We Wanted To Be Writers is a fairly humble title for a book delving into the careers of some of best writers in 20th century America. It shares stories of the inspiration and frustration these writers experienced in their days at the legendary Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from 1974-1978.

As you wander through the book, reading details of the lives of the young T.C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, John Irving, Eric Olsen and Jane Smiley, you might be surprised to learn how rough it was for them to become the writers they are today. There were financial struggles as well as intense competition with no promise of a stellar writing career to support their efforts. You’ll read as much about the personal lives and challenges faced by these writers, as you will about the creative process and their compelling stories along the road to success.

We Wanted To Be Writers is rich with advice, humor, empathy and honesty, leaving you with an urge to try a little harder with your own writing. One thing’s for sure; you’ll know you’re not alone with the rejection battles writers face. The book reminds that good writers make it, no matter the path they choose, as Doug Unger says: “by sticking to making their craft, surviving out in the cold, and getting lucky enough that readers find their work.”

— Helen Gallagher, BLOGCRITICS.ORG

Olsen and Schaeffer have put together a glorious book about the Workshop from an insider’s perspective. Right off the bat, I liked the conversational tone that pervades, which makes it an easy and enjoyable read. There is plenty of truth-telling full of gossip, drugs, and sex. But they also discuss what it takes to write, writer’s block, how they handled rejection and what success feels like. Talk about their initial fears, naiveté, and competitiveness is personal and honest. They wonder about the stuff they learned and did not learn at the Workshop. They reveal whom they liked as teachers and who left them cold.

This book is a must-have if you are a writer, a wanna-be writer or are simply curious about what goes into the making of a writer. If you read one book about writing this year, it should be We Wanted To Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

— Diane Prokop

We Wanted To Be Writers tells the tale of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop during the 1970s, a time when literary theory cold-cocked craft and creative writing congealed into a career instead of a calling. Thirty graduates of the program and survivors of life after an MFA offer up a master class over seven chapters, what they call “a compendium of reflections we wish we had before we arrived naked in Iowa City…”

You can turn to any page of We Wanted To Be Writers and learn something. But it’s much more enjoyable to go slow and allow that cumulative effect to take hold. It’s the difference between glancing at the sky or lying on your back and staring at clouds – eventually the patterns that make a difference introduce themselves and ask for spot beside you on your blanket.

— Sean Georgianni, Scribophile

This is the kind of book I would notice in a bookstore (great title!), but not pick up to browse or buy. Big mistake! Just like most of us hate Harvard because we could never get in there, a fare share of wannabe writers, like me, have that kind of prejudice against the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But the format here is so real when you read this book you feel, not like an outsider, but a participant in a discussion about the things you love, the challenges you face. And for writers, who are a solitary bunch, that is a welcome treat. You join a creative community that leaves you to do your own work in what Eudora Welty called an absolute state of Do Not Disturb.

— From Rosebud Book Reviews

Don’t assume that WW2BW’s is just some self-serving Workshop puff job because it definitely is not that. In fact, in just the first 60 pages there is plenty of “Workshop writing PR” heresy — actually jeered by one poet as “domesticated writing”. Marin Bell (1962 poetry grad, then back to teach at Iowa for more than 30 years) says, “by the mid-‘70s, there existed a scouting system that channeled … the best and the brightest … back to Iowa City.” Bell says of this new generation, “They were influenced by theories, they talked jargon, they adopted … sophisticated aesthetics… We had no room for … the funky, counterculture community of my student days (‘60’s) … rough hewn students from nowheresville … our loss, I felt.”

Wanting to be a writer can actually become a compulsive passion; on the third page of the book there is this instructive quote from over 2000 years ago:

“Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.” — Juvenal, from the first century (CE).

— Dick Cummins, Iowa Writers’ Workshop class of 1967

Buy the book, save the tuition. If I had known this book was forthcoming, much money could have been saved on all the how-to-write books that clutter my shelves. The information given by the participants about the writing and publishing life gives valuable insight into how the big guys do it. They might not realize it but their insight gives the rest of us the aha! moment they’ve tried so hard to find. The few bucks spent on this book give us the Iowa Writers’ Workshop experience without the expense or the hangover.

I love this book and will be thumbing through it constantly to bolster my writing ability. The subtitle of Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop only partially describes the wealth of information found inside. Olsen and Schaeffer have put together a masterpiece that not only delves into a culture, but provides a manual of creative writing methodology.

