Elizabeth George
Commencement Address
Whidbey Writers Workshop, Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, MFA Graduation
21 Aug 09
This is the third commencement address that I’ve given in my life, and the first that I’ve given to a group of graduates who’ve earned a degree from an accredited program not affiliated with a university. So the first thing I’d like to do is to congratulate you on your achievement. And the second thing I’d like to do is to congratulate the program itself and those people who founded it, because without their hard work, their creative ideals, their commitment to excellence, and their love of community, none of us would be here today. To have grown a program out of nothing isn’t an easy thing. To have grown it out of nothing and then brought it to the attention of those who evaluate such creatures, as this is profoundly remarkable.
Growing something from nothing is, in effect, what I’d like to talk to you about today. For as artists in the field of writing, that’s exactly what we have to do: We grow something from nothing. We have no marble, granite, or clay to work with. We have no paints, brushes, palette knives, or canvas. We have no pencils, no charcoal, no braziers, no bronze. We have one thing only: the written word.
Here’s what I love about creative writing and why I’ve loved it from the time I first could read: It soars. It is something insubstantial that, with the appropriate amount of passion applied to it, grows wings and takes flight. It’s a delicate thing. Too much passion and it becomes lopsided, a “bunch-backed toad” that is, alas, misshapen and jokeworthy. Too little passion and it turns to stone, inert and lifeless and worthy of skipping across the water, perhaps, but little else. The beauty of this art form is that it absolutely requires passion to be done well but it also requires that the passion be harnessed, disciplined so that what pours onto the page is the result of something that is not only deeply felt but also deeply thought.
Now, most people think they can write. Indeed, the invention of the personal computer has allowed to be poured into bookstores some of the worst novels ever printed on paper. Even more examples of mankind’s proclivity for literary self-delusion no doubt languish, as I speak, on hard drives around the world. But the truth, as you and I all know, is that most people can’t write. They might be able to create an email; they might be able to pen the annual and generally abhorrent family Christmas letter. But writing a novel, a play, a short story, a collection of poetry? This kind of writing makes demands upon its creator, and those demands are ones of talent, of the passion I’ve already spoken about, and of discipline.
I used to tell my writing students that they needed talent, passion, and discipline if they wished to succeed as writers. I told them that if they had those three qualities, they would succeed. I also told them that if they had talent and discipline, they would probably succeed. And if they had passion and discipline, they would also probably succeed. I also told them that the bestseller list generally proved that if they had only discipline—lacking both talent and passion—they could also succeed. But the key to this career was discipline, which I still believe, even unto this day.
So where do we begin in this activity of ours, this growing-something-from-nothing for which we feel such passion? We begin where every art form begins. We begin with craft. For without a knowledge of craft, there is no art, for few and far between are the creative geniuses like Mozart, who—if I might make this a literary simile and not a musical one—somehow at seven years old compose prose or poetry like William Shakespeare, like William Faulkner, like Edith Wharton, like Hemingway, Austen, Steinbeck, Joyce, Eliot, like you, like me.
What you should have learned in your time in this program—what I hope you learned and what I hope any MFA program and any other creative writing program cause students to learn—is that craft is your fall back position. Craft is your safety net. Craft is what happens in advance of art. It obliterates blockage and it serves as a means of moving the writer forward. Without it, we’re at the mercy of muses who don’t even exist. Without it, we are frightened, unsure, and ultimately alone. We learn craft in order to take the leap into art. Craft is what makes art possible. We want, as I’ve said, to grow something from nothing. But we have tricks up our sleeve and those tricks are craft.
A mastery of the elements of craft in writing leads us to what I call “the successful manipulation of language,” which is, of course, the words massaged and molded into a story. But as you have probably discovered or will discover, that the successful manipulation of language alone is not—nor will it ever be—enough to carry us forward to the completion of a project we’ve begun. And it won’t be enough to carry your forward into whatever it is you choose to do with the degree you’ve earned and are awarded today. And it is this, too, that I would like to talk to you about. What next? What’s to do? Where do you head? How do you carry on?
