Doing Creative Writing

Steve May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134143115
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Are you beginning a creative writing course? Or thinking about taking one?

Doing Creative Writing is the ideal guide to what you should expect, what will be expected of you and how you can get the most from your course.

It clearly and concisely outlines:

• the contexts for creative writing courses, explaining where the subject has come from and why that matters
• the content, structure and delivery of the courses, helping you to understand how your course will be shaped, what you will be asked to do and why
• the skills you will develop, from self-discipline and time management through to the organization of ideas, 'reading as a writer' and editing
• possibilities beyond the course, showing how you continue to benefit from what you've learned.

Drawing on years of teaching and writing experience, as well as interviews with a wide range of students, Steve May provides all the background, advice and encouragement you need to embark on a creative writing course with complete confidence and to get maximum benefit from every writing session.

PART I
THE CONTEXT

1 Creative writing: can it be taught?

• Can I learn how to be a better writer?
• Isn’t writing more about inspiration than skills that can be taught?
• What do I have to do to improve my writing?

I suppose in other creative disciplines you have to learn how to use all the equipment but [doing creative writing] you don’t really have any equipment apart from a pen. (Student comment)

I can only write when I’m inspired. (Student comment)

The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that . . . His manner is his secret, not necessarily a deliberate one. He cannot disclose it, as a general thing, if he would; he would be at a loss to teach it to others . . . the literary artist would be obliged to say to his pupil . . ., ‘Ah, well, you must do it as you can!’ (Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’)

One of the questions that may be in your mind when considering or beginning a course is whether creative writing can really be taught. You might even be wondering whether a course could interfere with your natural creativity, by imposing rigid methodological frameworks on a process that has always been spontaneous for you. This chapter will argue that to get better as a writer you have to practise, that you have to practise the right things, and that it makes sense to get advice about what to practise from someone who understands how to write well.

Practice makes perfect – or does it?

If you wanted to play the clarinet, you wouldn’t expect to pick the instrument up and play it fluently straightaway. You would expect to have to practise. You might also consider it desirable to have instruction, from a book or a teacher.

Why should it be any different for a writer? Because writers have no instrument, other than the pen or word processor, it is often assumed that they are not artists in the same way that musicians or painters or even dancers are.

If we pick up the clarinet for the first time, most of us will be aware of the difficulties awaiting us: we can see the silver levers and buttons, feel the keys under our fingers, the reed rough on our lips. This is by no means a simple piece of kit. No such warnings flash up when we first pick up a pen to write creatively. Not everyone knows how to play a clarinet or use a paintbrush, but everyone knows (or thinks they know) how to use a pen. What’s so special about a writer? They’re just doing something that anyone can do.

This attitude tends towards the conclusion that if you want to be a writer you don’t have to practise, you just wait for inspiration. All that matters for the writer, following this line of thought, is the idea. It is assumed that the idea will come complete with the means and form of its expression.

This attitude is not uncommon among students starting to do creative writing, who may insist they can only write when they’re inspired. Further, when invited to take part in an exercise, for example to do with story analysis or narrative structure, many students will announce with something approaching pride that they ‘never plan’. This is, I contend, something like the learner clarinettist announcing that they can’t play a scale, and expecting congratulation.

It is one of my assumptions in writing this book that, in fact, those levers, rods, pads, keys and reeds (or their metaphorical equivalents) are attached to every pen. The fact that they are invisible may lure us in with a false confidence, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it weren’t so quickly dispelled by our early attempts.

When our clarinet squawks or refuses to speak at all, we have a pretty good and visible idea why. When our pen fails to produce the poetry that glowed in our head, it’s easy to get discouraged. As one student put it: ‘I’ve got a head full of good ideas, but every time I write one down it comes out ordinary’.

Poet Ted Hughes makes a similar point in his book Poetry in the Making:

When I was young, I was plagued by the idea that I really had much better thoughts than I could ever get into words.

This dissatisfaction is probably not due to the idea being poor but to the writer trying to play the concerto before mastering the instrument.

So if you are tempted to protest, when asked to try a certain exercise or approach, ‘I never do that’, or ‘I can’t do that’, reflect on the clarinet parallel. No, you don’t do that, no you can’t do that, but it is the business of your course to teach you how to do it. But I’m running ahead of myself. We’re nowhere near enrolling on a course yet.

It is the contention of this book that for someone to write well without practice (leave aside instruction for the moment) is as likely as someone picking up a brush for the first time and painting the Mona Lisa, or picking up a clarinet for the first time and sailing through a Mozart concerto, or, for that matter, picking up a golf club and winning a major championship. They may know what they want the picture to look like, they may know what the music ought to sound like, they may even be able to clout the ball a fair distance, but they will need to do a lot of work on all kinds of aspects of technique before they have any chance of realising what they have imagined.

