The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Workshops
Work in progress

So it is with relief and pleasure that I turn to a set of books that show some of the actual work of teaching writing. Jincy Willet’s The Writing Class (2008) is a murder mystery set in a university adult extension course in fiction writing. The workshop is taught by Amy Gallup, who is, you will not be surprised to learn, a failed novelist. She is also, however, a talented and enthusiastic, if at times irritable, teacher of writing. There are twelve students in Amy’s class, one of whom, embittered by countless rejections from publishers, begins to anonymously terrorize the others—first with scurrilous unsigned reviews of their writing, then with a series of increasingly violent pranks that culminate, inevitably, in murder. In the mode of Ten Little Indians, Amy and the remaining students must figure out which one of them is the killer before he or she strikes again.

The Writing Class does not strive for profundity, but it does offer a smart and witty take on several issues in writing—particularly on how we respond to the voice or self a writer projects on the page. For the main clues Amy and her class have to the identity of the killer come from the short pieces of fiction each of them has written, as well as the comments they’ve made about each other’s work. And this proves a not very reliable set of clues. As the discussion in Amy’s classes reveals, what many of these beginning writers construct is a kind of idealized version of themselves—who they would be if a movie star was acting them. And so, for instance, the doctor in the class, who clearly views himself as superior to the rest of the students, writes a thriller with an annoyingly virile physician as its lead character, while the middle-aged matron writes a fantasy of domestic revenge in which a wronged wife kills her indifferent spouse. Others fail to get past the clichés of the genres they are writing in—populating their stories with vampires and private eyes whose personalities are drawn more from pop culture than from life. And the stories that are good—an older woman preoccupied with the infidelities of a young neighbor, a day in the life of a high school geek—conceal their authors through their art. This uncertain relationship between the real-life author of a piece and the voice we hear speaking in it is illustrated midway through the novel, when on Halloween evening, as a lark, Amy’s students all show up for class wearing costumes, confounding her attempts to call the roll and playfully evoking the concept of persona—the idea that a writer constructs a mask through which to speak.

One of the things I like most about The Writing Class is that no one it, including Amy, is shown to have unsuspected reserves of talent. Most of the characters in the novel are passable writers, a few are pretty good. I do think we see them learn about writing, but less through what they write than through how they learn to talk about one another’s work in progress. At each of their meetings, the class discusses stories written by two different students. There are six of these workshops over the course of the novel, so we get to see at least a paragraph or two from the writing of each of the twelve students. (It’s a well-plotted book.) The first workshop gets off to a rocky start when a student reads a poem about a failed suicide. Some members of the class rush to assure her that everything will be okay, that she is among friends, while others look uncomfortable at having unexpectedly found themselves in a “group therapy situation” (28). Amy’s response is helpfully brusque. She insists that everyone in the class has the “absolute right to have his manuscript assessed as fiction, and each reader has the solemn duty to read it that way” (29, original emphasis). From that point on, her course (at least before it gets sidetracked into a search for a murderer) becomes a practicum in doing just that: discussing not the content but the craft of a piece of fiction.

In the first few workshops, Amy plays a strong role in both starting and redirecting the conversation about a piece. She’s quick to push beyond the compulsive attempts of one student to praise just about anything that anyone writes, especially for their “use of metaphor” (147), as well as the equally predictable complaints of another student about the sexual politics of almost every story they read. She insists on certain rules for discussion—insisting that readers summarize what a story is about before either criticizing or applauding it and quickly silencing authors when they try to break into the conversation about their stories. She explains literary techniques as needed. In short, she does not hesitate to act the professor—and new teachers of writing would do well to study the moves she makes as a leader of class discussion.

By about the fourth class, though, the students start doing much of this work for Amy. They’ve grown more at ease with one another and more willing to separate their responses to a piece from their feelings about its author. There’s no clear turning point, as there rarely is in an actual course. But students begin more and more to talk to each other rather than respond to questions Amy asks them. For instance, there’s a remarkable scene midway through the novel when a young woman, Tiffany, whose piece is about to be discussed, gets cold feet and disavows her story before the class has a chance to talk about it. One of her classmates gets annoyed, insisting that he wants to discuss the story because, it turns out, he is impressed by how Tiffany draws her readers immediately into the mind of her narrator. Another student agrees with him that the voice of Tiffany’s narrator is compelling but notes that almost nothing happens in the story. Amy then looks on as the members of the class

wrangled for fifteen minutes over whether Maggie had an epiphany (she hadn’t), and for another ten over whether “Untitled” was really a story at all or a vignette, and Amy didn’t need to distinguish between the two because Carla did so neatly, from memory . . . Edna offered measured praise for the piece’s linguistic cleverness, Chuck and Frank backed her up, and the slackers—Harry, Marv, Syl—whom Amy could usually count on to say nothing unless they liked a story, complained that if nothing happens, it isn’t finished. (155—56)

And so on. What I find striking here is that not only does Amy drop out of this debate but, in a way, so does Tiffany. That is, the conversation of the class is no longer focused simply on offering her advice but rather on figuring out what everyone in the room might learn as a writer from reading her story. Of course, that is a remarkable complement to pay any writer, and Tiffany realizes as much. As the class draws to a close, she apologizes for “pretending that this piece didn’t matter . . . thanks for taking it so seriously” (156).

You’ll recall that Amy’s class is also being stalked by an anonymous killer. At their final meeting the members of the writing class reread together the emails, parodies, and story reviews the anonymous killer has sent to each of them, seeing if they can figure out the person hiding behind the prose. They can’t. But in an odd way, that proves reassuring. For in rereading, they find a critical angle on texts that had previously terrified them. Looking at the killer’s clever, self-consciously erudite phrasings, they start to sense someone desperately eager to show off. One student, not the best writer in the class, remarks that he tried to write a few sentences in the style of the killer to see what it would feel like and quickly gave up: “This is the way people write when they want to make you feel stupid” (284). A teacher to the end, Amy gushes:

“What you just did is what I’ve been trying to get you to do all semester—read with your own eyes, listen with your own ears. That was a genuine critical response to the reading, Syl.” (284)

The others agree with Syl. While the killer is adept at writing in a wide range of voices, which is what makes it so difficult to figure out who she or he might be, all of those voices seem calculated, above all else, to impress. And, ironically, as soon as a reader catches on to that strategy of intimidation, it ceases to work. The author now seems to bluster more than threaten.

The killer is eventually revealed through other means. The Writing Class is not a novel of literary detection in which the identity of a criminal is revealed through their words. If anything, it is something closer to the opposite—a novel that explores the gaps between the self on the page and in everyday life. It’s also a lot of fun. Amy has been through a couple of marriages, publishers, jobs, careers—all of which has left her skeptical and droll but not jaundiced. As the novel progresses, she really begins to like the members of her class, more for who they are as persons than for what they might become as writers. So do we. The novel thus suggests several ways of tracking the progress of a writing class. One involves students doing more of the work of the class and the teacher less, another with a move away from simple advice giving and toward considering the possibilities and questions raised by a piece, and still another with the class becoming a group people simply like being part of, whose conversations they enjoy and value.