Richard Bausch Thinks You Can Never Permanently Ruin a Piece of Writing (And Other Tidbits)

Richard Bausch’s collection, The Fate of Others, is available now from Knopf, so we asked him a few questions about writer’s block, rereading, bad writing advice, and more.

What time of day do you write (and why)?

 I’m quite fortunate in that I have always been able to work in various circumstances. This may be attributable to my having begun while I was in the Air Force, teaching Survival and the use of survival equipment (parachutes, survival kits for fighter jets, sea survival with inflatable rafts, etc.), and living in a barracks among disparate others from far away and often from other countries.

I wrote my first novel, Real Presence, mostly between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m., sitting at a big quartermaster’s desk in the dining room of an old converted hunter’s cabin. But I have on many occasions since worked at all the hours: in the mornings, mid-afternoons, evenings, and still, often enough, in the middle of the night.

I have never applied to and never used any kind of artist’s residency or time at a colony or a retreat; I always said that I wanted to write about Life, and in order to do so I felt I needed to be elbow deep in life. But it’s also true that the few times I’ve been isolated by circumstance, as when touring a book or spending a visiting writer appointment at colleges, I’ve actually found it rather difficult to muster the necessary will to write.

Anyway, the door to my studio is always open when I’m working at home on something, and I have no fear of interruption or distraction. Writing is terribly difficult to do well, of course—and I have always found it so, but I work in the faith that the matter of it, whatever any story or novel or poem is built on—none of that ever truly gets lost. If the writing is any good, the deepest aspects of it will be there, even if they are re-surfacing.

How do you tackle writers block?

Ninety-nine percent of writer’s block is actually rather classically at the level of psychosomatic trouble. Imagined barriers.

My old friend William Stafford, that strangely, beautifully renewing and incandescent poet, gave the best answer I ever heard when asked what the solution to the problem might be. This took place at a reading he gave in 1981 at George Mason University, where I had brought him as a visiting poet. Someone in the audience asked, “What should I do about writer’s block?”

He smiled sweetly, patiently and, nodding, said, “Lower your standards and keep on going.” Some folks in that audience took that as a joke. It was not a joke. It was profoundly perfect advice. (Nearly the equivalent of the Chinese Proverb: that if you give a fish to a hungry man, you’ve fed him for one day; but if you teach that man how to fish, you’ve fed him for a lifetime).

In any case, I have repeated Stafford’s advice many times. Because, as I’ve often pointed out to my students, YOU CANNOT PERMANENTLY RUIN A PIECE OF WRITING. You cannot damage it or break it, or harm it in any permanent way. It is not made of glass, or stone.

On your worst day as a writer you can only render it as needing for you to go over it again. That’s what revision is all about, and that’s where the real artistry is, anyway.

Hemingway’s famous writer’s block was in fact predominantly a psychological breakdown: a result of repeated shocks to his brain from too much alcohol (a bottle or two of white wine before breakfast; and then on through the day, red wine and daiquiris and straight whiskey or vodka; he said it was like fuel).

Moreover, it’s now quite clear that at the sad end, he was suffering from CTE: chronic traumatic encephalopathy—the disease of football players and boxers. He’d had at least nine serious concussions over the years.

So. If one is a person who has these problems, then, yes, that block is real, and earned, shall we say. But in the particular instance, the trouble is more physical than anything else, and the person is in need of a doctor, not a therapist or writing coach.

If one’s block is of the much more common psychosomatic kind, then the sufferer is supplying their own obstacles, which can be overcome simply by keeping on with it. If one feels it’s shitty, and doesn’t know how to “fix” it, one should try it from another angle, or point of view, one should move with it.

“Visit it every day,” my dear friend Mary Lee Settle said to me when I was struggling with my second novel, “Let it know you’re there.” And to that I add, Shake it up, take the trouble, remember the comment that genius is nothing more than an infinite capacity for taking pains; let it teach you what it is, go back and make your way through it again. And then again. And still again if it comes to that.

