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How and What Do Creative Writing Teachers
Teach And What Do Creative Writing Students Learn?
Grant Caldwell
School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne
In discussing these questions, I will
address the general principles applied in my teaching of
creative writing; I teach across a broad range of
areas—verse
(in its many forms), short fiction, novellas and novels,
monologue, memoir/autobiography, faction, ficto-criticism,
metafiction—and the specific application of
these principles varies somewhat within these areas. First,
I will address what I consider to be the “false situation” of
the classroom for creative writing. I will then discuss
the processes that can be explored and learned in this
limited environment, demonstrating its workability and
effectiveness.
Often when opening a lecture or seminar,
especially to first year students, I will state: In art,
the first rule is, there are no rules. And the second rule:
always maintain the right to contradict yourself. This
usually gets a laugh (and I think it was George Bernard
Shaw who said about teaching: “Make them laugh or they’ll hate
you.”), but it is hardly adequate, it needs elaborating
upon.
In one of his many letters to his fiancé,
Felice, Kafka said of writing:
...writing means revealing oneself
to excess...This is why one can never be alone enough
when one writes, why there can never be enough silence
around when one writes, why even night is not night enough.
(in Heller & Born,183-184)
The student/writer is certainly not alone
in the classroom; there are also all kinds of expectations
placed upon them, they are among people whom they mostly
do not know, and there is a time limit to their creative
activity.
To take this idea of the need to be alone
further (before explaining what I think can be done in
the classroom), if one agrees with Kafka, then why is “even
night...not night enough”?
I think it is because it is only when you are in an absorbed,
unselfconscious state of mind that the creative energy
kicks in; only then can the work fully engage you, only
then will it in turn have any chance of engaging others.
Some people have used drugs effectively
to achieve this state of absorbed unselfconsciousness,
but it is obvious that, unless you have the constitution
of a rhinoceros (like Charles Bukowski) you will not live
a long or happy (or creative) life if this is your methodology,
and I also don’t think you will
achieve your complete potential as an artist. There are
a number of possible exceptions to this contention, but
who is to say what extra heights Coleridge or Michael Dransfield
or Dylan Thomas (among others) would have achieved if they
had escaped their various addictions? And how many unheard-of
artists of great potential have destroyed their artistic
potential this way?
But let us get back to the question of focus,
of being absorbed in one’s work, and how difficult
this may be in the classroom. Richard Flanagan wrote that:
The creative path is dark, groping,
essentially mysterious. If you are listening to any
voice other than your own, you’re lost, or, what
is more likely, are yet to cross the threshold that
marks the beginning: the loss of self-consciousness
and, in its place, the detached exploration of self.
( 7)
The detached exploration of self. This is what I
hope the students achieve within the false situation of
the classroom. And whatever difficulty they have in applying
this principle in the classroom, they will at least learn
the principle for further use. It is in the light of this
principle that the grading of students’ work
should be explained: As well as it being subject to the
individual taste (and moods!) of the examiner, the quality
of the work will be influenced by the students’ varying
ability to cope with the false situation, and their ability
to achieve a detached exploration of self, i.e.
their loss of self-consciousness.
Some students cope better
with this than others. Some students pick up on the principles
and processes of writing more quickly than others. This
is why the grades and marks, although important, especially
for further study, should not be taken too much to heart.
I think it is important to explain and discuss these limitations
with the students in the initial classes. Doing so seems
to relax them, disarming an atmosphere that may otherwise
be overwhelming, even stifling for them. The result is
that their creative work becomes easier, less self-conscious,
more effective, and they become more supportive of each
other.
So, students may rightly ask: If the classroom
is a false situation, what are we doing here? This is a good question, and
one that should always be asked.
My answer is usually along the lines of:
We cannot teach you how to write, but we can help open up the doors of (your) perception and
experience so that you can learn to write, you can learn to discern and criticise
your own writing and that of others, to speed up and facilitate a process that
might take you much longer and might otherwise discourage you. This process
may also involve the theoretical analysis and the undertaking of higher research
and further study leading to employment that will support your creative work.
