Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

Inciting a riot: digging down to a play
Writing the creative writing professor teaching, or not teaching, creative writing

ARITHA VAN HERK

Icannot resist thinking of the writing life as a condition that occupies the writer, a low-grade viral state, with flu-like symptoms. Much has been made of this writing life, with dozens of books and blogs proclaiming its habits and discouragements, with tips and tricks and guidelines and recommendations, all seasoned with the condiment of the particular author’s experience. Similarities can inevitably be tracked. Pain should make an obligatory appearance and nature must enjoy at least a cameo. Walking and woods and wildness serve as integral conditions, but none so furiously that they upstage the central mystery: the conundrum of how to write.

This is the ice rink of hubris, to imagine teaching this slippery ritual to any audience of captive chairs, to think that there are ways to hand out skill or distill its conspiracy of mechanism and magic, when what is required is not so much a translation of inspiration, but of the quotidian, of patience, of the uses of distraction, of the carpenter tools of claw hammer and level.

Students of creative writing used to clutch the work to be discussed close, holding pages against their chests as if to keep the words warm, or to warm themselves with the heat of the words on the page. Now they keep pages and words alike at arm’s length, even pens and pencils alien instruments, and the shaped plastic of the keyboard, the cool glass of the screen, where their words embark. I fear this interval as a fracture, a dead space separating their fingers and their words, but they happily ignore the carnal knowledge between their writing and its evocation. All is reduced to words, those slippery conceptual units that beguile and baffle, that escape and elude their intrinsic work. In the dubious pedagogy of creative writing, cartography begins with words.

Meditating on words is one method by which to instruct an impossible-to-teach pursuit. Words themselves argue the complexity of what they suggest. For example, it is useful to negotiate the plurals of all that is grammatically singular: sugars, snows, stupidities, sands, and, not least, singulars. Ah, the way that language trips and skips, inviting this play. Activities that might be individually very different in their specifics but similar in some general aspect will sometimes be plurale tantum or in plural form, ­pluralia tantum. These are words used for objects that actually operate in sets, like scissors or glasses or pants. I am particularly fond of the Dutch plural for brains, hersenen. Uncountable nouns indulge in shenanigans, heroics, or hysterics, and sometimes all three together. Thus arises the challenge of unitary objects and how they can work in writing, the weight of mass nouns and whether they can be measured or counted, the terrible thicket of plural logic. Dodging, too, misery words that lurk around the margins of a page: luggage, despair, money.

Words can plumb the abyss of the body, the blood and bone the young occupy and yet ignore, too confident of their lives to imagine betrayals, how experience will fall on them, a heavy book from a shelf or the sudden force of a bag of oats in a pantry, sliding from above to administer a thump that should include roughage. I quote Simon Winchester’s reflection on set, that perfectly innocuous word, too short to be a missile, but too intricate to be discounted:

I include this simply as an aide-mémoire: there are more meanings for this innocent-looking trinity of letters than there are for any other word in the English language —fully 62 columns’ worth in the complete Oxford English Dictionary, and which naturally include such obvious examples as: the condition of what the sun does each evening; a major part of a game of tennis; what one does if one embarks on a journey; what one does if one puts something down on a table; a collection of a number of items of a particular kind; and a further score, or more, of other disparate and unconnected things and actions. Set is a term in bowling; it is what a dog (especially a setter, of course) does when he is dealing with game; it is a grudge; what cement does when it dries; what Jell-O does when it doesn’t dry; a form of power used by shipwrights; what a young woman does when she wants to secure a man’s affections; the direction of a current at sea; the build of a person; a kind of underdeveloped fruit; the stake that is put down at dice … need I go on? In the search for a synonym it is worth pointing out, and only half in jest, that it is quite possible that one or other meanings for set might fit the bill, exactly, and will have you all set, semantically, and quite neatly, without nearly as much effort as you supposed. (799)

And so, we loop toward what the next sensory event will bring, indulging in a writerly eagerness for detour and its temptations, the pleasure of research as digression.

In fact, a writing class can become a unit of measurement, a yardstick, a cup, a salt-lick, a boot, eluding the contours of its expectation like vapour, the faint murk of water hanging in the air but not containable, merely a miasma, a ghost. I want to dote on the lengthening light of February, how blithe it is to have escaped winter’s lockdown, dark at four, too pitiless to allow even a fingernail of moon to eclipse its thick authority. But writing students are determined to find something to give themselves the impression they exist and can write. And though I might talk about the ablative absolute, its participle ferocity, they stare at me blankly, preferring not to know the name of the adze they wield or the hammer head that will bruise their collective thumb. Even if I shift to punctuation, and how Beckett declares the semi-colon hideous, they laugh. Afraid of its railing, the teeth inside its footprint, they simply avoid the mark.

