Category: teaching

I.
I’ve taken to saying this a lot in classes. The only rule to writing is You can’t be boring.

Every other rule you might come across is breakable. Use vivid verbs. Structure your essay with scenes. Show don’t tell. Write what you know. Don’t bring out a gun at the end of your story to resolve the conflict.

One student last term said that her old writing teacher?a much beloved and now dead writer and critic?pronounced in class Don’t write flashbacks, because?he actually said this?nobody has written a good flashback since Proust.

Every “don’t” spoken in a creative writing classroom is an invitation to do. Except Don’t be boring. And yet, there’s an important corollary to the One Rule: Only you get to define what “boring” means.

II.
If, then, the only rule is Don’t be boring, I need to change the way I teach. It’s no use teaching craft techniques when all of them are ignorable. If it’s true that every artist decides for themselves what’s boring (and thus what not to write), then I can best help students by getting them in touch with their boredom. More specifically: how to cultivate it. The artist is the person more bored than others?perhaps more bored by others?and through that boredom creates something new and fresh.

“Writing can’t be taught,” say any number of tenured writing professors.^[a] These same idiots would maybe also argue that you can’t teach boredom. You can’t teach people to Daria their way through books and the art world. To which I say: Watch me.

I.
There’s this thing that happens a lot in writing workshops I’ve noticed after a decade or so of teaching them. For those outside MFAland: in a writing workshop, everyone but the writer of the manuscript talks about that MS at hand, discussing their reading experience and suggesting things for revision.

Now: suggestions can be useless. “You might have a scene where your protagonist goes to Frankfurt. It might be neat to see them in a European airplane hub, since they keep talking about customs and beer….” But some are useful: “The narrator speaking in this essay seems unhappy with her upbringing, but I can’t understand why. We might get some flashbacks of seminal moments from her childhood, portraits of her parents, etc.”

One true thing about workshops is that some students?not those being workshopped, but those participating in the conversation?will take another’s suggestion to help a MS as some kind of personal affront. Like an argument against the kind of writing they feel driven to champion. What happens in this instance is that such a student says this: I don’t think this piece needs some long-winded memory about how her mom was mean to her, or some belabored history of her mother’s upbringing. It’s not about her!

This sort of thing drives me crazy. It drives me up a fucking wall.

II.
Imagine, if you will, a wedding that two people are planning. Probably they’re related, or will soon be. They are standing in the banquet hall where the reception will be held, trying to figure out some ways to make it not look hopelessly generic. The sister of the groom points to two empty corners. What if we get some sprays of roses to put there? Maybe on pedestals? That might look nice….

The sister of the other groom looks at those corners and frowns. I don’t want these wilted, weeks-old roses drenched in birdshit at the reception! I mean: who wants to look at that?

III.
What we hope to teach CW students is to access and then be led by the force of their imaginations. At home, that imagination is tasked to make new things we haven’t seen before. In the classroom, that imagination is tasked with envisioning a better MS than what they have before them. Some folks, when you suggest a thing, can only imagine its worst incarnation. Or maybe it’s this: they hate the suggestion so much they reductio it ad its most absurdem, and suddenly the talk becomes less about the possibilities for the work at hand and more about What Writing Is and Should Do.

Once a workshop becomes an argument about What Writing Is and Should Do (as opposed to How This Piece At Hand Might Better Achieve Its Aims), that workshop has been voided by its hubris. You’d be right to stand up and walk out of the room.

Did my semiannual review of my students’ course evaluations this morning, which at my school are complex and quantitative and?if you’re the sort of person who sees your score and then sees your school’s average score and maniacally compares them free of any context, even if the thing scored doesn’t apply in any way to your subject?unhelpful. Sometimes, but rarely, do students write in qualitative comments. For one course, one student did. Here’s part of what they said:

His feedback is so helpful for students needing to make revisions to their written work. In rare instances when perhaps the dialogue exchange isn’t helpful, he hears himself not being helpful and fixes it.

Reading that was one of the proudest moments I’ve had as a teacher.