It is also important to point out that, while this theoretical analysis may
cross over into students’ creative work, and may even help to inform
it, it is a different activity from creative writing, and wherever possible
it should be treated separately. There is, of course, the exception of ficto-criticism.
I am often asked by student writers, who
should they be writing for? Many established writers I have read say that they
write for themselves. Though there are times within the fog of creation that
I become aware of the possibility of an “audience,” these thoughts
are fleeting if the work is engaging me at all. From this the obvious questions
arise: WHY should one not think of who will be reading the work? And
if so, HOW is this achieved?
The HOW comes from the said unselfconscious
engagement with one’s work, the absorption with it, which, hopefully will pass over
to the reader; but if it doesn’t, at least the writer will enjoy creating
it. The WHY is more contentious. There are some students (and artists/writers)
who need to know who their audience is/will be; but generally, I sense that
any thought of the future for an artistic work while it is in process, will
inhibit and diminish it.
And let us get something straight here:
I am alluding to creative work of the highest possible
quality, otherwise what is the point? Like Alice Munro’s
first person narrator in Live of Girls and Women: “They
were talking to somebody who believed that the only duty
of a writer is to produce a masterpiece” (1971, 61).
And further, if the artist/writer is thinking about WHO
they are writing for, they may not be absorbed in the work
(i.e. unselfconscious) and it is likely to become contrived
and/or polemical.
I also suggest to students who are worried
about whether they can become great writers or not that
they can relax, because if they are to become great writers
they will become great writers, no matter what they do.
This is not to say they will not have to work hard, but
they will be compelled to work hard, because they have
a hunger to write. Charles Bukowski made
the important distinction between those who want to be
writers and those who want to write. I would say need to
write.
And what of those students who will not
become great writers? Some of them will become very good
writers, whose work will be loved by a small audience,
or even a large audience, but their work won’t last like a great writer’s,
it won’t create the same depth of feeling. And what of those students
who don’t continue to write beyond the creative writing classes? Is their
study a waste of time and energy? Of course not.
They will be far greater teachers,
publishers, academics, doctors, lawyers, administrators,
journalists, shiatsu masseurs, etcetera, than they
otherwise would have been, because they will know more
about themselves and about how theirs (and other) minds
work; they will be more articulate, and they may even continue
to develop their writing while pursuing their alternative
vocations in publishing, editing, film-making, journalism,
etcetera; and they will more than likely continue to be
keen and critical readers. One of the profound beauties
of Creative Writing as a discipline is that it is so obviously
not specifically vocational. And what of those students
not suited to creative writing classes who would otherwise
be great writers? As I have implied already, they will
become great writers in spite of, not because of any hindrances.
My basic approach to “opening the
doors” with students involves the close reading of literary texts, including,
where necessary, theoretical texts, as well as the “triggering” of
ideas through particular exercises on ideas and situations.
There are basically two processes in the
art of writing that should be addressed separately: 1)
The inspiration or drafting of raw material; 2) The redrafting
and perfecting of this material.
1) Inspiration
I take the view that nothing will
be discovered if you know what you are looking for. And
if you know what you are looking for, the reader will also
know, soon enough, and they will quickly become disengaged
i.e. “dead.” If in the Eighteenth Century
you decided to set out from Europe to discover the world
you would not have found much if you had gone to the places
you already knew about; nor would you have gotten far if
you had jumped in the Atlantic and begun swimming. You
would have to have prepared a ship (structure) and provisions
and equipment (language) and sailed off in the direction
you (or no-one) had never gone before (the unknown). Of
course, if you went to a place you already knew in a NEW
WAY, you may have
discovered something new about HOW you got there, but perhaps
this is where the analogy becomes confused; or it reflects
the basis of ficto-criticism.
