With Kevin Allison

Janet Burroway is the author of eight novels, plays, poetry, essays, texts for dance, and children’s books. Her Writing Fiction : A Guide to Narrative Craft, is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and her multi-genre Imaginative Writing is in preparation for a third edition. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita of the Florida State University. She divides her time among Florida, Wisconsin, and London.

 KA: A problem many of our clients bump up against is that they'll have their mechanical elements in good shape but still lack that "page-turner" quality. What advice do you give to students who’re having a hard time hooking readers and keeping them captivated?

JB: This is one of those “how-do-you” questions that is probably best answered “very carefully.” I have struggled all my life with plot, and am very well aware that among my students, too, there is more likely to be good writing than good storytelling. As with most human problems, the first step is to be aware of your own tendencies, and work harder where you’re weak. I have a good friend—not a writer but an excellent reader—whose advice to me is, “Just tell the story, Janet, would you please just tell the story?” And I have her voice in my head (though not in first draft) where I indulge myself without guilt—when I come to shape what I’m doing. It helps me chop out the self-indulgent language, the show-off psychology, the metaphorical ornaments.

When I don’t know where the action is going, when I don’t know what’s going to happen next, that’s when I’m likely to write beautiful prose in ever smaller circles. In order to keep the reader in a state of anticipation, I have to be headed somewhere, and if I don’t know where that is, very likely I have, literally, lost the plot. Understand, I don’t mean that on page ten I need to know what’s going to happen on page three hundred—but I’d better have an idea what I’m heading for on page twenty.

It’s always worth going back to the questions: What does my character want? and What stands in the way? Robert Olen Butler has been very helpful to me in revealing this “want” as a deep, fundamental yearning, even if it’s manifest in a particular situation in a muted or apparently trivial way. The fundamental desires are few: survival, safety, love, community, home; and when these things are threatened, what we feel is fear. That fear is also at the core of plot.

KA: Can you remember a time a student went against the grain of your advice—meaning your tips on effective fiction writing—but came up with a great piece of fiction anyway?

JB: No, probably because he or she didn’t bring that brilliant script to show me! I’ve no doubt it has happened. I’ve certainly seen stories made worse by the attempt to please me, or to answer to all the criticism of the class.

I did have one student who set out to parody my assignment in significant detail—by recording to the second or centimeter all the dimensions, temperatures, distances, and durations required by a young soldier to obey his sergeant’s instruction to “shit, shower, shave, and shake your dick.” It was publishably funny and, of course, proved the virtues of the assignment.

KA: In some ways, working with an editor is like working with a writing teacher. What are the pros and cons for an author getting into such a collaborative process with something as personal as a work of fiction?

I’m always reluctant to get into it too early, when the story is still unformed and I am (still, astonishingly) vulnerable to praise or criticism (the one just as dangerous as the other). I’m lucky that my husband is very patient and even genuinely interested as I talk a writing problem through. He has the sense and grace to offer feedback that is not advice.

Once the piece is a thing—which usually means a whole viable draft, even of a novel—then I’m hungry for that relationship, which has through forty years and a dozen editors been a rich, enlarging experience, as intense as friendship and often leading to a friendship. The sharp extra eye has many times saved me from a folly or led me to a revelation. I’ve never thought of an editor as a “collaborator,” and am sure the editors didn’t either. Good editors want you to write your best, not to write it for you. Nor do I consider those people “writers” whose basic skills have to be provided in-house—I’ve heard some horror stories of that sort, usually to do with marketable celebrities from some other medium.

KA: Do you feel that writing and revising your textbook over the years has made you a better fiction writer?

JB: Yes and no (of course). Absolutely, the struggle to figure out what I thought and then manage to say it taught me more than it probably taught anyone else. I don’t believe that knowing hampers art, and I’m a fierce champion of the writing course. (When I say fierce, I’m not kidding. I think everyone should draw, dance, play music, and write, and that our country’s shocking disregard for and neglect of these skills has left us with an impoverished educational system and a populace that doesn’t recognize a cliché when it’s flung at them…) Where was I? Yes—on the other hand, the analytical side of the brain is what gets exercised in the writing of a text. There’s always the danger of developing one muscle at the expense of another. I undoubtedly spent many of the limited writing hours I had working on these books, which—let’s face it—are easier to write than fiction. So they represent a seduction of sorts. I’ve retired from teaching now, and for the first time in my life I’m a full-time writer. One of the (many) pleasant discoveries about this life is that I wasn’t lying for all those years; I really do write more when I have the time.

KA: Since the seventh edition of the book has been released, what if any moments have you had thinking, "Ah! Here's a point I'll have to make in the eighth edition..."?

JB: Hey, these books are barely out! I have folders for the 8th Writing Fiction and the 3rd Imaginative Writing already, with story possibilities, quotations—but they’re paper folders, not yet e-mail and pc files. The 7th edition of WF had some major changes in the chapters on Character, Setting, and Point of View, and Elizabeth Stuckey-French and I will be gathering reactions about how those work, as well as tucking away possible exercises and stories for the next time round.