Is writing then design, the sentences siren songs that ask to be heard and followed? Is it arrangement I teach or is it, Houdini-like, how to escape George Orwell’s “familiar dreary pattern” (“Politics and the English Language”), how to resist premeditated words in their ant-trail path across structure?

The. That damned article. The bear went over the mountain. Sanctified now, the story reversed to Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” The sentencing confusion of article noun verb, iambic pentameter plod resisting its own interruption.

Writing students yearn to be slovenly, to let their pants drool around their hips, to spill over the edges of the lines in a colouring book. They stuff every idea and object into the gunnysack of “thing,” as if that noun will cover the bases, the territory, the spread, the camel’s hump and all its alternatives. I have come to detest “thing’s” smug laziness, its distance from its own provenance, its automatic door introducing an excuse or retribution, its appetite for abstraction, its colloquial evasion, its bloggish faux-intimacy, its lack of specificity, its infernal refusal to commit, its thinginess as offensive as injury. Thing is durable and remorseless and ubiquitous, rather like a battered purse filled with wrapped mints and shredded tissues, hoarding comfort.

And yet, behind the casual is a desire for aesthetic purgatory, that wish to have some object to stare at, if not hold onto, more comforting than the wind that flings itself against the windows of our patience. Little do writing students know how a candlestick or a fringed shawl will outlive words without even digesting the essence of their own thing-ness. Omelettes lie shivering with fat on a plate and wait to congeal. They insist on being eaten hot, steaming with their own coagulation. Eggs, my home economics teacher explained to us, coagulate. Like blood, whispered one of my classmates.

Writing students are sometimes bellhops, officious and obsequious at once. Just try to get them to talk about the body. Camel toe and penis line, the onslaught of scent, the obligatory pungency of flesh in active decay.

I try to persuade them that the malodorous aspects of writing are most interesting, but they resist, don’t like to think of smells and their provenance, or the cause of such smells, the stink of death, the promise of age. They want to write a story that is squeaky clean, repelled by soil, sprayed with aromatic gel. Dirty diapers, the reek of sewage, the raw wind melting gasoline-soaked snow, unidentifiable slime. The drive-by body of the struck skunk in full black and white repose beside the road. The high smell of a salesman anxious to close a deal. Tousled sheets.

I am teaching not only finesse and content but architecture, the struts and bearing walls of structures that need to hold within their frame a narrative. From a two-by-four studded world comes a yearning for the curve of balconies and balustrades, the rock of verandas and the projection of bay windows. It is the window seat we all imagine, inside but soaked with light, a cushioned bench where one can draw up one’s knees and read.

The gift of literature, its sheer expanse, an open prairie of books like whispering stalks of grass, drenched with plenitude. In the sere landscape of pragmatism, the one we’re condemned to live in now, such wealth simply waits, sentences unspooling like floss, silently reciting promise. That lovely dart from line to line, page to page, the ripe wait of the next and the next and the next.

Involute: a complex experience that cannot be disentangled.

How then to charm the process, seduce it into co-operation? Not the classroom or the students but the stew of practice, how to make praxis accomplish more than its habit and desire, how to make it tremble every once in a while, tremble and wonder. Onslaught, although not assault, subtle enough to perform as persuasion.

Offer rules but waive them immediately when useful. Let the wild follow the wild, hope that transgression will lead to surmise and risk. Always happy to meet a malapropism, its charming dimensions signalling that language can still play with our expectations. Can still irritate. There’s a grail. And recondite, a word to wield in a workshop. Cryptic. Impenetrable. For those who expect me to perform miracles, make the process translucent, an application like those we download on smartphones.

But their impatience with detail! They are not born to be philatelists or seam checkers (does that occupation still exist?), pharmacists, or dental-orthotic technicians. They are eager to drive Olympic-sized graders, cutting huge swaths through open fields and not thinking to look behind. Avoiding the callow suburban street, they step onto the ferris wheel of fantasy, a spin above the ground that pretends it is not of this world. Making me yearn for scientists, for the training of lab reports as antidote to Tolkien and his incessant inheritance.

Fear is still useful. Squelch that desire to shore up the ego, mine or theirs, to measure excellence against effort. Every time I walk into a workshop, the chairs hedging the classroom table, I am afraid, not of failing but of succeeding too well, persuading the eager chins lifted there that they can slaughter dragons and make a fairy tale out of that corner cupboard where the cookie-tin crouched, waiting to satisfy a sudden crave for sugar, to reward tears. Supposing the cheap therapy is true, that all goes back to childhood, its tension and thirst, its scars and retributions. I shudder at that, don’t want to play therapist of any kind, not suited and not trained, and even worse, repulsed by the confessional.

