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Craft Essay 4:
Trusting Your Instincts

Ted Morrissey

“My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with ‘P’ on this side (‘Positive’) and ‘N’ on this side (‘Negative’). I try to read what I’ve written uninflectedly, the way a first-time reader might (‘without hope and without despair’). Where’s the needle? Accept the result without whining. Then edit, so as to move the needle into the ‘P’ zone. Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.” — from “George Saunders: What writers really do when they write” (The Guardian, 4 March 2017)

In this article, Saunders, the author of Lincoln in the Bardo as well as many other works, discusses in detail the creative process — his and other writers’, and other creative types’. It’s a long article but worth the time. His description of what writing is (and what it isn’t) rings true with my experience.

Nowadays many creative writers elect to hone their skills by taking courses in creative writing, and even pursue degrees in fields like fiction writing and poetry. If so, they find themselves critiquing their classmates’ writing, and having their own efforts critiqued, which can be illuminating, but it can also be devastating to one’s ego and self-confidence. Some students stop after receiving an undergraduate degree in creative writing, while many others continue by pursuing an MFA; and some go even further, academically, and obtain a Ph.D. in creative writing.

Throughout these various levels, having one’s work judged by others (both instructors and peers) is a regular part of the process. It’s not uncommon, however, for creative writers to quit writing creatively once their degree is completed. Without the pressure of deadlines and without the encouragement of teachers and classmates, many promising writers stop writing altogether.

My mentor when I was working on my masters, Kent Haruf, used to say to us: “The world doesn’t need another story.” Kent wasn’t being mean or pessimistic. He was stating a simple truth. That is, if we never write another thing, the world won’t even notice. There won’t be anyone banging on our door wanting to know when our next story or poem or script will be available. In fact, most of the people in our lives would really prefer if we didn’t write. Writing requires long hours of solitude, of isolation from family and friends that may go on for weeks or months or even years. Meanwhile, our family, our friends, our employers want us in the world. They aren’t malevolently trying to keep us from our dreams; they just want our time and our attention, and they almost certainly deserve it.

So, unless we thrive in social isolation and are independently wealthy, we’re going to have to find a way to carve out time to write. And we’ll have to judge our writing ourselves. What’s working? What isn’t? How do I make it better? This is where my William Gass meme enters the picture. As I mentioned earlier, peer review — i.e. “workshopping” — can be hard on one’s self-confidence. Everyone in a workshop setting can find things they don’t care for in our work (reading reception is a wholly subjective process). But just because Reader A doesn’t care for Plot Development X, that shouldn’t be taken as proof positive that there is something truly flawed with the plot development. Some people prefer tea, some coffee … some a triple shot of espresso.

My experience is that more often than not, the critiques that student writers receive in workshop are wrongheaded and therefore do more harm than good to the creative process — but only if the critiques are taken seriously. Gass said, “[L]earn not to take advice.” I wholeheartedly concur.

Try this: Think of a book you love, love, love — a book that has made your quality of life better just by having read it. Now go to Goodreads (or Amazon or any crowd-sourced review site), and see what others think of your beloved book. (I’ll wait …) Calm down, it’s okay. They just don’t get it the way you do (I’m sure they too, somehow, have people who love them).

That’s just how fickle and idiosyncratic the reading public is. I mean, it took the reading public writ large seventy years to figure out that, far from sucking, Moby-Dick was a masterpiece. Imagine the comments unpublished Hermie Melville would have gotten from his classmates when he workshopped some chapters from his WIP “The Whale.” Downtrodden and teary-eyed, he probably would have switched his major to agronomy or marine biology. Or dropped out altogether.

Another obstacle for the creative writing graduate is the leap from producing smaller projects (stories, poems, and brief scripts) to producing full-length novels, collections, and screenplays. George Saunders also speaks to this issue in his article referenced above. I expound on what he says in this video:

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Ted Morrissey’s novel excerpts, short stories, poems, critical articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in more than a hundred publications. Among his award-winning novels are Crowsong for the Stricken, Mrs Saville, and The Artist Spoke. Delta of Cassiopeia: Collected Stories and Sonnets was released in 2023. He is a lecturer in Lindenwood University’s MFA in Writing program, and also teaches creative writing and literature courses for Southern New Hampshire University. His craft essays have been culled from his lecture notes. Visit tedmorrissey.com and follow on Twitter @t_morrissey.

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