Writerly advice

I've decided to add a collection of my aphorisms delivered to MFA students on my latest speaking tour. These are insightful responses to sound questions, so please take them all to heart:

"A writer should write from the guts. That's why I never write in the morning until after a good bowel movement. Only after a serious shit can you write things that are true."

"If the words aren't coming right is when I chew on bulbs of raw garlic. If that doesn't work, try venison, cooked bloody and eaten under a full moon at midnight. Otherwise, you're probably just destined for failure."

"True writers never doubt themselves. Period."

Fourth admonishment: 'show don't tell' is horse shit

"Show, don't tell" is certainly the most dangerous and misinterpreted advice given to young writers. It's well meaning, but nevertheless harmful. It is the enemy of "voice," and it altogether strips the role of the author from the finished prose. In essence, it turns Pommard 1er Cru into two-buck Chuck.

There are much better, albeit more complex, ways to encourage writers to focus on story movement, on pressing the narrative along, on cautioning them not to linger unnecessarily or stray off track. But ours is a culture programmed to love taglines, and "show, don't tell" has become a brand unto itself. It represents all of the bland, voiceless fiction that plugs the arteries of our literary world. I've never done a serious study, but it strikes me that the phrase has arisen out of the paranoia in the 50's and 60's that television and film would compete with reading and thus shrink the audience for fiction. The thinking is that readers are busy people, and they don't want anything to pop the "bubble of reality," this fantasy land created by the plot of a novel, lest they grow distracted and turn to the Great American Lobotomy Tube or to other, more spare writing that doesn't slow down their busy lives. If an author dares to bog readers down with subtle description, or to "tell" them the story in the inflated language of a narrator's voice rather than simply "show" them the bare bones of the action, then the readers will turn away.

This is bullshit. Readers read because they enjoy being "told" a story. Those who want to skip right to the movie will probably not purchase the novel in the first place. Some authors resonate with readers, and some don't, but stripping the prose down to action alone is rarely the right answer. People read specific writers over a long period of time because they've become attuned to the author's "voice," or in other words, the way the author "tells" the story.

Stories are told. Movies are shown. "Show, don't tell," I realize, is a rule. And it is a requirement of any serious writer to break every rule as soon as it's codified. But I still hear people I respect flogging this phrase, and I'm sure they don't realize the damage they're doing by encouraging incipient writers to turn away from their voices in favor of "showing" the naked skeleton of the plot. I understand that some tastes prefer such twiggy, undernourished storytelling, and that's fine. (Note, I don't put Carver or Hemingway in this category...what they were doing was lush and altogether different from "show don't tell") Taste in storytelling is subjective much in the same way that some men prefer women who look like that emaciated corpse Ann Coulter, while others...Trout included...require a little more. Some people...most in fact...prefer to be "told" a story. There is a reason my girls, when small, put away their video tapes and much preferred to hear Daddy Trout "tell" them a story, complete with my embellishments, exaggerations, asides, tangents, gestures and affectations. When you ask a young writer to "show and don't tell" you are asking her to strip out all of these things that make live storytelling so dynamic. Some say that's a good thing. I say not.

My good friend John Schultz has oft lamented the loss of the author's voice, and he's studied the issue more than I. Once, while antelope hunting in Outer Mongolia in the mid-70s, John and I weathered a three-day storm in our yurt, railing about the issue while the tent walls flapped in the wind. Incidentally, John founded one of the better writing programs in the country with a central platform being the flabbiness of the "show, don't tell" mantra. While I still find the notion of the MFA program dubious (namely because one such program has hired me), John's outfit is as good as it gets.