I want perversely to encourage the rude and unwieldy but in the end I desist, let them choose their own temptations — murderers and bad men, those who never wear ragged underwear. Still, they yearn to baffle, to ­confound the reader, to raise their words to the level of multiple meanings, the density of suggestion and its after-effects. My taste for the unstated, the inexplicable, will never be sated. I’d rather not know how the key fits in the lock, but, of course, I’ll insist that detail be present, even if not on the page.

I am the reader/teacher who wants to savour the content and read in a gulp, not despoil its margins with pencilled (truth to tell I use red ink — for I am inclined to shouting) comments that record dissatisfaction. I want them to exercise their own disdain, disdain for the impeccable bland, the tailored suit, the sleek upholstery of television sets, and all the upright dullness sold by chains.

And encourage their reading, tipping at books as if they were birds at a puddle, but perhaps better than were they to devour the oeuvre of those published writers they admire en masse. Reading is a way of looking for love, finding contentment among the thicket of sentences. Desire is all poetry, but reading is that embrace of aloneness that leads to conjunction. And there is so much to read, so much that reads the reader, the arrangement of words always seductive.

I want to know what books litter the floors of their writing rooms. I want to know if their mess is like mine, a mixture of unsent thank-you cards, travel guides, aged magazines long past their publication dates, a mugful of thumb drives that hold different drafts of different efforts, and three staplers — now why is that necessary? Surely one would do?

They mock my injunction against death. Snowmobilers do die in avalanches, they declare. Hikers are mauled by bears. Nuns are struck by cement trucks. Nouns can be slaughtered by verbs. Even good politicians can be assassinated. The poor are eliminated by poverty. We dispatch 115 million chickens a day, in the service of food. That’s death on a grand scale, they shake their fingers at me, while I stubbornly resist the ease of death, how it can be brought to bear with a shameless deftness, the laziness of a writer refusing to administer mouth to mouth or lifesaving surgery. What is so tempting about death, I demand? The subsequent quiet, or the grotesque pleasure of the extinguishment?

Thanatology, I insist, is the price to be paid for a character conveniently eradicated. Let us at least see an autopsy, the slime of disintegrating tissue and the gnaw of maggots. But no, students want a clean death, quick and painless. They’ll settle for blood, its dramatic spill, its bright shine against grey pavement, but they don’t want to think about the cold steel of a cadaver dissecting table, the rubber brick that arches the chest upwards for ready access to the knife’s evisceration. While they are inclined to death and its temptations, they resist disclosure, look away.

And what about, they ask, famous suicides? Hart Crane and Diane Arbus, Cleopatra and Virginia Woolf? They are interested in the lives of writers and the augury of their deaths, which they deem to be “romantic,” but they focus on the stone in Woolf’s pocket and not the soggy mass of her fur coat after she had been rolled by river water for twenty-one days. It is more important, I remind them, that Hart Crane’s father invented Life Savers and sold the patent before they became the ubiquitously popular roll of candy that they are now. They look at me with disbelief, are far more inclined to remember him lost at sea and stung by his short stint in Paris’s La Santé prison.

Still, dangerous conditions fascinate us all: Caracas and Cape Town, Rio and San Pedro. We recite with relish moments when we have encountered crime, eager to believe that we have been at risk. Subject matter is so fine a tool that it resists invention, even while the mantra that there is no new story is one that we carry in a pocket, knowing there is no new story, only a new rearrangement of words by which we do our best to convey rapture or deliquescence without falling into a pit of lachrymosity.

And then there are the illnesses, Palsy and Parkinson’s, a tremor, a collapsing leg, a cast to the eye that nevertheless makes a character beautiful. A whisper not whispered, beautiful. And yes, we all steal from our grandmothers, their Eccles cakes, their fiercely guarded wrinkles. We hoick their old-world bicycles from the back of the shed and try to ride them. Sick days, I insist, are a luxury that no sick person wants to take. Only the well indulge themselves, wish for the soft table of bed to muse and mutter.

I watch their faces. A brow and eye socket, a thread vein and the upper frenulum, the notch of a lip, is what stays over time. A bang cut savagely short, allocating to its forehead bare declaration, a name curlicued with ancient origin. Those are the student narratives that stay.

