My Writing Manifesto: A Lesson in Bitterness and Finding the Hidden... well... Lessons

By popular request on my main blog, I'm posting my full "Writing Manifesto". This was done for the final creative writing workshop class I took at Miami University in Ohio. It was the end of two loooooong and difficult years for me, which kind of comes out in the writing. It's long and possibly confusing, which is typical of me. Enjoy.


The Frothy Blossoms: My Writing Manifesto

The Beginning (Or, Knowing Me, the Ending)

I was told once, in a critique, that the “interconnection of characters and plots” was one of my big themes and that my stories had a “whirlwind-like, which way is up, effect”.

I think that’ll be true here as well.

To me, it is all interconnected. My inspirations, my intentions, my beliefs about writing and how I feel I fit into the writing world (I often don’t think I do). Maybe that’s why I write the way I do – with all my multiple perspectives and time jumps and non-linear narratives.

Or maybe I’m just fucked in the head.

Either way, really.

But I guess that’s just my warning, my preamble, my little yellow hazard sign to say that this isn’t going to be normal or straight forward. But it is my manifesto (I know this because I’m writing this part last) and it pretty much does declare all my intentions and goals and feelings. And I know it’s supposed to be readable and a public document and all. And it is.

It just may not be one that make all that much sense if you’re not me.

But nobody ever said it had to.


The Frothy Blossoms: Part One

I’ve never read the Bible.

I have a student in my Intro level creative writing class who recently wrote a story that prompted another student to comment “I don’t feel intelligent enough to read this.”

Those two things are connected, I swear.

My student’s story was an interesting bit of writing. It was filled with poetic descriptions (nephews as imps with azure eyes and roses with frothy crimson blossoms), random jumps in time, abstractly connected scenes, deep themes buried under all that poetry, and enough clutter and movement to confuse damn near anybody.

About half my class got it. Or, more accurately, they got enough, enough of the story under the frothy blossoms, or enough of the beautiful descriptions, or enough of the pretty sharp dialogue, or enough of something, to want to keep reading. The other half had no clue. They felt, as the one girl said, like they weren’t bright enough to understand it. They couldn’t get through the phalanx of azure eyed imps who only appeared for one page, they couldn’t travel through time as we moved forward to and camp and on to love as “rich poetry and pumpkin pie.”

A great debate ensued. Did the story work? Did the author simply have, as one girl put it, “mad skills” and should soldier on, even further into the pumpkin pie and poetry? Or, as others offered, was it simply an overdone, overwritten, confusing mess that made no, as one guy put it, “fuckin’ sense”?

As with any debate, they eventually turned to the expert for the answer. Me.

- to be continued -

The Reading List and the Unread Masses

I’ve got to construct a list. So far, so good, even I can make a list.

It needs to include fifty texts. OK, still all good. I’ve got that many books on my shelf at home.

Ah, but only twelve of those texts can be of my own choosing. The rest need to come from a list provided to me by the far more esteemed and considerably better suited to choose what should influence me English Department. Hey, I can live with that. They are the ones giving me the degree after all.

And then I see the list. And recognize all of four names on it (which actually turns out to be three when I discover one isn’t who I thought it was). But that’s still fine, I always knew I’d have to read to get a Master’s. So, I just ask for a little advice.

Read people who write like you. Explore similar themes, tackle similar topics.

OK, so who writes about a bunch of adult morons, acting far younger than they are, working in a toy store in a never ending quest for young pussy, good times, and any way they can find to remain “not adults”? Anybody?

OK, how about this one? Three sad sack people, all of whom desperately love each other, but can’t seem to stop fucking up each other’s lives, even from the grave. Oh yeah, and there’s infidelity, murder, an (almost) incestuous relationship, a psychic, and a town that may or may not be Satan. Anybody?

No, huh? Well, shit.

OK, so no similar topics, characters, etc. But there’s themes, we all know that. And if I can just figure out what my themes are (beyond betrayal, pain, and the brilliance of a well placed dirty joke), I’ll be all set.
And the list I can choose from is nothing if not lengthy, there’s bound to be numerous writers on there who share a similar style with me. Writers who like to fuck with time and point of view, who eschew the typical rules of narrative and story telling, who don’t subscribe to the idea of finding who’s story it is, of limiting it to that one character, writers who still believe that the story is the key and that how you tell it doesn’t really matter. Writers who still hold to that literary Field of Dreams - If you write it (and it’s good), people will read it.

There are writers like that on the list?

Great! Now I can read them, study them, let myself be influenced by them, absorb some of their brilliance (clearly they must have some as they’re on the list and only writers of great literary importance and cultural impact would be included on our list, right?). Only one problem.