I believe that each time through, I get a little smarter about it, I’m educating myself about it. Heading for the truest goal: something beyond my conscious intention, separate from me and all my neuroses regarding it: a created thing. Itself. A real story. The one I often find that I didn’t know I was writing. And the one that no one else but I could have written. Because the true key to originality for a writer, is arriving at one’s truest self.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

There are two pieces of advice that enjoy general currency, and they are untrue often enough to qualify for something not to say to an inexperienced writer. The first is “Write what you know.”

This one has fed into the recent fanatical infantilizing of American Art and culture—something about which I believe future generations will laugh at us—and is in fact completely antithetical to the act itself, of writing fiction. My dear late friend Allen Wier, a great writer, told me once about reading a section of his novel Tehano (which in my judgment rivals Tolstoy), a section that involved a raid by Commanches, led by one of his major characters, a brave named Two Talks.

And after the reading, Allen told me, an English professor in the gathered assembly stood and said, “I wonder how you came to the decision to colonize your Native American characters so?” Allen, after a pause, being the gracious man he was, simply said, “I don’t know how to answer that except to say that I believe in the power of the human imagination.”

So. As advice, “Write what you know” is finally false. And I have worked very hard to write through the nets of complication in my own being and my own experience to realize what I don’t know—or, to put it more precisely, to discover what I didn’t know I knew.

The second piece of what actually adds up to bad advice is “show don’t tell.” That occurs usually and all too often in lectures and workshops, and it is actually only true in certain instances. And in those instances where it applies one must work extremely hard to make it give forth what isn’t told.

But in my travels in the writing workshops around the country I see dozens upon dozens of pages of bad prose, constructed with great care and containing heaps of contextless talk instead of dialogue, and meaningless gestures and detailed actions, overwrought with portentous passages given in the mistaken idea that holding everything back creates drama. This stems from the grievously wrong belief that the reader will turn the page out of curiosity alone, because the writer is showing and not telling.

But the fact is that curiosity alone is never enough to make someone turn the page. In fact, contextless prose is always dull, always so devoid of real tension that even kindly-disposed readers will turn away.

Because, again, the real truth of narrative interest is that it’s what the reader KNOWS that makes the drama, and creates the kind of curiosity that makes him turn the page. And therefore the real best advice for the writer is to try never to forget that a good story is always a matter of show AND tell, and the writer has to figure out—with each story, long or short—when to do the one and when to do the other.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

From beloved Shawn Colvin, this beautiful line: “And if there were no music, then I would not get through, and I don’t know why, I know these things, but I do.”

Which book(s) do you reread?

I’m rereading War and Peace for the sixth time (first read it when I was nineteen), I’m rereading The Great Gatsby for about the forty-sixth time (been reading it almost every year since 1971, when I first read it). Others, Anna Karenina (five), Chekhov’s stories and plays, and the stories of Katherine Anne Porter (over and over), of John Cheever (the same); Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, George Garrett, Vasily Aksyonov, William Maxwell, Mary Lee Settle, Grace Paley, William Styron, James Baldwin. (All, repeatedly.)

I reread a lot. Including history and biography, and poetry. All the poets. Over and over.

And of course I have a whole lot of friends my age and younger to keep current with; beginning with my wife Lisa Cupolo, whose first book of stories, Have Mercy On Us caused a sweet stir across the literary landscape in ’23.

My colleagues and friends are all very productive, and as my old pal Richard Ford said once in an interview about our generation of writers: “We haven’t wasted a lot of time pissing on each other’s shoes. We like each other, and we celebrate each other’s successes and grieve each other’s losses, too.”

And, for me, I always had my identical twin brother, Robert Bausch, who wrote brilliant novels and stories, to read and reread. Among them, The White Rooster, and Other Stories; and the novels, Almighty Me, A Hole in the Earth, The Lives of Riley Chance, In the Fall They Come Back, Far as the Eye Can See, and The Legend of Jesse Smoke.

As John Berryman said somewhere in one of The Dream Songs, I think: “Work and pals. Work and pals.” Yes.

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The Fate of Others by Richard Bausch is available via Knopf.