This post is really just an excuse to show you pictures of my kitten.

I started calling him Moxie before I’d even decided to adopt him, when I wasn’t even sure what his gender was. At first he seemed relatively calm for a kitten, but now that I’ve let him loose in my apartment and called him all variations of his name (Moxicillin, Moxers, Mox Pox, etc.), he has started to grow into it. He’s already figured out a way to climb up my couch with his little kitten claws, and he’s figured out that he can just fit if he walks along the tops of the books on my lower bookshelf, and he’s gotten stuck behind the refrigerator—twice.

All this to say: I should have known better. I put a lot of stock in names. I had a whole list going of potential future cat names before I ever had a cat. (The other top possibilities were Gatsby and Bo, short for Bogart.) And I’ve gone through several phases when naming my hypothetical, someday kids. At first it was plants: Holly, Ivy, Rosemary. At some point I turned to multisyllabic names: Julianna, Isabella, Josephina. There has always been a suspicious lack of male names, which I can only assume hinted at some deep-seated rejection of the notion of brothers, which I’d never had. Besides, there’s enough to worry about just trying to name girls.

Kids are mean. You can’t name your child anything that rhymes with a dirty word or anything that can easily be turned into a joke. You have to be careful about initials too because what if you finally settle on a name and their initials turn out to be LOL? I long ago vowed to never brand my child with a unisex name. (My parents thought they were being progressive, or anti-sexist, or something, but they didn’t realize that pairing a unisex first name—Casey—with a last name that is also a men’s first name—Patrick—would result in endless mail addressed to Mr. Patrick Casey and of course the requests for “Patrick? Patrick?” at the doctor’s office. Even the gynecologist.)

In that case, maybe an interesting name would be best, something that would never be confused with a last name. But nothing that ends in –i. Nothing too specific like Autumn or Summer. Not Montana or Dakota or Berlin, lest people think they were conceived there. Nothing too literary, though I’ve always been partial to Scarlett, and I once met a girl named Arwen. Most names of ex-boyfriends and their new girlfriends are off-limits, to avoid acid reflux. Nothing boring like Sarah or Laura or Joe, since that requires them to use their last initial to differentiate from the Sarah or Laura or Joe sitting next to them in kindgarten and the whole point is to make your child feel “special.” Nothing too old-fashioned. No Mildreds or Muriels or Waynes. Something with spunk but not too much spunk, like Roxanne. But not Roxanne because “names that are used in famous songs” are also off-limits. The list goes on and on.

Even more than my hypothetical children, I worry about what to name my characters. A name can change your whole perception of a person. In my fiction workshop so far, I’ve heard people refer to the names of characters in my classmates’ stories as “stripper-ish,” “bizarre,” “old man,” and “exactly what you’d expect.” Character names were among the many things Gordon Lish changed in Raymond Carver’s stories. In one instance, he changed the name of a woman’s abusive ex-boyfriend from Carl to Ed. Because Carl might not be the brightest crayon in the box, he might work as a mechanic at the Ford factory, but he’s a relatively nice and upstanding guy with a gentle nature. Ed dropped out of high school and is going bald at 26. Ed is a guy you can picture hitting his girlfriend. (No offensive to the Eds out there.)

So, what’s in a name? “That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” So sayeth Shakespeare. But if someone blind-folded you and said, “Here, smell this diaper” or even, “Hey, take a whiff of this skunk cabbage,” and then handed you a rose, chances are no one would think it smelled as sweet. We can’t blame Shakespeare for being oblivious to the effects of priming, but all I’m saying is that names do have an effect.

This is likely another reason why I am not cut out to be a fiction writer. But maybe I’m over-thinking it. How much do you think about character’s names when you’re reading (or writing) a short story or novel? Am I the only one who is so worried about this?

Alas…  One of my M.F.A. colleagues (on staff at Willow Springs) says that if I review a batch of poems that have been submitted and I provide reasons for it not to be accepted (or pursued further by my fellow editors), that must mean that my own verse is better.

