Scott Lax - author and educator

If there is one piece of advice I have for creative writers of all kinds, it's this: You have to tell a story. You can't just type in information and hope that readers will find it interesting.

There are millions -- billions -- of interesting stories. Everyone has one. Everyone's grandparents have one; everyone's pet has one.

What makes us writers is that we take information or imagination or both and tell a story. It's the simplest and most complicated thing. Tell a story.

Writers are cerebral by nature. Who else would want to sit for hours at a time making stuff up as fiction or writing about places or other people as nonfiction, and doing so all alone?

Still, it's not a good idea to be isolated, and part of not being isolated is not being isolated from your own body. You need exercise. Basketball, yoga, marathon running or strolling around the block; it doesn't matter what it is, you need something to get out of your head, and out of your chair. Like the non-fanatical experts say, ten to thirty minutes a day is fine. But do something.

There are a lot of out-of-shape writers, maybe for all the right reasons. They're working hard creating worlds from words. Yet, those reasons really aren't OK. Better to stick around longer to create those worlds. I give myself this same advice every time I don't feel like exercising. It's something like writing: you do it even when you don't feel like it.

For those of you - especially the young - who are seriously considering a life and career as an artist, actor, writer, filmmaker - this is for you. This won't be the most pleasant thing you've ever read. It's not a commencement address about following your dream and everything working out (though that is the ideal, isn't it?). It's all a bit gnarlier than that. Here it is:

You can want to be an artist. You can want money and security. You can want fame.

All of these things are valid wants. But none of them are guaranteed to go together. If you are determined to be an artist that writes - a writer of things in which you believe, say, instead of advertising copy or promotional videos or what have you - you will need to be prepared for a rocky road. This is not an artist-friendly society. It is a commerce-friendly society. That's simply the way it is.

If you commit to art, you commit to sacrifice, at least for a while (if you're not bankrolled), maybe for a long time, and with no guarantees.

This could mean no medical coverage or care in a society that doesn't guarantee its citizens medical care, but does guarantee them that they must pay taxes for corn and soybean subsidies and waging war. It means that you may not know where from where your next dollar will come. It means that you may have to scrap in ways you never imagined. It means you may not be able to go to the doctor or dentist or the hospital. It means you may lose things that are precious to you.

This is the commitment you make to art. Not fake art - not artistic jobs that end up selling things, that end up as advertisements or promoting ideas that come from corporate boardrooms. Rather, art. Those other things are artistic, and worthy of admiration by many, maybe by you; sometimes by me. But they are not art.

Very little great or even very good real art - the expression of a person's soul - has come from anything other than hard work and sometimes suffering. I believe this. Yet in that suffering and hard work lies transcendent happiness. Therein is your main reward. If money and security comes, you've hit the mother-lode. If not, you are still an artist. And you are rare. From that, I hope you take some small comfort.

"Write about what you know" is a quote that most creative writing students have heard too often. They also hear, "Write about what you don't know about what you know." Or, "Write about what you know you don't know you know." I'm no mathematician, but I imagine there lots of variations on this theme.

My advice is to write about what you care about. If you don't know about it, research. Or imagine. Or just make it up. In my new novel I wrote about a village in Europe that doesn't exist, and in a geographical area I've never been to. I created it. That's what's so wonderful about fiction: you have no limits. It's the one place where no one can tell you where you can and can't go and what you can and can't do.

If you escape into your fiction and do so with craft -- you must learn some craft or you'll lose your reader -- you are in for a fantastic trip. It's a trip into the human psyche. You can go anywhere. Craft is your craft... do you see what I mean? Skill is your vehicle. Take care of your craft, your vehicle, and it will get you where you want to go. It takes works, and preparation, and persistence. It isn't easy. But if you really want to write well, it's worth the hard work.

H.L. Mencken once said, "There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers."

I sometimes give my students an assignment to write about something they don't want to write about. I've heard and read some wonderful results of this exercise, but here I only want to say why I think this can be helpful.

