writers

My Fiction Workshop Fortunes

July 26, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

The capacity to tell stories is an accident of birth for me. I was born thinking this way. There was no point in my life when I did not think about stories and causal events, about humorous and dramatic ways in which events could be told, and about how a blank page could be filled with wonder. If I have wandered far and wide, and been driven, seduced or called away from writing in my life, I have always returned to a string of authorial stepping stones that connects my past with the future before me.

Actually becoming a writer — by which I do not mean a professional, but rather a practicing writer — is a combination of accident and intent. The more things go in your favor, the easier it is to harness gifts and put words to a page. The more things go against you, the more you must overcome. Whatever obstacles I’ve faced in life, I was born with a number of storytelling gifts. I also happened to be born and raised in a town that is home to a school that values fiction writing. That I neither knew nor cared about these things until I went to college is yet more evidence that the fates were being kind.

My Home Town School
By nature I am not a particularly adventurous person. I have tended most of my life to look before I leap, even when others have counseled that he who hesitates is lost. So it should not come as a surprise that when I finally decided to go to college, after considerable academic carnage in my high school career, I had no thought of going anywhere except to the school in my home town. It wouldn’t have mattered what college it was, or what town I had been born in: that’s what I would have done at that point in my life, and probably for a decade after. (It’s true that my grandmother, father, mother, aunt and uncle also went to the same university, but that’s not why I went. I went because it was familiar and close.)

That I was born in and grew up in Iowa City, Iowa, is an accident. That Iowa City is the home of the University of Iowa, which is the home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is also an accident. I planned none of it, yet when I finally decided to wade into storytelling, after more academic carnage in college, the Workshop was there. [ Read more ]

Art, Craft and Writer’s Block

April 14, 2010 By Mark 3 Comments

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I know full well there are days when the writing comes easy and days when the writing won’t come at all, but I don’t ascribe the difference to any unseen or mystical force. Rather, I ascribe the difference to the fact that writing is damned hard all the time, and any day when it’s going great is a miracle.

I was reminded of my feelings about writer’s block by a post from Stephanella Walsh, in which she herself talked about coming to terms with the myth of writer’s block. It’s a good post, and particularly so because it admits to change, which is something too few people are confident enough to do.

Stephanella does a solid job of listing reasons why people reach for the “I’m blocked!” excuse, and I don’t disagree with any of them. People have been using the excuse of writer’s block — and the premise: that writing necessarily flows from some hidden spring of inspiration — since the first caveman struggled with the first cave painting.

I would like to propose, however, that there is a basic choice that every storyteller needs to make when approaching their work, and that in making this choice a writer necessarily allows or precludes writer’s block as an aspect of the storytelling process. The choice I speak of is whether or not writing is viewed first and foremost as a craft.

If you view storytelling as a craft — as a mix of techniques and channeled authorial gifts (the stuff you just happen to be good at) — I don’t see how writer’s block pertains. When you write from craft you can say you’re stuck, or you’re tired, or you hate your life, but the idea that your muse is playing coy, or that something that happened in your childhood is getting in the way of your ability to bash the holy hell out of your keyboard is absurd on the face of it — as it would be if you were a ditch digger and complained of ditch-digger’s block.

On the other hand, if you view storytelling as art — as a nebulous, ill-defined process of introspection and pure expression devoid of any compelling need to communicate with the reader, or even to be intelligible — then I suspect that writer’s block is useful in an endless variety of ways. Including, perhaps most importantly, by connecting you in spirit to all the other great writers who sat back in a sunny cafe chair and bemoaned the lonely fate of the truly and tragically gifted.

It’s your call, of course. But if you’re thinking that what you’d like to do is tell stories, you might want to take a long hard look at what your storytelling is in service of. Giving your authorial fate over to the unseen or mystical strikes me as a both a considerable statement of intent and a mistake. Unless, of course, what you’re really interested in is the drama of being a storyteller as opposed to the end product.

— Mark Barrett

The Agony of Success

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Why do storytellers tell stories? There are as many reasons as there are writers. Here’s a sampling.

One thing I’ve never been comfortable with, however, is a storyteller — and particularly a successful storyteller (however you gauge success) — who talks about how difficult, unbearable, agonizing, hopeless, unrewarding, soul-destroying, righteous, brutal, painful, exhausting or heroic the job of storytelling is. [ Read more ]