When people ask why I became a writer, I tend to emphasize the era, in my mid-20s, when I turned off the television and became a more serious reader. I talk about the sentences of Saul Bellow and Lorrie Moore, how enraptured I was, how I wanted to emulate them. It makes for a nice story.
But it’s not the part of the story that really matters. What really matters, it seems to me now, is that I was bored with my job as a newspaper reporter and depressed. I was living in exile from my family and driving away the people I loved with an astonishing efficiency. What I needed was therapy. As it happened, I applied for a Master of Fine Arts in fiction.
Most of my comrades arrived in similar states of disrepair. We did our best to conceal the worst of it, to play the part of eager newbies grateful for the opportunity to hone what we referred to majestically as “our craft.” But the crazy inevitably surfaced, under the aegis of booze or pot or some brisker narcotic. After parties, we stumbled into the night howling songs of loneliness and sorrow. At least I did.
Around the workshop table, our instructors urged us to focus on technique: point of view, sentence structure, show don’t tell. We were permitted to discuss the suspiciously familiar afflictions of our characters, but to probe too vigorously into psychology was to invoke the cardinal rule of workshop: writing is not therapy.
This made sense to me. As the child of two therapists, I knew the process well enough by then. My sessions were tedious affairs, thick with self-pity and grievance — the trademarks of the young solipsist.
I figured I had gone into the literary racket because I had urgent and profound things to say about the world and because I was a deeply creative person. But looking back, I can see that the instigating impulse for me, for all of us really, was therapeutic. We were writing to confront what Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.” And not just any hearts. Our hearts.
2. A Theory More or Less Guaranteed to Rankle Therapist and Writer Alike
A generation ago, when “Annie Hall” won the Oscar for Best Picture, talk therapy occupied a prominent place in our collective imagination, whether or not you partook. If you wanted to spend several hours a week baring your soul to a stranger who was professionally obligated to listen and react, you went into therapy. Today you join a writing workshop.
Plenty of folks still seek therapy, of course, including writers. And not all of us are damaged individuals who write to work out our neurotic conflicts. (I’m sure there are plenty of well-adjusted authors, even if I have never actually met one.) What I’m suggesting isn’t a correlation, so much as a broader cultural shift — that literary endeavor has supplanted therapy as our dominant mode of personal investigation.
The waning of psychotherapy has clear roots in the rise of psychopharmacology. Drug companies have been hard at work over the past three decades, marketing meds to troubleshoot our faulty brain chemistry. As managed care has compelled more and more psychiatrists to trade their notebooks for prescription pads, the classic image of the patient on the couch has been replaced by a man with a pill in his palm.
The ascent of creative-writing, particularly in an age dominated by the impatient pursuit of visual stimulation, might seem harder to explain. But my sense is that people remain desperate for the emotional communion provided by literature.
Consider this: Back when I started writing fiction in the early ’90s, there were a few dozen M.F.A. programs in the entire country. I had no idea the degree existed — and I was an English major from a liberal-arts college. Today, there are nearly 200 such programs, along with more than 600 other undergraduate and graduate degrees in creative writing. Thousands of people attend literary conferences and take courses at writing centers. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ annual conference, once a lowly gathering of faculty from 13 member colleges, has grown into a kind of sprawling four-day trade show that plays host to more than 10,000 writers, editors and aspirants.
Over the past few years, I’ve visited dozens of these programs and conferences. I’ve met hundreds of students and talked with them about their work. Some are young college grads hot to become the next Dave Eggers. Others are grandmas hoping to document or embellish some bit of personal history. In each case, what strikes me aren’t the particulars — age, attitude, ambitions — so much as their essential motive. What they really want isn’t fame or fortune but permission to articulate feelings that were somehow off limits within the fragile habitat of their families. They are hoping to find, by means of literary art, braver and more-forgiving versions of themselves.
I think now of the student I met last year, a beautiful, nervous young woman of Caribbean descent who had written a comic essay about the grueling ritual of straightening her hair. Despite her breezy tone, glints of despair kept showing through, particularly in those passages when it became clear that her immigrant parents enforced this humiliation.
“It sounds like there was a lot of pressure on you to be perfect,” I said.
The woman, whom I met only a few minutes earlier, began to weep in quiet convulsions.
