"The Writing Student," an essay by Jane Hudson

Writers on Writing
Nonfiction

The Writing Student
by Jane Hudson

Sure, I tried writing in my early twenties. I was working as an employment interviewer in New York City and wrote several vignettes about interesting applicants I met on the job. Unhappy with the results, I tossed the vignettes, and thought I’d try again later. Here I was 40 years later, enrolling in my first writing class (“beginners welcome”), where insider writing lingo such as, “omniscient point of view,” “dialogue dumping,” and “narrative arc,” was being tossed around the classroom. I was scared to death.

We all have to begin at the beginning, I told myself, so buck up and get to work. What I needed to do, I thought, was to select a story of a writer I admired, Alice Munro, for example, and use that as a model—simple, right? I tried it—I wrote and I wrote, and everything I wrote sounded awkward, clunky, and amateurish, that is, exactly like the beginning writer I was. Several writing classes later, I asked myself, would I ever progress? How could I be such a sophisticated reader, I thought, and yet, such an amateur as a writer? Was there a secret to writing well, and, if so, what was it? I despaired of ever writing anything that would truly capture a reader’s imagination.

Now, three years later, having taken seven writing classes with a variety of instructors (all of them good), I feel that I have only just begun to understand the path to writing well. You can learn and apply all the various writing rules in the world; you can practice and practice, and still end up with prose that is lifeless and boring. You can devise complex story plots in your mind filled with fascinating characters; imagine intriguing mysteries and alternate worlds of the future—all “can’t miss” ideas when they’re in your imagination. But try putting them on paper, and they seem to lose the vivid life they held as you imagined them and turn into pedestrian prose.

Yes, as the writing rules and guidelines remind you, there certainly is a craft of writing, and all aspiring writers need to learn that craft. But it seems to me that the real path to good writing, once you are familiar with the elements of the craft, is the ability to go deep into your mind and memory and call up the feelings of past personal experiences, and then to find the words to bring those feelings to life, again, for the reader, in whatever story is being told. Only in this way will the story resonate with the reader. For you can describe a feeling, using many words, but unless the feeling is evoked by the words, and felt by the reader, the story will only be words on the page and devoid of feeling. Ultimately, I think it is connected to the reason I, and, I believe, many others write or want to write. That is to try and make sense of life—what are we doing here, what is the purpose and meaning of life, and where are all of us who are alive today headed as we journey toward the end of our lives.

About Jane Hudson
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A native San Franciscan, Jane Hudson has a BA in Psychology and a Master's in Library Science from UC Berkeley, as well as a 2nd BA in Art History from SFSU. She recently retired from a 27-year career as a librarian at the SF Public Library where she was a district manager. Prior to that, she was a government documents librarian, a children's librarian, and a branch manager. For the past two years, she has focused on writing, taking a variety of writing classes at OLLI at SF State. In addition, she enjoys making art, attending theater and opera, getting together with friends and family, and working as a volunteer with the Bay Area Book Festival.