Write Like A Serial Killer: Authors Talk About the Compulsion to Create at Poets&Writers LIVE

At Saturday's Poets&Writers LIVE event in San Francisco, my MFA friends and I found the most interesting panel session to be Why We Write, modeled after the magazine's column of the same name. Melissa Faliveno, the magazine's associate editor who moderated the panel of five writers and poets, referenced a prior stage conversation between David Shields and Caleb Powell regarding their recently published collaboration I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, in which the two debate the merits of being wholly devoted to art or to life.

"My job is to curate my feelings as a writer," said Shields, author of 16 books with four more coming out in the next year. He spoke about the weaving of a psychic wound into art: "The best art is in conversation with that wound, even if it never talks about it." 

In an excerpt we watched of the upcoming film adaptation of the book by James Franco, each man pointed to a physical accident and resulting injury that shifted their trajectories toward becoming writers. The prolific Shields, who teaches at Warren Wilson College, said he became "addicted to writing books." In the P&W article "Art vs. Life," he addresses the cost of that singular kind of focus: "I always wanted to become a human being, but I overcommitted to art." Shields accuses his former student Powell, a stay-at-home father of three young girls, of doing the opposite: "My conception was that you wanted to be an artist, but you overcommitted to life."

It was the perfect jumping-off point for this panel of writers who were asked about the challenges of showing up for writing "when family, jobs and other obligations throw a boulder in your path."

Here are some snippets from that conversation that I scribbled into my notebook:

Michelle Tea, an author of five memoirs and two novels, said it was easy to show up for it when she was writing fervently in her twenties. She mentioned her "insane relationship" with her own writing in which she can't trust her inner critic and is baffled each time she sits down to write a new book, and described her writing approach as "barf a bunch out and clean it up later." Tea, who also just had a baby, admitted, "I don't know how I'll ever write again."

D.A. Powell, an award-winning poet who teaches at my alma mater USF, talked about writing as a process of turning outside what we have a natural tendency to do internally (in our observations and introspections). He said quality time means "I'm going to devote this moment" and encouraged: "Keep assembling your language. Something will come from it."

"Consistent practice like a pianist," recommended Alejandro Murguia, an American Book Award author and the sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate. To move past stumbling blocks he reads others' work, which allows him to then "enter my own text creatively inspired." He emphasized the value of reading aloud: "Making yourself sensitive to language." In a melodic voice he described the writing and revision process: "Cut away and expand and cut and expand until that final polished (poem) is like a dwarf star: one spoonful weighing three tons."

Yiyun Li, author of Kinder Than Solitude and several other books, learned discipline first as a scientist. "There's no excuse to wait for inspiration," she said about writing from 12 to 4 a.m. when her two babies were asleep. Aside from the pressures of real life, she said fiction fulfills "a desire to be with my characters."

Wendy Lesser, founding editor of the Threepenny Review and author of nine nonfiction books and a novel, quoted the poet Robert Pinksy: "I enjoy having written." She humorously described the compulsion of writing like that of a serial killer--the pressure to do it builds and builds, he has to do it, then... oh, it feels so great.

Using Fraudulent Artifacts: Playing with Form and Repurposing Text to Create Fictional Narratives

In their AWP workshop on Using Fraudulent Artifact to Teach Fiction Writing, panelists David Shields, Matthew Vollmer, Arda Collins and Joseph Salvatore discussed teaching and writing "stories that masquerade as other forms of writing," altering the way a text is delivered through a familiar visual form such as: a shopping list, rental agreement, bill, menu, recipe, glossary, interview, newspaper ad, receipt, instruction manual, primer, catalog, comment card, year-end report, data sheet, class notes from Alumni magazine or letters... the list goes on.

Shields and Vollmer are the editors of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (or: Other Dubious Documents--depending on which website you look at)-- forthcoming September, 2012. They cited inspiration from texts such as Rick Moody's "Primary Sources" and Lydia Davis' "We Will Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth Graders," which Jonathan Messinger describes as "a series of letters to a kid named Stephen—in the hospital with an infection—from his friends at school. The narrator takes on a mock psychologist’s tone, analyzing each letter for 'overall coherence' and style."

So what attracts a writer to utilizing these forms, breaking from narrative convention in fiction? By inhabiting the language of found text, writers consider how we manipulate language and voice, the panelists said. The language becomes the material to work with. It forces writers to confront form and structure, to "become awake to ways language is used around them"--even to the point of "exacting giddy, witty revenge on form." Anything, they agreed, can be used "to house a story." By creating and sharing stories "encrypted in documents," writers can "break open the world of form."

Here are a few suggested exercises to try or teach. Each offers "constraints" which create tension while also allowing freedom of expression within them:

• Each student invents a character. Have two characters write letters to one another--a great way for students to develop characterization and "invent a world together."
• Write an "About the Author" to create a bio of oneself or a fictional character. Consider satire, as Sandra Cisneros does with: "She remains 'nobody's mother and nobody's wife.'"
• Invite students to find artifacts to appropriate themselves; let language/diction/voice dominate the discussion.
• Write a letter poem, starting with the prompt: I have something I need to tell you.

All this talk on how "form puts pressure on a writer to manipulate it toward meaning" immediately started sinking into my subconscious. At the top of my panel notes I brainstormed: "Montage of 10 match.com men's emails: sew together snippets for a story of one failed relationship, from hope to disenchantment." For my last fiction submission I did just that, creating a narrative arc with a character composite, although I admit my piece at this point blurs the boundaries--a real genre-straddler. In this case, I wasn't just borrowing "found" form, but using--and re-purposing--some real content. A future idea: use travel brochures/maps/postcards I brought from Australia as forms to narrate tensions between Aboriginal and tourist ways of "seeing" or traversing landscape.

The writing, these panelists said, doesn't have to be entirely fiction; it can "blur the line between" fictional, essayistic, poetic, reportage and doc/mockumentary forms--as in Chris Marker's film "Sans Soleil," "a fake travel documentary narrated by a false sociologist to indeterminate countries."

Or consider the current trend in appropriating both content and form: re-mixing multimedia narratives as in this recreated (and humorously 'heartfelt') trailer for the horror film, "The Shining."