Writers Discuss Their Creativity : Conference Covers Various Aspects of the Written Word

The blank page is God’s way of letting you know how hard it is to be God.

--Writer Craig Vetter, as quoted by writer Bob Reichle.

That saying spoke directly to the subject of Bob Reichle’s workshop--”Writer’s Block and Reader’s Block: Nazi Voices in the Brain”--recently at the seventh annual “Writing for Your Life” conference at Loyola Marymount University.

However, most of the day’s speakers--and the 500 writers and would-be writers who gathered for the conference--focused more on the pleasures and/or the responsibilities of writers than on the pains of composition. And most did not refer specifically to a higher power.

Yet religious notes were struck here and there: whether it was well-known children’s book writer Jane Yolen talking about stories’ mythological underpinnings, or horror novelist William Relling Jr. saying he has “exploited” elements of his “strong religious background” to make his work spookier, or mainstream writer John Irving reading excerpts from a novel-in-progress about “the persecution of a truly religious character in a society that really doesn’t have any values.”

How to Write Better

From 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on a recent Saturday, high school and college students mingled with older professional and beginning writers, listened to speeches by cartoonist B. Kliban and others and chose among workshops on how to cope with literary agents and word processors, how to fix your screenplay and how to get past the secretary. But mostly they talked about how to write better--whether it be academic, public relations, newspaper, radio, play, screenplay, magazine, fiction or poetry writing. Many conference speakers emphasized what Yolen called “the most important thing about being writers--that we’re storytellers,” but not everyone thought stories should be told clearly. In a talk called “Ten Wrong Reasons Why I Write,” novelist Chuck Rosenthal said that it was not until he learned to “forget completely about logic, causality, communication and reality” that he began to write well.

With “Loop’s Progress,” the fourth novel he’s written but the only one that’s been published, the Loyola assistant English professor said he stopped worrying about whether readers and editors would like his writing. He also disciplined himself to write 400 to 600 words a day by following the writing rule that “if you’re stuck, take your characters to the zoo” to keep the story moving.

“For the most part I have no idea what I want to say until after I write it down,” Rosenthal said. “I don’t write in any way to portray reality. I’m more interested in language, not in communicating scenes (although) the scene setting is inevitable if you’re a storyteller.” However, he confessed, “It often takes a whole lot of rewriting not to make any sense.”

The importance of “soldiering on” (making oneself write) was stressed by Yolen, who said she’s just sold her 99th book. “One doesn’t wait for inspiration to hit, rather one finds inspiration when the fingers hit the typewriter keys,” she said. “You don’t write for an audience, and you don’t write for applause, you write because there’s a story inside of you and it has to come out.”

Writes on Typewriter

Yolen, who lives near Amherst, Mass., and is the president of Science Fiction Writers of America, writes both adult and children’s literary fairy tales and fantasies. She gets her best ideas “in the car traveling at 55 miles an hour, in the shower, and right when I’m about to fall asleep--always places where I’m inaccessible to children or to the telephone,” she said. She writes daily from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on a typewriter rather than a computer because she’s afraid of losing material through a computer glitch. “I’m like the Delphic oracle, with the stories pouring through,” Yolen said, and “I literally don’t remember” what’s been written in a first draft.

Yolen said she’s been able to write so many books while raising three children because “my husband is a saint. We eat a lot of pizza and the house is not terribly clean.” Formerly a teacher, now a full-time writer and public speaker, Yolen also long ago trained her children (who are now 16, 18 and 20) to know “that unless they were bleeding from an important orifice, they should not bother me when my fingers were on the typewriter keys,” Yolen said. “Other than that, I was always available.”

Wrote as a Child

Yolen said she began writing as a very young child. In contrast, Bay Area cartoonist B. Kliban (who refused to say what the B stands for) did not get launched on his artistic career until after he had worked as a merchant seaman, a short-order cook, and a postal employee, among other jobs.

Kliban made it clear that the conference’s setting--the largest Catholic coeducational university in Los Angeles--was having an effect on him. “In keeping with my religious beliefs, I thought I’d start this off with a reading from the South Bay Yellow Pages,” Kliban said, and proceeded to read off the phone book’s dermatologists’ listings (a joke that was not appreciated by all attendees--”What was that about?” one bewildered student muttered afterward).

