Three Times Time by Jack Matthews

Author:Jack Matthews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American Literature
Publisher: Personville Press
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fifth Interlude

Somewhere I heard you say that stories are things that happen to people who have become story tellers. The problem with a statement like that is, it doesn't really say anything. It ignores a bigger, more difficult and more obvious question: how do you become a story teller?

By writing stories.

Wonderful. So how do you break out of that vicious circle?

I don't know.

You don't?

Well, maybe I have some ideas.

I certainly hope so. Like what?

Well, I think stories can sneak into things you write when you don't think you're writing stories.

Come again?

Let me put it this way: one of the best tricks writers can learn when they are blocked in some way, or bled of all inspiration, or abandoned of all hope, is to try deliberately to write something bad or meaningless. I'm not speaking of just your everyday, down-home badness, I'm talking about bad. And as for meaninglessness, I'm talking about blithering away on the page until something happens that you wouldn't have dreamed possible.

That all sounds pretty off-the-wall to me.

It is. It's as off-the-wall as creativity itself. But the reason it works is that by deliberately striving to write a stupid or silly or meaningless text you automatically and necessarily circumvent whatever is preventing you from writing well. It also circumvents the high seriousness that can imprison writers when they forget the game aspect of their enterprise. The result of intentionally writing something wacky or meaningless may be no better than what you're trying to escape from, but it will be different. And that's enough, for that particular moment of crisis. The trick is, keep writing. Of course, the essential other part of that is, keep reading. It's good if a writer can arrange for a fifty-hour day, with plenty of energy and paper and books and … .

Enough!

But even if your attempt to write garbage or nonsense is a failure – in both ways, in both directions – when you go back to the original text, you will come to it out of a different head. And, since experimentation is at the heart of creativity, you're likely to generate an invigorating notion that can salvage the scene or character that has proved obdurate and troublesome.

It all sounds gimmicky to me.

Of course it is, but gimmicks are …

I know, I know. You can use the cheapest trick, and if it works, it works … in which case you can jettison it. You've said all of that before, but I remain unconvinced. Part of it is, the great stories I've read just don't seem radically different from the devices you're talking about. Those tricks don't strike me as having any relevance to the masterpieces we've been taught to admire.

I'm convinced they do; although I'll admit that their effects can seem different. But there's no way to teach writers to create masterpieces. Here it seems prudent to point out that when you teach creative writing, you're teaching craft more than art … even though it's hard to know exactly where one ends and the other starts.

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