Heretics, Dreamers, Skeptics and Rebels: A Writer’s Secret Life

Notes prepared for a Symposium at Minot Statey,
April 8, 2003

Thank you for attending this final session of this symposium on The Writers Life. Let me begin by saying in what sense I am a writer and in in what sense I am not. I suppose an Episcopalian priest does not fit very well in the available categories of rebels, skeptics, dreamers, and heretics. All those things imply a kind of stubborn loneliness however, and to practice orthodox Christianity in the Post Christian era, and to be an Episcopalian in Lutheran Land have give one some practice in stubborn loneliness.
 
Surely I am not a writer in the sense that Joyce Carol Oates is, who has written 90 books, or even in the sense that some of those who have preceded me today, who have published far more than I have. I have published fewer than a dozen poems and made a grand total of $115 from their sales. I have also written a novel, which is unpublished, but not totally unreadable. I have a copy here.
   
To justify my appearance here, I have to remind myself of three things: first of all, Jane asked me to be here, and I would do anything Jane asked, because she is a good friend and because she has done more than any other single person I know to make Minot State a center of literary culture. Second, I am a writer in the sense that I do it every day, or nearly every day and also in the sense that I can’t not do it. I have tried and nearly perished in the effort.  Augustine said that everyone had a God shaped hole in their heart which only God could fill. Whether that is true or not, it is true that some people have an writing-shaped hole in their psyche that only writing can fill. it is very much an addiction, though relatively cheap one. In one sense, all serious writing is therapy. Of course, if it is any good, it goes beyond that, but it always at least that. Third, from what I've read, the practices and procedures I am prepared to share with seem pretty typical of writers far more productive than I am, so any deficiencies of quality or quantity is not the result of bad procedures, but the result of my not following my own advice, or the result of what we might tactfully call other other things.
   
With that much apologia, let me begin by saying that writing, at least at the beginning, is primarily a matter of time--making it and then using it. Notice I did not say finding it. I know as well as I do that there is not free time to be found. it has to be made, carved out of the bottomless busyness of life. The brutal fact is that if the need to write runs deep enough, you will make the time. If you think you want to write and consistently fail to make the time, then you should cheerfully accept that you don’t really want to write, and enjoy spending it time as you do. My good friend Dave Gresham, was and remains, the most talented non-writer i ever knew. When people asked him why he didn’t write, he said he wasn’t desperate enough. Writing is a desperate game. It pays poorly and it’s hard work. The world has plenty of books already and will do pretty well without yours. As someone once said, if you can not write, don’t.
   
But if you can’t help yourself, and I can’t, then you will make the time. You will write late at night after it spouse and kids are asleep, or you will go to bed earlier and get up and do it before they wake up, as I do. Almost all writers write their first works while holding down full-time jobs. Hemingway was a journalist, Fitzgerald wrote advertising copy. Wallace Stevens was the vice-president of an insurance firm, a job he never gave up. Frost taught school. Eliot worked in a bank. But you will have to make the time. You can get ideas “on the fly,” but growing those seeds into ripe fruit requires blocks of what Keats called stillness and slow time. To be serious, most people need at least an unbroken block of at least an hour several times a week.
  
 I need to say a couple more things time, and about false dilemmas that feel like issues of time.  If you are young, and making important choices about career and marriage and values, you may feel you should forego a career and security and instead do day labor in order to have the time to write. Or you might think that marriage and children are incompatible with writing because you have heard and marriage and children take a lot of time. As it happens, that is very true.
    
You may think you need to deliberately choose to be a rebel, a skeptic, a heretic or a dreamer. Poets have talked about this. Yeats wrote that “One must choose, perfection of the life or of the art.” And there is a line is Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology,  where a woman says, “I could have been as great as George Eliot, but I had five children and no time to write.”
  
 Or you may be drawn to stories of Rimbaud and Verlaine, people who deliberately choose a dissipated life style, who  ruined their lives, disarranging their senses into order to break free of conventional worldviews, because they thought that was what it took to write. They agreed to sacrifice their lives on the altar of their art. Conventional and bourgeois life seemed to them the enemy. When people read these stories, they forget that those who choose a dissipated lifestyle lost as much writing time recovering from hangovers as they would have taking care of their children.
  
 It can even be that if you choose a conventional career and family life, and your writing does not turn out to be what you hoped, you may feel as if you did not sacrifice enough. You may think, “If I had only taken more drugs, and gone without health insurance, and been more promiscuous, or a bigger jerk, I could have been a better writer.” Sometimes I say this myself, but when I put it like that, it sounds as stupid as it is.
    
