Don't Forget to Say Thank You

One of the persisting stereotypes about writers (and artists in general), is that we’re all raging egomaniacs who lack gratitude. Supposedly, we’re people who have little to no patience with the world and merely perceive much of life as either fodder for our craft or a distraction to keep us from it. And to be fair to those who believe this, precedents certainly exist, and one doesn’t need to look too far back in literary history to find them.

When Ernest Hemingway was a young writer, two of his mentors were Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. Anderson, author of Winesberg, Ohio, urged him to move to Paris and provided him with letters of introduction to his friends—among them Stein and Ezra Pound, the poet who coined the phrase, “Make it new”—on the Parisian Left Bank. Without him, Hemingway wouldn’t have had a way into that scene. Stein and Pound then provided him with the sets of critical eyes Hemingway needed in order to grow into the writer he eventually would.

How did he pay them back for their generous mentorship?

During his time in Paris, Hemingway published his first two books, Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time. Many critics, aware of his debts to Anderson and Stein when they read his early literary offerings, made somewhat unfavorable comparisons of his work to theirs.

The comparisons infuriated Hemingway.

While composing his break-out book, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway took time—exactly ten days, by some accounts—to write a short novella, which is not well-remembered today (and rightly so). The book’s title was The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race. A.E. Hotchner (a friend of Hemingway’s and author of the book Papa Hemingway), described it as a “vicious satire of Sherwood Anderson.” The famed publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons published it alongside Hemingway’s much revered debut.

The book soured his relationship with Anderson (for obvious reasons), and it began his falling-out with Gertrude Stein. For the rest of their lives, the two regularly clashed and eventually, what once had been a close mentee-mentor relationship devolved into a bullfight, with each trying to gore and lance the other in print.

There’s no denying Hemingway’s importance to anglophone literature as a writer. His minimalist style (the iceberg theory of writing), was a breakthrough that’s gone on to set a standard for what, many believe, modern prose should resemble. However, his ingratitude makes him difficult to like as a person. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (delivered via pre-recording), he said, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life […] He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer, he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

It is easy to read that last sentence as one last, spite-filled jab at both his early critics and his mentors, who didn’t see him as a lone, rugged individual he clearly pictured himself as (a mental trap into which far too many Americans plummet). Perhaps Hemingway would’ve been Hemingway no matter what. Talent, after all, will out, even if recognition doesn’t come in one’s lifetime. Yet, history proves that he didn’t do it alone. At least in the beginning, Ernest Hemingway had help. He had teachers who both believed in his talent and helped him bring it to maturity and eventually a level of mastery that many subsequent writers attempted to emulate (if not outright imitate).

This ingratitude is precisely why I find it difficult to like Hemingway as a person. He wanted everyone to think that, like Athena, he sprang into the world, fully-formed, when in fact he too was once a student, who learned his craft at the feet of masters.

Contrary to this sentiment, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian, David McCullough, observed in his book The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For that, “little of consequence was accomplished alone. High achievement is nearly always a joint effort.” This sentiment resonates much more closely with what I believe to be true.

Rugged individuals, who swoop in and save the day before riding off into the sunset, are an invention of myth, reinforced by popular culture. And while they’re fun, they are myths nonetheless. Human beings are social creatures through and through, whether we like it or not. We need communities. We need each other because on our own, we’re quite weak. Together, though, through sharing and imparting the knowledge and wisdom we each possess, we can all grow—individually and collectively. We are all, in effect, one another’s teachers, passing on the loves and passions we’ve acquired throughout our unique sojourns upon this mortal coil.

Of course, we must also all take responsibility when it comes to our learning as well. Any teacher can only encourage and advise one towards growth. The initiative lies upon the shoulders of the student to both absorb the lessons and put them into practice.

Nonetheless, we cannot forget those who helped us. I certainly would not be where I am today were it not for the teachers who helped me.

The first, and most important, was my teacher Ms. Hale. She served as both my fourth and fifth grade teacher in Elementary School. At the time, (this was in the early 2000s), the United States was going through one of its periodic pushes to increase literacy, so the government urged every teacher in the country, especially at the elementary level, to get their students to read and write more. Ms. Hale was no exception. She encouraged us to keep lists of all the books we read during silent reading time. She read books aloud to us every so often (usually children’s classics, like Charlotte’s Web and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Most importantly, she got us to write creatively.

