I was out for a morning walk this past Saturday. The air was chilly, the lake was moving only slightly with very low swells blown in by light winds from the east, there were twenty or so sails moving across the water, far out and south, and also to the south, a dozen miles away, the Chicago skyline was standing dark and sharp-edged against the pale sky. Clouds were coming in from the west, and as I walked through the lakeside park at Northwestern University in Evanston, I realized I was getting the last of the brilliant but mild sunshine of the day. And I also realized that the tune in my head was from a high-school musical in which I had led a tiny band in a makeshift pit between the front row of seats and the high stage, banging away at a large, old upright piano (tuned for the performances), with only drums, a bass and a tenor sax. The show was Sandy Wilson’s “The Boy Friend,” a 1950s satire of 1920s musical shows–energetic, superficial, and fun to stage. And I asked myself—where in the world did that tune come from, as I am walking briskly along on this crisp, beautiful morning?

*

I tried retracing thoughts I had had already on this walk, working backward through the associations. And I saw that they made a kind of sideways sense.

*

I became aware of this possible process when years ago I read Christopher Bollas’s wonderful Cracking Up (1995). A fellow poet, Steve Berg, told me enthusiastically about this book. The subtitle is “The work of unconscious experience.” Bollas, a psychoanalyist who also has a PhD in American literature, and who has written many books, is keen to understand the freedom of the unconscious, and how in our unconscious, whether we are awake or asleep, many trains of thought are continuously being generated, developing, and then breaking apart and disappearing. This particular book has always seemed to me one of the most fruitful I have ever read in thinking about how the process of writing draws willy-nilly (and fortunately) on our unconscious trains of thought, unconscious feelings, unconscious memories of experience.

*

I mean the writing of fiction and poetry, drama and even the personal essay, although it is no doubt true that in even the most impersonal writing tasks there are flickers of unconscious choice to use this word and not that, to extend syntax this way and not that. What makes this interesting is the idea of freedom. We all know how deadening it can be when our choices, word by word, are made in a state of linguistic and cultural unfreedom—that is, when routine wording is what we put down, simply because that wording is easily available to us, is familiar to us, and in almost all the other writing we do, whatever it might be, we want readers to come with us without their having to work too hard. (A whole subject awaits us there, but I won’t go into it today.)

*

Bollas shows how and why a train of thought can be retraced, when we are lucky, from a thought or a decision which we feel to be unforeseen and spontaneous back through a whole train of ideas and feelings of which we have been only very slightly aware as we were thinking them. A kind of associational “logic” is revealed.

*

So all of a sudden I realize I am humming to myself the song, “Won’t You Charleston With Me?” (When I got back home I looked up that show online to find a list of song titles, and recognized–for I could never have remembered–which title went with the tune I was hearing from memories of forty-five years ago.)  And I began to try to go backward, to try to remember what else I had been thinking of. It went like this:

**

I remembered having been thinking, at an earlier point on the walking trail, of having performed at the piano very happily when I was sixteen, and so enthusiastically, I now remembered also, that my fingers had bled a little from how hard and for how long I had to keep hitting those keys in order to be heard in that auditorium, which was very big.

*

And I thought how I never enjoyed performing again, and I wondered if this was because my experience in competitions and in a concerto performance two years later had been simply awful. But why had I been thinking about that?

*

I then remembered having watched the first twenty minutes of a “Nova” program on Darwin earlier in the week. I couldn’t stay with it—it was a poor production, the acting was strained, the dialogue was hopelessly unconvincing as real talk between people, and… the flashback to Darwin’s romance with his wife, the devout Emma Wedgwood, was set in her family living room, where she was playing Chopin on the piano.   Beautifully, of course, because the playing had been dubbed into the soundtrack by a professional pianist.   And I, in a petty mood, had been annoyed that the young Victorian ladies portrayed in the movies always play the piano perfectly. But why on my walk had I thought of the Darwin movie?

*

And then I recalled the first moments after I got beyond the town street and onto the path leading into the Northwestern University park land, and how I started heading birdsong from a beach-side copse to the right (while on the left is a massive two-level concrete parking lot, but mostly empty on Saturday morning), and I thought about how often I advert, in my own mind although not in conversation, to evolution in general, as one of the great beauties of the universe (at least, when it is not nurturing new strains of virus and bacteria or wiping out “native” flora and fauna, and so on).

*

And why was I thinking about that? I had been completely unaware of these thoughts as a train of thought; I had not, after all, been thinking about what I was thinking—I had simply been thinking it, in the form of an occasional thought that surfaced for an instant and then was gone again while my conscious thinking was pretty much focused on the path, the lake horizon, the skyline downtown, the breeze, the sun, a women’s lacross scrimmage on the lakeside field, and so on.

*

Now I could see the under-sequence of thoughts as a very private version of what I try to do when I am at work on a poem—looking deeper into how the thought/feeling moves…   This is how I teach, sometimes, too– looking for the wobbly spots in a draft, the gaps or seemingly overly emphatic passages that, to me at least, imply that something important in the train of thought/feeling that the poet is trying to shape remains ungrasped, unexpressed, unrealized.  Flagging those moments, I make no attempt to guess what’s under the surface of the draft, since whatever it is that’s missing, if it is missing, only the poet herself/himself could find by using the draft as a trail of clues leading back…

*

Sometimes—the best times—this exercise opens up a space into which a new thought/feeling rises.

