Harper and Kroll: Creative Writing Studies

*Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy.* Ed Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters LTD, 2008. Print.

Three useful articles here. Fraser for the value of post-structural theory. McLoughlin for a framing of the project. Hardy for a negative example of the application of the intentional fallacy to the workshop.

Fraser, Gregory. "A Translator's Tale."

Fraser considers himself a translator in the sense that he devotes himself "'translating' the discourses of critical theory into the art and discipline of Creative Writing" (152). Fraser is especially interested in translating post-structural and postmodern theory into CW practice. The primary value of this theory to CW students, according to Fraser, is that is saves them from "parochialism" and/or "provincial attitudes." Understanding sophisticated theory allows authors to write sophisticated creative work.

The value of understanding Foucault's work is that it leads to closer examinations of power relations:

Without a fine-tuned awareness of 'minute and everyday' expressions of power, as well as of larger authoritarian forces in culture (not to mention the continual commingling of the two), Creative Writing students may open their work to criticism of parochialism...[S]killful authorship demands a keen perception of authority in its innumerable forms—in big business and government, to local-level yet no-less-complex exchanges between parents and kids, to 'everyday' (and often seemingly power-neutral) interactions with friends, lovers, and perfect strangers...It is frequently this vision of power that leads students to subtler works of fiction, drama, and poetry. It helps them avoid the narrow view that simply ignores the play of power, and the similarly limited vision that believes power to be located solely in institutions divorced, form, and standing above, the 'everyday'. (157)

Postmodern notions of the de-centering of discourse and the subject help "emerging writers de-essentialize their characters and destabilize formulaic plots" (160).

Lacan for characters:

I find that the Lacanian notion of deferred desire can help students create characters whose motivations are less predictable, more open to surprise. (160)

And Lacan for poetry:

Lacanian theories about selfhood have a special force, as well, for student poets. At the onset, many students who wish to write poems proceed from myths of wholeness about the self Students often write poems to voice what they take to be the essence of an inner being. They seek // to capture some final, genuine truth about an allegedly unique emotion or experience. And these underlying assumptions often produce texts that reach for effect...Lacanian theory can help students recognize not so much the fragmentation of an ultimately unified albeit imperiled self (a modernist conception), but the cultural/linguistic manufacture of the very idea of selfhood (a more postmodern assertion). Such a perspective gives students a different kind of freedom to adopt masks and to explore self-contradictions as generative rather than logically fallacious. Lacan can't help students completely shed the dominant fictions of culture (none of us can do that), but his thinking can encourage students to recognize and tamper with these assumptions in unexpected, artistically vitalizing ways. (160-1)

And Lacan for the creative process:

Students may in fact become more willing, after a little training in Lacanian theory, to let language (rather than a sense of stable selfhood) guide the poetic process. They may allow language to suggest unstable constructions of selfhood, flickers of desire, suggestions of unconscious strings of motivation. This can lead to stronger poems. (161)

Derrida has some value, too:

Derrida's thought can 'free' them [students] from the 'tyranny of the central idea.' Such freedom frequently leads to greater flexibility in characterization, plot development, and language use. By not beginning with a main theme or idea, students avoid working predictably down the page. (162)

I'm not as convinced by this argument. I've yet to see a constructive application of Deconstruction that works. And how could such a thing work? Derrida's thought is liberating for some, since it allows for the undoing of established categories, etc... But I'm not sold on the idea that reading "Structure, Sign, and Play" will allow students to write less predictably, or that whatever they'll come up with instead will be preferable.

McLoughlin, Nigel. "Creating an Integrated Model for Teaching Creative Writing: One Approach."

