On the first day of an introductory fiction-writing course I teach, I ask students to talk about what they read and the writers they hope to emulate in their own work. These days, the reply is often, “I don’t read much.”
This seems especially odd among students who sign up for a fiction-writing class, students presumably interested in becoming writers themselves. What I’ve discovered is that many students sign up for this course not because they are interested in literature, but because they’re interested in stories–character, drama, setting and so on–and most of them associate stories primarily with TV and movies. They come into the class wanting all the right things–to create interesting characters, to render provocative settings and scenes, to shape dramatic action–but they think almost entirely in terms of the screen, not the page.
This scenario is one many college and secondary-school English teachers can probably relate to. Showing students how to do the slow, sustained work of reading literature, what I call deep reading, is a continuous process in literature courses and writing courses that rely heavily on reading. As the well-known statistics point out, the average 19-year-old today has watched thousands of hours of TV but has probably done little serious reading outside of school. I can relate to this because I was also raised in a TV generation.
Like most kids coming of age in the ’80s, I learned the essentials of narrative not through Homer, Shakespeare and the Old Testament, but through “Grizzly Adams” and “Star Wars.” I only discovered deep reading in college, when I first came across the novels of Jack Kerouac–my first encounter with all the things words can do that images can’t.
Another generational attitude I tend to share with my students is a suspicion of the supposably “civilizing” capacities of Great Books–the idea that spending an evening alone reading “King Lear” is any more innately ennobling than spending an evening fixing your car or going to a baseball game with your kids. Presentation is an important part of this: Today’s students seem highly wary of literature professors who try to pass themselves off as tweedy high priests of culture. I also try to avoid the temptation to wage a smear campaign against the banalities of TV and movies (if only because this would make me an enormous hypocrite). In fact I often rely on them to help create a common language for beginning fiction writers. Explaining a scene break in a story as a “fade to black,” for example, gets the general idea across quickly and clearly.
The point is not about convincing students that literature is “better” than film, but helping them see all the things writers can do through language that they can’t do through other media. As Sven Birkerts says in “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”:
“(Literature) has the singular advantage that it can stimulate inward process and explore states of consciousness in ways not available to other expressive arts.”
Another advantage of literature is its highly participatory nature. More than any other artistic form, it is a collaboration between artist and audience; any single “performance” of a great story or poem is only as good as its reader. These are empowering ideas for readers and writers.
As I’ve invested more time and effort in selling deep reading in my classes, I’ve also discovered other, less-obvious things it offers students. Like most younger people in our culture, my students’ lives are filled to bursting with activity, as well with sights and sounds. One of the pleasures–and requirements–of deep reading is silence, something many of us have trouble finding these days. (This is true even in places dedicated to higher learning: The lounge in our student union has a giant-screen TV that blares soap operas all afternoon.) When we do find that still, silent place, and an hour to spend there, we have to fight the nagging feeling that we should be doing something busier and noisier. I realize I’ve internalized this as a teacher, in the ways I often avoid even momentary lapses into silence in the classroom, especially during class discussions. Better to fill the empty space with my own aimless chatter than allow for a silent moment after I’ve posed a question to which no one has an immediate response. And just as deep reading provides an occasion for reflective quiet, it also provides a temporary sanctuary from the relentless onslaught of the image. As the boundaries between entertainment and advertising increasingly collapse in the popular arts, literature seems a safe space, a place to engage with character and narrative outside the influence of image-driven commercialism.
The ubiquitous and pervasive power of the image creeps into my fiction-writing class in myriad subtle ways. In a recent discussion with a student about a story she had written, I pointed out that her central character, a teenage girl, was given only the sketchiest personality traits. “She’s a lot like Clare Danes,” the student told me. “On the surface she seems vulnerable and uncertain, but below the surface there’s this strength, this assuredness.”
What this student meant, I think, was that her character resembles characters the actress Clare Danes has portrayed in movies and on TV. It’s something I come across more and more with student writers–the tendency to cast their embryonic creations as brand-name movie actors, like a producer pitching his project to studio execs. Mainstream movies, in which character is almost always mediated through celebrity, condition us to think this way. I encourage students to fully claim their creative autonomy as fiction writers, not to let Hollywood circumscribe their imaginative visions. The characters we encounter in good stories are not actors acting–at least not until the book is made into a movie. They are simply themselves.
One of the distinguishing features of literature has always been its capacity to work against the grain of common wisdom–to shine light into the corners of our lives we’re inclined to turn away from, or to show us ordinary things in new detail. In this way, the content of literature has often been somewhat countercultural. These days, it is literature’s form that seems countercultural, even quietly subversive: a form that requires us to sit silently in a room alone, momentarily unavailable to advertisers, immersed in a piece of technology that hasn’t changed much in the last 500 years. The act of deep reading cuts sharply against the grain of contemporary life–one of many reasons why it is such a valuable thing to learn to do well.
