Koch - The modern library writers workshop: a guide to the craft of fiction

Between 1977 and 1998twenty-one yearsI taught in one of the most noteworthy graduate writing programs in the United States, working term after term with aspiring young writers as they tried to get a grip on the elusive craft of fiction. For eight of those years, while simultaneously continuing to teach fulltime, I served as the program's chair. For over two decades, then, without once missing even a single semester, I spent much of my energy thinking and talking about the craft of fiction in a perpetually renewed and perpetually changing dialogue with some of the most promising young writers of their several generations. I worked one-on-one with many hundreds of gifted people, and I have since had the quiet pleasure of seeing many among them emerge as the leading younger writers of our era. During those twenty-one years, I read thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of manuscripts in every stage of completion. I edited. I admired. I argued. I advised. I praised. I questioned. I doubted. I shut my mouth and hoped. I did my best to help people test their talent and find their way, struggling through what seemed to be every conceivable problem of literary technique. Though I cannot claim always to have found solutions, I did learn a whole lot about problems. As I tried again and again to help people with them, I saw failures of course, but I also saw, every week, gifted people inventing their way out, finding a path to transcendence on the page, discovering mastery in words, working their way toward clarity in steps that were sometimes small and uncertain, and sometimes sudden and giant. My long and thoroughly instructive immersion left me with a very highly developed sense of what can, and what cannot, be taught about writing narrative prose.

It also left me with an acute distaste for sending people off into deadly isolation to waste their time reinventing wheels. Except in journalism, writing is a necessarily solitary trade, the most chronically solitary of all the arts. Writing's inordinate quotient of solitude, and the need not only to tolerate that solitude but even to love it, is an immovable fact of the mtier, and one of the most salient psychological facts you must grasp about it. Yet too often aspiring writers are condemnedas if in punishment for their wish to writeto feel their way to the most elementary methods of the craft entirely on their own, hit or miss, and without any help whatever. There is no need for this absurd waste. Every writer is fated to face thingsand plenty of themthat will have to be mastered alone, in solitary struggle. These real problems will leave no time to waste fumbling for the obvious. Most writers tend to exaggerate the obstacles to getting good work done. Even a small technical problemlet's say, how to revise a draftcan leave them mired and hopeless. I've heard about entire projects, months and even years of work, lost over an issue that a few words of sound advice and ten minutes of straight talk might have solved.

Unfortunately, all too many perfectly intelligent people, generally of the writing-can't-be-taught school, really believe that writers are supposed to teach themselves everything, all alone, and by magic. They would never dream of asking a pianist or a painter or a composerleave aside a record producer or a film directorto find out everything about the craft without help. In these areas at least, nobody would have the slightest difficulty grasping the necessary interplay between what must be taught and what must be picked up privately in the knack of any technique. Why not writing?

The Modern Library Writer's Workshop is an effort to assemble and integrate what I believe amounts to something like a consensus among writers about the basics of their craft. In these pages you will hear my voiceit's a prose variant on the voice I use in private conference with my studentsalong with many other voices, all of them talking about the craft. Most writers love to talk, and one of the things they love to talk about most is writing. In interviews and letters, in table talk and memoirs and manifestos, writers have always held forth in surprisingly full detail about how they do what they do. It adds up to a vast, largely untapped literature on technique. It is both ancient and modern, and it runs through literary history at every level of the culture, including the most exalted. Some of the most important figures of classical literature produced enduring ars poetica. Commentaries on oratory, poetry, drama, eloquence, and the sublime form an essential and large part of the classical anthology. No small part of the prophetic tradition in the Bible can be read as a meditation on inspired utterance, on what it is and how it is achieved. Inscribed within Shakespeare's work there can be found a great Renaissance treatise on the theater, poetry, and the workings of the dramatic imagination: Here is an ars poetica produced at the very summit. Listen carefully, and you can learn to hear the great novelists of the nineteenth century thinking about writing, about how to write, almost incessantly. The same is true of many major figures of the twentieth century. For example, a perfectly respectableand surprisingly thickmanual on literary technique could be assembled from selected passages of Hemingway's novels alone. Not the interviews. The novels.

Moreover, the audience for this powerful substream of literature about technique reaches far beyond a small cluster of interested technicians, and it always has. Horace addressed a wider audience than just other poets. Shakespeare surely put interchanges on dramatic technique into his plays because he knew they would touch his larger audience. The craft of writing is bound to the experience of literacy and language itself. All of us are involved, consciously and unconsciously, in the way language is bound to all communication. All of us are involved, somehow, in how our thoughts and imaginings find focus. And while not everyone is a writer, every