One of the last things people who know or are partnered/related to me would commend me for is my communication skills, but early on in my teaching ? especially when I started teaching nonfiction ? I realized that listening to what students want to do with their writing is more important than what I think they should do. Being clear about the difference, being clear about how what I think they should try to do stems from what I hear they want to do, is always a challenge. It’s one of the hardest parts of teaching artists how to grow.

So here I am bragging about my teaching, but with the greater point of pointing out something all writing teachers should be working toward.

I had to teach a class the morning after election day, and knowing my students and myself I knew it wouldn’t work to discuss “Consider the Lobster” and talk about the uses of research in nonfiction. So I went to church in the morning to pray over what to do and I was reminded of George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” (PDF), and I thought, let’s talk about that.

I read it aloud and we talked about it. We talked about the election. We talked about the role of the writer in society. We talked about the role of the writer in the self. I asked students to write essays titled “Why I Write” and said that the only way to do this wrong is to be false about it. If you write to get revenge, write about that. If you write to explore erotic fantasies about your junior-high classmates, write about that.

I said, “And think right now. Why do you write right now? It’s not a contract you need to hold yourself to.”

I invited them to share the essays with me. A couple actually did. Here’s the one I wrote:

Why I Write

I am sitting in the chair I sit in in my living room and Neal is around the edge of the wall in the kitchen area and I have an idea for dinner. We should, I think, make frozen Chinese food. Neal, though, may have his own idea for dinner and it may be better than my idea for dinner. So I think that I should ask whether he has any ideas for dinner. I say it in my head: Do you have any ideas for dinner? I wait patiently until he comes back into the living room.

?Drrvnideusdurn?? I say, my tongue a slug in my dumb mouth.

?What was that?? he asks.

?Doyouhaveanyideasfordinner?? I repeat.

*

Once, in an election year summer, I was on a porch with a man telling me that my generation was going to bring about the end of the American Democratic Project. He and I were born within a decade of each other. I was trying to say that I wanted to vote for the candidate who inspired me the most, but he was telling me I had only one choice and that was to vote against the candidate he feared the most. He has, I think, been made afraid by messages and images he sees on TV and the Internet. I say instead, ?You?re, like, bullying me,? and I leave the porch.

*

Sometimes, certain words strung in a certain order have a kind of beauty to them. Here?s one I discovered and chewed over in my head for a while just last week: Help me not to feel that people feel that way about me. There is a feeling there, and an idea about the self and how the self is seen and maybe created by others, that I hadn?t known or understood until the words came to me in a rough but interesting order and I reshaped them into that sentence. The process of doing this is what I think of when I hear the word ?writing.? Writing isn?t just the record of thinking it is the mechanism through which I think, and what I have found over the last decade of doing it is that aesthetics?say, the careful attention paid to words? sounds and effects?can lead me to new truths.

This is ancient, this idea. It is at least Keatsianly ancient: beauty is truth and truth beauty. It has the pleasingness of facts and folk wisdoms and what I?ve for a long time erroneously called ?universal truth?, but it is only partially true, and at times dangerously untrue. There are many strings of certain words in certain orders that have a beauty to them on their own, but the problem with words is that they signify, and some beautiful words create lies, or obfuscate truths.

A not nefarious example: once, I heard on the radio a eulogistic essay for a newly dead coach. The man reading it was a longtime sportswriter. It ended with the line, “People talk about someone being a gentleman and a scholar. Well, he was a gentleman and a coach.” It had, I could hear, the sound and feel of a beautiful ending, but it said, in the end, nothing. The sportswriter let his beautiful language take over and get in the way of my understanding his subject.

*

Some beautiful words tell truths and some beautiful words tell lies. Why I write is to know the difference, and to use that difference to be understood. I speak and no one listens. I write it down and people know it to be true. That?s Rene Ricard. Replace ?know? in his second sentence with ?feel? and I begin to get a sense of why I write.

These days I’m trying to think more about how I might better use my imagination, or create something new in the world, or both, not just when I sit down to write, but when I go through my day-to-day life. I’m also listening almost exclusively to The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree, for what it’s worth. I’m reminded of something my friend Peter asked a visiting writer back when we were both teaching in Alabama:

“As an artist, do you feel impelled to act artfully in everything you do?”