Let me speak first to those of you who burn to write, who long to make writing your means of putting food on the table and a roof over your head. This is difficult. For most people, it’s not even possible. The world of publishing into which you enter is a world much changed from the world I saw 24 years ago when I signed my first contract. There were no e-books then. There were no ipads. Amazon.com did not exist and the biggest challenge to booksellers at the time was an organization called Crown Books, long gone out of business. I was purchased—if you will—by that rarest of entities in today’s world of publishing. I was purchased by a house that saw in me not a quick ascent to the bestseller list but a long-term career to be developed. This is because in those long ago days of 1986, mega-corporations had not taken over publishing. It was still what’s called “a gentleman’s business,” one in which writers developed relationships with editors and publishers and those relationships lasted decades, even lifetimes. So I was lucky, but I did not know it at the time. I knew only that writing was what I wanted to do and, like some of you, I wanted to do it to put food on the table and a roof over my head.
If that’s who you are, then you must live as if that’s who you are. What I mean by this is that writing must become your job. You must put away everything but the word itself. You must marry the word and make the word primary in your life.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by this, and forgive me for taking it out of my own life, for I do know that nothing’s more tedious than listening to someone drone on about their own experience. But in this case, I have only my own experience to draw from for this particular example. During our recent hot spell—hard to believe it was only last week—a friend phoned in the morning and asked me if I wanted to meet her for a swim that afternoon. A spontaneous occurrence on a very hot day. Very tempting as well. When I declined, she referred to me as a Puritan, tied to my obligations, work-oriented to a fault, driven by demons, and all the rest. To which I proudly tell you now: Yes. All of that is true. Because the work comes first. The work is primary. The work is more important than a cool swim on a very hot day. Plus, for me the work now consists of writing two novels simultaneously, and you cannot do that—no one can—if the work is not primary in your life.
Let me speak second to those of you who know that the pursuit of writing as a means of support is going to be impossible for you because of other obligations. Yet you long to write. You intend to write. You are determined to write when and where you can. To you I say, this is entirely possible and there are scores of people who are out there doing it already. Some work jobs that require nothing of them when they leave the workplace, freeing their minds to write when their workday is done. Some work jobs that are largely physical, freeing their imaginations to plan out writing projects while they fulfill their obligations on the job. Some have careers that make this impossible other than on vacation time, so that is how they use that time, attending writing colonies and retreats, dividing their time between family fun and stretches at the yellow legal pad. But no matter what their situation is, their determination to write, whether that means getting up at 4:00 a.m. to write in advance of the work day or creating one page each day until a project reaches it completion, as did one student of mine when she realized that was the only way she would be able to continue her life as a writer once her twins were born. And that is how she approached her writing, and eighteen months later her first novel was complete.
Then let me speak finally to those of you who don’t quite know yet what the possibilities are for you as a writer. Perhaps you enrolled in this program to “make yourself write.” If that’s the case, there’s a long and difficult road ahead of you because you’re about to discover that freed of the requirements of a program, if you have no discipline, you’re going to have to develop some. And fast. Or perhaps you enrolled in this program because you always wanted to see if you could write. Now you know. You succeeded and for many people that success is enough and that is okay. That’s excellent, in fact. Or perhaps you enrolled to prove something to yourself or to someone else. You have done so. You can go with God.
At the end of the day, what really counts is knowledge, don’t you think? And among all the knowledge a person can gather, what counts the most is knowledge of self. When I finally decided to sit down and write, after having avoided writing for the better part of a decade, my husband at the time watched me create my first novel, and then my second, and then my third and he said to me, “If you’re trying to leave the field of teaching, there are easier ways to do it, you know,” because, you see, that first novel was soundly rejected by everyone and so was the second and they both deserved to be rejected although I couldn’t see that at the time. And I heard this remark with some degree of confusion because, as I explained to him, I wasn’t trying to leave the field of teaching at all. I was merely trying to find my way back to what I had long been intended to do.
I’d reached that point of knowledge in my life. I called it put up or shut up time. I reached it one day when I said to myself “what do you want to say on your deathbed, my dear? ‘I could have written a novel.’ Or ‘I wrote a novel.’”
The answer turned out to be simplicity itself. Most of the time, I find, the answers to big life questions are.
Now is your time to answer your own question, then.
You’ve accomplished this. I congratulate you.
Now what will you do next?
