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Pulling From the Well: Allowing Creativity to Flow in the Creative Writing
Workshop
Ron Roebuck
National University, Southern California
Creativity
is a difficult concept to pull apart and examine, much less foster in a student
of writing. It is interesting and ironic that we can’t put our collective
finger on what is creative, but we seem to recognize it when it comes our way.
Creativity, then, is like the rest of the universe: it defies a categorical description,
which is what makes it creative in the first place.
The word “creative,”
like the word “creator” implies something coming from nothing, something
being made, assembled in an original, interesting way. There are competing theories
about the generating of creativity, but what if creativity was seen not as a
building process, but instead as a tearing away of what’s blocking the
inspired kernel of creative energy, letting it flourish into a fully mature flower
that grows its own way? From this model, a creative writing workshop would be
designed to allow what writer Natalie Goldberg (1990) calls “wild mind” to
thrive. The model must foster a continual practice of writing to show and not
tell; it must create an environment that brings the ideas from the collective
unconscious in a novel, original way.
Creating
this environment is much easier said than done, partly because the classroom
carries with it a number of real life complexities. How do instructors deal with
the vast differences in the “talent” that their students display?
What is talent, for that matter? What techniques will allow all students to tap
their inner resources for a chance to express who they are? Moreover, is self-discovery
even the main concern of creative writing, or is it merely to write something
publishable? How do we define something as creative? How do we assess student
performance without stifling the very creativity that we are trying to foster?
How do we view the purpose of grading? These questions (and many more) make the
development of the optimal workshop that operates in the real world, a challenging
prospect.
If we are
to construct a workshop that allows for the flow of true creativity, we have
to attempt to define creativity and see how it best thrives. The definition and
nature of creativity has been, and continues to be, a controversial subject. Linda
Sarbo and Joseph Moxley realize this in Creativity Research and Classroom
Practice, stating that:
The complex
process of social judgments by which our society defines
a creative work is fraught with subjective and irrelevant
influences, and even experts in a particular field—music critics, art historians, scholars, and scientists—often
disagree on the
creative value of a work. (133)
Further, Sarbo and Moxley make a salient point in that creativity must be “defined
in behavioral terms that can accommodate products as diverse as a preschooler’s
drawing and Einstein’s theory of relativity.” (133) What then is
the consensual take on the definition of creativity? Sarbo and Moxley say that “there
is agreement that a creative act must be seen as valuable or interesting, and
that it cannot be accidental.” (134)
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology
of
Discovery and Invention, reinforces this description but articulates it
in a deeper way through what he calls the systems model. He argues that the question
should not be what is creativity but rather: Where is it? He talks
of how creativity can be understood in terms of the domain in which it
exists, the domain being “a set of symbolic rules and procedures, knowledge
shared by a particular society, or humanity as a whole.” (28) (Writing,
of course, is one example of a domain.)
Another aspect of Csikszentmihalyi’s
definition of creativity is the field, which is
made up of people who decide the value of a new product,
and if it should be added to the domain. Critics, curators,
editors, foundation administrators and other “gatekeepers” make
up this component. Finally, the individual person is
the last component in his model, and when that person introduces
a new idea or pattern into the domain, creativity has occurred.
Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of creativity
is that it is
any
act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain,
or that transforms an existing domain
into a new one. And the definition of a creative person
is: someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain.
It is important
to remember, however, that a domain cannot be changed
without the explicit or
implicit consent of a field responsible for it. (28)
Thus, in tying
all of this to creative writing, our approach to the workshop
must encompass all three aspects of creativity: the domain (writing) the field
(instructors and administrators) and the creative person (the student). The workshop
must honour the domain of writing, and there is no getting around that there
are certain rules and procedures that give it definition. A musician, for example,
cannot express him or herself without learning how to play a myriad of notes,
and in fact, the freedom to express oneself increases as one learns more aspects
of the domain. True also with the writer. The instructors and administrators
must strive to provide the best possible conditions for creativity to flourish,
and the writer, as alluded to above, must be open to a
variety of methods to unleash the creative power that resides in what John Gardner
calls “the
secret room where dreams prowl.” (120).
What of
this theory that creative writing comes from the collective
unconscious? Why favour this explanation over the others?