Well, I’m not sure that it “must,” but for the time being at least, I am struck with how we rationalize by non sequiturs ad infinitum (and how we lapse into latin).  Nothing follows nothing:  good, better, best…  And the grand prize goes to… Subjectivity!

***

Jorie Graham has loads of fascinating things to offer about the poetics we practice, the poems we write and the poems we judge (ie., compare and contrast with other poems).  In this regard, the Poetess-in-Charge at Harvard U. even has her own rule named after her own controversial evaluation of various works in the University of Georgia’s 1999 contest.   The rule essentially stipulates that a judge must recuse her or himself if the potentially award-winning poems are penned by the aforementioned judge’s students, or her future husband.

With that contentious hullabaloo out of the way, consider what the author of the recently released collection, Place, has to say on the subject of narrative, which happens to be the pre-emptive- strike category by which prose (fiction and non-fiction) seems to hold poetry under lock and key in the literary basement.

Narrative, coupled with the block-form stanza, is the idol to which nearly every student of the craft must pay homage and bow down.  The only problem is–what if the stinking existence, which yawns before us like halitosis, what if the entire kit and caboodle of the space-time continuum, bears little resemblance to the storied-arc by which we’d like to float above it???  And so, Jorie Graham once told an interviewer at Lumina, the magazine affiliated with Sarah Lawrence College:

Consequence in narrative is illuminating, often morally instructive, moving, and surprising. But to privilege linear, temporal constructs over all other ones is to refuse to represent, as I began by saying, way too much of ordinary human experience. Everybody dreams. Leaping and associative progress is natural to the way time passes in everyone’s life. We are just taught to distrust those sensations of time as “irrational.” This is a much larger cultural issue. There is much power in the hands of the creators of the narratives, and the master narratives, by which we “recognize” our lives. So I’d say, yes, be intimidated, if you are, by non-narrative poetry. Experience is intimidating. But don’t be distrustful—choose to trust it, go along for the ride, see if it reminds you of anything.

How bleeping gracious is that!

And don’t you dare be intimidated by the phrase, “Experience is intimidating…”

And don’t you dare feel as if Graham is patronizing you (or matronizing you)!

Far from it.   What she’s doing, in her kind and gentle and intellectually-trying way, is warning you not to enter a contest that’s sponsored by “The Non-Profit Organization Dedicated to Story-Telling in the Digital Age.”   She’s warning you.

You’ve been warned.   Don’t say Jorie Graham didn’t try to get you to leap into the abyss before you caved and wrote a beginning, a middle and an ending.  Loser?

Peace–

Can you still say that you write only for you? These two years you’ve been full of bravado, while inside missing home with every part of you.  You told anyone who would listen that this was all for you. But really, you’ve done this for someone else, too.

Your mother finds a double space and a misplaced comma and makes a note of them. She tries to pretend she doesn’t know that the first section is a relationship exorcism, that she never liked that boy, anyways.

Will you ever not be the kid offering a macaroni necklace? A clay duck painted yellow? Wanting praise and needing it.

Your mother is tired. She’s still doesn’t like her current job, but she knows until her other ventures pay off, she has to keep working at the call center. It pays the bills. Leaning in closer, her eyes strained from staring at a screen all day, she moves into section two, the section about your father, her ex-husband.

What is truth if, when you tell it, you have to lie? This is Art, we say to each other — artists huddled in dark corners, holding one another.

It’s a little after midnight on the East Coast when your mother finishes looking through all 54 poems in your thesis. And even though she has to be up in six hours for another day at the call center, she searches for her phone to call you. On the West coast, you’ve just gotten out of class. You’re in the backseat of a classmate’s car when the phone rings. You look at the screen and you almost don’t answer it. But you do.

Dreams are fickle. We desire them, work hard to fufill them and when we finally have them, squirming like toads in our hands, they seem less than, other. But, oh, our Mothers, they are always the same.

And then nothing happens. At all. You stare for a few minutes, hoping that the first line with somehow magically appear in your brain. Nothing. Nada. This is when you open Facebook, thinking, “I’ll futz around on the internet for ten minutes, and then write.”

