Advice for Young Writers

I teach creative writing to American students studying at Oxford University. Among this year's students is one who is a star. She writes so brilliantly that, after reading her latest offering, all I can do is sigh with pleasure - and not a little envy. For some time I've been encouraging her to submit work to publishers but she procrastinates. Today I found out why: she is scared of her own future.

In college vacations she has worked for literary agents and publishers, so she knows the business from the inside and is painfully aware that these days the usual trajectory for a successful novelist is to begin incandescently and then peter out in a shower of sparks. Gone are the days when an aspiring novelist's career was nurtured by editor and publisher. My student knows the game and knows she doesn't want to play it.

God help us - what do I advise her? Any ideas? Publish under a pseudonym until she feels she is at her prime and then burst upon an unsuspecting world fully-formed? It's one way, but I'd be grateful for any serious ideas. It really is a problem for the twenty-somethings with real talent.

Writing from the solar plexus

I have been teaching creative writing for a long time, perhaps twelve years, but yesterday's tutorial with one of my American students (in fact, all my students are Americans, on programmes at Oxford University) was the best yet. She was finding it difficult to express what her novel is about; she didn't really know herself. I sat like a TV psychiatrist and probed with questions until we got to the nub of the matter: why  she wanted to write it. It involved a confession on her part to past misdemeanours. What she wants to do is to educate people and better inform their opinions about certain things. She is angry, with herself and with the world.

Now, as she spoke, I felt her words in the solar plexus. It was so strong a sensation that I asked her what part of her anatomy she was speaking from. Not surprisingly, it was the same, the solar plexus. Her instruction for the week is to write from there, to feel as she writes. It doesn't matter if it is crude, malformed and unliterary. Just get it out. We can talk about style, word-choice, sentence variety, the use of the semi-colon, and it matters not a jot if the content is no good. What makes content good is the passion of the writer and the truth of what is said.

Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,/Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

We need to give birth to our writing, to scream and thrash, to howl in anguish. And when it comes, it is bloody and covered with mucus and placenta. That's content. I'm tempted to say that style is washing the babe and clothing it, but in fact I think it's in its genes and will leave that discussion for another day.

'Fool,' said my muse to me; 'look in thy heart, and write.'

I wonder now what Sidney meant by 'heart'. The seat of feeling does seem to be in the solar plexus. In Indian philosophy, 'heart' is a much larger concept than the physical pump behind the left breast. When I checked 'solar plexus' in Wikipedia, I found this:

According to Hindu beliefs, the solar plexus chakra is "the center of etheric-psychic intuition: a vague or non-specific, sensual sense of knowing; a vague sense of size, shape, and intent of being." As such, some psychics recommend "listening" to it since it may help out in making better decisions in one's life on many different levels.

In my study of Sidney, such as it has been, I can see that when he wrote Astrophil and Stella, when, in fact, he wrote this first sonnet in the sequence, he had changed as a writer. As he says himself, he stopped looking for words, inspiration and a model in other writers, stopped valuing study above direct contact with nature, and begin to write from the heart. I can only wonder if by 'heart' he meant 'solar plexus'.

David and I have been enjoying a joust-by-email with friend Jonathan over the past fews days, inspired by Jonathan's provocative statement that novels are 'not improving' and, therefore, not worth reading. Once the dust had settled, we saw that we all believed the same thing, that very many modern novels are not worth reading. It is not enough to create a plot and some characters, to write even a gripping story beautifully. Not enough. What the reader needs is to feel the writer's passion, about some aspect of being human. When we read a good novel, when we feel improved by what we have read, it's as if a hand has reached in and squeezed that organ behind the abdomen, the solar plexus.