Think of the loss to history if we fail to record the full and authentic lives of people, their private lives, their domestic lives. When Canadian writer Peter Ward began working on his book Courtship, Love, and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada, he came, he says, “head-on into the frustration shared by all who want to know what the silent Canadians of the past thought and felt. The evidence of personal experience and feelings, of private conduct and personal relationships, is at best fragmentary.” The “Maps and Chaps” recording of history, as it is sometimes called, has carried forward only the sketchiest outline of society. It is no wonder that novelist Margaret Drabble has been called a true chronicler of the late twentieth century; her novels hold the randomness of felt lives, the diurnal rub and drub of existence as it is experienced by at least a segment of our population. The eccentric but captivating fictions of Nicholson Baker rather bravely, I think, risk triviality in order to record what we all experience but hesitate to enter on the page: the sensation of a shoelace breaking loose in the hand, for instance, or the precise colour and muscular flicker of a baby’s eyelid. The sensations, recordings and reorderings of these writers, and others like them, add up to more than the sum of their small parts.
This kind of writing takes time. You have to pay attention. You have to have the patience to move the words around until they are both precise and allusive. I believe it is worth the effort. You can think of such fictions as entries on a ledger that push past print into an expanded reading of our world in all its intricacies and mysteries.
In Brief …
• To write is to raid, the saying goes. Writing is like life: a kind of cosmic lost-and-found bureau, an everlasting borrowing and lending of personal and communal experiences.
• How to avoid harming or wounding others? Write first, and revise (or disguise) later. If you’re hobbled by the fear of giving offence, you’re unlikely to write at all.
• Refrain from embarrassing others or borrowing their stories without permission. Like everyone else, writers need to sleep easily at night.
• You have to pay attention and have the patience to move the words around until they are both precise and allusive.
~ 5 ~
BE A LITTLE CRAZY; ASTONISH ME
CAN YOU REALLY TEACH PEOPLE TO WRITE? I MIGHT POSE A PARALLEL question: do we really teach people to be philosophers or mathematicians? Don’t we, instead, hand over to our budding philosophers or mathematicians a few basic tools that permit them to self-evolve?
Perhaps what we really mean when we say we can’t teach writing is that we can’t teach someone to be Virginia Woolf. On the other hand, a number of our most accomplished writers were, early in their lives, enrolled in writing courses: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Wallace Stegner, and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few.
Ah, but writing is God-given, it’s often said, the implication being that the writer is also God-protected and superhuman, an uncomfortable assumption for most of us these days. Those who reject the God-given thesis sometimes believe that Bohemia is the place to learn to write. But Bohemia, that mythical realm—meaning freedom from compromise and convention, an excited, open state of mind, a portable set of liberties that fertilize the ground from which writers spring—has not much flourished in North America.
Writers are romantically believed to be seekers of solitude, but in fact they have historically gathered around centres of power. Today the university has become one of those power centres, delivering encouragement in the shape of course offerings and informed tutoring. A centre of learning, it can be argued, is an appropriate venue for the teaching of writing since it also possesses libraries, bookstores, accommodation, staff, classrooms—and, most important, people who know how to write and who are willing to share their knowledge and intuition with those who are learning. Haven’t writers always, in fact, functioned this way—teaching, coaching, mentoring, advising, editing and influencing other writers—in garrets or coffee houses or the courts of kings or in country houses, through correspondence, or by the simple dissemination of their books? The place of interaction has shifted; a slight and gradual formalization has occurred, but the process is not radically different from what it’s always been.
Early writing programs, perhaps in order to defend their legitimacy in the university, were often rather traditionally organized, using textbooks and assigning letter grades for weekly assignments. They were, in fact, institutions that ran on the gas of criticism rather than creativity. Gradually the workshop evolved, becoming the cornerstone of most creative writing programs, and there are some who believe that this manner of teaching has influenced the way learning has come to be shared in other enlightened (that is, non-hierarchical) disciplines. Basically, workshopping in creative writing programs means that the work of students is read and critiqued by members of the class and by the writer/teacher who acts as a sort of group leader. Ideally students are drawn out, cajoled, persuaded, questioned, nudged, niggled and encouraged to make a new and personal set of criteria, rather than fed a critical line or one way to approach creating fiction.
If this methodology sounds vaguely, nostalgically familiar, it may be because it gestures toward the methodology of the medieval or even classical university. Obviously students are not taught how to be original, but they are made aware of non-originality and they are exposed, though not perhaps systematically, to certain skills involved in writing: setting up a scene and furnishing it, situating a narrative in time and space, controlling the flow of information, creating a mood, deciding who is telling the story and why.
