I’m not a big fan of writing advice – of a certain type.  In fact, when I’m in that kind of pissy irritated mood that leads one to go out of one’s way to seek reasons to become more irritated, I’ll often skip around the internet from one blog to another that purports to tell writers what they MUST do and then rail – usually to myself – against the idea that there are people out there who are saying there’s ANYTHING that every writer must do.  They must write every day; I don’t.  They must use outlines; I don’t.  They must show their work to trusted readers for critiquing; I only sometimes do.  They must try to write while in a semi-conscious dreamlike state.  What?  Huh?

Really?

Of course, this puts me in an awkward position when I actually want to give writing advice.  So, the disclaimer I’m attaching here and always intend whether it’s stated or not, is that anything I say about what’s helped me along the way or for that matter torpedoed me, is said in the spirit of sharing experience and not at all as some kind of declaration of what I think all writers MUST do.

Except of course on the subject of subjectivity.

(Just kidding. . .)

(Sort of. . .)

I had been writing off and on for decades, been through endless (some feeling literally endless) workshopping experiences and had an MFA from Warren Wilson before I realized that taste in literature is subjective.  I mean, I knew it in some way – but not in any particularly helpful way.  The realization came (Short Story Writer Has Epiphany!)  at the second meeting of the first writing course I ever taught.  I was in the middle of a discussion of the Grace Paley story “Conversations With My Father,” a story I love, a story it never occurred to me anyone else wouldn’t love (a story that in my heart of hearts I believe everyone should love) and it became clear to me that not everyone in that room loved it.

“How many of you like this story?” I asked, and about two-thirds of the hands went up.

“Huh.  So, how many of you like Faulkner?”  About one third.

“How about Virginia Woolf?”  Just about half.

“Well,” I said, “I just hope you all remember this when your work is being workshopped.  If half the folks in here think you’re on the right track, you’re right with Virginia Woolf and you’re ahead of William Faulkner.”

Seem obvious?  It wasn’t to me.

A few months after that, an editor with whom I had previously worked rejected a story of mine in no uncertain terms.  She was kind about it, but there was none of that “oh, this was close” stuff.  It was an unambiguous no, and I felt pretty devastated.  I went through one of those I shouldn’t try to be a writer patches. Then, a week later, another editor called me up whispering in shaky, anxious tones that he had just read the same story and was hoping, hoping that it was still available for publication.

“Why yes, I believe it is.”

I felt a certain sense of vindication, mingled with relief, but what I eventually realized, what I think it’s so important to understand, is that neither of them was right.  Because there is no such thing as right.  The illusion of objectivity in responses to art is just that.  For better and worse, when you decide to write, you hurl yourself and your cherished work product into a world that is ruled by individual taste.  The only way in which either editor was right, is that both were right.  The story was wrong for the first journal and a good fit for the second – but not for any reason beyond their subjective responses to the piece.

Writing is not a fixed currency.

Am I saying there’s no such thing as bad writing or good writing?  I guess what I’m saying is that long, long before the question of inherent quality can be addressed, the dominance of subjective response has so trampled it that it’s barely worth asking.  And  it’s a question I particularly dislike because in the asking lies the implication that some of us are more entitled to write than others of us, because some of us are “good” and others of us are “bad.”  I would far rather err in the direction of inclusion than risk endorsing that conceit.

One more story.  In 2007 an essay of mine appeared in the book  The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume I. The anthology is published by Norton, the selection made by the editors of Creative Nonfiction Magazine. I was thrilled to have the piece included, chosen from thousands I was told – and I was also amused, because a couple of years before Creative Nonfiction Magazine had rejected the same piece.  A sad little D-list xeroxed rejection slip.  And again, that isn’t a matter of self-correction on their part.  It’s almost certainly a question of whose desk it crossed the first time, and whose desk it crossed the second time.  No one right; and no one wrong.

So why is it so difficult for so many of us to remember as we get rejections that each one is just the subjective response of an individual reader and not a judgment from on high either about the worth of that piece or about our right to write?  I suppose that a certain desire for universal approval is natural to us all.  And I don’t think it’s surprising that writers, many of whom suspect they have no business writing, hear rejection as a confirmation of their worst fears and so take it to heart.

