Object Lesson
In college, I took a creative writing class taught by a visiting famous writer.
His style was Hemingway-granular, Carver-cryptic. At nineteen, my style was TBD. I liked big words and was very fond of adjectives, which he kept telling me to choose between.
I liked description. He did not.
I liked my characters to say what they meant when they spoke, and clearly; he loved non-sequitur and inference.
I wanted to explain things. He told me people aren’t interested in explanations, they just want shit to happen.
He was nice to me. He was not nice at all to the middle-aged suburban lady who was taking advantage of the Outside Special Student Program.
He smoked in class. I didn’t care. Suburban lady did. She complained. He kept smoking.
I wrote a story in the first person about exploring a basement and getting swallowed up in it as metaphor for our superficially mundane lives masking dark secrets. I used the word “burgeoning.” He hated it.
Suburban lady dropped the class. Soon after she called me up (turns out she knew my parents) to rant about the famous writer and his arrogance. I had to agree. I mean, she was right.
One class- and classes were seminars, three hours long- he told us about his weekend at the racetrack. We talked about horses and gambling. The subject of writing didn’t come up once.
I deliberately flattened a story about a father and young son fishing, and the father tries to tell his son he’s divorcing the mom, but he can’t. Then, the father starts fantasizing about throwing the son overboard so he doesn’t have to go through telling him about the divorce. The father ultimately doesn’t, and they just go back to shore even though they haven’t caught any fish and the kid still doesn’t know about the divorce.
He said it was the best thing I’d ever written.
By the end of the semester, I wasn’t much of a writer, though I now knew what the famous writer liked. I also learned something about how, at that time, the world worked.