For those of you for whom this works, this post is not for you, and you can please exit stage left pursued by a bear.

That's right. Move along.

For those of you like me, read on. When faced with the Blank Page of Doom, I typically do five things instead of actually writing.

#5  Cleaning

I am a messy person by nature. As I told several people before I went on my Texas trek last week, I actually had dishes on my floor at one point because my sink was full. (I have since done the dishes; it took effort.) The problem is I’m one of those people who have to be really motivated to clean before I actually do it. Once I’m motivated and in the mood, I can happily clean my entire apartment for several hours on end. This includes wiping down baseboards, scrubbing my kitchen floor by hand, and dusting all my power cords.

But if I am unable to write, I usually suddenly get inspired to clean the holy crap out of my apartment. This ends up being great for my mood, for about twelve minutes, because then I realize that my apartment’s clean but my cursor is still blinking at me on a blank page, as if it’s judging me.

#4  Napping

Is there anything better in all the world like a nap in the middle of the day? No. No, there’s not. Anyone who says otherwise is full of it.

This dude knows where it's at.

I dig naps pretty hardcore, and in recent years I’ve leveled up to roughly a 94 as far as nap-taking goes: I can nap anywhere, at any time, even if I’m not tired. I prefer to do it without pants and with a fan on, but I can make do with anything, as long as it means I can procrastinate writing my Great American Novel a little longer.

#3  The Internet

This one is all-inclusive of the sites I visit the most when procrastinating as though it’s my job. Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Facebook all seem to be a given in 2012, but you should also know: The Oatmeal, Cracked, QuickMeme, South Park Studios, Passive-Aggressive Notes, FAIL Blog, Good Reads, Memebase, and Hyperbole and a Half. I won’t even go into why all of these are awesome; wait until you can’t write, then find out on your own. May the Force be with you.

#2  Organizing

This is a little different than cleaning because of what I organize when I’m trying my best not to write. I organize really, really stupid shit—not your usual books or DVDs in alphabetical order. No. I organize my pantry in alphabetical order, cans from biggest to smallest (biggest in the back, for clarification), and then I’ll rearrange them again if I think of a better way to do it (most used items in the front, least used in the back). I go into my bathroom cabinet and do the same to my various medications and pill bottles and Tums and vitamins. I count how many Q-tips I have left, divide by two per day (one for each ear), then write down when I need to buy new ones. I count and organize and do all manner of ridiculous things that have virtually no real purpose in my life.

And when this is done, I move on to…

#1  Exfoliating

I love the crap out of LUSH. If you don’t know what LUSH is, hie thee to Seattle. It’s a good thing I live on the other side of the state because I still have three bills to pay this month. LUSH has handmade, eco-friendly, usually all-natural, often vegan cosmetics and bath doohickies and shower whatsits. They make a toothpaste with wasabi. You can get solid shampoos. Their bath bombs look like orbs of the gods. They are not particularly cheap, but holy hell are the products all amazing. One of my last things that I do before I finally am able to write is I exfoliate like a mother. I scrub and moisturize and shrink my pores and take a small brush to my toenails and generally make myself presentable to humanity. I always feel so good after, and shiny like a brand new baby. And because I feel so good, I think, “Hey, you know what would make this even better? Writing.”

Thus, I write. And then I feel like myself again for days on end.

Basically me.

Here’s the bracket:

Fight 1: F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Franz Kafka

Fitzgerald shows up drunk, on a butcher’s tricycle, and has to be lifted into the ring. He saunters over to the opponent’s corner where he has a conversation with the stool. He calls it Zelda, hugs it, then falls asleep. Meanwhile, Zelda Fitzgerald, his manager, is nowhere to be found. (Suddenly hip to technology, she’s back in the locker room playing the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on a Gameboy.)

