The Artist's Development: 2 Stages or 3?

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Tuesday, May 01, 2007
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My undergraduate years can be neatly divided into two periods: the time when I had no friends, and the time when I did. The first era took up the whole of my freshman and sophomore years, and since I was friendless, I spent most weekends barricaded in my dorm room reading book after book. At the time, I hoped to graduate college and go to work for the CIA, ridding the world of the Red Menace, so a lot of my reading consisted of spy novels. I read John Le Carre, of course, but I also read a lot of Robert Ludlum -- enough to realize that each of his books was essentially the same book, and that the best of them all (The Road to Gandolfo broke the mold. It was only natural, then, when it came time to pen my first novel, that I feel back on a familiar form. My epigraph came from Chaucer, but the plot and characters were pure Ludlum, albeit leavened with a cynicism I'd picked up from reading The Second Oldest Profession.

I share this little anecdote because I think it illustrates the way many writers develop. We begin as consumers, then make the decision to contribute a book of our own. A voracious reader reaches the point where he "gets" what's going on beneath the surface. There was a time when, given a ream of paper and an open weekend, I could have produced a passable imitation of a Ludlum novel, simply because my brain was so full of them I'd begun to think in Ludlumesque ways. Sure, the resulting book was derivative (though I'd like to think it was more than the sum of its parts), and if I'd been consuming Proust or Faulkner or Salman Rushdie I might have produced better, though equally derivative, work. But Proust, Faulkner and Rushdie seemed not to know about the Walther PPK and how every story needs one, so I read Ludlum instead.

The problem with 2-Stage Development, moving straight from consumer to contributor, is that the results can be derivative and thin. I saw this in my own work, and I've noted it in the writing of friends and colleagues, too. I have mixed feelings about my graduate school experience -- mainly because my own shortcomings prevented me from making the most of it -- but one thing I'm grateful for is that it shoe-horned a remedial stage into my development. I learned to be critical.

Critics are to writers what internal affairs is to cops. We tend to admit their necessity in theory and then object to every evidence of it in practice. In this case, I'm not saying that thanks to grad school I became a literary critic. If anything, my brush with theory had the opposite effect. I appreciate what such folk do, but couldn't pull it off myself. Here, what I have in mind is just a combination of detachment and self-awareness. I learned to think about what I'd read and what I wanted to write. As simple as that seems, it's missing in a lot of developing artists, who focus on "how to" at the expense of "what" and "why." As a result, technique is fetishized and people begin to talk about writing fiction as if it's just a little less complicated than brain surgery, when the fact is that most reasonably educated, well-read people with a bit of time and determination could probably right a decent novel. (That's only a threatening admission, by the way, if you think writing a "decent" novel is good enough.)

I'm not saying that critical awareness solves all the artist's problems, but it does tend to put things in perspective. It comes, of course, in a variety of guises. The accomplished genre novelist who knows his market and keeps up with what his fellow writers are publishing displays a critical awareness that the fellow who just reads and reproduces often lacks. Commercial awareness is part of that middle stage. But it isn't the whole thing (or even the most important thing). For me, the critic stage is where I stopped thinking in terms of imitating someone else and started thinking about dialogue and influence instead.

Of course, it's possible to write novels without even reading them, let alone thinking about them, so my little 2 Stage vs. 3 Stage diagram only goes so far. I've experienced it both ways, moving from consumer to contributor, then going from consumer to critic to contributor, and I think the latter option is better. Which means that if you're reading this and it rings true, you want to start looking for ways to develop a critical appreciation. For me, it was easy -- I had one forced on me in grad school, and then went from there. Outside the academy, you face some challenges, and perhaps we'll talk about those in a future post.