The terrible dictates of plot outdoing dialogue or ritual. Until the plot goes submarine, runs quiet and deep. Plot itself interests me very little, and yet students are mesmerized by the enigma of what will happen next, the then and then and then and then. They try to outline plot until I resist, say that I would far rather hear the words than hear about what happens. I yearn for characters to slice a pear into slender pinwheels or to pare their nails (I am well aware of the homophone’s seduction). It is not that I resist action in favour of contemplation, that I endorse the hurried lope of the vexatious. I am happy to observe characters at sleep just so that they are doing something instead of strolling benign and continent through the geography of their stories, waiting for some event to supervene, to provide meaning and impetus. I’ve over-told the story of how I was instructed to pay homage to greatness, especially in terms of “war and peace,” when I was then and still am far more interested in the scandal of an orange, the missing salt in the spaghetti sauce, the chronic foreboding of a dripping tap, those small particulars capable of starting a war or reciting heats of madness. These are the legislators of discontent, not orphaning or tragic accident but the minutiae that bode a thicker cancer, a dread bankruptcy.

We must, of course, identify cheap tricks: withholding, suppression, the irritation of sunsets blooming at appropriate moments. The writers who don’t want to give it away, the writers who want to be sure that the reader “gets it,” the writers who overwork the mechanical pencil until its spring recoils. I remind them that mechanical pencils are prohibited for those writing the Law School Admission Test, surely because of some candidate clicking the mechanism and unaware of her tic as a periphrastic delay to all answers. What is the wooden sheath around the lead of a pencil called? A scene to inscribe the teeth marks of an unfortunate testee. Bite-mark ana­lysis: more than one criminal has been indicted by leaving behind the gnawed stub of a pencil. Now, there is a mystery, why any character would test his teeth on pencils.

But oh, the extravagance of ideas in a writing class, their race and disposition, the way they will organize dinner parties and crowd scenes, the riot of accidental paradigms trapping desire in their netting without ever putting shoes to pavement, or making knives approach scattered peas on china plates.

And yet, they understand the need for profile. The character needing not only an address and a closet, but a job, a means by which to make a living, to fill, even if inadequately, the maw of a bank account. Can a woman running a shoeshine stand turn this head? Can a salesman sell? I remind them that characters need to have a horror of dentists, credit card debt looming over their shoulders, some reversal of fortune to make us care. They have to figure out how to give characters presence, to move them past John or Joe or Mary to the sweaty perfidy of Raskolnikov, the terror of Quentin Compson, the suave aura of Philip Marlowe. Or closer to home, the loneliness of Lou in Bear, the enchantment of Anne (of Green Gables), the recalcitrant stubbornness of Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel.

What is important, and here is the one piece of advice I dare to offer, is that they take the time to avert their gaze, to be shy with their offerings, to allow their stories a little privacy, a chance to tuck a towel around their naked shoulders. They believe that, as writers, they are meant to expose, to lay bare, when in truth, the writer is a keeper of secrets, a key in the lock of one of those old-fashioned diaries. Those are surely locks meant to be picked, but an action carried out discreetly, the contents not flaunted for scrutiny.

And if they have yet to figure out the dubious contestation of connection, how we make forays toward one another and yet dodge away, wary of revealing too much, eager to disclose but wanting to be taken seriously, they are yet tender, inquisitive, and faithful to what is itself most faithful, the desire to make words count.

Works Cited

Winchester, Simon. “Reflection.” Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. Ed. Christine A. Lindberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.

Inciting a riot: digging down to a play

JUDITH THOMPSON

To write a play is to incite a riot; to awaken the artist in a student is to inspire a personal revolution, to tear down the walls around their imprisoned minds, to let their beautiful, terrible souls grow, expand, and fully occupy their beings. To teach the writing of a play is to carefully un-structure the student’s thinking, which can be perilous for the student, as the school system and academy reward highly structured, dry thinking with the high grades and hyperbolic letters of reference that can make a career with a steady income a possibility.

A student who chooses this un-structuring is taking a risk; once the freeing process has begun, there is usually no turning back. To be a real playwright, this process must happen and it must be a full revolution. For the revolution to begin, the student must unravel the Gordian knot, or as Shakespeare has Cleopatra express it, “this knot intrinsicate,” that society, religion, and family have crafted in each and every individual, around the still-shimmering but suffocated soul. It is the beautiful obligation of the ­creative writing teacher to first motivate students to begin freeing their souls, and then, with various magic tricks, commonly known as writing exercises, to show them how.

In the academy, it is often very difficult for students, particularly graduate students, to shift away from the requirement of their academic courses to the freedom of thought and approach that is needed to create art. Students are often delighted at first by the idea of throwing off the ties of academia, but soon find even a small amount of freedom of thought frightening and dangerous. I tell them that frightening and dangerous are what good writing is, and that now they are ready to begin.