In 1973, all the teachers of creative writing in colleges and universities in the United States were invited to a conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Library of Congress. Five hundred writers/teachers attended, among them such luminaries as John Barth, Wallace Stegner, John Ciardi and Ralph Ellison. The animated discussions between the participants brought to light some disturbing revelations. Only about one percent of creative writing students became writers. Ninety-nine percent of students of the day were “lured by the glamour of the profession or the desire for money and fame.” (I can only suppose that these numbers were arrived at anecdotally rather than statistically.)
Three other discoveries came out of the meeting. 1. No one knows how to teach writing. 2. In particular, no one knows how to teach the talented. And 3. The talentless can be taught only a little.
It might be thought that these dismal conclusions would spell the end of creative writing teaching in America. Exactly the opposite occurred. Courses in creative writing proliferated, writer-in-residence programs were established in all corners of the country, writers’ retreats (often with a writer/teacher available) flourished, and degree-granting writing programs grew in number and in power, and their presence was more and more seen as a sign of prestige for their mother institutions.
Creative writing courses are often the only place in our society where writers can come together. They are our salons, our “left banks,” our wine bars, the laboratories of our literature. Creative writing classes give to students of literature a glimpse of the way in which literature is made, how difficult it is and how fragile and fleeting the creative impulse is. A certain sharpening of critical ability occurs in these classes, at least some of it self-directed. In addition, writing courses seize upon that compulsion most young people have to write a poem or story, to say something in words that are entirely their own. A social function is served, too, I think. These classes are, after all, small and intense, and deal frequently with highly personal material. A student once told me that reading his own writing to a class was like standing up and taking off all his clothes. Certain standards of kindness and trust must be established and adhered to. I think many of these social transactions are useful, more useful in the long run perhaps than aesthetic transactions.
At the time my novel about Judith Gill was published (Small Ceremonies, 1976), I had had no experience at all with creative writing cl
asses, either as student or teacher, and in my “creative” description of such a class in Small Ceremonies I turned out to be partly right and partly wrong. I was right—and I can only suppose that I had picked up a certain amount of random information by a kind of osmosis—about the general informality of such classes—the seventies were, after all, the days of encounter groups, of such experiments as the human potential movement. I was right about there being a wide variation in students’ backgrounds and ages, right on the whole about the size of classes—they do vary from ten to twenty—right about those little class exercises, and right, too, about the rather nervously offered and vaguely worded student criticism. But I was wrong about student boldness, the desire to shock, and student willingness to abandon themselves in their writing and to their classmates. Creative writing students are often painfully guarded; it is one of the great problems of teaching. And I was wrong about student commitment to philosophical or political causes. It is the self that chiefly interests them, the lonely self, the misunderstood self, and this produces a kind of writing that is often claustrophobic and, worse, bewilderingly private. Finally, I was wrong to believe that students exhaust themselves in their initial cathartic explosions. In fact, it takes several weeks to establish an atmosphere of trust in a class, and it is only then that creative and critical skills begin to grow.
I try to establish an atmosphere of creativity, not correction, and I begin each new class by introducing myself, asking students to use my first name, Carol, since I intend to use their first names. Sitting around a seminar table, it seems to me, demands the informality of first names, although I have no idea whether other writer/teachers feel comfortable with this particular form of familiarity. I explain to my newly registered class, as undramatically as I can, that I am a writer, and I list briefly what I have written. I outline in about a hundred words or less what I consider writing to be about, and for and of, and then I make a point never to refer again to my own work or, directly, to my own writerly views. When teaching, I insist on setting a distance from my own work because I am wary of imposing my ideas and my methodology on developing writers who are, as you might imagine, almost dangerously open to suggestion. (I recall teaching a short fiction class at the University of British Columbia in which the previous instructor had decreed that writing in the first person was masturbatory and therefore indecent—it took me a full year to restore confidence in the first person voice.) Each writer evolves a method of writing or an approach to writing that is personally productive and engaging and rewarding. I write 500 words a day, but I am not at all anxious to press this limit on eighteen-year-old students or even on forty-year-old students. I write every day, whether or not I am ignited by the force of what some call the fire of inspiration, but I would not want to suggest to others that their thirty-six-hour or sixty-four-hour flights of inspired intemperance are wasteful and self-indulgent because I am not at all sure they are.
I make it a point to declare to the class at our first meeting that everything—that is, all material—is open to scrutiny except that which is pornographic or sexist—and occasionally we disagree as a class about the limits of these two reservations. What constitutes sexist writing? Why is a long, voluptuous and explicit sex scene acceptable and an off-hand reference to a hateful, hairy-legged woman not? This question came up in my class once and I’m not sure it was satisfactorily resolved.
I always ask my students at the first class to introduce themselves and to reveal why they have registered for the course. Only very occasionally does a student say: “I want to become a great writer.” Generally they respond by saying modestly: “Because I want to learn to sharpen my images, or write better dialogue, or test my material on an interested audience.” Once a woman replied that she wanted to discover what a story was. Good luck, I said to myself, since I’ve never been able to frame a satisfactory definition myself.
