As for the look of disbelief that washed over her face, I told Tanika that here she had stepped outside of herself to give us yet another cliché – and even if these words weren’t old and tired, how can a writer know that a look of disbelief had washed over her face if she’s writing from the first-person perspective? On a technical level it is only possible for the first-person narrator to describe how the comment made her feel, and how she imagines her reaction to the comment made her look, example, Tanika’s bad writing made me wish I was wrapped in white sheets and stoned to death. Then I told Tanika that she finished this sentence with a technique I call the anti-image: an illusion of compassion that really wasn’t there. Here the bad writer identifies and describes the absence of a setting, characteristic or emotion because, I presume, she thinks it will make her sound more ‘literary’. ‘But if the feeling or image you are describing is not there, then why waste time, words and space discussing it?’ I asked her. ‘Why aren’t you telling us what is there rather than what isn’t?’
Tanika didn’t give me the smug grin that I spotted on Christopher. Instead she stared at me as if I had smashed the Ten Commandments, completely bewildered and confused. Then she said, ‘It’s like you’re trying to teach me university stuff, but creativity isn’t something you can learn.’ Such bad writers often pigeonhole me as the narrow-minded snob who cannot appreciate the uniqueness of individual voice because I’m so academically educated that I now have a conservative and restricted understanding and expectation of great literature. But rather than insisting that creative writing was her God-given talent, if Tanika was even slightly interested in learning about creative writing as an academic skill and vocation (which Auburn Council was paying me to teach her), she might not have strutted out of the room like the Queen of Sheba before I could show her the following piece, which was written by a student at Lurnea High School and published in a Sweatshop anthology called Violence:
We like to bully Mohamed and Yousif
because they are gay and ugly
because they are show off
because they are bitch
because they are ass holes.
When I share this piece with participants in my creative writing workshops, I ask them two questions, for which I usually get the same answers:
‘What is it?’
‘Graffiti.’
‘Is it good?’
‘It’s rubbish.’
I then explain that I had published the piece under the assumption that it was in fact a poem, not graffiti (even though I am well aware that graffiti can be poetry), and that it displays many of the features of poetic language that writers are expected to identify and appreciate in the classroom – metaphor, since the author does not literally mean that Mohamed and Yousif are homosexuals or female dogs, and repetition, because because because … The poem is untitled and the writer is anonymous but when I ask participants in my workshops what they can uncover about the writer’s identity from the writing itself, they can often work out that it was written by someone young, male, from a non-English-speaking background (migrant or refugee) from Western Sydney and who is influenced by both Australian-English and American-English vernacular and popular culture. That is an impressive amount of detail to be able to extract about an anonymous writer from what they had deemed ‘graffiti’ and ‘rubbish’. Secondly I ask the students what this poem is about and they always interpret it literally. They say, ‘It’s about bullying.’ The ones who see themselves as cleverer and are trying a little harder, like the Chinese and Indian kids in the Gifted and Talented class at Parramatta’s Saint Blah Blah High School say, ‘It’s about two or more people being racist to Mohamed and Yousif.’ Never in five years of teaching this poem has any participant realised the unique sense of irony that is being evoked in the words, that the writer was sitting in the classroom in front of his friends Mohamed and Yousif and was using my writing exercise to make fun of them, who laughed along with him when he read the piece back to me. Analysis of this poem serves two purposes: to identify first that good writing is always unconventional, unique and complex (even in its simplicity), and second that education and training specific to creative writing enhance any writer’s ability to read and write creatively, rather than diminish or limit a ‘natural’ ability to do so.
Of course for bad writers the idea of learning creative writing through education and training is unheard of. Learn? What do you mean learn? Good writing comes from the heart. This would be a completely unacceptable attitude in any other discipline. Would you try to perform brain surgery or replace a car engine or get into a professional boxing ring because you have heart? Nobody is denying that to be good at one of these professions you need to have a passion for them – but this is not supposed to be a substitute for education and training. Boxing is a particular area where I can draw some useful analogies because I was a fighter before I was a writer. I strode into the Belmore PCYC like every other Lebo in Bankstown, with my chin high and my chest cocked and a cigarette wedged between my left ear and my razored head. I peered over the boxing ring at a Lebanese boxer shorter and skinnier than me – five foot five and fifty-five kilos max. ‘I can knock you,’ I said to him, and straightaway he stepped over and spread apart the ropes, inviting me into the ring. I proceeded to throw straight jabs at his head and every time he’d roll under them and give me a roundhouser into the rib, sucking the air from my lungs and my loins, until finally, not even one minute into the fight, he stung me so hard with a right uppercut in the stomach that I went down on the canvas and began to spew up that night’s dinner (potato and gravy and two pieces of fried chicken from KFC). Then the Leb called everyone in the gym to come over and have a look at me, and he said out loud while I continued to spew, ‘You see, that’s what happens when you act like a hard cunt!’