Initially, Ezra Pound had informed everyone that the charity matches would be a professional-wrestling style match and told everyone to wear a costume that representative of their work. Soon thereafter, Hemingway suggests they make it a more manly sport, and suggests boxing. Pound agrees, but never gives Kafka the news that the format has been changed. Kafka, having no idea how to represent himself, let alone his work, decides to dress in a giant beetle costume like a post-metamorphosis Gregor Samsa. For added effect, he brings along his manager, a boa constrictor named Indiana.

Result: Fitzie is disqualified.

Fight 2: Edna St. Vincent Millay vs. Hemingway

Edna St. Vincent Millay starts off furiously with a flurry of quick jabs, and then she distracts Hemingway by leaning down in her low-cut blouse. The pig can’t resist leering, and she catches him with an uppercut, then another. Soon, he’s leaning into the ropes, and it looks like she might upset the self-proclaimed “best boxer in this bunch.”

Soon, however, Millay begins to tire. She heads back to her corner, where she throws in the towel saying simply, “I cannot last the fight.”

Result: Hemingway wins by default. After he’s declared the winner, Hemingway jogs around the ring triumphantly, arms raised, even though all he did was get hit in the face about fifty or sixty times.

Fight #3 Ginsberg vs. Frost

Ginsberg enters the ring at the end of a long procession of what appear to be monks of some variety. Ginsberg is playing a lute, which Frost snatches away and snaps in half. Before the referee can even start the fight (or get their gloves on), Ginsberg and Frost are swinging at each other. Soon, it turns into the equivalent of a mixed-martial event.Knees and elbows are thrown and Frost pulls on Ginsberg’s beard, before Ginsberg manages to get Frost into a rear-triangle choke, and Frost reluctantly submits.

Result: As no actual boxing occurred, the referee has to find a different way to justify a winner. He calls the match for Ginsberg because Frost was mean and broke Ginsberg’s lute.

Fight #4: Walt Whitman vs. Ezra Pound

When the match starts, Walt Whitman initially walks up to Pound and tries to shake his head. Instead of fighting, he suggests that everyone goes and “plays base-ball, the American game.”

Pound responds with a quick body blow, then an uppercut to Whitman’s chin. Whitman again tries to reiterate his desire for a non-violent sport, but Pounds repeated jabs soon goad him into a real fight. Like a rabid mountain man, Whitman lets loose with wild haymakers and bolos, and they connect—1, 2, then 3 in a row. Soon, Pound is bloodied, but Whitman doesn’t let up, soon even Whitman’s great beard is swaying like a heavy bag.

Result: The ref gives Pound a standing count and calls the fight.

Fight 5:  Ginsberg vs. Whitman

Just as Ginsberg and Whitman are about to start the fight, Ginsberg bashfully asks if Whitman would like to go out sometime, maybe they could have dinner or catch a base-ball game. He suggests that maybe they could stop at one of the local supermarkets in California to pick up grub. Whitman agrees and they depart.

Result: No match on account of love at first sight.

Fight 6: Kafka vs. Hemingway

Because of the result of the Ginsberg-Whitman match, the Kafka-Hemingway match becomes the championship bout.

Kafka enters the ring, baffled, still not sure why he’s there—or anywhere, for that matter. Kafka sets his snake/manager on the stool and waits.

Hemingway, talking smack, doesn’t care about Kafka’s confusion, and implies that Kafka is simply yellow and doesn’t want to fight. As the fight begins, Hemingway comes out swinging, landing a few good punches, but they don’t do much damage because of Kafka’s elaborate beetle costume.

Kafka doesn’t throw any punches; instead, he simply ambles around the ring in his beetle costume as Hemingway pummels him. Eventually, the audience begins to boo because of his inaction—and because Hemingway’s punches have no real effect.

To liven things up, Andre the Giant, who is in the audience because Pound had invited him to participate in the originally planned professional wrestling-style event, decides to enter the ring.

As Hemingway wails on Kafka, he climbs up the top rope and when Hemingway steps back to regroup, leaps onto Kafka, knocking him out. The ref counts out Kafka, and Hemingway, the consummate jerk, doesn’t hesitate to start punching Andre, despite the fact that Hemingway’s body blows hardly have any effect.

