Movies about Creative Writing Teachers

Marc Lawrence, dir. The Rewrite (2015)

Bronwyn and I were watching this truly silly Hugh Grant vehicle the other night, when I got to thinking about the portrayal of Creative Writing teachers on screen - to date, at any rate. Strangely enough, there were one or two moments during the film when I got a faint intimation that its author (also its director) might know something about what he was talking about.

Hugh Grant was turning in his usual foppish performance as ineffectual-Englishman-abroad, but sometimes - such as the moment when he was forced to face the full horror of a Creative Writing class he hadn't prepared for at all - when it began to resemble reality for a brief instant.

His method of evaluating portfolios - consisting of checking out their respective author's profile pictures on facebook, rather than actually reading any of them - had a certain undeniable panache, but it was when I found I was actually taking note of some of his techniques and resolving to try them out next time I'm in class, that I realised that the movie was working for me, at least: despite the complete lack of any screen chemistry between Hugh Grant and Marisa Tomei; despite the floppy, rather pointless ending.

That's pretty sad, isn't it? Taking pointers from Hugh Grant. I must be desperate.

Curtis Hanson, dir. Wonder Boys (2000)

It got me to thinking, though. What are some of the other notable Creative Writing teacher performances in cinema history? I was very shocked indeed to discover, a few years ago, that none of my colleagues had ever even seen the Great-Grandaddy of them all: Wonder Boys.

I'm afraid that this film has been in my personal pantheon for so long that it is, for me, beyond all criticism. I know people say that Michael Douglas was miscast, that he's too old, that he doesn't look enough like an intellectual ... etc. etc. Blah blah woof woof - as Jessica Alba once memorably put it in an episode of Dark Angel.

Who the hell cares what he looks like? Whether there's even the slightest plausibility in any of the events of that long strange weekend in Pittsburgh, the weekend of Word-fest?

"That book of yours must have been one nutty ride," as one of the bit-players remarks to Grady Tripp, Michael Douglas's character in the movie, author of Arsonist's Daughter, "a little book I wrote 'under the influence,' as you put it, which happened to win a little thing called the P.E.N. award," as he points out pompously to Katie Holmes, who is trying to persuade him to edit out one or two little details ("the characters' dental records, the genealogies of their horses") from his latest opus.

I find myself quoting from it at least once a day: "As fit as a fucking fiddle" - Grady's description of Tobey Maguire's character, aka: "James Leer, Junior Lit major and sole inhabitant of his own gloomy gulag", whom he's just caught with a loaded gun out in the garden of the Vice-Chancellor's house; "Jesus, what is it with you Catholics?" - the "sensitive" response to James's latest story from one of his classmates; "Sometimes people just need to be rescued" - when Grady and his editor bust James out of his grandparents's house, leaving a dead dog behind in his bed to act as decoy:

"Spells? Jesus, James, you make it sound like we're in a Tennessee Williams play. I don't get spells." / "What do you call them, then?" / "Episodes."

I love the way that nobody uses anything but a typewriter to produce their various works, short or long, with somewhat unfortunate results when it turns out that Grady, for one, does not make copies. "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," as Bob Dylan puts it in one of the two songs he contributed to the film.

"It's nice to know that the youth of America are in safe hands" is Robert Downey Jr.'s parting shot as he disappears into the Dean's office to attempt (with mixed success) to parley them all out of trouble.

Part of it is the excellence of the book it's based on, of course. Michael Chabon's second novel is yet another long love-letter to Pittsburgh, his "drug of choice," as Grady characterises Frances McDormand's taste for the written word. Whole sections and subplots of the book have been left out of the cinematic version. What is there, however, rings true enough to Chabon's semi-autobiographical tale of a writer caught in the trap of an unfinishable and uncomfortably vast second novel, after the breakthrough ease of his first, the Great Gatsby-like Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Mostly, though, it's just that even though our professional (and private) lives could never bear the faintest resemblance to Grady's (perish the thought!), one can't help feeling at times that they should - that it should be as cool a thing to do as Michael Douglas makes it. For me, this is the closest thing to Holy Writ the profession has yet inspired.

Danny DeVito, dir. Throw Momma from the Train (1987)

When it comes to quotable quotes, though, this early effort by Danny DeVito and Bily Crystal is pretty impressive, too. The DeVito character's "short stories" - all of which run something like "He came into the room. He was carrying an axe. He hit her with it again and again and again. Until she was dead" - are quite effective, as are Billy Crystal's attempts to improve them a bit: "There's no real suspense. We don't get to know any of the characters, to feel for them, before they get killed - perhaps instead of killing her he could offer her a mint julep?"

