THE PINCH OF DEATH – Writing a novel for class

After my fiancé graduated law school in Kentucky, we came East – where our families lived – to get married. I applied to Brooklyn College for the MFA program and was hired as a writing fellow. What followed was an experience so discouraging I can well understand why graduate students are at a high risk of suicide.

First, there’s the contrast between the high prestige of the position and the pitiable pay. You could literally make more money (and spend the same amount of time) combing the subway for lost change.

Next, there’s the “job” they want you to do, which is to prepare seriously undereducated freshman to write an essay justifying their admission into the hallowed world of academe.

I had fun developing my own syllabus, which was basically teaching critical thinking in the most fun way I could possibly imagine. A teacher “reviewer” who came to watch the class wrote me a rave review – I don’t think anyone in my life has ever praised me as much as he did. I still cherish that evaluation. But don’t get excited – the second guy (months later) disparaged me so much that if you add the two reviews together I think you’d have to give me a sad C-. But at that point, They Knew About Me – that I had no college degree -and so they were trying to get rid of me. Really, you can’t blame them – how could I prepare students to get something I didn’t have myself? And what – you may ask – was wrong with MY thinking and reasoning powers that I had not expected this?

The truth is, I had flouted “rules” all my life – they always seemed ridiculous – and because I was a “rara avis” I usually got away with it. But clearly, this could not continue. Much chastened by my brush with the universe (which represented itself as “sanity”) I did go ahead and get a BA degree in psychology from LaSalle. I even got half a masters under my belt from Springfield College until I saw that it was useless.

But back to Brooklyn. There were classes I took, of course, in WRITING – which was my absorbing interest and passion. I kept the fact that I had actually published a novel a secret because the class expressed such a tragic belief that being published was their deepest desire and most desperate and holy quest. I knew that it was the writing of the book itself – finding the subject AND the expression that was your spiritual release into the world – that was the most important absorbing and exciting. My first book was written to specifications – what was “popular” – under the ingenuous theory that I would develop important publishing relationships (my editor lost her job, my company bought out and revamped.) You could hardly brag about an experience like that.

For my class on the Novel I decided to write a novel. I thought it would be fun. If you wrote a chapter every week you would have a novel at the end.

One of my classmates was an ex-nun – a most interesting person – whose experiences strongly affected me. I effortlessly adapted her into my heroine, because my book was a mystery. Surely these are the easiest to write – they must evolve according to a plan. You have to introduce the problem, then the suspects, give clues, and make the reader care about the outcome. I had an idea it would be less emotional than my first book, which got bogged down into a bizarre love story about a fatherless girl pathetically seeking mentorship. THIS book would be all business.

I got such massive pushback from the class I’m kind of surprised I went through with it – but I was enjoying the writing and the characters were alive to me. “Criticism” in class was students laboriously reading each others’ work, describing its emotional effect on them and describing different ways things could be said. The forward motion of a novel – the sweep, the assumption of power – was thereby utterly dissipated. Everyone just rewrote the first chapters of different books endlessly. So it shouldn’t have been called “Novel Writing”, it should have been called “Paragraph Writing” – a class I wouldn’t take.

This teacher and I butted heads on all kinds of issues. First off, he said great writing couldn’t have a “happy ending.” I saw his point but I thought it shallow. Surely completion of a quest – solving a mystery – is an enormous relief. But mysteries aren’t serious writing, he insisted. (Uh oh. Since I was engaged on one.) Well, what about the Odyssey? Jane Austen? {Probably Tom Jones, if I could recall the ending.)

MODERN literature!! He insisted. We can’t have happy endings anymore!

That was when I realized the whole thing was bogus. If I was bogus, they were even more bogus. I was eight months’ pregnant at the time and this man’s feeble philosophy defied the spinning of the planets, the arrival of spring, the creation of Life itself. What a silly fellow.

I finished Pinch of Death, and still reread it with pleasure, A very charming book.