Now, you might well say, pretty well all of us have some writing skills, learned at school and elsewhere – certainly more writing skills than we have clarinet-playing skills. Surely this puts us in a better position than our first-time painter or clarinettist. Very well, to make the analogy fairer and closer to the truth, let us allow our would-be Mona Lisa painter some experience in interior decoration and the creosoting of fences, and give our clarinettist an apprenticeship on the swannee whistle. Relevant experience, but not adequate, and that is the position of most of us in terms of writing skills when we first try to write creatively.

To sum up: it is a central assumption of this book that if we want to improve and become effective writers, we must work, and practise. If you don’t agree with this, if you feel all you have to do is wait for that flash of inspiration and then start writing, then maybe you should stop reading now and slip this book quietly back onto the bookshop shelf, or (if you’ve already bought it) try and sell it on eBay. You should also think very carefully about the wisdom of enrolling on a creative writing course.

So (if you’re still here) we agree that to improve our writing we have to practise, or at least that the idea of practice is worth considering. But why take a course when you can write perfectly well in your spare time? All you need to do is to write in the privacy of your own home. Practice makes perfect – or does it?

Pressing the brake to go faster

Gary Player, the famous and very successful golfer, when an opponent accused him of being lucky, replied, ‘It’s funny but the more I practise the luckier I get’. As I’ve argued above, it’s fair to say that you’ll have to be very lucky indeed to write anything worthwhile without a lot of practice. However, as my trumpet teacher used to say, it is a fallacy that practice makes perfect, because if you practise doing something the wrong way, bad habits will simply become ingrained and we’ll get better at doing it wrong. So, for example, if you practise pressing the brake pedal in order to make your car accelerate, no matter how ‘good’ you get at pressing the brake pedal, no amount of repetition will increase the speed at which you are travelling.

When I was in my teens, I learned one of Mozart’s piano concertos off-by-heart (nearly). I couldn’t read music fluently, and I couldn’t play anything else on the piano; I just worked out the notes painstakingly slowly, and then played them over and over again (ask the neighbours) until I could play quite a lot of the piece at nearly the proper speed.

A worthy investment of time? Perhaps, if you want a party piece to try and impress people, but in terms of learning, virtually useless, and extremely labour intensive. Why? I was studying one piece of music as though it was unique and had no connection to other pieces of music. Learning to play it did not help me to play any other piece. I couldn’t transfer what I’d learned and apply it in a new context.

So, how are you to know what is worthwhile practice and what is the equivalent of pressing the brake pedal? You may have spotted the direction in which my argument is moving. We have established that practice is essential, as is knowing how and what to practise.

Going back to my experiences as a pianist, after taking lessons from an experienced player (and buying an instruction book) I came to recognise common features and generic skills (scales, chords, fingering patterns, for example) that can be used in piece after piece. There are also conventions and principles that underlie musical compositions, which supply context and act as short cuts to understanding how the piece should be performed. Thereby, learning one technique is not a closed end in itself, it is a gateway to other pieces. Now, every time I stumble through one piece, it is easier for me to stumble through a whole lot of other pieces also.

So, might it not also be a good idea for someone learning to write to consult someone with knowledge and experience of the writing process? It seems so logical that I’m almost tempted to rest my case, but there still remains an entrenched belief among many that the teaching of writing is impossible and that writers cannot (or should not) explain their processes.

Heather Leach, in the useful and inspirational Road to Somewhere, says: ‘It’s probably true that no one can teach you to become a writer’ (p.11). Fiona Mountford, in the Daily Telegraph (17 November 2003), concludes a very positive article about a writing course she attended on the following negative note: ‘But can people really be taught how to write? The question niggled me. The obvious answer is no’.

Why is that answer obvious? Common sense would seem to point in the opposite direction. If you can teach painters and musicians and dancers, why can’t you teach writers? Why is writing a special case? Novelist Henry James, in ‘The Art of Fiction’, explains as follows:

The painter is able to teach the rudiments of his practice . . . If there are exact sciences there are also exact arts, and the grammar of painting is so much more definite [than that of writing] that it makes the difference.

According to James, then, you do need to practise, but you can’t be taught very much by someone else, because every piece of achieved writing is unique and made in a unique way. He sees in writing few, if any, parallels with the painter’s vanishing point, perspective, composition and light and shade, nor with the scales, chords and fingering patterns of the pianist.

His argument is that while a painter uses the same techniques for every picture, for the writer every project is utterly unique, a new adventure, a journey into the unknown. Therefore, the writer who has written, who has made this journey into the unknown, can be of little or no use to anyone planning to make their own journey, because every journey has a different and unique destination. The aspiring writer must learn to write in the same way as I learned my first Mozart concerto, in a lonely, blind struggle along an unmapped route where not even one’s own experience is of any use in understanding the process.

