Here’s what Jerry Cleaver remembers about his first big-name writing professor at the University of Illinois some 30 years ago: “I had lots of questions.
“Unfortunately, the noted author/professor had few answers. He told us little about how stories work. `Write a 2,500-word story for next week,’ he said.
“The following week he proceeded to take our writing apart, telling us what was wrong with it but little about how to fix it.”
These sorts of people show up at practically every turn in our lives, not just classrooms. But fortunately for Cleaver and an untold number of his students during the last three decades, he decided to believe in himself rather than in someone else’s criticism.
It is a gift, having faith in your instincts. Cleaver is willing to pass it on to you by–get this–teaching you how to write fiction. The material from his long-popular Writer’s Loft course taught on the city’s North Side (yes, in a loft space near Wrigley Field) is now available as a new book, “Immediate Fiction” (St. Martin’s, $24.95). He has operated the course for 20 years, after 10 years of teaching a writing workshop at Northwestern University.
The book will guide you on story form and how to keep writing and get published. But Cleaver’s highest potential as a teacher may be in encouraging students to learn more about themselves by the process of writing.
There is considerable research about the health benefits of writing about stressful experiences. Past studies, most notably by psychologist James Pennebaker at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, have reported fewer visits to the doctor, less depression and an improved sense of well-being. Newer research shows that writing might well be therapy for individuals with chronic illness.
One study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that people with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis felt measurably better four months after completing a simple writing exercise. The research subjects were asked to write about their most stressful life experience, past or present, for 20 minutes each day for three consecutive days. They were instructed to not worry about spelling or punctuation and to keep writing for the whole session, even if they had to switch to another experience or repeat the topic.
Joshua M. Smyth, a psychology researcher at North Dakota State University and lead author of the JAMA study, said at the time that research doesn’t point to the health benefits of writing as strictly catharsis. Instead, his educated guess is “that writing things down allows you to organize your emotions” and make them “more coherent and linguistic,” an act that appears to trigger the physiological response.
That’s where Cleaver can contribute, even though he doesn’t recommend putting any more pressure on your writing self than does Pennebaker or Smyth. He simply has developed a system to “work on the right things” at your pace.
For Cleaver, it starts with “rules of the page.” Close your eyes, or at least forget he teaches fiction writing, then consider these rules as they apply to any difficulty in your life:
“Mess is inevitable. You make a mess. You clean it up. You lose your way. You find it again. Your writing veers away from the story. You rein it in or you follow to see where it takes you. You do this many times until you get where you want to go. So accept the mess as inevitable and good, let it happen, work with it, and you will get there a lot faster.”
“Mistakes lead to discovery. Penicillin, the light bulb and the Slinky were all the results of mistakes. Creative people have a lot more good ideas than other people, and they have a lot more bad ideas. They have a lot more ideas, because they let everything out. The experienced writer writes his first draft, reads it and says, `This is awful, I’m on my way!'”
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“What we’re after in fiction is the full experience. We rarely feel only one thing at a time. Life is seldom so simple. Crisis usually involves being pulled in many directions at once, internally as well as externally.”
“Show, don’t tell. Showing takes place in real time, the pace of reality. Telling generalizes, compresses, skips. No one wants part of a big experience left out.”
The last one is my favorite from taking Cleaver’s course, though he fully discloses that “show, don’t tell” is a time-tested writing rule rather than his creation. In his Writer’s Loft classroom or this book, this rule can resonate throughout life. Just imagine what more showing can accomplish, particularly if it curbs excess telling.
Plus, you might just turn out a few short stories or a novel in the bargain.