The Day Job: Growth, Learning, and the Search for Teachers

It arrives in snippets.

In high school and college I’m sure my English teachers were caring, competent purveyors of English education. Undoubtedly they offered helpful advice, inspiring direction and constructive criticism. If only I had been ready to learn.

Now I’m ready. Where are they? Where’s the instruction to help me grow as a writer?

I have this theory about writing classes. At any given time, no matter what is going on in the classroom, at best only one or two students are getting anything. The problem for the teacher is that there’s no way to tell which students are learning, nor, exactly what they learned. The problem for the students is that they never know when something valuable will roll by them. They have to hope they’re paying attention when the moment arrives. So, what a student needs is to seek out numerous learning opportunities. Only a writer with open ears will hear the right magic at the right time.

The quest for continuing evolution challenges writers, especially when they no longer have the freedom to dump their work and families for a six-week stint at Clarion or any of the other excellent workshops. School passed them by. New lessons await, and they’re finally ready to hear, but it’s too late. Are they truly destined to live lives of quiet desperation, isolated from mentors and helpful peers? Will the only feedback they get continue to be the cryptic missives from editors whose dooming sentences begin with “alas,” or replies written on blue paper, sometimes referred to as the “blue form of death,” or ones that open with “Thank you for your submission, but . . .”?

Surely there must be a more immediate and available manner of directing writerly growth? Thank goodness, there is, even for the folks who can’t pony up the tuition to a workshop, or, heavens above, for a master’s degree in creative writing. The instruction waits everywhere, if they look for it.

But the help comes in snippets. Writers now are no different than when they were students in class: they never know when they will hear the one piece of advice that will get them going, solve some problem, or reveal a new direction. So, they can’t depend on one source. They have to pay attention and be ready for the moment.

My own list of influential snippets stretches for miles, from Ray Bradbury talking about taking inventory of key images in his life in Zen in the Art of Writing, and how he’s been writing stories from that writing session ever since, to Anne Lamott’s “one-inch picture frames” in Bird by Bird and why I don’t have to write the story all at once, to the poet, Lew Welch, and his fundamental premise in How I Work as a Poet that for writers the basic tool is speech.

I never know when a lesson will hit me. The learning can’t be forced, so I read all the time, waiting for the lightning to strike. Sometimes the lesson is technical, like Ken Rand reminding me in The 10% Solution not to overuse the word “that.” Sometimes the lesson is inspirational, like when Orson Scott Card wrote in a book I asked him to sign, “There’s always room at the top,” and sometimes the lesson is thought provoking, like when Connie Willis said as advice to writers, “Never kill the dog.”

The opportunities to learn aren’t just in books geared specifically for science fiction and fantasy writers either, although I’d be remiss not to mention the excellent Those Who Can, edited by Robin Wilson, or Robert Silverberg’s exceptionally helpful Science Fiction 101. For me, the poet Ted Hughes’s book, Poetry in the Making, or the children’s educator, Ralph Fletcher’s What a Writer Needs, where he uses only little kids’ writing as his examples, have also been influential.

For that matter, the help isn’t always in books. The interviews in Locus Magazine have been a goldmine of writerly advice. I’ve learned valuable lessons listening to podcasts, like the ones available at Adventures in SciFi Publishing, or reading writers’ blogs, like John Scalzi, Jeff Vandemeer, Jay Lake, and many others.

But often, my teachers are in books. Today I bought the Stephen Jones edited anthology, H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural: Classic Tales of the Macabre. I found it on the bargain table in our local bookstore. I picked the book because it introduces each story with excerpts from Lovecraft’s seminal essay on writing horror fiction, “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” At one point, Lovecraft talks about his writing process that involves multiple outlines, and then flexible revision of the story as he writes, but what caught my eye most was this sentence,

“I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.”

I can already see how that thought will influence the story I’m writing now.

For another writer, maybe nothing in the book would be helpful. Maybe that writer might learn from rereading Strunk and White’s Elements of Style or John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, but for me, for today, H.P. Lovecraft was my teacher.

Thank goodness I was ready, or I would have missed that snippet, and I didn’t have to quit my day job to learn it.