I don’t want to write like any of them.

Why, oh why, in a culture (and here I speak of the English Dept. culture) where we claim to value difference and creativity and originality do we actually reward the same thing over and over again and, in fact, encourage such similarity and repetitiveness and shun and degrade anything that is, I don’t know, different?

I guess this is my long winded, occasionally off topic, round and round the literary mulberry bush way of saying that my intentions for my work are as follows:

- To be different.
- To be original, interesting, challenging.
- To fuck with the rules and the system

And, most importantly…

To write my way. Close minded, mired in tradition, the nine people in this room say it’s so and so it must be “writers” be damned.


The Frothy Blossoms: Part Two

So, now I needed to come up with an answer. Mad skills or confusing mess?

Both, was of course, out of the question.

And both was, of course, the answer.

“Clearly," I said to the young, impressionable writer, “you’re good at
descriptions. Yours are poetic and beautiful. But sometimes, they’re a bit overdone.”

She frowned. Clearly, being good at something and having that be not good was a hard concept to grasp.

“It’s,” I said, “A lot like playing the guitar or the piano. You get good at that one note or that one riff or the scales and, of course, you want to play that note or that riff or the scales all the time. You’re good at it, why wouldn’t you? We all want to do what we’re good at.”

She nodded. Clearly, being good at something and wanting to do that over and over and over again wasn’t that hard a concept to grasp.

“Take me for example,” I said. “I’m good at dirty jokes and snapping off one line paragraphs, little one liners that add a punch.”

I am pretty good at that, you know.

“And I’m good at mixing my stories up, flipping them around, telling them in weird ways that make people have to work at reading them.”

Me? Tell a story in a less than traditional way? Me?

“But,” I said, “sometimes I do it too much, you know? I use so many one liners that they lose their impact. People get sick of them. They see them coming and they just skip over them.”

Like you’re skipping this one.

“And I mess around with the time so much and tell the story in such a weird ass way that like half the people that read it have no clue what the hell’s going on.” I shook my head. “My own ‘mad skills’ lose half my audience every time.”

“And the other half?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said. “They get it. And they,” I said, “they are the ones I write it for.”

- to be continued -

The Birth of the Writer

I was told once, in a critique I received during a fiction workshop, that in my writing I should at least give some mild consideration to the highbrow. Because, the author of this critique said, that’s what most readers of short fiction are. “Average Joe,” this writer said, “probably doesn’t subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, or even buy novels.”

Well, duh.

I don’t subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker. Fuck subscribing, I don’t even read them. Couldn’t even tell you the last time I picked one up, other than maybe at Barnes and Noble, to move a misplaced copy out of the way to get to the newest issue of Maxim. And I, Average Joe Writer, don’t buy novels either.

I buy books.

You remember books, right? Those things most of us used to read as kids and maybe even teenagers. Those flimsy kinda things, made out of paper with some fancy dancy picture on the cover that no doubt had nothing to do with what was inside. Remember books? Those paper jobbies you read under the covers with a flashlight or devoured in one sitting on some Saturday afternoon when it was too rainy to go play baseball or go to the mall. Books. Those paper and glue bundles with that magic prize inside.

A story.

Remember stories?

Ah, stories. With heroes and villains and the fate of the world, or at least a relationship or two, hanging in the balance. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and The Great Brain and those little running rabbits of Watership Down. And then, as I got older there was Huck and Tom and eventually Holden and other books I was made to read and outwardly loathed and secretly loved. And then I discovered the Kings and the Clancy’s and the Grishams (say it ain’t so!) and the sections of the local bookstore I could (as an advanced reader) rip through in a week or two, getting caught up in the adventures of a family trapped in old hotel with a crazy ass daddy, a CIA analyst chasing down Sean Connery in a Russian sub, or maybe a lawyer or two, always doing something laywer-ly, but with just enough action and loose women to make it interesting.

Ah, stories.

Do you know what I thought when I read those?

I thought, My God, who would publish such tripe? Who would allow such hacks to demean the world of literature (and I always said that with the appropriately refined British accent)? Who could so belittle the power of fiction as to write such obvious, cliché ridden, lacking in meaning and depth rubbish, such blatant sell-out, money grubbing whore, work?

Oh. Wait. My bad. I never thought that.

I thought – Gimme some more.

And they did.

And I lapped it up, reading it in all it’s junk food digestible, in one brain cell out the other, when does the movie come out glory. And I watched as the people around me – Average Joe and Average Jane, did the same. And I decided, then and there. That’s what I was going to do.

