Christy Writes: Studying with Saul Bellow
For the past few years, I’ve wanted to take graduate courses, maybe get a master’s degree, in creative writing. I haven’t, however, and it’s more than just taking on more crippling student loan debt that has held me back. That’s just a practicality, a technicality, a checkbook reality. The truth is I don’t want to take a class in which a professor will tell me whether he likes what I wrote or not, if my voice is emerging correctly, and whether it’s okay for me to bend the rules of writing. Like sentence fragments.
Still, I know there is much room for growth in my writing, and I do find that it gets better when I read, and not just read but really study, the writers I admire most (John Updike, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Jonathan Franzen, Joan Didion), and even those current prodigies I really don’t understand the appeal of (Donna Tartt, Jonathan Safran Foer). Their writings have been celebrated, lauded, and read, read, read. They have much to teach me, and with everything they’ve written that I read, I learn something. Sometimes it’s as simple as “Wow, that was really terrible,” but more often than not, they broaden my thinking, stroke the writing part of my brain, challenge me, make me angry, make me laugh… but above all, they show me what’s possible. They tell me not to be afraid to push myself, to try something new, to break the rules and spit on convention, to close my eyes, put my head down, and run like hell toward the goal.
So I typed the above paragraph into Google to try and find a writing course or two in my area, and came up empty. I know, right? Weird. So I decided to take matters into my own hands – if there wasn’t an adult school or university out there that could give me what I want, I’d create it myself.
I sat down and made a list of authors I want to study more in depth. From there, I worked out a year’s worth of study plans, with two months at a time dedicated to each author. I chose two books for each – including their prize-winning novels if they have them – and any interesting secondary writings on them I found.
That finished, I left space to make notes of particular themes I find in their work, or ideas they inspire in me, and gave myself the assignment of a half-hour a day of freewriting based on those themes or ideas. The most important part of this course, however, is also the most intangible: how what I learn from these masters will infiltrate my own work, subtly influencing not only how I write, but how I define myself as a writer. As Stephen King puts it, you can’t expect to blow anyone away with your writing until you’ve had it done to you.
By now I was excited. First-day-of-school excited. I headed out in the rain for the half-mile walk to my local library where the reference librarian helped me unearth two books by my first assigned writer, Saul Bellow. We talked a bit about his mind-blowing success (the Nobel and the Pulitzer, anyone?) while she got them from the shelves, and by the time I left I was so elated I splashed through the puddles and soaked my skirt and my sandals and found it the most poetic soaking in the history of rain.
The books, of course, I carried in my arms, against my chest. At one point the wind shifted and encouraged the rain to slip under my umbrella, and I moved them as though I were sheltering Bellow himself, keeping him away from the invading drops. The rain could have its way with me, but it couldn’t touch him, not right now, not when I was on the precipice of learning what he has to teach me.
This will be the most exciting writing course I’ve ever taken. I can’t wait to get started.
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