Good, too, are Crystal's struggles with the first line of his new novel: "The night was ..." hot, sweaty, cold, dark, humid - culminating in the "Momma" character's suggestion: sultry. "I'll kill her myself," shouts Crystal. Maybe because she's a better writer than he is.

The term "criss-cross" certainly entered my vocabulary thanks to this film. For years, though, I was under the impression that it was an actual quote from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, which Throw Momma from the Train sets out to parody with such vigour. Not so, it would appear. It's all Danny DeVito (or, I suppose, the screenwriter, Phil Silver).

David Anspaugh, dir. Moonlight and Valentino (1995)

Finally, last and probably least, there's this little zircon from the mid-nineties. At the time I had a bit of a crush on Elizabeth Perkins, who plays an uppity poet forced to teach Creative Writing classes for a living after her husband dies in this otherwise forgettable rom-com. I can't quite remember who gets off with Jon Bon Jovi, who plays a hunky house-painter - but the plot summary on the Internet Movie Database says that he "profoundly affects" each of the four female star's lives.

I do remember a scene in class where Elizabeth Perkins is trying to explain to a student why the single repeated name of his girlfriend does not constitute a poem. He keeps claiming that to make any addition to the word would be pointless: it already expresses all the meaning in the universe. She keeps on arguing that his work cannot be expected to connect with an audience who've never actually met her. He says that he doesn't care.

I suppose what interested me about the scene was the way in which you could see the teacher gradually becoming more and more persuaded of the merits of his argument, while feeling unable to say so without letting the side down. A not too unfamiliar situation, I'm sorry to say.

Spike Jonze, dir. Adaptation (2002)

So what do you think? There are bound to be others I've missed. I suppose one should include Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, with its brilliant parody of Robert McKee - played by Brian Cox - and his (in)famous "story seminars."

Annabel Jankel & Rocky Morton, dir. D.O.A. (1988)

Then there's a minor thriller called D.O.A. (a remake of the 1950 film noir classic), starring Dennis Quaid as an English professor who is poisoned by a colleague who is planning to plagiarise a novel by one of Quaid's students, a young man who has just committed suicide by jumping off a building (though actually he was pushed - by the colleague in question).

It turns out that the drunken slacker Quaid never even read the student's novel, simply scrawled an "A+" on the front, and so would never have been able to detect the theft. By then it's too late, though: everybody dies or goes to prison and the book doesn't even get to see the light of day. No great advertisement for the profession, to say the least.

There are plenty of other films about writers stealing other writer's work: The Words (2012), with Bradley Cooper, would be a case in point - or the rather more amusing The Hoax (2006), with Richard Gere, about the faking of Howard Hughes' memoirs - but that's not really the same thing. There's no element of writing teaching going on in either film, so far as I can see.

The same goes for the excellent 2006 Will Ferrell / Emma Thompson film Stranger than Fiction, or the even better Love and Death in Long Island (1997), or the surprisingly entertaining Ruby Sparks (2012), or even Misery (1990) itself, for that matter - or any of the rest of those truth-gets-confused-with-fiction-in-the-screwed-up-mind-of-a-writer movies ...

Richard Kwietniowsk, dir. Love and Death in Long Island (1997)

Sacha Jones: One Woman's World

Sacha Jones: The Grass was Always Browner (2016)

A long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away from this one, I had a student in my Creative Writing paper at Albany called Sacha Jones. It takes most students in this course quite some time to get into the frame of mind where they can critique and analyse each other's work without fear of possible social repercussions. Developing that group rapport is an important part of teaching the paper.

Sacha, however, had strong opinions, and was not afraid to express them. Her ideas about form and structure seemed impressively astute and advanced, too, so I wasn't entirely surprised to find out from her midway through the course that she was in fact completing a PhD in Political Studies at Auckland Uni at the same time as attending this beginners' writing class. Let's just say that she stood out from the first.

Sacha Jones

She must have enjoyed it, though, because she went on to enrol for our stage two course in Life Writing (broadly speaking: Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, Genealogy and all variants on same). I usually only give a couple of guest lectures in this paper, but this year I was teaching the whole thing as one of my colleagues was away on leave.

It was, I have to say, a very stimulating experience. I recall some fascinating debates on the longterm legacy of the Women's Movement on writing and (indeed) society in general, where I tried to stress the immense value of that "the personal is political" mantra, and all the other ideas so hard fought-for then and so taken for granted (often, alas, in their absence) now.

This was very much Sacha's territory: part of the subject of her PhD (now completed) in fact - and she had a lot of light to shed on it.