However, there is not and cannot be a formula for teaching creative writing; each method is as unique as not only each playwright is unique, but as every one of their plays is unique. Each group of students creates its own living, breathing organism, unlike any other. My aim as a teacher is to respond to that organism in the most sensitive way possible. Sometimes I am successful and sometimes I have felt that I have failed: for example, a few years back there was a student who would arrive very late, talk while I was talking, sit directly in front of me reading a huge hardcover book, which he held up, almost in front of my face, as I talked about my process, and tried to inspire the class. When I asked him to please put the book down, as it was distracting, he was furious. At the break, he asked me why I “hated him.” I was mystified. He had no notion that I might be offended, or even just thrown off my lecture, by his clear message that he was not interested. That student was in dire need of the self-scrutiny that is critical to the freeing of the mind; how could he possibly create characters if he was incapable of empathizing with the teacher — of seeing me as a vulnerable human being? I regret that I was not able to impart this to the student; he became more and more hostile and his writing was less than mediocre. He was not ready, as an unformed identity, to hear what I had to say. He was full of rage that he clearly did not understand, and some of that rage was channelled toward me. I don’t know if one can ever be prepared for a hostile student. The fifteen-year-old girl inside me, who was persecuted for having acne as well as opinions, bolts forward in these circumstances, and I find myself hobbled, though I do not show my feelings to anyone but my family. We accept that teaching any creative practice is going to be fraught; as in therapy, there will be transference, both positive and negative. Indeed, I have had the most wonderful responses to my teaching imaginable, as well as the few “haters,” which seems to be the cost of what we do, especially for women.

In my humbler moments I decide that it is, in fact, my job to earn everyone’s respect, even those who seem unwilling to give it. I tell myself to just try harder, knowing that I will not always succeed. Conversely, in discussion with colleagues and friends, I will conclude that my teaching has nothing to do with these attacks. The occasional hostile student is part of the game, like being tackled in football, and there is so much that is good about the job that I will just have to take the bad with all that good. After all, I have always received a few vicious reviews for my plays, as well as a truckload of praise. All that being said, teaching is like any art — endlessly perfectible but never perfect. There is a piece of folk wisdom I recently heard: your children show you who you are — an idea that is difficult to accept but probably true — and that leads me to believe that our teaching shows us who we are. We stay the same and yet we change every day, and we have triumphs and family crises and heartbreaks that will affect our teaching. And none of us will ever be perfect.

I never took a playwriting course, or any creative writing course; not in grade school or high school or at university or the National Theatre School. I was dimly aware that the mostly excellent Queen’s Drama Department in 1975 offered a playwriting course. Most theatre departments and theatre schools in that era had their share of professors who had affairs with students, and Queen’s was no different, as I learned years later in conversation with others who had been in the theatre program; a few of them, in my experience at Queen’s and at the National Theatre School, were superb teachers as well as “players,” and there were, miraculously, a handful that were true artists and gentlemen. The teacher as lecher dynamic proved deeply destructive to young artists: even if the affairs were ostensibly consensual, their integrity was violated, and they were robbed of the autonomy that artistic practice is all and only about. Agency, autonomy, identity. I believe that this sexual conquering revealed an unconscious fear of the creative power of the young; removing their agency was the fastest way to freeze the creativity of the students, and thus, remain dominant.

What does this rant have to do with the teaching of playwriting? Everything. To teach any artistic practice is, as I have said earlier, to pry open the heavy steel door that locks the unconscious life from the conscious mind. If a teacher regards the student as a sexual object, the student will consciously or unconsciously absorb that objectification, and the unique identity of the student, which creativity utterly depends upon, is temporarily obliterated. When we are young, especially, we will take on almost any role thrust upon us by those in power, particularly those we respect. Recently, a student that I was mentoring shared that a previous teacher/mentor, who was forty years older than her, had, after many congenial dinners with his wife and son, declared his “love” for her. This declaration slammed her creativity shut and filled her with anxiety; if she saw him at a public event she would run away, heart pounding. And a couple of years later, when she was starting to almost feel sorry for the guy (a sad romantic?), she found a play of hers that he had made lurid comments on — along the lines of “You need to have SEX with this character, you need to take all of your CLOTHES off with this character.” No wonder she was blocked! He had taken away her agency with his expressed desire, and two years later she is still fighting to regain it.

All great art is infused with erotic energy, and when that energy is diminished in the artist because of a violation, the art is diminished, unless the art is exploring that very violation. Erotic energy is the energy of the living body on the earth, in relation to other living bodies, and it must be in every play, whether a solo piece or multi-character. Eros is deeply connected to passion, which can only come from suffering (which is in the etymology of the word) — and where is suffering but in the body? Cliché that it is, I believe absolutely that art can only come from one who has suffered, and everyone will suffer eventually. Many of us transform the suffering into art in order to survive it. Many artists have sexual and/or physical abuse in their past, but they have worked through it in their art in order to reclaim their power.