I also think that writing workshops carry in them the danger of training us all to seek consensus.  Not every workshop falls into this trap, but many end up defining themselves in terms of “liking” or “not liking” the piece.  We all say that we’re there to get advice, but in my experience, when I ask a writer how a workshop went, she’ll almost always answer either “Great! They loved it”  or “Awful,they didn’t like it at all” and only very occasionally something along the lines of “It went well, I got some really good advice.”

Problematic too is that there just seems to be something in the dynamics of a group that pulls in the direction of agreement – and agreement argues against subjectivity.  Workshops very often seem to want to give clear advice, which in a room of a dozen people is pretty much guaranteed to promote the notion that there is some objectivity to all of this.   In truth, there are almost certainly people among the group who don’t connect to the work on the table and may well not have anything useful to say.  If I had asked the editor who rejected my story how to make it better, I can’t imagine what she could have told me.  She so disliked the premise of the thing.  Really, she could only have said what she did which was “I’d like to see something different.”  While the editors at the journal that accepted it could and did help me make improvements, because they were already on board with the essential conceit and most of the execution.  Workshops rarely make those distinctions, rarely acknowledge the role of subjective response, rarely suggest that people who thoroughly dislike a piece might want to leave some extra room for those who feel connected to it and may know best how to help.

I write this, of course, just about two weeks out from the release of my first book.

I’ve spent the last eighteen months in a bubble in which reside my editors (who love my book), my agent (who loves my book), my publicist (who loves my book), my husband (who loves my book) and so on. . . and so, as the bubble bursts, have had to remember this stuff all over again, while reviewers (who may not love my book) and readers who don’t know me from a hole in the wall (and may not love my book) have their chance to speak.  I very much doubt that I’ll manage to remember at all times that the goal here isn’t unanimous acclaim.   Criticism stings even when it doesn’t make you feel wholly invalidated.  But some years ago, in some important way, I understood and accepted that not everyone would admire my work, and realized too that I couldn’t and shouldn’t write toward that end; and, even with momentary lapses, that acceptance has helped me along.

So my advice to you. . . well, you know.

Fifty percent gets you to Virginia Woolf.

Her age.  My age.

Middle-age.

I was an unrepentant weeper when she made her debut.  I watched the thing oh, I don’t know, maybe thirty times.  (Maybe 47 times?)  I read all the criticism, that of reality shows in general, of her voice, of the set-up, suspiciously perfect, Simon’s shocked expression a little rehearsed, perhaps?  And I agreed with much of it.  I pondered the feminist angles – I ponder them still.  And then I clicked back over to You-Tube and I wept.  Cried my blessed eyes out every damned time.  Great big snuffly sobs.

It’s a late-bloomer thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Or maybe you would.  It turns out a lot of people do.  It turns out, as I’ve learned, that a lot of women do.

A couple of weeks before Susan Boyle took the world by storm I spent a week as the Fellow at the Sirenland Conference, in Positano, Italy.  The Fellowship is awarded to an emerging writer who doesn’t yet have a published book.  It’s an amazing conference – stunning location, brilliant teaching and serious attendees, many of whom were women more or less my age.   By then, my book had been under contract for about six months and I had received both a lot of congratulations and a good many warnings about the impact a first book might (and might not) have on my life.  I’d also answered numerous questions from other early-career writers about how it had all happened, how I’d gotten an agent, all that kind of stuff.  And I expected more such conversations at Sirenland, which was fine with me.  I was delighted to talk about my book.

But what I experienced there was unlike any of that.   The women I met, not all but many, were less interested in the the fact that I had sold my first book at the age of 46 than they were overjoyed by it.  They didn’t ask me the kinds of questions I had grown accustomed to, not at first.  They just beamed at me.  They stopped me in hallways to talk about how much my story – a mother home with kids for nearly two decades getting her first book contract at 46 – meant to them.  They spoke about hope.  They expressed great surprise.  More than one woman said the story made her feel like crying.  One woman did cry.

I was taken aback, at moments moved close to tears, myself.  And I was glad to have made them so glad.  Surprised that they seemed so surprised.  But mostly, I have to admit, I was upset by what I saw.  Their joy, their shock, bespoke such a deficit of hope for themselves.  It was clear to me that though they were writing, and working hard at it, many, many of these women shared an underlying assumption that the world wasn’t really interested in what they had to say.

