6 | The Writer • November 2019
appears we are born with the correct
instincts, but by the time we’ve grown
up, we’ve forgotten how it’s done.
I myself am oldish (though not yet
elderly) and by now have had quite a
bit of experience falling down in both
the literal and figurative senses. Much
of this is just normal human falling
down, but I feel that being a writer
has given me more experience than
average. If you are considering
becoming a writer yourself, you
should know that writers are subject
to quite a lot of falling down. This can
be shocking at first. Your beloved,
amazing novel is rejected. It is
rejected again. By failing to pursue a
respectable career, you fall down in
someone’s expectations of you. This
someone is usually a parent, a teacher,
a spouse, or an older sibling – or all
four if your fall is really spectacular.
Your novel is rejected again. Your
poems are rejected. Your queries to
agents are rejected.
Or this: You had a respectable
career, but you relinquished it in order
to have more time to write, and your
income falls way, way down. You fall
down in your rent payments or in the
eyes of the credit bureaus. You take a
humble job to pay the bills and your
ego – which has been reminding you
with increasing anxiety that the win-
dow for respectable careers won’t stay
open forever – falls off a cliff.
Twenty years ago, I could have used
a refresher course on how to fall down.
Now I could teach one.
The first thing you do is you trip up
on something: your art doesn’t sell, the
audience snickers, you are turned downby a publisher, a lender, a boyfriend, or
a dance partner. You go down. You’re
startled for a moment, until you realize
you have had an upsetting incident. You
wail. You find someone to give you a
kiss, which may or may not help. You
feel you might as well die now because
life is so awful. You wallow in this feel-
ing for awhile. There is no time limit on
this stage, but eventually you might
remember to play a Louis Prima tune,
which nobody can resist.
You can’t go wrong with “Pennies
from Heaven.”
—Annie Sheppard writes novels and speculative
nonfiction mostly, as she is not entirely convinced
by reality. Her work has appeared in Phoebe
Journal (winner, 2016 Nonfiction Contest),
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Fourth
Genre (runner-up, 2018 Steinberg Essay Prize). She
lives in Oregon.BOOKISH
The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing
By Tara Mokhtari
“Learning how to shape your ideas into
well-crafted pieces of writing is essen-
tially learning how to think critically and
creatively at the same time,” Tara
Mokhtari writes in the introduction of
The Bloomsbury Introduction to Cre-
ative Writing, now in its second edition.
“Any good writing teacher will tell you
that learning how to write is tanta-
mount to learning how to think...The
key theme of this book is the relationship between knowl-
edge derived from experience and the pursuit of writing.”
Mokhtari asserts this approach is part of what makes her
text stand out from the rest in the industry: “I am interested
not only in craft, but also in how the creative process creates
new ways into knowledge, and how refining and practicing
craft can complicate our relationship to the world,” she says
in an interview with Bloomsbury about the latest edition.
But the second edition further helps Mokhtari achieve
another goal: To develop transferable skills that will lead to
fruitful careers for all students. “It is imperative for creative
writing programs to both nurture minority voices and prepare
students with critical thinking and practical transferable skills
for the job market,” she says.
“Perhaps forty years ago, if you undertook a creative writ-
ing degree, you could have expected to publish a novel or col-
lection of poems at the end of it. You also probably would not
have graduated with massive student debt. Things are radi-
cally different now,” she tells Bloomsbury. “It is imperative for
creative writing programs to both nurture minority voices and
prepare students with critical thinking and practical, transfer-
able skills for the job market.”
To that end, the book offers real honesty about pursuing a
career in creative writing (“it isn’t sufficient to want to be a
writer merely for the romance of it, for the ego, for the fame,
for the money: mostly because only a very small number of
writers achieve the career which affords them any or all of
these delicious benefits”) as well as information on writing
for video games, video scriptwriting, virtual reality, and other
forms of digital content.
It also includes a wealth of information, exercises, and
workshop suggestions for a variety of genres, including
screenwriting, playwriting, and hybrid forms.
“Over the course of this book, and then for decades to
come, your relationship with writing will grow and change the
same way every relationship does – and that is alright,” Mokh-
tari writes. “Be patient, keep working at it, give it whatever it
needs to develop, have faith, and honor your writing practice.”