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Telling Stories: An Anthology For Writers
Introduction: Why We Write, Why We ReadArt is not something you can take or leave, it is a necessity of life. What is "art" but the effort of giving permanent form—in language, in painting, sculpture, music—to those elemental forces in our lives, those passions, hurts, triumphs, and mysteries that have no permanence otherwise, and so require art to be known at all? Our lives, especially at their happiest moments, fly past as quickly as a mountain stream rushing along its rocky course, throwing up frothy, sparkling spray; the effort of art is to slow the rapid motion, to bring it to a halt so that it can be seen, known. All artists know either consciously or instinctively that the secret intention of their life's work is to rescue from the plunge of time something of beauty, permanence, significance in another's eyes. I have a story to tell. Help me tell my story! Suddenly there began arriving in the mail, a few months ago, lengthy, handwritten, emotional letters from a former high school classmate of mine whom I hadn't seen in many years. He'd become a successful surgeon, having attended an Ivy League university and medical school after graduating from our high school; he had a large family, owned extensive property in New England. Yet how yearning, how rapturous his letters, filled with reminiscence for our high school years in Williamsville, New York, a suburb of gritty Buffalo. At Williamsville High School, he'd been an excellent student in English and history, as well as science and math; he'd published fiction in our student magazine, wanted to be a writer, and would have become a writer if his undergraduate professors hadn't discouraged him, suggesting he was better qualified to be a doctor. So he entered medical school instead, where he excelled, and entirely gave up writing and even reading the literary works he'd always loved; and twenty years passed, and more; and suddenly, out of a growing dissatisfaction with his own success, he was swept by the desire to return again imaginatively to his adolescence, to a time when he hadn't yet made his decision to reject a writing life. I was puzzled and touched by this man's letters, so passionately handwritten on his medical center stationery; I tried to match them with the boy I'd known years ago, but could not. We hadn't been so close in high school as he seemed now to be remembering, though we'd shared a strong interest in writing and were founding members of a student literary society quaintly called Quill and Scroll. Through the years of adulthood, of professional success, my ex-classmate's love of writing and storytelling had lain dormant in him, unexercised; now it came sweeping forth, and seemed to be transforming his emotional life. Over the months he sent me, along with his handwritten letters, which were marvels of lyricism and sharp, witty analyses of our high school past, many photocopied pages from our yearbook, heavily annotated. His intention was to stimulate me to write "the Great American Novel" of our high school years: he would supply all the information I needed, I would do the writing. A romantic prospect, unfortunately unlikely. Such letters suggest how powerful the instinct is to tell a story, to have one's story told, to be somehow transformed by the story of one's life told by another, and published, and read; how deep the yearning is to interpret one's life as, not mainly accident, as most lives are, but as a coherent narrative, with a supporting cast, set in a real, vividly recalled time and place. This instinct to memorialize is at the heart of writing, and the complex of bittersweet sensations we call homesickness is the predominant emotion. To be yearning for—what? Something impossible to name? Not exactly the rooms of our first, childhood houses, nor the backyards, streets and alleys and landscapes of childhood, our long-ago parents, our long-ago relatives, friends, classmates, our long-ago pets; but rather the emotion these memories stimulate, which can be as powerful, as devastating, and as mysterious as romantic love, which it closely resembles. Even a young writer, who in theory hasn't as much to remember as my middle-aged ex-classmate, will find that his or her most compelling work is probably memory-based; the writing with which others identify most readily is usually stimulated by something "real" and its ideal mode of expression is first-person narration: "I." Since I'd begun writing in my twenties I've received letters like those from my ex-classmate, though never before any quite so engaging and richly detailed. Most of the letters I receive are from complete strangers, and many of these make the plea I have a story to tell, help me tell my story! To amplify their requests these strangers send me news clippings, photocopies of legal documents and of private papers, snapshots, old diaries; one astonishing "gift" was a massive, not very legible journal kept by someone's grandmother in the early decades of the century. This is a fantastic story, it will make a fantastic novel. Why we write, and why we read; why we so need "stories"—it's a mystery. A young man with a hope of becoming famous, well-to-do, talked-of, envied in his small Mississippi town, a young man of not much perceptible talent, and comical egocentricity—who can explain how William Faulkner began to write, in his late twenties, prose works of surpassing beauty, power, and genius? Another young man with outsized ambitions, aggressively egocentric, exploitative of both women and men, crude in his behavior and in his letters, and, at the outset of his career, a frankly derivative writer—how did Ernest Hemingway discipline himself to write, in his early twenties, prose works that would in time redefine American literature? It is as if seemingly callow motives, of seemingly callow men, are only the surface reasons for writing; other, deeper reasons compel the work, of which the writer himself may not be conscious. These writers are like those who claim their only motive for effort is money but who become yet more demanding of themselves with time, more compulsively perfectionist and competitive, as they have accumulated millions of dollars. "Trust the writing, not the writer," D. H. Lawrence has said, for the writer as an individual is likely to be a bloody liar; or, in any