“The editors who liked the book all talked about appreciating what they called the ‘maturity’ of the stories,” I began to add, when I told the story.  “It was actually viewed as a positive that the author had some years behind her.  That it didn’t read like a book a twenty-something could write.”

More happiness.  More shock.  More hope.

Just as I had understood that their joy wasn’t exactly about me, Robin Black, getting a book contract, I realized that their hope wasn’t exactly for themselves getting one.  It was something more basic, more elemental than that.

I write a lot about women in their sixties and seventies – in my fiction, I mean.  I do so because I find older women  fascinating – think of all the life they carry!  What wealth, as characters, they bring.  And think too of what a vastly complicated existence they live, how complex a discrepancy is so often forged between who they understand themselves to be, and how they are viewed by the world.  If they are viewed at all, that is.  If the combination of their gender and their age has not rendered them, as one friend put it, describing her progress down a street, “eerily transparent.”

“First people stop seeing you as sexual,” she said.  “Then they stop seeing you at all.”

It’s a terrifying thought.  Not being seen.  Not being heard.  Truly terrifying.  Yet it’s also an everyday kind of fear.  For many women, invisibility is an expected, largely unexamined consequence of age.  There it was in Italy, that assumption, revealed by the celebratory response to the possibility that it might not be true.

When the whole Susan Boyle story broke, there was phrase often used in its recounting.  Written off.  Susan Boyle had been written off.  By the judges.  By the two men who asked her rude questions.  By the young girls in the audience who so evidently considered her a joke. How laughable of a woman who offered so little of what we are used to applauding women for to walk on that stage!   How presumptuous of her to stand at its center!

Written Off.  Maybe it’s because I am a writer that I find the phrase to be such a chilling one.  I think of writing as a means of creation, not of disposal.  Or maybe it’s just because I’m a woman who is no longer young.

It took my meeting those writers in Positano to understand how deep the fear of being written off runs in so many women as they feel themselves age.  It took my own inexplicably emotional response to Susan Boyle’s moment of being heard – of writing herself back on – to understand how deep that same fear had long run in me.

Now what we all need to understand is how to eradicate that fear, how to render it irrelevant, how to write it off as a relic of the past – instead of ourselves.

[As a little digression here, just a few words about the whole "can you really teach people how to write?" thing.  My own philosophy on this is that it's the wrong question.  The question I prefer to ask and have answered for myself - in the affirmative - is can you help people better understand why they want to write and how they might best help themselves reach those goals?  How can you make the process - inevitably tortuous as it is for us all at times - as valuable and as meaningful and as satisfying for that individual as possible?  I don't worry about teaching people how to be good writers or publishable writers - I worry, quite a lot as it happens - about helping people who want to write, love to write.  And in my experience the more they love doing it, the better they are at it.  And the better they become, the more they love doing it.  And the more they love doing it, the more easily and eagerly they can absorb the technical, craft aspects that will help them become even more pleased with the results.   Maybe that's a somewhat specious way of dodging the question, but it keeps me on track.]

So, there I was yesterday with this room full of students, early days in the semester and we’re all adjusting to one another – in what feel like productive ways.   I’m using some new workshopping methods that seem to be valuable.  No one is even close to having fallen asleep.  Or burst into tears.  And then at the very end I hear myself saying to them:  “I just want to tell you that if you’re going to do this, if you’re going to write, don’t just write.  Don’t just fiddle around in it.  Try to be a great writer.  Think about the writers who have moved you,the ones who have made you want to do this, and aim to be in their company.  Don’t take every word you produce too seriously, but take the power of words seriously, always.  Take the potential to be powerful seriously, that potential in each of you.  Write to reach that potential.”

Or something like that.

I’m cringing a bit now writing this, as I cringed right after class.  Because what on earth did I mean? I, who am the champion of people letting themselves play on their pages. (“Stories are like mud pies!” I tell students.  “Keep mucking around in them!  Don’t take yourself so seriously”).  I, who advise every student I have to tape a card over their computer saying:  “No one ever has to read a single word I write” – just exactly to banish the pressure to be Great.  (What does it even mean: GREAT??  I hate the very word.)