All these are versions of the Romantic Myth of the Artist, which has found its way into the title of this Symposium. But Joyce Carol Oates addressed this issue last light when she said that rebellion and heresy and skepticism can be a detriment to writing when they go too far or when writers pursue them for their own sakes. (She was kinder to dreamers.) She also said that some writers are jerks, and some are nice people, but jerkness and talent are independent variables. And she demonstrated this in her own person. No one could have been any more charitable, sensitive, generous, patient than Joyce Carol Oates. No one could have been a bigger jerk than Marge Piercy when she was here eight years ago. Yet both are productive and important writers.  The bottom line is everyone should be a nice as one can be, and everyone one should pursue the elemental and profound rewards of a career and family as much as they can. If you have talent and need, you will find a way to do more than that. Art has many enemies, but being sensible and comfortable are not among them.
  
 If the conflict between art and convention is one false dilemma, the conflict between art and religion is another. When I was 20 I decided I knew more than God and dispensed with Him. Partly I was seduced away by science, but partly too, by art. It did seem as if most modernist writers whom I admired were skeptics and rebels if not heretics and dreamers.  I rememered D.H. Lawrence but I overlooked Dante and Milton. Once outside the faith, I stayed outside partly because I was afraid that returning to faith would take away my ability to write (even though I had not yet demonstrated that ability) or even my desire. I understood that a relationship with God might make me happier, but I knew little of joy and so associated happiness with numbness and thought I might become too happy to write. I needn’t have worried.
   
When I did return to the faith of my fathers, in my late 30’s, I was broken enough that I was prepared, like Abraham, to sacrifice the the thing most valuable to me--in my case, my image of myself as a writer--to obtain a relationship with God. but a ram bleated in the thicket. God took my ambitions as a writer, blessed them and gave them back to me. Though I cannot claim to have written much or well, I assure you I have written more and better since my I made God my religion than I ever did when art was my religion
   
 Now let’s talk about using that time once you have found it. Writing is said to be a great mystery, and i will say just a word about that at the end, but I want to spend most of my time on mechanics, which are not mysterious at all, and which can be divided it into five activities, which I do, and which all writers do. In real life, they are intertwined. In a single hour, one could be doing two or three of them. I will list them here in the order in which I have added them to my own routines, which I think is the order a beginning writer might undertake them.
   
First is some sort of journal, or daybook, some sort of pad with blank paper in it. Three-ring binders are best. Here is where I start poems. Every day that I write, I look back over the last few pages of my journal and then examine my life and my experiences in the light of their possibilities for poetry. It does not matter that I lead a quiet and boring life. Many writers did. Being a poet is not having an exciting life and writing it down on the page. Being a poet is using the craft of words to make exciting life on the page. When you have been at it a while, or if i are a certain kind of person, things that happen during the day will register at the time as “having possibilities,” and you can come to the desk with some momentum already built up. Most poems in a journal are just beginnings and never get finished, but sometimes they get closer to done than not, and sometimes you will be drawn back to a poem on successive days. In a normal year, I will write a 50 or 100 pages of journal. At the end of the year, I read through it, type up anything that looks promising, adding finishing touches as I type. in a year, maybe 30 things will seem worth typing, maybe six of those worth sending off for publication. Most of what I have published came to be in this way.
   
The journal can also be used to take notes on it reading, which comes second on the list. For every line of poetry you write, you should read 500 lines. Within certain limits, the more the better. Most of what you read is by contemporaries, poetry being written and published fairly recently. JCO said write four your own time. Poets transcend their age, but first they have to know their age; they have to get into their heads the idiom of the time. I have a couple of anthologies of contemporary American poetry I read nearly every week. I have their titles on the bibliography. These I alternate with standard historical anthologies such as The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and with anthologies of the Best Poetry published in a given year.
   
At least occasionally I go through a whole book of poems by one author. I also read all the poems in each week’s New Yorker. JCO talks about finding a writer that speaks to you. I will go further and say those should be of two kinds, one an Olympian, who writes so well that i cannot imagine how that person did it, let alone imagine itself doing anything like it. For me, that would be T.S. Eliot. You also need one who writes very well but in an accessible enough style that you can learn from it. For me that would be Paul Mariani. Your favorites will change over time, and this is as it should be. It is good to write down lines you like, and better still if you can memorize them and recite them to yourself during the day. This specific reading of poems comes in addition to the normal reading of fiction and newspapers and magazines, and if you are a student, of homework.
   
