This is a tough sell to students rooted in social realism, and young writers without the imagination to move beyond autobiographical fiction--namely, to that host of first novelists who treat a novel as nothing but a thinly masked rendition of their lives up to that point.
Nor are the earliest efforts young writers make to escape autobiographical fiction necessarily successful. A student of mine at Iowa--a brilliant fellow, academically; he would go on to earn a Ph.D. in something I can't even pronounce or spell--wrote an accomplished, lucid short story about a dinner party from the point of view of the hostess's fork.
If you think this sounds fascinating, my case is already lost. Indeed, the young writer's fellow students worshiped this story and the young genius who wrote it; they regarded my all-too-apparent indifference to the fork story as an insult not only to the author but to all of them. Ah, to almost all of them, for I was saved by a most unlikely and usually most silent member of the class. He was an Indian from Kerala, a devout Christian, and his accent and word order caused him to be treated dismissively--as someone who was struggling with English as a second language, although this was not the case. English was his first language, and he spoke and wrote it very well; the unfamiliarity of his accent and the cadence, even of his written sentences, made the other students regard him lightly.
Into the sea of approval that the fork story was receiving, and while my "but . . ." was repeatedly drowned out by the boisterous air of celebration in the class, the Indian Christian from Kerala said, "Excuse me, but perhaps I would have been moved if I were a fork. Unfortunately, I am merely a human being."
That day, and perhaps forever after, he should have been the teacher and I should have given my complete attention to him. He is not a writer these days, except on the faithful Christmas cards he sends from India, where he is a doctor. Under the usual holiday greetings, and the annual photograph of his increasing family, he writes in a firm, readable hand: "Still merely a human being."
On my Christmas cards to him, I write: "Not yet a fork."
(I used to say this to my students in Creative Writing: the wonderful and terrifying thing about the first page of paper that awaits the first sentence of your next book is that this clean piece of paper is completely unimpressed by your reputation, or lack thereof; that blank page has not read your previous work--it is neither comparing you to its favorite among your earlier novels nor is it sneering in memory of your past failures. That is the absolutely exhilarating and totally frightening thing about beginning--I mean each and every new beginning. That is when even the most experienced teacher becomes a student again and again.)
And what about the fork author--where is he today? In Boston, I believe; more pertinent, he's a published novelist--and a good one. I much admired his first novel, and was overall relieved to see that the characters in it were human beings--no cutlery among them.
Alas, these generally pleasant memories should not conceal the fact that I must have played the Nelson Algren role to more than one of my writing students. I'm certain that I've hurt the feelings of young writers who were more serious and gifted than I judged them to be. But just as Mr. Algren didn't harm me by his blunt and (I think) unfair assessment, I doubt that I have harmed any real writers; real writers, after all, had better get used to being misunderstood.
When it happens to me, I just remind myself of what Ted Seabrooke told me: "That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it."
The Imaginary Girlfriend (1995)