Andre begins to grapple with Hemingway, then hoists him and throws him into the third row of seats. Everyone applauds when this happens.

Andre raises his hands in victory, and heads over to Kafka’s corner to sit down. Then he sees the snake. Andre, reputedly deathly afraid of snakes, faints.

The referee shrugs, holds the snake in the air, and declares it the winner of the tournament.

*Williams Carlos Williams is the ringside doctor.

*Time machines would be required to make this a fair (and possible) tournament.

With a spirograph, everyone's an artist!

I was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on my kazoo yesterday when I got to thinking about what a truly democratic instrument the kazoo is. I say this not just because it’s ideal for playing our national anthem (as well as other patriotic tunes like “God Bless America” and “The Fifty Nifty States”), but because no one is ever better at playing the kazoo than anyone else.

It is impossible to be bad at the kazoo. It is also impossible to be good at the kazoo.

To test this theory, I looked online for kazooing videos. All of them sound exactly the way you expect them to sound – like someone playing a kazoo. There are no professional kazoo players. No one attends school on a kazoo scholarship. No one is writing academic articles on the cultural impact of the kazoo.

So, it’s a gratifying little instrument. The bar for success is very low. Most people can play the kazoo perfectly the very first time they pick one up. All you have to do is hum into it and it makes a somewhat musical sound. It can be played loud or soft, fast or slow. If you are playing it for your friends, and if those friends have a sense of humor, they can dance to it. But the pitch and range of the kazoo are limited. The kazoo lacks complexity. The kazoo is actually rather annoying for anyone who has to listen to it being played for more than a few minutes at a time.

The kazoo of sports is the wiffle ball. It is easy to hit a wiffle ball. But it is hard to hit a wiffle ball very far.

The kazoo of visual arts is the spirograph. Every pattern you make with the spriograph looks kinda cool. But not super cool.

The kazoo of gardening is the Chia Pet. It is easy to grow those little clover things on a ceramic head. But it is not actually all that interesting to have a ceramic head covered in little clover things.

There is no such thing as the kazoo of writing.

There is no style or genre or formula for writing with which someone can just sit down and create something they find immediately satisfying.

I guess an argument can be made for haikus as the kazoos of writing because they are so short; it’s easy to write one pretty quickly. But it’s hard to write a good haiku. Writing a good haiku takes just as long as writing any other kind of poem – longer, for those who are not so syllabically inclined.

I guess an argument could be made for Mad Libs as the kazoos of writing. But as a writer, I would find the suggestion that one could fill out a Mad Libs sheet and call it “writing” insulting.

Of course, actual athletes probably find the suggestion that one could hit a wiffle ball and call it “playing a sport” insulting.

Actual musicians probably find the suggestion that I can hum into a kazoo and call it “music” insulting.

Actual musicians probably say there’s no such thing as the kazoo of music.

On a related note, this is the internet’s best kazoo video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Peace–

Rule #11: I am Kanye West

I’ll be honest: I know nothing about writing fiction. Which is why I decided to take a fiction workshop this quarter. It’s interesting (and slightly appalling) to me that I am in a graduate school creative writing program and still didn’t understand the term “objective third” until recently, simply because my focus is in poetry. I think we should all know a little bit more about each other’s crafts.

In the interest of learning everything I can about fiction, I’ve been diligently copying down rules and proclamations that my classmates and my professor, the esteemed Sam Ligon, have handed down during class, and that is what I plan to teach my SAC students. Listed below are some examples of rules I’ve learned, followed by the way I, as a newcomer to the genre, have come to understand them:

Rule #1: Never use adverbs.
What I learned from this: Fiction writers don’t like description.

Rule #2: Don’t use the word “towards.” Only British people say “towards.”
What I learned from this: Fiction writers are jealous of British people, probably because their words automatically sound pretty when they speak.