This diatribe is the result of an office visit this morning by Yu, a promising student. She's shown hints of a magnificent voice through spare, hesitant prose. I at first thought it was the fact of English being her second language that was restraining her, but in truth it was that she was struggling to adhere to all of the "show, don't tell" advice she's heard over the years from teachers, writers and those write-by-numbers rulebooks that one often finds in the do-it-yourself section of the bookstore. Still, the exuberance of her voice was unwilling to heed such restraint, busting through the seams of her skeletal plots. When I explained the nonsensical nature of that advice much in the same language used above, awareness crept into her big, honey-brown eyes. She smiled, covering her mouth with her hand. When I finished she leapt out of her chair and wrapped her arms around my neck, kissing me wetly on my cheek. I was surprised because her impulsive gesture of affection didn't fit my (probably racist) stereotype of demure Asian women, but that's another subject entirely.

In any case, I'm thrilled at her breakthrough and eagerly await Yu's next manuscript in which she promises to "tell" me a story. For the rest of you, I urge you to abandon that hollow-eyed, Ann Coulterish, meth-hound, bare-bones writing. I urge you to push your prose to the purple, stray from your skeletal plot on the most tangential and voluptuous of diversions just to see what the hell else is out there, feel free to flash back and then flash backwarder, interject your omniscient, God-like voices with impunity, pop that supposed "bubble of reality" and grab your reader by his ears, planting a big, wet storyteller's kiss on his forehead.

Sexfoodwords

Ella called this afternoon and commented on the bleak pronouncements on prospects for fiction writers in my previous post. For some reason she and Billie have been reading my blog closely, as if looking for clues to my mental health and wellbeing. I'm glad that they're reading it, but also annoyed.

In any case, she's my brash daughter and also the consummate pragmatist, while Billie is the idealistic dreamer. Ella's attractive. Her beauty is raw and abundant, with huge, black eyes and a wicked laugh always hovering at the edge of her lips. She's a lesbian, and it's interesting that we share similar tastes in women, physically speaking. Spiritually, emotionally and intellectually I find that most or even all women tend to be my betters.

E.Trout: So anyway, Daddy, what's the point of it all?

B.Trout: Kind of a broad question, isn't it?

Ella: I mean writing...why would anyone do it if they, as you suggest, "should give up the notion of success?"

BT: Why not?

Ella: But if there's no hope of succeeding?

BT: It's not about success.

Ella: Then what's it about?

BT: It's a very basic and essential form of communication. It's kind of like cooking.

Ella: How's that?

BT: Cooking is probably the most direct form of human communication outside of sex. Sex, of course, being the most urgent and engaging of all of the senses, is the ultimate form of interaction, but then it's only appropriate in very specific circumstances. Cooking is a close second and more ubiquitous. If you don't eat, you die. In preparing a meal...whether for family, a lover, or a stranger who shows up at your door, you're building a conversation that contains the sum total of your culture and your life's experience. From the table setting to the spices. From the way you operate the flame on the burner to how you wield the wooden spoon. From everything you've learned from your grandmother to everything you've invented on your own, or out of necessity by way of poverty, abundance, season, climate, etc. You lay out this elaborate composition on the table. It's a delicate ritual. It is direct communication. It is something that you do with passion and care even if there's no hope of financial remuneration. You don't require "success" to cook. You do it because it's a part of the human condition.

Ella: But I'm studying to be a chef, so there's a financial aspect as well...

BT: True...you will eventually get paid to cook. But if there was no hope of ever making a living through food you'd still cook anyway, wouldn't you? You'd still be passionate about the table, right?

Ella: Of course.

BT: Same thing with writing. Storytelling, behind sex and food, is the third most direct way of communicating with fellow hominids. Music, dance, visual arts all follow after. When you read something that's written well, or when you hear a story told, you are living inside the author's brain. You are swimming with their soul. You are experiencing what it is to be human and alive. And let me say that I'm not talking about Tom Clancy here, or anything that is written with any consideration for a market. So, in order to write well, you have to take the potential of success out of the equation. If there's no feasibility of financial "success" and you'd be willing to spend five hours a day writing anyway...just like you'd still cook or make love without remuneration, then you'll be a fine writer. But if the possibilities of financial reward were removed and this would cause you to quite writing...then you're not cut out for it. If there's no book release party in a Manhattan apartment near Central Park, and no book tour, and no guest writer engagements in your future, and no options on the screenplay, and no royalty checks, and you go to your grave with a stack of pages read only by those with the patience to love you, or perhaps they'll never be read at all, and if this promise of obscurity lessens your interest in prose even slightly, then give up now. Go take the LSATs. But if you're still eager, despite all of that, to plunge ahead...then write. If the process of writing is as essential to you as eating and breathing, as inherent as the procreative impulse, then by all means continue.

