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The Empty Room April 16, 2016

Last year, I took Writing Fiction 2015, a University of Iowa’s International Writing Program MOOC. While I have had much opportunity to guide and/or proffer teaching and analysis to writers along the way (and hope to have accomplished same in this coursework, even though I did not sign up to mentor), I thought perhaps being in the company of other writers would jar me from the empty room.

I did not take the course to learn how to write, and in fact, at one point experienced  a place where I had to ‘block out’ what was being said because it would have invaded places I keep sacred (and must) as a writer. That, however, will perhaps be the subject of a future post, and is peculiar to each writer: that a place does exist wherein beginning writers should study writing is a given.

When I was very young, I studied writing. Too, whenever I have the opportunity, I hand on what I know and/or have learned about writing: I have taught writing, though not in what could be counted as ‘formal’ situations. One, however, did involve a group of writers, and a setting I oversaw, and teaching was very much the focus of what I gave.

At the point in my writing, however, that I thought the MOOC might be a good thing, ’empty room’ had become the motif to explain what kept knocking me out of the saddle, and leaving me powerless to reorient, and begin again.

One must allow that falling off a horse can do very real danger, hence its beauty (though clichéd) as a metaphor.

No one would quibble with a bit of hospital stay, there!

I took the course, however, in that hope of escaping the empty room, and finding my way back to voice again. A very real sterility exists in the 9 to 5 world, and the more that world becomes our daily roost, the harder it is to find our voice again. It is not just an empty room, devoid of people with whom one might converse about the important things, but it is void of people to whom one might aim one’s work.

Some sense there is of an imagined someone with whom one converses, when writing. Yes, all writers ultimately write for themselves—if the empty room has removed even you, however, how very empty it is!

I do not experience, as I say frequently, writer’s block. I experience identity block, and that is a different matter entirely. (And yes. It is quite possible that, were I to sit before my computer every day, I would experience a very real block, here and there.

I do not regard the pacing one sometimes faces, however, in the course of writing, as a block. And, truth to be told, I rarely pace. The words are not silent, and I have worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end, still producing words.)

Writers who write in addition to working a forty hour week, however, deal with more than just an empty room, if they dwell in a day world that is 9 to 5 business. I recently devolved to calling it the deadness. But all the images grope at explaining the same thing. It is that deadness—that emptiness—that loss of life and voice and thrust that cripples me now, too much of the time, and that is what I hoped to resolve, in the University of Iowa’s MOOC.

And yes, for a few weeks after, I gained my prize.

And then. Knocked out of the saddle again…

[Editor’s note. I studied under Berry Morgan, at what was then Northeast Louisiana University, either my freshman or sophomore year of college. It was an upper level class, and required pre-approval by Ms. Morgan. NLU was on the semester schedule.

In 1978, I studied under Dr. Bin Ramke, who was the 1977 Yale Series of Younger Poets. I took a poetry and a fiction seminar under Dr. Ramke at what was then Columbus College. The college was on the quarter schedule.

I highly regard, however, another course as well—it was a basic composition course, for which I still have the textbook. (I took this course at NLU as well.) While it taught expository writing (I remember the professor well, but not her name), much of a sense of ‘order’ to writing came from it—it helped train the details within me, and show me where they could be found, and which details should be found.

The textbook for that latter course is Writing Prose, by Thomas S. Kane and Leonard J. Peters, Third Edition, published by Oxford University Press, 1969. Highly recommend for writers of any level, whether it is still in print or not. (Amazon and ABE Books are my go-to places for out of print books, although I do use others, if I can’t find what I want.)

I distinguish now between the places where I actively learn (and am self-taught), as opposed to being taught by others. Poetry is a form I could study and be taught by others, as it involves specific forms that I do not know.

Screenwriting, likewise. In fiction, however, as noted above, I zealously guard the sacred place where I cannot be taught. Where I must sift, and observe, and analyse, and learn on my own.

This is a theme to which I will return frequently…]