After the end of the course, I didn't see so much of Sacha: a couple of meetings at the Society of Authors, and - of course - the stimulation of following the postings on her blog One Woman's World. This blog very much exemplifies the idea of exploring all the ramifications of - yes - one woman's life in the early twenty-first century, complete with "Poetry, prose, politics and parenting; photography, pirouetting, pruning and prattling on: a few of [her] pleasures, predilections and predicaments."

And now Sacha's memoir, The Grass was Always Browner, is being published by Finch Publishing (Sydney, Australia)! It's due out in New Zealand a little later this year: in May, if I'm not mistaken.

Now I always think it's extremely uncool - not to mention completely inaccurate - to claim any credit in the successes of one's former students. People's achievements are their own, and any help you may have given along the way is likely to loom larger in your imagination than theirs. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm not extremely proud of her and very chuffed to hear about this happy event.

Nevertheless, the fact that she was already well advanced in her Doctoral studies when we first met means that I'm unlikely to have exerted too much influence on her development as a writer. Never mind: I'm pleased to celebrate my colleague's book here and to recommend it to you strongly.

The book has many resonances for me, as my mother grew up in Sydney (though at a somewhat earlier date), so I grew up on tales of bull-ants and the blueness of the Blue Mountains. We made several trips over there during my grandparents' lifetime, so I retain quite a vivid memory of the family house in Chatswood (immense it seems to me in memory: with great wooden verandahs where I lost my favourite Matchbox toy, a little police car, and had to be comforted with the gift of a little koala bear).

If you'd like to sample some more of Sacha's writing, you could look at her fascinating piece Hunger, included in our online anthology of students' writing from the Life Writing course. It gives you some idea of the territory she covers: ballet, bulimia, body issues, but - of course - many of life's brighter aspects as well.

The best of luck with the book, Sacha!

What is the "Writer's Voice"?

[Kathleen Ferrier sings]

What exactly do people mean when they talk about "voice"? In writing terms, that is.

The subject came up recently at work when it was proposed to replace the term "point-of-view" - in a list of literary techniques to be covered in one of our Creative Writing papers - with the expression "voice."

Now, for me, trying to teach writing in terms of "voice" is the equivalent of adding a few of the basic tenets of Alchemy to one's Chemistry lesson. It isn't that I don't like Alchemy (or Black Magic in general, for that matter). In fact, if I were teaching a course in the history of Poetics and Literary Theory generally, I'd certainly devote a good deal of time to the discussion of "voice." But I see it as more integral to the growth of the discipline than an item of practical, quantifiable information (unlike image, point-of-view, personification and other useful literary critical concepts).

However, nobody else seemed to get what I was waffling on about. They said that "voice" didn't have to have anything to do with ideas of "the writer's authentic voice" or any of that Black-Mountain-poetry stuff. It was a perfectly legitimate narratological term: "the voice in which the writer chooses to write."

But is it? To find out, I started off with that repository of all idees recues [aka "common knowledge"]: Wikipedia.

On their page of voice definitions, I found a list of the principal ways in which the word could be used:

First, general definitions:

• Human voice
• Voice control or voice activation
• Writer's voice
• Voice acting
• Voice vote
• Voice message

Second, in music:

• Vocal music
• Voice register
  • Vocal range, referring to soprano, alto, tenor, bass
  • Voice type, referring to operatic and classical soloists
• Voice (polyphony), a melodic strand in a polyphonic texture
• A monophonic signal in sound synthesis

Third, in linguistics:

• Voice (phonetics)
• Grammatical voice (passive, active etc.)

That was basically it.

Clearly the only one of these of any use to us is the second.

This is what the page devoted to it had to say:

Writer's voice is a literary term used to describe the individual writing style of an author. Voice is a combination of a writer's use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text (or across several works). Voice can also be referred to as the specific fingerprint of an author, as every author has a different writing style.

In creative writing, students are often encouraged to experiment with different literary styles and techniques in order to help them better develop their "voice." Voice varies with the individual author, but, particularly in American culture, having a strong voice is considered positive and beneficial to both the writer and his or her audience.

I think that's a pretty fair summary of the way the word is generally used.

Paragraph one is, I think, talking about something which we might equally easily call a writer's style, though the implication in context is that this is a more comprehensive term, covering other aspects of their characteristic signature and literary "fingerprint."

Paragraph two is the one which really interests me, though. I can't count the number of writers I've met who were angsting about the unearthing of this "personal voice" which some Creative Writing teacher or other has convinced them was the central component of success in the field. It always seemed to me to have a strong affinity with the Pentecostal gift of tongues: a kind of self-baptism in the zeitgeist which would descend upon you when you least expected it.

