Writers on Writing: Fictions, Theories,

This seminar examines how 20th and 21st century writers have staged in their fiction, nonfiction, and multi-genre works ideas about why, how, and for whom they write. What do writers have to say in their essays and public talks about the strategies they use to sit down to their writing, when everything else in the world seems to be requiring their attention elsewhere? How is the figure of the writer and their often-fraught relationship with their work depicted in fictional accounts and in the complex retrospection of memoir and essays? In what ways do writers tether their goals for their work to the needs and experiences of others in communities of which they are a part or that they wish to reach? The course begins with essays and talks that answer the question, “Why I Write” by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, bell hooks, Stephen King as well as philosophical explorations through Helene Cixcous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. These ideas about writers’ motivations will provide launching points for how each of us can begin to theorize our own motives as writers. We will use these ideas as a frame for reading novels that center the figure of the writer including Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, Macedonio Fernández’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), Jenny Offill’s The Department of Speculation, and Colm Tóibín’s The Master. Through the work of essayists and memoirists, Samulet Delaney, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson, we will track how writers wrestle with the political, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of their identity as writers. Our final weeks will invite us to explore writerly advice and strategies for getting the work done. We will listen to podcasts featuring historians, such as Drafting the Past, explore revision strategies in John McPhee’s Draft 4, consider our writerly routines with excerpts from Maria Popova’s literary blog, The Marginalian and distill ideas about the work of research and writing from talks and essays by writers who have influenced each of us at Columbia and beyond. Students will produce their own autotheory of writing to accompany a piece in any genre that they will be drafting over the course of the semester.