eduify | write faster

By Julia H. Jackson

Matthew Clark Davison is, among other things, a fiction writer, lecturer at San Francisco State University, an Artist Mentor with the San Francisco Performing Arts Workshop, a private writing coach, and teacher of a non-academic writing workshop called The Douglass Street Lab. He also is the Faculty Advisor for the SFSU graduate literary magazine Fourteen Hills. His novel manuscript ROADMAP won the Clark/Gross Novel-in-Progress Contest and was granted a Stonewall Alumni Association Award for excellence. His current novel manuscript, Letters to the Dead, was awarded a Cultural Equities Grant from The City of San Francisco. His short stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly’s Unbound, 580 Split, and Lodestar Quarterly. These days he teaches eight classes a week, and yet nearly every night he still makes time to write. He agreed to offer some tips for young writers for this second installment of our series on Writing Careers—Real Tips From Real Writers.

What’s your background?

MCD: I discovered writing as a powerful art form in the basement of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco—in a workshop similar to the kind I teach now for Performing Arts Workshop. At the time, I was a gay teenage runaway; a high school dropout. It was San Francisco during the middle of the AIDS pandemic. The women teaching that workshop saw that I had stories to tell, and encouraged me to pursue my education. I earned both my B.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where I have been teaching for over ten years. I also have been teaching a private writing workshop called The Lab for the past three years. I am an Artist Mentor with the Performing Arts Workshop, where I teach creative writing and also give feedback to artists about how to improve their pedagogy. I’ve also been a cold-caller, a ESL teacher in Italy, a waiter, and a book-keeper (even though I am severely dyslexic when it comes to numbers.)

You define yourself as a fiction writer, educator and mentor. Who or what inspires you?

MCD: I’m really fascinated by questions that can’t be answered—the unanswerable questions. I’m inspired by everything—by every book I read, by the visual arts, dance, music, nature, exercise, observing people. I’m really interested in fiction that explores self-destruction. I’m endlessly intrigued by the contradictions inherent in the human experience. How passion defies logic. How people destroy themselves when they’ve been given information how not to—and how people sustain themselves when their circumstances seem to have set them up for the opposite. I’m also an amateur photographer. In between big projects, when I have to force myself to write at night, like now, I use the Macbook tool Text Edit, and challenge myself to write until I fill that little four in by four inch space with words. It’s not unlike taking a quick snapshot.

What has the novel process been like for you?

MCD: My recently-completed novel, Letters to the Dead, started as a short story. I called this story my “No, But—” story, because every time I submitted it, the editors would say, “No, we won’t accept this, but do you have anything else?” and then they’d publish the second story I sent. Sometimes the themes need more space to spread out.  Short stories are impossibly difficult to do well. It’s like decorating a tiny space. Novels have more square footage. It took me five years to write my first novel, and three years to write my second novel. I loved the process of it—I started to really think as my character, Janis, as a friend, or an extension of myself. I wrote extensive journals from her point of view. Sometimes I’d be at a party and I’d sneak into a bathroom to write. One time, my cousin asked me my opinion on a restaurant, and I said, “Oh my god, Janis loves that place!”

You’ve taught classes such as the Craft of Fiction for many years. What has teaching taught you about writing?

MCD: Everything. I learned to speak Italian while teaching English; by listening to Italian people make mistakes in their English because they are translating word for word. Teaching is the same thing. In the Craft of Fiction, we do experiments, and with 35 students in the class, patterns emerge in their writing that I can see in my own work. Although it’s the same class every semester, I always assign new stories; I’m always looking for new work. With the Lab, we use art forms outside of creative writing, such as essays and video excerpts and music written by visual artists or architects or musicians or dance choreographers. In this session of The Lab, we used architecture concepts to talk about how plot is formed in fiction and memoir.

What tips can you offer for young writers?

MCD: I would remind them that revision is their friend, not their enemy. That the subject matter has to be interesting to you, and if it’s not, then you need to risk more. I can’t stay interested in any subject long enough to go through the revision process if there’s not some part of the subject that scares me. I’d also say imitate the writers you think are brave. That said, it’s better to be the best you than a bad imitation of someone you admire. Imitating is good as long as your goal is to find your own voice in the process, rather than appropriate someone else’s. Find what you love. Take care of yourself so you can sustain a writing practice. Practice all the time. Read your work out loud. Be open to feedback, but try not to become dependent on it. What you write is up to you.