[Kathy Acker: Young Lust (1989)]

The late, lamented Kathy Acker has some wryly amusing things to say about the quest for a "personal voice" in her essay "Humility," written after she'd been sued for plagiarism by the late, not-so-lamented Harold Robbins:

In late teens and early twenties, entered New York City poetry world. Prominent Black Mountain poets, mainly male, taught or attempted to teach her that a writer becomes a writer when and only when he finds his own voice.
...
Since wanted to be a writer, tried hard to find her own voice. Couldn't. But still loved to write. Loved to play with language. Language was material like clay or paint. Loved to play with verbal material ...
...
I can't make language, but in this world, I can play and be played.

So where is 'my voice'?

Wanted to be a writer.

Since couldn't find 'her voice', decided she'd first have to learn what a Black Mountain poet meant by 'his voice'.

What did he do when he wrote? A writer who had found his own voice presented a viewpoint. Created meaning. The writer took a certain amount of language, verbal material, forced that language to stop radiating in multiple, even unnumerable directions, to radiate in only one direction so there could be his meaning.

The writer's voice wasn't exactly this meaning. The writer's voice was a process, how he had forced the language to obey him, his will. The writer's voice is the voice of the writer-as-God.

Writer thought, Don't want to be God; have never wanted to be God. All these male poets want to be the top poet, as if, since they can't be a dictator in the political realm, can be dictator of this world.

Want to play. Be left alone to play. Want to be a sailor who journeys at every edge and even into the unknown. See strange sights, see. If I can't keep on seeing wonders, I'm in prison. Claustrophobia's sister to my worst nightmare: lobotomy, the total loss of perceptual power, of seeing new. If had to force language to be uni-directional, I'd be helping my own prison to be constructed.

There are enough prisons outside, outside language.

Decided, no. Decided that to find her own voice would be negotiating against her joy. That's what the culture seemed to be trying to tell her to do.

Wanted only to write. Was writing. Would keep on writing without finding 'her own voice'. To hell with the Black Mountain poets even though they had taught her a lot.

Decided that since what she wanted to do was just to write, not to find her own voice, could and would write by using anyone's voice, anyone's text, whatever materials she wanted to use.
...
Wildness was writing and writing was wildness.

"There are already enough prisons outside language." Acker's equation of the "writer's voice" with the desire to be God, i.e. a creator ("maker") rather than just a user of language, seems to me a cogent one. Of course our characteristic language choices are idiosyncratic, particular- we each have a "voice" already: not simply the timbre of the way we speak, but the kinds of things we say (our personal idiolect, if you prefer a more technical term).

But enshrining a particular version of this voice as our "writer's voice" does seem a bit like adding yet another layer of mystification to the writer''s "priest-like task / of pure ablution round earth's human shores" (Keats)). In any case, why bother to look for it if it's already there?

Jorge Luis Borges said he spent years trying to convey the tone and atmosphere of the barrios of Buenos Aires. Then one day he gave up and wrote a detective story, "Death and the Compass," in the manner of Poe or Chesterton, in which he deliberately eschewed local references. "After the story was published, my friends told me that at last they had found the flavour of the outskirts of Buenos Aires in my writing." ("The Argentine Writer and Tradition" [1951])

In other words, if you're getting too worried about what might or might not constitute your "authentic voice", why not just turn round and start questioning what you're writing about instead?

Acker's strange, third-person essay continues:

There were two kinds of writing in her culture: good literature and schlock. Novels which won literary prizes were good literature; science fiction and horror novels, pornography were schlock. Good literature concerned important issues, had a high moral content, and, most important, was written according to well-established rules of taste, elegance, and conservatism. Schlock's content was sex horror violence and other aspects of human existence abhorrent to all but the lowest of the low, the socially and morally unacceptable. This trash was made as quickly as possible, either with no regard for the regulations of politeness or else with regard to the crudest, most vulgar techniques possible. Well-educated, intelligent, and concerned people read good literature. Perhaps because the masses were gaining political therefore economic and social control, not only of literary production, good literature was read by an elite diminishing in size and cultural strength.

Decided to use or to write both good literature and schlock. To mix them up in terms of content and formally, offended everyone.

Writing in which all kinds of writing mingled seemed, not immoral, but amoral, even to the masses. Played in every playground she found; no one can do that in a class or hierarchical society.

(In literature classes in university, had learned that anyone can say or write anything about anything if he or she does so cleverly enough. That cleverness, one of the formal rules of good literature, can be a method of social and political manipulation. Decided to use language stupidly.) In order to use and be other voices as stupidly as possible, decided to copy down simply other texts.