Peter mentioned he himself did, and wanted to see how another writer (I’m feeling pretty sure this was a fellow poet) thought about it. I passed it off at the time as poet/artist silliness, but now I see it as a pressing question.

Most of the work I do every day, other than read the books I picked to teach, is to sit with a pencil over double-spaced manuscript pages of 12pt Times New Roman and figure out what to write on it that both expresses my reactions to what I’m reading during the act and also encapsulates my response to what the piece has said or done as a whole. Also: I have to do something with my pencil to help the student learn how to develop either the piece in front of me (in revision) or just personally as a writer (when it comes to write the next thing). I’m not complaining about my job. It’s very hard work.

It’s not creative work. In fact at times it seems like destructive work: Here’s a map of all my confusions about what you’ve done, also lots of corrections of things you neglected to proofread. I do what I can to be encouraging and to point out successes, but even that seems destructive. It emphasizes that the point of having made this thing is to see how teacher responds.

It can easily become work I dread. In fact, right now I’ve got 20 projects to start reading and marking up and rather than get started (and but also to give myself a sense of purpose when I do start) I’m here writing a blog post about it. Anything to get out of doing the actual work. What I dread isn’t my students’ writing—when I get into it their stuff is continually surprising and great and worth sharing—it’s the role I have to step into. It’s not a foreign role. I’ve been doing this for ten years now. But it’s not my role, or it’s not a role I’m eager to understand myself as.

Yesterday on Twitter I asked, “What if marking up student manuscripts were more like a collaboration between two interested writers?” and it got precisely one favorite. (Thanks, Chris!) It’s one way to bring a sense of the creative process to this job of mine. The danger, of course, is for Teacher to lord his creative self all over the student’s work, but this happens all the fucking time in creative writing workshops, doesn’t it?

Here, finally, are some notes on what this theory might look like in practice:

• Understand the student not as a subordinate but as a fellow writer asking for my help and advice as a fellow writer.
• Continue using a pencil, because I will mess up and be wrong in some of my responses.
• Stop correcting grammar and usage and typos, but point it out when it leads to genuine confusion about what’s being said, because I’m not an editor, and I know so many great writers who fuck up in this regard and there’s no correlation between proper grammar and moving art.
• Suggest in notes at the end that the student look up some business of grammar or usage s/he consistently gets wrong, and name a good and useful resource for him or her to do so.
• Point out what I’m jealous of and wish I’d come up with.
• With flat/boring parts, which we all end up with in our drafts, be honest and clear about why I’m being bored and what I’d try as a writer (as opposed to what I need as a writer or what I expect as a teacher; that is: suggest tacks always out of a spirit of creativity and invention).
• Be clear on syllabi about my philosophy or rationale when it comes to responding to manuscripts, and invite students to stop by office hours to collaborate in person and address their concerns, or if that’s not convenient do it over email or via Skype—i.e. be available.

There’s more thinking to be done about this. But I’m done thinking that the chief way students learn to become writers is through the feedback they receive on their manuscripts. I did this last term and I’ll do it every term coming up: assign students a revision plan to be turned in with a draft and you’ll be amazed at how much of “your work” they’ll have done before you even get a chance to.

UPDATE: I’ve at least partially solved this problem.

Continuing my research into Bjork’s “desirable difficulties”, I found some video interviews he did that summed up a lot of his lab’s research into learning. One thing they’ve studied is the effect of “interleaving,” which means alternating among a set of disparate things to learn rather than learning them in dedicated blocks, one-by-one.

So for instance, they had test subjects learn painting styles throughout the history of art by focusing on 6 works each from 12 major painters. One group looked at and discussed all 6 works from Painter A, then moved on to the 6 works from Painter B, and so on. This was the “blocked learning” group. The other group looked at 1 work from Painter A, then 1 work from Painter B, and so on through all 12 painters. Then another round of new works. This latter was the “interleaved learning” group.

When, at the end of the learning period, each group was given a new set of paintings, to identify from their styles the artist who made them, the second group did better on the test. The group that learned through interleaving better recognized signature styles than the first one did.