One place to look is in the descriptions given by writers
themselves about their creative process. In Creativity:
Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Csikszentmihalyi
interviews writers about their goals and methods in regards
to their craft. He found many similarities among them,
one being
the oft-stressed
emphasis on the dialectic between the irrational and
rational aspects of the craft, between passion and
discipline. Whether we want to call it the Freudian
unconscious…or the Jungian collective unconscious
where the archetypes
of the race dwell, or whether we think of it as a space
below the threshold
of awareness where previous impressions randomly combine
until a striking
new connection happens by chance, it is quite clear
that all the writers place great
stock in the sudden voice that arises in the middle
of the night to enjoin: “You
have to write this.” (263)
Rollo May, in The Courage to Create, makes
a similar argument for the role of the collective unconscious
in the nature of creativity. He relates his own experiences
with “out of the blue” thoughts that run contrary
to his previously held conscious beliefs and how these
thoughts led to an entire change in one of his long held
psychological theories.
What was going on at the moment when this breakthrough
occurred? Taking this experience of mine as a start,
we notice, first of all, that the insight broke into
my conscious mind against what I had been trying
to think rationally. I had a good, sound thesis and
I had been working very hard to prove it. The unconscious,
so to speak, broke through in opposition to the
conscious belief to which I was clinging. (58)
May then explains that Carl Jung believed that there was
a polarity between the conscious and the unconscious that
was compensatory, and that “consciousness
controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious,
while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up
in banal, empty, arid rationality.” (59)
May goes on to explain that these breakthroughs of the
conscious into the unconscious can raise fear (hence the
title of his book) because the breakthrough also causes
anxiety when one’s seemingly solid belief system
is at least challenged or perhaps destroyed.
Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now sees great promise
in letting the collective unconscious dictate creative
vision. By various means, he encourages the stillness of
mind for the purpose of creative insight. He surmises that “all
true artists, whether they know it or not, create from
a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.” (24)
He goes on to imply that our conscious mind gives form
to creative impulse, but the impulse itself comes from
non-conscious origins.
Sarbo and
Moxley do well in relating all of the above to the creative
writing classroom. They state:
Because
May traces the origins of creativity to the unconscious,
he assumes that creative
acts cannot be voluntarily or involuntarily induced.
On the other hand, a logical
corollary of this theory offers teachers an indirect
means for engendering creativity
in their students. Since creative acts are dependent
on the intensity of the artist’s commitment to
the encounter, we can help our students’ creative
opportunities by facilitating their engagement in the
writing process. (134)
Thus, we must engage our students while creating opportunities for this muse
to make its way through them.
Obviously, the argument here is not to say this is the
only approach that can “work” in terms of creating
great writing. What is being advocated is a viewpoint that
looks at creative writing as a practice, a meditation,
and a means by which anyone can get to know themselves
better, but also as a method for producing truly fresh,
creative work. Therefore, the styles and techniques that
follow are aimed at anyone interested in creative writing.
The understanding is that writing “talent” exists
within anyone. As Gabriele Rico notes in Writing the
Natural Way ,
if one has the ability to “speak, form
letters on the page, know the rudiments of sentence structure,
take a telephone message, or write a thank-you note, you
have sufficient language skills to write the natural way.” (15)
As a veteran teacher in an alternative continuation high
school, I interact with students with varying degrees of
language and writing skills. Some students are highly articulate
and comfortable with creative writing while others have
tremendous anxiety and resistance. Additionally, teenagers
in general are in an experimental phase in their lives,
they are pushing their boundaries, questioning authority,
and exploring issues that affect them and society at large.
All of these factors coupled with the autonomy that is
part and parcel with an alternative school have provided
fertile soil for a creative writing workshop, but not one
without challenges.
One of the challenging aspects of teaching creative writing
is breaking through the anxiety created in trying to “do
it right,” the need to please
the teacher and get a good grade. Ironically, the want
to get it right can very often stand directly in the way
of the fresh, naked writing that is the goal of the writer.
Rollo May goes to the well-known mathematician Jules Henri
Poincare to assert that, in May’s words, “often
the mind needs relaxation of inner controls—needs
to be freed in reverie or day dreaming—for the unaccustomed
ideas to emerge.” (65) May describes the process
of the revealing of these breakthroughs by summarizing
Poincare’s
testimony thusly:
(1) the suddenness of the illumination; (2) that
the insight may occur, and to some extent, must occur against what
one has clung to consciously in one’s
theories; (3) the vividness of the incident
and the whole scene that surrounds
it; (4) the brevity and conciseness of
the insight, along with the experience of immediate certainty.
