New Writing Rule

Go outside! Learn languages! Work strange jobs! Live.

Robin MacArthur, May's Guest Blogger

Confession: I keep spending my “writing time” in my car driving back roads.

The chorus inside my head: What? No! Get in front of your computer and start typing! The only way to learn how to write is to write!

But the voices don’t seem to be doing any good.

A year ago I graduated from an MFA program in Fiction, and I spent the years I was in school compulsively (and without a breath) reading and writing fiction. I considered it my job, and was diligent. The result? I came out a much better writer, decently well-read, with a collection of stories on my hard-drive. But one year out this thing keeps happening: in the rare moments I have consecutive hours to myself (I have a wild-hearted and -limbed two-year-old), instead of taking an imaginary road trip through an imaginary place with people made of ether, I climb into my real car and set off down the dirt roads that spin out around my house in Vermont.  

I pass: a trailer park, a stream that’s flooding due to a pair of industrious beavers, a handful of old farmhouses with wildly differing yard decorations. I roll down the window and feel my eyes widen, my spine relax. I breathe deep and smell: damp earth, burning brush, cow-shit laid out fresh over bare fields.

It’s wonderful. I feel deliciously alive. But shouldn’t I be at home writing?

At night something else startling keeps happening. In the hours after my daughter falls asleep, instead of picking up The Best American Short Stories of 2010 or the most recent story in The New Yorker, I drift towards a far bookshelf and reach for: The Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (song sparrow, hermit thrush, veery…), The Peterson Field Guide to Northeastern Ferns (bracken, ostrich, maiden…), and Tom Wessels’ Reading the Forested Landscape. I’m transfixed by these natural histories, but the pile of accruing un-read fiction on my bedside table unnerves me. What is going on? Am I not really a fiction writer? Should I have studied biology, ecology, forestry? Why the f*!k don’t I want to read or write stories?

On my next trip I pass: a pink bathing-suited girl spinning a hula hoop in front of a mustard-colored trailer; a cigarette-smoking father and son pulling into a field in a late ‘70s red Ford truck; a clear-watered lake where a pair of loons are making a home. I pull my car over and dip my bare feet into the cool, moss-scented water and hear: thrush, cars on the highway, far-off tractor. By the time I pull into my driveway my “free time” is up but my heart feels tender, my body porous and capacious, and images ricochet through my mind. That night I read about birds and trees and stone walls and the deep ecology of this place where I live and I am startled, in the midst of that reading, to feel some old, familiar feeling deep in my stomach. It’s that bees’ nest of images, fact, details, and compassion, swarming and buzzing and out of it popping, like a fresh-born leaf: the desire to write.

Gary Snyder wrote, somewhere, that if you want to be a poet you should learn to identify and name your local flora and fauna. Snyder’s directive is a naturalist poet’s take, but I’m thinking it could be applied to all arenas: if we want to be good writers of any kind, we need to step thoroughly away from our creations (and the creations of others) on a regular basis, open our eyes and noses and ears, and gain intimate knowledge with the specificity of the “real” world around us, be it woods, schools, dive-bars, neighborhoods, racetracks, rivers, all-night gas stations, trains, or what have you.

Specificity. Not merely the rules of detail (write “Chevy” instead of “car”) but a sense that the created world is so vivid and intimately known that no other writer could have written the piece. Specificity consummated with experience. Specificity that throws the world into Technicolor, that registers accurate cadences, dialects, and birdsongs, that smells of one-place-only’s flowers, dirt, and smog, that rings with the peculiar linguistics of one time and one location. Specificity so specific that I feel I’m no longer me, lying in bed, reading words printed onto paper, but a seer with the superhuman capacity to transport myself, utterly, to another time and place and slip (my God!) inside a different human being’s skin.

And the only way I can see to execute that highly ambitious magic? Of course it helps to practice (write). And of course it helps to see how others have done it (read). But an as-important ingredient, by my book? Is to leave the confines of one’s house, mind, computer, and collection of books, and enter the world. Engage with “the real” often and with verve.

Fiction at its best is a way to escape the confines of the self, to live and inhabit the body and experience of another human being, which is one of the most joy-invoking and spiritually liberating things we can do. It’s a way to illuminate truth without the hindrances of the concrete world. But in its weaker moments? It’s an exercise in escapism, or, even worse, an exercise in craft.

During my MFA years I got in touch and in tune with the writing world, but stopped feeling in touch with the world outside my door. After three years in that closed circuit my fiction began to merely repeat the successes and failures of what had come before me: my muscles turned slack, my reserve of images and compassion dried up, and my pages began to lose their freshness, vitality, uniqueness, and relevance.

And so my new, personal, fiction-writing rule? Go outside! Travel! Read field guides and histories. Learn languages. Work strange jobs! Live.

The book I’m most excited to read right now? Jaime Gordon’s National Book Award-winning The Lord of Misrule. Previous to writing the novel Gordon spent more than three years working at the lowdown tracks of West Virginia and Vermont, where she lived in a beat-up trailer, went to the tracks at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, slept a little in the afternoon, and headed back to the tracks at night. In other words, she was obsessed with and fully engaged in the culture and landscapes she later wrote about. I don’t know if I’ll love Gordon’s writing, or the story, but I feel pretty sure that I’ll learn things I didn’t know about the world, and that I’ll believe she has something meaningful to say.

The creative process, for me, demands a constant flow of inhalations and exhalations: breathing in the concrete, raw, “real” world and exhaling my imaginative, un-constricted renderings of truth. Which is the reason I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing: leaving my computer screen and The New Yorker for field guides and the woods and construction sites and dive bars and back roads. I’m going to re-engage with the world outside my head in order to re-infuse my fiction with the artifacts of the “real.”

And my brazen hope? That you’ll join me. Let’s make our fiction a wily and spider-legged creature, tapping directly into as many cultures and places and ways of knowing as possible. Let’s go out into the world with eyes and ears and nostrils open, do things we’ve never done before, become experts in some singular thing or place, become passionately and inanely and physically obsessed. And then, out of that obsession? Let some beautiful, deeply-tap-rooted and highly original fiction bloom. I, for one, can’t wait to sit down, inside, on some rainy day, and read all about what you find.

Robin MacArthur is a fiction writer, mother, and one-half of the musical duo Red Heart the Ticker. Her work has appeared at Hunger Mountain and in Orion magazine. She recently received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives on the land where she grew up in Marlboro, Vermont. You can read more essays by Robin at her blog Woodbird.

Tagged as: naturalism, Robin MacArthur, Vermont, writing