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VOICE_KNOW_TELL

                                             November 6, 2013
Dianne Johnson,
"They'll Make You a Writer",
November 7, 2013,
New York Review of Books.                  The writing in this review is
                                           really terrible, by the way:
Reviewing Mark McGurl's                    verbose to no purpose, tangled
"The Program Era: Postwar Fiction          phrasing that doesn't seem quite
and the Rise of Creative Writing":         right, and probably isn't
                                           technically grammatical... it
  ... three dicta familar to us all,       doesn't confuse only because the
  which he [McGurl] takes to be            general drift is usually obvious.
  fundamental to creative writing
  programs, if not to literature itself:

    1.  Find your voice.
    2.  Write what you know.
    3.  Show don't tell.
                                                             (May 21, 2015)
  ... McGurl contends [that these dicta]
  have produced a literature of solipsism,          The way I would put it:
  an inward turn toward first-person                "writing" is best thought
  narratives and parochial, self-involved           of as a tool, and the goals
  subjects, American narcissism.                    are actually "thinking" and
                                                    "communicating".  ModLit
  These dicta also reduce and simplify              teaches an obsession with
  the variety and complexity of available           "recording", and focuses on
  writerly stances ...                              the minutiae of experience
                                                    rather than understanding.
This isn't a bad thesis, and no one who knows
anything would take these three dicta as
anything but rules of thumb at best--

"Write what you know." is pretty                           STAGGERING
weak advice to give to a young
person who hasn't had much chance             I'm reminded of the case of
to really do anything; "Find your             Dave Eggers, who eloquently
voice" isn't really necessary: you            describes being a young
can write coherent, effective prose           writer desperate for
without a unique voice; and just              personal material to write
telling the reader what you're                about to the point where
trying to get (rather than                    it's a distraction from the
"showing" it) at may greatly                  lived events.
simplify the project at hand.
                                              I suspect Eggers might be
         TELL_ME_TRUE                         taken as a guy who found
                                              his voice, but it's less
         WAR_AND_PEACE                        unique than many high-
                                              brow reviewers realized--
                                              it reads a lot like "zine
                                              writing" to me.



      Dianne Johnson reminds one how
      out-of-touch the NYRB crowd is:

          ... he could have added that though American
          literature has Poe and vampires, what it
          doesn't have much of, except for _The Wizard
          of Oz_, is a stock of stories involving
          magic and fairy tales.  It has no tradition
          of enchantment like the one J.K.Rowling so
          successfully and lucratively drew on ...

      Yup, just Poe, vampires, and Oz,
      and a few million other examples
      she's never heard of, because no
      one who is Serious reads that stuff.


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