The Leb taught me quickly and painfully and embarrassingly that to be a great boxer, I needed a qualified trainer, someone to watch me from the outside and advise me on my technique – the speed, power, procession and combinations of my punches, my stance and footwork, my defence, my fitness, my stamina and my endurance. I needed the right diet, to put the right food in my body and to keep drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and hubbly bubbly out; and I needed fellow boxers around me, who would get in the ring with me and spar regularly, enabling me to apply the theoretical skills I was learning on pads and bags.
Now, as a teacher of creative writing, every day I have bad writers waltz into my office the way I waltzed into that gym, confidently handing me their work and expecting me to be knocked out by their creative genius, unaware that they are about to hit the canvas. Just like I learned in boxing, I tell them that if they want to be great writers, they need a qualified trainer, what we call in the industry an editor, someone who is watching them from the outside and keeping an eye on their form, technique, development of characters, settings, details and voice, someone who is providing them with critical feedback on an ongoing basis. It is often difficult for me as an editor to convince bad writers that this is a healthy and normal part of the business, which should be accepted without taking personal offence. Next I tell them they need the right diet, not necessarily what they put into their bodies (though I often think a lot of these bad writers need to cut back on the snacks and alcohol and do some sit-ups and push-ups), but what they are putting into their minds: what are they reading, watching and listening to? Here’s a scale I use to measure the quality of a writer’s diet: Fifty Shades of Grey is KFC and The Swan Book is the vegetables you grow in your backyard.
Then of course there is sparring for a writer. In boxing this requires a fighter to step into the boxing ring with his or her peers and throw hands, not to hurt one another but to learn from one another and refine technique through one another. With the exception of the writers’ collective I have been running at Sweatshop, I have not found another group that has been able to achieve a serious culture of sparring. Usually I attend one of these groups as a guest author and witness bad writers wh
o exchange stories, which they read from start to finish, only to be praised by their fellow writers’ group members with perhaps a light tweak or criticism here or there regardless of how unoriginal, unsophisticated and undeveloped the work might be. At Sweatshop nobody is allowed to pull their punches; we train the members to listen to each other’s work, find every opening available and strike. Sometimes we will do a stop-and-start edit, in which we will interrupt the writer as they read to offer suggestions specific to each line or paragraph or scene, sometimes we will listen to an entire piece and give an overview of where the piece could improve (though this is rare), and sometimes we will ask the writer to read the piece a few times over (especially if it is a poem by a good poet) because there are particular details that need clarifying.
On multiple occasions bad writers who have attended the Western Sydney Writers’ Group for the first time find our feedback extremely confronting and offensive and don’t ever return, assured that we simply do not know what we are talking about. To these people I say, Salaam alaikum! I don’t want to work with anyone who cannot take constructive criticism, who cannot rewrite, and who cannot separate the personal pain of writing about their dead grandmother from the professional craft of conveying the story about their dead grandmother in an effective and original way (and I have also found that it is extremely difficult to help these kinds of people anyway). Take, for example, this Palestinian-Australian girl that once attended our writers’ group named Leila, who had an American accent because she learned English at an international school in Abu Dhabi. Of course it was confronting and upsetting to be told that a story about her four-year-old cousin who died in a crossfire on the Gaza Strip is no good, but in all fairness no-one had actually questioned the degree to which she loved her dead cousin, we had simply pointed out that it was lacking in detail and characterisation, preventing us from feeling and understanding the experience of her loss, to write: I woke up to the news that my sweet beautiful gorgeous baby cousin was deceased and the rest of the day was a blur. Leila argued that my heartless feedback proved I had Asperger’s syndrome. She even recommended that I see a doctor called Jamal Rifi about it, who by coincidence has been my family physician since 1996.
On another occasion I made a bad writer cry because I stopped her while she was still reading so our writers’ group could begin discussing her work. This woman told us she had nine children, which I believed because the sleep bags under her eyes looked like onion rings, and that she was Indian, which I did not believe because she was fairer than a snowflake and kept wobbling her head as though she had something to prove. For three minutes my writers’ group listened as she read a five-page poem called ‘Africa’, in which she listed generic and clichéd images about starving black children in a Third World ‘country’ she’d undoubtedly seen on television, with lines such as: Africa, a country of wonder in my eye. Hunger, to live and die. Then finally, after we had heard more than enough to offer an analysis, I interrupted her and began to explain that if she’d actually been to some countries in Africa, then she should speak specifically about herself in relation to those places, or if she was simply writing about her impression of the continent of Africa based on what she’d seen on television, then this was fine too, but only if she came clean and framed the poem in such a way. Indeed, a fair-skinned wannabe-Indian mother of nine living in Harris Park and making judgements about the Third World based on what she sees on the television is more interesting than any of her white saviour fantasies. Straightaway her eyes began to swell and her head began to wobble out of control. She said, ‘How can you know if it’s good or bad without having heard all of it?’ Usually at the core of this response is that the bad writer wants an audience rather than a critic – someone to listen to their story and their pain and show them compassion as though we are offering a free group therapy session (which is what most writers’ groups actually become). Nonetheless, to answer the question of ‘how do you know?’ at face value, the truth is that if a bad writer doesn’t know what good writing is on the first page, it’s impossible that they have worked it out on the fifth page, and a good editor will pick this up straightaway – especially when the title of the piece is ‘Life Happens’.
