How to Become a Writer (Or, Woe to Joy)
Loorie Moore's classic Day One writing class story (and what it teaches us about The Fun)
Today’s Writing Music: "Here and Now" by Devon Gilfillian
Today’s Reading: Appleseed: A Novel by Matt Bell (whose Writing Exercises Newsletter inspired me to start this!)
Before we go much further, let’s define better what I mean when I talk about The Fun.
As we discussed last time, The Fun is what drives us when we first start out being creative. In his essay, “The Nature of the Fun” DFW wrote, “You don't expect anybody else to read it. You're writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don't like.”
One reason that I love teaching creative writing now is that it puts me in steady touch with younger writers who are still deep in this phase of their writing lives. (I’ve been teaching, in some form or another, for about twenty years now: at a middle school, a couple of summer camps, evening adult ed. classes, and eventually in several colleges and graduate programs.)
When meeting a new class of writers, I often hand out a short story by Loorie Moore called “How to Become a Writer (Or, Have You Earned this Cliché?”. (I used to think this was a brilliant idea that only I had ever had, until I discovered several friends who do the exact same thing. So much for originality.) Among other things, the story contains one of the best descriptions of the Fun that I’ve yet run across.
(Feel free to take a moment to read the story at the link above, if you like—it isn’t long. But I’ll also summarize it here.)
Moore writes the story in the 2nd person—so, to You, if You are a girl named Francie who accidentally ends up in a Creative Writing Workshop (thinking it was Bird-Watching 101) and gets hooked—poor thing—and so goes on to face various rejections, confusions, and discouragements on her way to becoming a writer.
I like to use it on Day One because it we can read it out loud together in about fifteen minutes. It is humorous and so serves as a fine little icebreaker. Afterwards, I ask the students to talk a little about what parts of it feel true to their own experience of wanting to become writers, and it tends to get them talking.
Often we never get past the first paragraph, which goes like this:
“First, try to be something, anything, else […] Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age— say, 14. Early critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.” Francie then accidentally breaks a free drinking glass from the gas station (love that detail). “This is the required pain and suffering,” Moore concludes. “This is just for starters.”
My students want to know, before they go too far down this path… are pain and suffering (and miserable failure followed by disillusionment) really required for artistic success?
And the answer is: yes, but…
As the class progresses we’ll go on to discuss things like flawed characters and conflict and plot arcs, all of which suggest this premise is valid. That, yes, creating something artistic usually does involve grappling with some pain and some suffering. In Francie’s case it will be: her parents’ divorce, a brother with a leg injured in Cambodia, and some childhood embarrassments. In grappling with them, she creates new problems for herself. She isn’t very good—or at least her teachers and friends never seem to like her stories, which often involve people being blown up randomly (this, one on level, to avoid writing a real ending, but also it mirrors what happened to her brother.)
She keeps trying to come up with metaphors that don’t quite work (others look at her with faces as blank as: doughnuts, vandalized clocks, a large Kleenex, and finally a sheet of paper.)
Her peers don’t get her style. Her professors never seem to agree: one wants her to write only from what she knows, the other wants her to use The Power of the Imagination. They beg her repeatedly to try and write something with a plot. (“Plots are for dead people, Pore-face,” she writes in the margins of one such assignment.)
Her parents beg her to consider a business major.
But surely the story ends in Francie’s victory, right? She gets a fat book deal and dies happy? The End?
No.
It doesn’t even end with Francie writing a book. I can’t even tell if she’s ever finished a whole story. We’re told she keeps a “folder full of fragments” and the ones we see are cryptic at best. (“World as conspiracy. Possible plot? A woman gets on a bus.”)
Ta-da!
So why don’t my students all immediately drop the class?
Because throughout Moore’s story, Francie’s struggles are always met with gentle irony and humor. She keeps trying, and that’s exciting. Sure, Francie may not become the next John Grisham by the final lines, but we do see her become gradually more confident. We admire that she doesn’t just change her style to please those teachers and friends—she keeps blowing people up. She keeps right at that same blank face metaphor, determined to get it right. And we repeatedly witness Francie having Fun with her work.
