Suffering

During my first nonfiction class, my teacher told us a story. When she was eighteen she entered and won a place in a one-time workshop with a prestigious author whose name I don't remember. When it was her turn before the firing squad, the distinguished author ripped her and her work to shreds. The way she described it this was not at all in keeping with normal workshop decorum of constructive criticism. He made her cry.

After the class, the distinguished writer took my teacher aside and told her, "For the next three years, don't write a word. Go to Terrell County, Texas and get a job as a waitress. After three years, you'll have enough material to be a good writer."

Then she said, "Bull. Shit." Writing is about craft. And no one has the right to tell you what to do with your life or make a value judgement on your experience. That's why Lee Gutkind's article "The MFA in Creative Nonfiction: What to Consider Before Applying" in the most recent edition of Poets and Writers pissed me off.

In the article, Gutkind writes that the most important criterion a potential applicant should consider is "How much have you suffered--or experienced?" He elaborates, "I'm not contending here that young people can't write with power and beauty or that they haven't suffered. But it's often better to join the Peace Corps, take a job driving a taxi, or interact with a different culture before studying writing on a master's degree level."

Flannery O'Conner said something to the effect that if you make it through childhood then you've got enough material to write. All of our experiences, everything, is inherently interesting.

There's a scene from Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation that I particularly love, when Kaufman's meta-character sits in a screen writing class and asks the instructor, Robert McKee, how you write about the everyday world since it's mostly boring and nothing happens. McKee responds, "Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day... Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love. People lose it..."

Our everyday experience is a plenitude of bizarre wonders and miracles.

But this isn't what irks me about the "you need to suffer" philosophy of nonfiction writing. For one, this fetishizes and glorifies trauma. I think this can lead artists, young artists especially, to make stupid decisions -- I've met many who did. At worst, I think this devalues thoughts and experiences that aren't about this sexy suffering.

Chuck Palahniuk has a great essay in Stranger Than Fiction called "You Are Here" which criticizes the popular tendency to write about personal trauma. It's an ineffective and perverse form of exorcism. I'm not sure I agree with Chuck -- there's nothing wrong with writing as therapy -- but when you rest your life on life as story, trying to strong arm your memories into a thing that gives meaning to your suffering, you may need reevaluate your methods. Everyone has suffered. Telling the world is not a universal cure-all.

And that, I think, is what really bothers me about Gutkind's criterion of suffering. We're all filled with a wealth of material and memories, but not everyone who wants to attend a nonfiction writing program wants to write about themselves. There are whole galaxies of writing that fall under the category of "nonfiction." Just because the memoir and the personal essay are popular right now doesn't mean everyone wants to write them. What about those of us who want to write journalism, criticism, science articles, and social commentary and want to come at it from a different angle than the traditional disciplines?

What about those of us who just want to learn how to write more effectively about the facts? What if you just want to know how to best tell a true story, regardless if it's about suffering or not?

Premise

It's only fair to admit that everyone warned me it was a bad idea to spend the week alone at the Body House.  But I have a deadline, I told them.  You're spending the week at a secluded, New England mansion where a family was murdered, among other things, and it's rumored to be haunted, they said.  They said, This is not the best way to meet a deadline.  You've never met my editor, I told them.

At first I was able to get a lot of work done and the house was quiet and peaceful.  It is my understanding that this is the way of things.  On the second day, though, on my walk through the woods I saw an apparition of a hanged man, eyes bulging, tongue lolling, swinging in the trail in front of me.  That was inconvenient.  I shrugged and decided that I'd have to skip the morning walks from now on.  It was more time to write, anyway.

The problem was I was out of ideas.  The story wasn't going anywhere.  For five months solid I'd been hammering out chapters about the Smith family tragedy.  They were losing the family farm, John was an alcoholic, Shawna was seized by wanderlust, Lydia was estranged, and Simon sat at the window all day drinking chamomile tea speaking to no one.  It's boring, they told me.  But I knew better.  Even so, the sixth month of the endeavor came and I hit a wall when Shawna asked for a divorce and John sat at the kitchen table speechless.  That's what I couldn't get past.  That was the trouble, the divorce.

That and the blood curdling screams from the basement that started at 10:37 exactly every night and lasted until dawn.  On the fourth day I improvised ear plugs from Q-tips, but that only helped so much.  I've never been a sound sleeper.

On the third day, no progress made, I started reading some old journals that the last occupant had left behind.  It all started out very normal, all about the life of a secluded heiress in New England.  The longer I read, though, the more intelligible the writing became and it was frequently interrupted by archaic symbols and abstract drawings of death and destruction.  Some of it was written in blood.  The diarist wrote of nightmares that haunted her through the day, of a Dark one that feeds on pain and anguish that would consume the world.  I wasn't impressed.  Clearly a wanna-be hack or cartoonist.  No Anne Frank's diary to be found in that house.

I made good progress on the fourth day.  John spoke up and told Shawna to leave and then went on a binge.  Lydia, the prodigal, finally revealed that while she was away in Europe she became romantically involved with a woman, had a breakdown due to her Christian upbringing, and returned home out of an act of desperation.  Simon was still sitting at the window with his tea, but you couldn't have everything.

I was feeling pretty good about myself and felt the urge to masturbate.  Just then, though, the door to the study creaked open and in the gloom of the cellar I saw two blood red eyes staring at me.  There were things watching me all over the house, I realized.  I've never been an exhibitionist and masturbation is really a private act so I just decided to call it an early night.

On the fifth night the screaming stopped.  This was a welcome relief for all of five minutes until I heard someone tramping, ostentatiously up the stairs.  A moment later a slender woman as pale as death flung open my door.  She then proceeded, in a shrill, scratchy voice to tell me how her twin brother had raped her and then locked her in the basement, telling everyone that she was mad and then, after years of seclusion and psychological torture, he killed her.

I listened as best I could.  After you get published, people do this to you all the time.  They tell you sob stories hoping you'll write about it so they can brag to their friends that such and scuh book was based on them.  Ridiculous.  Anyway, the pale girls' story wasn't worth the lost sleep.  No one believes stories like that because that's not life.

On the sixth and last day I was able to finish the draft despite untenable circumstances.  Just after I started working, blood began to drip from the walls.  It started as a trickle and then a steady stream.  It wasn't long before the house was flooded and I had to use the desk as a work space and ad hoc life boat.  I kept telling myself I didn't deserve this and powered through.

The family had called an emotional armistice in order to get through the business of selling the farm.  In cleaning out all the family possessions they slowly began to remember good times, but it wasn't enough to heal old wounds.  In the final chapter, the family is staying in the empty house one last night when an electrical fire starts.  They all get out safely, and the story ends with all the family watching their home and financial security burn to cinders.

It was a day early, but I decided that staying another night at the Body House would just mean another night of lost sleep so I drove back to Iowa.  My editor, when she got the novel, sent me a dubious email.  When I asked her for clarification she said it was boring and I told her she could fuck herself.

A week passed and the bills came.  My bag was empty and after some desperate pleading I got my editor to talk to me again.  How do you feel about horror? I asked her.  She said that I should stay out of her personal life.  I told her I was bored and angry and frustrated and haunted.  I told her how a tornado took my house when I was sixteen, every woman I've ever dated was named Sarah, I lived as a woman for a year, I declared bankruptcy once, I am a rock-paper-scissors international champion, and how could life be so unbelievable?

She asked, Have you ever considered writing nonficiton?