Fabricating stories and a writer’s value

Next door, a col­league is singing the praises of some writer’s hand­book, so full of wisdom:

• “Your char­ac­ters must expe­ri­ence a crisis in the first 10 pages of act 1!”
• “Use a spe­cific object repeat­edly in the story!”
• “The audi­ence will lose interest if you don’t [whatever]”

This is when my head­phones go on. I’m sure these for­mulas work, but to what end? They’re so inor­ganic — like blue­prints for a com­mer­cial product.

Maybe some find these pat­terns useful, but I can’t approach a story like an Ikea book­shelf: “Here it looks like I need to con­nect sad event A with unex­pected chal­lenge A to pro­duce audi­ence empathy 1.”

Edi­tors and edu­ca­tion are crit­ical, and I under­stand that preparing a man­u­script for a mass audi­ence requires a respect for that audi­ence — this is different.

All this per­va­sive writing advice speaks to some­thing else. It says, “Your goal in writing is to please others, and the pro­ce­dure we’re selling is more valu­able than what’s inside you.” It seems like such a cyn­ical place to start cre­ating any­thing. To me it sounds like dieting advice. I say either exer­cise, or don’t; Write, or don’t; Every­thing else is procrastination.

This is why I’ve never con­sid­ered writing work­shops or con­fer­ences — because in their ses­sion descrip­tions I hear echoes of the sure-fire for­mulas and moti­va­tion rit­uals that adver­tisers sell to aspiring authors with the promise of making them real (pub­lished). I object, both to these sys­tems and to the inse­cu­rity they create by implying that writing does not make one a writer.

Of course, I’ve never been to a work­shop, so this is my pro­jec­tion. I know that I unfairly judge the kind people who really care about writing and other writers, by asso­ci­ating them with the detestable moat of schemes that inevitably sur­rounds their gatherings.

But this feeling extends at least to some com­mu­ni­ties I’ve seen online. Across  so many blogs and forums, there is an entire writers cul­ture out there that feels alien to me, and for all its aching for legit­i­macy and val­i­da­tion (“I write because I HAVE TO! Because I’ll pos­i­tively die if I don’t!”) I just can’t stand it. There is writing, editing, reading, and then the pub­li­ca­tion chase, and the more I see, the more I’m con­vinced that a lust for the latter can be dis­tracting and poisonous.