It is at this point that I can hear the phantom convulsions of my literary comrades. “Damn it, Almond,” they’re saying. “You really are making workshops sound like therapy.” Fair enough. The official job of a workshop is to help a writer improve her prose, not her psyche. But this task almost always involves a direct engagement with her inner life, as well as a demand for greater empathy and disclosure. These goals are fundamentally therapeutic.
What’s more, the workshop is (or should be) only one small part of a larger creative process that involves reading, reflection and writing. It is this solitary work that marks the writer’s most sustained investigation of the self.
As much as we like to indulge in this fantasy, authors don’t create anything out of whole cloth. Like the patient on the analytic sofa, we fixate on particular stories and characters and themes because they speak to the fears and desires hidden within us. Our inventions inevitably take the form of veiled confessions.
J. D. Salinger didn’t write “The Catcher in the Rye” because he suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of his little brother. But he did conjure Holden Caulfield from the deepest part of himself, as a means of wrestling with his own anxieties about loss, madness, and the cruel deceptions of the adult world.
The beauty of the artistic unconscious is that it allows us to sneak up on our own intentions or to disguise them altogether. A few months before the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s life, a fan asked him to identify his central topic. As the author of 14 wildly inventive novels, Vonnegut might have cited the perils of technology or the corrosive effects of wealth or the moral tolls of war. Instead, he said this: “I write again and again about my family.”
3. The Internet Enters Our Story
Back in the old days, the Internet was billed, rather quaintly, as an “information superhighway” that would ease the exchange of data and ideas. As anyone with a smartphone knows, at this point it functions more frequently as the world headquarters of narcissistic recreation, a place people prowl when they’re feeling lonely and restless and unrecognized. The central innovation of the social media has been to offer a public forum for our private lives. The Midwestern wife who once devoutly guarded the intimacies of her kin, now posts essays about them on her blog and tracks her hit count.
But the Internet, while it might excite the desire for creative self-expression and sudden acclaim, does little to slake our deeper yearnings. What we want in our heart of hearts is not distraction but just the opposite, the chance to experience what Saul Bellow called “the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” We want to be heard and acknowledged. It’s the difference between someone “liking” our latest Facebook update versus agreeing to listen to our story, the whole bloody thing, even and especially when it runs up against bruising revelations.
For those with the means, therapy used to serve this function. But it did so in a covert and stigmatized fashion. Creative-writing programs represent a return to the ancient pleasures and virtues of storytelling, a chance to break the frantic cycle of screen addiction. Students join a flesh-and-blood community of writers, readers and critics, all of whom have chosen the rigors of narrative over the emotional fragmentation of the digital age. They receive professional guidance, and the possibility exists, however gossamer, that they will mature into genuine artists. Try finding that online.
4. A Word in Defense of the Writing Cure
It’s become something of a trope for critics to grouse about the creative-writing boom, particularly those critics who cling to the Hemingway model: that artists should be forged by the fires of “real life,” not trained in academies. It’s certainly true that the modern literary landscape can feel, from the inside, like an elaborate Ponzi scheme in which naïve acolytes subsidize the careers of their betters.
I recently began leading a new workshop composed of students in their 50s and 60s. All have children and busy careers. And I sometimes wonder, as I look around the room, why at this late stage they’ve chosen to write at all. I fear that perhaps I’m giving them false hope. But it’s hard for me to remain cynical when I think about their motives. What they’re seeking is exactly what I wanted: the refuge of stories, which remain the most reliable paths to meaning ever devised by our species.
A few weeks ago, we critiqued a novel excerpt about a trio of fractious sisters who travel to a family reunion in the country of their birth. The author was prone to comma splices and garbled exposition. But I spent most of class gently suggesting that she work to expose the dynamics roiling beneath the family bickering. Afterward, she told me she was grateful the class had discerned what the piece was really about. She paused, shifting from one foot to the other. “It’s tough with my sisters. There was a lot of unhappiness.”
I have no idea whether my student will do the lonely, dogged labor necessary to get her novel published. I’m not sure that’s what matters in the end. What matters is that she and her comrades have found a way to face the toughest truths within themselves, to begin to make sense of them, and maybe even beauty. In a world that feels increasingly impersonal and atomized, I can’t think of a more thrilling mission.