Rule #3: A story cannot be a metaphor nor can it be made of metaphor.
What I learned from this: Fiction writers don’t believe in allegory or Animal Farm.

Rule #4: A relationship should always be treated as a conspiracy.
What I learned from this: Fiction writers generally end up alone.

Rule #5: “The pool boy never sends his regards.” –Sam Ligon
What I learned from this: Sam Ligon has a sordid past involving a pool boy.

Rule #6: Whatever you’re good at will kill you.
What I learned from this: Fiction writers are wary of being good at anything. And/or they are frequently afraid their characters might come to life and kill them.

Rule #7: If there’s going to be a dead body, put it on the first page.
What I learned from this: Fiction writers don’t like surprises.

Rule #8: “All you’re ever gonna need is polio.” –Sam Ligon
What I learned from this: FDR is Sam Ligon’s favorite president.

Rule #9: Dreams are dream-like and crazy people act crazy.
What I learned from this: Fiction writers discourage thinking outside the box.

Rule #10: “Always feel what Oprah would berate you for.” –Sam Ligon
What I learned from this: Sam Ligon has a strained relationship with Oprah.

Rule #11: You can believe anything.
What I learned from this: If I write from the point of view of Kanye West, people will have to believe that I am Kanye West.

Rule #12: There’s no single definition of good writing, but we know it when we see it.
What I learned from this: Good writing is to fiction writers what miracles are to Catholics.

In mad excitement for my guests, I spilled coffee on my computer. Then in a series of stupid acts, I erased all the pictures of their visit except for this--saved by Facebook.

After a delightful and stressful month or so that included:

• two weeks of teaching Russian students English online
• losing that job due to my sporadic internet connection (I signed my first contract for DSL in early February and am still waiting for it to be connected)
• a two-week training that qualifies me to teach for Berlitz
• an eight-day visit from my parents (which included eating lots of cake, drinking lots of beer, seeing a couple castles, learning European history, visiting several cities, taking lots of walks, and having meaningful conversations over many a delicious meal)

I suddenly found myself alone with several days in a row of unstructured time. You know what that means. I had no excuse not to write.

Except that I’d spilled coffee on my computer and it wasn’t working. But, after backing up all my files and erasing the entire hard drive, the computer began to work again (except for the keyboard, which explains the auxiliary one stationed in front of my laptop).

It’s just that instead of copying some of my folders I copied “shortcuts” to them. My “novel” happened to be in one of these.

But that was okay because I needed to rethink it, anyway.

We all know that real writers don’t wait for inspiration. We know better than to believe in writer’s block. I held up my thumb in search of a lift, and I got picked up by the comments section of “Why Write Novels At All?” in the New York Times.

[Novels] occur in the mind of the reader most of all and give people the space to consider people and situations in ways that even direct experience does not. (N123, Boston, MA)

I had been contemplating turning my “novel” idea into a play, but N123 reminded me how much I value the intimacy of the writing/reading exchange. I love the way reading a novel relies so heavily on the collaboration of the reader, and I love the care a good writer takes in order to guide the reader’s imagination just so.

I love how reading authentic representations of life allows us to mull over events, motivations, and results slowly, with the depth and care we can’t always offer experiences we witness first-hand. And I love how writing prose allows us to engage with the most interesting thing in the world: layered, intricate, and oftentimes inconsistent human thought.

For all of us who are ill-equipped to offer much to the world in the way of practical knowledge or skill, at least we can keep trying to offer alternate ways of thinking about this nutty world. And even if we utterly fail in that, we can live countless lives—meaningful and tragic—through reading (between stints of washing the world’s cars, floors, and toilets).

Many of you may have seen the video of John Irving’s comments about Hemingway, or at least you saw the headline and probably rolled your eyes. It was part of a promotional series on You Tube in which Irving discussed various aspects of his fiction and talked about the writing life, except that two of the videos inexplicably centered on Irving talking about how much he’s always disliked the writing of Hemingway and Twain.  (Sidebar: who at Simon & Schuster thought to themselves: You know what the best way to promote this bestselling author’s new novel is? Ask him to shred some literary giants. Doesn’t this just give more ammunition to the literary snobs who are bored by Irving’s work? When did publicly declaring that Hemingway was “macho crap” become a good way to promote your own novel? I don’t understand. However, they’ve now realized what terrible publicity it was and pulled it from the interwebs, but I was still able to find them. Here’s the Hemingway roast and here’s the Twain one.)

