While I'm at it, let me make a point about life experience. You grew up reading novels and collections of short stories — or Janet and I did — where no matter how short the bio of the eminent writer, there'd be a sentence like, "He picked grapes in California, drove an ambulance in Italy, worked as a newspaper reporter. Dishwasher. Worked in a power plant in Mississippi" — and so forth. It was understood in the culture that artists had to be directly connected to the real world. Now, even in this day and age, people who get lost in the track I'm about to describe to you have some kind of childhood or young adulthood, and the first novel of the hot young writer with the big-name publisher takes its power from the fact that there was some life actually lived at some point. But the bio says, "Got his undergraduate degree at Amherst or Brown, took his MFA at the University of Iowa, and has been teaching at such and such a college." The second novel, if the author is lucky, is a kind of derivation of the first; but the third novel is about a professor having an affair with a student, and the fourth novel is about a novelist. You just see the life — and, not incidentally, the career — shutting down. Then this author starts writing nonfiction. The enduring artists are ravenous for life, ravenous for experience. And so the things you've done in the world beyond academia, things that are not rooted in books and defined by ideas, these things fill up your unconscious, they are the primary stuff of your compost heap.
Now, in the context of certain stories or books you are given to write, some of your "life experience" will necessarily have to come from a kind of research, and I'd like to mention several rich resources for that research — beginning with the Internet, which is a whole new sort of library for writers. The kinds of sense detail you need are available in a way that they never were before. An example from my own experience: in Mr. Spaceman there's an old woman telling a story about her youth when she went out walking, came over the peak of a sand dune, and observed the flight of the first Wright brothers plane — which gave her the lifelong yearning to fly. When she describes that plane later in her life, she would know exactly what kind of cloth was stretched over the skeleton. But I didn't know. Now, how do you find out such a detail? You could spend hours searching in a traditional library — because you wouldn't find it in the obvious places like an encyclopedia. But on the Internet — at the time, Google didn't exist; AltaVista was the best search engine, so I went to AltaVista and put in "Wright brothers," "plane," and "material," and "cloth." Three minutes later, I'm at a Smithsonian Institute Web page where I discover that it was muslin.
There are also a number of useful books that should be on your shelf. One that's really helpful in terms of sense details is called The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary,
published by Oxford University Press. It's about 650 pages of line drawings of everything under the sun — a warehouse, a riverfront, a grocery store, whatever, and each of these very detailed drawings has sixty or seventy little numbered arrows to tell you what every part is called. If your character is walking out onto a pier in the Hudson River, and you have him sit down on one of those tubular, rounded things that comes out of the pier, with ropes around it where they tie up the ship— you sort of lose the moment if you say, "Well, he sat down on that tubular thing…." OK, you go to the drawing of the docks and you see an arrow pointing at that thing and, by golly, it's a bollard. They've got two pages of hats that tell you the difference between a porkpie and a boater and a bowler and a fedora, and so forth. It's a great resource.
The Merriam-Webster's Collegiate and the Random House Webster's Unabridged are to my knowledge the only two dictionaries of American English that will tell you when a word entered the language — and when you're writing in period that can be crucial to know. I was writing Wabash, set in 1932, and the cop was swinging — I was going to say a billy club, but billy club came into the language in the 1940s. Nightstick came in at the turn of the twentieth century, so it's his nightstick he's swinging, not his billy club. These are very useful dictionaries in that respect. And, of course, there is the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, that gives you the timing for every subdefinition of each word, which the other two do not.
Another useful book is The Pantone Book of Color by Leatrice Eiseman and Lawrence Herbert, published by the art
house Harry Abrams, which contains thousands of different shades of colors along with their official names. Sometimes having such a visual point of reference will be helpful.
There are several books that can aid you with period detail, but one I like is called American Costume, 1915–1970 by Shirley Miles O'Donnol, Indiana University Press, which will show you what people wore every day. You might also look for copies of all those wonderful old reproductions of Sears, Roebuck catalogs, which were popular a few years ago. You should steal a big city phone book next time you go to New York or Los Angeles.
There are a number of baby-naming books that I find really useful. One I especially like is Beyond Jennifer and Jason, Madison and Montana, which gives the period popularity, connotation, classical meaning, and so forth of hundreds of names. I find it useful to name my characters very early in the process, and it can be important to find the right name.
There's a great book called A Field Guide to American Houses, which will give you a view of and the accurate names for architectural features of common domiciles. Another, called American Shelter, is also useful in this regard.
It's a good idea to have handy a good slang dictionary. Two I recommend are The New Dictionary of American Slang and the Thesaurus of American Slang, both edited by Robert Chapman.
7. The Bad Story
I know that you've read "Open Arms" for tonight [see appendix], which is a story I'm proud of. But if I'm going to critique many of your stories by telling you to put them away and never look at them again, I think it's only fair that I begin by expos-ing to you a story that I had to put away and never look at again — except for the purpose of illustrating a good writer's bad beginnings — a story whose origins were, eventually, eighteen years later, recomposted into "Open Arms."
So tonight I'm going to treat you to that awful story, and I'm going to begin by reading a bit from the notebook that I carried around Vietnam in my hip pocket. I carried it with great self-importance. My ambition back then was to be famous. I carried that book in my hip pocket thinking that I could see it under glass some day: This was the curve of his butt. These are the smudges made by his fingers. Yes, this was his toothbrush.
These are the false things, where ambition goes wrong. Your ambition as an artist is to give voice to the deep, inchoate vision of the world that resides dynamically in your unconscious. That's what you must keep focused on; that's the only ambition worth anything to you as an artist. The desire to give voice and the desire to be published sometimes feel like the same thing, but they're not. The dream that comes from your white-hot center and the dream of fame — they are not the same.
In any case, I always carried a notebook around and I made hundreds of notes. After I figured out what art is all about, I never looked back at them again — except to look for this passage; and I didn't do that until I started to teach. Here's the passage from the notebook: