On Stifling Writers

Posted 22 August, 2007 in Flannery O'Connor, Writing Life |

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers,” said Flannery O’Connor. “My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”

Good thing O’Connor isn’t around to read a recent YouGov poll reported in the Guardian, which suggested that more Britons — nearly ten percent of those polled — dream of being writers than they do of pursuing any other job or avocation.

In a follow-up blog post on the Guardian’s site, John Crace wonders why:

It’s not even as if writing is that glamorous. You sit alone for hours on end honing your deathless prose, go days without really talking to anyone and, if you’re very lucky, within a year or so you will have a manuscript that almost no one will want to read. Your friends and family will come to dread requests for constructive feedback - which they know really means just saying, “This is far better than Amis or McEwan” - and if, by some small chance, you do land a book deal you will spend the week of publication wondering why your book isn’t piled up at the front of Waterstones and why you haven’t even picked up a single, measly review in the local paper.

Crace suggests that because writing is something that anyone with a basic literacy can do, it’s the one area of creative endeavour that the average person feels (s)he has a shot at breaking into. On the level of individual sentences, Crace posits, it’s often difficult to distinguish between an unpublished amateur and Margaret Forster (Crace’s example, not mine). It’s only with an agglomeration of sentences and paragraphs that a dearth of creativity begins to make itself apparent. Having read slush-pile submissions for a Canadian publisher, and having written manuscript evaluations for dozens of unpublished aspiring novelists, I can fairly safely attest that many of them don’t reach the level of minimum proficiency even on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

Regardless, the seemingly unquenchable desire of John/Jane Q. Public to write the next great forgotten or ignored novel has led to a veritable cottage industry of creative writing classes and writers’ workshops, many of them taught by working writers who need the money to live.

There are always a few people in these classes who have genuine talent. Unfortunately, the net result of the encounter with a creative writing workshop is usually to have whatever spark of originality or vibrancy that exists in their writing systematically beaten out of them; they emerge on the other side as cookie-cutter replicas of existing writers. To quote O’Connor once again: “[S]o many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.”

And then there are those others: the retirees with time on their hands, the doctors and lawyers and police officers and high-school teachers who feel that their rich life experiences have provided them with the perfect fodder for great fiction, by which one presumes they mean bestselling fiction. Crace’s advice to these people is not to quit their day jobs. O’Connor puts it more vigorously, if less compassionately:

Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing about writing, because they think they are already writers by virtue of some experience they’ve had. It is a fact that if, either by nature or training, these people can learn to write badly enough, they can make a great deal of money, and in a way it seems a shame to deny them this opportunity; but then, unless the college is a trade school, it still has its responsibility to truth, and I believe myself that these people should be stifled with all deliberate speed.

2 comments to “On Stifling Writers”

Panic, August 22nd, 2007 at 1:41 pm:

• And then there are those others: the retirees with time on their hands, the doctors and lawyers and police officers and high-school teachers who feel that their rich life experiences have provided them with the perfect fodder for great fiction, by which one presumes they mean bestselling fiction.

  Vincent Lam’s success won’t stem the tide of this, I’m afraid! ;)
  Wasn’t Crichton a doctor or some such too?

Steven W. Beattie, August 22nd, 2007 at 1:52 pm:

• He was, but then, so was Chekhov, so I guess you never can tell …

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