The Class I Could Have Used When I Was Learning to Write
I asked the writer JoAnna Novak about the perils and profits of delving into the creative process.
If you are a fan of the Mel Brooks’ movie Young Frankenstein, you’ll probably recall the gag title of Victor Frankenstein’s diary: How I Did It. I’ve been laughing at that one gag for decades, and I secretly want to use it for my own memoir. The title is grandiose and obvious — the lack of detail suggests its own importance — but it’s also naturally compelling (just take a look at the Times’ bestsellers lists): Human curiosity about how things are made is eternal, and readers and writers of literature are no exception.
Part of why I love being an editor is is the opportunity to learn from writers. In the course of our interactions, I come to understand more about how they do what they do. It’s a particular knowledge that varies from author to author and I find it endlessly interesting. Usually, I have a ulterior motive. I’m always trying to sort out one creative problem or another and hearing about how others navigate their work can fortify me in my own efforts. But sometimes I fear I’m going down a rabbit hole by spending too much time with other peoples’ process instead of figuring out my own.
Today I’m featuring a conversation I've been having with JoAnna Novak. JoAnna is a fiction writer, poet and memoirist, whose most recent book, Contradiction Days, published by Catapult, is an intense and finely rendered chronicle of the anxiety and emotional turmoil she experienced during her pregnancy and how she navigated that by way of an immersion in the work and life of the artist Agnes Martin. You can learn more about JoAnna and her work at her website.
I first worked with JoAnna on an excruciating but somehow funny piece, My $1,000 Anxiety Attack, which she wrote for our Disability series at The Times, and which was selected for inclusion in our anthology, About Us. But my purpose here is to explore the common interest we have in the writing process, which I know from loitering on Substack for the past few months, plenty of others are interested in, too.
JoAnna teaches a course for Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles called The Creative Habit, after the title of Twyla Tharp’s book on the subject. In it, she and her students explore the “literature of creativity, inspiration, and success by artists across mediums: dance, tightrope walking, painting, writing, and more.” This seems like the one topic I could have really used a class on when I was learning to write, but one that no one, even in my MFA program, bothered to explore. We were being asked to produce work of quality without ever being taught how we might go about doing that work. I suppose it was assumed that we already knew this. Maybe some of the students did, but I didn’t. And I’m trying to gain some understanding of it now.
I asked JoAnna for her syllabus for this class and it contained all sorts of interesting things. The idea of writing as a physical act, as something embodied, and one that involves devotion — even akin to religious devotion, as expressed, for instance, in the work of Saint Teresa of Avila, whose work I cherish, even if I can only claim to faintly comprehend it.
I asked JoAnna if I could engage her in a few conversations about this and she agreed. Below are some questions and answers, edited or amended to suit this format. I hope it might be of interest or use to others like me who find themselves as drawn to thinking and writing about the practice and process of writing as they are to producing their own imaginative or reportorial work.
Peter Catapano: You write in several modes — poetry, fiction, memoir and essayistic nonfiction. Can you say a little bit about the impulses that drive you to these different forms and whether you consciously decide to pursue one over another at different times? How do you negotiate them in a way that allows all of them at one time or another to flourish?
JoAnna Novak.: I love reading in all of those modes, and I think my love of reading propels my love of writing. There are times when I say I “need” to read in one mode or another, and I think what I mean when I say that is that that mode offers me a way of experiencing language or encountering story or accessing voice that the other modes cannot — or seem as though they cannot, at least in that moment. What I need to read sometimes mirrors what I need to write, and sometimes it’s the opposite.
I try to finish short things — poems, stories, essays. I don’t like unfinished starts and I try to let short things breed other short things, especially poems. In that way, I write manuscripts. I also try to act when I have an idea: draft a story in a day, send an editor a pitch. Acting is a way of starting — and, then, finishing. I think that cycle of starting and finishing gives me lots and lots of time to practice and, hopefully, all that practice leads to some degree of flourishing.
P.C.: I love the idea of your course on the creative habit because I feel that's something that was missing in my own education as a writer. Can you say why you decided to teach this, especially to teach it to young people, and how your students respond to the class and what is typically learned there? Do you find any sense of surprise or a new understanding among your students about what it means to write?
J.N.: When I was pregnant, and dealing with that turmoil you mentioned in the introduction, I was very afraid I would lose myself as a writer, that Mother would supersede Writer in the identities I could possess. (Not the case, as it turns out!) Among some books that I’d inherited from a mentor I found Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I read those two books during that turmoil-ridden period. Lamott and Goldberg’s voices were such a balm, such a tonic to my own fatalistic thoughts. I knew then that I wanted to teach this course.
I’d also been in a slightly similar course in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I studied poetry. Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier) taught a class that included Teresa of Avila and Philippe Petit — I think that’s the only syllabus crossover— a class that examined creativity in other disciplines. I wanted to combine the exploratory mode of Dara’s class with the reflective, soothing feeling I get from Lamott and Goldberg.
Partially I teach a class like this to give students resources. To help them know where they might turn when or if they’re stuck. I want the class to empower my students, to help them build up a reservoir of confidence and optimism in their ability to get words on the page.
Most often, my students tell me they confront their habits — usually, the ones they want to change. They become more intentional about their practice and see how that leads to their goals, and they work on articulating an ethos or some sort of mission. A couple years ago, a poet I worked with cited the class as a turning point in his thinking of himself as a writer; the class helped him get serious and take his work seriously. I loved that.
