The Writing School: a guide to being a fiction writer

By Adam Tramantano

How are fiction writers supposed to understand the behind-the-scenes mechanics of constructing stories? What is the language for the blueprint for a novel? Classic terms like plot, conflict, setting, make sense for literary analysis. But the art of analysis and the art of construction are different. Fiction writers need a flexible and complex way to articulate the facets of their mechanics. This book explores the deeper issues of what fiction writing is all about. Fiction writers are experimenters of causality, inventors of experience.The Writing School, a guide to being a fiction writer, engages you in the complex process of thinking about your own writing approaches while providing ways to chart the blueprints of your processes.

 

Adam Tramantano draws on more than twenty years of exploring the writing process as a writer, editor, educator, and academic. He has a doctoral degree in education and his dissertation focused on how individuals conceptualize their writing processes. In addition to the writing process, he has written about the processes of art, teaching, and research. Tramantano offers breadth and depth of experience in the process of exploring creative productions. In this book, Tramantano is a guide and a cultivator of creativity: "a cultivator's main positioning is always towards the magic of the creative process. A cultivator believes, fundamentally, that there's just something wrong with steering anyone off the path of creative production. "

 

Fiction writers are not simply people who make things up. They demonstrate the beautiful limitlessness of the human imagination. They are choreographers of imagination. They create worlds that can become just as valuable, just as meaningful, and perhaps just as real as the one we're living in. This book reveres the power of fiction writing by regarding it for its complexity and its possibilities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Tramantano
• Release date: Apr 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224871520

Book preview

Copyright © 2024 by Adam Tramantano

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

CHAPTER ONE

The magic of making things up

The magic of making things up. That’s what fiction writing is all about. It ought to be joyous, mysterious. I wrote this book because I want anyone who has the inclination to write fiction to thrive in that pursuit. I believe that my insights offer different ways of explaining the processes of fiction writing. In the next chapter I explain some things about my background in connection with fiction writing. But here I want to express the wish that you experience joy and that you thrive in fiction writing or whatever creative productions you pursue. A fiction writer draws from the mysterious wellspring. Is it a muse, a subconscious place, an eternal connectedness, or perhaps a dreamlike state that we get to experience while awake? What is this space of fictionalizing that happens in the mind? Do we construct stories consciously, or do they somehow come to us, and we are the deliverers?

I have seen different approaches to a feeling sense about living the writing life. There’s this idea that writing is supposed to be an existence of suffering, of feeling bad about all you’ve created, of not thinking something’s good until you’ve gone over it so many times with the plow, the rake, the steel blade, and now you don’t care about it anymore. You’ve removed your own soul from it and now it’s good, or half way decent. I can never see any legitimacy in this way of being. It seems to me to be part of a larger paradigm that somehow we are stronger or more humble if we never enjoy a thing, if we never lay claim to achievement, if we insist on creative activities as being hard work rather than being mysterious, joyous, nurturing processes.

Nurturing processes. That’s what I think creative acts are. They cultivate the good in us. And when we work on our artistry, or craft, or technique, or strategy, or whatever you want to call it, we can get better at providing work that becomes part of someone else’s nurturing processes: readers, listeners, viewers of art.

So I never bought the idea that I was supposed to be miserable as a writer. I’ve heard people proudly state this, that they’re stuck in some existential quagmire of needing to write and hating everything they write, of never being able to feel a sense of fulfillment. I see this as an extension of the cool façade, the idea that one ought to project outwardly a sense of unaffectedness, of no smile, of being perpetually unamused. It’s also connected to certain mythologies surrounding creative people. We go to cliché and iconographic examples of absolute genius, believing in un-nuanced accounts of artists who are constantly in turmoil, and just so happen to be geniuses.

We’ve constructed mythologies around creativity. We, collectively, as people. These stories are contemporary folklore. They are multi-authored. We might find ourselves adding to the mythologies, believing them, perpetuating them in our own minds. That’s the most powerful slate upon which to chisel the continuity of mythologies: our own minds.

But I never accepted any of that. I was always suspicious of the idea that joy was somehow fundamentally a sin against creative production, against good output, against excellence. This horrific idea that, in order to do good work, you must hate it, is also, in a big way, deeply rooted in certain attitudes about work. There are some mythologies there as well. There is the idea that work is supposed to be miserable, that it’s only supposed to supply an income, that fulfillment seeking in our work is an aimless pursuit. But I think that if we enjoy a creative pursuit, we have hopefully realized that it is, in some sense, work. And we have hopefully experienced it as joyful.

