Richard Russo’s Advice for Beginning Writers

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James Salter once said, “As a writer, you aren’t anybody until you become somebody.” I can just hear you now: Tell me something I don’t know, fool, but Richard Russo includes the quote before his first essay in the collection, The Destiny Thief, for a reason: becoming somebody in writing is about as far-flung difficult as becoming a major-league athlete or an A-list Hollywood actor.

Why, then, are the numbers of wannabe writers legion? Part of the reason is that beginning writers are clueless. The problem with that obvious statement is, to become successful, you have to be. To an extent.

Here’s a relevant excerpt from Russo’s essay, “Getting Good”:

“In ‘The Getaway Car,’ Ann Patchett’s wonderful essay about becoming a writer, she observes that not many beginning cellists believe they’ll be playing Carnegie Hall anytime soon, whereas beginning writers (and I was one of these) will often send off early work to The New Yorker. It’s possible that musicians are just smarter than writers, but a more likely explanation is that playing the cello immediately announces itself as both difficult and foreign, whereas writing feels like an extension of speaking, something we’ve been doing almost since birth. For whatever the reason, aspiring writers are less gifted than cellists at judging how long it takes to get good. When the relatively short apprenticeship that beginning writers too often anticipate turns out to be a very long one, they become understandably frustrated and resentful. Had they gone to law school, they’d be lawyers by now. Indeed, had they chosen to do almost anything else, they’d be making money instead of hemorrhaging it.”

From here Russo launches into writing as a vocation vs. writing as a business. Self-publication, thanks to Amazon and other platforms, is a cinch nowadays. The trouble is, you shouldn’t pull that cinch unless you know something about the business aspect of writing.

Yes, you can make an end run around the slow powers-that-be (conventional publishers), but to what purpose? You climb one mountain (seeing your work in paperback form) only to see another that’s much larger–finding people to actually buy your book, then read it (uh, I mean someone other than Aunt Mae and your best friend who borrows stuff off you all the time and feels obligated).

Maddening, no? Like everything else in life, success in writing amounts to a medley of talent, self-discipline, and luck, with the only bar being that which separates the disciplined from the pretenders. But even among the disciplined, success isn’t guaranteed. There’s the luck part. And the who-you-know part. And the being in the right place at the right time part.

But not the excuses part, thank you. The one merit to the old guard is that wannabe writers were often rejected again and again and learned from that. They grew as humble and self-aware as an aspiring cellist. They studied and tried different things and made themselves better instead of repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

But they surely didn’t schedule auditions with Carnegie Hall. And why? Because they had to show up personally, for one thing, and listen to themselves through other ears and not their own self-deceiving ones.

Meanwhile, writers still wet behind the ears continue to send stuff to The New Yorker because it’s easy and done through the internet and they’ll never know how much of the piece was actually read before being gonged into the form-rejection file. Mercifully, I might add.

The conclusion? Keep doing what you’re doing. Only don’t.

Ah, the writing trade. Don’t you just love it?

Dean Young on Reckless Poetry

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Here’s my review on the late Dean Young’s _The Art of Recklessness_. I read it because I could use a little shaking up. Hell, everybody can. Seems everyone’s writing the same poem sixty-seven different ways (that look amazingly similar), my and self included. Young, who had a facility for flights and fancies, makes it look easy–then talks about it as if it’s easy. If you’re interested in his little book, here’s a preview:

What? There’s an ART to being RECKLESS?

Seems I took no classes as a kid. I just had at it, devil take the hindmost (because he seemed little interested in the foremost). The title, though, is chosen because it is part of Graywolf Press’s “Art of…” series. Dean Young (who else?) got the call for recklessness because, well, HIS recklessness (called “poetry” in some circles) is quite artful. Came this close (holds fingers an inch apart) to winning the Pulitzer Prize for his collection, Elegy On Toy Piano.

What did I gain from this book? A lot of what, a bit of why, but not much of how. That is, if you’re looking for Dean to share secrets to his controlled anarchy, keep looking. Instead, he shares a few opinions on the wild and the crazy, on the Dadas and the Surrealists. And though he claims John Ashbery to be our greatest modern poet, he mentions him but once, giving the lion’s share of attention to poets we don’t immediately consider when we think “reckless”: John Keats (with his wild and crazy Odes), William Wordsworth (who never met a word he didn’t write down), and Walt Whitman (leaves and the grass electric).