While some bad writers are not interested in any education and training, there are those who conduct what I call pseudo education and training. These bad writers respond to criticism of their work by claiming that they are emulating or drawing from the techniques and style of a good writer they have been reading. For example, we had a bad Croatian writer named Victor (after a lawnmower) who attended our writers’ group for over eight years. This was a middle-aged father of four who only ever wore bland-coloured trousers and checked shirts from Lowes and had a monotonous reading voice that sounded like Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesiser (which is rare because most writers in Western Sydney, even the bad writers, come from cultural backgrounds with developed oral storytelling systems and can perform their writing pretty well). At every workshop Victor attended, instead of taking any notes about his writing, which were always based on the fact that he was not being specific enough about who his characters were and where they were from, he argued that we were burdening him with cultural representation and that he simply wanted to write ‘the universal man’ and ‘the universal place’.
‘There is no universal man and place in literature,’ I told Victor week after week and year after year, even though I was well aware from his conventional family life, computer voice and plain outfits that he saw himself as the universal man.
‘But that’s how James Joyce writes,’ he responded.
Only a clumsy illiterate halfwit might think there is something universal about Leopold Bloom and Dublin on 16 June 1904 – and the problem is that such responses are predicated on the assumption that reading your favourite writer means you can now write like your favourite writer. I have no doubt that bad writers think they are writing the way James Joyce was writing but this is as absurd as a bad fighter thinking they can now fight like Muhammad Ali because they watched a video of him floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. Imagine this bad fighter then went to a boxing gym and displayed his Muhammad Ali fighting style to a trainer, only to be told that his footwork is a fumbling mess, his defence has major holes in it, and his punches are slow, sloppy and weak. ‘But that’s how Muhammad Ali fights!’ the bad fighter responds.
To adopt the style of a favourite boxer, bad fighters need to start from the ground up, learn how to stand before they learn how to float, learn how to jab before they learn how to sting. Similarly, to adopt the style of a favourite writer, bad writers need to start from the word up, learn how to manage a three-line sentence before learning how to manage a four-page sentence, learn how to write a short story before trying to write a novel – it’s unbelievable the number of bad writers who decide one day that they are going to write a novel and turn over 100,000 words before having had any confirmation from an editor, critic, publisher or accomplished writer that they can even write 1000 words.
A more embarrassing response than ‘But that’s how James Joyce writes’ is what I call the Milhouse defence – which draws reference to a moment in The Simpsons where Milhouse is criticised by Mr Burns and responds, ‘But my mom says I’m cool.’ Bad writers use this rhetoric to rebut criticism offered by an editor or literary critic or creative writing teacher; they claim that some well-known writer, who was clearly patronising them like a blind mother, said their writing is good. For example, during a writers’ workshop I was facilitating at the Blacktown Arts Centre, I met a young woman named Belle, the daughter of a plastic surgeon who adventured all the way over from North Sydney to show me a personal essay about how she envied the poverty-stricken kids she encountered in Mumbai: It didn’t matter that I was staying at a five-star hotel, brown kids just seemed to know how to laugh on the streets. I told her that this piece lacked a certain humour and irony about herself which was needed to distance it from yet another case of Poor White Girl s
yndrome. ‘Well, I did a workshop in Bangalore with Arundhati Roy and she said my work was pretty damn great,’ Belle shot back. This is a pathetic and disrespectful approach to the maternal and paternal figures we adopt in our writing lives. First, Arundhati Roy wasn’t at the workshop in Blacktown to defend such a claim, so I guess we just had to take Belle’s word for it; second, even if Arundhati Roy thought Belle’s essay was good, that did not mean she would have disagreed with my criticisms and discouraged Belle from any revisions; and third, even if Arundhati Roy once told Belle that she was God’s gift to literature, how does that change the fact that I spotted a serious flaw in her work?
*
So now that I have detailed some bad attitudes towards writing, what are good attitudes towards writing? Unfortunately, there are some aspects of creative writing, like in all creative arts, that simply cannot be learned. No-one can just give you the identity or experiences to tell an interesting, new, important or worthwhile story (which explains why so many writers steal them) and no-one can just give you a unique voice or a unique method of evoking, manipulating and evolving the English language, or any other language for that matter. This is why I have always believed that writers from Western Sydney have a particular advantage for creating new Australian literature. It is a region where culture is an orgy of Leb, fob, nip, skip, wog and curry-muncher; where gender is a lawyer in a burka living next door to a Thai masseuse who gives Muslim boys hand jobs; where class is the great-grandchild of Ataturk who is stalking his second cousin on welfare at Auburn Japanese Gardens; and where sexuality is a clash between the Suzuki-driving hausfrau suburban gays of the south-west and the herds of transgender sex workers soliciting truckers in Mount Druitt.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 18
