ed 366 967 aut7or title institution report no pub date note ... - ERIC

6 Reconsidering the Workshopno intentions worth talking aboutthat he has nothing to say whenhe sits down at the typewriter, only something to makewill writemuch better fiction. The student who thinks about narrative logic,writing strategies, the foregrounding or erasing of the narrating act,who has learned that writing fiction consists largely of putting off tellinga story, (that in fact the ingenious devices by which she delays the storyare, in the end, the story) will write better fiction than when she istrying to make the reader feel what she felt when her aunt Maggiedied. The reader will still weep, if weeping is called for.Students need to learn from us that reading is only a preliminaryto further writing, that a text is a moveable thing. They need to learnthe difference between the probabilities of life and the necessities ofnarrative logic.I wake up in the morning, stare at myself in the bathroom mirrorit's me all right, a little older than I remembered, but not looking toobad. Only there's this lump below the jaw, on the right side, which Ihaven't seen before.Say for now that this is a novel and I'm a fictional characterif Idon't worry about the lump, I'm probably done for, I've got cancer.Otherwise what's the lump doing there, not on my neck, where it couldmean no..hing, but in the narrative, where it must? If I do worry aboutit, then my chances are fifty-fifty. Maybe it's there simply to make meworry, and there's no need for narrative logic to kill me off. Or maybeit's cancer. But within this (rather traditional) narrative, if I worry I'veat least got a chance. (There is, naturally, a third option. A novel inwhich I stare at the mirror and think, "If this were a novel I'd be donefor; since it isn't, the lump doesn't mean anythingit's just a lumpno more, no less." This obstinate assertion that what I'm reading islife and not narrative discourse is, of course, the basic strategy ofrealism, which is more complicated than we dreamed of.)I'm writing the storyI've got my character in front of the mirror,he's just noticed the lump. I have options. The question is how tothink about them in such a way as to write a better story. Or else I'mreading the story in a workshop, and the question then is how to talkabout the options effectively.Naturally when we're working on the first draft we don't think likethis. We dig blindly. One word leads to the next. We follow a vein, itpeters out, we turn back and follow another. It's catch-as-catch-can,no-holds-barred, and gouging discretionary. (Or maybe we do thinklike this after all. First drafts are already always second drafts, revisions.We hear a sentence in our head, change it, write down something thatresembles it. All writing is rewriting. The fabled first draft, like Derrida's