Prayers to Broken Stones (2 page)

Compared to the efficient and reassuring circle of sofas and comfy chairs at a Clarion Workshop, where everyone has a clear view of everyone else’s face, where the group leader has no greater position of authority than each student … this was a nightmare. And the group was too large to service everyone.

When I had arrived, the evening before, I’d been given a stack of manuscripts that needed to be workshopped, but no advisement was forthcoming as to the order in which the stories would be discussed. So I’d read at random, not much impressed by the quality of the material, hoping I’d hit the ones that would be up first. Naturally, I spent the night reading exactly the ones for later in the week.

So when I got to the foyer of the building next morning, with everyone mingling and doing bagels and doughnuts and coffee, I checked the list. Imagine my pleasure at
discovering I hadn’t even glanced at the first three or four scheduled for discussion.

Hurriedly, I grabbed copies of the unread stories from the stacks, found myself a far corner of the library, and began to catch up. The first three were undistinguished, but competent. The fourth was just plain awful. I didn’t get to the fifth story … the call for beginning the session was delivered by a staff liaison.

I entered the classroom, saw the rows filled, saw the empty chair on the low platform, waiting for me as if I were some stump revivalist minister come to preach The Word. My heart sank, and I knew this was going to be an extremely difficult morning.

Understand: I do not believe “anyone can write.” That is to say, anyone can slap together words in some coherent sequence if s/he had done even a modicum of reading, and has at least a bare grasp of how to use language. Which is talent enough for writing letters, or doctoral theses, or amusing oneself with “creative endeavors.” But to be a
writer
—not an “author” like such ongoing tragedies as Judith Krantz, Eric Segal, V.C. Andrews, Sidney Sheldon, and hordes of others I leave to you to name—one must hear the music. I cannot explicate it better than that. One need only hear the music. The syntax may be spavined, the spelling dyslectic, the subject matter dyspeptic. But you can tell there has been a writer at work. It fills the page, that music, however halting and rife with improper choices. And only amateurs or the counterproductively soft-hearted think it should be otherwise.

When I am hired to ramrod a workshop, I take it as my bond to be absolutely honest about the work. I may personally feel compassion for someone struggling toward the dream of being a writer, who doesn’t hear the music, but if I were to take the easy way out, merely to avoid “hurting someone’s feelings”—not the least of which are my own, because nobody likes to be thought of as an insensitive monster—I would be betraying my craft, as well as my employers. As well as the best interests of the students themselves. Lying to someone who, in my opinion (which can certainly be wrong, even as yours), doesn’t have the stuff, is mendacious in the extreme. It is cowardly, not
merely dishonest. Flannery O’Connor once said, “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

Similarly, I take it as my chore to discourage as many “aspiring authors” as I possibly can.

Because you
cannot
discourage a real writer. I’ve said it a hundred times in print. Break a real writer’s hands, and s/he will tap out a story with feet or nose.

That was my attitude when I took my seat before the wary eyes of young and old men, young and old women, all of them assembled in hopes of having some guru tell them they had a chance. (I have virtually given up doing workshops. I cannot bear the pain I cause in the name of the holy task that is writing well. Let someone else do it.)

One of the writers whose manuscript was early on the list was elsewhere, in a poetry section, I believe. So we talked about the second story, and we went around the room asking for the opinions of the other workshoppers, before I spoke to the work at hand. The comments weren’t particularly scintillant. The usual “I liked it a lot” or “I’d give it an 86, it has a good beat, and you can dance to it” but nothing very deep, and nothing very deep needed: it was an okay piece of writing, but no more than that.

Same for the third story. But then we came to the fourth; a truly amateurish hodge-podge of incomprehensible clichés presented without grace, virtually every word misspelled, and festooned with all of the worst bad habits indulged in by those who (in Stanley Ellin’s words) “mistake a love of reading for a talent for writing.” I knew this was going to be an unlovely interlude.

