The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

The work of teaching writing
Dead poets and wonder boys

I’ve spent a good deal of my time over the past two decades observing other writing teachers at work. If a teacher I am about to visit asks me what I hope to see, I usually tell them that I’m more interested in what they do than in watching what their students do. In many classrooms, of course, the students don’t really do much of anything—except listen to the teacher, take notes, or text their friends. And even in many seemingly good classes, they are asked to do very little beyond occasionally offering an opinion as part of a teacher-led discussion. I’ve sat in many classrooms and listened to students and teachers talk brightly together about a text they’ve all just read. But when I’ve asked the teacher afterward how this conversation might help students with the essays they were writing for the course, I’ve too often received a blank look or an anxious reply to the effect that they just hope the class will somehow get people thinking.

The movies love quick and voluble classroom conversations. Indeed, they often suggest that such moments are the very aim of teaching. Sylvia Barrett finally breaks through to her class in Up the Down Staircase when she engages them in a boisterous discussion of A Tale of Two Cities as it relates to current politics. Mark Thackeray turns his class around in To Sir, with Love when he begins to talk with students about their lives. And each one of John Keating’s classes seems to lead to some new personal epiphany.

I don’t object to lively class discussions. They’re fun. But in focusing so intently on the individual class meeting as a social drama—as an isolated event that goes either well or badly—we risk losing track of how so much of learning to write needs to take place over a longer span of time. Here, then, are some other forms of intellectual work we might look for in the movies:

✵ Students write. We see (or hear) some of the actual texts students create.

✵ Teachers respond. We watch teachers acting not just as cheerleaders who urge students forward but as coaches who offer comments and advice on their work.

✵ Students revise. We see evidence of learning in the changes students make to their writing.

Such a shift in focus can help us find insights into teaching in some unexpected movies, as well as see new possibilities in more familiar teacher features. Let me offer an example of each.

While I have never come across it on a list of movies about teaching, Rob Reiner’s 1990 horror film, Misery, has a lot to say about writing and how it is taught. The movie is an abbreviated but accurate retelling of Stephen King’s 1988 novel. Almost all of the action takes place in a single room of a snowbound and isolated cabin in the Rockies, where Paul Sheldon (James Caan), author of a bestselling series of romantic potboilers, is held captive by his “Number One Fan,” the insane and violent Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). Paul has been badly injured in a car crash, but that is now the least of his worries. For in his last novel, Paul had brought his series of romances to a halt by killing off their heroine, Misery Chastaine, so he could then turn his talents to writing what he considers more serious fiction. But Annie is outraged by Misery’s fictional demise and sets Paul the task of writing a new novel in which he brings her back from the dead. So long as the novel progresses to her satisfaction, Annie will allow the lame and now drug-dependent Paul to live. Under her watchful eye, Paul grudgingly begins work on the manuscript of “Misery’s Return,” all the while plotting his vengeance and escape.

The movie thus sets up a macabre version of a writing class. Annie has given Paul an assignment to complete, along with a due date (before the snows melt and search parties can come looking for him). She even turns the room in which she holds him captive into what she calls a writer’s “studio”—consisting of a card table, some Corrasable Bond paper, and an old typewriter with a missing n key. And like so many writing teachers before her, she will serve as the first and only reader of his new work. We watch Paul as he struggles to compose a text that meets Annie’s standards, which prove surprisingly high, while still injecting slight twists of defiance into his prose. Much of King’s novel reproduces the pages of “Misery’s Return” as Paul types them out, while the movie has Annie offer spirited abstracts of what she reads. There is even a hint of collaboration, as Annie uses a pen to fill in the missing ns in Paul’s typescript. But overshadowing all this is the utter power Annie holds over Paul. She does not need to inspire, she compels. It is no surprise, then, that when Paul finally gets the chance to strike back, he acts out a schoolboy fantasy of revenge and rape—hitting Annie over the head with the typewriter she has provided and choking her with the pages she has forced him to write.