Copy them down while, maybe, mashing them up because wasn't going to stop playing in any playground. Because loved wildness.

Having fun with texts is having fun with everything and everyone. Since didn't have one point of view or centralized perspective, was free to find out how texts she used and was worked. In their contexts which were (parts of) culture.

Liked best of all mushing up texts. Began constructing her first story by placing mashed-up texts by and about Henry Kissinger next to True Romance texts. What was the true romance of America? Changed these True Romance texts only by heightening the sexual crudity of their style. Into this mush, placed four pages out of Harold Robbins', one of her heroes', newest hottest bestsellers. Had first made Jacqueline Onassis the star of Robbins' text.

Twenty years later, a feminist publishing house republished the last third of the novel in which this mash occurred.

- Kathy Acker, HUMILITY, from The Seven Cardinal Virtues, ed. Alison Fell (London: Serpent's Tail, 1990): 113-31.

So precisely what I'm not saying here is that everyone should go off and emulate Kathy Acker by cutting up schlocky novels and exposing their beating hearts to the purifying rays of post-structuralism. Not at all. I think it worked for her precisely because she turned her eyes outwards - away from all the self-help, personal-building mantras about the "inner you" - to the basic building blocks of the society she lived in. Acker is perhaps more appropriately seen as an avatar of Charles Dickens than of Jorge Luis Borges, Raynmond Queneau & other dedicated game-players.

It also got her into a lot of trouble, though (just as it did Dickens in his day). Game-players and court jesters are generally more welcome to society at large. But really, either approach is fine: the rapier or the bludgeon. Just as long as you have some kind of an end in view.

Personally, I don't care what you write about - as long as you write about something. If you've never given any thought either to your subject matter (the myriad things there are to write about) or the make-up of your target audience/s, then I don't think concepts such as "voice" are going to be of much help.

What they do contribute to, in my doubtless prejudiced view, is a quietist, depoliticised writing, on bland, twice-chewed-over subjects, designed not to rock the boat or get your readers to think (let alone feel) anything new. Yawn.

Why not write about everything that interests you? Why not (like Borges) deliberately eschew your own lovingly-polished tricks of style? Try to start again every time you pick up a pen (or sit down at a screen)? Forget all those self-aggrandising, cult-of-personality techniques for making yourself famous?

I guarantee it won't be long before people start telling you what a pronounced personal style (they may even, heaven forbid, use the v-word!) you have. The only thing is, you'll be quite unaware of the fact - your eyes will be elsewhere, on all those fascinating things you were dying to write about in the first place ...

[Francis Barraud: Nipper & His Master's Voice]

What are we teaching when we say we teach Creative Writing?

[Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes" (1985-95)]

I'm giving a paper with this title at the School of Social and Cultural Studies seminar series at Massey Albany on Wednesday 28th May at 4 pm.

Here's my abstract:

I've noticed that the idea of teaching Creative Writing tends to elicit negative reactions both in other writers and other academics. I've had solemn lectures from both sets of colleagues on the impossibility of teaching someone to be "creative". The Romantic idea of the divinely-inspired artist obviously dies hard.

With this in mind, I thought it might be helpful to clarify what it is that I personally think I'm doing when I presume to teach Creative Writing, to compare this to various other practitioner's definitions, and generally to try to demystify the whole vexed subject.

Theory


It's not that I'm unsympathetic to either of the responses listed above.

The Writers are, presumably, afraid (on the one hand), of an army of institutionalised clones marching out to take over the literary world; on the other hand, they're concerned that the mysterious character traits which make them happiest when sitting by themselves in an attic poring over mysterious pieces of paper are unlikely to be transmissible through formal instruction.

It's not hard to empathise, too, with their fear of being replaced by a pre-programmed, predictable robot artist. They know that such an artist would probably suit society's purposes far better than they do. It wasn't by accident that Plato excluded poets from his ideal Republic.

The Academics, for the most part, seem to feel that it's just an excuse to let students lollygag around the quad staring into space and trying to imagine what it's like to be a tree or a bird – an essentially vain and frivolous way of evading the realities of solid, quantifiable research and easily assessable sets of skills.

Assessment is really the rub here, I feel. I mean, these are university courses we're talking about – not consciousness-raising exercises. Therapy sessions and confidence courses undoubtedly have their place, but should one get a grade for completing them? How do they contribute to a coherent pedagogical schema?

Well, luckily, the subject is a lot less mysterious than it might at first appear. Perhaps you'll permit me to quote here from my own introduction to our Stage One course in Creative Writing (Poetry and Fiction) here at Massey Albany:

Be concise; get to the point; be clear on what you want to say.

