Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016
How to teach (online)
Writing creative writing pedagogy
KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER
When the novelist Lee Gowan asked whether I might be interested in proposing an online course to the New York Times adjunct (and now defunct) education component, the New York Times Knowledge Network, I had been thinking for some time how I might replace certain aspects of a mostly volunteer position I held as a colleague of the poet George Murray and the novelist Peter Darbyshire at the influential website and online community Bookninja. I blogged about literary news there for about a year and hadn’t much liked the public nature of it. I wasn’t naturally funny in the way that George and Peter could be, and my preternatural sarcasm didn’t always translate. I wanted to quit but instead became the website’s magazine editor, a position I loved because it gave me access to other writers in the form of interview possibilities. I interviewed (among others) the novelist Tom McCarthy and the Australian writer Nam Le, and discovered I liked the form, liked getting into the heads of other writers.
Besides being an accomplished writer, Lee Gowan also happened to be my boss at the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto, where I had taught in-class workshops for a couple of years — everything from the short story to reading courses (which I fancied). His query couldn’t have come at a better time. I spent about three seconds formulating a course that would incorporate the things I had liked about Bookninja, namely the social interaction among its readers and the proximity I had to writers through interview. The course I designed was a salon-style creative writing workshop called Writer’s Talk: Writing Through Reading with The New York Times. The student-writers who registered for the course were paying for the privilege (well, I hoped it would feel like a privilege!) of interacting with one another as serious students of writing, but also of interacting with living, working writers, the very writers whose work they would be grappling with throughout each week. I assumed (mostly) rightly that the New York Times brand would act as a calling card and that it would at least gain me introduction to any writer working on the planet. The brilliant thing about an online course, I reckoned, was that it was international in possibility. I could invite any writer living anywhere into the course, just as I hoped the student body would be also be far-flung. The first incarnation of the course featured Roddy Doyle, Nicholas Shakespeare, Deborah Eisenberg, Lydia Millet, Jonathan Lethem, and New York Times editor Frank Flaherty. My students came from all over Canada and the United States. I also had students, over the years, living in Africa, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, and Europe.
Each week my students studied a particular aspect of craft with special focus on the work of one of the writers. They would generate a short assigned piece based on each specific aspect: point of view, narrative voice, structure, momentum, the child’s voice, writing biography, the researched novel, the fairy tale, plot/subplot, humour, dialogue, empathy, and, well, the basics, plus whatever I happened to be interested in teaching. And each week my students entered into a question-and-answer session with the author. There were rules, of course, that structured what the students might and might not ask visiting writers, but since the focus was on craft, and since we had spent enough time parsing the writer’s work, the questions invariably followed the topic of that week. So, for instance, we asked Roddy Doyle about writing the child’s perspective (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha) and Nicholas Shakespeare about researching his novel The Dancer Upstairs (students had been encouraged to rent and watch the film, as well, and questions ranged between the two media).
Writer’s Talk ran from the fall of 2009 to the spring of 2012, at first three times a year and finally, billed as a boutique course, twice. There were seven iterations of the project, each one eight weeks in length, with a student-body cap at fifty (the course usually ranged from twenty-five to thirty students). The roster of visiting writers was impressive. Besides the first guests, Dwight Garner, Motoko Rich, Lynda Barry, Bill Gaston, Kate Bernheimer, Francine Prose, Andrew Pyper, Miriam Toews, Alissa York, Lynn Coady, Douglas Glover, Kim Addonizio, Tom McCarthy, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Sheila Heti all came and shared generously (outstandingly) their expertise in very particular ways. To a fault, my students asked probing and intelligent questions because they had immersed themselves in the work in the particular way I had asked of them. This allowed them a kind of authority to ask each writer real questions, questions that were asked to deepen their own practice. The investment they had made in the writer’s work was paying off in an investment not only into their own practice, but also into the larger view of what writing means as a social exchange (how writing is something outside of the self as much as it may be of the self). Here are a couple of examples of these exchanges:
Roddy Doyle
Writer’s Talk: When you are writing about a shared time and place — even when it is fictionalized and historical — how much thought do you give to those who might feel this is their story as well, people who might see themselves reflected in it in a highly identifiable way — though not necessarily people who you know personally. Though on that … I also wonder about this in a case of a book like Rory and Ita when you are telling someone else’s story, but it is your story too — not just as an author, but as a son. Have you ever felt you had to take this into consideration in your writing? Has it ever limited your ability to tell the story you want to tell?