McLoughlin speaks of "writerly criticism":

At the center I write. Everything stems from that. If I didn't write, I would not be interested in writerly criticism, because to write means one must also criticise in a writerly fashion. Writerly criticism is // different from literary criticism. There is a difference of viewpoint. Literary criticism is concerned largely from the reader's viewpoint. What impact the text has on the reader, how different readers may read a text. While writerly criticism is concerned with that also, it is only part of the story, it is only ever a means to an end. A writer will examine a text critically in order to look closely at the effects it might have on the reader, and at different ways the text may be read, but the motivation is different. The writer may want to add an ambiguity or remove one; a writer may wish to engender a specific effect or set of effects on the reader. Either way, writerly critics are concerned with making the text 'better'. They tend to start from the premise that, this would work better if... (88-89, his ellipsis)

McLoughlin feels that teaching creative writing is, to some extent, teaching students the art and practice of writerly criticism. It allows them to practice such criticism on their own texts. However, he does not feel that they are best taught by workshoping their own texts:

It quickly became apparent that exemplars of good and bad writing worked much better as a way of demonstrating, in practical terms, particularly fine writing or cliche and redundancy etc. in a less emotionally charged atmosphere. It enabled students to criticise and edit the writing of others and by extension their own writing, through using worked examples from other writers that pointed out certain features that students could recognise in their own work or try and adapt to their own uses. (89)

Here's how to pass writerly criticism on to students:

Teaching students to be critical requires balance between bringing out ideas they may have about how a text is working (or not working) and whether the text is good of its type. That // means also teaching them that just because they don't 'like' a text, it does not mean that it is not working, or that there is nothing they can learn from it as a writer. In order to teach this, as great a variety of texts as possible are introduced and the students are asked to interrogate the text from several viewpoints: Does the text work? How does it work? Could it be improved and if so how? What are the constituencies out of which the text is written? What can the student learn from the text as writer?

Later, he expands slightly on these last questions:

How does the author achieve his/her effects? What tropes do they use? What can I learn from these texts as a writer? (92)

The rest of his essay is taken up with the elements that must be taught and the sequence in which they are best taught. It's a good essay and a fine prescription for CW. Strikes me that this along with Shelnutt's article would make for a healthy class discussion, since she provides the best critique yet of CW status quo, and he provides an solid alternative model.

LEAD:
He cites Kolb's model of the writing cycle from Jarvis, P. (2004) *Adult Education & Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice*. London: Routledge Falmer.

Hardy, Nat. "Gonzo-Formalism: A Creative Writing Meta-Pedagogy for Non-Traditional Students"

I was hoping for more from this guy, but (as far as I could tell) he was promoting the traditional workshop in grandiose terms.

Most importantly to me, he exposes his unexamined assumption that the author of a text should be silent while the class critiques his/her work:

On a symbolic level, the workshop...embodies the 'death of the author' notion, because the monological author must restrain any response to criticism until the critical mass has concluded its interpretive, or poly- // phonic, review. For any author, donning the scold's bridle for the duration of workshop dialect is the most difficult, nay emasculating, part of workshop. Verbal castration sounds excruciating, and, for the silenced writer, it is as if he or she must quietly endure a discriminating panel of critics who cast literary judgments on the author's work...Once critical discussion of the creative work has concluded, the author can address his or her live audience to clarify ambiguities, ask questions or, in some cases, beg forgiveness. (103-104)

First of all, it's not possible to comment on this without first addressing Hardy's sexism. How can "any author" feel that something is "emasculating"? Has he ever felt de-feminated? Or, better yet, how can "he or she" endure "verbal castration?" Do his female students have their balls cut off by words? Or is that that all words have testes, and the workshop removes these, neutering each author's language?

In any case, this strikes me as really bad practice and leads to much wasted class time. Gonzo-formalist wasted class time, I guess. Authors are left on their own to measure the distance between intention and effect, rather than the whole class working intentionally and conscientiously on this project together. I guess "Gonzo" is his justification for all the weird, wasteful turns that class discussion can take when it is not directed toward productive criticism of the text. Radical.

Harper: Teaching Creative Writing

*Teaching Creative Writing.* Ed. Graeme Harper. London: Continuum, 2006.

Mostly this book is broken down by genre. Everything from radio to hypertext. There are a few pertinent essays in the back.