Writing about what you don't want to write about helps you understand your own nature better, and helps you examine your prejudices, as well as the wider world you may have neglected. This applies to writing about people you don't like, as well.

In fiction, those people may become characters. Those characters – because you now understand them, even if a little – become people once again, instead of clichéd characters. In other words, they're not dull. They're real.

As well, you'll face your fears, including those that involve people that frighten you, or have hurt you or those people about whom you care. It's okay to create a character without being that character. You are not your characters. You are a writer, the one who creates them. There's a big difference.

While I can't call myself a connoisseur, I suppose I can say I'm an oenophile - a lover of wine. The protagonist of my new novel is a connoisseur, though, a wine writer who travels from Paris to the South of France, then to Ohio, where he has a dark purpose that is against his nature. In any case, wine plays a significant role in my novel, as a metaphor and in and of itself.

Recently I tasted a French wine, after a few weeks of only tasting Australian, Italian, Chilean and American wines. It was a relief. Not because there aren't wondrous wines of the above-mentioned countries: all of them produce amazing wines, even in my writerly budget's range.

It's simply that, for me, in general, French wines allow their flavors to emerge and be interpreted. There is something I sense (and of course wine is utterly - or almost so - subjective) in many French wines. They emerge; they hint; they whisper. They are the most literary of wines... for me. (Not for everyone, certainly; and if we ever move to Northern California, I will, naturally, take this all back and ingratiate myself to the great vintners of California.)

All of my wine musings mean only this: What I like is for a wine, like a story, to emerge from the bottle or page. I don't want to be smashed (literally and figuratively) over the head with it. I don't want a "big, chewy fruit and sugar bomb" in a wine, or a James Patterson novel in a book. (Though I admire both in other ways - more power to them, both big wines and Patterson, Inc.)

When you write: allow your reader to figure some things out. Not everything, of course, but you don't need to over-explain. One of my teachers told me to "write for smart people." I don't think she meant I.Q. I think she meant to write for real readers - those who wish to think, not merely move their eyes across the page and demand to be entertained.

For me, with wine or words: complexity under the surface of ease of consumption is preferable. If only F. Scott Fitzgerald had stuck to moderate wine consumption and stayed away from the booze... how ironic, if you think about it… for he was the French wine of literature.

I was recently informed that I won second place in The Lit's MUSE magazine Literary Competition. I won it for a short story I wrote -- under 3,000 words -- called "Sales Call." The winner was Toni Thayer, for "You Are What You Play." I've never met Ms. Thayer, but send her congratulations and wish her much success.

This is a particularly nice award, as it's the first short story I've submitted to a magazine -- I wrote it for the contest, pretty quickly -- and it's about a subject that I've thus far avoided – sales, and the lost world of American manufacturing.

I was once a traveling salesman, a manufacturer's representative, though the story itself is fiction. I typed “Sales Call,” as a title, and the rest just came pouring out. I had no idea what it would be when I typed that title. I spent so much of my younger years in that occupation. (Drumming, and music, should be coming up soon in my fiction writing, as I was a professional drummer, too - sometimes it takes some distance to write about a thing.)

I'm gratified that the judge chose to recognize something that isn't anywhere close to the de rigueur, MFA fiction that I read so much of in magazines. It's just a story about a young salesman and an old sales pro. That's all I'll say about it, as I heard it's going to be published in The Lit’s MUSE magazine in March.

For me, it's a bit of confirmation that trends don't matter to everyone; that you should follow your heart and write about what you want to write about; and that what's hip today will be passé tomorrow. Don’t worry about what judges or editors or publishers are looking for. You’ll paralyze yourself. Just write cleanly and from the heart.

I'm grateful to Judith Mansour, executive director of The Lit, for promoting writers and literature in NE Ohio. If you want to read an article that ran today about The Lit and the contest, click the link on the Announcements or Home page of this site. As for the story, it should be published pretty soon.