“If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without the dream, a copy of a copy of a copy,” The Dean of Recklessness tells us. He also is a great cheerleader. Any poet would love to have him as a teacher (U of Texas, Austin, at one point, methinks). “Our poems are what the gods couldn’t make without going through us.”

Dean Young may seem playful as hell in his poetry, but this book can be scholarly as all get-out at times, throwing around some big-boy words (the kind where I say, “Huh?”). He also quotes with abundance. Here’s a Wallace Stevens, for instance: “It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.” Oh, I love it. The Art of Being an Amateur I have nailed! Where do I begin collecting checks and raves?

And there’s humor here: “Poetry, as everyone knows, is in competition with girls’ volleyball for the crowd. It’s all about numbers… And in regards to the common bellyache that the only audience for poetry is poets: but it’s been noted by many that poetry is like a foreign language; you need to learn grammars and idioms to get it, so what’s so terrible about people who know Portuguese being the people who are interested in listening to and reading Portuguese? Arcane specialization? Elitism? Surely no more than girls’ volleyball. Poetry’s greatest task is not to solidify groups or get the right people elected or moralize or broadcast; it is to foster a necessary privacy in which the imagination can flourish. Then we may have something to say to each other.”

Dean also calls complacency the greatest enemy of art, with an aside about the hidden “me” in “poetry”: “It is also worth entertaining the notion that the least important time in any workshop is when your own work is being talked about. It’s called ‘Poetry Workshop,’ not ‘Me Workshop,’ after all. The imagination wants to say something you can hear and often what you say about someone else’s poem is exactly what you need to hear about your own. The way in is to go out.” Clearly Dean Young has trafficked with a few poets in his day. Self-promotion (while pretending not to self-promote) is the name of the game.

As for examples of reckless poems, they are few and far between, given the brevity of the book. It’s more Young providing the Old history of imagination’s resistance. All in all, equal parts cheerful and depressing. Cheerfully, you might wing it next workshop or on-line critique group, even though you know the mavens of tradition are waiting in the wings to nitpick your punctuation, your grammar, your syntax. On the other hand, he warns, sometimes reckless art is bad art.

Great. Just when I was beginning to take wing and feel the exultation of freedom, I get the overheating rays of the sun again, melting my wax. You can write bad poetry conventionally OR unconventionally, I’m afraid. The World of Art takes no prisoners, even in a minimum-security prison like Recklessness.

The Fourth of July: Sis, Boom, Bah Humbug!

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IT’S THE FOURTH OF JULY

and he’s listening to Oh Say Can You See in a sea of runners and an awakening 8 a.m. heat. The blue smell of Ben-Gay on the mentholated old guys & Axe on the sun-venerating young guys & armpit on the just-rolled-out-of-bed lazy guys & no one’s run a New Balance step yet. The ellipsis after the song’s last line is always a chant of USA! USA! USA! from the fun-run campers who must not read (at least footnotes) because they never feel the wet hand of irony in that disunited “U” running down their body-painted backs.

Jesus, but he bolts when the pistol goes, heat or no. On the course, though, he is passed by sausage-heavy middle-aged men & oxy-huffing retired men & stick-legged kids & women of all stars & stripes. Begrudge not, says the Bible, so he celebrates their speed or their youth, their fat or their fair sex—whatever hare-bodied thing there is to celebrate.

That night, after the picnic-table splinters & charred cheeseburgers, after the fries & bottles of we’re-out-of-ketchup, the fireworks mushroom into night clouds & umbrellas rain down hiss & heat sparkle, made-in-China reds, whites & blues. He cranes his neck, the skies soured with smoke & sulfur, holding tight the hand of his sweetheart.

Then it’s blessed be bed, after the grande finds its finale, only he is wakened by more (USA!) fireworks up the street (USA!) at 11:30 p.m. Still the holiday, after all, ignited by the undoubtedly drunk, after all, because booze is God-Bless-America’s drug of choice, after all. The outdoors explodes until midnight & he’s had about all he can stand lying down & cursed be Thomas Jefferson anyway, with his noble agrarian society & its whiskey rebellions & its pursuits of happiness & its God-given rights & its who-the-hell-are-you-to-tell-me, question comma rhetorical.

You know how this ends: It’s insomnia again. In the shallow, post-patriotic hours of the Fifth of July. Come cock-crow morning, on his walk, Fido sniffs the empty nips & plastic fifths along the sandy shoulder of sleepy roads. There’s even a patriotic Bud box, hollowed-be-its-name, white stars emblazoned on the blue of its crumpled carcass.

God bless America, he tells it.