Rob Pope gives a succinct intro to his "Textual Intervention" deal in his essay called "Critical-Creative Rewriting":

Of course, all mature courses in Creative Writing require some evidence of 'process', too. But unless this is supported by a work-log and a full record of research and reading as well as reflection (as in a comprehensive portfolio), the critical element is often perfunctory: a dutiful bolt-on attached after the event. (130)

It strikes me, though, that most if not all criticism happens "after the event." For writers and readers both. Northrop Frye distinguished between pre-critical and critical experience of a work by stating that the first was the only type of experience that could take place while reading (or viewing, as with a play) since the whole was not yet in view and could therefore not be judged.

Writing can be a pre-critical experience, as when a work is developing by "inspiration" or "intuition" or whathaveyou. It can also be a critical experience--that is *the writing itself* can be a critical experience--as when one looks at what one has written and must make decisions about what to change or leave alone and why. So all writing, at least all rewriting is critical at some level. I suppose some folks rewrite more by "feel" and would call their revisions "inspirations" or "inspirational." Even so, they must, even if unconsciously, filter their work according to some standards of what makes a good piece of writing, or how a given piece will best suit its purpose.

Pope seems to feel this way too, since he says that "writing is not just 'creative' but...there is always a 'critical' dimension to it too (we weight the words we choose)" (131).

Maybe his "bolt-on" comment was meant simply as a take-down of workshop approaches that don't feature the critical as a part of the creative process and not as a take-down of the creative process itself. That makes more sense.

His description of the process he proposes:

We always start with a text that already exists, preferably in more than one version, and then we rewrite it: adapt it, critique it, intervene in it. (131)

*Textual intervention* is the more or less deliberate challenging and changing of a text so as to put it off balance: to point it in a fresh direction or develop it in an alternate dimension—to de- and re-centere, de- and re-construct it. This might involve anything from tinkering with a few words to full-scale textual transformation. (132)

He gives *Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead* and *Wide Sargasso Sea* as examples of the latter and "To buy or not to buy" as an example of the former.

The rest of his essay gets more specific about how to create textual intervention-based exercises. It's not a bad approach. Certainly a nice twist on the "imitation" exercise. It takes one aspect of the creative writing process and puts it in a new context. "Textual intervention" is what we all do to our own texts every time we write, calling it "revision." Pope's exercise allows students to make the revision process explicit and creative and playful by turning it loose on someone else's stuff. At some point, I think it would be important to make it explicit that this playful revisioning is what it is: an exercise that allows writers to bring a sense of play and creativity to the revision of their own work.

Harper's own essay "Research in Creative Writing" is a bit trying but gets at some good material.

His answer to the question "What is valid academic work for CW?" is, more or less, that writing is research. I'm oversimplifying things, but not so much. It would be better to say that, for Harper, research or critical work of some kind is always a part of the writing process:

The creative writer engages in, and constructs alongside their creative practice, an active critical understanding of a specific kind. This critical understanding is in part based on a development of a craft, a set of skills that are practical, applied, pragmatic; the creative writer learns what works, and aims to employ this learning...The creative writer's critical understanding is also based on a sense of genre, form and convention. (161)

This leads into his "responsive critical understanding" idea, which I've read about in other work by Harper elsewhere:

The creative writer researches their sense of critical understanding, 'in process', whether prior, during or after the production of a single work, and most directly in relation to immediate or future work, planned or as yet unplanned...This can be called *responsive critical understanding*, and it is both the purpose and the product of creative writing research. (162)

CW research exists for the purpose of enhancing whatever part of the writing process is necessarily critical.

He recommends research into what he calls the "art" and the "cultures" of creative writing. By art, he means "that all writers have a concern with words, their meaning, their arrangment, and their impact on their audience...the writer seeks additional knowledge of the nature of words, and of their use" (163). By "cultures" Harper refers to the "interaction between...the individual writer and her or his environment." His explanation of how this research takes place is helpful:

'What if?' is the question that drives the process of creative writing...'What if this was my life?' 'What if my daily routine took this turn?' 'What if this disaster had befallen me?'...The creative writer inserts themselves [sic] into the inter- // pretative position; empathetically, providing a way for the reader to follow through a speculation, effectively alongside the writer themselves [sic]. (164)

All his what ifs involve his own person, rather than a character separate from himself. And his list may be more specific to fiction writers than poets perhaps. But the idea that a writer is exploring material through a creative response is interesting. It means the creative project *is* a critical project, and defends the intellectual process of creative writing as equal (at least in merit) to other academic work.