This bothered me all afternoon.  And during the night.  Ugh.  But what I woke up thinking today is that by “great” I didn’t mean some overblown version of “good” – though I’m afraid it may have sounded that way to them.   I didn’t mean, when you sit down at the keyboard, make sure you try to write well, make sure it’s  Really Well-Written – because that’s precisely the point of the card taped above the screen.  To free them, to free me, from the impulse to try to be a Good Writer.  To remember that you can write anything AT ALL and hide it away.  Hit delete.  Print it and shred it.  So yes, play in those mud pies.  Do things that seem outrageous.  Embarrassing.  That seem downright bad.

The thing is, of course, that words are damned tricky things.  We writers depend on their slippery nature.  I mentioned that in my first post – the way that the meaning of a word is both seductively specific – yes, that’s precisely it! I pinned that baby down! – and at the same time also infinite.  Therein lies their glory – and their potential for all manner of  betrayal.

So, yes, of course, by “great,” I didn’t mean “really good.”  I meant something completely different from that.  I meant write what only you can write.  Write what matters to you.  Write about those things, from those angles that deep in your private self you believe are yours alone – your views, your understandings, your sense of what is important about this life thing we have been handed, its finite nature, our capacities for love and cruelty and recovery; and the times when those capacities let us down. Or whatever it is that matters to you.

No wonder they looked at me like I was a little bit nuts.  (I imagine them in their dining hall:  “we have this wacky writing teacher . . .She’s a little too. . intense. . “)   I was talking to them in that class – I swear I was.  But of course I was also  – really, I suppose -  talking to myself.  Which is arguably not an ideal thing to do in a class.  But it’s early days in the semester.  There’s time to catch that impulse in myself.

Maybe every blog post I write for a while is going to circle around to the fact that I’m sitting here, 47 years old, waiting for my first book to come out.  And, for better and worse, it’s a book in which I did what I am advising them to do.  I wrote about what I think matters.  I wrote – oh, what hubris we writers we need to have and eventually to own up to having! – from the angle I think of as mine alone.  I said what I believe no one else can say.  Told ten stories I believe I alone can tell.  And while I cannot possibly judge the quality of the work, and stopped trying to do some time ago, I know how very honest a book it is.  How very exposing.  I know the exact moment at which I decided to allow my truest self to be there, in those words.  I know it is a book, that though fictional, entirely so, carries inside it,  my infant self, my childhood, my young womanhood, my early years of parenting, my current years, these years in which I can’t help but understand that years are finite things.  All  of me.  There I am.  288 pages worth.   And it is scary as hell.

Yet I know as I sit here, excited, anxious, relieved and also numb at times, waiting for its arrival, the one thing I don’t regret, won’t ever regret, is having put it all in there, having gone for broke.  And that’s what I wanted them to know.

Can you know that at 18 and 19?   Even 21?

Note to self: on Thursday, in class, maybe clarify a little bit:  Um, so when I said that about going for greatness. . .don’t go for greatness.  That’s not really what I meant.  But if you’re going to write, if you really want to do this, for heaven’s sake, for your own, and for ours, please throw caution to the wind.

Maybe they’ll still think I’m a little nutty, a little intense about all this.  I suppose I am. Especially during these waiting days.  But maybe they’ll remember that advice one day and be glad for it.

Even teaching presents us opportunities to revise, it seems.  And thank goodness for that.

So, in the spirit of having no plan, I’ll just start by saying that I woke up this morning thinking about the fact that I’ve never kept a diary.

Over the years – which in my case means over more than four decades – I’ve tried to keep diaries (or as they seem to be called now ‘journals’) from time to time.  And it hardly makes me unique that I’ve failed.  I know plenty of people who have failed at journal keeping ,often because after an enthusiastic, dedicated start, they lose steam somewhere around week three, maybe during a particularly dull period of their life (‘ate dinner again tonight, watched tv. . .’) or possibly when they figure out that to be honest means painting a less than flattering self-portrait (‘Kicked the neighbor’s dog again. . .feel bad about it, but couldn’t stop myself’)   But that was never me – I mean I never got far enough to be either dull or despicable.  I always ground out at sentence one.