Now, I really like a couple of Irving’s novels, and I tend to push back when people give flippant reasons for why they don’t like his work. Often I find that they don’t have a good reason– they’re just annoyed that his work comes straight out of Dickens and it’s cool to hate Dickens. Fine. (I’m not asserting that Irving is the second coming, by the way. Novels are subjective and therefore can never be perfect, and enjoying a novel is different than thinking it’s perfect. But it bothers me when people seem to like or dislike any author just because they feel like they’re supposed to, because their literary brethren view author X or Y that way.) But in this video, Irving rails about how Hemingway’s dictum to “write what you know” is a horrible, terrible, awful, no-good thing because it limits the imagination, and confines the writer to a narrow scope of what he or she has seen or experienced. Well, I think many of you would agree that’s not really the takeaway from the “write what you know” advice. Hemingway wasn’t saying “don’t be imaginative.” I’d argue he was advising writers to incorporate things into your fiction that you know intimately, that you understand, that you can be authoritative about, and then take imaginative leaps from there. Which is exactly what Irving does in his fiction.

You’ve probably seen this (admittedly funny) chart , which creates a visual of the obvious: Irving often writes about male protagonists who live in New England, who grow up at an all-male boarding school because a parent teaches there; who have a parent who is involved with the theater; feature a protagonist who falls in love with the sport of wrestling; involve a mysteriously absent father whose role is partially filled by an amazing stepfather; feature a child who experiences a trauma that changes the trajectory of their life; and a sexual relationship between an older woman and a much younger man. I hate to be a jerk here, but what part of this is not writing what you know? Every item I’ve listed here is part of Irving’s personal history. Did I know that before Garp and Owen Meany and Cider House? Nope. Does it change how I read them now? Nope. I enjoy those novels. Judge your heart out. I find myself suspended in the world of each one and I want to stay there. The writer is drawing on his personal experience but it doesn’t matter. My experience of the book is not changed one iota knowing that Irving knows physical details about Vienna because he also spent time there, or that he had a positive relationship with his stepfather, or that wrestling is a huge part of his life. I could care less.

Now, picking Irving for this example feels a little cheap, because the super-literary audience is already inclined to dislike his work or his popularity or his affinity for Dickens. But Irving seems to be a good example of an author who tends to draw on a lot of personal experiences for his fiction, and for my money, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

One of the books that’s been called his most directly autobiographical, the one that Irving himself has said was the most difficult to write (“I have not written a novel that disturbed me so much“), was not exactly well-received. A reviewer at The New York Times called it “an immensely protracted story devoid of any conflict” and noted that he didn’t want to give away the ending because any reader who had the patience to stay with the protagonist through the “gargantuan” book deserved to not have it spoiled for them. Slate and others had some pretty harsh things to say about the book. I’d agree with most of the criticisms- I didn’t think that book worked. But can we really blame that on the fact that the book was deeply autobiographical? I don’t think so.

As the previous post posited, it seems as if sometimes drawing off personal material works and sometimes it doesn’t, which is a somewhat unsatisfying non-conclusion to draw. But it still seems interesting to me how some writers embrace it and can make it work for their fiction, while some will do anything in their power to avoid anything even remotely related to their background in their fiction. But despite all the cliches about how adorably cliche beginning writers are, writing totally obvious versions of themselves with better teeth, I wonder how much y’all consider this as you’re writing fiction. Do you worry about this, too, or is it a non-issue for you? Do you look back with amusement at previous work where you did use personal material, with disastrous results? Or do you know in the back of your mind that at some point you’re going to have to address X in your fiction, because of something in your past that makes you care about it?