But here’s the key thing: Continue reading More on Teaching and Learning

I’m writing this paper on what neuroscience and cognition can teach us as writers of nonfiction—who, it’s been said, write essays that “show a mind at work” without, from what I can tell, learning much about how the mind even works. A colleague of mine in the psych dept at USF turned me on to the work of Robert Bjork down at UCLA, who developed the notion of “desirable difficulty” as an aid in learning, and today I found his seminal paper on the topic: “Memory and Metamemory Considerations in the Training of Human Beings”.

What I like about psych papers—particularly ones that look at learning and cognition—is how they demistify and take the romance out of what I and my colleagues have a tendency to romance and mystify: our training human beings to be writers.

I read this:

Richard Schmidt and his collaborators … have found that … reducing the frequency of feedback makes life more difficult for the learner during training, but can enhance posttraining performance. They have demonstrated that providing summary feedback to subjects … or “fading” the frequency of feedback over trials, impedes acquisition of simple motor skills but enhances long-term retention of those skills.

Schmidt works on motor skill learning, but Bjork found correlation to verbal learning skills, too. In other words, continuous feedback (like the kind creative writing students get in workshops) feels good and makes the task of learning feel easier, but there’s plenty of evidence that it doesn’t actually help learning.
Continue reading Feedback Helps Performance But Not Learning

Short answer: I never learned how to.

Long answer: I never learned how to teach anything, really. Most collegiate teaching begins as stabs in the dark by people who believe they can do but don’t yet know how to get others to do. But while I eventually picked up how to teach, say, scene or voice or character or structure, any assignments, texts, or exercises to get students to think about revision have escaped me.

Also, there’s no time. Requiring students to conceive, write, and revise a full-length essay within the 15 weeks of a semester is yet another instance of the academy doing its best/worst to fit the messy idiosyncrasies of writing processes within its arbitrary timeframes and practices. It’s practice that will be unuseful not only in their other classes^[*]
but also in their careers, should they go on to be writers.

Within 15 weeks, amid other assignments and work to focus on, the messy, idiosyncratic process of revision defaults to what Carol Bly calls “literary fixing”, i.e., showing in that scene more than you told in the first draft, or keeping the point of view consistently close to the central character, or making sure you don’t leap into the present tense without warrant.

Here’s the thing about teaching this kind of “revision” in the academy: it’s really good at getting students to practice technique. What it’s not good at is articulated well in Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd’s Good Prose, one of the better books on writing I’ve read in years:

I remember in college reading [Fitzgerald’s] The Last Tycoon and studying a note that he left in the manuscript: “Rewrite from mood. Has become stilted with rewriting. Don’t look—rewrite from mood.” I reread those lines so often, trying to understand them, that they stuck in my memory. Fitzgerald knew that there are at least two kinds of rewriting. The first is trying to fix what you’ve already written, but doing this can keep you from facing up to the second kind, from figuring out the essential thing you’re trying to do and looking for better ways to tell your story. If Fitzgerald had been advising a young writer and not himself, he might have said, “Rewrite from principle,” or “Don’t just push the same old stuff around. Throw it away and start over.” In any case, a lot of learning how to be edited was for me learning the necessity of this second kind of rewriting […].

My emphasis. Revision as it’s taught in the academy—often meant to be performed over a number of weeks based on whatever consensus one’s peers came to in workshop—isn’t just unuseful practice, it’s detrimental to the most important part of the process: figuring out the essential thing you are trying to do. This is markedly different from figuring out how to improve what you’ve done.

Sometimes, what you’ve done isn’t worth the trouble. Throw it away and start over. If you insist on keeping it, knowing this distinction between the kinds of rewriting is your best bet. Also: make your own schedule.

It’s easy to point to MFA rankings as meaningless, but what they mean is that young people who are interested in devoting years of their lives to writing are looking at a limited set of programs around the country. Funding is key, as are low amounts of teaching. Programs that look like long-term residencies, or where New Yorker writers teach, rank very high. And who’s to say this isn’t the best way to learn how to write or what kind of writer to be?

