Senior Celebration Speech 2010

When I was your age and an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, I came across an anthology of young writers in the university bookstore entitled 20 under 35, and I thought to myself, with all the hubris of youth, “Thirty-five? That’s not young, that’s old!” I was quite certain that by the decrepit age of thirty-five, I would have already set the literary world ablaze. Well, thirty-five has come and gone, and I’ve yet to publish the Great Canadian Novel. When a friend of mine, also a writer, turned thirty-five without having published a book, he rued that fact that he could no longer be, as he put, a “boy wonder.” 

In an article for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes, “Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity.” After all, Orson Wells made Citizen Kane at twenty-five. James Joyce wrote “The Dead” at twenty-five, years after he’d already written the other groundbreaking stories in Dubliners. Even more precociously, Jonathan Safran Foer wrote Everything is Illuminated at nineteen. But the story Gladwell chooses to tell is that of a writer named Ben Fountain. Fountain was a few years out of law school when he decided to quit his job and take up fiction writing, something he’d only done in a couple of creative writing classes in college. Here’s how Gladwell tells the rest of the story:

In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Ché Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking”…

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.

No doubt there are boy and girl wonders among you—I’ve seen such promise with my own eyes—but the fact remains, most writers take the path of Ben Fountain, not Jonathan Safran Foer. Most of us are not prodigies but late bloomers, and that means our literary apprenticeship will be long, possibly very long. At first blush, this may seem like sobering news, especially to those who’ve just invested a lot of time and energy to say nothing of money in what they presumed was their education as a writers, but actually it’s heartening, because it means that talent, even genius, isn’t a preternatural gift but something that can be achieved through application. In his book How the Mind Works, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, formerly of MIT and now at Harvard, has this to say about genius:

Geniuses are wonks. The typical genius pays dues for at least ten years before contributing anything of lasting value… During the apprenticeship, geniuses immerse themselves in their genres. They absorb tens of thousands of problems and solutions, so no challenge is completely new and they can draw on a vast repertoire of motifs and strategies… They work day and night, and leave us with many works of subgenius… They do not repress a problem but engage in ‘creative worrying,’ and the epiphany is not a masterstroke but a tweaking of an earlier attempt. They revise endlessly, gradually closing in on their deal.

This description of genius across disciplines sounds remarkably like, of course, the life of a writer, reading prodigiously and turning out draft after draft. This is the life you can expect for years to come, which begs the question, how does one endure the long apprenticeship? How does one make it from twenty-two to thirty-five or even forty-eight? There’s probably no one answer, but here are three things I would urge you to do:

First, set high standards and be patient. It’s worth noting that after he starting publishing, Ben Fountain “adjusted his expectations and started again.” I take this to mean that he became less interested in simply publishing than producing work of high literary merit. When you’re young, by all means, publish your work wherever you can. A young writer needs encouragement, and nothing is more encouraging than seeing your work in print. But at some point, if you’re serious about your art, adjust your expectations—that is, raise the bar—and don’t let your work out into the world until you’ve met them.

Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust was a Neuroscientist, recently gave a talk here at IC during which he discussed something called the marshmallow task. The task involves placing a marshmallow in front of a four year-old and telling her that if she can resist eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes, she will be given two marshmallows. Resisting the marshmallow, of course, is tortuous for most four year-olds, and many give in before fifteen minutes are up. Apparently, no other test—IQ, what have you—no other test is a more accurate predictor of future success than the marshmallow task. Translation: successful people have the ability to delay gratification. So my advice is: delay publication until you meet your own high standards—standards shaped, of course, by reading the best things you can get your hands on.

The second thing: be disciplined and work tirelessly. As Pinker says, geniuses work day and night. Ben Fountain started every morning at 7:30 and wrote until lunchtime, then lay down and closed his eyes for twenty minutes before writing for a few more hours. Novelist Émile Zola instructed a young Paul Cézanne to paint every morning from six to eleven, then go to the Louvre and copy the masters from noon till four for a tidy nine-hour workday. “I think that ought to be enough,” Zola wrote.  As I like to say, the only difference between those who are writers and those who are not is that writers get the work done. Richard Bausch says, work harder on your writing than anything else in your life. He says the only question to ask is, did I work today? If the answer is yes, that’s it, good enough. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says, “Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.” And Lorrie Moore says, “Finally, there is no formula outside the sick devotion to the work.”

The third thing: find support. What late bloomers need, according to Gladwell, is someone to see them through the long and difficult time it takes for their art to mature. Cézanne, the ultimate late bloomer whose best work came in his sixties, was sustained for decades by a circle of friends that included Zola and fellow painter Camille Pissarro. Even Cézanne’s father, who disapproved of his son’s ambitions, grudgingly supported him financially. Ben Fountain’s wife worked so that he could write, and she didn’t flinch when he made research trips to Haiti, not even when he went for the thirtieth time. As Gladwell puts it, “Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories.” In graduate school, I was asked the party game question: What would you rather have, true love or success as a writer? Turns out, you need one to have the other. You don’t necessarily have to marry another writer, like I did—doesn’t always work as well as it does for us—but you should, as Lorrie Moore says, “live with someone who can cook and who will both be with one and leave one alone.” Hopefully, your time here in the Department of Writing has given you a basis in friendship and even love that will see you through to the very end.

Here’s the good news: because you recognized your passion for writing sooner than later, and because you’ve gotten the chance to study with my generous and talented colleagues, you’ve read better books, written better essays, poems, and stories, and thought better thoughts than Ben Fountain did and certainly I did at twenty-two. So you’re much farther along in your apprenticeship than either of us at your age, and justified in your confidence that, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, you will succeed. However, should you reach the ripe old age of thirty-five without having achieved all of your goals and begin to feel doubt, as I have, or even lost, as I have; should life’s vicissitudes blow you off the bright straight course mapped by youth; should you have trouble mustering the courage to ask your father for yet another loan or your beloved for permission to go to Haiti or Morocco or Siberia for the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth time; should your four years at Ithaca College begin to look like a halcyon but possibly misbegotten and strangely distant episode in your life, remember the immortal Flaubert, who said, “Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation”; remember that this is the life you wanted, not just a day or a year but a lifetime of reading and writing; and remember, above all, that you, like most, are simply a late bloomer, and you still have time.