Ella: I see. So...have you told your students any of this? Or do you just growl at them and basically tell them to quit?

BT: Well...

Ella: Daddy...you can kind of be a bastard at times.

BT: So true, Ella Trout, so true.

Ella: I think you need to lighten up. And maybe, just to be fair, the next time you give a reading and that guy asks for advice for novice writers, maybe then you should tell him what you've just told me. It might come off better. He might actually buy some of your book after you're done speaking. That might even bring you a little more satisfaction than your usual scowling and brooding. And then everybody wins.

BT: My dear, as always, you offer sound advice.

Ella: Just thinking, Daddy. Gotta run.

BT: Peace and love, Baby Trout.

Baby Trout: Peace and love, Daddy.

Second admonishment: seven sins of topic selection

Unfortunately, as part of the contract securing my employment, I am forced to teach one section of "Rhetoric and Composition 101," the prerequisite writing course for all majors. Fortunately, the interest level of these students is even lower than my own, so my workload is rather lax. Still, I feel it necessary to offer some advice should any student in such a course wish to avoid having her instructor crumple and then urinate upon her assignment, as I did last night while grading essays after a few glasses of tawny port.

The simple avoidance of the following themes or vehicles in an essay or work of fiction can greatly increase your odds of success:

1) Grandma dies - Don't they all?

2) And then I wake up to find that it was only a dream - Bad enough in a freshman with third-grade vocabulary, but middle-age graduate students? How did you get in the program? Whom do you read? What fucking planet are you from?

3) The [accidental death/suicide] of my [friend/cousin/sibling] makes me aware, for the first time in my young life, of my own mortality - Less stimulating than the account of your first bowel movement on a big-person potty.

4) The church mission trip to Guatemala - Hmm, let me see, how will it end? Do you, perhaps, return to suburban Dallas after having faced this direst of poverty with a renewed appreciation of how blessed you are to be a citizen of the USA? And did the Mayan family--for whom you slapped together a few bricks and handed a sack of corn, a case of bottled water, plus a trunkload of Jerry Falwell pamphlets--mention that they used to subsist growing their own maize until NAFTA and other "free" trade policies disrupted six-thousand years of corn culture, driving them off their ancestral land and slamming them up against our newly militarized border, forcing them to take factory jobs for three bucks a day (jobs, that, incidentally, used to belong to the likes of Uncle Johnny [now alcoholic] in Des Moines)? Of course, they weren't able to tell you because you never bothered to learn any Tzeltal, let alone Spanish. But I'm sure they appreciated the literature, as anything bearing the bloated visage of Rev. Falwell makes wonderful toilet paper.

5) Grandpa dies.

6) First hunting trip with Dear Old Dad - Courtesy of my good friend, Mike Curtis, fiction editor of The Atlantic.

7) Spring Break in [Daytona/Puerto Vallarta/NameYourBeachHere] - A sand-crusted, drunken orgy is neither original nor particularly appealing, and what really astounds the Trout is not the two girls from Ohio who sneak you past their chaperone into their motel room where they simultaneously fiddle with your privates, rather the complete lack of imagination American Youth show in selecting travel destinations. It causes one to wonder which is the greater of our cultural afflictions: fast food or MTV? Both seem manifestations of the corporate institutionalization of boredom...now there's a topic for an essay.