Comments around the room were sparse. Most of the people there had at least enough ability to recognize plain awful writing when they encountered it. So they lay back, and as I asked for more opinions, and didn’t get them, a sense of genuine uneasiness filled the room. The tension that precedes the high wire aerialists attempting for the first time the death-defying simultaneous three-person triple somersault.

I asked for the gentleman who had written this story to
identify himself. If I was to do it, at least let me be brave enough to look the man in the eye.

An elderly man, tall and thin, looking weathered but very kind, raised his hand. I cannot remember his name.

And I told him. I told him that insofar as I was equipped, by years as an editor and critic and workshop attendee or instructor, by a lifetime of reading and struggling to overcome the flaws in my own writing, by everything I knew or believed or suspected about good writing, that he seemed—in my view—to possess no talent for writing. Not a small, but serviceable, talent. No talent at all. I was not insulting or disputatious, but I was sincerely firm in giving it to him straight.

As I spoke, the room grew tenebrous. Some of the attendees slumped far down in their chairs, as if trying to vanish from my sight. Others turned away, using one hand as blinder. On the faces of some of them I saw a look that must parallel that worn by soldiers in combat when they see, with guilt and human relief, that the bullet has struck the next man in the trench.

There was no way of stopping without explaining, page by page, the utter tone-deafness and ineptitude of what he had done.

Finally, I stopped. Then I asked him if this was his first story, or if he had ever submitted anything for publication.

He was a nice man, a very decent man, and he answered me without rancor. He said, “I’ve written sixty-four novels. I’ve never been published.” My heart broke for him. But what was I to do? I said, “Perhaps you might better spend your time at a craft, or an art, for which you have a greater aptitude.”

He shook his head. No one else but us in that room. Just that fine old man and I, joined at the hip forever. “I appreciate what you’ve said,” he told me, with a strong voice. “I think you’re being honest and saying what you believe. But it won’t deter me. I want to write, and I’ll keep at it. But I thank you.” I think about that man whose name I cannot recall almost every week. Whenever I sit down to work, I think of him.

But it was clear we had to have a break right then.

We couldn’t continue without a pause. It had to settle to its own level of acceptance in each of them. So I told them we would reassemble in fifteen minutes. The room emptied in an instant; and no one came out of the group to speak to me, or to ask a question. I feared I had been destructive, no matter how deeply I believed it was my obligation to be candid.

It was not in me to join the students in the corridor. I knew they hated the thought of returning, probably for more of the same; and wishing they had chosen one of the other visiting instructors’ section. I couldn’t blame them. It had been a horrorshow.

So I picked up the fifth story, now at the top of the stack. No matter how awful I felt, it was my job to get it read before the fifteen minute break was up. But the room, and my outlook, was dolorous. Pity the poor sonofabitch who had written that fifth manuscript. I began to read.

It bore a mundane title, but the opening sentences were strong and written well.
Thank goodness,
I remember thinking. At least we won’t have another bloodbath.

And I read on.

It occurred to me, somewhere along about the middle of the story, that I was crying. And when I finished the story, I had been touched, had been manipulated as all excellent writing turns and bends us, had truly experienced that
frisson
we seek in everything we read.

I found my way into the corridor, needing air. The story had really gotten to me. And all down the hall, I saw others from the section, sitting on the floor, crying; holding onto the wall for support, crying; standing in small groups outside, many of them crying. Clearly, this was more than merely competent work. We had been reached by a real writer; a writer with a helluva gift.

When the section reassembled, I called out the title of the story, and said we would now open for discussion.

Very few hands were raised to offer comments. But the few who did speak, all praised the story. Then, as if the floodgates had been opened, others began speaking without taking turns, just tumbling over each other to say how deeply they had been affected by this wonderful, wonderful story.

Then it came my turn to offer a critique. And they looked up at me with some uneasiness. Would this awful man savage even this exemplary piece of work, was he merely acid-tongued and snide, did he
enjoy
hurting these delicate souls?