In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
talks about writing in the morning until he couldn’t keep writing (from
fatigue or other commitments). “I always worked until I had something
done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way
I could be sure of going on the next day” (15). He
also advised not going back over your work too closely until it was finished,
and not to think about it until you were doing it:
It was in that room
that I learned not to think about anything that I was
writing from the time I stopped writing until I started
again the next day. That way my subconscious would be
working on it and at the same time I would be listening
to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning,
I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about
my work and make myself impotent to do it.” (15-16)
One of Hemingway’s earliest and
most significant teachers, Gertrude Stein in a conversation with John Hyde
Preston, in 1935, spoke about this initial process of inspiration:
You will write if you will write without
thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think
of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say
that creation must take place between the pen and the
paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. You
won't know how it was, even what it is, but it will be
creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and
not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you
are doing. Technique is not so much a thing of form or
style as the way that form or style came and how it can
come again....
You cannot go into the womb to
form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes
forth whole—and
there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but
it has come itself—and
that is creative recognition. Of course you have a little
more control over your writing than that; you have to
know what you want to get; but when you know that, let
it take you and if it seems to take you off the track
don't hold back, because that is perhaps where instinctively
you want to be and if you hold back and try to be always
where you have been before, you will go dry... (159-160)
The citing of the above ideas
does not mean that I am advocating an avoidance of opinion or polemic in the
creative work. What I am advocating is the un-self-conscious delivery of that
polemic, so that it is subtle, hidden, and even ambiguous rather than overt,
contrived, or preaching. The latter is the province of essay, dissertation,
and exegesis. There are exceptions to this, but generally if the reader smells
an argument, a position being taken by the author (as distinct from the narrator),
the spell is broken. The spell is what engages, what makes the reader think
and imagine, what allows them to make up their own mind, hopefully toward the
mysterious truth that art can suggest.
And so, whether it be a piece of verse
or a novel, let us presume the student now has a piece of raw material, a rough
draft of some kind, which they must now revise or rework, because they cannot
expect a piece to come out completely formed—although this does and
can happen. And if you are a writer you will enjoy this process as much as
the discovery process. I cannot understand writers who say they hate writing.
What I hate or find difficult about writing is when I am not writing, when
I am between large works or when my inspiration machine is having a “rest” i.e.
re-filling the inkwell.
2) The art of redrafting and perfecting
The longer you can leave between creating this piece of
raw material and going back to work on it the better.
And here again we have more evidence of the “false” situation
of creative writing classes. But these classes are about
(apart from "opening doors”) about
the learning of processes, learning that it is as difficult
for others as it is for all of us, more or less. So,
you have left your raw poem, your raw novel alone for
a week, a month, a year—Ralph Waldo Emerson advised: "Never
read any book that is not a year old" (188).
Now you can read it as if it were someone else’s,
now you can read it and hear its flaws—in language,
idea, structure, etcetera. Now you can attack it ruthlessly.
But this is a learned art, one that can be partly taught
but is always only fully learned by reading and by writing
and by working on one’s writing.
In summary, I suppose what I am attempting
to suggest is that, rather than the teaching of creative writing, what is required
is the allowing of it, its facilitation or release from the person; the presumption
being that people are natural story tellers, natural “creators” of
pattern and inference, that they have this and learn this as part of their
formative learning, and they need it in order to communicate and know themselves
and others in the large scheme of things. They are not ignorant of these fundamental
inclinations to invent and create, their abilities need only to be encouraged
and teased into form.
References
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Complete Works.
Vol. VII Society and Solitude. London: George
Routledge & Sons. 1883.
Flanagan, Martin. The Age Newspaper, Saturday Extra,
August 5th, A
Critic Must Be a Good Writer First. Melbourne, Fairfax,
1995, 7.
Hemingway, Ernest. Chapter
2. “Miss Stein Instructs.”
In A Moveable Feast. Jonathan Cape, U.K., 1964.
14-23.
Kafka, Franz. Letters to Felice. Erich Heller and
Jurgen Born (Eds.) James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth
(Trans.). London: Minerva. 1992 c. 1974.
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. U.S.A.:
McGraw-Hill.1971.
Stein,
Gertrude. “A Conversation with Gertrude
Stein” by John Hyde Preston. In The Creative Process,
Brewster Ghiselin (Ed.). NY: New
American Library. (Harold Ober). 1935. Reprinted
in The Atlantic Monthly. 1952 c. 1935.
159-168.
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