Wrong

I refuse to read, or allow to be read in my classroom, a work of prose containing any of the following as a fictional character: a vampire, an ex-Navy SEAL, a talking unicorn, a dwarflike creature with hairy feet, a television celebrity, a private investigator, Spock, the President of the United States.

A Short History of a Salmonid: Answers to Some Questions

While my opinions on inane questions from novice writers seem to have left some leery of posting their thoughts (yes, there is such a thing as a dumb question), a few intrepid readers have emailed some worthy inquiries. I will answer them here.

Recommended reading? Anything and everything. I preferred the Great Russians as a youth. No other country has had such a literary run, and while the socioeconomic and cultural reasons behind this are fascinating and warrant volumes, I will only say: Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Pasternak, Gogol, Pushkin. One should even included Nabokov, especially his early German and Russian works. Next, read all of the Moderns. The world has never seen such a gathering as Paris in the '20s. Where you go from there is your choice. I preferred Hemingway because I grew up not three hundred miles from his boyhood home and because all youths essentially grasp Nick Adams. There's a literary line that, uniquely American in style, can be traced from Hemingway to Carver until the Iowa Workshop finally killed it off. And I'm not just saying this because I was fired from that program after teaching there for only three weeks.

Fraud? Yes, incidentally, people have accused me of imitating both Jim Harrison and Garrison Keillor. Also Rick Bass. In truth, all three are better writers than I, though Mr. Bass's first book, "The Watch," came out long after my last good novel was published. As for the other two, we are all largeish northerners with rural roots. There are obvious differences. I consider Mr. Harrison a dear friend and a better fisherman. I know Mr. Keillor only through radio, and I thank him for his work. If I've stolen anything, my only defense is lack of imagination and what Mr. Costello concedes: "Any good artist is both a thief and a magpie."

Origins of the species? My mother was born and raised in Berlin. Being Catholic and Jewish, her family fled before the war for obvious reasons. My father was likewise part German, and part rural Mississippi, hailing from Chicago. They met at a dance where he was the drummer in a polka band. They settled down on a dairy farm, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Music? Billie Holiday first stirred me. I initially thought there was an angel trapped inside the little transistor radio I clutched up in the hayloft as a little boy; it was the only place on the farm where I could receive the jazz station from Milwaukee. I was obsessed with her for some time. When I hit puberty, the sound of her voice alone could cause the ermine to stir in his warren...still the only woman who has been able to accomplish this feat through singing (discounting those saucy female hip hop artists). Ella Fitzgerald is glorious. Louis Armstrong. The flute concertos of Frederick the Great. The usual Germans and Austrians, including the Strausses, Beethoven, Mozart, even Wagner. More recently: Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash's later albums, John Prine, Bonnie Rait, Steve Earle. All the blues musicians, especially Buddy and Phil Guy, Koko Taylor, Son Seals and Big Daddy Kinzie.

If I could be any other writer, who would it be? An inane question, but still somewhat intriguing, so I'll answer it as my mood allows. It would be Arundhati Roy, who has created a new genre of music with her prose. I would give all my remaining hours on the stream to write like her for three minutes. I don't know if I'd actually want to "be her" as that would rob me of the pleasure of falling in love with her, which I've done on three separate occasions. The last time was when we were co-panelists at an anti-war roundtable, and I was so smitten that I walked for three hours through Central Park in driving sleet, contracting viral pneumonia. I eagerly await her second novel, which is long overdue.

Fishing? I actually prefer brookies to brown trout. I love fishing the clear streams of my home country where the fish are so skittish that a misplaced #22 midge on 2-weight line can clear a quarter-mile stretch. I don't mind those one-fish days at all. The roiling waters of the west are fine, but I'll as soon fish for bass, walleye or northern pike with a crank bait. In my newest "home waters" they tell me that a tan fabrication known as a "woolly bugger" is the best fly, but I've had no luck. I'd sooner use my midge rod for panfish. All trout, however, are gorgeous creatures, the fly being the best way to take them. But I'm no snob: I'll fish with a worm and bobber from a dock if it suits me.