So I want to propose a positive mythology, one that is nurturing, one that tilts towards feeling good while doing the work and also about our work. This need not mean that we always think everything we do is great. It need not mean that we never look to revision, that we never rework things, that we never learn. On the contrary, it means that we let go of the idea of finality as the ultimate achievement. We let go of the classic notion of process where the final product is worked at tirelessly (and often joylessly) and is finally done and never returned to. Instead we can view the writing process as the very act of living the writing life. We may revise this story, or this portion of this story. But we might also move on and revise our very ways of constructing fiction into our next story. Just because the work itself isn’t specifically revised, re-envisioned, does not mean that we aren’t growing in our capacities as writers. But we can also celebrate revising rather than seeing it as an intrusion, or as a set of mistakes to be corrected. We can revise the you did something wrong approach to revising and realize that revising is our current selves realizing what our past selves could not have possibly known. Revising is a sign that we are onto something, that we’ve learned a thing or two, that we’ve grown, and are growing, in our creative productivity.

Another part of revising the old mythologies is in reasserting the very fact that all creative work is paradoxically necessary and unnecessary. The old, negative, discouraging ways of looking at the writing life, with the brow beating criticisms, and the vision of the writer as a perpetually miserable person—those are rooted in an absurdly unspoken notion that it’s all somehow necessary. But it’s optional. A very freeing realization is to assert the fact that any creative thing you do is completely unnecessary. In one sense it’s unnecessary. You can, after all, decide not to do it. On the other hand, that statement can be just as tension causing as it is freeing. While it is technically unnecessary, it is very necessary in terms of our deeper needs as human beings. We need to construct, we need to create, we need to put our stories out into the universe of stories. You write because you are compelled to write. And so part of revising the old mythology is to say, you think writing is hard, try not writing.

I call these books The Writing School. This is the second one. The first one was about being an essayist. Here’s how I explained this idea there:

I’m titling this book The Writing School because that’s what we’re always in as writers. Life is our writing school. The truth is that the writing school, the art school, all schools of creative activities, if you’re on one of these paths, you’re already in it. You’re in the library. You’re stuck there. If you don’t believe me, try to not be a writer. That is far more difficult than trying to be a writer. (From Chapter 2, The Writing School, a guide to being an essayist).

Not writing. It is so difficult when we know we have something to say, when we know we have stories to tell, when we know that we have a voice that we want heard. The creative drive, once we really find an activity, once we get drawn to a particular creative calling, feels almost inevitable. So it’s paradoxically and totally unnecessary yet completely necessary. It’s unnecessary in that any given work we are working on, we can, if we choose, just put it aside and never pick it up again. We’re not obligated to anyone. On the other hand, we are obligated, in unspeakable ways, to fulfilling our creative callings.

So this wonderful paradox gives us both the freedom to put the work down and to also pursue it. This means, in part, that the notion of things being just one way, the notion of an aesthetic true north, is an optional one, one that we invent. A lot of the old discouraging mythologies of writing are also premised on simple dictums: write what you know, be clear, only write what has purpose in moving the whole piece forward. There are decontextualized dictums that, on occasion might make sense, that are thought of as musts for all occasions. It becomes easy to apply criticism in a world where doing the work is so hard.

And what is the role of criticism?

In the old mythologies, audiences might have relied on critics when there was limited access. When we could not read the first few pages of most any book, for free, from the comfort our homes, it might have been helpful to read a review. When we would have had to wait a year or longer for a film in the theaters to be available for home viewing, the movie reviews served a purpose. But once the world provided us with the access revolution, a revolution for both creators and audiences, a revolution increasing access in all directions, why then, do we still need the very act of criticism?

Analysis, to be sure, is its own art. The complex analysis of the work of others not only enriches our complex regard for the works, but is, in itself, an intellectual art that we can stand in awe of. Criticism sometimes means complex analysis. In that respect, that kind of criticism advances the in-depth appreciation of artistry. But the is it good or is it bad kind of criticism, that has had its day.

In my previous book in The Writing School series, I discuss the ubiquity of criticism and why it thrives, why it is so hard to shake: doling out criticism provides an immediate and false authority to the critic; being a critic requires no prerequisite; and because the notion that our opinion matters has run amuck. (Excerpt From Chapter 4 Three ways of quarantining criticism).

Here, I’d like to articulate what it means to be the opposite of a critic. Not someone who goes actively against critics, but one whose way of being in regards to creativity is fundamentally doing the opposite thing. I’m talking about being a cultivator. A cultivator steers towards the positive. A cultivator might point out places where the text might not function in the ways that the writer desired. But a cultivator’s main positioning is always towards the magic of the creative process. A cultivator believes, fundamentally, that there’s just something wrong with steering anyone off the path of creative production. There is room in the universe for all functionalities of creative production. Some of us will hang our paintings on our own walls only. Others will have the works in galleries for centuries to come. Some of us will write works that have perhaps a few dedicated readers. Others will write works that have millions of readers. The very act of creative production is one of positive contribution to that very individual doing the work. That reason alone is all anyone needs to be a crusader in protecting the creative sensibilities.

So I am a cultivator, not a critic. This doesn’t mean I think everything is great, or that I don’t have tastes or preferences when it comes to my own consumption of artistic works. It means that I do not buy the mythology that art only ought to work in one way and only in the service of audiences. Art is for the creator too. The creator has a special experience with the production process that nobody else gets to have. When you encourage and help someone else in their creative journey, you are providing one more molecule of