To return to the playwriting class I did not take. I often wonder why I chose not to take it, and instead, unbelievably, took a design course for which I was totally unprepared. Why would I take a turn so wrong and at such a tender place in my journey as a person? I had always read as if I was starving for words and stories. I had been acting in plays since the age of eleven, so playwriting, even if just to learn more about acting, would seem to have been a wise choice. Was this the Trickster having his way with me, throwing me off my course as a test? In a way it was, for my self-esteem and sense of agency had been badly damaged by growing up in the Catholic Church (have faith, don’t ask questions, women are for baby-making only and they must wear hats in church because sins will travel through their heads and into the minds of men), sustaining (again, apparently consensual) rape in a teen relationship with a university student, and difficult family issues, and therefore I had lost my agency. I did not know what I wanted, beyond being an actress, and I was only an actress in the most passive sense of the word. Give me a script and I will inhabit your character. I never for a moment dreamed that I could actually be the primary creator, the playwright, whose ideas and thoughts and soul would be expressed through the characters, through the play, which could live on for years, for decades, even, possibly, for centuries. Me? I was a girl, a very girly girl. I was apolitical, and I hadn’t a clue who I was or who I would be. So I did not choose to take the playwriting course. Who knows what I would have written?

I sometimes wish I had taken it, as I have heard it was a fairly inspiring and rigorous class, and I would have written my first play earlier. However, upon reflection, I realize that I was not ready. One has to be ready to write a play — to force oneself to write prematurely usually means a terrible play, which might put a student off for life. I saw this happen in that class at Queen’s. A troubled but fabulously brilliant friend of mine took the class and it seemed that writing was the perfect thing for his unbridled charismatic and dangerous energy. He was a procrastinator, like all of us, and he often missed class in order to entertain and intimidate the rest of us in the Green Room. The final assignment was a full-length play. A few weeks after the last class, our local high-school theatre teacher was sitting with the prof, chatting about the state of theatre in town. As he did, he leafed through the pile of plays on the prof’s desk and came upon the play my friend had handed in. He was interested in what my dynamic friend, who had also been in his high-school class, might have written. But as he read, he realized it was his play, his own play that he had staged with us in high school. My friend, who could have written something very exciting, had just handed in a mediocre play written by a high-school teacher. Why? Laziness is the first answer, followed by outrageous risk-taking, very much in character for someone who shoplifted constantly. The true answer? The prof resented my friend always being centre stage, having the class enthralled and laughing while the prof tried to teach. He tried to squash that energy. So my friend absorbed the script he was given about himself by the prof and chose not to write anything. I know he could have written an amazing play had he been encouraged and empowered and given real freedom. On the other hand, my friend was very difficult to deal with in a classroom: he would sabotage the class at any turn. I understand the impulse to inhibit that kind of disruptive energy. What is a teacher to do? How do we balance our needs as teachers with the writing student’s need for freedom and empowerment?

I urge my students to free themselves, to follow their instincts, to be bold, unafraid to offend, and to just write, write and write more. I also tell them that with freedom there must be strict discipline, rigorous self-criticism, constant rewriting, and never ever complacency. When a talented student embraces both the freedom and the rigour, the student is ready to walk the path of a playwright. Sounds grandiose? It is.

The magic tricks that are writing exercises are many, and every creative writing teacher has her or his own bag of favourites. Many of the writing exercises I use are about exploring the identity of each student, helping students understand the choices that make them who they are. Students tease me sometimes about my classes being “like therapy.” While I never pretend to be a therapist or offer therapy of any kind, I believe that self-awareness is the key to creating character. We ask ourselves: What am I lying to myself about? and then tell ourselves a hard truth. It may mean the animal lover finally seeing the connection between the blood on their plate of roast beef and the suffering animal. It may be the vacationer at the Mexican resort seeing the connection between their privilege — and perhaps occasional cocaine use — and the poverty and suffering of the Mexican people. What do our habits and reflexes reveal about us? I ask students to scrutinize their beliefs and separate what was inscribed by family and society from what they have discovered: What is autonomous and what is scripted? They usually resist the idea that anything they think or feel is constructed, and so my job as a teacher is just to keep asking, but never push … if only a few seeds are planted, they may sprout years and years later and clear the way for true artistic practice. I have had many students approach or email me years after they graduated saying, “Now I understand what we were doing. Thank you!”