I recently jumped ship from a MFA program ranked 11th this year in nonfiction to a program mentioned nowhere in the editorial pages of magazine, guardian of such rankings. N asked me how I felt about that, and here I am wondering.

The University of San Francisco’s MFA program is older than such ranked programs as Virginia Tech and New Mexico State, but we provide very limited funding, is probably why we’re not mentioned. (Perhaps exorbitantly is an apter adjective back there.) How do we attract students to our program when so many others are cheaper if not free, more or less? And how might we justify charging them such high tuition for a degree program that doesn’t grant its graduates the kind of guaranteed income of a medical or (ever decreasingly so) law degree?

These were the concerns I had when considering the job. The funding issue was the only impediment I had to moving as rapidly as we could out of the toxic state of Alabama. The best answer I got from my future colleagues was, “We’re aware of the problem and doing what we can to improve things.” And it’s true that we are. But then I got a look at our Program’s mission. From its second graf:

By fostering the analysis of self and world that is essential to ethical writing, the program also serves the university’s mission of educating hearts and minds. Designed to enable working adults to complete the MFA degree, the Program serves the university’s mission by creating an opportunity that might not otherwise exist for this student population.

In short, I teach at a night school, one housed at a research university committed to social justice,^[*] and one with the resources and foresight to hire faculty in three genres who each makes me look like a chump.

It’s true that programs with funding require certain freedoms of its applicants—freedom from obligations, family, or career to devote two or more years of your life to study (and, often, teaching); and freedom from debts and other financial constraints to be able to live around the poverty level for years.

I don’t know demographics, but my money’s on that being a small, small percentage of 2013’s U.S. population.

I have parents as students, which is not a first but multiple parents in one class is. Most of my students work full-time jobs. Somehow amid all this they find the time to write what they’ve agreed to write and read the books we’ve agreed to discuss. That right there is a valuable lesson in how to be a writer: you make time amid obligations in your life to get your work done.

Does it matter where you go? Contentment and minimal disruption seem key. “Because they lack money, poor people must focus intensely on the economic consequences of expenditures that wealthy people consider trivial and not worth worrying over,” writes Cass R. Sunstein on scarcity in the latest New York Review. It can be hard to find the time to sit and read and think and write while high tuition costs make that kind of intense focus happen. Then again, one of my friends in town started writing out of financial necessity. Her most recent book was a Times bestseller. USF’s MFA program prints up a fortnightly newsletter. It’s called Signal for reasons I haven’t yet uncovered. Every issue there’s news about an alumnus’s newly published work.

Dithered over that title’s preposition and decided that opting for the positive would help everyone in the mess that’s to come.

I.
If good students are the ones who enter every class full of passion and curiosity, Joey’s been one of my best. The other night we had a Twitter exchange he covers clearly and in full in a blog post that you should go read if you’re the type who likes watching writers dicker with themselves in public about writing problems (and if you aren’t: hi, Mom). In essence:

Sardonically, I tweeted: “Sorry Paul Harding, you only get to use the word ‘eerie’ once in a novel, not once every three pages.” Dave Madden, my former professor, responded: “But he got that novel published & won the Pulitzer for it, so clearly he got to use the word ‘eerie’ as much as he felt he needed to.”

Turns out I was wrong about which Harding novel Joey was referring to, but I stand by my argument all the same.

And I stand by Joey’s. Writers grow by reacting against published work and letting this reaction push their own writing elsewhere. The danger in this, though, is in thinking of good writing as writing that’s gonna wow the shit out of your workshop peers. And from where I’ve been and where I’ve taught, nothing wows a workshop more than a well-placed word in a novel sentence such that something sonically beautiful happens—i.e., lyricism.
Continue reading Ways Toward Lyricism

I.
I teach in a graduate writing program where to suggest we ought to be prescriptive (i.e. start with first principles to apply to the work at hand) in our workshop comments or revision suggestions would be like insisting we ought to admit few to no black students, or queer ones. It’s taken in faith as wrong. That second position is indefensible. I’m here to see how I might defend the first.

