Continuous Vivid Dream

Impassioned to Write. By Charles Johnson

Tonight I want to say a few heretical things about writing. Some things that may shake some of you up.

After thirty years of publishing I still don’t know what a writer should be.

I found the process of discovery as rewarding as the topic itself.

I try to listen to my characters and let them take me where they will. I try to see clearly and vividly what they are going to do next. I try to chase down any thought, image or impression that arises during the writing process even if it contradicts my own most cherished beliefs and ideas. With each new story I’m returned to “beginner’s mind”. With each story I realize what a story can be. I never learned how to segregate my interests because they all seemed simply means of getting at the truth.

I was never interested in writing about myself. It didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t interested in what happened to me. I wanted to explore in fiction things I didn’t know, through writing and research.

I was hopeful that my students would fill in the gaps of historical and cultural history. David Gutterson was revising everywhere and at all times.

He was a midwife to stories. The midwife gets out of the way and moves on to the next delivery. He doesn’t take credit for his work.

A theory for a course: “Real writers are technicians. They do not cringe fearfully before a creative writing chose—it is merely a task. The real writers that know they have several ways of executing it successfully—there is always something to do—revising, reading, researching, relaxing over a meal or a book or a film but only truly with a portion of your mind. The rest of your thoughts are mindful how the work is constructed. You are or should be focusing on the taste feel or smell of things so you won’t draw a blank when you sit down at the computer.

The world itself is your subject. Not where meaning is worked but requires your voice to make it intelligible. Create your own voice and vision—it is the project of a lifestyle. Regardless of the work and sacrifice—there is no other goal worthy of an apprentice writer. You should learn the craft of your predecessors and contribute your work in such a way that it is continuous of your past of your discipline but projects into the future.

Why people write fiction? The writer is not a leader, always the best seer, the writer when he is most authentic is a servant who seeing what others perhaps had missed gently and persuasively informs them of a meaning by making them feel its presence in the theatre of a fiction. Such an author writes about people for people. “

The writer is a servant of truth. Regardless of the writing we do, if we want our work to enrich our culture and the culture our children will inherit:

We must be truth tellers and servants of truth.

The kind of writer knows it takes fifteen years for a writer to be established.

He knows to be a good midwife he must develop a lifetime to his craft.

This writer is patient and is generous in his work. He thinks about why author James McPherson said “whenever he writes a story he feels the duty the moral obligation to include some datum of black American history in that story because of the lives of people of color have been marginalized.” This kind of writer knows by instinct: “Spirit first technique second.” Ernest Hemingway: “He needs to write what hasn’t been written or be deadmen at what they had done.”

The writers need to be inter-disciplinary. They may be able to solve any writing problem three different ways.

They must be prolific if only to survive.

They understand that writing well is the same damn thing as thinking well, not just being clever, or funny or popular or well-known but thinking critically and independently.

Saul Bellows: This society like decadent Rome is an amusement society. That is the grim fact, art should not, cannot and should not compete with amusement. It has business at the heart of humanity. The artist should be a prophet not in the sense that he foretells things to come but that he tells the audience at the risk of their displeasure the secrets of their own hearts. That is why he exists: he is a spokesman for his community. This account of the artist’s business is old much older than Collingwood but in modern time this truth is seldom expressed. No community all together knows its own heart and by failing in this knowledge the community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death. The remedy is art itself. Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind: the corruption of consciousness.

The kind of writer I’m talking about, the kind of culture needs right now.

1. There are no rules.

2. The first rule is wrong, so pay attention

3. You cannot write for an audience. The artist’s first job is to survive.

4. You can make no mistakes but anything you write can be made better.

One heretical footnote: the writer the artist works first and foremost in spirit of service to others and the greatest hope is that the work he offers may be received as a gift.