Nil Desperandum

I look at the professional writers I long to be like and despair.

And yet . . .

I look at the professional writers I long to be like and see they struggled too.

Take Rincewind the Wizzard, the character created by Terry Pratchett.

In the first Rincewind book – Pratchett’s first – we see a lot more of the classic fantasy novel environment (exotic settings, exciting, scantily-clad women, fantastic creatures, etc.) than we see in Pratchett’s later novels. As a reader, it’s clear that The Colour of Magic is a lot closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars than, say, Thud!

What I’m getting at is best summed up by what Stanford University educator David Labaree says in his article “Writing Essays by Formula Teaches Students how to not Think,” published at aeon.co.

The point is that learning to write is extraordinarily difficult, and teaching people how to write is just as hard. Writers need to figure out what they want to say, put it into a series of sentences whose syntax conveys this meaning, arrange those sentences into paragraphs whose syntax carries the idea forward, and organise paragraphs into a structure that captures the argument as a whole. That’s not easy. It’s also not elementary. [Author Stanley] Fish distils the message into a single paradoxical commandment for writers: ‘You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free.’ The five-paragraph essay format is an effort to provide a framework for accomplishing all this.

I’m going to argue that the best authors do exactly what Fish admonishes: They learn the form, and then set themselves free from it.

Pratchett’s later novels are filled with the satire and humor we expect from him. They’re present embryonically in The Colour of Magic, but don’t come out fully because Pratchett was still learning the form.

The discouraging thing here – for novelists and for teachers of writing – is that to set writers free from the form is something that cannot be taught. It has to be learned through long practice in writing to the form, experimenting with the form, and then finding ways to use the form to one’s advantage (I don’t believe anyone actually strays completely form “the form” – whatever form it takes in the genre they’re writing. It can also be said that in Pratchett’s last novels he’d again become slave to the form of his own making, as he battled with The Embuggerance as well.) But they do become the better writers they want to be. Over time and with lots and lots of practice.

What does this all mean for me as a writer?

It gives me hope.

Maybe I’ll get better. I’ll certainly get better the more I write. I can see that in Doleful Creatures. It’s a long shot from where it was as a finished NaNoWriMo novel in 2005. And I can see the potential in other projects I’ve done. I just need to write more. Practice more.

What does this mean for me as a teacher of writing?

Maybe somewhere in the swamp of students I have had over the years, there are a few I’ve helped start on that long writing journey. Maybe.