We were young and hip enough to recognize when a writer’s new idea was already cresting in popular culture. And we pooled our best insider advice about tax law and literary agents. For years we all trusted our tax returns to the same preparer, a woman who specialized in finding loopholes for emerging painters, musicians, writers, and other marginally profitable artist types.
The evening would repeat this pattern—students reading, everyone responding—until people were too tired to pay attention. Occasionally the phone would ring and wreck the mood of someone’s story. I was adamant about Tom unplugging the phone, but he’d forget, and it would ring and sabotage the payoff of someone’s perfect plot point. Usually mine. As students got better, no one wanted to read after them so the anchor person was usually Suzy Vitello, Monica Drake, Joanna Rose, or me.
Finally, Tom would read from his work in progress. No one was allowed to critique Tom’s writing, no one dared. It was thrilling to hear something we knew would soon go into a real book. Or something we’d know, later, had been cut from the eventual final draft. Not unlike seeing the secret deleted scenes from a movie.
We’d applaud Tom, and he’d begin lighting candles. Candles on the table. Candles on shelves. Someone would pass out glasses and people would open bottles of wine they’d brought.
From that point it was a party. We’d talk about books, but mostly about movies because it was more likely several of us had seen the movie in question. We debated Thelma and Louise. Boogie Nights. Prêt-à-Porter ate up an evening. Tom lent us books or told us what to read. Story collections by Amy Hempel, Thom Jones, Mark Richard, or Barry Hannah.
As wine was poured Tom would rub his palms together in a loud, showy way and ask, “Okay, who owes me money?” We’d pay two hundred dollars in cash for ten sessions. When cash got tight, Tom took household objects in trade. He’d moved from New York and still needed furniture. I remember Monica in particular bringing a lamp…a vase…
The writer Steve Almond recently stated in the New York Times Magazine that writing workshops might be replacing psychoactive drugs as the new talk therapy for mental illness. By writing, people present their lives as fiction and tackle their issues as a craft exercise. By redeeming their protagonist, they find their own redemption.
Tom would agree. In his approach, called Dangerous Writing, he encouraged students to explore their deepest, secret, unresolved anxiety. The writing process would provide the reward of resolving those issues, making publication and sales—if they happened—a less important bonus. For me, the workshops served an even larger purpose.
Through our lives, our relationships are based on proximity. We attend the same school. We work at the same company or live in the same neighborhood. And when those circumstances change, our friendships dissolve. But at Tom’s and in workshops since Tom’s my friendships have been based on a shared passion. Instead of proximity, our mutual passion to write and share our work brings my friends together, largely the same group since 1990. Every week. That means seeing each other through marriages and new babies and someday grandchildren. Some among us have died. New friends have entered workshop. We’ve watched each other fail and succeed.
Back in the 1990s it was our party every Thursday night. And whereas my partying to date had been about binge drinking—toking bong hits and shotgunning beers to forget my boring life and job—this was a party that celebrated a new future. We were young, toasting our heroes. Our dreams would actually come true. We would all become authors. Process: The Good Writer as Bad Artist
If you’re going to be a good writer, don’t be afraid to also be a bad artist. Ray Bradbury painted. Truman Capote made collages. Norman Mailer drew. Kurt Vonnegut drew. James Thurber drew. William Burroughs blasted paint-filled balloons with a shotgun.
Monica Drake, the author of Clown Girl and The Stud Book, paints the most perfect still lifes, in oil paints, on switch plate covers. She protects them with several layers of clear varnish, creating unlikely little masterpieces people come in contact with every day.
Consider that some form of visual art will complement your writing. To recover from the colorless, limited world of abstract language, spend some time working with colors and tactile shapes. Process: The Writer as Showman
If I were your teacher I’d tell you to overserve your audience.
According to the linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, the books that become classics are the books that bring people together in community. The Tolkien books, for instance, are famous for uniting like-minded readers who love them.
To create this community, give readers more than they can handle alone. Give them so much humor or pathos or idea or profundity that they’re compelled to push the book on others if only to have peers with whom they can discuss it. Give them a book so strong, or a performance so big, that it becomes a story they tell. It’s their story about experiencing the story.
Again, my core theory is that we digest our experience by turning it into stories. Repeating the story—good or bad—allows us to exhaust the unresolved emotion of it.
If you provide readers with something too strong to readily accept, they’re more likely to share it. Community forms as people assemble to explore their own reactions. Charles Dickens knew this. As did Mark Twain. A book needs a face, and even the best writers have to act as showmen. Promoting a book is part of your profession so there’s no point in hating the process.
Find some way to love every aspect of the writing job.
Somewhere around my bah-zillionth book tour I