I ask them to write down what they consider to be the hardest thing about writing, and over the years I’ve collected such responses as: Knowing how to begin. Knowing when I’ve reached the end. Getting the thoughts in my head onto paper. Finding time. Learning to concentrate. Finding my own voice. Avoiding libel and/or injury to others—chiefly mothers. (Mothers, I’ve found, take a hard knock in creative writing courses.)
Believing students should write the stories they would like to read, I brace myself and ask new students what they read. Some confess to reading nothing but texts for their other classes. Almost all of them read Stephen King and Sidney Sheldon; younger students are wrapped up with Kurt Vonnegut; one or two will have read Margaret Atwood, usually for a class. A few have read Alice Munro and Anne Tyler. Most say they prefer to read novels, but they want to write short stories. Why? Because the size of the novel frightens them.
I begin each three-hour class with a short discussion of some aspect of writing—tension, tone, voice, and so on. Then we do an in-class writing exercise. Over the years I’ve collected certain exercises that work, at least most of the time. I might for instance pass around a photograph of a human hand, and ask them to write for six minutes, using the voice of the owner of the hand. I then give them two or three minutes to edit their material, and then we go around the table reading what we’ve written. Or I might give them a single word, the word “pink,” for instance, and ask them to run with it in any direction they choose. These exercises do a number of things, showing the students how variable responses can be and how readily available the source of creativity is. Often I repeat an exercise and say, “Take it further at this time.” It’s as though they need someone to say: Be a little crazy. Astonish me.
Part of the class will be spent on a reading of the weekly assignment. A typical assignment might be: write a paragraph describing a room without using any adjectives. I ask the students to provide copies of their work for the class. We keep the critiques of these exercises short, bearing in mind that they are exercises, attempts, experiments, and not finished work.
Every student declares a major project within the first month. I ask for a short story of no less than fifteen pages; a short play, about twenty-five pages; or a group of poems, about fifteen pages. We workshop two of these projects a week, discussing them in detail, offering oral and also written comments.
A very great improvement in writing is seen within weeks, particularly after the problems of clichés and sentimentality are identified. An understanding of point of view brings further improvement. But then I notice a slowing down. It is possible, it seems, to teach people how to write better, but impossible to get them to have better ideas. What writers need is to learn to notice things, to recognize a story when they see it and to trust their impulses. A creative writing teacher can to a certain extent give permission. A teacher can also say: You will have to write 300 words by next Wednesday, and this kind of deadline is a spur to a student who has been meaning to get around to writing for twenty years. Creative writing classes also provide an opportunity to try out material on an audience, although in fact that audience is often poorly equipped in terms of a critical vocabulary and with the kind of courage it takes to deal vigorously and honestly with the work of peers.
Marking is a special problem, and some advocate that pass/fail marks would be more appropriate. I base marks on attendance, participation, commitment to writing and to the class, and on improvement. This last is highly subjective, as you can imagine.
To write is to be self-conscious, as Jane Austen certainly knew. What flows onto paper is more daring or more covert than a writer’s own voice, or more exaggerated or effaced.
—Jane Austen: A Life
Writing classes tend for some reason to be less homogeneous than other university classes, and so new and unexpected accommodations must be reached. How will an eighteen-year-old youth, fresh from a suburban high school, find a measure of commonality with a fifty-year-old man who has been fired from his engineering job, who is freshly divorced, who is a single father, who has recently been hospitalized for a nervous br
eakdown? (This sounds like a collision out of a soap opera, but it nevertheless occurred in a course I once taught.) Will a twenty-year-old woman, a lover of Stephen King and a fundamentalist Christian, be able to comprehend an ironic, cryptic, emotionally charged short story written by a sixty-year-old woman, the wife of a psychology professor, a woman who has wanted to write for thirty years but felt blocked before writing a single word? Will a young man who has written a gothic horror story in which the hero dies by being flushed down the toilet have anything to say to a young woman who has produced a dozen short exquisite prose pieces about the fantasy, the seduction, the necessity—so she says—of her own projected suicide?
The human transactions that take place in writing class are enormously useful in the long run, perhaps more useful than the aesthetic transactions.
It had always seemed something of a miracle to him that poetry did occasionally speak. Even when it didn’t he felt himself grow reverent before the quaint, queer magnitude of the poet’s intent. When he thought of the revolution of planets, the emergence of species, the balance of mathematics, he could not see that any of these was more amazing than the impertinent human wish to reach into the sea of common language and extract from it the rich dark beautiful words that could be arranged in such a way that the unsayable might be said. Poetry was the prism that refracted all of life. It was Jimroy’s belief that the best and worst of human experiences were frozen inside these wondrous little toys called poems.
—Swann
Writing Assignments
1. Write a poem, incorporating a phrase from a poet you love. Ask yourself:
Startle and Illuminate Page 6