I was going to be a writer. And I never once said it with even a hint of a refined British accent and I never once thought of the highbrow and I never once thought of it as anything other than what it was:

Making shit up. Telling stories.


The Frothy Blossoms: Part Three

The look on my young pupil’s face was enough to tell me she still didn’t get it.

“But if half your readers don’t get it, why write it?” she asked. “Don’t you want to write for them too? Why would I want to write a story that half the people in this room don’t understand?”

Because, I said, the half of the people in this room that don’t get it aren’t going to be buying your shit and therefore paying your bills and giving you all the love and worshipful devotion a person of your talents deserves.

See? I can write a one liner that’s longer than one line.

What I really said was:

“It’s your choice as a writer. Let me give you an example. There’s this guy I read a lot – James Morrow,” I waited for a nod of recognition from her or anyone.

Anybody think I got one?

“He writes satire, which I usually don’t get,” I said. “And he writes about God and religion. His books are filled with allusions to the Bible and the Old Testament, the New Testament, this religion, that religion, stuff I don’t get at all,” I said. “I’ve never even read the Bible.”

Told you they were connected.

“So you don’t understand his books?”

I shook my head. “Nope, a lot of it I don’t get. The allusions and stuff. But I still read them. Every one, even his book of short stories, even though it was called Bible Stories for Adults, and even though I never read the Bible and I’m an adult in age only…”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because the stories were cool. He’s got these three books about God dying and they find his body beneath the ocean and have to tow it for a proper burial. And there’s plagues and wacko’s and sex – all the good shit.” I smiled. “That’s why I like his work – the story underneath the allusions, underneath his frothy religious blossoms.”

And that’s why they - that one half of the class – liked her story.

Because of the story beneath.

“Morrow writes about the things he’s interested in and in the style that works for him,” I said. “And I’d bet you anything that every time he turns in a first draft to his editor, he’s got about a hundred more allusions and a hundred more references to things that heathens like me don’t have the first fucking clue about.”

“But he takes them out?”

“Some of them, enough of them for some people, like me,” I said. “But I’ve got religious friends, dudes that go to Bible Study every week and they can’t stand reading Morrow.” I shrugged. “Can’t please everybody.”

And that, I told her, is the greatest skill any writer can have. The ability to accept what he or she can’t change – the audience – and to write for that half that gets it and for themselves.

Like Morrow.

Like me. Most of the time. Some of the time.

Not often enough.

To Whore or Not to Whore: That is the Question

Allow me to share with you an excerpt or two from my memoir, to be written some fifty or so years from now.

On the question of where, during my long (and profitable) career as a writer, I got my ideas:

Generally, I thought of people I knew, and usually didn’t like, and made them even weirder and more unlikeable than they really were, put them in some bizarre situations, tossed in a few shockingly graphic phrases/ideas (oral sex and the strange behavior of men when obsessed with a fine piece of ass were usually good for this) and let things go where they may.

As to whether I thought my work, typically lumped as “mainstream” or, if some critic/peer wanted to insult me, as “genre” fiction, was as credible and worthy of acclaim as “real” literature:

I wrote “real” literature, or tried to. In college. In grad school. And all it did was bore, confuse, and put my readers to sleep or make their heads hurt from trying to figure it out. And Average Joe (or Jane) doesn’t buy books if he’s asleep or has a headache don’t buy books. So I quit and went back to what I was good at.

And, as to whether or not that “quitting” meant I sold out and was nothing more than a Grisham or a Clancy, a “literary” whore as opposed to an actual artist:

Did I sell out?

Fuck Yes. Sold out every copy. Every time.

And that selling out paid my bills. It put food on my table. It kept my wife in shoes, my kids in toys, my dog in chewy toys filled with peanut butter, and my mortgage up to date. And it kept shlubs like me entertained. Not bad for a day’s work. Does all that make it worthy?

The more important question, I think, is far simpler.

Do I care?

What do you think?


The Frothy Blossoms: The Conclusion

I don’t have a conclusion. Not Really. I don’t know exactly why I do what I do or feel how I feel. To me, writing has always been a personal thing. Yeah, there’s some things you can learn from a book or a class, but the best writing, the real writing, the stories that are alive and wonderful and make me want to read more and write more and be more, well, there’s just something about them. There’s that presence or that life, or that feeling behind it that comes through in the words and makes one thing abundantly clear:

The writer loved writing it.

I think I forgot that the last year and a half. At least a lot of the time.

So I guess that’s my conclusion, my intention. To remember.

From now on.