MFA in a Box: A Why to Write Book by John Rember

Author:John Rember [Rember, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: education
Publisher: Dream of Things
Published: 2011-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

Rules for Writers

Ed Jones’s Ten Truths that Will Help You Be a Better Writer by Being a Better Witness

If you’re white, don’t assume you can know what it’s like to be a black person. If you’re black, don’t assume you can know what it’s like to be white. The same caution applies to all races, genders, occupations, educations, and levels of wealth.

Experience trumps language.

Don’t pride yourself on your empathy. You have less than you think you have. Most of the time what you think is empathy is projection, where you assume that someone else’s inside is just like your inside, warts and all. It’s not. People who have been married for twenty years sometimes look at each other and discover they have no idea who the other person is.

Being in love with or hating characters makes getting to know them exponentially more difficult.

Your characters are real, but they’re not flesh and blood people. From the standpoint of your readers, they’re words on a page that they hope to be able to use to imagine flesh and blood people.

Street smarts don’t always work on the page. For example, I’ve wondered what it would have been like for Ed Jones to have so much physical and emotional and intellectual power, and to have found a place where he could express it freely — The College of Idaho — and then go out into the world as a cog in a great prison system whose greatest purpose, if you look at the evidence, is to keep poor black and brown people locked up. What’s it like to be a superior human being who becomes a self-betraying functionary in an inferior and corrupt system? More people than Ed Jones have found out. That’s street smarts talking, and the bad thing about street smarts is that they close off possibilities, in stories and in life. They will make your writing into a self-contained, self-reinforcing system, and that’s a form of self-inflicted blindness. I’m not saying that street smarts can’t get at the truth. They just don’t tell very good stories.

If you write down overheard dialogue and what you see when you sit for an hour in a coffee shop and stare at people’s faces, you’ll likely upset people and may be get arrested. But you’ll be a better writer.

The code of conduct for a witness starts with paying careful attention to what’s going on around you, and avoiding making assumptions based on preconception or prejudice.

It’s possible to subject memory to the available evidence. There’s always opportunity for fact checking, even in fiction.

If you’ll open the door when somebody’s pounding on it, the stories will find you.

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