I begin every writing class with an exercise that beautifully illuminates the person underneath the social persona. I ask students to scan their memories for one of the many moments that they know transformed them somehow, in the smallest or largest way. The stories are always, always breathtaking, jaw-dropping, and transformational for the listeners as well as the speakers. The storytellers are always perfectly connected as actors; their voices, bodies, and emotions all working together to communicate a moment that is an essential part of the unique mosaic that is the storyteller’s identity. Another thing it does is to shake up the students’ first impressions of each other, helping them understand that appearances are deceptive and that almost nobody is who they seem to be. Young writers — all writers — fret about structure. I urge them to listen carefully to the unique structure of each story — usually about twenty per class — and assure them that each of them has an impeccable sense of structure when the story they are telling is, for them, a deeply significant and pivotal moment. When they ask me how they will know if it’s a “significant” story, I assure them that the mere fact that they remember the story and that they chose to tell it means it is the right story. And it means they need to tell it, although they might not know the reasons.

For example: a young man of about twenty told the class a story about killing a raccoon. He prefaced the story by telling us that his greatest joy was hunting with his father. He then told us of a night not long before when his mother woke him and said there was a terrible sound in the field behind the house, and that she thought a rabid raccoon might be attacking their dog. He went out to the field, picking up a big shovel on the way. The moon was full, so he didn’t need a flashlight. There, in the long grasses, he found a sick-looking raccoon, cornered by his dog. After he sent the dog away, he attacked the raccoon with the shovel. As he told us this, he made a weak joke about not wanting to get the raccoon brains all over the shovel. He paused. He said he wondered if he should kill the raccoon, but “what the hell.” He struck the raccoon, over and over, until it died. When he went back inside, his mother was delighted. He looked at us with a little grin and added that raccoons are pests and everyone hates them, as they get into the walls and the garbage. At the end of his story he admitted that he hadn’t been completely sure if killing the raccoon was right, but “what the hell.”

Most of the other students laughed, mainly because they sensed he needed them to laugh. I observed that it was a wonderfully dramatic story, a great example of dramatic storytelling, because his need to tell the story meant that the event for him, spiritually, was like a splinter. It was causing a sort of ethical inflammation, a throbbing, the way a finger with a splinter in it will throb until it is removed. The telling of the story is like the tweezers probing the finger for the splinter, but it is very painful to remove a splinter, and the finger will pull away. The student felt unconsciously guilty about killing the raccoon, which was weak and in distress, and he wanted reassurance, or an end to the nagging guilt: he wanted the splinter out. This was his dramatic action, as a character. He wanted us to laugh about the image of brains on the shovel because that would be reassurance that what he did was not wrong. And further, the story (I did not say this) was his way of shyly questioning hunting altogether. He would never acknowledge the twinges of regret he probably had when he killed an animal, as that would be seen as a betrayal of his father, but his way of expressing this was to tell the class this story. A brilliant example of how to write character: it is always stronger if the character does not understand his or her motivation, but his or her actions tell us everything.

My mistake as a guide was to tell him what he was not ready to acknowledge — that he was feeling guilty about killing the raccoon. Thereafter, I felt hostility coming from him. Nothing angers us like the truths we are not ready to face, but that is exactly what a great play does to the audience, and though some of the audience will be grateful for the awakening, some will hate us for it. This explains why so many plays that have been declared masterpieces, or historical treasures, were reviled by the critics at first. Works of art that shift our thinking, that challenge the expectations of the audience, are often reviled. It is the few forward-thinking critics or, usually, academics, that see the brilliance and the need for hard truths to awaken us, and it is they who teach these plays, which might otherwise be forgotten.

Another recent example came from a young man from a religious immigrant family who told my class of seventy an account of being raped by a taxi driver in Montreal. He bravely explained that though he never said no, and actually performed more than the taxi driver had asked for, he was frightened and confused, and afterwards felt thoroughly violated — he understood sexual politics enough to know absolutely that he had been raped. I was in awe of his courage, in telling the class; I reflected that this was similar to the situation of students having “consensual” sex with their theatre teachers or directors. And marital rape as well: an actress who was in a recent workshop of mine shared that she had been raped every night of her first marriage, to a highly regarded neurosurgeon. She had never told anyone this, because she had just realized it through playing a role in my play, which explored violence against women. Her desire or lack of it was never even considered; lying there like a starfish was her wifely “duty.” So this young man’s story applied not just to a shy gay man just beginning to come out but to all and any individuals who have felt violated despite having apparently consented. To tell the story was an act of revolution, and though there were thirteen writing assignments in this class, each inspired by a different play in the anthology I used, every piece of writing this young man handed in dealt in some way with sexual violation. He has tremendous talent and courage, and I know his work will be on our stages within the next ten years. I believe that all great writers — playwrights or prose writers — are working out a great big splinter, over and over. When the splinter is out, often the writer stops.