The class assignment that changed my life was when she got us to write (and illustrate) our own fairy tales. We’d just finished reading The Witches by Roald Dahl, along with a Language Arts (that’s American Elementary School speak for “English”), course on the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. To hammer home what we’d learned, she had us write our own stories. I can still remember the title of mine: Merlin and the Magic Monster. The following year, nearly every afternoon, when we’d come back from lunch and recess, there’d always be a writing prompt written on the chalk board, such as:

“I’m so glad it’s Friday because…”

“My mother had never gotten so mad at me, until…”

“I didn’t used to believe in magic pencils until…”

“SPLASH! I dropped the Dino-DNA…”

I loved these prompts for one reason: they made the act of writing fun. At every writer’s core, despite those times when drafting feels like a slog through knee-high hot mud while it’s raining acid, the reason we keep doing this is because it’s fun. Ms. Hale was the first teacher who made me recognize that. She was the one who turned me on to the act of writing as something I could enjoy. For that, I’ll always be grateful to her.

Around the age of 14, I began to take writing more seriously. During then, I started working on—although I didn’t realize it at the time—two different novels. I got about three quarters through one of them before hitting the brick wall of “I don’t know what happens next,” so like most novices, I just abandoned it. The other one I managed to finish—after working on it for four more years. Once I’d completed it, I realized something: this is what I want to do with my life. However, I was also self-critical enough to know that my writing skills were, then, subpar. So, I had to find a way to improve.

When I entered the University of Missouri-St. Louis, I found my next two great mentors.

First and foremost was John Dalton, author of the novel Heaven’s Lake. I only had two workshopping classes with him, but under his generous tutelage, I actually managed to improve my craft. How did I know? Because I took both my Beginning Fiction Writing Workshop, along with my Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop with him. In his criticism of my tepid stories over the four-year stretch between those classes, he saw, and noted, my improvement on the page. I learned how to sharpen my dialogue, how to flesh out a scene, and I was finally getting somewhere with the art of implication. His mentorship propelled me down the road of improving my craftsmanship, and without that, who knows where I’d be now?

Second, there was Drucilla Wall. Dr. Wall gave me something that I firmly believe every fiction writer, and every artist period, should have: an understanding and appreciation of poetry. Up until that point, poetry had been an enigma to me. The ideas that literature was more than what was on the page, that words could carry multiple subtle and ambiguous meanings, and that cadence and rhythm was, and should be, just as important as the intended meaning a line carried—Dr. Wall gave me all of this. How did she do it? By getting her students to actually write poetry. In those classes, I realized that I’d never be a great poet, but by learning to love it by crafting poems, I’ll forever be grateful to her for that. (She was even encouraging about my writing abilities and kept pushing me to keep writing poetry.)

My last and most recent mentor, I only met a few years ago. His name was (and is), Christopher McKitterick.

I first became acquainted with Chris (as all his students call him), when I applied to the James Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s annual Short Fiction Writing Workshop. It was 2018, and though I knew I’d improved my abilities as a writer, I recognized that there was still something missing. I didn’t know what though, but I thought if I could find a teacher to provide me with this “missing piece,” then everything would finally come together.

Under Chris’s tutelage, I found that missing piece. Everything that had not quite clicked in my mind about story-writing craft finally came together into something truly cohesive.  

What made Chris’s teaching different is that rather than focusing on style, which he assumed all of his students had a grasp of (and he always encouraged us to refine our prose), was that his focus in teaching was on storytelling. Concepts like enter late, leave early, writing a hook and final line that echo one another, beginning stories as close to the start of the conflict as possible—things that make a piece of fiction compulsively readable. My writing process practically changed overnight because of this after attending the Gunn Center Workshop.

I doubt that would’ve happened had I not had Chris for a teacher.

Hemingway, to some extent, was correct. We writers do our work alone. There are no ghostwriting elves, who will write our stories for us if we leave the manuscript and an offering of some kind out at night. Each time we sit down to write a new piece, it is both a test of our present level of skill and an opportunity to advance our skill further. However, none of us who practice this craft do it completely alone. The tools we acquire must come from somewhere, and it is wrong to forget to acknowledge and thank those who gave us those tools. Unlike musical and mathematical prodigies, writers don’t spring fully-formed into the world. We are nurtured creatures. While it is up to us to take the tools that our mentors give us and apply them, pretending that they weren’t gifts is foolish.

To all the teachers I’ve mentioned, and to all my other mentors and friends who’ve encouraged me to this point, thank you. To those of you reading this, consider this: the next time you’re in the middle of doing something that took you much practice with a gifted teacher to learn, just think of them. Bring their name to mind, smile, and quietly say thank you. One day, you may indeed play that role in someone else’s life.