Dreams” is currently the afterword to my short fiction collection Aye and Gomorrah (Vintage Books: New York, 2003), though I wrote it initially in 1980 to conclude another anthology, Distant Stars. Thus you must put up with my self-references for a page or so. Finally, however, it turns to topics that might interest this book’s readers.
“After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on ‘The Beach Fire’” was first requested by a fanzine, Empire, which endured a few years toward the end of the 1970s. Aimed at aspiring writers, each issue printed an amateur short story the editors had previously sent to a handful of professionals for comment. Most writers returned a paragraph of encouragement, in which they also pointed out one-to-three flaws. The editors printed these critiques along with the tale. I decided to send back, however, a fuller response. Incidentally, I have changed the name of the characters, the writer’s initials, several of the tales’ incidents, and the story title itself to protect the brave and laudable youngster, who, after all, was not yet seventeen when she or he first wrote it.
Something I don’t mention in my piece on “The Beach Fire” (nor did any of the other three writers who sent in their much briefer notes): however unintentionally, the “alien-as-beach-ball” is lifted from John (Halloween, They Live, Escape from New York …) Carpenter’s marvelously lunatic student film Dark Star, which was shown at hundreds of SF conventions throughout the seventies and eighties and which reduced auditoria full of science fiction fans to convulsive laughter. Since Empire’s editors, as well as its readers and writers, all came out of science fiction fandom, likely the author of “The Beach Fire” had seen, or at least heard of, Carpenter’s spoof. Perhaps the plagiarism was inadvertent. But Carpenter’s original was so telling and so widely known that the similarity would have immediately put the piece out of the running with any professional editor who recognized its source. I chose not to bring it up because to discuss what you can and can’t take from other artists would have doubled, if not tripled, my essay’s length. But even the nature of plagiarism has become a new order of problem in the last thirty years. From the eighties through the present, writers from age fifteen to age thirty-five have regularly handed me stories that were pastiches of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or, more recently, Rowling’s Harry Potter. Many do not even bother to come up with new names for the characters. Some have actually been quite skillful. But all these young writers were quite surprised when I told them that there was no hope of publishing such work outside a specifically fan context. More than one told me: “But whenever you read about movies or television, or even best sellers, everyone always says what producers and publishers want is something exactly like something that’s been successful. That’s what I thought I’d done …”
Without going further into the problem, let me say: this is a book for serious creative writers. That means it’s a book for writers who have at least resolved that problem for themselves and come down on the side of originality; that is, writers who are not interested in formulaic imitation, at whatever level, however well done, fan to commercial. I stress, too: interest in formulaic imitation is not the same as interest in writing within one recognizable genre or another. What’s here applies just as much to the mystery, the science fiction tale, or the romance as it does to the literary story, however normative, however experimental. Writers with genre interests are welcome among these pages. (Much of my own writing has been genre writing.) But the fine points of the difference between genre and the formulaic within a given genre are why such distinctions require thought.
The final essay, “Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student,” deals with that all-important problem, structure. What is it? Why do you need it? How do you control it? That is to say, it speaks to the aspect of narrative that makes fiction an art—and an art whose elements here alone are clearly distinguishable from those of the poem.
Four letters to four different writers follow the essays. All are actual (or based closely on actual) letters sent at their particular dates (1997–2001; again, titles and identifying details have been changed). Two are to poets. Two are to fiction writers. One of the poets and one of the fiction writers are affiliated with universities. Two are out there on their own. Two are black. Two are white. Two are male. Two are female. Two are gay. One is straight—and I have no idea what the sexual orientation of the other is; statistics would suggest straight. But statistics only suggest.
Two of these letters answer writers who wrote me specifically for advice. In them (and in the closing interview on canon formation), I talk about reasons why the situation of the writer is what it is and how one might respond to it in order to negotiate it intelligently. One letter makes its point through criticism of a novel widely read today. All four to all four men and women deal, however, with an overarching truth about creative writing that is currently not a popular one, especially with most people picking up such a collection as this. I go into it, however, because it gives a flavor of what writers think about as they write back and forth. In their various modes, all four letters deal with the writer’s current condition.
The collection proper closes with five interviews. For me interviews are largely a written form. In all five cases, I received the questions in writing and wrote out my answers. The first appeared in a special issue of Para•doxa on “The Future of Narrative,” edited by Lance Olsen.* It deals with some specific problems and possibilities of experimental writing. (Be warned: I enjoy the genre.) The second interview answers a set of eight questions on “The Situation of American Writing Today,” posed in 1999 by Gordon Hutner, the editor of American Literary History. It appeared as part of a symposium consisting of the responses to those same questions by a dozen-odd writers. Here my answers focus on the way writing relates to criticism. “A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview” is my attempt to talk about what art can actually do in our world—and what it can’t. “A Black Clock Interview” focuses on questions of history, genre, and breakthroughs. The last interview, “Inside and Outside the Canon,” is also “A Para•doxa Interview” and concerns the literary canon and literary canon formation. Specifically it tackles the ticklish question of how writers’ reputations develop. By the way, it’s the piece I refer “R—” to in the third letter here. As such, you may want to read it before that letter. I put it toward the end so it would be easy to find.
Finally an appendix, “Nits, Nips, Tucks, and Tips,” covers some topics the ignorance of which might easily hamstring a young writer, if no one has yet taken time to go over them with him or her: dramatic structure, how to punctuate dialogue, point of view, when to use first person and when not to, writing what you know, trusting your own images, and what makes characters believable or sympathetic, along with some minimal remarks on grammar and style.
I conclude this preface with something about “the basics” of creative writing—plot, character, setting, theme. Probably it’s an overstatement to say that none of them exists—but certainly none of them exists as a basic. They are, all of them, effects. (Yes, even character.) As such, they may be basic elements for the reader. But, like a building that soars a hundred stories into the sky and lifts the eyes of passersby to the clouds, each needs some solid (and often largely invisible) foundation work. For the architect or the writer, the building of the foundation is what’s basic. Certainly one can get so caught up in foundation building that one loses sight of those final effects. “Commercial” writers accuse “literary” writers of some form of this, repeatedly. But, if I may push the metaphor, the idea is to build an edifice that remains standing in the mind and does not collapse two hours after closing the book, magazine, or journal (more often, pieces of it coming loose and crumbling before the reader finishes the first chapter), so that its flimsy shell with gaping holes can only attract viewers during the season of its advertising campaign.
A reasonable concern—in many a worry; and in few a hope—is whether a creative writing teacher wishes to teach her or his students to write the way he or she writes. Emphatically that is not my enterprise. But the agenda here is no less personal. The thrust of these pieces is to teach writers to produce works I would enjoy reading. In the following introduction and even more in the pieces to come you will get a better sense of what