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Making a Literary Life: Advice
for Writers and Other Dreamers by Carolyn See
©2002, Random House
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Fiction:
The Handyman
Making History
Golden Days
Rhine Maidens
Mothers, Daughters
The Rest is Done with Mirrors
Non-Fiction:
Making A Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers
Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in
America
Blue Money
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From "Writers' Carousel,"
The Writer's Center, Maryland (September, 2002)
by Judith McCombs
What's not to acclaim about Carolyn See's engaging, tenacious,
heartening advice to writers and would-be writers? I must be missing
something--Lord knows I'm not the gushing type--but after three
weeks of reading and talking about this book, I still can't come
up with a convincing complaint. See's pithy advice nudges the
novice and the stranded writer into reality--first, don't tell
non-writers how you want to write. Second, call up your own material--the
people and events that shape your life and imprint your dreams--and
if they don't look like what you think of as really worthy literary
material, so what? Third, write: a thousand words a day, five
days a week, for the rest of your life. No writing ahead, no catching
up--each day starts at zero. Two hours of heavy editing count
for a thousand words.
See, whose primal model is her charming, late-blooming old Texas
dad--a character who survived her mother's jeering to become a
published writer of Western pulp stories and soft-porn novels--applies
this four-pages-a-day quota to just about all the kinds of creative
prose there are, stories, novels, creative non-fiction, and also
to genre stuff and commercial magazine pieces. Although See believes
she has no idea what poets should do, I would bet that many poets
could translate See's quota into an analogous, ritual time for
the deep, obsessive focus involved in making poetry.
There's a lot of heart-warming,
soul-stirring, in-your-face advice about how to change your writing
self from invisible to visible, and how to do the same for your
work. First, write brief, charming letters of appreciation to
literary folk whose work you genuinely admire. (This is where
I cringed, recalling the letters I have never written to writers
and mentors, some now dead, whose work has meant so much to me.)
If the Great Writer answers, wonderful. If not, so what?
Other advice: find literary people who will encourage your work--look
around you in your writing classes--and hey, are you willing to
encourage their work? Realize that having a story, article, or
book published is like having a baby: you have to be the one to
take care of it, let people know, give them copies, give a publication
party--instead of sulking or wilting as you wait for the world
to discover you. Why? because you love it most, and if you don't
love it enough to nourish it, it won't thrive. (Here I recall
not only Whitman publishing his own work, but also Dickinson writing
to Higginson, apparently to explore her best chance at publication.)
All this you get in the first third of Making a Literary Life.
Equally contagious are See's
strategies for coping with rejection--see it as a boomerang, not
a spear, reply instantly and positively, promise them another
piece in three or four weeks. You also get strategies for how
to fashion query letters to editors, how to deal with character--the
element that drives See's own work--and with plot, point of view,
geography, scenes; how to rewrite, by yourself and in tandem with
your editors; how to save for, enhance, and survive your first
trip to New York; how to incorporate yourself as a business so
that you can take all your literary expenses off your taxes.
Making a Literary Life is
one of a remarkable and essential triad that I would urge most
writers to seek out. If you need to sharpen your skills in fiction
writing, Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft: Essays and Discussions
on Story Writing for the Lone Mariner or the Mutinous Crew (Eighth
Mountain Press, 1998) will give you more specific advice than
See's on point of view and the other elements, less on making
a literary life. If you're mainly into poetry, or the short-short
fiction that has to have a poetic intensity to move the reader
deeply, much of See's advice holds true, despite her claiming
poetic ignorance. If you want to trace how reading feeds a writer,
Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
(Cambridge UP, 2002) is covertly a portrait of writer and Muse,
overtly a tribute to the sources that have shaped her work, from
comic books through myth.
It can't be coincidence that
all three of these books are by people who are conspicuously Outsiders,
who have made their way as writers belonging to a non-elite gender,
and a non-elite region or country--far west of the Hudson, far
north of New York. Their books share an uppity independence, a
tenacious, honest energy, an openness to renegade genres and strategies
and truths that open and deepen the world we know.
Judith McCombs is the
author of Sisters and Other Selves, Against Nature: Wilderness
Poems, two books on Margaret Atwood, 20/20 Visionary Eclipse,
and Territories: Here and Elsewhere. She teaches at the Writer's
Center in Bethesda.
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