Another reason this last quote is helpful is that it complicates the distinction between what I've been thinking about as the "creative" side and the "critical" side of the writing process. The "creative" side has a critical element to it, or it can. It can represent a critical imaginative engagement with the world.

LEADS:

I read in another article that Wendy Bishop has a more recent book on the writing process.
On Writing: A Process Reader.
There's a 2008 edition out. Could have some good leads on current stuff on the writing process.

Dawson: Chapter 3 and 4

In this chapter, "Workshop Poetics," Dawson puts into practice the theoretical analysis of workshop practices that he promised in his intro. I'd say the results are mixed. He repeats his "mini-histories" approach from the last chapter, this time giving the background of three guiding principles of most Creative Writing workshops: "Reading as a writer," "Show, don't tell," and "Discovering a voice."

Here's his orientation for the chapter:

In asking if there is a poetics of creative writing, I mean a general theory of literature (fiction, poetry, drama)--but literature as creative writing, that is, as a process rather than product, something which has been written rather than something which is to be read; and a general theory of literature which enables the analysis of specific texts, in particular, the student manuscript. (90)

I'm not sure if he can really make a distinction between something that "has been written" and something else that "is to be read." Likewise, splitting process and product is a bit problematic, but the general orientation is sound, I think. He wants to ask what literature is for writers, and he wants to ask this in a way that helps us all to analyse student work. Fair enough.

In his section on "reading as a writer," he defines this phrase as "reading with the aim of discovering ways to improve one's own writing" (91). Apparently, reading like a writer goes back further than the source I cited as a lead in my last post. Dorthea Brande's book Becoming a Writer (1934) was the first to use the term.

Dawson starts with Walter Besant and works forward in large strides. He arrives at Moxley's collection Creative Writing in America and notes that most of the entries are occupied by this notion of teaching student writers a particular method of reading.

A few quotes worth pulling:

We have seen here an attempt to distinguish Creative Writing from Literary Studies by virtue not of the work students produce, but of the manner in which they read literature. It is a difficult distinction, however, based on a difference of motivation (to learn how to write rather than how to appreciate literature), and presumably of expertise (the writer drawing upon his or her first-hand experience of the craft rather than a training in literary study)" (95).

It is obvious that the terminology employed in the writing workshop, such as plot, structure, point of view, dialogue and character, is formalist in orientation. And it is also obvious that this sort of reading of literature wishes to concentrate on the craft of writing: how a work of literature is made, rather than extra-literary concerns. The claim, however, that 'reading as a writer' is somehow not criticism, based on a writer's point of view than a critic's, cannot be validated. (96)

So the distinction between literary studies and CW, between the author and the critic, is tenuous at best. Authors do criticism, and CW students are very much students learning to appreciate literature even as they learn to "make" it.

Dawson's work on "show, don't tell" is more or less a rehashing of Wayne Booth's work on the same topic in his Rhetoric of Fiction. So I'm skipping. Better to quote from the Booth.

In the "discovering a voice" section, Dawson brings Morton and Zavarzadeh back in as "the most damning critique of Creative Writing from the perspective of postmodern theory" (108), which is a pretty clear sign that I need to find that one and read it.

There is a sort of "surprise" section on Authorship that has a bunch of good stuff in it. It strikes me that Authorship is a central concern for Creative Writing Theory--defending the author against claims that would undermine his/her power, finding ways to understand the reach and limits of authorial power in such a way that enables authors to base their efforts on reasonable assumptions about what effects they might hope to achieve--these are important projects.