II.
Definitions may help. The OED’s got this for prescribe: “To write or lay down as a rule or direction to be followed; to impose authoritatively; to ordain, decree; to assign.” No wonder we hate it. Good writing rarely if ever comes from following rules or directions, or from imposed authority. But there’s more: “To limit, restrict, restrain, circumscribe; to confine within bounds.” This is interesting; half the writers I know—students or otherwise—feel creatively charged by imposed constrictions and restraints. There’s a whole school of literature founded on same. We have the medical definition (“To advise or order the use of [a medicine, remedy, treatment, etc.], esp. by a written prescription”) we could adopt metaphorically, because it’s softer, and more accurately gets at what we teachers of writing do in the classroom.

And then we can get literal: “To write first or beforehand; to describe in writing beforehand; to write [something] in front.” To pre-scribe. To see prescriptive grammar, or prescriptive guidelines for writing, as maps sketched by elder frontierspeople. Where be monsters? “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” prescribes Stephen King, “and I will shout it from the rooftops.”
Continue reading The Courage to Be Wrong: In Defense of Prescription

In looking at the upcoming term’s calendar to see when classes began (Aug 22, for any UAers reading), one date listed was Constitution Day, September 17. Columbus Day? No. We don’t get Columbus Day off, for obvious reasons. But Constitution Day, yes. I had never heard of Constitution Day, so I Googled it and found this Web site, which looks very official with information on the Constitution itself and lots of articles copied from Wikipedia about founding fathers, and a gift shop which as of this writing seems missing or broken.

It felt like a made-up holiday, or something Southern (the address listed on the site is in Naples, Fla.) and suspicious. But then I Wikipedia’d it, and found out Robert Byrd stuck its founding into the budget bill of 2004, mandating that September 17 be named Constitution Day, and that all federally funded schools teach some aspect of the Constitution on that day.

I have vague memories of this as a Bush-era news-listen-to-er. But now I’m a teacher at a federally funded school. It would be a delight if UA were allowed to teach its students about the broken, bigoted, power-consolidating, 300,000-word state constitution Alabama should be more famous for. But maybe just putting it on the academic calendar is enough to satisfy the federal mandate. (And perhaps its being in quote marks is some kind of comment?)

This year, Sept. 17 is a Monday, so I don’t need to worry about it.

Five minutes of e-sleuthing, by the way, uncovered that constitutionday.com is regstered to the same address in Naples, Fla., as the Advocates for Civil Justice, which seems from what I can tell to be an unregistered pet project of aggrieved divorcee Bebe McFadden against Florida Circuit Judge Brian J. Davis.

If there’s any tragedy to Constitution Day it’s that, up until 2005, September 17 was a federal holiday called “Citizenship Day”. Anyone thinking in 2012 (or 2004, for that matter) that the U.S. Constitution (which is part of every school’s curriculum) is more important to teach for one day a year than citizenship is proof enough that people need to be taught more about citizenship.

UPDATE: September 17, 2012, is the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which could be lesson no. 1 in schools on Citizenship Day.

This post is maybe 40 percent good intentions and 60 percent vanity, but this is a blog so what do you expect? I started revisions this morning on the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2010. I’m using FocusWriter because I like how it fills the screen with nothing but a blank field. Very useful. What I realized as I was going through this morning was that FW holds onto the string of composition steps for a very long time. Longer than Word might. I mean: you can hold ctrl-Z (i.e. Undo) and watch everything you’ve done over the past hour or two fall away, step by step. Then rebuild it with ctrl-Y. Like magic.

The teacher in me (who just got done teaching a termlong course on improvisation, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens in the drafting process) saw an opportunity: record this to show folks your process. I don’t believe anyone cares about my process, but I am always fascinated by others’ processes. So I’m sharing it here.

Now: had I screencasting software, this’d be a lot easier to share and funner to watch. Instead, all I have is MS Word and Adobe. So here’s a PDF file that I recommend you open in Acrobat Reader or whatever you have, full-screen, set to display one full page at a time. Because each page contains each step of the composition process. So if you hit arrow down, you should be able to watch the paragraph (255 words) develop step-by-step.

