A Boot Camp for Creative Writing
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By CHARLES JOHNSON
If our furniture was as poorly made
as our fiction, we would always be falling onto the floor.
-- John Gardner
One of my life's great ironies is that, while I've taught in a distinguished
creative-writing program for 27 years at the University of Washington (we
have three MacArthur fellows in a faculty of nine), I've never taken a
college-level creative-writing workshop, nor did I want to back in the
1970s. Back then, when I first began furiously writing fiction, the last
thing I wanted to do, as a graduate student moving through rigorous
philosophy seminars toward a Ph.D., was sit through the intellectually
questionable workshops I'd seen from a distance or heard about. To my eye,
they were dominated by the instructor's personality and unsolicited
political opinions, and took an approach that was highly subjective, a
"touchy-feely" urging of twentysomethings to "write about what they know."
My sense was that those apprentices, who knew so little about literature,
history, philosophy, or culture, wrote and rewrote the same underwhelming
story, usually about their first sexual experiences, all semester long. Here
was not where I wanted to bring my manuscripts. I knew I would be bored. I
asked myself then, as I sometimes do now: How long would Melville, Poe,
Kafka, Emerson, or Dostoyevsky have survived in a soft-at-the-center course
like this?
But when I was hired at UW in 1976, two years after I published my first
novel, Faith and the Good Thing, I was faced, at age 28, with the
task of deciding what I thought a heuristic, highly productive fiction
workshop should be. From the start, I felt it should be a labor-intensive
"skill acquisition" course, emphasizing the sequential acquisition of
fiction techniques and providing the opportunity to practice them. The
curriculum should be capacious, allowing for instruction in all styles,
genres, and subgenres of fiction. I believed that apprentices learned best
(as in music or the martial arts) through oldfangled imitation of master
craftsmen, through assignments aimed at learning a repertoire of literary
strategies, and by writing and revising prodigiously. I saw the goal of a
(literary) art class as the creation of artists who were technicians of form
and language; it was the preparation of journeymen, not one-trick ponies,
who one day would be able to take on any narrative assignment -- fiction or
nonfiction, screenplay or radio drama, novel or literary journalism -- that
came up in their careers. And such a class should make clear that writing
well was always the same thing as thinking well.
Fortunately, when I first worked out this course -- for both undergraduate
and graduate students (for the latter I simply add stiffer requirements) --
I had many pedagogical and professional experiences to draw on. I'd spent
seven years as a journalist and cartoonist working in all forms, I'd written
seven novels, I'd consumed a whole library's worth of writing manuals and
texts on aesthetics, and I'd apprenticed with the novelist John Gardner, a
bluff, combustible, and brilliant teacher who once told an interviewer,
"Writing is the only religion I have." I remember once when he was going
over one of my chapters for Faith in his office at Southern Illinois
University, and I asked if he needed to stop in order to prepare for his
creative-writing workshop. Gardner shook his mane of silver hair and said,
"No, teaching creative writing is a joke," and we continued with his
critique of my work until the bell rang for him to go to class.
Because I did not want my short-fiction workshops to be "a joke," I designed
them to be demanding, and though requirements have evolved over the years,
their rigor remains the same. I assign three full-length stories for my
students to complete and revise during the term. I tell them I don't care
what they write, only how they write it. If their first story is told in
first person, I ask them to try the other two in third or second person;
and, if their protagonists in that first story are people very much like
themselves, to switch their characters' gender, race, or cultural
orientation.
I also urge them to experiment with the wealth of literary forms that are
our global inheritance as writers. From John Gardner's first book, The
Forms of Fiction (1962), I extracted a three-page handout titled "Short
Fictional Forms," which shows the essential differences in the sketch,
fable, parable, yarn, tale, and modern short story. I give students several
other handouts as well, some deadly serious, others more whimsical,
including Mark Twain's risible essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses";
Lajos Egri's chart, "The Bone Structure," from The Art of Dramatic
Writing (1946), for conceiving well-rounded characters; and my own
essay, "A Theory for This Course," in which I insist that the work they turn
in must present: (1) a story with logically plotted sequences; (2)
three-dimensional characters -- that is, real people with real problems; (3)
sensuous description, or a complete world to which readers can imaginatively
respond; (4) dialogue with the authenticity of real speech; (5) a strong
narrative voice; (6) rhythm, musicality, and control of the cadences in
their fiction; and finally, (7) originality in theme and execution.
But that is just the beginning of what I ask for.
During the course I have students read Northrop Frye's lovely The
Educated Imagination (1963), to help them see, in my paraphrasing of
Kant, that education without imagination is empty, and imagination without
education is blind. I lecture on such de rigueur topics as plot,
description, dialogue, character, the structure of dramatic scenes, and so
forth, but usually from a philosophical angle -- for example, tracing the
rise of 20th-century subjectivism and the historical and cultural evolution
of viewpoint from the loss of faith in omniscient narrators and an
agreed-upon "objective" world to stream-of-consciousness, the recognition of
the relativity of viewpoints, and the preference of many contemporary
readers for the supposedly greater authority of first-person narratives.
Always, I return students from theory to practice. I give them the
impossible task of handing in a photocopy of the finest prose passage
they've ever read, telling me in one page why they admire it, what literary
strategies in it they want to master. (I promise them that by the end of the
term I'll show them how to achieve such effects.) Using the notebooks of
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Albert Camus as examples, I ask them to maintain a
writer's workbook, one they are to fill daily with images, ideas, scraps of
language, character sketches, overheard dialogue, and so forth, that they
can use when revising their fiction.