— Schuyler T. Wallace, author of Tin Lizard Tales

Rather than run each interview in full, a la the Paris Review interviews for example, Olsen and Schaeffer arranged excerpts of the interviews into “conversations” on various topics such as the creative process, or how to deal with writer’s block or rejection, and related topics, including the best bars in Iowa City, of course.

From Chapter 4: Say Yes! to Everything

Maybe it’s a good thing there was no Internet back when we were applying to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; we were spared the Workshop’s buzz-killing disclaimer currently on its Web site concerning what can or can’t be taught or learned there. Would we have been so enthusiastic, so positively gleeful about our bright prospects and what the future held when we got those acceptance letters if we’d read that the folks at the Workshop itself agreed “in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught”?

Well, of course we’d have been just as pleased with ourselves, because we wouldn’t have believed a bit of it! We all assumed we’d come out of Iowa better writers one way or another. What writers don’t assume they’ll get it right eventually if they just keep at it? And besides, we were facing the delicious prospect of two years to do nothing but write — well, we intended to do nothing but write until we discovered all of Iowa City’s swell bars.

But the Workshop’s disclaimer does raise some questions: What gets taught at the Workshop, if anything, and how? What gets learned?

…

No doubt the artists who, some thirty-five thousand years ago, painted the figures in the caves in Chauvet, France, the first recorded “creative acts” found to date, struggled with the very issues creative types have always struggled with, meaning above all they wondered where their next meal was coming from, when they weren’t yearning for—pleading for—another good idea, for inspiration, for some little nod of recognition from what might have passed for the muse back in the Aurignacian.

No doubt they struggled with creative blocks, too, and tried to ignore that nagging internal editor going on and on and on about that line there, the one defining the haunch of that ibex, really, you can’t be serious. And no doubt there were critics back then, too—surely there have been critics as long as there have been artists—one of whom probably held up a torch to view that new work daubed and brushed on the cave wall with red ochre and carbon black pigments, and who thoughtfully scratched at his lice and gnawed on the leg bone of some now-extinct mammal and opined, “Don’t you think that auroch there—you do mean for that to be an auroch, I assume—isn’t just a little, well . . . derivative?”

Philosophers, poets, visionaries, and maybe a few lunatics have been pondering the nature of creativity ever since. And what all of this pondering points to, again and again, is that creativity (whether in the arts, the sciences, politics, business, or even the military) is a process with several characteristic steps.

The Workshop’s waffling disclaimer aside, the creative process can be practiced and honed and refined, and at least some aspects of it can be learned, perhaps most effectively in a community of people sharing their struggles and small triumphs along their individual wandering paths.

MARVIN BELL — One of the secrets in life is that if you do anything seriously long enough, you get better at it. Good writing is contagious; one doesn’t learn to hit a baseball by watching others strike out. Hence, the “teaching effect” accomplished by good writers who also teach. Hey, that’s a useful term: “the teaching effect.”

Teachers influence students, whether in person or through books. Students learn in the presence of teachers. Is it only coincidental that so many works of serious literature have come from alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? Maybe nothing can be “taught,” but anything can be learned. In the absence of models, there is little learning. Good writers who teach provide models for the writing life, which encompasses craft, knowledge, nerve, attitude, and even, sometimes, lifestyle. In addition, if enough good writers, young and old, gather in one place, good things happen. That is the essence of a workshop: that we are all in this together, students and faculty.

JANE SMILEY — We go to workshops for community, to meet like-minded people. Most writers don’t succeed if they’re just sitting in a room writing but not getting out. If you look back at the history of the novel, nearly everyone who succeeded was part of some sort of literary group. There is hardly anyone who thrives on being solitary. Think of Virginia Woolf and her circle; they supported one another, and talked to one another, and talked about literature. Thackeray and his friends, the same. People do it in New York City as a matter of course, so the idea that you would somehow not thrive in a more communal environment is absurd.

SANDRA CISNEROS — I believe in workshops. I teach workshops. I just don’t believe in the academic workshop. I believe in alternative workshops. We used to do workshops at community centers and in my living room. We’d do workshops in coffee shops, where we’d sit for two hours and read each other’s work and not say a word until we were done. That’s what we can do for each other.