“So,” I would begin, “I’ve decided to keep a diary.”  Or I’d skip the statement of the obvious, the meta-moment, and jump straight to the headline, something like, “Today at school I threw up” or”I am in love for the first time in my life.  I mean REALLY in love”  (These are both from my middle-school oeuvre).  But that was pretty much it.  Because the question of to whom I was speaking always bothered me.   The basic premise seemed to be that I was talking to myself.   But I didn’t exactly believe that.  I couldn’t quite let go of other possibilities.  Like the possibility of discovery.  Someone would find the thing and would learn all my secrets.  My brother.  My Enemies – an ever shifting group of adolescent girls who, like me, managed their painful self-consciousness by critically dissecting one another.   The second danger was that My Biographers, that august group whom I assumed would not be interested in my writing as such, but in my life as the glamorous star of stage and screen I then imagined I would one day become, would pore over the pages looking for evidence of my magical magnetism.  And I just couldn’t bear the idea that I would seem average, typical.  Dull.  Which even I could tell I was.  No matter how I tried, I couldn’t seem to manufacture any magnificence  of any kind – not unless I lied, which meant it wasn’t really a diary anymore, was it?  So by the time I had realized that I couldn’t tell the truth lest it be read by those who would use it against me nor do a convincing job painting myself as goddess-like – at the age of say, thirteen – I no longer understood the point of the exercise at all.

The thing that never occurred to me then was that the act of writing might, at times, be something completely separate from the act of being read.

I think about this often now, about those pages I never filled, each time I am asked “When you write fiction, do you have a particular reader in your head or do you write for yourself?”    (As an aside I’ll just say that I never tire of questions like this one and “How do you get your ideas?” and ‘Do you know the whole story when you start.”   I don’t tire of being asked or of reading about other writers being asked, because every single writer has a different answer; and also because I am always reminded of what a luxury, what a gift it is to do work in which other people are so interested.  Yes, I suppose it can be tiresome answering the same question over and over and over, but imagine how much more tiresome it would be if no one cared about the work you do!)

I never did take to journal keeping but gradually, in stages, I stopped worrying at all about who might be reading what I write.  The first shift came when I began to write fiction in college, and the issue of what people might find out about me disappeared.  Or so I naively thought. I now believe that fiction is in many ways more revealing than is memoir, fiction being a bit like dreams we show the world, but back then I believed I had hidden myself.  So all that obsessed me about my work in those days was: IS IT GOOD?????  (And it was definitely an all-caps kind of concern.)  And all that I thought it might reveal about me (and desperately wanted it to reveal about me) was: I”M A GOOD WRITER! (RIGHT?? RIGHT??)  And while that concern didn’t wholly silence me the way my worries about self-revelation had, it certainly shut me down in other ways.  It made me careful.  It made me tight and ungenerous with my words.  It made me cautious – and, as I have learned the hard way, caution is one of the most effective enemies to good work.

After my college years, I wrote off and on for nearly two decades and throughout that long stretch, as I had three children, one unhappy marriage, one far happier one, dealt with some terrible losses, absorbed the facts of a child’s special needs, struggled with bouts of depression and crippling anxiety, something odd happened to my impulse to write.  It stopped being about who would read it.  It stopped being about being good – or bad.  Revealing or a veil over the real me.  It stopped being much of anything other than the means through which I tried and tried and tried again to make sense of  life.  I wrote because writing made me feel more in control – not of the writing, but of the moments passing me by.  And I wrote because through an odd and gorgeous alchemy writing helps me be the best version of myself I can be.  Not that I become wonderful or – lord knows – perfect, or anything like that.  I just become a better me – flaws and all.

I’m pretty sure now, decades after the fact, that at least some of those friends of mine whose shelves or attics or memories are filled with rows of journals in which they scribbled daily what had happened to them and what they had thought at the time, weren’t concerned with who else might see what they wrote.  I’m pretty sure that they had already intuited, long, long, long before I did, the way in which words with their particular dynamic of specificity of meaning and infinity of the same, can help us live better lives.

Hmmmm.  I wonder if all this is on my mind because in just under two months my first book comes out and I find myself  – inevitably, I would think – newly obsessed with what people will think of my work. . . Food for thought.  Fodder, maybe, for another post.

More to come. . .I very much hope you’ll come back and discover along with me where this blog is going to go. . .(now, what does that mean about writing for others and writing for oneself?)