Students sometimes become frustrated with the way I work. They want the craft before the art: hard rules on structure, character, dialogue, story arc, climax, denouement, selling the play, copyrighting the play (I say, “Don’t worry, no one is going to steal your play, you will be lucky if they even read it”), and getting an agent. I tell them that all of that means absolutely nothing if there is no art, and when there is art, or soul, in the play, that is what determines the craft. The craft must serve the art. I give them an assignment to write a short scene, and some of them, those who have not had any theatre training, will protest: “How do I write a scene? I have no idea!” I love this because the answer is twofold: You play scenes many times every day. For example, scene one: you ran into a friend on the way to class. You were trying to avoid her because she was so drunk the night before and said some strange things. She asked why you were avoiding her and you lied. This is a scene. It is a scene because something happened. There was a dynamic between two characters, both of whom wanted something. And it is part of the “play” of your relationship to this friend. The reality of your friendship may not be interesting enough to write a play about, so you would need to ask yourself what could happen that would make a play about this relationship powerful. I suggest she take a seed that is already there, such as jealousy, and amplify it, blow it up to operatic/Greek tragedy proportions. So then the student is writing about something universal, with her relationship to this friend merely the jumping-off point.

A second way to learn what a scene is, I tell them, is immersion. Read as many plays as possible, from all eras, and especially see as many plays as possible. There is no formula, and if you write to formula you will fail. Many of my students whine endlessly about seeing the plays, even though four of the six assigned are on campus — they find every excuse not to see theatre — and I wonder why they are enrolled in theatre courses. They will protest: “I don’t actually want to be a playwright, I just needed a course for my degree.” What can I say to that, other than that playwriting is, other than my family, my reason for living, it is life and death, it is a legacy, and it is history? I exhort them to watch people. To listen to what they say. To write it down, from memory, as we must become tape recorders. To look at what was said and see what the tiniest verbal tics and repeats and loops and fracturing really mean. What are they really saying to each other?

A character exercise I love: Think of the most fascinating person you know and write concrete details about that person as fast as possible for five full minutes, a list — for example, wears red bangles, says shit in every sentence, wobbles when she walks, has a fat tummy and skinny legs, always looks surprised, has three dogs, loves ginger ale, and on and on for at least two pages. These are always tremendously entertaining, and they teach students that we know what is happening in the deep waters by what is happening on the surface. All these details are clues about the person underneath. A bad play will analyze its characters. For example: this person has always wanted his mother’s love. A good play will show us through fantastic and unique detail, which a good writer, yes, can make up, but there is nothing as powerful and quirky and amazing as real-life detail.

I ask them to listen to the way each storyteller creates a full character with one verbal brushstroke. For example: “And my friend Roxy kept three huge poisonous snakes in her basement but was head cheerleader who baked shortbread cookies for the elderly and had a new hairstyle every three weeks.” I suggest that they examine the three descriptions of Roxy, and think about what she craves and what her action in a play might be.

I try to incite a riot within each student. I hope that beyond the specific art and craft of playwriting, they begin to question everything, to look more closely at all behaviour, and what it reveals, and to believe that writing a play can make a difference in the lives of the audience.

But what about me? It is commonly believed that there is a sort of hex on teaching: if you teach what you do, it will corrode what you do, until your art is nothing but a pile of rust, and you are no longer an artist, just a teacher waiting to retire. Perhaps that is why I insist on being a playwright first and a teacher second. I think of my classes as workshops, in which I have the privilege of sharing my process. Every class is a performance, a solo show that sometimes becomes a play with twenty-one, or even seventy-one characters. Sometimes the play works, and sometimes it doesn’t. It is always exciting, and always exhausting. Does it corrode my playwriting soul? It does not, because I have never reduced what I do to formula, to right and wrong. I still learn by having to put into words what I try to do, and each and every student’s story is an unforgettable gift.

Teaching also shows us who we are: we stay the same over the years and yet we change every day, we will have surgery and we will get fat and we will become thin and have triumphs and family crises and heartbreaks and reunions and just bad days, which will all affect our teaching. None of us will ever be perfect teachers, but the greatest gift we can give our students is to practise our art, to never become complacent, never give up, to revel, as artists, in our flaws and inconsistencies, embrace each crisis and write, write, write, with the absolute knowledge that while death will have all of us, our plays will remain vital, the characters waiting for living, breathing actors to bring the soul to life again and again, long after our remains have vanished in the earth.