We’re very glad to continue a longstanding Writer’s Center
tradition of hosting readings by winners of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House competitions. This Sunday, October
27 at 5:00 p.m. the latest winners, Robert Herschbach and Kathleen Wheaton will
read. We will have a reception and book
signing following the reading. Please note that the reading begins at 5:00 p.m. We're fortunate to post a blog entry by Kathleen Wheaton, author of the prize winning fiction collection, Aliens and Other Stories.
Where Do You Get Ideas? Or Why I Read
By Kathleen Wheaton
When I took my first creative writing workshop in college, our
young and handsome instructor, who’d recently published a story in the New Yorker, imparted tips on craft that
everyone made eager note of: show, don’t tell; have your characters desire
something, read your own words aloud to find your voice.
He also urged us to spend as many waking hours as possible
reading. This sounded humorous, like telling members of the football team to be
sure and get plenty of exercise. But as the term progressed, it became obvious
that some students hadn’t--and didn’t--read all that much. Their impulse to
write seemed more organic than mine, to spring from an internal well of
imagination I didn’t possess.
“Creativity” was big on campuses in the late 1970s (you could
take a class in it), and it bothered me that a quiz administered by the psych
department revealed that I was too cautious, my habits too orderly, my homework
too promptly finished, for me to qualify as a creative personality. And the
stories I wrote for the instructor (himself a natty dresser with neat
penmanship) were usually a response to something I’d read: about a trip to a
new place, a romance gone wrong, an old person looking back on life. Writing, I
felt, was an ongoing conversation between someone long dead or far away, and
me.
I moved to Spain after college and taught English, and then
moved a lot more, to Boston, New York, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and
Tepoztlan, Mexico. It was several years before I had enough freelance newspaper
and magazine assignments to be able to say that I made my living as a writer.
With journalism, your inspiration is clear: your editor gives
you an assignment, you do it and hand it in--it’s like having homework for the
rest of your life. But I continued to
write short stories, and here the “why” was murkier, especially after I was
married and had two children. I could claim that I turned down assignments and
spent money I wasn’t earning on babysitters because it turned out that I
actually was creative, because I had
a deep-seated drive to invent and imagine. The truth is that some other writer
was doing the imagining first, and that was what always got my own wheels
turning--to want to describe my
peculiar neighbors, the view from my
window, my midnight epiphanies.
Living much of the day in another language, and writing what I
hoped were indisputable facts, I looked forward to sinking under the covers at
night with a novel. In the early 90s, before books could be turned into bytes,
they were expensive to mail or took up precious space in suitcases, so I chose
carefully, and reread a lot. And then I’d want to sit down and reply to my
invisible, distant, dear friends.
The British novelist Anthony Powell once said that when writers
read they’re always thinking about how they’d have told that story. I don’t
think he meant that they’re nitpicking or criticizing (though they also do
that) as much as working out what they’ll say when they get their turn at the
mic.
Of all the arts, we view writing as the least collaborative--songs
are written and movies made and dances performed and even murals painted with
and alongside others. A book written “with” someone else is ghostwritten,
somehow bogus. Writing is only properly done alone, we’re told, in that
hard-won room of one’s own. To say that you rely on others for your ideas, your
techniques, your stories, seems to
skate dangerously close to confessing to plagiarism. But I’m not talking here
about about passing off someone else’s work as your own. I’m saying that
stories, like language itself, evolved from a long-ago mother source. Nobody is
born speaking a language--you listen, imitate, practice, until your words sound
like you. And you have to know the story--in as many iterations as possible, as
close as you can get to the ur-version grunted around the campfire while the
mastodon sizzled--before you can tell yours.
