can writing be taught? be writers stop writing in their head and start writing for real – that’s not something for which they should apologise.
poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.
And as for same-old, same old being produced… it never ceases to amaze how students respond in distinctive and original ways to an identical source of inspiration. There is nearly always someone who produces an idea that confounds us all, forcing us to re-think assumptions.
He’s right: peer review doesn’t mean expert review. New students often worry that they aren’t qualified to give constructive feedback, forgetting that as a reader they are the very person the writing was aimed at. Sometimes the most useful comment is also the most straightforward such as I don’t understand. Very often it is the easiest thing for the writer to fix and the hardest thing s/ he can see without a nudge.
Classroom exercises are too artificial to be useful. Yep, the real writing happens away from the classroom when you have thinking time as well as writing time. When you can reflect and revise and your writing is part of something bigger. However, exploring a literary technique with a pen in your hand is a good way of understanding what it can do and being forced to write against the clock can produce exciting results. The poet Ted Hughes described it as a crisis which rouses the brain:
Answering difficult questions (such as why did character X do that? Why did character Z refuse?) can help a writer discover many things including that the story he or she has written isn’t the story they set out to write. None of this will necessarily make someone more publishable, but it will make him or her a better reader of their own writing.
But not always. Ten minutes can seem like an awfully long time when it’s the wrong exercise, you’re in the wrong mood or you’re saddled with the wrong tutor. (It happens). Even that experience is an important lesson for writers, however. We are too ready to beat ourselves up if a passage of writing refuses to sing. What we need to do is accept and move on. Writing classes attract weird students. Work through it. Write. And that is exactly what you have to do in class. Sharing work doesn’t produce better writers.
Illustration by J. Whelan
“The compulsion towards haste overthrows the ordinary precautions... Barriers break down, prisoners come out of their cells.”
Screenwriter and author Hanif Kureishi, of My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia fame (and who actually supervises creative writing students at Kinston University) clearly feels that there is something suspect going on.
Author and editor Louis Menand writing in the New Yorker in 2009 was deeply sceptical about “The writing courses, particularly when they have the traditional workshop method. the word ‘creative’ in them, are the new mental Creative-writing programs are designed on the hospitals.” theory that students who have never published a
the sunflower edition ~ 15