"CONFIRMATORY" WRITING

The kind of books that are booming now, especially on ebook gizmos, are “immersive” -- strong narrative theme, maybe fiction and maybe not. The kind of book that sweeps you into a forcefield, another world, that holds your attention so strongly that you forget all about the time and have to go out for dinner because you didn’t peel any potatoes early enough to boil. Non-readers sink into movies the same way, but they will not remember long ago being called by their mothers to do chores and begging for “just one more page”!

I don’t quite know how to describe the kind of books I read, partly because they are an assortment. Non-fiction that is research, like the brain function books I’ve been exploring; “high” literary Western writing of many kinds including Native American books; deliberate but limited forays into genre writing like pulp Westerns; sci-fi of some kinds, and -- oh, I confess -- Maeve Binchy. Plus censored and verboten books. I started reading every Montana writer’s book I could find and still do that some, especially the women, but the category has sort of dissolved. Now they’re all over in Portland. Or don’t write anymore.

It’s only logical that people should “write what they know” because what choice do they have? Whether anyone would want to read it is another question entirely. To publishers that’s the crucial question: will people buy this book? They care nothing about any other dimension or quality. If immersive sells, that’s what they buy and promote. If scandal sells, THAT’s what they buy and promote.

To the reader it’s a matter of personal taste. Do I “like” this? Do I want to keep reading? Do I want to read other books like this?

To the writer a book could be almost anything. A shedding of ghosts. An analysis of survival. A scrapbook of lost things. The seeds of tomorrow. If you’re a writer, people will ask you “have you been published?” To them it is the dividing line between amateur and professional. If you’re not published, you’re not really a writer. It’s the criterion for a lot of memberships in organizations, as though it were a college degree. It says, “someone more important than you thinks this is a worthy writer.” That’s what people THINK it means, esp. if the book has won prizes. But in fact it only means that the book sold, it made money for the publisher. Or if it didn’t, there’s one pissed-off publisher somewhere.

Self-published puts all that stuff in the whirling machine. Some things are too good for any publisher. Some things are just fine being published for a defined group: proceedings of conferences, repair manuals, family memoirs, porn.

The point of some writing is the actual procedure of writing which can be a kind of self-education or auto-psychoanalysis or growing process or safety valve. If a person I care about is doing this kind of writing, I’m very much absorbed in it, because it’s a window to a soul, but I probably get too interested in the writer and so do others. It radiates passion-vibes.

Most people don’t know “how” to write which is why they get writer’s block. All they know is how to spell (with a little help from spell-check if they think of it) and string words together, but they don’t know how to access their sub-verbal being, which is really where the writing lives. Down in there someplace is the fuse and the bomb and the debris. What one writes is the debris. You have to figure out the rest. But no two people write the same way. Despair, revenge, true love, bad habits -- they all get into the mix.

In 1961 when I first began to teach public school, I signed up for the Famous Writers course. It was a LOT of money, which mostly went for stuff you didn’t need, like special paper with a Famous Writers logo at the top. That outfit made a mint for decades until someone finally uncovered the scam: the idea was to sign you up for a contract you couldn’t escape and then give you uninspired assignments. If you doggedly sent them back, there was a panel of supposed experts (meaning people who couldn’t make a living writing) who tore your writing into shreds. The bloodied endurance champions who kept on with it didn’t learn a damned thing, because all the criticism was grammar, usage, and stock remarks like “don’t be pretentious” and “show don’t tell.” What the hell are those supposed to mean? It depends on what you’re writing, doesn’t it? And who you are? The goal of these hired critics was to kill your ego. They were good at it.

Confirmatory writing is quite the opposite, more like the teacher who tries to be encouraging by strategically praising what fits a general consensus of what writing ought to be like. Which means establishing what sort of writing is in hand. I mean, if you are writing something that confirms the ideas of a suburban liberal, that will be quite different from writing a story about small town set-in-their-ways recently-immigrated populations. If those two “kinds” are pitched against each other in a story, one faction will want the green horn slicker to be showed up and the other faction will want the rural guy to look like a hick. (And maybe a convincing story about the two types collaborating and becoming friends would sell pretty well.) I will tell you this: I met very few teachers besides myself who would allow the kids to write about their real lives, and with good reason. I sometimes wondered whether I should call the police.

Confirmatory writing always has a happy ending. Everything turns out all right, meaning that it meets with the approval of the person reading. Presumably the writer wanted it to turn out that way as well, but consider Debra Magpie Earling who could not sell “Perma Red” for ten years until she finally buckled and wrote an ending that falsified the reality she had wanted. And she’s Native American which for a while was supposed to be a guarantee of saleability.

Confirmatory writing sticks to what is expected, so Doig “must” write pinafore stories about cowboy country and Hillerman “must” write cop tales about the SW. Territory too new, too much shock, and the book won’t sell. I always wonder what it would be like to read what these well-established writers REALLY know.

PS: Two of my self-published books are available as ebooks for the Nook. Go to Barnes & Noble and look for Mary Scriver. One is the story the 7th grade in Heart Butte composed collaboratively in 1989 and the other is about my exploits in Portland as a lady dogcatcher in the Seventies. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether they are confirmatory.