This post comes from notes I am taking in going through these DIY courses. For the writing course, in which I am reviewing books I read previously, I reviewed Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. Chapter 11 of the book is entitled Reading for Courage, and following are my notes from that chapter.
Chapter 11: Reading for Courage:
My own experience attests that it takes courage to write.
The fear of whether what one is writing is good enough is a constant challenge.
The courage to write badly, to put words on paper that you know are not well
written but are going to be revised is a constant struggle to overcome. The
author suggests that reading great classic writers can give one courage,
especially when we consider how their writing challenges readers, how many
people don't get them, and how when their works were first published they often
received bad reviews.
The author suggests that reading such great writers and
appreciating their difficulties can be an antidote to irrational feedback from
writing workshops, bad advice and misguided comments.
I'm not sure however how one distinguishes between
recognizing when criticism is faulting something that we know we are doing for
a purpose or whether it is actually a flaw in the writing. Some writers can
become self-deceived into thinking that everything they write is great and then
they go on American Idol, so to speak, and their nakedness becomes apparent.
The answer I suppose is really taking to heart the experience of the great
writers, having confidence, and gaining experience through extensive practice.
Also relevant is the type of writing one wishes to do. Those who challenge the reader have a more difficult course. The novelist Gogol describes the happy state of those writers who please their public and the misery of those who write about the human condition as it really is without sugarcoating: "he will not escape the judgment of his time, the judgment of hypocritical and unfeeling contemporaries who will accuse the creatures his mind has bred of being base and worthless, who will allow a contemptible nook for him in the gallery of those authors who insult mankind, will ascribe to him the morals of his own characters, and will deny him everything, heart, soul, and the divine flame of talent." The emphasis is added because being judged on the grounds that readers assume that I identify with who I write about is one of my fears, a fear of having the character and values of a character ascribed to the writer. I learn from Gogol that the fear is not unique to me, which is good to know and one must get over it.
The courage is not merely a matter of daring to defy the contemporary
standards of style, but also having the courage to write without paying due
homage to the political totems of the time. Why must a work of art reflect the
fashionable values of a prevailing majority of the time rather than those of
the author's own heart? Francine Prose states, "reading can give you the
courage to resist all of the pressures that our culture exerts on you to write
in a certain way, or to follow a prescribed form. It can even persuade you that
it might not be necessary to give your novel or story a happy ending." p. 258.
And it is not just in the form that one can defy the times but also in the
content, in the meaning, in the values.
Prose goes on to discuss Pedro Paramo, a novel that I
have come to admire and that I did not remember was discussed in this book. She
includes a long quote, nearly 4 pages, with discussion about how mysterious the
story is. This is in the context of having the courage to write in defiance of
literary conventions. Certainly Pedro Paramo defies conventions, but the author
says nothing about that, nothing about the style of its writing. This book makes many great points that I admire and
value and have to learn from, but it also has many strange flaws that perplex like this lack of discussion of an example.
Prose includes a quote from Isaac Babel about how much hard work revising is, and the quote is also a good guide to effective revision:
"I work like a pack mule, but it is my own choice. I'm like a
galley slave who's chained for life to his oar but who loves the oar.
Everything about it. I go over each sentence, time and again. I start by
cutting all the words it can do without. You have to keep your eye on the job
because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to
dig them out – repetitions, synonyms, things that simply don't mean anything. I
go over every image, metaphor, comparison, to see if they are fresh and
accurate. If you can't find the right adjective for a noun, leave it alone. Let
the noun stand by itself. The comparison must be as accurate as a slide rule,
and as natural as the smell of fennel. I take out all the participles and
adverbs I can. Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way, but
too many of them make the language spineless. A noun needs only one adjective,
the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun. Line is as
important in prose as in an engraving. It has to be clear and hard. The most
important thing of all is not to kill the story by working on it. Or else all
your labor has been in vain. It's like walking a tight rope. Well, there it is.
We ought all to take an oath not to mess up our job."
The statement about the oar really gets to what it is like to
be a writer. We love it even though it is slavery.
To conclude her book, Francine Prose includes a long list of
Books to Be Read Immediately, which mostly consists of books she referred to in
the text. The list is a good resource to remember.
DIY Update
As an update on my DIY program as a whole, as I keep falling behind, I realize that I am being over-ambitious, essentially committing myself to three courses at the same time, as well as keeping up with my own writing, along with all of my existing obligations. Since I have progressed well into all three courses, rather than stop one or two of them, I decided that it would be best to stretch out the schedule for an entire school year, until next May. I will provide an updated calendar in a later post spelling this out.
I am enjoying this program so far, but having dived in before really working out how it is going to work, I am still not sure what I intend to get out of it or even why I am doing this. In other words, because I have to be both instructor and student, I feel like as an instructor I need to understand the objective of the program and each course, as well as the level of rigor, things that an instructor would already know and define, but as a student I am still exploring and trying to discover answers to these questions.
