Michael Langan muses on how a love of reading, an openness to creative practices from other disciplines, and a resistance to strict rules help him to help others with their writing
As a mentor, often the only thing I have that my clients don’t have is a certain amount of experience of writing, and of struggling with writing. When I’m thinking about questions concerning writing that pop up in my own working process, it often helps me to think about two things.
The first is my personal experience as a reader. I adhere to the idea that all writers are readers first; that we first fall in love with reading and that’s what gives us the impetus to write. Toni Morrison, a great personal touchstone for me, famously said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” This has always struck me as a foundational thought for having your own vision and the confidence to follow its call. It also makes me think about what it is that reading gives me. It’s true to say that my relationship with reading is the most important, and long-lasting, of my life. It’s not only an integral part of my identity, it’s as life-giving as breathing. And so, in my writing struggles, I consider how other writers, and other works, have provided me with an emotional landscape of my own.
Secondly, I like to consider creative practices other than writing, and certain artists, musicians, actors, etc., who have spoken or written about their own struggles and experiences. Reading about, or listening to, an artist or musician whose work you love can be inspiring and incredibly helpful and you can draw energy and ideas from them in the same way they may well have done from writers. It can also suggest answers and solutions to your own difficulties that are relevant while also tangential, or askew; in this way, you can consider your own personal principles of creativity in the wider sense, rather than narrowly related to writing.
As a writer, and especially as a teacher of creative writing, I’ve read a fair few ‘How To…’ books on writing; from the purely commercial, guarantee-yourself-a-best-seller type, to the more ‘academic’ workbook, usually geared towards students doing post-graduate degrees, as well as the more discursive, speculative, ‘writers-writing-about-writing’ book-length essay. Many of these contain nuggets of wisdom that you can copy down, think about, maybe even put into practice if that feels right. I sometimes wonder what I’m looking for when I read these books, and the answer, I’ve come to realise, is not ‘answers’ to the questions of writing but the opportunity to enter into a conversation about writing with someone you respect and admire or are interested in. That experience allows you to move towards a greater understanding of what is you you’re trying to achieve in your work – what it is you want.
Here’s an example: recently, I read Orhan Pamuk’s The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, a series of essays on writing originally given as lectures. In the first chapter, Pamuk writes: “We dream assuming dreams to be real; such is the definition of dreams. And so we read novels assuming them to be real – but somewhere in our mind we also know very well that our assumption is false. This paradox stems from the nature of the novel. Let us begin by emphasising that the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states.” A statement like this doesn’t answer any questions I might have while hitting my head against the coal-face of writing, but it makes me think deeply about the nature of the creative activity and the form in which I’m engaged. It gives me the energy to carry on in lieu of those answers I’m looking for; ones that often come not when thinking about them at all, but when you’re caught in the creative act.
By way of contrast, a few years ago, a list of ‘Ten Rules for Writing’ written by the American novelist Elmore Leonard in 2010 went viral. As a result, a number of newspapers and literary magazines asked contemporary novelists to devise their own version of these ‘Ten Rules…’ mainly, it seemed, as a way of generating easy and popular content; a kind of literary click-bait. I had a number of negative responses to Elmore Leonard’s Rules, written as they are in the stentorian tones of the Ten Commandments and peppered with ‘never’ and ‘always’ and ‘don’t.’ One of the Rules is, “Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly,” but what exactly is ‘regional dialect’ or ‘patois’ if you’re a straight, middle-aged, white American man? And try telling that to Marlon James, to Colson Whitehead, to Anna Burns, or to Irvine Welsh! Another is, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip,” as if there is an amorphous blob called ‘readers’ who all think alike. Readers are individuals for whom reading is a subjective, personal experience and while, of course, some novels are more commercially successful and popular than others, writing for some imagined group audience in this way is only going to result in a kind of generic, standardized writing, purporting to be some kind of default of ‘good writing’, while actually being very culturally specific and creatively limiting: how would much South American writing fare when judged against them?
My mentoring style works much more in the discursive, conversational sphere. A writer I work with may well have some technical ‘glitches’ to sort out – consistent formatting of dialogue, for example, or understanding the difference between paragraphs and section breaks – but, in the main, it’s the deep thinking about what the writer is trying to say in their work that is the most important part of this process, alongside helping the writer to achieve what it is they want to achieve. In mentoring, asking questions is essential, as is offering advice and suggestions, rather than imparting knowledge as if brought down from a mountain top, written on tablets of stone.
My experience of reading also enables me to recommend books to clients that I think will inspire and interest them, maybe offering models of writing to consider, or some technical ‘nuts and bolts’ help when examined closely. I also feel I learn a lot from many of my clients and students – they have different interests to mine, different histories of reading and a wide variety of experiences. This is one of the reasons why mentoring can be so rewarding for all involved; we grow as a result, and we grow together.