case, not to know the simplest truth about his or her deepest self—a truth any attentive reader might easily discern from reading the work. For the writer, reading is part of the process of writing. Even before we know we will be writers, our reading is a part of our preparation for writing. Conversely, our writing might be defined as the preparation for our reading of that writing unique to ourselves—the writing no one else except us can do. Every book, every story, every sentence we read is a part of our preparation for our own writing, so it's wise to choose our reading carefully, as an athlete trains carefully, as a musician practices at his or her instrument for hours and for years in pursuit of excellence, of fully realizing a talent. The love of storytelling—to hear stories, and to tell them—is universal in our species. Those with an apparent talent for writing, which is to say a talent for using language as painters use paint, as musicians use their instruments, are not of a special breed but simply mirror the common human desire. If like my former high school classmate you have a natural talent for writing, and a love of the imagination, you risk a lifelong deprivation if you fail to cultivate it as vigorously as you can. Write your own "great American novel," I advised my ex-classmate; you're talented, you're intelligent, you have the driving passion, and you know as much as anyone about American life. Your story belongs uniquely to you. There are art works that bide their time in us, which we don't fully understand, or perhaps we misunderstand, at the time we first encounter them. The reason is that they provide answers to questions we don't yet know to ask. We aren't yet old enough, or subtle enough, or deep enough. To reencounter such work, years later, is to reencounter a supposition grown into a truth. "For the question often arrives," as Oscar Wilde has said, "a terribly long time after the answer." The book of my early childhood I most loved was Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which I read, reread, and partly memorized when I was eight years old. I identified both with the wondrously resilient, inquisitive, and courageous Alice and with the effort, mysterious to a child, of making a "book"—a small portable object with pages, many of them illustrated, and with illustrated covers. How children love to imitate! For what is imitation but the sincerest form of love? Soon I was making my own "books" out of tablet paper with construction paper covers; my miniature novels were earnestly handwritten and illustrated, and seem to have been about, as my parents recall, talking cats and chickens. (We lived on a small farm in upstate New York.) All children invent stories; all children love stories; children's self-evolved stories are invariably fantasies of invisible playmates, some of them animals; children can spin out of their imaginations, like the fairy-tale miller's daughter spinning gold out of mere straw, remarkable creations, of a fanciful beauty and significance startling in the very young. So in our deepest selves writers are still children; the child-self is a sort of flame that continues to burn throughout our lives, to which the writer or artist is by nature more attentive than other adults. We look to stories, our own and others', as we look into mirrors: that which is locked inside of us can be released by the magic of another's art, or maybe our own. This is the continual revelation of art, and accounts for our enormous hunger for it. Telling Stories represents to me a highly personal gathering of stories and prose pieces; yet it isn't a private gathering, for most of the writers included here are of unquestioned merit, and all have written exemplary works. Many of these have been presented in my writing workshops at Princeton University, where I've taught since 1978. Students have been stimulated to write, and to write well, by models of prose as divergent as Williams's minimalist masterpiece "The Use of Force" and John Updike's domestic, conversational "Friends from Philadelphia"; they've been excited by the formal possibilities of very short stories, "miniature narratives" like those by Katherine Mansfield, William Carlos Williams, Italo Calvino, and American contemporaries like Stuart Dybek and Elizabeth Tallent; they've been encouraged to practice "creative revision" by studying the texts of James Joyce's early story "The Sisters"; they've been encouraged to write dramatic monologue/performance pieces; they've discovered the possibilities for the dramatic employment of "ordinary" life experiences by reading William Heyen's "Any Sport," Gish Jen's "In the American Society," Grace Paley's "Anxiety," Gary Soto's poems, and others; they've been challenged by the possibilities of reimagining classic tales and of reshaping "genre" for their own purposes and by discovering, in forms of prose like the journal/diary, the germ of narrative. Within each section, arrangement is generally chronologically by authors' birthdates rather than the publication dates of work; in the final section, composed predominantly of our American contemporaries, arrangement is less strictly chronological and more thematic, with like-minded stories grouped together. Anthologies, too, tell stories; the underlying story of Telling Stories may he the development and expansion of the art of storytelling itself, from its roots in a firmly Anglo-Saxon mode of psychological realism to one of spirited diversity and inventiveness in which "genre" itself becomes fluid, no longer confining but liberating. —Joyce Carol Oates |
ContentsIntroduction: Why We Write, Why We Read I. Miniature Narratives Anton Chekhov / THE STUDENT II. Dramatic Monologues Joyce Carol Oates / LETHAL III. Early Stories Franz Kafka / THE JUDGMENT IV. The Art and Craft of Revision James Joyce / THE SISTERS (1904) / THE SISTERS (1914) V. Re-Visions: Reappropriations Hebrew Bible / GENESIS VI. Narrative in Other Modes Memoir, Diary, Personal Document Nathaniel Hawthorne / FROM THE AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS (1845) Poems That Tell Stories Homer / ODYSSEUS BLINDS THE CYCLOPS VII. Genre: Horror H. P. Lovecraft / THE RATS IN THE WALLS VIII. Classics and Contemporaries D. H. Lawrence / TICKETS, PLEASE Afterword: The Practice of Writing—The Writing Workshop Notes on Authors |
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