Roddy Doyle: I don’t give much thought to the consequences of what I’m writing, until I’ve finished the first draft. In the case of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, I was using the geography — and the house — of my childhood, which, in the case of the house, I shared with my siblings and parents (who still live there), and the school, streets, general locality of many people. If I’d let it become the over-riding consideration I’d never have written the book. So, I wrote it — then worried. Then I began to disguise it — changed names, ages. One of my sisters, when she read the book, said she found it both very familiar and unfamiliar. She read it a second time — and accepted it as a novel; the story had nothing to do with her, the parents in the book weren’t hers, etc. As for worrying about people I don’t personally know — I never do. I had a very early lesson: after my novel The Commitments was published, so many people claimed it was based on them — musicians who were still children when I was writing the book, bands I’d never seen play, etc. As recently as last week, at a Bob Dylan gig, a woman told me that I’d based one of the characters on her husband. None of the characters was based on anyone I knew, yet so many people saw themselves — because they wanted to. It had nothing to do with me.
Lynda Barry
Writer’s Talk: Lynda, what is the bridge between text and graphic for you? I’ve been a big fan of your cartoons ever since I can remember. You have always been doing something interesting with adolescence. Taking a brave stance on it somehow. I wonder if it is the words or the drawings that come first, and if you have thought of why this might be.
Lynda Barry: It’s funny because I’ve been thinking a lot about when words and pictures separate for people. A kid learning to write the alphabet is actually learning to draw the alphabet. When I remind people that writing by hand is actually drawing, they look surprised and then try to figure out how it is not drawing, how it is different, but there is no way to argue it. A person knows the physical moves required to make any letter of the alphabet or numeral. The same person can make these marks very small or very large. With a pencil, or a wet mop on a wall. It’s just a specific movement with a mark maker.
When I’m making a comic strip these two things are not separated at all. I don’t pencil my work in before I start. I just work very slowly with a brush, and as I draw the frame of the panel I’ll often “hear” a sentence in my head. It’s not mystical at all or deep or anything different than when a song gets caught in your head. You didn’t consciously put it there, but it’s playing, you can “hear” it — it’s not the same as hearing it coming from a radio, but I would bet most people would describe it as “hearing the song” in their head rather than “thinking the song.”
So I “hear” a sentence and I can tell who is saying it — which character — in the same way you can tell who is singing that song in your head. I’ll write out that sentence, and if another one follows I’ll write that out too. But if one doesn’t follow I usually start drawing the character who said the sentence or the person she is saying it to. And in that way the comic strip begins. Each line leads to the next one.
In between there are times I have to just wait. So you’ll see a lot of freckles on my characters or patterns on their clothes or little lines built up in the background. That’s me waiting for the next line. It won’t come if I’m not in motion. If I just sit there like “The Thinker” nothing comes at all.
My characters don’t tend to be attractive at all. For drawings of girls in a comic strip, this isn’t common. I always thought it might be the reason people say I can’t draw well. If I could draw well, why would my characters be so homely?
I’ve written characters who have a lot about feeling very ugly, especially ones who have very beautiful mothers. That part is from my life. My mother was very beautiful. She let me know this all the time. And she also let me know I looked like a female Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine. She hated the way I looked. I always felt like a gargoyle around her. That relationship is certainly reflected in my work. I never had to put it in intentionally and I don’t think I could intentionally keep it out.