*

I don’t think I have any special talent for working back through a train of thought of which I was not aware. I manage to do it sometimes, and at most times not, and on most days I don’t even try.   But the surprising thing that comes to mind—that has already come to mind—fascinates me and seems to me intimately related not only to the ways in which dreams move (which was Freud’s interest) but also to the ways in which a poem gradually finds its shape as a sequence of ideas and feelings. One can’t move one’s whole creative process into the unconscious; one has to make artistic decisions that are more deliberate and more pondered than that; but one can’t escape—and one shouldn’t try to escape it, whether by distracting oneself from it, or by denying its existence—the unconscious dimensions of one’s writing.  One should use them, as I think all successful artists do.

Today’s New York Times includes an unlikely source of information about how one teaches oneself how to make art–the political columnist David Brooks.  He summarizes points made in two recently published books, Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code and Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated.  Brooks describes the process of becoming a remarkable artist (musical composition and fiction writing are the two examples on which he mostly focuses, but he also mentions getting better at … golf and tennis): by persisting in endless practice, “performers delay the automatizing process.  The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills.  But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough.  By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.”

I think of Cyrus Colter telling how he wrote out James Joyce’s “The Dead” and works by Faulkner, to learn “how to write those sentences.”  He  meant this in a way that is completely literal yet brings with it a deep learning process.  And there are many other stories of this sort.  And as Brooks reminds us, the practice habits and sheer energy and stamina of most great musicians are legendary.  (But, out of philosophical habit, I would think, Brooks does not account, as he should, for why some musicians may practice eight hours a day and yet never become great.  Etc.)

I come from the other side at the artistic issue that is implied here–wanting, as I have mentioned in earlier posts, to raise to consciousness what intuition is already doing in my process of drafting and revising my work, so as to draw more deeply on what I know but aren’t aware I know–experientially, emotionally and intuitively.  By de-automatizing my “natural” habits of writing, I hope to draw more deeply on the truth and reality of my lived experience, rather than on what I have learned unconsciously, unwittingly, lifelong, to think of as my experience, simply because my culture–anyone’s culture–inevitably imposes this narrowness.  (Why does it do so?  Because our psychic mechanisms–for survival, first, and then for flourishing–keep us all most comfortable when we accept what passes for common knowledge, received opinion, the shared sense of the way things simply, inevitably, are.  Even many who have devoted themselves to rebellion or difference of one kind or another are subject to this mechanism, and may satisfy it by joining with others who rebel in similar ways.  We human beings must expend a lot of energy to see what reality is–outside us and within us–and to represent it, in one way or another, in writing.  And when we can write with some of that truth to experience, we find that in fact we are speaking to a deeper layer of shared knowledge than everyday consciousness.)

David Brooks’s summary of recent research and thinking suggests, from his direction, which is a more pragmatic one, that disrupting our automatic processes of artistic (and even sports) practice may not only give us the hard-won good results of our ability to “develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine,” but may also be related to our becoming aware of what we are thinking, feeling, writing, doing. And thus we are able to do it more deliberately. Able to think, as well as feel and react.  (To return to a point I made above, but in a different way: we do a lot of instinctive reacting, out of our impulse toward self-preservation; but self-preservation is not the key impulse in the actual practice of art, no matter how much any particular artist’s art-making may also help keep him or her alive.  Even physically.)

David Brooks’s Op-Ed piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html

Sandi Wisenberg is the faculty adviser for The OLLI Journal, which is the annual literary magazine of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Northwestern. She wrote this at the request of the new editor. You can find more information about the Journal and read the latest issue at http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/olli/journal. She is the co-director of the MA/MFA in Creative Writing program at NU. Her third book is The Adventures of Cancer Bitch (U of Iowa Press, 2009), nonfiction that Bookslut called “damned funny” and “far more selfless than most illness memoirs.”

What is good writing?

First, a caveat: There are a few works that everyone agrees are good—such as the plays of Shakespeare. But it’s easy to find disagreement about most other literary efforts. For example, the 1980 Atlantic Monthly reviewer of Raymond Carver’s (now classic) story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, wrote: “There is nothing here to appease a reader’s basic literary needs.”

So, what criteria should The Journal editors use? I’ve come up with some attributes of good writing. They’re not exhaustive. And you may disagree with them. I’ve also provided examples and definitions you can find on line. Just click twice on the URLs.

Good writing has fresh language. The words are not trite or cliched. If there’s repetition, it’s deliberate and artful—to make a point, for emphasis, to please the reader’s “ear.” There’s a mix of rhythms in the sentences—OK, except for Hemingway. Great writing also helps you see the world in a new way, by the writer’s perceptions.