KA: There must be times occasionally when you're disappointed in the writing process of a promising student. What are the pitfalls facing young writers? How can they avoid dropping the ball?

JB: I feel this strongly: the most important thing a writing student can do is to figure out how to make writing a continuing part of life. Publication is grand because it buoys your spirits and gives you energy to keep on. But it is not the point. The point is, is this something you want to do, and if so, is there a way you can keep doing it even if you have to subsidize the process some other way, even if you have to get up before the kids do? When I was a student myself and someone said, “Writing is a hard life,” I thought they meant, “It’s full of glamorous heartbreak.” Uh-uh. It’s solitary, exacting, sometimes boring, and sometimes discouraging. It’s also sometimes exhilarating and sometimes ecstasy. If those rewards are enough, you will probably find the energy to do it (and it’s mostly a question of energy, not time. I have time, and always did, to read the newspaper, watch TV, walk the dog, paint my toenails….)

But I also want to say that if a very talented student goes on to have a fulfilling life as a restaurateur, photographer, mother, or landscape gardener (as a few of mine have), I’m not at all disappointed, nor do I think their efforts at writing a waste. On the contrary, I believe that learning to write imaginatively is a crucial part of a liberal education, and if it weren’t so, if we were only teaching for the genius and the best-seller, we’d have no business doing it in a university.

KA: Are there any myths or superstitions you have to dispel with students about the literary life and literature itself?

JB: I’ve already mentioned the myth of glamour (try the fame of a twenty-city book tour; you won’t want to do it twice.) There are other usual suspects: that drugs or booze help you do it, that starving in a garret is inspiring. And then there is the old saw that “writing can’t be taught.” Talent, genius, can’t be taught in math, mothering, or music, either. But writing can only be taught. Nearly everyone will learn to speak, but children have to be taught to write, and can for a long time and in many ways be taught to write better. And better.

I don’t think I have any myths to dispel about literature. It’s not as powerful in the world as it once was, but that’s the world’s loss. I once wrote that, “Literature is my credo because it is capacious, tentative, and empathetic; because it acknowledges irony and anomaly; because it poses dilemmas, for which it declines to offer a way out, in small acts of perpetual reconciliation.” I’ll stand by that.

KA: What other writing craft books do you admire?

JB: Many—there’s a long list of them at the end of Writing Fiction. The oldest of them that comes immediately to mind is The Art of the Novel by E.M. Forster; the newest is A. Alvarez’s The Writer’s Voice. Also high on my list are books by Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Bonnie Friedman, Fred Busch, Annie Dillard, John Gardner, Jerome Stern, and in poetry Jane Hirshfield and Ellen Voigt. I tend to like either hard-nosed technical advice or idiosyncratic writer-meditations, rather than cheerleaders. I edited and put together Robert Olen Butler’s lectures, From Where You Dream, because he wouldn’t, and they’ve been very helpful to me. A company called Elephant Rock involved me (and half a dozen writer friends) in making a DVD about revision, called So, Is It Done?—and I think that’s useful too.

KA: What key points about writing craft do students have the hardest time mastering?

JB: Point of view, I think, because you can’t start at all without having made a choice about it (I went, He went, or You went…) and yet it is the most nuanced, pervasive, and complex of techniques. I tried through six editions of Writing Fiction to say everything I knew about it, but reviewers consistently and rightly complained that in order to do so, I’d made the discussion academic rather than useful to writers. So in the seventh edition Elizabeth and I tried to cut down on the distracting detail.

For the novice writer, learning how to stay in a point of view is crucial, because as Carol Bly says, this is (after clean copy, spelling, and grammar) the clearest sign of professionalism. It’s not easy to learn. This is one of the places that a class helps, because it’s often easier to see in someone else’s ms. than your own that the point of view leaps out of Mary’s mind and into John’s, or gives us a view of Mary’s eyes and a view from Mary’s eyes in the same sentence. Many writers deftly get away with this, but you only get away with it if you know what you’re doing. E.M.Forster points out that the great advantage of fiction is that it allows you to see both inside and outside of a character (whereas in life you only see the inside of yourself and the outside of others). That’s true. It may be precisely because this double vision of fiction is unnatural that it requires literary sleight-of-hand to make it work.

KA: What are some of your very favorite novels?

JB: I’ll try to mention a few you might not expect. The Inheritors by William Golding. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt. Morality Play by Barry Unsworth. Democracy by Joan Didion. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. And a few stories: “Mobius the Stripper” by Gabriel Josipovici. “PU-239” by Ken Kalfus. “Ralph the Duck” by Frederick Busch. Just about everything by Alice Munro. Of course “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, “Bullet in the Brain” by Toby Wolff, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore. Enough. And never enough.

Janet Burroway is the author of seven novels including The Buzzards (Little, Brown l969, Faber l970) which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in l970, and Raw Silk (Little, Brown and Victor Gollancz, London l977), which was runner up for the National Book Award in l977. Her textbook: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Sixth Edition, Addison Wesley Longman 2002) is the most widely used fiction writing text in America. Read more about her at janetburroway.com.