Strong Advice for Fledgling Writers

I'm working my way through the current issue of Tin House and I like what I've seen so far. They sent it to me as a complimentary gift, hoping I'd be encouraged to subscribe, but I'm not at all ashamed to say that was never my intention. In fact, I've already returned the bill, marking it "CANCEL." I think I prefer single issues of lit journals to subscriptions--with the latter, there's always the dread that a new issue is coming soon, and I'd damned well better get reading the current one even if I'd rather be reading something else. I'm already two issues behind on my reading of The Believer, even though I enjoy that mag quite a bit.

Anyway, Tin House is quite good so far. I thoroughly enjoyed Steven Millhauser's "The Room in the Attic" (mysterious, mesmerizing) and I'm partway through Tony Swofford's interview of Chris Offutt. Offutt has some interesting insights on creative writing, particularly for novices:

Student writers are working in an artificial artistic environment. They've got to turn in a fifteen-page short story by Thursday. It becomes a deadline or an assignment. There is enormous pressure to produce something that's good in this minimum time. This is contrary to both learning and making art. Once you start writing something with the idea that it will be exposed to the world--the self-consciousness that you're writing it for other people to read--you lose the whole point of writing because you start protecting yourself, either from exposing yourself emotionally or from the possibility of comments that will make you feel bad. Once you start doing that, you're doomed. And that's something that's very difficult for student writers to understand, that you have to dispense with the artificiality of the workshop setting. You have to go to "I-don't-give-a-f***-villle" in order to write.

Luckily, I'm in that neighborhood almost all the time.