Frank Conroy on the storyteller’s pyramid
Photo by Fynn Schmidt
“Although it is true that reading over one’s head is good, writing over one’s head is very bad indeed. It is an almost certain guarantee of failure, in fact.”
Frank Conroy taught a generation of writers at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was the program’s director from 1987 until 2005. In his essay “The Writer’s Workshop” he outlines his approach to teaching, compares writing to a pyramid, and emphasizes the importance of working from the bottom up rather than the top down. Many writers, Conroy says, believe that the “real action” happens at the higher levels where the “fancy stuff” is, but he insists that “any attempt to write from the top down will likely fail.”
The higher levels only work if the lower levels also work. Common ground between the storyteller and the audience begins at the base of the pyramid.
Meaning
A writer’s words must mean what they say and say what they mean. Conroy stresses the importance of choosing the correct word and standing behind it. Obese, fat, chubby, heavy, and stout have different meanings. Briefly, from the OED:
Obese: Very fat or fleshy; exceedingly corpulent.
Fat: In well-fed condition, plump; well supplied with fat.
Chubby: Round-faced; plump and well-rounded.
Heavy: Of great weight; weighty, ponderous. The opposite of light.
Stout: Thick in the body, not lean or slender; usually in unfavourable sense, inclined to corpulence.
Because it appears twice in the above definitions, here is plump defined on its own (“Of full and rounded form; sufficiently fleshy or fat to show no angularity of outline; chubby; having the skin well filled or elastically distended”).
As an example of “lax prose,” Conroy explains: “He sat down with a sigh means that the sitting and the sighing are happening at the same time, which precludes a construction such as ‘I’m too tired to think,’ he said as he sat down with a sigh. The reader will undoubtedly get the drift and will separate the sighing from the saying, but the writing is sloppy from the point of view of meaning. It doesn’t, at the literal level, mean what it says.”
Sense
Conroy on sense: “The boy ate the watermelon makes sense. The watermelon ate the boy does not, unless the author has created a special world in which it does. Unmotivated behavior in characters doesn’t make sense to the reader, who is also confused by randomness, arbitrariness, or aimlessness in the text. The writer must recognize the continuous unrelenting pressure from the reader that the text make sense. It can be strange sense, to be sure, but the reader has to be able to understand the text to enter it.”
Frank Conroy gazing at the base of the pyramid.
Clarity
All else equal, shorter is better. The goal is not brevity for its own sake, Conroy insists, but clarity. By distilling things to their essences, the writer can achieve clarity regardless of style. Clarity has aesthetic value all by itself. Conroy gives the example of George Orwell, a pleasure to read for his clarity regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics .
Samples from the master
“In my opinion the struggle to maintain meaning, sense, and clarity is the primary activity of any writer. ”
Conroy says that maintaining sense, meaning, and clarity “turns out to be quite hard to do, demanding constant concentration at high levels, constant self-editing, and a continuous preconscious awareness” of your reader’s needs. How does Conroy manage it in his own work? Judge for yourself.
Here is the opening of Stop-Time:
My father stopped living with us when I was three or four. Most of his adult life was spent as a patient in various expensive rest homes for dipsomaniacs and victims of nervous collapse. He was neither, although he drank too much, but rather the kind of neurotic who finds it difficult to live for any length of time in the outside world. The brain tumor discovered and removed toward the end of his life could have caused his illness, but I suspect this easy out. To most people he seemed normal, especially when he was inside.
I try to think of him as sane, yet it must be admitted he did some odd things Forced to attend a rest-home dance for its therapeutic value, he combed his hair with urine and otherwise played it out like the Southern gentleman he was. He had a tendency to take off his trousers and throw them out the window. (I harbor some secret admiration for this.) At a moment's notice he could blow a thousand dollars at Abercrombie and Fitch and disappear into the Northwest to become an outdoorsman. He spent an anxious few weeks convinced that I was fated to become a homosexual. I was six months old. And I remember visiting him at one of the rest homes when I was eight. We walked across a sloping lawn and he told me a story, which even then I recognized as a lie, about a man who sat down on the open blade of a penknife embedded in a park bench. (Why, for God's sake would he tell a story like that to his eight-year-old son?)
A passage on childhood, also from Stop-Time
Children are in the curious position of having to do what people tell them, whether they want to or not. A child knows that he must do what he’s told. It matters little whether a command is just or unjust since the child has no confidence in his ability to distinguish the difference. Justice for children is not the same as justice for adults. In effect all commands are morally neutral to a child. Yet because almost every child is consistently bullied by older people he quickly learns that if in some higher frame of reference all commands are equally just, they are not equally easy to carry out. Some fill him with joy, others, so obviously unfair that he must paralyze himself to keep from recognizing their quality, strike him instantly deaf, blind, and dumb. Faced with an order they sense is unfair children simply stall. They wait for more information, for some elaboration that will take away the seeming unfairness. It’s a stupid way of defending oneself, but children are stupid compared to adults, who know how to get what they want.
An interlude of characterization from the story collection Midair:
On the street he threw the paper away, freeing himself not only of the paper, but of all that it signified. It occurred to him that the entire business of reading the paper in the first place might be in order to fully savor the moment of throwing it away, with the concomitant sensation of freedom and the reassuring feeling of time having been marked. He imagined an enormous metronome, a metronome the size of a mountain whose giant tongue swept slowly and majestically through miles of air to tick once, and only once, a day, at precisely the moment he dropped the newspaper into the trash.
An example of flash-forward From Body & Soul:
With a shock, and only because of the thick glasses, the lazy eyes, and the unhealthy whiteness of his skin, Claude recognized the young man as Peter. Lost in the folds of his suit, he was so thin, crooked, and dazed he looked like a dying man. (Which, in a sense, he was. Years later he was to leave home and go to the University of Chicago as a graduate student in history. In his small, luxurious off-campus apartment he would explode his brain with a German Luger pistol from his collection of World War II memorabilia. Claude would hear how he had lived alone, friendless, without a single telephone number in his new address book, how he had set a table for two, put some Wagner on the record player, sat down, and slipped the barrel of the gun into his mouth. His body was not to be discovered for some time, and the police were to have trouble establishing his identity, so empty was the apartment of any clues.)