(66)
To make these breakthroughs happen, May outlines conditions
that he deems necessary for the experience. He speaks of
hard work on the topic before the breakthrough, leading
to a rest in which the “‘unconscious work’ has
been given a chance to proceed on its own.” (66)
May notes that this last point is particularly important. “It
is probably something everyone has learned,” he offers. “Professors
will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally
alternate the classroom with the beach; authors will write
better when…they write for two hours then pitch
quoits, and then go back to their writing.”(66) He
goes on to echo Eckhart Tolle, by recommending what he
calls “the constructive use of solitude.” (66)
My experience with encouraging risk-taking and experimentation
with my high school students was directly inspired by implementing
many of the techniques outlined in Natalie Goldberg’s
books Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within and Wild
Mind: Living the Writer’s Life. Goldberg,
a Zen Buddhist, advocates the value of what she calls “first
thoughts” (Bones, 9) and feels that they have
the “freshness and inspiration” that makes
for compelling writing. She holds that:
First thoughts
are..unencumbered by ego, by that mechanism in us that
tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is
permanent and solid, enduring and logical. The world
is not permanent, it is ever-changing and full of human
suffering. So, if you express something egoless, it
is also full of energy because it is expressing the
truth of the way things are. You are not carrying the
burden of ego in your expression, but are riding for
moments the waves of human consciousness and using your
personal details to express the ride. (Bones,
9)
She compares writing with Zen meditation and relates that
writing and sitting are similar in that we must face great
emotions that are tied up with first thoughts, but not
shrink at them. They are to be contacted and like a great
warrior, one must not stop writing when they come up.
When I implement
the above approach at the high school level, the basic unit of the technique
is the timed exercise. Students are briefed in the “rules of writing
practice.”(Wild Mind, 1) The first rule is to keep the hand moving.
Once one begins, they are not to stop until the timed exercise is over. Goldberg
believes that if one keeps the creator hand moving, the critical editor within
can’t catch up and censor the first thoughts. Secondly she advocates
losing control and not worrying if what one is saying is polite. Next, she
places importance on being specific, to get below labels of objects and people.
Finally, she insists that writers not worry about punctuation, spelling, and
grammar and that they “go for the jugular” especially if something
that comes up is scary or risqué, because that’s where the energy
is. (Wild Mind, 2-5)
There are
many timed exercises that Goldberg recommends, but the one that I have found
to be very effective at lowering student anxiety toward creative writing while
also paving the way for fresh writing is the “I remember” exercise.
(Wild Mind, 10-11) Students (following a briefing on the above rules)
are told that they will be required to write for ten minutes, with their prompt
being “I remember…” They are told to begin with this
phrase and continue writing, without censoring themselves, for ten minutes.
If the student gets stuck, they are to write the phrase again until something
comes up.
After ten minutes, a break is taken where students are encouraged
to go for a short walk, stretch or do some other physical act other than writing.
(This links up with Rollo May’s assertion, mentioned earlier, that a
rest period between sessions will help to produce the needed breakthrough from
unconscious to conscious mind). When the
students return, they do a similar timed exercise, the exception being that
they now write the phrase “ I don’t remember...” as a prompt.
The results
of these exercises were fairly astounding, in that many students produced pages
of text that told, for the most part, intimate compelling stories from their
childhood or from just weeks, days or hours before. As a teacher trying to
get students to kick start their writing practice, it was strange to have so
much to work with and discuss from such a short exercise. The learning curve
climbed quickly as I tried more timed writings and as I was able to reiterate
the “rules.” All of the writing improved, mainly in its clarity
and attention to specificity. Just as important the students were having fun,
there was joy in the seemingly scary, dreadful act of writing and discussing
what they had committed to the page. It seemed that a huge hurdle in self-censorship
had been crossed, and the possibilities for further growth became real.