Most successful pieces inform the reader how to read the piece. For example, an essay with a light beginning “tells” or signals the reader that the rest of the piece will follow suit. If the tone changes dramatically, the reader will be confused. If a piece begins realistically, the reader will expect the rest of the piece to be realistic (unless the author manages to ease the reader into the unreal).

There are exceptions. There are always exceptions.

PROSE:

1. Realistic stories, memoirs and travel pieces

Novelist John Gardner said that readers “recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language…” Good writing should be smooth and consistent and detailed enough so that the reader isn’t jerked out of her “dream” while reading it. For example, if a writer gets the reader used to reading about people sitting in a kitchen for two pages, and then the writer suddenly shifts the venue without a transition, the reader will probably be jerked out of the “dream.” That said, some writing works by juxtaposition and association, and the reader is expected to pause between segments.

In a realistic short story or memoir, the reader knows where the characters are in time and space, is given enough information so that she can imagine the setting.

Dialogue should sound natural, and the characters should sound at least slightly different from one another. Dialogue should reveal character, move the story forward and show relationships. It shouldn’t be expository. (“Remember the time we went to the beach?” “Oh yes, I remember–we went with my husband Joe and your husband Moe and your three children. It was before Moe left to join the circus.”)

Main characters should be round—as contradictory as the people you know well. Beware of stereotypes, unless you’re writing fables..

Action should emanate from character. Beginning writers often force action or revelation. In a good short story, every action should feel inevitable.

Language should be consistent. If a piece begins conversationally, then it should be conversational all the way through—unless there’s a specific reason for it to change. Again, if the diction changes abruptly for no good reason, the reader will wonder what’s going on.

A classic short story with a very close third-person narrator is Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss.” You can search for it at http://www.short-stories.co.uk/. Find classic American stories at: www.americanliterature.com/ss/ssindx.html..

Then there’s flash fiction or short-shorts. You can read about them here and scroll down for a list of anthologies: http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/flash.shtml. I’m partial to Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces, edited by Mark Mills, for reasons that will become obvious if you examine the table of contents. Another site: http://www.quickfiction.org/

Memoir usually consists of a story, plus reflection on the meaning of the event, or on the way the writer’s view of the event has changed.

There should be some shift, however subtle, from beginning to end. The shift could be in mood, circumstances, opinion. It could be a shift from isolation to community.

The best travel pieces provide vivid descriptions of people and places, while telling a story of an interior journey or awakening or change of perception. Here’s a fairly short, straight-forward but quirky travel piece: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E1D61439F931A25752C1A963958260.

2. Non-realistic prose

In a recent review-essay in the New York Review of Books, novelist Zadie Smith wrote about the tiredness of “lyrical Realism.” Of a new realistic novel she says, “It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.”

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083>

As an alternative, Smith writes about metafiction, mentioning Donald Barthelme. (Choose from many of his pieces here: <www.jessamyn.com/barth/>.) There are also fables, fantasy, science fiction, as well as work that’s mythic, surreal, absurd. Here’s Stacey Richter’s recent “The Land of Pain,” which is unrealistic but to my lights, truthful: <www.ewu.edu/willowsprings/archives/richter.pdf>. The problem with some fantasy and science fiction is that the characters and plots are generic. That’s why literary magazine editors sometimes ban them; it’s easier to condemn them all than to go through many bad submissions. But then they might miss a story by someone like Borges: <www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_links.html>

Here’s a short fable by Kafka: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4855051/A-Little-Fable.

3. Essays

Consummate essayist Phillip Lopate says that an essay shows the mind at work. Writers are expected to use exposition in an essay. The best essays are explorations and are not polemical. The essay can digress, as long as the digressions are interesting.

What is interesting? There’s the rub.

Here is an essay by Lopate, which is about what many memoir writers fail to do:

<www.philliplopate.com/reflection.html>. The essay-review is another form of the essay, where the writer explores a topic, using books for fodder. Here’s Lopate again, writing about another great nonfiction writer, Edmund Wilson: http://www.philliplopate.com/wilson.html

Then there’s the lyric essay, a term coined by the editors of The Seneca Review: <http://web.hws.edu/academics/community/senecareview/lyricessay.asp>. And there’s an online magazine that publishes all kinds of nonfictions under 750 words: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity. You’ll also find reviews, interviews and craft essays on the site.

POETRY

What is poetry? According to about.com, “Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary.”

Poetry is condensed, compressed language. Line breaks should be deliberate and should enhance the poem. Every word needs to be the exact word. As W. H. Auden said, “Poetry is memorable speech.” As Janet Burroway writes in Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, “Because poetry attempts to produce an emotional response through heightened evocation of the senses, imagery holds a central place among its techniques.” Also, poetry is the natural home for metaphor.

You can find a wealth of poems at www.poets.org, which is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. You can also search for literary movements from Acmeism to Slam to Victorian.

There is a hybrid, very similar to the lyric essay: the prose poem. Poets.org defines the prose poem thusly: “While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.” Read more about the prose poem here: <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5787>.

I hope that reading some of these examples will get you thinking about what you can accomplish in your own writing. Remember, too, that most good writing is re-writing. Many writers will tell you that their first drafts are rough, undeveloped and unpublishable.