I said, “Who among you is Dan Simmons?”

A quiet man whom I hadn’t even noticed, in the third or fourth row, raised his hand. He seemed to be in his early thirties, physically average, a plain man with nothing bizarre or even out of the ordinary about him. He looked at me squarely.

I only remember, in specific, some of the things I said to him. Dan remembers most of it accurately. But the
essence
of what I said was this:

“This is not just a good story, or a competent story, or an original story. It is a magnificent story. What you have created here is a wonder. It is what writers mean when they say ‘this is what good writing is all about.’

“The writing is extraordinarily adept, a level of craft that comes to writers only after years of trial and error. The story is original, and it is filled with humanity. What you have created here is something that never existed in the world before you dreamed the dream.”

The section was stunned. Fifteen minutes earlier they had seen a poor guy eviscerated, and now they were seeing some other guy raised as a symbol of everything they hungered to possess. (Had I planned the encounter as a demonstration of the two edges of a sword, I could not have put it together more perfectly. In real life, one does not encounter these neat, symbolic scenes of contrast. In real life it’s messy, and rarely plotted for the epiphany. But here I had stumbled into just such a set-piece.)

Then I said, “Now, having said that to you, I will change your life forever.

“Mr. Simmons, you are a writer.

“You will always be a writer, even if you never set down another word. There may be another writer among this crowd, but I think it unlikely that anyone else here is as totally and correctly and impressively a writer as are you. But now that I’ve told you that, I must tell you this: you will never, not
ever
be allowed to turn away from that.
Now that you have the knowledge, you are doomed to spend the rest of your life working at this lonely and holy profession. Your relationships will suffer; your wife and family—if you have them—will inevitably hate you; any woman you come to love will despise that part of you for whom the writing is irreconcilable mistress; movies you will miss because you have a deadline; nights you will go without peace or sleep because the story doesn’t work; financial woes forever, because writers don’t usually make enough to pay the rent, allow the spouse to quit a second job, buy a kid a toy.

“And the most awful part about this, is that most of you think I dumped on
that
man …” and I pointed to the kindly old gentleman I’d savaged, “… but I’ve crowned with laurels
this
man. But the truth of it, is that I was trying to save
his
life, and I’ve just sentenced Simmons to a life of unending labor, probably very little recognition, and a curse that will not be lifted, even after death!

“You are a
writer,
Mr. Simmons. And you know how you can make book on that? You know you’re a writer, when a
writer
says you’re a writer.

“May I enter your story in the
Twilight Zone
magazine short story competition?” And everyone in the room fainted.

Dan can tell of all this better than I. His memory of that morning in the Rockies is near letter-perfect. But what he
cannot
tell you, is the look on his face as I spoke. It was amazement, and pleasure, and stunned silence, and fear. It was the moment in which the poor dirty stablehand learns he is the Lost Prince of Dimension Exotica.

He won the contest, of course. (On a technicality it was actually a tie with another yarn for first place, but each of the judges—including Peter Straub, Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson—went nuts for the piece.) Out of
thousands
of submissions, Dan Simmons took first place. The story was “The River Styx Runs Upstream” and it was only the first of many works that were to follow along the trail of awards.

Dan told me that he had been trying to sell fiction for
three years, with very little success. He had sold a story to
Galaxy,
and the magazine had folded before it could see print. He sold a story to
Galileo,
and the magazine folded before it could see print. He had been batting his head against the market for three years, while he earned a living as an elementary school teacher, a specialist in gifted and talented education.

He told me that he had come to this workshop as a last chance. It was clear to Dan, and to Karen, that with a child on the way, he had to make a commitment that could insure their security. Karen’s faith in Dan’s talent never wavered, but she could see he was torn, and tormented. So she urged him to go to the workshop. And Dan said to her, “If I don’t get some small reinforcement that I have talent, I’ll pack it in. This will be the watershed for me.”