Soon After First Light: Alan Ziegler
Soon After First Light is a series where we talk craft, process, and pandemic with Columbia's accomplished writing professors.
Here, we talk with Professor Alan Ziegler about teaching, active resting, and "conning ourselves" into getting started.
Alan Ziegler’s most recent books are Short: An International Anthology of 500 Years of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms (editor); Love at First Sight: An Alan Ziegler Reader; and The Writing Workshop Note Book. Previous books include The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes; The Green Grass of Flatbush (stories); So Much To Do (poems); and The Writing Workshop, Volumes I and II. Ziegler is the recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Word Beat Fiction Book Award (selected by George Plimpton), four PEN Syndicated Fiction awards, a CAPS (Creative Artists in Public Service) fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts grants for Some literary magazine and Release Press, which he co-edited. He is a recipient of Columbia’s Presidential Teaching Award, and he chaired the Writing Program from 2001-2006; currently he is Director of Pedagogy. Ziegler received a B.S. from Union College and a Masters in Creative Writing from City College of New York, where he studied with Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, and Joel Oppenheimer.
Alan’s current manuscript is Based on a True Life: Flash Memoirs and Squibs.
What is a typical workday like for you when you’re in the middle of a project?
Alan Ziegler: Of course, with pretty much every answer there's going to be a part that's pre-COVID and a part that’s with-COVID. So I'll try to balance that. Essentially if it's a day that I'm teaching a class, I don't expect anything else from myself. I may do some writing. I may answer emails, things like that, but I don't plan to write. Even if my class starts at four o'clock, I don't plan to write until two o'clock. I knew someone who was a student of Joyce Carol Oates, who's one of the most prolific writers that ever lived, and he said that when he went to her for a conference, he'd get to her office, hear the typewriter clicking away behind the door. As soon as it hit time for his appointment, the door would open up, they'd have their conference for a half hour, she'd be absolutely attentive to him, and then as soon as the door closed on the way out the typewriter would start clicking away again. I can't do that. My mind is focused on the teaching. On days when I’m not teaching, I try to get started as early as possible. I don't have any specific, routine time. I keep saying I'm going to get up at five o'clock and that doesn’t happen; but I try to get the first part of the day until I find myself kind of running out of gas and then, in the pre-pandemic days, I'd go to a cafe and continue from there. I’d have something to eat and then the stimuli would kick in. I wrote an entire section of a book to the fourth movement of Mahler's Fifth. I mean, it just happened to be playing in the cafe and every time I sat down to write, that's what I wanted to hear, even if it wasn’t playing. It became a stimulus like Proust’s madeleine cookies.
Now, in the pandemic, I try to do that here. I set up different places. I have a laptop, I have an iPad, I have a desktop, so I’ll sort of go to a different station. And the office I work in is full of stuff that can make me feel like I'm in other places.
I allow myself to get distracted by stuff. I find that it all pretty much contributes to my work and that when I need to really concentrate, I shut things out. Innumerable times, my wife has been standing right behind me for five minutes before I realize she's there. I developed that skill partly from working on newspapers. When you work on a newspaper, you have someone at the adjoining desk who's writing, making phone calls. I spent one whole summer at a desk next to a guy named David Duty. And every person he called, he'd say, This is David Duty, D U T Y calling. As much as that amused me, it also always interrupted. So, I learned to work with the distractions.
In a recent interview with Assistant Professor Lincoln Michel, he told me that while he was your student at Columbia, you used to say that all the things one does before writing (for example, taking a walk, feeding the cat, whatever is part of one's routine) are part of the writing process. Can you speak to this a bit more?
AZ: For a couple of years, my obsession was collecting fountain pens. When I go to another country or another place, I buy fairly cheap ones or good ones that don't work anymore and see if I can try to fix them. Eventually I started painting them. I thought I'd just paint the really cheap ones a different color. I'm not an artist, but I noticed that when I started doing this meticulous work that would take days, as soon as I picked up the pen, whatever it is that I'd been working on, would just come to me. So I think our body connects little routines that aren't necessarily related to the writing.
We're working all the time. Part of us is. I don't know a lot about anatomy, but every time I see all the things my body is doing to food, to medicine—you take a pill and somehow it knows where to go and what to do—our bodies are doing all these amazing things on a physical basis, and the brain is also always working. The unconscious part of the brain is just an amazing artist, but extremely undisciplined and unschooled. You need to tap into that. When you're stuck on something or thinking about something and you then go to make the coffee, your brain keeps working.