The combination of reading, discussion, and interaction meant that by the time the student-writers approached their own assignment, they had thoroughly immersed themselves in the material at hand. They were thinking about the complexity of the task in a way most novices don’t. In my experience, the work of reading and the work of writing are considered separate endeavours by many new writers, and my course sought to connect them in a way that showed how one could feed the other, and how there exists a reciprocity between the two experiences, a reciprocity from which the student-writer, just as the professional writer, stands to gain a great deal. If we are attuned to reading, we become (incrementally) better writers. This may seem obvious, but I had encountered student-writers who did not read, and who did not seem to think it was necessary to have read in order to give proper voice to their stories. Of course, in a sense they were right. One can simply write, but if one is to write well, coherently, and interestingly, one does well to read, and to read with one’s heart and mind thoroughly open and attentive to the intention of the work at hand.
The differences between teaching online and in-class creative writing courses are subtle but particular. In class, I could assess students’ temperaments more quickly and help students who were reticent or shy to find a way to speak. There was an easy inclusiveness to the in-class experience that was difficult to reproduce when one was in an atemporal course — that is, when the students and instructor are not necessarily in the “class” at the same time. Students living in disparate time zones interact in their time, not in real time, so spontaneity feels different. This is not to say that the online experience lacks authenticity, but it can feel less natural. Students are typically less impulsive in their comments and, in some instances, the forums can feel less conversational than an in-class interaction. This stems from the fact that the instructor will have initiated the conversation with a set of questions, and students with less time and inclination may simply respond before reading the discussion that flows from this initiation. Ideally, of course, discussion becomes a collective interaction, as it would in class. At times, though, an online forum can feel a bit disconnected in this regard, with some of the students interacting with the instructor and with one another, while some are less engaged and merely in conversation with the instructor.
My reaction to this, as an instructor, was to try to connect the students to one another in various ways. I would ask students to respond to one another’s posts, and I would ask students to lead discussions. This last had the dual advantage of giving them agency (or position of mastery) over material and also of indicating my own non-mastery. It suggested to them, I think, that we are all students when it comes to reading attentively. It also encouraged less “chatty” students to publicly engage, and to feel less inhibited.
One of the distinct advantages to the online experience for some students is the fact that it is text-based and not oral. This allows students to think about and edit their comments before they hit “Send.” Of course, there are still students who blurt and whose impulsivity sometimes requires retraction or intervention, but this is not so different from an in-class experience. My experience online has shown that the discourse often rises above what I might expect in an in-class scenario, especially given the typical demographic of University of Toronto registrants. Students can fact-check quickly, they can quote from writers and writing manuals, they can formulate their thoughts. This means that online I can often achieve a higher level of abstraction with my students and can in certain cases discuss more deeply how, for instance, point of view is flexible or narrative voice can shift (if done deftly and purposefully) depending on the skill of the writer. It’s not that I can’t do this in class, but, in a sense, there is more time online — students mull things over and then come back with insights, and since it is public to the rest of the class, the conversation can quickly become quite advanced. This was a pleasant surprise when I first began to teach online, but it has blowback, too. Some students become intimidated by the level of discourse and simply drop out of view. Since there is no way for me to engage them (I can’t call them out online as I might be able to do discreetly in class), this can be a problem. I will add, though, that generally if the class size is over fifteen, discussion is lively and genuine — and students get to know one another. Sometimes they form writing groups among themselves once the course finishes.
Online is becoming as real as in-class. As technology advances, I expect this will only increase the authentic texture of online courses — also, as people adapt to cyber-relationships of this sort, they become more skilled at presented themselves in ways that generate camaraderie in the classroom.
My in-class approach has always been to meet the students where they are, and to help them achieve more in their writing practice from that starting point. In other words, I do not come to the class with any real idea of who they are and who they ought to become. Writing is a journey, but there are many journeys, and I have no interest in a programmatic approach to writing. Interesting writing is that writing in which the writer accesses his or her own singularity. This is the kind of writing that sparkles; it is this writing that is lively and energetic. I have taken very few writing workshops in my own career, and those I did take predate institutionalized writing programs. I’m grateful for this, in a sense, because my unease with workshopping (as a system for generating good and proper writing) has led me to approach students individually, not as factory-farmed producers of literature. The emphasis in my classroom has always been on craft and how craft can help a sentence to do the work the writer needs it to do.