... Effective writing means communicating as clearly as possible with your reader. Stories and poems, the two specific forms of writing we’ll be working with, have always been considered particularly potent ways of getting information across. It’s how to promote that exchange of meaning that we’ll be concentrating on in the course, rather than the fostering of “creativity” in itself. That (hopefully) each of us was born with. Clear communication can be taught.

Whether you’re an English major, a Communications major, a Media Studies major, a Psychology major, or you haven’t yet decided what to specialize in, I can promise that this course will be relevant to your other studies. As well as teaching you techniques for expressing your own ideas in poetry and fiction, it will help you to analyze and understand other people’s work in greater depth.

If your interest is in Communication specifically, it will also help you to see the issues involved in choosing a medium of communication. Advertisers, PR people, News Reporters and Creative Artists all face essentially the same dilemma: how to reach a target audience with a particular message in the shortest possible time.

Obviously that explanation begs a lot of questions. "Stories and poems," I say above, "have always been considered particularly potent ways of getting information across." But of course that's not really the way they're usually regarded. What is a story? What is a poem? Why have most human cultures throughout history chosen to express themselves in these two forms (as well as in music, painting, sculpture, architecture etc. etc.)?

I'm not uninterested in these questions. In fact, I continue to speculate about them a good deal. But what I'm claiming above is that one can corral off that field of speculation from the actual technical practicalities of how to express one's ideas as effectively as possible (notice that I don't say "express oneself" – that really is too loaded for me).

And that, it seems to me, is what this field of study has in common with other disciplines here at the university. Can one teach religious studies without having strong religious views? I don't see why not. There's a whole series of events and concepts which can be discussed before the teacher obtrudes his or her own views – his or her own agnosticism, for that matter.

That, at any rate, is the theory behind English studies. A properly-trained English Academic is presumed to be a reliable guide to literary history, literary theory, and even literary appreciation. Books, after all, are written for readers (and, by extension, critics) – not simply for the delectation of other writers.

However, when we extend this to the teaching of professional practice within a particular field of study – the planning and construction of actual buildings, say, rather than architectural history or criticism – then I guess we apply slightly different (though still analogous) standards.

There’s no reason per se why the practicalities of a subject requiring technical knowledge as well as aesthetic judgement shouldn’t be taught by a pure theoretician. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to claim that our culture still places a certain value on experience. Overseeing the construction of a real, concrete building undoubtedly involves a lot of unforeseen hurdles and difficulties which have to be solved on the spot, and it’s then that the advice of someone who’s been there and done that can be most valuable.

For that reason, I think students are right to expect to be taught the practical details of their craft from teachers professionally active in the field (whatever field that happens to be). In the case of Creative Writing, I believe personally that that means someone who publishes – or at least has published – in that or analogous media. Which is not to say that such instructors are bound to be correct on any and all points of detail. Not at all.

What at least that degree of engagement implies to me is more along the lines of Shakespeare’s adage: “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.” How can a teacher empathise with the fear and trepidation their students feel in exposing their own work for critique, if he or she has never experienced that precise emotion, in that particular way?

You may reply that reading out an essay, or an academic paper, is every bit as daunting as reading out a poem or a piece of fiction. Perhaps - but then again, perhaps not. There are ways in which the full panoply of academic method and procedure can be deployed to deflect self-exposure in the case of critical work. With creative work, the masks of style and artifice are seldom sufficiently impenetrable to disguise the fact that one actually is setting up one’s dearest notions for appreciation or ridicule: "all my precious things / A post the passing dogs defile," as the poet W. B. Yeats put it.

So, to answer my initial question: yes, I think one can legitimately teach a subject called “Creative Writing” in a university context.

Mind you, it seems to me more a matter of refining process, rather than sitting in judgement on a student’s choice of raw material. The two inevitably affect each other. Nevertheless, I feel the distinction can still legitimately be made.

There's no getting round the fact that a degree of subjectivity will inevitably enter into each teacher’s choice of models and texts to study. Prior practical and theoretical decisions about what are and are not fruitful creative "directions" will also appear in his or her choice of what to stress both in class and when grading student compositions.

If our students are chided for lack of concrete detail, precise language, memorable situations and individual characterisation, it will be (of course) because we consider those traits to be not only intrinsically desirable in both poetry and fiction, but also because we consider them to be teachable. They are, in short, an excellent starting point.

If we continue to use such hackneyed formulae as :“Show, don’t tell,” or William Carlos Williams' "No ideas but in things," or Ezra Pound's “Nothing you couldn’t, in the stress of some emotion, actually say,” then that might appear to denote a residual obeisance to Modernist aesthetics. But isn’t it really more analogous to what we're doing in English studies when we instruct budding critics in the – undoubtedly theoretically outmoded – skills of New Critical close reading?

