Wallace Stegner on Teaching Writing

Sometimes it will be the most unassuming text on the “how-tos” of the mysterious world of creative writing that packs the most wisdom punch. I was reminded of this fact when I recently re-read Wallace Stegner’s essay, On the Teaching of Creative Writing. During my graduate school days in the early 1990s, John Gardner’s books on writing were all the rage. I remember studying The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers like a Bible, copying quotes into my journal to commit to memory, a kind of holy scripture I assumed I’d one day be called upon to doggedly recite. To this day, I still call up his notion of the “vivid fictional dream” both when reading my own drafts (poetry and prose) and critiquing the work of others. Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist discussed not only the necessary traits of a true writer’s nature but the faith and zeal that would be needed to survive the wiles of living the writing life. “It’s the sheer act of writing, more than anything else, that makes a writer,” Gardner wrote. That was pretty much all that our class of aspiring wordsmiths wanted to hear back then.

Since that time, I (like many of you as well) have read dozens of other books about how to write. Many have almost a cult following in literary circles; a few have even edged into classics-of-the-genre status like Gardner’s works. My personal favorites include Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (John Gardner wrote the forward), Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town.

Wallace Stegner’s book—if you can call it that—is more of an informal commentary, tape-recorded then transcribed from discussions held at Dartmouth College when he was a Montgomery Fellow in residence in the summer of 1980. He takes questions from students and, in his thoughtful answers, shares wisdom and insights from over four decades of teaching. Stegner isn’t afraid to tell the truth, his truths from years of uncertainty and self-doubt in his own long apprenticeship in making literary art. In answer to that ubiquitous question from beginning writers—Can writing be taught?—Stegner offers the following:

“How can anyone ‘teach’ writing, when he himself, as a writer, is never sure what he is doing? Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea…Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don’ts of voyaging.”

For Stegner, good writing is an end in itself. Throughout this essay, he keeps coming back to that. He explores the role of the writing teacher (which he doesn’t limit to a college or university, by the way), to encourage each and every student in her or his peculiar and particular talents. He reminds us of Henry James’s advice for young writers, to be someone “upon whom nothing is lost.” He is vocal about the fact that an abundance of material can be found right under our noses in the specifics of ordinary, daily life. This time through, the idea that “any experience, looked at steadily, is likely to be strange enough for fiction or poetry” especially spoke to me.

In Stegner’s view, a good writing class can act almost as a form of publication. Suddenly, your scribbled draft, your untidy, cut-and-pasted manuscript enters the workshop and, for a few moments, “is put into a posture of dignity, demanding attention.” This is sage advice to keep in mind whenever we read another writer’s work in a class or workshop, whenever we look through the slush pile (or the Writers’ Dojo electronic in-box) of hopeful submissions.

Like many writers who became venerated teachers of writing, Stegner also urges beginning writers to be avid readers, to study (and imitate) particular writers to learn techniques of the writing craft. He feels passionately that “many things [about how to write] are best learned in the laboratory of pen, paper, and wastebasket; and in a writing class all the members are utilizing the lab simultaneously.”

Stegner doesn’t mince words about the length, and at times dullness, of the apprenticeship required to become professionally skilled. He drums into his audience the necessity of being able to hear and learn from critiques. And he revisits why it’s absolutely critical to know (and be able to use) basic grammar and syntax if you aspire to write.

I type these words on my iBook while sitting in a wicker chair that was once owned by the novelist, Sinclair Lewis. (A friend’s father, an antique dealer in Vermont, bought it at an auction at the late writer’s summer home.) When asked about the best daily regimen for working as a writer, Stegner paraphrased Lewis, his advice to “put your seat on the seat of the chair.” Then he continued:

“It is not an easy discipline for everyone. Young writers often rebel against it, because when they go off by themselves, day after day, they get restless…It is a good test of one’s commitment…Nobody can make you go there but yourself, and you will make yourself go there only because that is where you want to be, that is what you must be doing.”

With honest examples from his own life and work, Stegner distills this writing journey so many of us are on down to a few pithy essentials: Take each and every piece of writing seriously. Offer critiques with an eye to helping the piece become what it wants to be. Read. Write. Revise.

Ready.

Set.

Go.