For just one example, she writes a story about “a menopausal suburban husband named Richard, who because he is so depressed all the time is called ‘Mopey Dick’.” (The first line of that story is, “‘Call me Fishmeal.’”) Let’s set aside for a second that this is sort of funny—it also shows us that Francie is having Fun. She’s poking at a classic work of literature, trying to deflate its seriousness a little, while at the same time borrowing some of that gravitas for herself. What could be more Fun than that?
At another moment Francie takes a strange sudden interest in mollusk sexual practices where a male globular octopus loses an arm during intercourse—she doesn’t know why, but we do—that’s a hell of a thing to include in some future story!
This is a writer’s secret weapon: anything can be used, the stranger the better.
And then, in the midst of much frustration, comes this beautiful line, which says it all:
The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius.
Boom. There it is. That’s the Fun. That’s what my students want to find—what I want to find.
Remember, Moore has been very careful to make clear in this story that absolutely no one else believes in Francie. There’s no kind professor, no encouraging parent, no roommate who loves her stories, no boyfriend who lays up at night reading her work. Nobody wants Francie to become a writer—not even Francie (so she claims). She is almost definitely not a genius, at least not yet. But in the middle of the night she can (briefly) believe she is. Because she’s got it: Something no one has yet seen. That’s the moment when you know it’s worth it. A moment of true discovery.
If you could bottle that feeling and sell it, you’d be rich.
Well, this is how we bottle it, isn’t it? We write it—and then, when someone reads it, they get some of that too. (Which is usually how you end up in a Creative Writing 1 class, trying to figure out how to find more of it.)
The final scene in the story depicts Francie on a date with a guy who is condescending about her dreams of writing. She doesn’t care… she’s busy watching him. Moore writes that, “he looks down at his arm hairs and starts to smooth them, all, always, in the same direction.”
And that’s it. Francie’s become a writer. That’s a writer line, if ever there was one. A perfect little defining detail for some character she’s assembling: it’s small, habitual, sensual. I love it. It makes me think Francie’s going to be OK after all. You can justify a lot of bad dates, a lot of wasted hours in meetings, a lot of stupid decisions in life—when you come out with even one nice little line like that.
Moore’s story doesn’t promise riches, approval, fame, or even really success of any sort to those seeking to pursue art. Writing won’t solve any problems either: won’t get Francie’s divorced parents back together, or lead to true love, or heal her brother’s mangled leg. All Moore suggests is that Francie’s life will be interesting, and that there will be a kind of happiness within it that few others will know or understand, and that it will empower her to take whatever pain and suffering comes (it comes anyway!) and transform it into something else.
There’s another line I love, by scholar Robert Polhemus, that I ran across while teaching a class on Children’s Literature (just one of the Fun things writers sometimes get to do). It’s in an essay about Through the Looking Glass, and he’s trying to explain how Lewis Carrol’s “Comedy of Regression” works. Carrol repeatedly takes serious and important things from real adult life and morphs them into absurdities for Alice to confront in Looking Glass World where everything is backwards. Through Play and Humor and Fun, she overcomes grown-up authorities and sees them for the vapor they really are.
Polhemus argues this is a highly subversive, even a radical act. Carroll is waging a rebellion against seriousness itself. And this is his rallying cry:
I will play with and make ridiculous fear, loneliness, smallness, ignorance, authority, chaos, nihilism, and death; I will transform, for a time, woe to joy.
I leave you with this: the sacred oath of every would-be writer.
This is the job. This is the goal. This is the Fun. And remembering that’s what we’re doing is the start of finding it again.
Writing Towards Fun #2 - Moore’s story ends with Francie noticing that her date has an interesting habit. The final line of is:
“He looks down at his arm hairs and starts to smooth them, all, always, in the same direction.”
Write this down at the top of your own page. You’ve just made it the first line of your own story. Keep going. Who is he? Who is noticing this about him? Where are they?
Without stopping or getting distracted, fill up the rest of the page. Don’t worry if it good or not, just keep writing… get that heat pounding and those armpits damp. (Ew, sorry.)
Just have Fun.