Seeing the Literary Life

                                                        photo by Marilyn Sanders

Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer
Mirror contributing writer

   With a little creativity, Carolyn See’s small office in the English department at UCLA can accommodate about ten writing and literature students. During her weekly office hours when school is in session, they crowd in, taking chairs from a stack she keeps in the corner, beside bookcases that house a small sample of her and John Espey’s rare book collections.
   Graduates drop by to visit and get a free shot of inspiration. Current students show up with leftover bits of class discussion or to argue about some assignment See has forced upon them. (“Are you serious about the charming notes? What’d’ya mean I have to go to a book signing?”) Chatty ones come to chat because, unlike most professors, See will regard the funny anecdote of your kleptomaniac uncle as perfectly relevant to her class, and she’ll be happy to counter with a tale of her own. The quiet ones, whom I was among during the time I studied with See, come to listen and soak up the possibilities, and to ask a few questions jotted down in advance.
   It was in See’s creative writing class and office hours that I discovered “why I want to write,” but I also learned the practical steps that would get me in print for the first time, things like how to “send something out.” (“Your name and address should go in the upper-left-hand corner...,” “Be sure to put numbers and your name on all the pages, since editors are disorganized.”)
   Fortunately for those aspiring writers who haven’t had access to her delightful presence, See has compiled the secrets of her success as novelist, memoirist and book critic in her newest work, Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers (Random House).
   With its wise but approachable mix of practical, technical, and magical guidance, the book takes readers from the moment they breathlessly set words to paper (or screen) to three months after the publication of their first books.
   Included are the creeds that any See-student can recite: Write a thousand words a day (or revise for two hours), five days a week, for the rest of your life. As often, write one charming note (or make one terrifying phone call) to a literary figure whom you admire, not asking for a favor. And make rejection a process, a “dating game.”
   When See was beginning her own literary life in the early sixties, the writing guide, as a genre, didn’t exist. She gleaned what lessons she could from the writers she loved and whose works she had read over and over, among them Virginia Woolf and Kay Boyle (who recommended those thousand words a day) and E.M. Forster.
   “Back when I was beginning,” she recalls, “women writers had only been published by the bundle for about 35 years, which is no time at all.  So I don’t think [aspiring] women writers had much of a clue how to write. We had Virginia Woolf … studied Virginia Woolf. But she was, first of all, stark staring mad and also depressive and also English and a snob and didn’t have children and didn’t have to work. So her advice doesn’t really ... it counts, but it’s not terribly relevant to the world that you and I find ourselves in.” Boyle, whose experience was perhaps more applicable to See’s (both women had first children and first divorces by age 30), was the first woman writer See had ever read who could look at men as romantic objects in fiction. “She wrote about these guys as though they were part of a landscape and she was the one who was watching,” says See. “It was revolutionary.”
   Very depressed in her youth, she also recalls reading a lot of Nathanael West, over and over. Later on, she says, “some of that depressive literature didn’t sound so good to me anymore. I would look at it and think, Well, get over it. Life is all right, it’s not so bad.” She laughs warmly.
   This is the See her students know. A woman who speaks frankly about how dark things can look, and yet approaches her life and craft with such toughness, compassion, and sense of humor that she exudes a kind of light. In the last couple of years, however, she was thrown into a despairing position, writing, she says, “with what Unamuno would’ve called ‘a tragic sense of life.’” While she was working on the book, her life partner of 27 years, distinguished scholar and writer John Espey, suffered an illness and then died.
   “There’s some line in the book that says, every day I would go out there and work and ‘it was a form of praying’ and I think that’s true,” says See. “Also I had to realize for the first time in my life that writing is not more important than anything else, which is a real shock if you’ve been a writer your whole life ... It’s just another thing we do, killing time until we die.” She smiles, adding, “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just an interesting thing to have found out.”
   A difficult journey yielded a “monster manuscript,” says See, “full of repetition and digression and ranting and raving.” But through the editing process, the book became what its author had envisioned when she began, a guide that “literally tells you how to move it from your head out to the paper and then into print” (“I hate to use the word empowering, but it’s so empowering.”), a guide that speaks not necessarily to the “already successful and sophisticated” but to “the timid, forlorn, and clueless.”
   “I want it for everyone who wants to do it,” she says, “not just the people in New York, and I have nothing against the people in New York, but it’s just, they don’t own it. We all own it.”
   This inclusiveness is another of See’s trademarks. During those crowded sessions in her office, she would always make sure everyone was introduced to everyone else, by first and last name. The idea was that we – public university students in sunny, sinful California, none of us in the “in crowd”— were our own community of writers, and the sooner we started taking each other seriously, the better.
   As lovely as this was, there were times when I wished the office wasn’t so crowded, and sometimes, by weird luck or because there was a holiday weekend coming up, it wasn’t. There were a couple of afternoons when I got to sit alone with this brilliant and kind writer and ask her all the humbling questions that others might not deign to answer. How do I combat my horrible laziness? How do I write a magazine piece? What do I do for money? (All things she would cover in class anyway.)
   Answers to these questions, and loftier ones too, are included in Making a Literary Life, and with its publication, See invites writers of all stripes into her office for a private chat. There she will tell us, as many times as we need to hear it “If you love this world and this craft, they will lift you to a place you can’t begin to imagine.” Words to read over and over.
   Dutton’s Brentwood Books and Random House are celebrating the publication of “Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers” on Thursday, September 5, at 7 p.m., at Dutton’s Books, 11975 San Vicente Boulevard. For more information, visit www.CarolynSee.com.
   Ed. note: Carolyn See is the mother of Mirror Associate Editor Clara Sturak.