It’s like cooking. Let's say I’m cooking eggs. I know when I turn the heat off, it's going to keep cooking. Or think about the concept of meat resting. It’s going to keep cooking even when it’s on the plate. So it’s not a rest rest. It’s an active resting. I think that's what happens with writing too. Sometimes you have to step away from the fire and just let it rest; and you don't have to do anything. It's going to keep cooking. The subtitle of the manuscript I’m working on has changed a couple of times, and the last change in the subtitle came while I was cleaning the milk-frother on the coffee machine (laughs).
The unconscious brain is artistic but undisciplined. Do you have any advice for writers who struggle with being disciplined in their writing practice?
AZ: Writing is partly a con job. The word “con,” you know, comes from confidence. To pull off a con job you have to get someone to have confidence in you. So I think we can do con jobs on ourselves as writers. One of the con jobs is just offering yourself rewards. The point is to set rules, even if they're kind of silly, and always be able to break them. So, you might say, I will sit down at my writing space, whether it's a computer or notebook, four times a day; and it could be as short as five seconds. You say that, and most of the time it's going to be more than five seconds. If you say, I'm going to write for two hours, four days a week, you may wind up doing seven days a week. The important thing is not to start with a rule that will make you feel like once you break the chain, you can’t get back to it.
One other thing you can do is say, I'm going to write when I don't feel like it, that's my assignment to myself. And again, because things kind of change chemically, once you get started, you can pretty much get going. It might have been Hemingway—I'm not sure—who started by typing the last page that he wrote the night before. You just have to get yourself started.
What is your relationship to drafting/editing and what is your advice for writers who may find the editing process daunting or difficult?
AZ: Some people find different phases of it difficult. Basically, you should treat the first phase with abandon. You can't go wrong, enjoy yourself. Nobody's going to read this the way it is. The third phase—and I'm skipping the second one purposely—is just craft. You're just going to enjoy doing all the fine things, doing the fine tuning. That's when you feel like a writer, and you think, I know how to do this. I know what to look for. The problem is the second phase. That’s when you have that first draft down and you just can't get things to click. That can be agonizing. But again, the con is to try to get yourself to love it. There are those three different dynamics and I think that if you can feel comfortable with two out of three, then you're okay.
Do you ever experience periods of creative block? How do you counteract these?
AZ: I have bunches of notebooks and once in a while when I think I can't do this anymore, I can't look at this, I grab a notebook and lean back to flip through it. And sometimes I find a line that makes me think Who wrote that? I find material. One of the things that I pleased myself the most with recently was a line that I found in an old notebook which at the time didn't seem worthy of coming out of the notebook. I saw it again and said, That's brilliant! I just need to add a little something.
Another thing that helps is photographs. Photography has become important to me because if something appeals to me, confuses me, intrigues me, I want to remember it, all I have to do is click it. I don't even have to put it in the notebook. The act of doing these things gives me a kind of arsenal of stuff that I can go to when I have writer's block.
How have the pandemic lockdowns affected your creativity?
AZ: I lost one of my offices—my real office—which I haven't been to since last March. The back corner seat on the M4, that was also my office. I suppose I could still access that, but I wouldn't feel comfortable. Travel has always been a real great inspiration, but I think most of them have been replicated through memory and experience. So we have the photographs, we have the notebooks. Thankfully I’m in what I hope is the final stage of a manuscript that's built on memory and it essentially ends in 2001. So I have so much I can do on that, and in some ways I don't want new material right now. If the pandemic goes on much longer, I can see how people would run out of momentum; but you just have to find a substitute for whatever the world gave you before.
There's a wonderful book that’s been translated as Journey Around My Room. It's written by a guy who was not a known writer and he was sentenced to house arrest. So he wrote this book and everything in the book stems from walking around his room. It's not just a tour of the room. It's memories that come up. And so I think about that a lot.
You've written both poetry and prose—is your creative process very different for each, and when you feel inspired by an idea, do you know immediately whether you'd like to explore that idea in verse or in prose?
AZ: The first writing that I did, going back to high school, were song lyrics and journalism. So there was verse and prose, but it wasn't poetry and it wasn't fiction; but I was steeped in that. Then I worked for a couple of newspapers and focused on poetry for my personal writing because that's what was going on in the workshops. I had a teacher who acquainted me with the prose poem in a way that I hadn't been before, and I started realizing I had that option.
