Posts Tagged ‘story’
Stuff your ears with wax: why writers should ignore literary critics and English teachers
I’m teaching a course on essay-writing this semester at New York University, and so naturally I assign short essays to my students. One essay I got back was interesting in part because it was so incoherent: it started off about a specific event, but thereafter devolved into a series of disconnected descriptions – almost if the writer had tried a free-writing exercise before giving up. And yet I knew the student in question was too diligent for that to be the explanation.
When I got in touch with him, he abashedly confirmed that indeed, he hadn’t wanted to write a straight account of the event in question: what he was after was an “allegory,” in which actions and consequences would seem so unimportant that their details could be discarded. His inspiration, he added, had been a Hemingway short story and a related commentary by the late novelist and literary critic, John Gardner.
Quelle mésaventure littéraire! I realized that what had happened to my student had happened many years ago to me, back when I too was a budding writer. (I’m not sure whether I’m still budding – let us get a little further into spring and I’ll tell you).
