This spring, Robert DeNiro
addressed the graduates of the Tisch School of the Arts. His remarks were funny (“ . . . Graduates: You made it.
You’re f*##*d.”), brutal (be prepared for certain failure to find
meaningful employment right away), but encouraging in his admonitions to
remember that, as artists, they are part
of a system of collaborators. No artist
is alone. Artists need to stop thinking
that they always know what’s best because they often don’t. Artists need to learn to trust others. Here was one of America’s greatest dramatic
artists talking about his recent lost auditions, his need to collaborate with
directors—but only after he had developed a years-long rapport, his insistence
on having the scriptwriter close at hand, his reluctance to simply make a
decision about how to play a scene without conferring with or listening to a
director. Collaborate. Trust.
This is a truth difficult for
many writers to accept. We feel very
protective of our work and protective of the sense of ourselves we have as we
write. But with few exceptions, none of
us can trust our own insights into our own writing.
For one thing—we’re blind to
those grammatical mistakes we have been using throughout our short story or
novel and throughout our lives. However,
know that they are there, no matter how hard you try to find them. Ask someone to help find them—those odd or
downright incorrect structures, those places where you used the wrong word or
used the right word inaccurately.
For another, we are looking out
to the world through the windows our work has constructed, and we don’t always
see what’s missing: “Where is the father
in all this?” “Why would someone think that?”
“If you believe this is the way others see you or your character, why is
that?” The worlds we build must be
consistent with the world our readers know—and this holds for fantasy and some
science fiction, as well—successful imagined worlds are not fabricated out of
the whole cloth of our heads.
And another: You have taken the path from beginning to end
of your story or novel so many times that its familiarity begins to provide its
own rationale. Listen to a second and
third reader and trust that she or he can sense when the narrative veers off
track. Early in our writing, we need to
“trust our compass,” as writer Michael Sims says. “Go where it points, even if it seems to take
you off a cliff. You won’t get
hurt.” Falling off that ciff might be a
godsend and get you to a place more interesting and satisfying than what you
had in mind. But that’s step one, not
step three or four—you may have found yourself in a literary ravine you just
can’t get out of without expert help.
In many ways, all of our
successful creative products, from spaghetti sauce to flash fiction to longer
forms like novels, are collaborations. We concoct, we share, we adjust.
We share again. If we’re not
getting the kind of advice we sense we need, we seek further experienced cooks
or writers to weigh in. And when they
do, we must trust that they will be sympathetic and constructive partners—our
colleagues, our mentors, our agents, if we are fortunate enough to have one,
half a dozen specialists in whatever we are writing about, the nephew in
college we hired as a fact-checker and paid in pizza, that nice person at
Kinko’s who caught a typo. Trust
them—they want us to succeed as much as we do.
Winona
Winkler Wendth is
a co-founder of the Seven Bridge Writers' Collaborative. She
has been a resident of Lancaster since 1992 and teaches
writing, literature, and other humanities courses at Quinsigamond Community
College. Wendth holds an MFA in literature and writing from the
Bennington Writing Seminars. You can read her work in a variety of
literary and general interest publications.