Finally, are we attempting to train our students to become good writers or good readers (or, for that matter, good writing teachers)? I would humbly suggest that it makes very little difference in practice. I certainly feel that students who have struggled to compose their own poems and stories, will be more knowledgeable about – and appreciative of – the craft that goes into admitted masterpieces of the genre, than those who have stuck entirely to the field of exposition and critique.

Whether our students go on to develop their abilities in the field we’re trying to equip them for seems to be more a matter of temperament than innate talent. Could either Jeffrey Archer or (say) William McGonagall be said to have mastered fully the technicalities of their respective genres? Both have nevertheless pursued writing careers with vigour and determination – both continue to be widely read (for whatever reason).

Trying to supply our own students with a similar sense of mission and dedication is, I feel, where our teaching responsibilities should end. If writing constitutes their particular bliss (to adopt Joseph Campbell’s formula) no doubt they will pursue it. If not, at the very least I hope we'll have equipped them to compose a better webpage or business letter.

Practice


So how does one actually set about imparting this rather notional set of skills?

Let's go to the experts on that one. Robert Graves' 1934 novel Claudius the God includes a hair-raising description of how the ancient Druids assessed competence in poetic composition:

The candidate must lie naked all night in a coffin-like box, only his nostrils protruding above the icy water with which it is filled, and with heavy stones laid on his chest. In this position he must compose a poem of considerable length in the most difficult of the many difficult bardic meters, on a subject which is given him as he is placed in the box. On his emergence next morning he must be able to chant this poem to a melody which he had been simultaneously composing, and accompany himself on the harp. [pp. 259-60]

The penalty for any failure is, of course, death.

Moving to more recent times, here's the renowned American author Ursula K. Le Guin in the introduction to her aptly-named Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew (1998):

Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.

... Groups offer, at their best, mutual encouragement, amicable competition, stimulating discussion, practice in criticism, and support in difficulty. These are great things, and if you're able to and want to join a group, do so! But if for any reason you can't, don't feel cheated or defeated. Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work ... Group criticism is excellent training for self-criticism; but until quite recently no writer had that training, and yet they learned what they needed. They learned by doing it. [pp. ix-x.]

That sounds more than a little defensive to me. Are writing groups really so recent an invention? Some of the literary salons of the eighteenth century would certainly seem to have anticipated them. And then there were the groups of friends such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien's Inklings, who read aloud, then critiqued one another's work. Is the idea so different, in fact, from what Coleridge and the two Wordsworths were doing as they walked and talked together in the Lake District?

John Singleton and Mary Luckhurst, the editors of The Creative Writing Handbook: Techniques for New Writers (1996) sound rather more positive about the benefits of the group experience:

We feel strongly that writers should not work in intellectual isolation.

They go on to specify:

This is a challenging era for a writer. On the one hand, there is a strong camp arguing that the process of writing is one of self-discovery and a means of understanding yourself in relation to the world. On the other hand, post-modernists are telling us that the search for a fixed self is pointless; that we will discover only selves and that none of them will be 'real'! So theoretically we're in a double-bind: but don't let it stop you writing! [p.16]

That last sentence may sound a little bland, but it's hard to argue with it. How you write and how you theorise about your own writing are not and never can be side-issues, but if you succeed in arguing yourself into silence it's hard to see who wins from that.

G. K. Chesterton perhaps summed up the argument for perseverance in a craft one can never hope to master in the phrase: "If a thing's worth doing it's worth doing badly." If you try to say what you've got you say then there's always the chance that something will get across - though, to be sure, never everything you hoped. If you give up and throw it away then even that slender chance is gone.

Finally, Colin Bulman, in his Creative Writing: A Guide and Glossary to Fiction Writing (2007) points out that:

No book or teacher can make anyone a great artist, but most great artists are masters of basic techniques ... This book is largely about basic fictional techniques; no book can show the reader how to be an innovator in fiction. [p.2]

Quite so. The Woolfs and Joyces and Nabokovs will continue to follow their own tortuous creative trajectories, but even they might have useful tips to pick up about what does and doesn't work on an audience - in this case, that initial audience of their creative writing workshop. Not everyone has a Lytton Strachey or an Edmund Wilson (or an Ezra Pound, for that matter) to bounce their ideas off.

The Exercise


This is the bit I can't really describe on the blog, unfortunately. I'm going to try and get my audience to participate in a group-marking exercise. I've chosen some actual poems from my Stage One Creative Writing class (extensively disguised to prevent identification of their authors, of course).