Katherine
Haake in What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies describes
a similar exercise that she calls “burrowing.” She states that “as
you dig and dig, things appear, layer after layer, deeper and deeper: words
after words after words.”(176) She adds that, “this is how language
drives writing, how writing becomes an intransitive act, how not thinking opens
out into text, how we as writers disappear into the writing, and the whole
concept of pleasure.” (177)
One of her students, Ronald Ortiz, described it thusly:
Unlike a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ exercise
that encouraged us to jot down everything that popped
into our heads, we were instead directed to associate
various free-form ideas into a coherent piece of fiction
based on a single random sentence. The goal of this exercise,
as I understood it, was to allow language to act upon
us, instead of the other way around. (177)
He adds that “burrowing wasn’t necessarily
easy, but it bypassed many of the barriers that we’d
often felt when we tried to write something.” (177)
Margo McCall
another student of Haake’s, reinforces the previous statements when she
says that
the…thing
that had a major effect was the idea that one should
just write, should silence
the internal critic and editor, and let meaning metonymically
accrue. The notion was
a radical departure from the way I’ve come to write…Letting
the words accrue
and speak for themselves, not having much idea of what
I was even writing,
felt tremendously natural.” (178)
Katherine
Haake backs up the researchers previously mentioned when she associates writing
as a growth out of language, “its own imperative carried in the weight
of each sentence, by which the next sentence is already determined.”(185)
Just as
compelling as Haake’s findings is the work done by Gabriele Rico on creative
writing and its relationship to the specialized hemispheres of the brain. In Writing
the Natural Way, she says that “writing begins with wholeness, specifically
with the innate human drive to shape personally meaningful, coherent wholes.” (9)
She adds that what she calls “natural” writing “depends on
gaining access to a part of your mind we normally do not associate with writing
skills. Contacting that part of your mind enables you to discover your own
unique and natural voice, which is your primary source of expressive power.” (16)
Rico’s
theory is interesting for the purposes of this writing mainly for the fact
that she is convinced that all people have access to an innate reservoir of,
as she says above, expressive power. She implores that we “begin with the
whole, with the fundamental human desire for giving shape to experience…for
creating form and structure out of the confusion that constitutes both our
inner and outer worlds.” (16) She feels that the first movement toward
gaining access to originality and freedom of expression is to “become
aware of the two-sided nature of your mental make-up: one thinks in terms of
the connectedness of things and events, the other thinks in terms of parts
and sequences.” (17)
Rico goes
on to say that most teachers of writing and investigators of creativity concur
that there are at least two different parts of any creative act (the unconscious
or generative phase and the conscious, critical phase that edits and revises)
that can have a conflicting relationship. Rico’s goal is to have the
two “work harmoniously rather than conflict with one another.” (17)
She advocates the use of clustering exercises that allow the unconscious mind
to go the way it wants in a non-linear fashion. Rico states that:
we cannot
force the birth of an idea, but we can do the next best
thing: we can cluster,
thus calling on the pattern-seeking Design mind and bypassing
the critical
censorship of the Sign mind, which relieves the familiar
anxiety about what to
say and where to start and opens us to the freedom of
expression we knew in
childhood.(29)
Basically,
the method involves a nucleus word that acts as a stimulus
for all words having to do with that subject. The words that are associated are
written in circles around the nucleus word. The clustering unfolds from the center,
and Rico states that if the nucleus word is “allowed to filter through
your personal experiential sieve, it will always generate writing expressive
of your unique consciousness.” (32) Often, a free write is done
in which the words are used to formulate a poem or short
story.
My experience
of this method with high school students is also positive,
especially in the brainstorm stage of writing a short story or an essay. I also
find it a great method for group or collaborative writing, and have done clustering
with the class as a whole on the chalkboard as a way to kick start the group
on a singular subject that I want them all to write about. Often, when a student
feels that they know very little about something, I will have them cluster, with
the direction to get down what they do know. If I would have asked them to write
a paragraph, the page would still be blank after five minutes; after clustering
the results are usually much more apparent.
Now that
some points have been made about the nature of creativity
and its relationship to writing, it is necessary to discuss the controversial
subject of how one, as an instructor, approaches evaluation in creative writing.
Much has been said about the pitfalls of the standard A through F grading and
the nebulous plus and minus added in seems to create more confusion than clarity
amongst students. Also, at what rate should instructors grade “talent” and
hard work?
Perhaps
the answers to these questions don’t exist, but some
method has to be put in place, for as Suzanne Greenberg
points out in An ‘A’ for
Effort: Where does Talent Fit in Grading Creative Writing?, “we
are not grading in the vacuum of the university. We live
in a culture where grades continue well beyond the university.” (172)
In other words, saying that the criticism of art and
writing is subjective and therefore should not be graded
is just not realistic. After much humorous description
of her trials and tribulations in the trenches with assessment
and her students, Greenberg realized that “the
more details I gave about how exactly I planned to grade,
the more often I was challenged, and the more time my
students and I spent discussing grading instead of writing…I
had achieved exactly opposite of what I had intended
to achieve.” (165-66)
Greenberg
came to see that a different approach was needed; one that
gave her and her students the space to focus on writing, a way to assess that
charted the growth of the writer during the time period without stifling creativity
or limiting risk-taking. Also, a system that rewarded hard work and allowed for
thoughtful revision while encouraging students to document and reflect on their
process as a writer.