Kliban was invited to the conference because “the captions he has to concoct (for his cartoons) are an incredible art form,” according to Loyola writing programs and conference director Linda Bannister. Kliban showed slides of his oil paintings, watercolors, designs for record album covers and posters, early caricatures, sketches and the cat drawings that made him famous. “I was a cartoonist a long time before I knew it. I finally accepted the fact that some of us have to be cartoonists,” Kliban told the audience.

Success With Playboy

Kliban said he officially began cartooning 26 years ago, with the sale of a few drawings to Playboy magazine. Later he began making whimsical cat cartoons to convey his sense that “cats look at us as some kind of difficult-to - manage cattle . . . sort of a cross between servants and cows,” he said. The drawings piled up, and “the next thing I knew, there was a cat book, and it took off and dragged me after it.” Yet without his earlier, quick success with Playboy, “I don’t know if I would have been a cartoonist,” Kliban said.

However, quick success was not stressed in some of the conference’s more nuts-and-bolts sessions. In a workshop called “Adventures in the Scream Trade,” newly published horror novelist Relling (“Brujo,” TOR Books) stressed the importance of persistence in writing, and the need to “tap some sort of universal emotion in an audience” when spinning a horror fantasy. In his own writing, he likes to draw upon “universal fears” of disfigurement, darkness and children getting lost, said Relling, a part-time Loyola English instructor.

Reared as a Protestant, Relling doesn’t “think of myself as a religious person but as an ethical one” who believes the essence of horror stories’ “scary stuff” lies in a struggle between good and evil. “I believe that, in fiction, good has to win. Otherwise, we’re in real trouble.”

‘Nazi Voices in Brain’

In his writer’s block workshop, Loyola English professor Reichle said the “Nazi voices in the brain” are both social and personal. Those voices, which say things like “ ‘I can’t write as well as that other person,’ ” result from a common “lack of writing strategies . . . . It isn’t so much that you’re being blocked as that you do not know what to do,” Reichle said. These “voices” may falsely tell a reader or writer what’s “right” and “wrong” in literature, he added, and it requires courage to overcome them and explore new material. It requires courage to overcome them, he said, adding that writing “is a blood sport, one takes a risk at it . . . .”

Is it a sport all should take up? Not necessarily, Richard Mitchell seemed to say.

“In some cities of America, there is a shortage of taxis,” said Mitchell, a New Jersey-based essayist who writes and publishes a journal called “The Underground Grammarian.” “In some places there is a shortage of men’s bathrooms. Of writers, there is no shortage. I do not hear people going around in the streets, saying: ‘What we need are more writers.’ I would have you consider that.”

‘Tell the Truth’

For those who are determined to write, Mitchell said, “the one thing a writer must do is tell the truth . . . .” A writer must admit that “I have been wrong, all my life; I have lied; I have been saying that which I knew would please; I have been ignorant of myself.” He has never found writing easy or pleasurable, Mitchell admitted, “and if you take up writing seriously, I hope that it will make you profoundly unhappy. I hope that every day you rise up from your desk and say, ‘What a fool I was yesterday!’

At day’s end, best-selling novelist John Irving (“The World According to Garp” and other books) was scheduled to talk about “The World According to John Irving.” Rather than giving a formal talk or taking questions, the New York-based writer read several scenes from his current project, “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which he called a half-finished “miracle novel wherein there is considerable room for doubt” about the nature of religious miracles. “I’m writing about a character who himself believes he’s a ‘chosen one,’” Irving said. “And there’s some evidence in the novel to support this, and some evidence to indicate he’s insane.”

Among those drawn to the conference by Irving’s presence was Charles Mepham, a “budding writer” from Glendale.

Mepham, who graduated from Loyola Law School in 1953, described himself as “a retired lawyer who’s trying to write his novel . . . . Every Irishman thinks he’s got a novel in him,” but “it takes a long time to find out what you want to be when you grow up. I had to wait 56 years.”