Stupid curves

Learning sucks. I hate it.

That thought struck me after reading this blog post by Kristin King, about creative writing programs. My formal creative writing education consisted of about a year of attending a group hosted by a professor in college. I struggled in that group, writing a lot of very bleak beginnings of stories. Some of the imagery worked, and some of the ideas were interesting in the sort of way that might seem deep if it was late at night and you were stoned. But they failed as stories. The writing professor compare the tone of my drafts to work by Carson McCullers. “Your good at pulling off an atmosphere of sadness, it reminds me of her writing.” (I was flattered just to have a word like “atmosphere” used about something I wrote. The best part of that compliment was that I started reading McCullers.) With a technique I now recognize, he followed that compliment with some gentle critical suggestions, noting that my writing was fundamentally static. Characters in my non-stories of mine trudged in circles and mazes, trapped in loops that ultimately went nowhere. “For now, stop writing characters or ideas or images. Just write a plot,” he said. “Something straightforward. Some people rob a bank. What happens?” For as long as I attended that group, I never did that. I meant to but I conveniently managed not to, because learning sucks.

Learning, like stories, consists of an arc. I didn’t know how to write anything dynamic. The basic dramatic structure of rising action, climax, falling action, that was all news to me. Some of the attraction of writing those fragments about people repeating patterns was also that I felt very stuck in my life at that point. That wasn’t a writing a problem, it was a personal problem, but it was a similar problem of not being able to imagine any kind of motion. This occurred to me when I read Kristin’s blog post. I like the advice she gives at the end: “Write your stuff. Don’t expect it to be good for about ten years.“ That’s hard, because it’s hard to put a lot of effort into something and have not turn out as well as you want. It’s much harder when it’s unexpected. It really sucks to writing and not like what I’m writing. That’s just a normal part of learning to write.

Some activities are enjoyable for the sheer doing, and learning to appreciate the doing is always helpful. That can help sustain a difficult effort, it provides some needed gratification. (I eventually did manage to write some drafts where actual things actually happened, but it took me a few years and most of them I wrote while unemployed. The excitement of getting paid and not having to have a boss provided some euphoria that served as a kind of painkiller to help me ignore some of my discomfort about writing. Being able to get up when I wanted to, cook, clean my apartment, and write because I wanted to, that all felt so good that I didn’t notice that writing was still really hard. I think I also mistook how I felt at that time for a reflection on the quality of the writing I was doing – just because I was enjoying doing the writing doesn’t mean the writing was particularly good.) At the same time, at least part of the point of improving at a task is to climb the learning curve. The attractive places on the learning curve for tasks tend not to be at the beginning - the ten years where you can expect your writing not to be any good. That long, flat part of the curve sucks. So much. Knowing that it’s a curve, though, knowing that the ground is sloping upward even if it’s too gradual to be noticeable, that’s really important. This isn’t a loop or walking in place. It’s rising action. It’s just rising really slowly. Know that makes it suck less to learn. A little.