If all goes well we'll end up agreeing that there actually are objective criteria for assessing them, and that it isn't a purely arbitrary expression of personal preference. If not, then I'll have to resort to Plan B.

Maybe some of the rest of you can suggest what that should be.

Coromandel

[photograph by Simon Creasey]

Hello Jack - I had a great tutorial on Wednesday, I read them Celan's 'Corona' and we spent about 30 mins discussing your own poem, coming up with ideas, me talking a little about dialectics and poetry referencing poetry.

Afterwards the students requested I ask you to provide your own reading of your poem, and i thought this would be a good idea, so, if you get time before next week could you send me a few lines on the poem? The main query was: who is the 'she' saying 'it's time the asphalt bled'? - '5-fingered sky' brought up some interesting comments: fingers of light coming through clouds and some discussion on the sky as a hand, or were there five clouds?...
Cheers,
Matt

Matt Harris and I are teaching the Massey-@- Albany Stage One Creative Writing paper together this semester. In each tutorial we discuss work by the students, but also pieces from the course anthology. It includes the following poem by me - first published in Poetry NZ 28 (2004): 9:

Coromandel

Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird
– Paul Celan, ‘Corona’


bird stalks by
5-fingered sky
Sunday

in the rearview mirror
Autumn gnaws my hands
we’re friends

van reversing
past the
pharmacy

check out those jeans
swap spit
talk shit

don’t stare at
us
it’s

time she said
it’s time the asphalt
bled

it’s time

I guess I should preface any discussion of it by saying that it's the first (and so far only) time that I've published a poem which began as a class exercise. A few years ago I was teaching a session for a Masters course in Creative Writing, and I decided to get the students to compose a poem based on a picture I gave them and a literal translation of a poem in a foreign language (rather similar to the Workshop exercise we did at Bluff 06 this year).

The pictures were all landscape photographs taken by my friend Simon Creasey, whose (then) girlfriend Kika was very keen on hillsides and cloudscapes. The photos he took to send to her were accordingly mostly bare of human beings, buildings, and other obvious distinguishing features. The one I've included above was the sole exception, and it's the one I used myself to write my own version of the exercise.

I attempted to combine it with the Paul Celan poem "Corona":

Corona

Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde.
Out of my hand Autumn eats its leaf: we are friends.
Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn:
We shell time out of nuts and teach it to go:
die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale.
time returns into the shell.

Im Speigel ist Sonntag,
In the mirror is Sunday,
im Traum wird geschlafen,
in dreams is sleeping,
der Mund redet wahr.
the mouth speaks true.

Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten:
My eye descends to the sex of the beloved:
wir sehen uns an,
we look at each other,
wir sagen uns Dunkles,
we tell each other dark things,
wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis,
we love each other like poppy and memory,
wir schlafen wie Wein in den Muscheln,
we sleep like wine in mussels [conches],
wie das Meer im Blutstrahl des Mondes.
Like the sea in the blood-beam of the moon.

Wir stehen umschlungen im Fenster, sie sehen uns zu von der Straße:
We stand embracing in the window, they look up at us from the street:

es ist Zeit, daß Man weiß!
It is time that one knew!
Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt,
It is time, that the stone condescended to blossom,
daß der Unrast ein Herz schlägt.
That restlessness beat a heart.
Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird,
It is time that it should be time.

Es ist Zeit.
It is time.

Notes:
l.15. bequemen (v.t) – to accommodate oneself to, conform with, comply with, put up with.

[Inspired by the literal version in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century German Verse, ed. Patrick Bridgwater, 1963 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 268]

I guess it's obvious that I took a lot of images from the Celan poem. I also tried to emulate its atmosphere of a doomed love story ... at least I read it as doomed. Celan scholars might disagree with me there.

I tried to combine that with the sense of desolation and emptiness in Simon's photo of the main street of Coromandel. The van comes from there, as does the 5-fingered sky, which I think was meant to evoke the five fingers of cloud which seem to be reaching out towards the viewer in the photograph.

I think my lovers (the guy driving into town at the beginning, the girl in the jeans) are trying to get out of town. I think they may not succeed. I think the asphalt is hungry for them. My friend Stu Bagby told me he thought I meant to imply that they'd robbed the pharmacy first. I hadn't thought of it, but maybe they did. Certainly they seem to be on the run from something at the end: fate?

I wanted to pare down my language to what my two characters might actually say to one another, but also to echo the kind of prophetic Biblical tone which Celan is so adept at. The poem is (obviously) meant to be suggestive of a story rather than filling in all the blanks, but I think in that it's fairly true to human experience. Mine, at any rate.