If this seems a grim version of a course in writing, then that is what horror movies often do so well—reveal the violence lurking under everyday life and work. Teachers often wish they could just make students do what they want, and, like Paul, many students have no doubt imagined alternative uses for the texts their teachers require them to produce. But unlike any of the other films I’ve discussed so far, Misery also shows a student learning something about the actual craft of writing. When Annie first assigns Paul the writing of “Misery’s Return,” he approaches the task cynically. His previous novel had ended with Misery Chastaine dying in childbirth. Convinced that Annie, whom he regards as a dupe like the rest of his readers, will accept almost any plot twist he comes up with, Paul opens his first draft of “Misery’s Return” by simply rearranging those events, now saying that, in fact, a doctor had arrived miraculously in time to save Misery and her newborn baby.

But Annie is not fooled. In a remarkable scene, she strides into Paul’s studio/cell, telling him matter-of-factly, “This is all wrong, you’ll have to do it over again.” In response to Paul’s surprise, she launches into a story about her disappointment when, as a little girl, she realized that the “chapter-play” movie serials she loved to go see on weekends were in fact cheating on their plots—that while Rocket Man was left trapped in a burning car at the end of one episode, he was somehow able, without explanation, to escape from it at the start of the next. When Paul nervously agrees that “they always cheated like that in chapter-plays,” Annie replies:

But not you. Not with my Misery. Remember, Ian did ride for Dr. Cleary at the end of the last book, but his horse fell jumping that fence and Ian broke his shoulder and his ribs and lay there all night in the ditch so he never reached the doctor, so there couldn’t have been any “experimental blood transfusion” that saved her life. Misery was buried in the ground at the end, Paul, so you’ll have to start there. (1:01)

Like The Shining before it, King’s Misery is a work of meta-fiction, a novel about writing a novel. But much of its self-reflexivity has a defensive edge. King knows it’s only horror prose, but he likes it. In Misery he makes a case for the value of being a good writer of genre fiction rather than a mediocre author of serious literature. And what Paul learns from Annie is that to be a good popular novelist, he needs to respect his readers. He has to play fair, to observe the rules of the genre, and thus to start with Misery in the ground.

In the next scene Paul watches as Annie reads his revised opening. “Is it fair?” he asks. “Should I continue?” Annie gushes in reply, describing how, in this new draft, Paul has not only explained how Misery came to be buried alive (having lapsed into a coma resulting from a bee sting) but also used that plot twist to reveal a heretofore-unknown aspect of her character (her allergic reaction points to her descent from the aristocratic Lady Evelyn-Hyde) (1:02). The point is not that the new version is more realistic or artistic but that it now makes sense as the next book in the Misery series. Paul is playing by the rules he set up in his previous work. As Annie remarks later, “This is positively the best Misery you’ve ever written.” Note: not the best novel, the best Misery.

I don’t want to make too much of this lesson in genre, other than to stress that it is an actual lesson in genre. Paul learns something from Annie about his own practice as a writer, and the movie shows him applying that insight as he quickly composes the rest of the romance for her. In King’s novel, it also becomes clear that Paul quietly agrees with Annie that “Misery’s Return” is his best work in the series. To use the parlance of teaching writing, he begins to make the assignment “his own.”

Nor do I mean to turn Annie Wilkes into some sort of model pedagogue. She is an ax murderer, a villain in a horror movie. But I think we can learn something about teaching by observing how she responds to Paul’s writing. Perhaps I can clarify the point by contrast. In Todd Solondz’s deeply unpleasant 2001 film, Storytelling, we are shown a college creative writing course taught by an imperious and self-absorbed professor. We witness two workshops in which the professor encourages his class to rip apart a story written by one of their classmates, and when they falter, he proceeds to eviscerate the authors himself. It’s not that the professor’s criticisms are wrong—from what we can tell, they seem on the mark. But his comments are unkind and unhelpful. “This is shit,” he tells one young author. Uninterested in his students as either persons or writers, he has nothing to teach them. Annie Wilkes escalates the level of violence from the emotional to the physical—drugging, hobbling, and finally attempting to murder her one captive student. But she does, in her crazed and amateur way, value and respect Paul’s work as a writer—and this puts her in a position to offer him a kind of advice the professor in Storytelling, despite his expertise, seems unable to offer his students. My point is that if we stop hoping that movie teachers will be versions of ourselves as we would most like to be seen, we might instead learn from watching what they actually do.