P.C.: When I delve into the details of the writing process I sometimes worry that it will be counterproductive, or perhaps that I’m using it as a way to avoid the “real work,” or the uncertainty, of writing imaginatively and originally. Do you find that there is ever a risk to you as a writer or to your students as aspiring writers of overthinking the process? Of being so immersed in trying to understand this activity that it interferes with the actual performance of it?
J.N.: Well, I would never ask students to do the kind of reflection they do in The Creative Habit in a writing workshop. I’d never ask them to talk about inspiration or their writing routines in that context. I think keeping those conversations separate is important. “Guard the mystery,” to riff on Cedar Sigo’s brilliant book title.
P.C.: I think that artists of any kind must negotiate various impulses in order to create work that is meant to be experienced by others — simply put, balancing the Apollonian and Dionysian, freedom and control. There is a lot of emotional energy driving your work but also a lot of attention and control put into the crafting of the prose, word choice, rhythm and sentences. Do you consciously negotiate those things as separate impulses?
J.N.: Richness and clarity were the poles my poetry teacher Peter Gizzi would talk about — I still find that useful when I’m teaching. In my own work, I don’t consciously negotiate those impulses. Even when I’m editing, which usually involves me reckoning with those impulses, I don’t really separate them.
P.C.: I’m kind of obsessed with the matter of what it means to write either with or without planning and intention. I tend to have ideas that excite me, but they often seem to die when I attempt to write them down. But if I write without clear intention and let the writing lead me to a subject or idea, I end up with a completely different result, one that’s exciting to me, but that is usually short on coherence or practical use. In writing Contradiction Days you used a sort of prompt and discipline inspired by the life and work of the artist Agnes Martin — you’ve said that you wrote the book by filling 6-inch-by-6-inch text boxes. Was your commitment only to putting words in the space or did you have a clear idea of what you were going to write or aim at before you undertook each day’s writing?
J.N.: I want to be a planner, an outliner, a writer with color-coded Post-Its on her wall, files of backstory on all my characters — and I’m not. I need to feel like I’m chasing something or being chased, at least at first.
In that initial draft of Contradiction Days, I gave myself permission to write anything in those 6-inch-square text boxes. The goal was to fill them up, and let the filling be a record of something. That said, I tried to keep my mind filled, too, with the sort of stuff I hoped I’d write about: Agnes Martin, the landscape of New Mexico, neurologists’ thinking on the relationship between mental illness and creativity. I reread Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion — one of my all-time favorite books — hoping to attain a fraction of her clarity and sensuality.
P.C.: I’ve been thinking about the book as the end result of a writer’s work and why we are so attached to that format, even after all the technological innovations that were supposed to erase it. I’m curious how much the idea of authoring books factors into your actual writing practice. Is the end goal of a book in your mind while you are writing? Or is it something you think about later? Say every six months? Is this something you think about often?
J.N.: I think about it more when I’m between manuscripts, when I’m wondering what I’ll write next. When I’m wondering what I’ll write next, what I’m really wondering is what book I’ll write next. Once I feel like I’ve got that in sight, then I’m hyper-focused on completing a draft of the manuscript. (Each of my last poetry manuscripts, I first-drafted in just under two months; the two prior, I first-drafted in a day and a weekend, respectively, albeit shaping large bodies of more unformed text.)
P.C.: A while ago we discussed an idea you have for an article that concerns itself with how young writers or students should or should not use AI to produce writing. You reference the experimental literary school of OuLiPo, devised in France in the 1960s by way of comparison. The Poetry Foundation explains that “OuLiPo rejects spontaneous chance and the subconscious as sources of literary creativity. Instead, the group emphasizes systematic, self-restricting means of making texts.” This sort of approach has attractions for creative writers, perhaps because of the unexpected poetic outcomes it can deliver, but how do you think students should view text produced by them in conjunction with systems (like AI) as opposed to the old-fashioned and often grueling process of articulating their own ideas?
J.N.: I was very drawn to OuLiPo-adjacent practices for how they seemed to get me out of my own way. I liked flipping through the dictionary, counting every seventh word, or using erasure or collage to estrange myself from my work or my work from myself. I liked feeding my poems into internet language translators and “perverting” the language — maybe the final translation, back into English, would give me a phrase or a sentence or a syntactical construction I wouldn’t have arrived at on my own — I can be so stuck in my own ticks and tendencies.
When ChatGPT and other large-language models were introduced so splashily last year, I started recoiling from those “alternative generative processes” I’d used, as the poet Keri Webster calls them. I started recoiling because I started feeling sad about AI further distancing the writer from themselves. I can’t help feeling bypassing the first draft — what Anne Lamott famously calls the “shitty first draft”— with something generated by AI is a critical loss for writers, especially beginning writers or young writers. Fumbles, false starts, messy drafts — these are the writer’s way of learning. I wouldn’t want anyone to sacrifice that! But, it’s probably no surprise, I like grueling. Life with a mental illness can be grueling, and writing — making something like art through that grueling, arduous, beautiful struggle — gives me hope again and again about life.
I learned to write through a most wonderful 7th grade English teacher, Chuck Coniglio (Mr. Coniglio back then). We had to write a weekly composition and he wasn’t shy with the red pen. After getting a D+ on my first composition, the writing gradually got better over time, such that after the end of the year he requested to keep my comp book to read as examples to future classes. The compositions were almost always writing from a creative prompt (e.g. what would happen if you only had three days of sight left?). Once, many years later, my mother saw him at a high school basketball game and thanked him for “teaching my son to write.” He actually started to cry and said that no one had ever thanked him for that. I am forever grateful for Chuck Coniglio!