The Whale Belly

How should a writer study? A writer trains by putting down words one after another over longer periods of time, or at the very least by sitting in a chair and maintaining focus. But this has to be a mostly unthinking process, like shooting baskets. It has to be a feeling experience more than a thinking one. So it makes more sense that another third of their training ought to be explicit thinking with good books, and maybe some glances at bad ones to provide a point of comparison. The last third has to be engagement in the real world, but I want to save that topic for another time.

The way a writer ought to read is a well-worn topic of discussion in academic and commercial books, with more or less a consensus around the importance of close-reading analyses of passages of good writing. Dorthea Brande, back in the 1930s I believe, wrote that a writer, especially a beginning writer, must read a book twice, once for pleasure, twice for study. Francine Prose won acclaim for her revival of close-reading in Read Like a Writer. And while this approach is logically sound, I think with any “best approach” one has to consider the inevitable fallibility of humankind in the face of the logical. It may be that dutiful close-reading with pencil ready like a scalpel is the most rewarding thing a writer can do while reading, but so is lifting the heaviest weight at the gym for the bodybuilder. One has to work up to such practices so that they feel the rewards of them rather than burn out from overexertion. I think it’s good to know about these practices of writers, but to wait until they are motivated to pursue them out of an internal yearning to improve, almost as if it were a necessity. Otherwise, they probably won’t get much out of it and see it instead as a rote practice to be endured.

When does a writer or any other aspiring practitioner know when they are ready to take on a training method like close-reading? I think it is an intuitive feeling, a need that starts imposing itself on the conscience. It’s when the will finally says, “Enough is enough. I’m tired of my mediocrity.” It’s like an addict hitting rock bottom and suddenly becoming amenable to change. It’s not a pretty process and requires what will seem in hindsight to be a lot of unnecessary suffering, but I don’t know if there is a more effective way of changing other than failing so hard for so long that one suddenly becomes willing to do anything to get out of the situation.

Of course, it’s always good to have a clear view of what the better path looks like when that time comes, and I can’t think of a better way than close-reading analysis. The point of it is to understand what the greatest writers of the literary tradition did to the point when you can reject it all and go your own way, as Harold Bloom used to say. I remember a film about Pablo Picasso that one of my art teachers in school showed us. He began by quickly and adeptly painting a classic figure of a woman with great refinement, only to turn to the camera and say in Spanish, “This is just to show everyone that I know how to paint traditionally,” then he slapped a thick swath of paint over the image and began to paint over it freely in his own experimental form. I think a writer ought to be able to do the same thing, to know exactly how writers of old constructed their stories and poems, ideally in several languages, so that they can eventually set out on their own paths. This is why I applaud the creation of “The Canon,” for all its warts and accusations of ethnocentrism, racism, and sexism. For it’s not supposed to be a centripetal force of conformism, but the center that acts as a foundation for pushing outward to more diverse and complex forms, styles, and perspectives.

So an apprentice writer has at least three main practices: writing for ever longer periods of time, observing the often overlooked details of everyday life, and reading ever more closely the great works in the tradition of the craft. There are other actions a writer can take in terms of participating in the community of writers, but these three are like pillars for personal development. Tomorrow perhaps I’ll write about observation.