True story: years ago, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I submitted to Nelson Algren what I thought might be the greatest story ever written by an MFA student. All I remember about it now is that it was long–some 40 pages, double-spaced, the dark inner voyage of a downbeat movie theater usherette who is tragically seduced by her brute of a boss. Not a happy trip, but voiced in pseudo-Joycean cascades of streaming consciousness (in my partial defense, I had originally entered the Iowa Workshop, as a poet).
During the day or so Algren had it, I waited for the earth to move. Here’s what I anticipated: a knock at my door, and there would be Algren, on his knees in admiration. That didn’t happen. Far from it. Actually, he wrote on my cover sheet: “Reading this was like trying to nap when somebody is pushing a lawn mower back and forth under your bedroom window.”
Wha-a-at?
I dashed off a hurt, angry note demanding a conference…
Now Nelson Algren was a tough guy, a man of the Chicago streets, and not in any way the kind of guy you demand things of. But he disarmed me by responding nicely with an invitation to talk it over at his place. He lived in one of those rambling old houses up the hill in Iowa City with his wife, who was young and unusually attractive. She came and went with coffee while he talked to me in his soothing, nasal drone that seemed to be coming from another room. The coffee was good. His wife was beautiful. I don’t remember what we talked about, except that it was not about my story. I could tell he was not at all apologetic about his reaction to my grand opus. That was settled in his mind: purely and simply, it sucked. He wanted to talk about other things…
I don’t think I ever read through that story again, after the 60 or 70 revisions I had given it. Algren was right; I knew it without having to hear him say it. I had been judged, and accurately, by an utterly unpretentious reader who just happened to be major American author. It was the beginning of my real education as a writer, although I wouldn’t know it–nor fully appreciate the things I would also learn from Kurt Vonnegut, until years later.
Reset: I began blogging informally a few years ago, as an extension of a novel-in-progress, Applestock ’66. (The blog is still up. And the novel is still “in progress”). It was nice to see chunks of my fiction, displayed in presentational form, as opposed to half-hidden in stacks of paper, or the digital equivalent, folders of MS Word files.
A few years later, I joined an online forum that was part professional, part social. Many of the forum members already knew each other, and enjoyed the kind of real-world rapport that encouraged quick wit and minimal wording. If you were boring, you were ignored.
During this time, I wrote no new fiction at all. But when I did begin work on a brand new novel (prodded into action by NaNoWriMo) I realized I picked up some new fiction writing habits, most of them a direct result of my practical response to the new challenges of online writing….
[I'll be back in a couple of days with a Part 2 of this post--some specific examples)
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Love the Algren story… which bars did he not detest in Iowa City?
Not many. But he was a gambler and spent a good deal of his time playing poker and hanging around the Chicago race tracks.
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