What I found was when I started to write, it usually felt like I was always reaching for the return key. All line breaks. But, over the years I have gone very low key on the line breaks.
Already my writing has always been all over the place in terms of genre, so I've been thinking that way for a long time. I always found that having options was good—to be able to start something as an essay and then start making stuff up and realize, it's a story. I always thought that that was an issue with writing workshops—that they were always sequestered into one form or another. At Columbia, in the undergraduate program, we had a class called Structure and Style, which was poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and script writing all in the same class. It was basically the required first class for the major that existed at the time. That's the class that I loved teaching the most. I'm feeling more and more that we should be able to read and write in different areas. I just don't see any reason to limit my options.
What is it like to balance your teaching and writing careers? Do you ever find that teaching distracts you from your personal writing, or do you find that the two careers are symbiotic?
AZ: I can't imagine anything else. I just consider myself really lucky and I can't see any other way. For the early part of my career, I had other jobs working on a magazine, I was a machine operator for a while. But teaching eventually came in. I was aware that writers were going into schools, but I was just scared to death. Because a lot of it was working with kids and I thought, I don't know how to do that thing that teachers do when they talk to kids (laughs). I also felt kids were like cats. You know, they see right through you, they don't care who you are, they won't even tell you that they don't respect you. They'll just ignore you. Serendipitously, I was in a workshop in the graduate school with a guy that I was becoming friendly with and he had started his own poets in the schools program in Brooklyn. Somebody had dropped out in the middle of a residency and there were only four classes left—four consecutive Wednesdays. He asked if I would take over. And it was money, you know? So I said yes, because if I screwed up, it wouldn’t be my fault (laughs).
I had no idea what it would be like, but I did my homework. I observed my friend teach. I went and got some material from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, where I wound up working for a long time. I got into this class and it was like 30 or 40 kids…and I left shell shocked. There was something about it I loved, but I had no idea how I did. I wrote a letter to someone that night saying, It would be so great if it turns out this is something I'm good at. I went back the next week and the kids applauded and cheered, and that was it. From then on, I had such a hunger for it that I didn't say no to anything. I just took whatever teaching was offered. This is pretty obvious but—just like being a writer—you have to want it. If you're doing it because it's a gig, and you just need the money, that's okay, but it's not going to be enough money. It's not going to be satisfying.
Teaching became part of my creative life. I'm a writer, I teach writing, I write about teaching writing, and then I teach writers to teach writing (laughs). It’s all connected. I can't say how it's affected my writing or what my writing would have been without teaching. I suspect I would be nowhere without it. I suspect I would've gone head over heels into some other profession and just put everything into that.
Could you put your finger on what makes you love teaching so much?
AZ: How many fingers can I use? (laughs). It's like the kind of thing, when you read something that just really moves you or delights you and you elbow whoever's sitting next to you. When you teach you have people who are captive. They can't avoid your metaphorical elbows. You get to interact with people in areas that are extremely important to them and have that kind of contact with people. And then when you do it for a while you see people go out into the world. I turned on the TV the other day and the lead actress had been in Short Prose Forms.
What are you working on now and what’s next?
AZ: I'm working on a manuscript called Based on a True Life. It's gone through many incarnations and I've been serializing it on the Best American Poetry site. I basically used that as my form for writing this manuscript. And so it’s changed over time from getting the feedback. I'm not going to compare myself to Dickens, but he did serialize his stuff and the work changed sometimes based on what he heard on the street.
I think we're landing on calling it a memoir; but I've opened it up to prose poems and fables and things that I call “squibs.” Essentially the idea is that if you read this, you'll get to know me. It's based on memory and it's somewhat chronological. Some of the pieces are really short—two or three sentences. Some of them are three or four pages.
What advice would you give to artists who are just starting to figure out process and routine?
AZ: For a long time I've quoted, “I don't like writing, but I love having written.” There are various variations on that and various attributions. I think you want to try to love writing.
There’s a line from Sunday in the Park with George by Sondheim: “finishing the hat where there never was a hat.” Just think about that. What you’re creating didn’t exist before. Another thing that happens in that musical is that the painter says, I'm not going to paint anymore. Everything's been said. Then Bernadette Peters says, Not by you. And that's it. Love what you're writing, realize that you're making hats, understand it's your turn to say it.