It’s day four in Positano, and it’s hard to believe that time is passing so quickly. Well, maybe not hard to believe, really, because time always seems to go by so much more quickly when you’re enjoying yourself. I mean, how could I not be enjoying myself in a place with views like this:
Yesterday morning, Hannah Tinti — editor of One Story, author of The Good Thief, and my writing workshop leader here at Sirenland — said that writing good descriptions is all about being a good liar. She used as her example one of my favorite movies, Reservoir Dogs, specifically the series of scenes over which we see Tim Roth’s character, Mr. Orange, first learn and then claim as his own the story that he uses to convince the other gangsters of his criminal identity. That made-up story — he was carrying a large amount of drugs and nearly busted in a restroom during a chance encounter with a group of police and their dog — begins as a sterile script that his partner forces him to learn. Over time, it evolves into a fleshed-out, detail-rich story. The details that he chooses to add to the script are what makes the lie become his own, and once the lie becomes his own he can convince others that it’s real.
This was part of a larger discussion about the importance (and proper use) of sensory images in writing — the importance, for example, of being precise, of paying attention to the rhythm of language, of valuing the quality of descriptive language (one good simile) over quantity (three mediocre ones). Information I’ve certainly heard before, but I certainly appreciate the reminder. It’s so easy to forget the importance of precision. To let your writing grow lazy. To forget the importance of lying well.
In any case, what’s no lie at all is that this has been an amazing experience so far. It’s hard to believe that there’s today and tomorrow left, and then I fly home Saturday. We worked on my story in this morning’s session, and I’m so full of ideas for it right now that I almost don’t know where to begin. But that’s a nice dilemma, I think, to have.
I recently (this morning over coffee, in fact) started reading a book called The Writing Life, a collection of short reflections by very famous authors on why and how they write. It was assembled and edited by Marie Arana, former editor of The Washington Post’s Book World, and published in 2003.
What’s funny about this is that I’ve had this book for at least five years. Maybe longer. It’s just been sitting on my bookshelf, and somewhere along the way I forgot that I’d put it there. I don’t really know what made me pick it up this morning, either. Just noticed it on the shelf, I guess, though I’ve certainly noticed it before. I mean, I’ve moved those bookshelves at least twice in the past three years, and the only way to move those suckers is to unload them first. So I’ve handled that book at least four times, but never opened it.
This morning, though, I pulled The Writing Life off the shelf and opened it and started to read the first piece. It’s a short reflection by Pulitzer-prize-winning author Francine du Plessix Gray on how she approaches the teaching of writing, and I was hooked from the very first sentence:
For some years now, whenever I’ve been asked to teach the craft of writing, I’ve told my prospective hosts that I would consider their invitation, on one condition: that the term “creative” — a word so stagnated by overuse that it should be confined to naming goldfish — be excluded from the title of my course.
Her point, as she goes on to explain, is that the very notion of certain genres of writing (such as fiction) being more “creative” than others is, at its heart, absurd. And I love this idea. Francine du Plessix Gray herself is a cross-genre writer, someone who has written both fiction and nonfiction at the highest levels, and I have such admiration for people who choose to do this, who elect to stand with their feet firmly planted in both writing “camps” (and all the various sub-camps that exist within each). Her declaration reminds me of my own time teaching high school English, the frustration I always felt at this so-often entrenched idea that there are but two kinds of writing in school: “academic, real-world writing” (which so often seems to manifest as that dreaded 5-paragraph essay) and “creative writing” (whimsical stuff belonging only in elective classes chosen by students trying to avoid gym). What a terrible, false reality we communicate to young students by cleaving all writing in two!
Her final sentences are a delight:
…never worry about what “category” your texts might fall into. The world, alas, will pigeonhole you before you know it, griping and caviling when you stray from the niche into which they’ve glued you. For the time being each of you is free to gambol and frolic in the delectable, Lord-given fields of human language. How we envy you.
So inspiring. I can’t wait to read more. I leave for Sirenland in three days; I think I’ve found my airplane book. And it was right under my nose the whole time.