As writers, we’re required to write alone. But I like to use the metaphor of writing being like cutting your own hair; there’s only so much you can do yourself, then you need someone to help you with the back. That’s what we do at the workshop; we cover each other’s back. So you don’t walk out with a bad haircut, so someone doesn’t say, damn, where’d you get that bad haircut? But you have to be with people you can trust. Believe me, if you can’t trust those people — which is what happened to me at Iowa — how can you grow?

JOHN IRVING — An older, experienced writer can be of use to a young, talented writer. The older writer can at least save the younger writer some time. You can’t (in my opinion) convert young writers to your method, or you shouldn’t try; you can illuminate your method in an un-pushy way, as a means of getting them to discover what their method is, and how it differs from yours. I don’t have a method of teaching writing; I certainly do have a process that I have learned to follow as a writer, but I don’t urge my process on anyone else. My Iowa students — for example, T.C. Boyle, Ron Hansen, and Allen Gurganus — don’t write at all like one another, and they shouldn’t. They never did! Everyone has something that you do too much of; maybe you do too much of it because you’re good at it, but everyone does something to excess — even if what you do to excess is being a minimalist. You do something to an irritating or a potentially irritating degree; you should know what it is. Maybe you shouldn’t back off doing it, but you at least should know what you do that irks people. (If you’re going to piss people off, you want to be sure you do so intentionally.)

Cocteau used to say that young writers should pay attention to what critics say — only the negatives. Because what the critics don’t like about you is probably the only original thing you have. Well, that may be true some of the time — or true about critics. But writing teachers aren’t and shouldn’t be critics; they should be trying to help you get better at what you already have a feeling or a passion for.

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS — Writing, or any art, is a calling, rather than a career. People enter into an MFA Program, not to “learn” to write, but to spend time in a mentor relationship with an accomplished writer, or a series of them, and to be part of a community for a scant two years that supports literature, reading, and the attempt to write. No one can “teach” anyone to write, but talented writers can find crucial support and encouragement, and learn to edit their own work (half the battle) within the Academy.

In a culture/economy that basically views artists with suspicion or hostility, the Academy has become a last outpost. The more MFA programs, the better, as far as I’m concerned, because those programs are encouraging literary readers, readers who care about contemporary literature. Many of those readers/writers will go on to publish their writing in one venue or another; a minority will publish a body of work.

MARVIN BELL — At the heart of “being creative” is always achieving a point in which the non-rational, the non-logical part of the mind has a chance to go to work. This is true of all creative writing, but it is true with a vengeance if one is writing the sort of poetry that tries to express the otherwise inexpressible.

I prefer to write when the pot boils over. Of course, over the years I have learned how to turn up the heat. I generally write very late at night, beginning after midnight, when the mind loosens its grip on the rational connections one needs in one’s utilitarian life. I like staying up late, always have. I write in spurts, always have. If the energy of the language flags, I walk away, which means I lose a lot, since one can’t always get back into an unfinished poem. Not if the poem has been pushing the envelope.

Regardless, I prefer the late hours, and I think they encourage pushing the envelope. And sometimes I write to stamp out my brain. The idea is always to write with abandon. I tend to say yes to whatever comes along.

SANDRA CISNEROS — Yes! Say yes to everything! What’re the worst mistakes a writer can make? Thinking too much. Don’t think. It’s not about thinking. You think when you edit. When you create, say yes, yes to everything. When the bell rings and it’s the Jehovah’s Witness folks, answer the door and say yes. The guy at the door might be in your story. Maybe he’ll leave a piece of paper that takes you to the next chapter. Say yes to everything; nothing’s an accident. Later is for the editing, but in the creation, be open, be gentle, like a mother; there’s nothing you say no to. Trust that the nonsense you’re writing will take you somewhere.

ALLAN GURGANUS — Exactly. Be generous with and to yourself. After that first draft, stash it away a while; work on other things (I believe in working on many units at once) let a little distance set in, and then reread it, ideally without a pen in your hand the first time, so you’re reading it at exactly the speed with which you wrote it, not interrupting. Reconsider it from start to end, bemused with a kind of teacherly or parental patience.

Of course, I can say but not always do that. I’ll maybe get two paragraphs in, trying to read it like that, impartially. Then I’ll go ah, that so sucks, and I whip out the pen. You have to take a macro view before you get into the dental-assistant details, the over-cleaning; if you go too fast to the incisor-brightening, you might be working on the teeth of a dead man. Or you’ll use up all your ingenuity on sentences that will prove redundant in the long run.