Seen a certain way, a sentence is nothing more than a web of words that captures some essential meaning. The magic is in the writer’s confidence in choosing those words, and putting them in the best order to do that work. In other words, the magic is not really magic at all, but a long journey of reading attentively and practice. Writing has an aspect of meditation to it, and the writer who practises will naturally recognize the hum of his or her zone, the G-spot of an interior speaking rhythm that produces confident, authentic writing. Conveying this in-class or online is equally challenging. Students often come to class with a very hardened sense of what writing is. We all write, so why should writing be difficult, or why should it be pleasurable, or why should this sell and that not sell? Of course, I cannot teach anyone how to find the speaking rhythm that is his or her particular one, but I can recognize garbled thought and overwritten sentences. I can indicate a clogged idea, or dialogue that doesn’t emerge from a character’s trueness. So, I edit. That is my process as an instructor. I go in and I try my best to weed paradise. This weeding, I hope, shows new ways into each student’s Eden. It’s difficult to fully assess whether this feedback is more fully integrated by in-class or online students — or if it is the same — because I cannot know in any given class setting who I have, and what each will achieve in the short time span (typically eight weeks). In both settings, I encounter students who excel, who go from zero to sixty in a short time, but I also see stalled students, and ones who are simply better readers by the end but who haven’t yet applied what they have learned to their own practice. I find it hard to stand in judgment of this, especially in light of the leaps some students take suddenly by course three, where I never anticipated this might happen. With writing, you never know when something exciting will happen, and transformation is not always sudden or spectacularly obvious. The least student will doggedly achieve what the naturally talented one won’t, because writing is practice.
My online courses, like the in-class courses, are multi-faceted, trying to impart to students the importance of full engagement with each other’s work. The online workshop runs slightly differently from the in-class one, in that I don’t/can’t oblige each student to give both positive and critical feedback — I can’t really oblige online students to participate at all (except through grades, which have limited power in a continuing education setting). I integrate the idea of true criticism into discussions I have with students in the early days of the course, impressing upon them how important becoming an adept reader is to the practice of creative writing, and how listening (to their own work and to the work of others) will help them become more attentive to the world around them. I ask that they read their work aloud before they post it — as an editorial exercise, but also so that they get practice hearing their own work. (A few have made YouTube recordings of their readings for the class, but I have not insisted on anything like this; it might be something to look into in the future, when more people are adept at the technology.) Writing is not only about being heard, it is about learning to hear, and I truly want them to become stronger listeners, stronger witnesses to their worlds. This, I tell them, will help them write better, and will open them to story in new ways. It is my hope — and my experience as an instructor — that they will begin to bring to their own work the expertise they begin to acquire through workshopping with a fine ear and compassion.
The workshop is an emotional experience. I ask students to be open and not to comment on the comments of others to their work (except to thank!) because I want them to process critical feedback, not to answer it or defend their work. This is difficult for students, since it effectively effaces them from the work. My students will all be able to quote me: “You won’t be sitting on the end of my bed when I read your book, so it better say and do what you want it to say and do.” The writer is ultimately effaced from the work; that is the nature of fiction. It makes authors sensitive, and that vulnerability is the fuel that ignites the next book. It is my hope that the critical feedback students bring to their colleagues’ work acts in a circular fashion, so that they open one another to the possibility of being ever more creative. There are rules around workshops I run so that the “reader” recognizes the “writer’s” vulnerability and directs his or her gaze to the work, not to the maker of the work. In both in-class and online settings I’ve seen very powerful and useful responses to early drafts, inspiring students to revise the piece more toward what they wanted in the first place but hadn’t completely been able to see. The student was helped to see where the work was bogged down or where it evaded the depth it could have reached. The idea is always that the student-writer becomes a writer-student. We are all learning.