If this is the case, then the teaching of writing is impossible, and signing up for a course in creative writing is a waste of your time and that of your teachers. To quote James again: ‘The literary artist would be obliged to say to his pupil . . ., “Ah, well, you must do it as you can!” ’

No-one in their right mind is going to cough up good money for that kind of advice. But is James right? The fundamental point at issue would seem to be the existence, or not, of (to use James’s own word) a ‘grammar’; that is, common features shared by different pieces of writing, like the chords, scales and rhythmic patterns of music.

Do various pieces of writing share common features? On the face of it, surely yes, at every level. We don’t have to invent a new language every time we write or speak; we use conventions of grammar and punctuation. At the level of meaning we each have our differing but related take on the shared pool (see ‘Authors, dead or alive’ below, p. 22). If I say ‘boat’, you will probably conceive of something boat-like, not something mountain-like or goat-like (unless you misheard me). At the level of narrative, can’t we discern classes of point-of-view (some books use first person, some third etc.), and don’t all stories share basic patterns, however complex, beautiful or convoluted the telling (someone wants something and tries to get it in the face of difficulties)?

We will return to these shared features in Part 3 of this book, but, for the time being, we can (I hope) agree that they exist and that they are recognisable, and hence capable of definition and being passed on from one person to another. To take one simple example: I can show you models of basic story structure (that is teaching), and you can apply one of those models to your own ideas (learning).

IN PRACTICE

You want to write a story. I don’t know what your story is about, what genre you want to write in, or anything else about it. However, because (I believe) stories share common features, I can be fairly certain that if you ask yourself the following questions about your story, it will help you to discover its shape and point:

1. Who is it about?
2. How do they change over the course of the story?
3. What do they want?
4. Do they get what they want?
5. Who (or what) is trying to stop them?
6. What are the key events in the story?
7. Which event decides whether the main character gets or doesn’t get what they want?
8. How does it end?
9. Which other characters are absolutely essential to the story?
10. Where is the best place to start?

Can Henry James (or anyone else for that matter) deny this simple proposition? Probably not. And I wouldn’t have spent so long on this argument were not the hangover from it still apparent in the teaching and learning of creative writing today.

Now, if you are a student in the United States, at virtually any level, taking a compulsory Rhetoric or Composition programme, or a student of English Language in the UK, or if you work for a company that believes in the importance of writing skills, or if you are involved in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language, or if you are studying science at, say, Warwick University in the UK, you may well have been frowning in puzzlement for some time now and wondering what all this fuss is about.

In all those contexts writing is routinely and, presumably, successfully taught (or why would so many people invest so much time and money in the process?). If you search for books about the teaching of writing outside of the strictly ‘creative’ area, you’ll find titles such as Strategies for Successful Writing: A Rhetoric, Research Guide, Reader and Handbook, or The Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers, which (according to its own publicity):

explains the purposes of writing, aids in the understanding of grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, gives the processes of research writing, and provides a section for ESL students . . . An excellent reference book for writers, those studying for an English CLEP, or to help all grade levels with English.

What can James and his adherents say to this? Isn’t this the teaching of writing, writ large? (The book quoted above is over 900 pages long!)

There must be something else at the root of his argument, something not clearly stated. It would seem to be this (and here I apologise in advance to Henry James for over-simplification): the Jamesian view refers not to techniques of writing but to content. When he refers to ‘grammar’ he isn’t referring to grammar as we know it but a meta-grammar on an aesthetic level. So, you may be able to teach someone (ordinary) grammar, syntax, punctuation, narrative structure, sentence structure, rhythm and descriptive techniques, but (aha, the romantic catch) you can’t give them the inspiration, the idea or the essence of the piece of work.

Again, I’m almost tempted to rest my case, so absurd does this argument appear. The proposition seems to be, first, that learning (ordinary) grammar, syntax, punctuation, narrative structure, sentence structure, rhythm and descriptive techniques won’t help you with ‘creative’ writing, but in addition that learning these things (or reflecting on them) will actually harm you as a ‘creative’ writer.

In this view, the artist is involved in a mysterious process that he or she can neither explain nor pass on. Any kind of analysis of process or explanation of method is to be avoided if not condemned; even to attempt such analysis risks driving out the mystery of the sacred art. The shared features of writing are ignored or looked down on; all attention is focused on the product as a finished, perfect entity; mystical, inexplicable content divorced from technique.

And here we come almost full circle: we have met two co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Part I The Context
• Part II Studying Creative Writing
• Part III Writers’ Habits, Writers’ Skills
• Conclusion Beyond the course
• Case studies James Joyce and other writers
• Further reading