Excerpt

Taken from Hawai’i Review Issue 53, 1999. Samrat Upadhyay Interviews Ian MacMillan

Upadhyay: Let’s move on to teaching, since you have been teaching for more than three decades here at the University of Hawai’i. A lot of students of creative writing suffer from the notion that you should only write from “what you know.” But your whole body of work defies that. I have also been puzzled by this pedagogy of writing because it seems very limiting.

MacMillan: I keep telling my students that you start with what you know, but that’s just a means of getting into something. Then you start projecting, then you start throwing your imagination at various barriers. I always tell my students that as far as the choice of subject matter is concerned, the best results come from the greatest risk. Bite off more than you can chew because most likely it’ll force you to write better than you ordinarily would. Enterprising writers make the unworkable work. I sort of coach a reactionary attitude towards those conventional visions of what writing is supposed to be. When somebody says don’t do such and such in your writing, a bell should ring in the back of your head that says, “I’m going to figure out how.” Or if you explain a novel or a short story idea that’s outrageous to a friend, who looks at you skeptically and says, “Really?” then the bell should go off that tells you that you can make it work. So, do what you shouldn’t do. That’s what makes you push the boundaries. This philosophy operates against the contemporary notion that somehow the work is inherently connected, then there’s an illegitimacy in the work. That’s a preposterous notion. We used to think the opposite, that if the work was too autobiographical, then it was bordering on illegitimacy right there. That’s what people complained about Thomas Wolfe. But now it seems people are very successful writing about their own experiences, or revealing odd corners of the American culture that they happened to have experienced. That’s great. It functions, and lets other people know what it’s like to grow up, let’s say, in Moloka’i or whatever. But there’s more to it. And other writers do other things.