"Clever, clever, clever, I find myself writing in the margins. “People who prate of sentimentality..."

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Clever, clever, clever, I find myself writing in the margins. “People who prate of sentimentality are very often people who hate being made to feel,” wrote Robertson Davies, “and who hate anything that cannot be intellectually manipulated.”

When I was in graduate school myself, the mode was minimalism. Raymond Carver—an author I had never heard of—was on everybody’s lips. The unstated goal, in those workshop stories, was to write a detailed story in which everything was implied and never stated. I should add that this was in Montana, and thus drew a certain young man with a fantasy of Western living: hard-drinking, solitude, landscape. It was natural that reticence would appear in their literature. My own taste in books—Colette, Faulkner, Marquez—was hopelessly out style, as was my own writing (not that I claim my stories were any good, or that I had any emotional maturity). I felt hopelessly ill-at-ease, but my exit strategy was to be smarter and cleverer than anyone else; I filled my stories with aliens and French aristocrats and references from literary criticism. These stories were baffling, and bad. Clever, clever, clever. Then, one day, I thought I would be cleverer still. I would write what they all claimed to want—a realistic story in real time with solid characters and scenes—and I sent it to workshop with a smirk. It was a story about a gay man and lesbian who get married in the ’60s as cover for their lives, and the love that grows between them. My “clever” idea left without the need for cleverness in the writing; I even included a reunion ending. Without knowing it, I had written straight into the heart of the beast. “Sentimental,” students wrote on their copies. “You need to pull back,” one said in class. And then our professor, William Kitteredge, a writer and former ranch hand in his sixties, who for many was the last word in Western manliness, said, “If you can’t be accused of being sentimental, you’re not even in the ballpark.” With his help, it was the first story I ever published. I have never looked back from sentimentalism.

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Thoughtful piece by Andrew Sean Greer:  "In Praise of Sentiment." http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/26/boys-don-t-cry-in-praise-of-sentiment.html

Yes, yes, yes!