Looks Like: The Reveal

The Lesson to Be Learned

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for

But first let’s revisit the question. As posted on Sunday, Gordon Lish would ask his students a question: Please tell us something you’ve never told anyone.

For Lish this ice breaker was the norm while teaching at Columbia. From The New Yorker:

In this environment, Lish became more than a demanding teacher—he made himself into a guru of fiction. His classes went from three hours, as had been the case at Yale, to five or more.

And the shared secret had to be charming.

“Remember, in reaching through your writing to a reader, you are engaged in nothing so much as an act of seduction,” former student Tetman Callis recalls him saying. “Seduce the whole fucking world for all time.”

And once everyone would share their secret… well, I’ll let Amy Hempel give the reveal.

At the first class Lish established just how much he would demand of his students. He started at least one term at Columbia by asking them to tell their most shameful secret, “the ineffable,the despicable, the thing you will never live down,” as Hempel wrote in Vanity Fair. One student admitted to having run someone over; another may have for the first time come out of the closet.

When the exercise was over, Lish smiled. “Did I say,” he asked, “that this secret doesn’t have to be true?”

Yes, that’s the take-away. You can lie. And while that might seem like Lish has manipulated his student, isn’t fiction about manipulating the reader? At the core of writing, as we’ve talked about in workshop, isn’t writing about sacrificing an old self in the hope of acheiving a new, better self? If you’re going to wound the reader, shouldn’t you also be wounded in the process?

As Lish once put it:

“The best writers are those who put themselves at risk—first destabilize yourself, then restore yourself,” Lish said.

To approach this exercise from a different direction, shouldn’t you treat your character’s ultimate secret(s) as gingerly as you treat your own? Your point-of-view character, your narrator, whoever, his secrets are as precious to him as yours are to you. Your characters should be as anxious and hesitant to reveal themselves as you are. If not, why bother? If you and your character aren’t going to put something big at stake, why are you asking for the reader’s time and attention?

The reader can suss out when the writer is being evasive. Being clever is fine, but if it’s not going to change the reader, why bother reading it? And why bother writing it?

Tom Spanbauer always beefed about this exercise of Lish’s, but Tom had his own version. Tom urged his students, “Write from your character’s broken heart,” and to get there Tom asked us about our own unresolved secrets. Our secrets still poured out, albeit in a more touchy-feely flow. Whether using Tom’s route or Lish’s, writing students still arrived at the same place.

Now, if you’ve done the exercise you’ve arrived here, also.