Writers have, as an option, the chance to take classes in "journaling" - journal writing. Or, as it used to be called, writing in a diary.

While I don't teach such a class, I write in a diary, by longhand, with pen and ink. It helps me separate out what I need to say to myself from what I need to say to the wider world. It works as a kind of therapy, and there's something deeply satisfying about it. Head to hand, hand to pen, pen to paper.

Blogging is another way to do this, but when someone blogs, even anonymously, there's an understanding that others will read it. So it changes the words. Even if the blog is brutally honest, I think that it changes the words, because it’s an other-directed action, not an inner-directed action. And that's fine, but not the same as writing only for you.

Then there's this kind of blog -- for advice (for writers, for example) -- or for any reason: politics, entertainment, cooking, ad so on. And those are all fine and often entertaining or helpful to others.

But literary creative writing -- fiction or nonfiction -- shouldn't be for therapy, or to rage against the machine, the wind, or your boss. It's for readers. Which doesn't mean it can't be a kind of (seemingly) unfiltered angst-ridden narrative (CATCHER IN THE RYE), or stream-of-consciousness (ON THE ROAD) or other works that seems as if they are coming directly from the writer’s subconscious. That seemingly unfiltered, flowing story or book that affects you is likely heavily edited (not so much with ON THE ROAD, but that’s an exception), and intricately crafted.

So how do you combine the two disparate things – a private diary/journal and fiction/literary nonfiction? Here’s my suggestion. Use your journal to find out about yourself – what’s really important to you, what your hopes and fears are, as well as ideas that pop into your mind while writing. Then take those ideas and, those hopes and fears and everything else, and use them to write honest fiction or literary nonfiction that is crafted and, you hope, read by others.

Some writers through history have used the bottle or the needle or other mind-altering stuff to access their unconsciousness. Too many of them died too young. There are other ways to access your inner writer. Writing in a personal diary is only one of them. If you haven't tried it, maybe it's time.

J.D. Salinger died. He gave us great literature that changed the way America and the world thought about stories. As for his personal life, he wanted to keep that private. I know a member of his immediate family, and my thoughts go out to that person and anyone else associated with J.D. Salinger who cared about him as a man.

Salinger gave voice to my generation's disaffection with established cultural values, decades earlier than they manifested in the culture itself; that influence continues. He certainly influenced my writing and my view of life and he entertained me. I couldn't have asked for more of him as a writer.

At a writers' conference last year, I gave a presentation. A young man, maybe in his early twenties, came up to me after my talk. He told me that CATCHER IN THE RYE and my novel, THE YEAR THAT TREMBLED, were his favorite novels. While I would never compare TREMBLED with CATCHER, he was likely saying that both coming-of-age stories evoked something important in him.

The larger point is: a writer is charged with trying to evoke something in his or her readers. It's not to be a role model -- as a writer. (As a father, husband, etc., that's different.) That's ultimately the writer's job - to evoke feelings and thoughts. And that's all. May Salinger rest in peace.

My earliest influences were the American Transcendentalists, particularly Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. They began writing in mid-nineteenth-century New England. The essence of their work was to push back against the Puritan ethic and materialism, and they celebrated freedom, individualism, inquiry, experiment and intuitive spirituality. They were at the literary center of American letters for half a century.

I think it helps to have some sense of where you write from in an intellectual and spiritual (or religious) sense. When I teach creative writing, I spend the first couple of classes working with students to access their writerly selves, so that they can supplant what’s been called “the icon of The Writer” with their own writer’s sensibility.

Real writing – that is, writing that lasts, that can take readers somewhere they’ve never been – usually comes from a writer’s core. Not from mere cleverness. Cleverness that affects intellect and hides honest feeling is like weeds growing where nothing else dares: in the cracks of a culture’s spiritual and intellectual sidewalks. It’s there, sure, but often ugly and ultimately abandoned, withered and forgotten.