Blake on Improvement

I ran across this quote from William Blake:

“Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”

For a stretch of about twelve or fifteen years, I read a couple of the popular writing trade magazines almost cover-to-cover. It wasn’t just about “studying” them — it was a form of relaxation for me. Reading about the craft of producing fiction was, I suppose, what TV is for many people. The articles gave me a warm glow, a tingle of excitement. I loved reading about the techniques and tools, the markets and trends, and I liked hearing the stories of writers who were actually doing it: setting their words on paper and selling them. It still thrills me to hold a book, to browse in a bookstore, to see a ream of typing paper or a computer monitor, to hear the click of keyboard keys and feel them under my fingertips.

Writers’ magazines definitely have their benefits. They keep you somewhat in touch with what’s happening in the publishing world. They can teach you shortcuts and the proper ways of going about things (such as submissions). They can chop a lot of time off the process of learning, which would otherwise be done by trial and error. They’re a wonderful source of resources and places to try sending your stuff. But — to finish the TV analogy — wallowing in the trade magazines has its negative aspects, too. Like TV, it can become a form of escapism. Every moment you spend reading about technique is a moment you don’t spend improving your technique, either by reading well-written literature or by striving to write your own.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, points out the mistake companies make in focusing on artificialities and secondary concerns at the expense of creating products (or services) and selling them. Instead of building a good computer, for example, they schedule a meeting to discuss selecting a committee to explore the feasibility of creating a task group to formulate a strategy. . . .

Endlessly studying writing techniques can be the same. Isaac Asimov said, “It’s the writing that teaches you.” And Asimov certainly knew. You’d have to walk quite a way to find a writer more prolific.

I’ve met “writers” who are all about networking and getting an agent and learning how to protect their intellectual properties from theft . . . but they don’t seem to have any actual material. They don’t, that is, write. I’m not sure when they’re planning to do that part.

There’s a second danger of studying too much technique. There’s the danger that you might learn it. I remember a big debate about ten years ago over the proliferation of writers’ workshops and MFA programs in creative writing. The criticism leveled against them was that they produced multitudes of Serious Writers who all wrote the same. Stories began to smell of having been “workshopped” — all the edges sanded off, all the distracting idiosyncracies plucked out, all the individuality boiled away. “Trained writers” were becoming a quite competent lot who had learned not to take any risks. Nor were the book superstores helping the matter, with their shelves of “safe bets” by a few giant authors, to the exclusion of almost anything else.

During my years of ingesting the trade magazines, I worked and reworked a gigantic novel manuscript, the infamous “second novel” (after Dragonfly, I thought I had it figured out How This Works — heh, heh!). When it came back rejected from my first publisher and two agents, I scrapped almost the whole plot and rewrote and rewrote it all again, grinding and polishing and stewing over all the techniques I knew I should be using. I “finished” it again after hundreds and hundreds of pages, after countless thousands of hours. Today, the book is rife with possibility in its ideas and characters, but the writing makes me shudder — it’s extremely hard to read because it’s been “techniqued” so much. Bleah! (Thank Heavens I was selling short fiction during those years, or I would have been pretty discouraged.)

A big epiphany for me in the last year or so has been to take a deep breath, “forget” the techniques, listen to the characters, and get back to basics — to not concern myself with what’s “marketable,” but about what excites and fascinates me in a story. [By “forget,” of course, I don’t mean “forget”: I mean that techniques must assume their proper place. They become part of the writer, deep inside, like all those scales you played when you were first learning to play your musical instrument.] Tell a good story. Slosh paint around. Break the rules when you need to. Use anything and everything to get the story told.

Clifton Fadiman wrote, “Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are fresh.” I think we need to go back and read the great old books that have stood the test of time — books that are still with us, and that were written before writers knew the rules and went to workshops.

A final thought about Blake’s quote: I’ve heard several Japanese friends say that Japan is a country not of innovation but of skillful imitation. In the arenas of manufacturing and technology, Japanese are masters of taking the inventions of other countries, making small improvements, and then cranking out steadily better and better models every year. [For readers who don’t know: I live in Japan. This paragraph won’t make sense without that fact.] This [Japan] is a land of discipline . . . a land of regular Improvement. But in most cases, the Genius is borrowed from abroad — from lands where it’s more permissible to sit on a creek bank doing apparently nothing . . . to wander the crooked roads until the stars come out . . . to try things . . . to listen to voices in the cornfield . . . to dream.

We came in with Blake’s words. Let’s look at them again, the same words, on our way out:

“Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”

Give me a crooked road any day, with moss growing on the stiles and branches bending low, and surprising meadows at the turns!