About this graf, all I’ll say is that I wanted to open the book with something nonfictiony and arguably wrong. Like Tolstoy’s Karenina opening. And then somewhere I knew I’d fall into fiction in the middle of a sentence. Early on you’ll see a whole out-of-voice paragraph with the word gradient underlined. This is pasted in from Wikipedia to help me understand how mirages work.

Anyway, here’s the PDF: Suicide – opening paragraph

I’m teaching a graduate seminar on plot and structure in novels and NF books. Today was Skloot’s Henrietta Lacks. The students had concerns about the ethics of writing (and potentially profiting off of) another person’s story. I had concerns about nonfiction writing and our formal or casual assessment thereof.

Here’s where I was coming from: I can go along with the notion that assessing whether an unpackaged text is fiction or nonfiction is way less interesting or important than assessing whether it’s just good. I’m not sure, though, that we can use the same set of tools. I’m not sure that what makes a work of fiction good—in the writing, that is—is the same as what makes a work of nonfiction good. Ditto bad fiction. When we recognize bad fiction, its relation to good fiction is of a different sort than bad NF’s relation to good NF. Or?

These are ideas I tossed at my students and we had the kind of discussion I got energized by and like happily increased blood pressure from. (Not sure this was the students’ response.) They had all sorts of characterizations for good writing. Beautiful sentences. Varied sentence structures. Thematic richness. Interiority with respect to characterization. I agreed with all these but was less than satisfied. The problem for me: aren’t this fictional techniques? Aren’t these writerly moves we use to make fiction work? Because nonfiction’s prose, do they just naturally apply?

When I write NF—right now, for instance—I do things with my writing—things other than use “I” and talk about my life and the world we live in—that I don’t do when I write fiction. I come to NF with a different toolbox. What, though, is in this toolbox I haven’t yet been able to characterize. Also, what’s in it that I don’t have and cannot use in my fiction toolbox?

It’s probably more backstory than you need. I’m not even at this post’s topic yet. Amid my prompting for ways we know writing is good, one student spoke up and mentioned truth. Fiction and nonfiction have different relationships to truth, but truth is central to what makes both of them great.

It’s almost the answer I spent probably too long looking for.
Continue reading Thoughts on Truth, Beauty, and Nonfiction

I mean: everyone else is doing it. For those unfamiliar with the hubbub: Poets & Writers magazine released, once again, its poorly conceived rankings of MFA programs in creative writing. These have made everyone angry—everyone except P&W (which is without questions selling a shitload of issues with this) and Seth Abramson, the lawyer/poet/blogger behind these rankings. Hoostown’s got a good roundup of the issues.

Who else isn’t angry about the rankings? Me. I love them. Look here (PDF file). At the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year, the University of Alabama was ranked 18th among schools for its nonfiction track. Then I got a job there teaching nonfiction. Today (another PDF), the University of Alabama is ranked 14th among schools for its nonfiction track.

That’s 4 whole points in just one year of teaching/advising excellence.

What’s it show? I think I’m something of a juggernaut!

I.
I’ve been flipping through Stegner’s On Teaching and Writing Fiction. Look at this bit:

The apprenticeship for poets is likely to be shorter than for fiction writers, because (at least in our time) poetry is essentially lyrical, which means personal, and the person is aware of himself well before he is fully aware of his entanglement in a society and a culture—the sort of entanglement out of which fiction most often arises.

Key phrase is maybe “in our time”. It’s no longer fashionable to assert that the fiction writer is concerned with the individual’s place in society, and yet you won’t be able to pick up a book from the 20th century on fictional structure and form that doesn’t assert this is the A-number-one characteristic for the novel.

Many of these texts are in my office right now. Otherwise, I’d be a good boy and quote from some to back this claim up.

At any rate, Stegner is among the first people in the U.S. (and thus the world) to get a master’s degree in creative writing. He pretty much singlehandedly began the now unimpeachable program at Stanford. And yet here’s an idea I’ve never run across, writing maturity as a factor of genre, not individual talent or ability.

II.
It gets better: Continue reading Wallace Stegner Espouses Some Unpopular Ideas