July 2010
Charles Conley was a 2009-2010 fellow with Teachers & Writers Collaborative and a 2008-2009 fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, North American Review, Gargoyle, and Canadian Notes and Queries. He was the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant in 2010 and a SASE/Jerome Grant for Emerging Writers in 2007. His teaching experience includes creative writing and composition classes at the University of Minnesota and Hamline University of Saint Paul, Minnesota, fiction workshops at Goodhue County Adult Correctional Facility in Minnesota and Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter JHS in Massachusetts, and co-teaching a poetry residency at MS54 in New York City.

How do you start a new piece?
Sometimes with a dream. Sometimes with a feeling I know I want to get to by the end of the story. Sometimes with a story I heard the other day. Sometimes with half an idea from one source, an eighth of an idea from another, and three-eighths I make up as I go along. Then I write my first draft quickly, searching for the story and sacrificing everything to the hunt of it. Embarrassingly, this means my first drafts often consist of sloppy language, cliché, and stereotypes. My feeling is, once I’ve found the story, I can find all those errors and remove them, but it often takes many revisions to do so.

What is more frightening: a blank page or a manuscript in need of a complete rewrite?
Neither. Both. To begin writing at all was such a terrible risk (what if I couldn’t do it?), I had to come up with elaborate protections against these fears, protections that have for the most part continued to work. I can usually avoid the worst of the fear by saying to myself, “I’ll fix that next draft.”

In Richard Hugo’s essay “Writing Off the Subject,” he states, “When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music.” In your writing practice, have you taken a position on this? In your teaching?
Despite several writers’ attempts to persuade me that this is a false choice, I remain convinced we have a natural tendency toward one or the other of these attitudes. For me, it’s that all music must conform to truth. I try to uncover the true thing first, then try to make it musical, which means often working with some thoroughly ugly prose. Making music is not a natural strength of mine, and time-wise, it’s where most of my drafting work goes (and probably where I’ve seen the most improvement).

As a teacher, I suspect that it’s easier to spot the truth-to-music camp than it is to find the others. There’s plenty of room for all different kinds of writers, and both should be encouraged, and everyone should be encouraged to work on what doesn’t come naturally.

How does teaching influence your work as a writer?
I’m not exactly sure. Teaching takes some of the same creative energy as writing, and occasionally I feel the negative effects on my work, but not often. A job that leaves me bored, though it doesn’t use up my creative energy, still seems to deplete it, leaves me turning on the TV or fooling on the Internet rather than writing or reading. For me, I guess, it’s worse to be bored than exhausted.

What’s your favorite in-class writing prompt?
I hated these as a student and never use them as a teacher except in emergencies (when I’ve run out of material for discussion).

Are there any aspects of writing that you feel can’t be taught?
Plenty, but I’ve never felt this calls into question the value of trying.

When you are teaching, what pet peeves do you come across frequently?
My worst pet peeves are faults I was or am guilty of, so I try to be as sympathetic as I can, or at least have a sense of humor about it. For example, I tell my students the single best revision exercise is to read their piece out loud. I also tell them that I know they won’t do it, because I didn’t, not for a long time.

The most damaging beliefs to me were in the area of genius vs. hard work. Conveniently for my social life (but not my writing), I believed that the best writing was the quickest, the kind that came most easily, that revision would take something away from my work (freshness?). I also waited around for inspiration a lot. What a waste of time.