Provides techniques, exercises and examples for stimulating creative writing

The Passionate, Accurate Story

Making Your Heart's Truth Into LiteratureBy Carol Bly

Milkweed Editions

Copyright © 1998 Carol Bly
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781571312198

Introduction

Writing Whole Literature:
Writing the Good News
As Well As the
Psychological Dismay

Jill's Wrath: How We Treat Young Writers

The greatest beauty in a short story mainly floats towards usfrom its plot. That is not a fashionable idea just at themoment, but it is true. In Charles Baxter's "Scheherazade," anold woman is healing her husband. He is in the hospital, aftera stroke. She tells him tall stories which he experiences as empowering.We see what he needs: he needs to see himself asthe ever-seductive male patrolling the range of does andmares, cutting his swath, a man with no consideration of anyhuman being other than himself. His wife's stories aredesigned to reassure him that all that starry selfishness is intact.There is beauty in the language and structure, because Baxteris one of the most passionate and most subtle short-storywriters of our time?but what makes me say, "What a beautifulstory!" is Baxter's plot. This wife is not under threat ofbeing killed if she can't amuse her husband, yet she is an echoof the original Scheherazade because she sacrifices her ownpsychological health?the sense of what is fair and decent?inorder to return her husband to his health. The story hasbeauty of plot.

    All beauty isn't in plot. There are two psychological disciplinesauthors exercise which make stories beautiful in toneand language: The first is the determination not to beembittered?at the same time as one avoids denial of the evilthat people do. That is very difficult. It is hard to describewretched behavior in even the tiniest corner of life withoutcynicism, perhaps because people will likely continue to behavein the bad ways. The second is using language ofconsequence, because how writer talks to reader and howcharacters talk to each other depend on psychological circumstances.

    Let's imagine a writer whose circumstances, from ageeight to age twenty-four, lead her again and again to write storieswhose style is either noncommittal or cynical. Jill is atwenty-four-year-old graduate student at a snappy writingworkshop. She does not write beautiful literature. Jill is not ahorrible person. Why is she deliberately writing ugliness?

    I pretend I am a social worker and Jill has been sent to"see someone." She is a writer, and here is her story, the storyof why Americans go out of their way to make ugly literature.

    Jill was born in Lawrencetown, Massachusetts, thedaughter of civilized parents who had stable notions and a safehouse. She always wanted to be a writer.

    She wrote her first official short story in the third grade. Itwas about the town dump, with its wheel spokes, bedsprings,moribund kittens in their gunny sack, rusting kitchen pots?allof which tell one another their stories. Dogs, cats, all domesticrefugees come to the dump and tell all the ways they havebeen cruelly used. (Jill had imagination.) When she got herstory back from the teacher, she found written on the bottom:"Jill, we have been studying sentences now for two years. Youknow perfectly well that a sentence begins with a capital letterand you need a period at the end."

    What Jill learned from that comment was that psychologicalcontent in literature does not count. What counts ismechanics. Maybe that's right! her half-conscious mind says.After all, whenever you try to tell your stories at home, yourmother says, "Boy, do kids have imagination!" to your dad.Both of them, mysteriously, in the next second, notice thatyou have tracked in mud, too.

    When Jill was in fifth grade, she wrote another story forher English class. Unfortunately her school had not elected toget in a poet or storyteller from the Writers-in-the-Schoolsmovement. Her new story was about parents who were rudeto their children?gratuitously rude. For interesting insights onparental rudeness to children, see Alice Miller's work, especiallyFor Your Own Good. Jill's parents were forever adjuringher to behave, but they were rude. This story came back withthe comment that Jill's spelling was improved: the teacher hadeven drawn a smiling face at the bottom, with radiating linescoming out from it, indicating, I think, sunshine.

    In the seventh grade, Jill happened to get an Englishteacher who herself did not read through any of the papersregarded as "creative writing" since creative writing was humanitiesfluff.

    So Jill's third try at a story about rude parents was channelledlike lock water into the peer-criticism pond. The peers,Jill's classmates, had now spent five years or more being toldto respect mechanics more than content, mechanics more thancontent, mechanics more than content. It never crossed any oftheir minds to remark on anything more inner in Jill's workthan her "effective sentences." If they had talked about Jill'scontent?the rudeness of her parents to her?it wouldn't havehelped Jill much: empathy is ineffective between young peers.Its marvelous use for giving people confidence and verveworks only when the empathizing is by an authority (parent orteacher or other wise adult)?not by other kids.

    Jill did a well-imagined story in the tenth grade. Here isthe plot: a tenth-grade girl came home from school to herparents' clean but uncultivated house in an industrial townnear Andover, Massachusetts. The author tells us the househad wall-to-wall carpeting, which ran from the hallways intoall the rooms, even her room. The previous owners had built afull-wall bookcase in the living room, but that didn't botherthis girl's parents: they put their copy of Reach Out and theirother book, We Never Would Have Made It Without Him, inthe center of the eye-level shelf, and then placed glass brickson both sides so the books stayed put. The girl threw one legover the lounge-chair arm and listened to the baseboard heatingfor a while. Then she took down one of the books andstudied the photo on the back jacket. It showed a woman sittingupright in a chair, and her husband sat on its arm, smilingBoth had excellent teeth. "Mom? Mom?" the girl said. Hermother appeared. "Mom, how much mousse do you supposethat lady's got on there to get that 360º look, anyhow?" Thegirl held up the book. "And those eyes, hey, Mom, like thedials on Dad's safe!" "Let me tell you something, young lady,"the mother said, "before you make any more fun of thosepeople of Jesus. You get this very straight. If we hear anymore smart remarks from you about Jesus or the people ofJesus, your father will take it up with you. This is a Christ-centeredhome. You know what Christ-centered means? Itmeans that if a certain young lady can't learn to love our Lordand Saviour, maybe she would like to just pick up and livesomewhere else and see how that feels!"

    Jill's teacher wrote on her story, "You don't give us anyidea of the colors of the house. You say wall-to-wall carpeting,but we can't see it because we can't see the colors of it. Youneed to offer more physical description." She did not commenton the author's disdain for the religious parents and theBorn-Again authors, nor on the mother's offering to throw thegirl out if she couldn't get filled with the spirit. Religion is achancy subject in American public...