Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
― Neil Gaiman
His name was Bernard Taper, he taught in the Berkeley J School after making his name writing about the great choreographer George Balanchine in the New Yorker, and he taught me a valuable lesson: Often the best advice about writing is the advice we ignore.
Taper found me annoying. I was a full-of-myself Berkeley undergraduate taking his graduate course on magazine writing and it wasn’t so much that I thought I knew it all as a writer, but that I assumed mastery would be mine sooner or later. I just couldn’t fathom Taper’s soft-spoken talk about it taking time and work and repetition and luck and some other unnameable x factor, not talent exactly, though that was part of it, and a cocktail of modesty, humility and patience.
I said something that made it clear to Taper that I was way too impatient and self-referential to tune into the importance – and relevance for me – of his message. He stared back, incredulous, and slapped me down with what should have been a reprimand: “I feel like you expect to pick up a tennis racquet and on the first try hit backhand winners down the line every time!”
I smiled like an idiot. Why yes, that was exactly what I expected! He had it right. But what was wrong with that?
So what was wrong with that? In a way nothing – every writer starting out has to believe that his or her imagination sits there potently, like a Saturn V rocket booster, ready to push you down into your astronaut seat with 3 Gs of acceleration as you are blasted up and hurtle toward escape velocity. Later will come the sinking reality that the blasting part has very little to do with actually achieving anything as a writer.
A writer, especially a young writer, craves that sensation of G-force acceleration. Now I’m cranking! I stayed up half the night working! Man oh man I’m doing something! I’m going to attempt something so crazy-stupid-unlikely that it will be amazing when I succeed gloriously! I’m halfway there already! I’m more than halfway there, because I believe (even though I’m on page one)!
How do you convey to a young writer that all this pent-up energy will be expelled and only in its quiet, possibly dejected and morose aftermath will the real work of writing be achieved – or not?
The obvious answer is: You can’t. That is why the notion of “teaching” writing, per se, is highly problematic. You can teach techniques in writing, you can offer a grounding in striving to find ways to live with ever more acuity of vision, ever more alert and receptive an ability to listen and truly hear, but you can’t intrude into the private interior space where a writer becomes a writer, or doesn’t.
I want to thank Bernard Taper for being a great teacher and sharing some of that teaching with me. His words stayed with me for years. A sense I had that he’d have liked to reach out and slap me also stayed with me. He cared, that was clear. Did he care about me? Not especially, not beyond professional responsibility, since I’d given him no glimpse of being worthy of that. But he cared about words, passionately, he cared about story-telling, and he left me the kit – with time, revisiting his words regularly, I was able to reassemble them and slowly develop some patience and stamina as a writer. It’s hard to listen to others – but if a teacher is clear, and speaks with authority, the listening might take place in stop-time, taking years to hit home.
– Steve Kettmann
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