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Richard Bausch makes a lot of good points about the how-to-write books genre of books in this essay in The Atlantic, but the article is limited by a lack of empathy for the people who get drawn into reading these manuals. This limit leads him to perform a powerful act of policing of the identity of writer.

… these people, many of them college students, want to be considered serious writers; they seek literary excellence; but they have come to believe that they can accomplish this by means of the convenient shortcut.

He assumes that people who haven’t read “great works” (which he seems to accept as a totally unproblematic category, though perhaps that issue was merely outside the scope of the article), if they want to be writers, want simply to pose. He assumes, too, that they are lazy and do not want to do the work.

What he ignores is the possibility that a lot of the people reading how-to-write manuals may genuinely believe that they are doing the work. Think about your own primary and secondary education: how many times did you hear that writers could only break the rules after knowing what they were? Is it any wonder that some people, when they want to write, would believe that they need to read these manuals?

Bausch’s essay also implies that the desire to be a writer has to come from reading literature or else it is fraudulent.

He did not come to writing from reading books, good or bad. He came to it from deciding it might be cool to walk around in that role. I meet this kind of “writer” far too often now in my travels around the country—even, occasionally, in the writing programs.

While the particular individual he was describing may indeed think this way, it would be a mistake to assume that everyone who begins from some point other than a deep love of Shakespeare is interested only in posing. Some writers begin with an urgent need to tell their stories. To ignore that reality or to dismiss writers who begin that way is to severely and unfairly limit who gets to be a writer. Let’s not forget that writers who come from marginalised backgrounds are a whole lot more likely to begin from the point of needing to tell the world their truths and a whole lot less likely to have had access to well-stocked libraries and guidance in navigating them. Given that Bausch opens the piece with details about dressing in suits and buying new shoes from Brooks Brothers, the class issue seems particularly clear.

Ultimately, his failure to empathise creates the message that you must already know which sorts of education in writing are useful (costly MFAs) and which are not.

If you do not already know, you cannot be a real writer. That’s a policing of identity I could do without. Such attitudes lead to a flattening of literary voices, no matter what stylistic differences survive.

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These days, most people who make a living from writing don’t make their living from writing. What I mean is that most people who earn enough money to live off of from being writers don’t earn that money exclusively from peddling words: they bring home their bread by teaching or speaking in some other capacity in public. To get those gigs, however, it is not enough to be a writer: you must be a Writing Expert (preferably with a TM). The best way to establish yourself as a Writing Expert (TM) is to prescribe certain ways of living and writing. To get those ways accepted, they should have a veneer of common sense and a slight outsider-edge. (After all, what’s a creative writing class good for if it doesn’t give its students a frisson of rebellion?)

An excellent example of How to Be a Writing Expert (TM) is this article from an “assistant lecturer in Creative Writing”: Does a room of one’s own really help you write a great novel? Sure it totally misses the point about Woolf’s work by ignoring the fact that historically women have not had the time, space, or independence which allows one to think and put words on paper, but it certainly serves the purpose of establishing Matt Shoard as an authority on how people ought to write!

Here’s the thing: comfort breeds complacency; rural bliss breeds The Lost Symbol . . . Real writers need frustration. They need embarrassment. They need cold, uncomfortable rooms, miles from a mobile signal. There should be an infestation of at least one parasite, a backlog of warnings from the Student Loans Company and just enough coffee for what Don DeLillo calls “an occasional revelation”.

Ah yes, the good old Romantic valorisation of poverty. If one person who wasn’t miserable wrote poorly, then misery must be a necessity for decent writing! (Actually, I have it on very good authority that China Miéville has a lovely flat, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.)

What’s really impressive here is how the “assistant lecturer in Creative Writing” manages to position himself in opposition to the fluffy bourgeois (who would want to have a retreat in the countryside) without actually having to suffer the loss of control over one’s life that poverty entails:

Personally, I like to hold “hungry” creative writing seminars through lunch, far from a vending machine, at the cold end of campus with the heating down. You can almost see Dan Brown leaving and David Foster Wallace taking his place. “I want to smell the breath of a stranger as he speaks my name,” wrote one student this week. They’re no more prolific, but they’re gutsier. Discomfort cures overwriting.

Oh the heroic young man, holding off from his trip to the cafeteria until he has finished his day’s writing! How brave! How, like, real! (I hope none of his students have trouble with hypoglycemia.)

I’d rather not smell the breath of a stranger speaking my name because when they’re that close, they’re that much closer to attacking me. Because I am a woman, I walk through the world (even if I’m just running to the store at 10 pm for a bottle of whiskey) with that discomfort. Because I am an Aspie, I hear all the time that I need to be “cured”, that my way of thinking and approaching the world is invalid. That is real discomfort. These seminars-before-eating and cheap flats (if chosen) are at best self-indulgence, at worst appropriation of the very real struggles of the oppressed.

Oh well, at least we agree about coffee. Too many writers on this side of the Atlantic try to make due with tea, and that’s just wrong. (See, I’m an expert too. Hire me?)

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Some of the discussion around the long-overdue arrest of Roman Polanski I take very personally indeed. The man who raped me was an artist—a poet, not famous, not great, not even as well published as I am, but an artist nonetheless, so when I hear people suggesting that an artist’s work can somehow expiate the crimes he has committed against another human being, I have to consider it from that angle. Let’s say the man who raped me wrote a collection of poetry so remarkable that even I felt the need to learn from it in order to improve my poetics. This would have to be a truly astounding work because I’m not all that skilled at compartmentalization. Based on my knowledge of his work with its rhetoric-pretending-to-be-important, it is highly unlikely that he could ever produce anything like that. Still, if he did: would it change anything he did to me? Would it make up for any of it? For the trauma? For the pain? For the loss of my sense of autonomy?

Of course not. Nothing that man could ever do would change the reality of what he did. To suggest that a cruelty committed against an individual can be canceled out through the some more generalized set of good works is to engage in a sort of moral bookkeeping that is fundamentally inhumane.

But what effect then does committing such crimes have on the value of an individual’s work? It’s very easy to paint a line between the life and the work and to say that one should not impact the other, but if you do that, then you construct a second identity for an artist in which s/he is a pure avatar of ideas. The problem with that (besides all the general issues with constructs) is that when an artist goes to create, they still have all of the rest of who they are hanging about them. Experiences, beliefs, attitudes: those don’t change just because someone has put on their art-making galoshes today. To actively avoid applying knowledge of those factors to the evaluation and understanding of a work of art may make certain cases simpler or at least more comfortable, but it is as much an error as ignoring any other aspect of context would be.

When the man who raped me uses a word like “sex”, it has tremendously different meanings from when the man who loves me uses it. I’m not sure that should only be the case when I read or hear it. I don’t believe that interpretations from my position should be waved aside as biased (as if any human were ever purely objective) or invalid in a broader sense.

But it’s messy, right?

That’s part of how you know it’s valid. A legitimate consideration of art as a human endeavor should be messy because humans are messy. Artists are messy. Audiences are messy. The creative process is messy. To try to present a clean and simple picture of any of that is a disservice not only to art but also to the experience of being human and all the horrible and wonder things that entails.

Try having a conversation with someone without making any eye contact. Describe how it feels.

If you normally do not make eye contact, either try doing so or have a conversation with someone or something that has no eyes. A tree, for instance.