The journal can also be, physically, the place to do it third kind of activity, exercises. At lest every third writing session, I itself formal exercises. These can be writing problems such as those described in Behn and Twichell’s The Practice of Poetry. More often they need to be exercises in form: the sonnet, the haiku, the rondo, the Spenserian stanza, and so on. Ron Pagett’s book Teachers and Writers’ Handbook of Poetic Forms or Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook are good sources. Sonnets are good. During his self-imposed apprenticeship, Ezra Pound wrote a sonnet a day for a year. Acrostics are good. I use words chosen at random from any book lying around on my desk.  Most of these poems will be bad, but you will learn something.
   
Still more often, it exercises need to be imitations of poetry--line by line, rhyme by rhyme, syllable-by-syllable, accent-by-accent imitations where you pour your ideas and emotions into someone else’s forms. In doing this, you will confront what some poets call the “crisis of form.” That is, you will have to decide where to break it lines. This issue could well occupy us for another day, so let me just say dogmatically that the pentameter is the basic line in English poetry and you need to master it, where or not you adopt it as it dominant form. My own current practice is to use primarily a “loose pentameter,” with five accents and a syllable count between 9 and 11.
  
 The bottom line is imitate, imitate, imitate. All the great poets did this. The older ones used Greek and Latin models. If you don’t happen to know Greek or Latin, you should learn at least one modern language and translate from it regularly. Some (but not many) of it exercises will take on a life of their own and becomes poems in their own right. Of course as you get better, you will do fewer exercises and more of the other kinds of activities, butt the best poets would no more totally give up exercises than a great athlete would give us stretching.
   
As you get better you will do more of the fourth kind of activity, which I call projects, or finishing things. This is where you pass from self-expression into the serious work of writing poetry. For most people, this is hardest and comes last. This is where you take those starts in it journal, or it ideas and bring them to birth, line by painful line, revision by revision, over a period of days and weeks or months. This is how the Wasteland got written, and the Iliad, and Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandhurst--the poems that have changed the way we write and think and imagine. Some of them are booklength. Yours need not be, though writing a booklengh poem is a good goal for a working poet. Such work is done slowly. James Merrill, who wrote poetry full time, said he felt good if he got five lines a day, though when he got going on his booklength poem, he could do 15. This is where, especially, you need a support group, someone to give you a sympathetic but serious reading of your drafts.
   
And that brings us to the last item, the matter of audience, and what is called getting published. There are two kinds of audiences: friends and family, and then that larger audience of strangers, out there somewhere beyond the lamplight. If at all possible, you should do what I did, which is marry a good reader, one that is both perceptive and honest. If your friends are not readers, they won’t do you much good. If you show it work to it friends and they tell you they “love it,” get new friends or use those friends for other purposes and seek out a sympathetic teacher or start a writing circle of people you know who write.
   
As for publication, it is the easiest part, really. Any marketing handbook, such as the ones I have listed on my bibliography, will tell you how to submit things and give you a list of markets. You simply go through the information, magazine by magazine, and write down the names and addresses of those that seem open to the kind of things you do. Look for the category of “literary” or “little” magazines, but don't be afraid of magazines for dog lovers or people who drive John Deere tractors if you have a poem about those things. If you want to be published, you can’t be picky. Then you put it poems in a #10 envelope, usually three to five at a time, with a self-addressed envelope and send them off. If you don’t hear in three months, write a follow-up letter. Keep a log of what you’ve sent where and when. If you get no response, assume the magazine went under and send those same poems elsewhere.
  
 Expect this to happen often. Many little magazines listed in even the latest Writers’ Market will go under by the time you can submit. Most of what you send out will come back sooner or later, mostly later. Don’t even think about why. Editors have a hundred reasons for publishing what they do, and you don’t know any of them. Sooner or later, your poems will catch some editor’s eye when they are long on space, and you will be published. Publishing is tedious and unpleasant work, but it’s part of the process. If you are not sending off, sooner or later, you will probably stop writing.
   
So there it is in five steps : keep a journal, read, do exercises, finish things, send them off. I am sorry to have made it so simple. Please don’t tell anyone else it’s that easy. As for the mystery, the best three books I know are listed on my bibliography. Writers have to find their own way in this area. For me, those ways take on a religious cast, as you might expect. From a religious perspective creation partakes of three mysteries. The first is of God’s essential activity, which is creation. The second is the incarnation. In art, emotion and truth take on flesh, as it were. Things otherwise intangible become accessible to the senses as they did when the son of God took on flesh. Finally, all art proceeds ultimately from love, and the more one can learn about love and practice it, the better chance, in the long run, one has of producing good art, and  God is said of be a great source of information about love and great model.  I take it that artistic creation, especially when it is cast in the light of these three mysteries, can be seen as a sacred act, an obligation and great privilege.