Dawson says this:

Authorship exists in the workshop as an implicit assumption, in the sense that an exemplary text is attributed to an agent who has consciously employed techniques of writing. 'Reading as a writer' operates by approaching the text as a series of artistic choices made by the author...And while these techniques are implicitly attributed to a conscious organising agent, that agent is only the anonymous embodiment of the compositional techniques themselves (115)

So students to not attempt to read into the psychology or biography of the author, but are simply interested in the author as a set of artistic choices among available techniques and their application.

The writer is the origin of the piece, the owner and the one responsible for its development towards an exemplary standard. The writer may be consulted for clarification and subsequently put forward motivation, an intent, which was not apprehended or indeed was misinterpreted by readers. (115)

The intent referred to in a workshop is not the end-goal of the critical work done on a piece. Rather, it provides an aid to the work of remediation or of improving the piece.

The object of analysis for intellectual work performed on student manuscripts is not the reconstruction of the writer's intention; there is no desire to latch on to a single wordless meaning and enable its expression (115)

This is not to say that students do not perceive themselves as creative beings using writing as a medium for their ideas. The student manuscript is undoubtedly an authored work but it is not critically apprehended or evaluated within the discipline according to a paradigm of authorial criticism derived from Romanticism. Furthermore, the reading practices which enable Creative Writing to operate as a discipline are not reifications of the writer's consciousness. They are derived from formalist literary criticism. (115-116)

So CW workshops assume an "intent" in student work, but are only interested in that intent in as much as it expresses itself in formal, or technical, choices made in the process of writing the draft, choices which may have resulted in a poor communication of that technical intent and which therefore require revision.

It strikes me that the whole project would be impossible without the assumption and investigation of the student author's intent. How else would one suggest revisions? Based on what? Without appealing to the author and asking "What did you hope to accomplish here? Why did you choose this form and apply it in this way?" we are left to apply our own arbitrary standards of taste or "good writing" which could only result in a sort of aesthetic tyranny. Not to mention a stifling of the very creativity the discipline is meant to nurture if not teach. And eventually a blandness and sameness to student work.

I am going to have to read up on the New Critical "intentional fallacy" and see how this compares to the type of formalist intent Dawson finds at work in the workshop.

Dawson's conclusions for the chapter:

The poetics of Creative Writing, then, consists of a critical study of exemplary texts which is no different from...formalist criticism.... The end of this study is not so much a critical evaluation of these texts...nor a structuralist account of the linguistic codes which underlie all narrative, nor even a stockpiling of narrative methods and devices which may be of use to the writer, but the development of a method of 'reading as a writer.' This same method of criticism is then deployed in the analysis of student manuscripts, of works in progress, with the intention not of passing final evaluative judgement, but of aiding its progress to a completed form, and with the secondary intention of encouraging the aspiring writer to internalise this form of criticism as a method of revision and editing and an integral part of the 'creative' process. (120)

Reading is the deal. Makes sense in light of somethings I've read by David Lodge and others. Criticism is an essential part of the creative process, and it is this aspect of Creative Writing that we can actually teach. Although, I'm not totally opposed to the "stockpiling" of techniques. You have to know what's been done and how its been done in order to find new ways to play with whatever genre you're working in. Still, reading is it. At least according to Dawson. The student writer learns to 'read as a writer' and thereby internalizes the critic as a part of his/her creative process.

And all this time, I've been told to "silence the internal critic." Dawson is suggesting that the whole point is to strengthen, inform, and give voice to the internal critic. It's this critic that is doing all the work.

Leads:

T.S. Eliot enters the discussion once again. His essays "The Frontiers of Criticism" and "The Function of Criticism" (and there may be a few others) look like they may be required reading for me this semester.

A nice quote from Paul Engle (1964):

Criticism is not simply a fiendish attack on a book, but a constant part of the writer's job, beginning with his rejection of one concept in favour of another, one image, one phrase, rather than others.

More or less supports Eliot's theses, I believe.

Chapter 4: I skimmed it and am passing. It's a history of Creative Writing in Australia, which is interesting, but not so germane. They get a late start down under, and wind up with the workshop model just like everyone else. They're a bit more interdisciplinary. Clearly separated from the English Studies folks.

The real meat of the book, I hope, is up next: Chapter 5. "Negotiating Theory"