Creative writing rightly has its doubters among practising authors. In the words of the novelist Flannery O’Connor (an
Iowa graduate): ‘I am often asked if universities stifle writers. My view is that they don’t stifle enough of them.’ She had a point. It is important to learn what we cannot do. A writing course will usefully teach a would-be writer that they cannot, and do not want to, write creatively. Not everything we learn is the means for self-progress. We do not always “win” through knowledge; sometimes it is better and wiser to lose. Creativity is not compulsory, nor is it a human right to create and publish imaginative literature. In fact, it is difficult, even terrifying, because it is a total and a totalling process.
To paraphrase Ben Jonson, language most shows a person. Writing requires nerve, stamina and long listening—as well as talent, and editorial discrimination. As Donald Hall lamented, writing workshops sometimes trivialize the art by minimizing that terror of total process. Although learning to write creatively can be fun, becoming and being a writer is a far more ruthless, wilder game, and creative teachers should make no secret of this or try to disguise the true nature of this endeavour.
Here are some cards; here is my table. I think creative writing can be taught most effectively when its students have some talent and vocation for it. If a teacher can shape the talent and steer that vocation, and the students enjoy the shaping and steering—then I think creative writing should be taught as a craft. The whole point of teaching creative writing, however, is that students must learn to make and guide themselves, for writing is mostly a solitary pursuit, even when written collaboratively using electronic media.
Courses in which creative writing is part of learning need not have the purpose of only turning out better writers of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction and children’s literature. They may have the purpose of creating better readers of these genres; more informed and sensitive scholars of these genres; and keener teachers of the literary arts. Since the literary mind may prove to be the natural mind, such courses may even create better communicators of other disciplines, such as the sciences or business. However, one of our main purposes is the one we never talk of openly except in the company of other wolves: our role in helping the strange come to life through language.
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Read more about writing creatively at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cambridge-Introduction-Creative-Introductions-Literature/dp/0521547547
Please begin listening to my series of podcasts, ‘Writing Challenges’, and get writing yourselves!
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/audio/more/writingchallenges/
David Morley
11 Nov 2007 12:00
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Tags: The Practice Of Poetry
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[Skip to the latest comment]Emma Darwin
Yes, it’s craft that can be taught. That craft may be sonnet form, or thriller plotting. But equally it may be finding stories within yourself that you didn’t know were there, or teaching your ears to hear the sounds and rhythms of words. Teaching writing for me is about teaching the craftsman’s skills: showing students how to find and understand materials, and choose and handle tools. But the purpose of it all must be is that the student makes whatever they have to make, as well as they can make it. Whether that becomes art is another matter entirely.
12 Nov 2007, 19:45
David Morley
What role does experience play also? I do mean mere experience of the world, but also experience of craft?
13 Nov 2007, 09:39
Emma Darwin
I think experience plays a huge role. Craft is all about the physical, intuitive (right-brained?) intelligence you only get by handling your materials: pilots need flying hours, and cooks need to discover how to fold in beaten egg whites without flattening them, for instance. It’s experience that means I can write a ten-word sentence ten different ways, off the top of my head. One of them will be what the piece needs, and it’ll be experience, too, that tells me which one it is. And if none of them seem right, it’s experience that tells me that’s because I’m trying to say the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong place.
13 Nov 2007, 17:58
Emma Darwin
Meant to say, experience of the world… hm. You need experience of something, that’s for sure, or you’ve got nothing to say. But too often ‘experience’ seems to be taken as being about crossing the Sarah or overdosing in Moscow, or something. Whereas real writing can be about anything: what matters is your take on it, and how you write it. Maybe it’s conscious experience of being human and the humans around you – that divided writer’s self that’s always watching even as it’s living – that matters. If you’ve got that, if that can inform your writing, the narrowness of the physical world doesn’t matter.
13 Nov 2007, 18:57
David Morley
As you say, ‘But too often ‘experience’ seems to be taken as being about crossing the Sarah or overdosing in Moscow, or something. Whereas real writing can be about anything: what matters is your take on it, and how you write it. Maybe it’s conscious experience of being human and the humans around you – that divided writer’s self that’s always watching even as it’s living – that matters.’ Very well put; and experience can be cultural too I think, or even experience of knowledge and unlearning it; or even – this is pushing it a little but might useful when you think of negative capability – the experience of inexperience.
13 Nov 2007, 19:54
Emma Darwin
I think the experience of not knowing – and recognising it as such – must be crucial to a writer. At a more mundane level than Keats’s, finding out what we don’t know about our fictional subject/characters/world is a big part of the drive for many (most?) writers; it’s a lot of the fun, too. And if you conceive of your job (maybe this is a fiction writer’s thing) as writing not about what you know, but about what you can make the reader believe you know, then you have to recognise what you don’t know as the first part of the process of making something believable.
But allowing yourself to stay with not-knowing is different. It sounds like a recipe for some dreadful writing. On the other hand… I think you could say that art – if it’s really good – always brings with it a sense of negative capability. That whatever you see in it, there’s more and other to be seen? Maybe that sense only gets into a work of art if the artist had it all along.
13 Nov 2007, 22:12
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15 Nov 2007, 01:35
Leila
Interesting discussion, and not a bad poem either, cheers Ya Ya… (you should probably cut line 16 though)
15 Nov 2007, 21:51
Robert O'Toole
There’s an important connection here to the question of how we teach reading, and I mean reading at every level. There is a tendency, both unintentional and in some quite worrying cases intentional, to make reading and the acquisition of reading a pasive process. We know that to be a mistake. My wife, responsible for literacy in a primary school, knows that to be a mistake. And yet increasing pressure is being put upon them to eliminate the active process of writing from the teaching of reading. Perhaps the government desires an electorate who can more efficiently read its manifestoes? – and not ever answer back?
Good writers make good readers. Creative writers are the best readers. There is then also a political dimension to what you are doing. Let’s not allow them to characterise your work as simply satisfying middle class aspirations, or to imprioson it within an arts show ghetto.
22 Nov 2007, 09:24
David Morley
Reading and learning reading are highly active processes; and as Robert O’Toole rightly puts it, passive reading and passive learning are types of coercion – the means to teach people not to answer back.
23 Nov 2007, 10:03
The safety net of a three year degree in creative writing is such a wonderful liberty for any aspiring writer. I’m discovering tools in my kit that I didn’t know existed!
03 Dec 2007, 18:25
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