The
portfolio approach in which students highlight work that
they deem the best has a good chance of covering all of the concerns listed above,
and Greenberg and others sing its praises while noting its drawbacks. The basic
concept is to get students to write without the pressure of letter grades during
the semester, while being provided with constant written feedback on each of
their projects.
Students work toward putting together
a packet by the end of the term, with an essay explaining
what they chose to include and why. Also, they provide
information on the evolution of their writing—how they
changed as the semester progressed. Greenberg adds that
if they want written commentary on the final packet, she
provides a way for it to be mailed to them after the class
has ended. (68)
From the
packet and by factoring in other aspects i.e. attendance
and class participation, a letter grade is given; this
method is therefore a meshing of two assessment systems,
a hybrid that is much more fitting for creative writing
assessment.
The drawbacks
for this plan are worth mentioning. Some students will
always be more preoccupied with the grade they receive
and may tend to be frustrated with only knowing their grade
at the very end of the course. Further, the transition
from the portfolio to the letter grade can be problematic,
and the controversial “talent” word
can raise its ambiguous head, as Greenberg notes here:
We
can’t grade solely on process. The final product
must figure into the semester
grade, or we can be left with the untenable situation
of awarding a mediocre
writer with an A simply because he worked diligently
all semester long. How
different is this than giving a math student an A because
he worked through
all the steps in a difficult problem before coming
up with the wrong answer?...So
talent does ultimately figure into my final grades.
(171)
In the end, evaluation, like the rest of the elements of
an optimal workshop, has to merge with serving the flow
of the muse, and that becomes the most challenging aspect.
Creativity doesn’t fit in boxes neatly, so evaluation
must be as fluid and nimble as possible.
Risk taking,
at first glance, doesn’t seem to have much to do
with most assessment tools, but Wendy Bishop, another proponent
of portfolio-based evaluation, feels that she can create
a model of evaluation that creates what she calls a “writing-intensive
zone.” This concept fits most directly in the earlier
supposition that an environment that fosters creativity
must allow for creative inspiration to fully flower from
the unconscious. Bishop contends that the zone allows
students
to take risks: attempt new rhetorical techniques, explore
challenging subjects,
try hunches and wild guesses, push drafts into dislocation
or pull initially fragmented,
tangential thinking into a more satisfying whole…As
with…any genre, writers
improve their craft through practice, and practice entails
controlled exploration…” (148)
Bishop adds that proper assessment should reward revision
and that education in revision is highly integral to creative
writing. (148)
To sum up
my thoughts about grading: Our evaluative practices need
not be seen as a static, obsolete dinosaur foreign to creative writing. Instructors
must work with moulding an amalgamation of styles and be willing to change as
one goes, in the manner that Wendy Bishop and Suzanne Greenberg have so eloquently
highlighted.
The writing workshop should be fashioned in a way that
serves to remove what is blocking the pure original manifestation of the collective
unconscious. Every aspect of creative writing pedagogy should keep this mission
at the forefront when designing, instructing, and evaluating the process and
product of the writer. From the standpoint of the instructor, the following quote,
from Stephen Minot (quoted from Greenberg’s article) sums it up
nicely. Minot writes, in his essay, “How a Reader Reads” that:
Good
teachers of creative writing don’t just teach the techniques; they infect
the students with certain enthusiasms simply by being in a closed room with them
long enough for the virus to catch.”(171)
References
Bishop, Wendy. “Risk-Taking, Radical Revision, Portfolios,
and the Creative Workshop.” University
of Central Florida, Dept. of English. 31 January 2004 http://english.ucf.edu
Csikszentimihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the
Psychology of Discovery and
Invention. New
York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Gardner, John. On Becoming a Novelist. New York:
Harper, 1983.
Goldberg, Natalie. Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s
Life. New York: Bantam, 1990.
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down The Bones:
Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 1986.
Greenberg, Suzanne. “An ‘A’ for Effort:
Where Does Talent Fit in Grading Creative
Writing?” University
of Central Florida, Dept. of English. 31 January 2004. http://english.ucf.edu
Haake, Katherine. What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism
and Creative Writing Studies. Urbana,
Ill: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.
May, Rollo. The Courage To Create. New York: Norton,
1975.
Moxley, Joseph, Linda Sarbo. “Creativity Research
and Classroom Practice.” Colors of A Different
Horse. Ed. Wendy Bishop and Mark Ostrom. Urbana, Ill: NCTE, 1994.
Rico, Gabriele. Writing the Natural Way. Los Angeles:
Tarcher, 1983.
Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now. Novato, California.1999.
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