Lessons on the craft of writing from Vivian Gornick
As a frequent participant in writing workshops, volunteer reader for two literary journals, and would-be creative writer myself, I’ve had lots of reasons to consider what qualities make one personal essay dull and lifeless, and another come alive and feel essential.
Vivian Gornick’s slim masterpiece of a craft book, “The Situation and The Story,” which I was assigned in writing school, helped me clarify the distinction. Step one of an essayist’s work, she says, is to find the right voice. To find the right voice, the nonfiction writer must decide “Who am I?” for the purpose of that particular piece of writing, creating a new “I” that is “I” plus someone more than “I.”
Of the various selves we might adopt — parent, employee, daughter, citizen, partner, friend — the only self who belongs in the story at hand is the one who intersects with the subject. This is harder, and less intuitive, than it sounds. Sheela the indignant citizen or anxious parent — along with Sheela the self-indulgent language teacher — is usually inclined to chime in when only, say, Sheela the idealistic Peace Corps volunteer is called upon.
An exemplar of what a rigorous paring down of selves looks like is Joan Didion’s brief classic “In Bed,” which concerns the writer as migraine sufferer. In just 1,436 purposeful words she moves us through each angle in her 360-degree experience of migraines until, arriving at the last line, we feel as though we’ve just emerged from an episode of the ailment ourselves.
“The physiological error called migraine is, in brief, central to the given of my life,” Didion explains at the outset. For my first subject in writing school, I chose an exotic incident from my time in a village in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, though it is not central to my life. In fact, it didn’t even make that much of an impression on me. But I wrote an essay about it, and shared the essay with my classmates and teachers, because I assumed that its exoticism — the unusual where, what, and who — would transform it into a good story, and me into a good storyteller.
Exoticism #1: Where. I mean, come on. Have you ever heard of a story set in Papua New Guinea?
#2: What. How often is a woman warned ahead of time that she may or may not be raped?
#3: Who. The man who warned me? He wasn’t just a no-name dude. He was a politician running for national office. (He didn’t act on his threat; he was drunk and no doubt passed out.)
With raw material this unusual, surely my job would simply be to document the details, then wait for everyone’s wowed reaction. Apart from a couple of half-hearted “Yikes,” my classmates’ primary reaction to the story was indifference. Nursing my wounds afterward, I came upon a quote from Italo Calvino: “An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.” I’ve come to realize, too, that a story that depends on an exotic birthplace for its existence is likely to turn out to be nothing more than a party trick, an anecdote.
There’s nothing wrong with anecdotes, but they’re not what I was aiming for, even then. I want my stories to burrow inside my readers and stay there. A brave, observant writer doesn’t need to go any further than his apartment terrarium (Edward Hoagland’s “The Courage of Turtles“), childhood garage (Scott Russell Sanders’ “Under the Influence“), or father’s face (James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son“) to break your heart. These essays are not narrations told from the shore about what happened one day long ago in the water; they’re reports from the depths. At least that’s what the writer makes us believe.
I’ve learned to stop picking through my life’s biggest adventures in the hopes of connecting with people. My time is better spent engaged in the opposite activity, turning inward and tuning into my obsessions. (Another quote I like, from Howard Thurman, directs us: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”)
Once you’ve found the subject that enlivens you, you’ve arrived back at that first question: Who am I in regard to this experience? In answering this, you will have found your persona, your midwife, your surrogate. Now your job is to, as Gornick puts it, “transform low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.”
Detached empathy might sound like a contradiction in terms, but it’s exactly right. I can sense it in myself when an essay is going well. I can sense in the pieces I return to again and again. Another essay Gornick cites at length is George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” pulled from his days as a policeman in Burma in the 1920s. Though he admits to a contradiction of feelings — he loathes the British Empire, and both sympathizes with and loathes the Burmese — he writes with irrefutable candor and clarity. More remarkable still is what “Shooting An Elephant” goes without. In life, Orwell, as Gornick describes him, “could act and sound ugly.” I once read a description of him as both anti-elitist and extraordinarily snobby. But in the essay there’s no whiff of these lower emotions. There’s no superiority, bitterness, or bias. His persona, here and more famously elsewhere, is just “involuntary truth speaker.”
When I’m writing with emotional momentum, and a piece is moving forward of its own accord, I feel as though I am living both inside and outside my feelings at once. In tapping into that more and more familiar persona — heartfelt, searching — that’s both me and also larger than me, I feel freed from the boring burden of ego. I channel a communal “we” rather than a self-interested “I.”