should be addressed to the room as a whole and not to the author, whose presence, for the rest of us, is superfluous. We are studying the text, what the text actually is rather than what the author might have wanted it to be or thought that it was.
The people in my workshop are usually in their late twenties, very bright, exceptionally well read by modern standards, ambitious, and in thrall to books and literature. As sophisticated as they are about other people’s writing, they are often quite naive about their own, half assuming, for instance, that when they write their souls are on their pages and that an attack on the page is an attack on the soul. I try to make the point that when the soul is truly on the page the work has risen past the level at which it makes much sense for us to talk about it. Victory has been achieved and the work passes over to the attention of students of literature, culture, and aesthetics. We, on the other hand (and I include myself), have more immediate goals. We’re trying to write better prose and to struggle through whatever we have to struggle through to do it. In a not entirely ancillary way, we want to get published, as a confirmation of the value of the work and a partial authentication of the worker in the chosen role of writer. These latter passions are tacitly understood as part of the general background of the workshop, but it fairly soon becomes clear that in only the most minimal sense are they a function of the quality of the work. It is better to separate, even if somewhat artificially, the text from the author and keep our attention on the language.
Chalk in hand, I go to the blackboard and suggest that it might be helpful to think about the relationship between the writer and the reader. A common error is to use the following model of a transportation exchange.
Writer ———> Text <——— Reader
The writer creates a story and puts it into a code (language) that is the text. The reader decodes the text and receives the story: simple transportation from the writer/creator to the reader/witness.
But what really goes on is more complicated. The language statement “yellow pencil” can carry no actual color. The reader must add the color with the mind’s eye for the full image to emerge. Likewise, the reader’s energy is needed to hear tones of voice in dialogue, to infer information that the text only implies, to make full pictures from the text’s suggestive sketches of the physical world, to respond to metaphor, and on up to higher and higher levels. The reader is not a passive witness to, for instance, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” He or she is pouring energy into the text, which, as a result of severe discipline, has been designed to elicit, welcome, and use that energy. Indeed, without work from the reader the story doesn’t make much sense, (What are they going on about? Where is the train taking her and what is she going to do there?) So the above model is wiped from the board and another put in its place.
This model purports energy from the writer (the act of writing) aimed at the reader and energy from the reader (the act of reading) aimed at the text. The text here is thought of not as a single plane or page in space, but as the zone where the two arcs of energy overlap.
This model suggests that the reader is to some extent the co-creator of the narrative. The author, then, must write in such a way as to allow the reader’s energy into the work. If the text is unintelligible it falls short of the zone and the reader is blocked. If the text is preemptive and bullying it goes past the zone and smothers the incoming energy, and the reader is blocked. In either case the dance of two minds necessary to bring a living narrative into existence is precluded. Note that no judgment is made about how to handle the reader’s energy once it has been allowed in». Great demands can be made of
The people in my workshop are usually in their late twenties, very bright, exceptionally well read by modern standards, ambitious, and in thrall to books and literature. As sophisticated as they are about other people’s writing, they are often quite naive about their own, half assuming, for instance, that when they write their souls are on their pages and that an attack on the page is an attack on the soul. I try to make the point that when the soul is truly on the page the work has risen past the level at which it makes much sense for us to talk about it. Victory has been achieved and the work passes over to the attention of students of literature, culture, and aesthetics. We, on the other hand (and I include myself), have more immediate goals. We’re trying to write better prose and to struggle through whatever we have to struggle through to do it. In a not entirely ancillary way, we want to get published, as a confirmation of the value of the work and a partial authentication of the worker in the chosen role of writer. These latter passions are tacitly understood as part of the general background of the workshop, but it fairly soon becomes clear that in only the most minimal sense are they a function of the quality of the work. It is better to separate, even if somewhat artificially, the text from the author and keep our attention on the language.
Chalk in hand, I go to the blackboard and suggest that it might be helpful to think about the relationship between the writer and the reader. A common error is to use the following model of a transportation exchange.
Writer ———> Text <——— Reader
The writer creates a story and puts it into a code (language) that is the text. The reader decodes the text and receives the story: simple transportation from the writer/creator to the reader/witness.
But what really goes on is more complicated. The language statement “yellow pencil” can carry no actual color. The reader must add the color with the mind’s eye for the full image to emerge. Likewise, the reader’s energy is needed to hear tones of voice in dialogue, to infer information that the text only implies, to make full pictures from the text’s suggestive sketches of the physical world, to respond to metaphor, and on up to higher and higher levels. The reader is not a passive witness to, for instance, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” He or she is pouring energy into the text, which, as a result of severe discipline, has been designed to elicit, welcome, and use that energy. Indeed, without work from the reader the story doesn’t make much sense, (What are they going on about? Where is the train taking her and what is she going to do there?) So the above model is wiped from the board and another put in its place.
This model purports energy from the writer (the act of writing) aimed at the reader and energy from the reader (the act of reading) aimed at the text. The text here is thought of not as a single plane or page in space, but as the zone where the two arcs of energy overlap.
This model suggests that the reader is to some extent the co-creator of the narrative. The author, then, must write in such a way as to allow the reader’s energy into the work. If the text is unintelligible it falls short of the zone and the reader is blocked. If the text is preemptive and bullying it goes past the zone and smothers the incoming energy, and the reader is blocked. In either case the dance of two minds necessary to bring a living narrative into existence is precluded. Note that no judgment is made about how to handle the reader’s energy once it has been allowed in». Great demands can be made of
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