Are any writing programs worthwhile? Sure. My good friend Ed Doctorow runs one of the best at NYU. Also, Columbia College (Chicago), which another friend, the longtime fiction editor of The Atlantic Monthly, has called "the true home of the American story." Both are urban institutions, and the non-homogeneous nature of the studentry surely amplifies the rare ability of the instructors.

Food for fiction? Ah, the most intrepid question of all. My favorite meal is always my most recent excellent dining experience. It depends, too, on season. Braised lamb. Steamed asparagus. Sauteed oyster mushrooms (no more than 1 day from harvest). Pair this with a quality Coates du Rhone of your choice, or even a grassy Sauvegnon Blanc. I've also had luck with this fall table: crostini with tomatoes and olive oil (extra, extra), risotto con fungi al porcini, roasted chingili (Italian wild pig). This would be paired with a good Brolio or Montalpulciano (or even Montalcino). For dessert, apple slices with fresh lime-raspberry glaze and a glass of espirito santo.

First admonishment

Nothing so gives away the overeager novice, and annoys seasoned writers more, than talking about your fictional characters as if they're real people. This is particularly bad anywhere outside the confines of the classroom. I took a pair of students to a roadhouse after Tuesday's class, and one girl said, upon entering, "Callie and Hoss would love this kind of place...they met in a bar, you know, though I haven't written that scene yet..."

She's a decent writer, but that moronic comment has just cost her a whole letter grade.

Pork loin for Mr. Clayhouse

Had an experience today to make this entire writing school concept seem less inane.

A student, a laconic, tallish, thirtyish, square-jawed fellow, asked this lucid question after class: what should a writer eat? Like anyone who has toured the MFA reading circuit in order to whore up a few bucks for poorly bound reprints of novels long past their relevance, I hate the standard post-reading, eager-young-writer questions: when is the best time to write? is it better to write longhand or on a keyboard? do you recommend using an outline (Lord please deliver me)? do you have any advice for aspiring writers, &c, &c, &c.

Ah, but what a writer should eat...this is a question of literary merit.

Billy Clayhouse, the student in question, is an Okie with Kiowa roots. Unlike that playacting aristocrat that is Our Leader, Clayhouse has the bearing of a true cowboy. His western jeans, his crewcut and his pearl button shirts are not affectations. He hasn't said two words in class until now, except to read from his work, and then his voice is steady and clipped, like his prose. In his own way, he often tops Miss Puppycute when it comes to pure style, his only drawback being the fact that none of his work, up to this point, has featured any human beings. I'm all for dogs and cats as characters in narrative, but it's people that make fiction pulse. Clayhouse has featured an owl, a coyote, prairie chickens, a covey of quail, etc. But then, to the traditional Kiowa, animals are people and vice versa.

In any case, we spoke at length about the usual reduction sauces and the importance of restraint in a marinade. I recommended "Dad's Own Cookbook," which Harrison, the pre-eminent foodie, touts as essential for anyone starting from scratch. I've no doubt Clayhouse could do justice to a rabbit spitted over a campfire, but his skills are otherwise fairly raw. He mentioned macaroni and cheese as a staple, which caused me to shudder. I realized, then, that this was no pampered trustfunder or the recipient of suburban largess...this was a fellow working his ass off (golf course grounds crew) in order to eke his way through, of all things, an MFA program.

In any event, I shared a very simple grill recipe featuring pork loin ribs marinated in olive oil (extra, extra), fresh lime, orange peel and black pepper, then rolled in dried rosemary and seared before a gentle, slow grilling. Serve with steamed carrots (lime butter sauce) and some Ojibway rice. We strolled to my apartment where I bestowed on him a bottle of San Giminagno white, which I gave him permission to refrigerate, this being appropriate only for a novice.

For the first time in my playacting at professor, I feel as if I've made strides with a student.