The person who taught me the most about writing, and by writing I mean the rebar and concrete and beams of it, was a literature professor I had in graduate school.
The majority worked very hard to avoid Mary Helen Dunlop’s courses because graduate school leaves precious little time for beer drinking and pitching and mooning and to take one of her classes was to give up on all of those things, which I think is an awful decision.
However, I was ecstatic to get into one of her seminars and she was as gorgeous and formidable and brilliant as everyone warned, her syllabus as impossible.
What made the way for me to learn from her is that I was her ideal sort of reader. When she assigned a novel, she would send us away to read it and by this she anticipated more than once and with our malformed thoughts written into the margins of the Dover edition books she’d always order for the class.
This isn’t how we’re trained to read, you see. We cut our literate teeth on school reader competitions where we mark off rows of read books with stickers and win donated bicycles; to love reading is to stuff our library bags full and feast under the covers until our fingertips are rough with ink and our eyes are gritty.
Then, if we become English majors, or something like them, we eagerly sign up for coursework where course descriptions promise all of the modernists, inches and inches of South American poetry, the Complete Works of Everything Norton Saw Fit to Print.
We gorge and swallow, nutrients from our canonical binges sure to twine themselves around our bones.
I mean, it’s not a bad method, actually. It’s stockpiling, it’s inventory, it’s rows of goods we can pull from to make meaning from our lives or understand really fucked up sorts of things, or really beautiful ones. Oh, and we can write from what we have on hand, even if we’ve found ourselves homesteaded in the garrets of nine to five unbearable bullshit or parenting or just the general overwhelming unendingness of things.
This is not, however, the sort of reader she wanted.
And like I said, I was her ideal sort of reader, one who re-reads and makes malformed thoughts.
I’ll let you imagine the class discussions, they were everything you imagine, and then more penetrating dress downs than you possibly could. I want to skip ahead to the part where she gave me the rough materials of myself as a writer after giving me a C-/D on my first paper.
Which, yes. I’m right there with you. My god. It was the moment that I was certain that I had been found out: my breasts unbound in front of the other soldiers, my gloves stripped to expose the callus of the menial labor I was doing through the day so I could dance in the glittering ballrooms at night. You could be she wrote to me, her handwriting a copperplate of scarlet letters, a good writer. But you are not one now.
Her office was papered with nineteenth century French pornography and she had that way of crossing her legs that is only possible when your thighs are very long and you are unafraid of what the entirety of the universe thinks of your life.
How?
That’s what I wanted to know. And also, by what means? I was willing to justify the ends, of course. She had put that in writing, the ends, the possible ends: a good writer.
She asked; why don’t you start with the big idea? The biggest one? Why are you saving your biggest ideas for the end?
I didn’t know. I didn’t know! All I could think was, I have big ideas?
Then she told me, if you bother your reader with a lot of inveigling as a way to escort them the long way to your big idea, your big idea will have left with someone more interesting before you get there.
She said something like this—there was a metaphor about a party.
Start, I know she said, with your very biggest idea. Because if you do, your ideas will only get bigger from there.
It is the only way, she said, to see exactly how far you can go. And when there isn’t one more big idea, you must stop. Right there. Without writing one more letter.
This was the concrete and the rebar and the beams. The big idea, the biggest one you have, will not be your best idea, but you’ll never get to the best ones without starting with the biggest one.
The only way to know how far you can go is to start at the furthest point you’re capable of, already.
There is no chance that your reader will ever get to your best idea unless you just fucking grab them with the biggest idea possible. They must be inside of your writing before they realize they are inside your writing. The surprise of your ideas must be inevitable.
I promise that you have no understanding of what your biggest idea is—this is the other thing. If it’s not impossible to start and terrifying to finish then you must start again, probably from near to where you finished. You know if what you’ve written has achieved some kind of worthwhile afterlife if you feel exhilarated by your own vulnerability.
Like, I am so fucked and naked and fantastic.
You could be a good writer, but you are not one now.
This, it is, it is the big idea I start with every time I sit down to write. I could be a good writer, but I am not one now. I am not. It is the most impossible way to start, and so, the only way I can make what happens after the impossible beginning inevitable to my reader. Inevitability, in this case, is the existence of ideas that were previously impossible.
I could be a good writer, but I am not one now.
Now, I just have big ideas.
I am not a good writer.
But I could be.