In this creative "boot camp," as I often call it, I also give students a
healthy dose of Gardner. (I put everyone who works with me for the first
time, grad or undergrad, through the same drill.) When he heard I'd been
hired at UW, Gardner sent me three unpublished pages of challenging writing
exercises he'd worked out in 1976 for his students at the State University
of New York at Binghamton, along with a sobering two-page introduction
stating how apprentices must "learn the feeling from within of a complete
fictional form," as well as "scores of ways of doing everything." Those
exercises and their introduction appear at the end of his posthumously
published handbook, The Art of Fiction (1984). In the 1970s and '80s,
I assigned all 30 exercises to my students, which meant they did three a
week. (These days for a class that meets twice weekly I assign the 10 most
challenging exercises.) Among my favorites, then and now, are:
(1) "Write three effective long sentences: each at least one full typed page
(or 250 words), each involving a different emotion (for example, anger,
pensiveness, sorrow, joy). Purpose: control of tone in a complex sentence."
(2) "Describe a character in a brief passage (one or two pages) using mostly
long vowels and soft consonants (o as in "moan," e as in "see"; l, m, n, sh,
etc.); then describe the same character, using mostly short vowels and hard
consonants (i as in "sit"; k, t, p, gg, etc.)." The purpose of this
exercise, Gardner wrote, is to help students see that "describing a scene in
mostly long vowels and soft consonants achieves an effect far different from
that achieved by a passage mostly in short vowels and hard consonants."
(3) "Write a monologue of at least three pages, in which the interruptions
-- pauses, gestures, descriptions, etc. -- all clearly and persuasively
characterize, and the shifts from monologue to gesture and touches of
setting (as when the character touches some object or glances out the
window) all feel rhythmically right. Purpose: to learn ways of letting a
character make a long speech that doesn't seem boring or artificial."
(Later, in a second monologue, students present a philosophical position
they tend to favor, but present it through a character and in a context that
modifies or undermines it.)
Since 1976, my serious students have sparked to this syllabus, which demands
from me reams of reading and redacting drafts until the wee hours of
morning. Among my earliest apprentices in the late 1970s and early '80s were
David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars, and Gary Hawkes,
now co-director of the creative-writing program at Lycoming College and
author of several novels, among them Semaphore and Surveyor.
They were burning to write and be artistically challenged. Some students
transformed certain exercises, like Gardner's three-page monologue, into
complete stories and published them in literary magazines.
Clearly, with good students, one can be demanding. I urge them, since
writers are lovers of language, to begin reading a good dictionary from A to
Z (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary or the
2,129-page, unabridged Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary) as
Gardner and I, respectively, had done, to improve their vocabularies and
develop their own lexicons, and my very best students do that. In class, I
write a new word each day on the blackboard to see if students know it --
ullage, gride, yirn, or kalokagathia -- and give a "prize" (usually a copy
of a literary journal) to the students whose fiction discussed that day
exhibit the most delicious, perception-altering use of language. Sometimes
if they return for a second course with me, I give them writing exercises of
my own invention and 17 selected from Copy and Compose (1969), by
Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester, a splendid book that makes them
compose new sentences in numerous forms: elaborated, compound/complex
sentences; antithesis; various forms of keyword repetition; epanalepsis
(circular sentence); and so forth.
This approach to teaching fiction writing has been rewarding for my students
and me. Occasionally, five or six of the best pupils continue on their own,
meeting at one another's homes to discuss their stories. Former students
have gone on to become successful novelists, college professors, editors,
filmmakers, and even one Seattle detective who specializes in sex offenders.
(He told me that the class's emphasis on exactitude in language helps him
write concise, accurate police reports, precise in their diction, thereby
reducing the chances of a perpetrator's going free because of foggy
wording.)
However, that doesn't mean that over the last three decades I haven't been
forced to modify the class, as the backgrounds and academic preparation of
students and the enveloping culture have transmogrified. At some point in
the late '80s, I realized that students were far less informed about the
novels of depth and density I sometimes referred to (such as William
Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus)
and the aesthetic texts -- Aristotle's Poetics, Longinus's essential
On the Sublime, E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, T.S.
Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Albert Murray's remarkable
"The Hero and the Blues," Sartre's What is Literature?, William
Gass's "The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words" --
that my better students in the '70s were at least glancingly familiar with.
In the period of identity politics and Kulturkampf that swept over
American colleges in the '80s like a tsunami, students' imaginations
cratered; their stories became depressingly less imaginative and daring, but
they were oh so politically correct. Furthermore, I began to notice that
some students timidly waited for me to analyze and dissect the fiction we
were discussing that day or let a handful of the more vocal class members
dominate our discussions. That, of course, would never do. This class was
demanding, yes. Students worked hard for their professor and themselves. But
what I needed to ensure was that they worked just as hard for one another.
About 10 years ago, I added a new task to the standard requirement that
students provide hard copies of their fiction for all class members to edit.
At the start of each discussion, one class member provides a full critique
of whatever story is under review, and when he or she is done the rest of us
offer our judgment of that story and the accuracy of the critic's analysis.
Each student must perform this chore twice during a term, making it
impossible for anyone to hide or withhold his or her judgment. I ask
undergraduates to speak for at least 10 minutes and graduate students for
between 20 and 45 minutes. If they identify a problem in the story under
discussion, I ask them to suggest at least one -- even better, two --
solutions the author might try. Everyone in class needs to be prepared to
step up and volunteer to take the place of that day's reporter if for some
reason he or she misses class.
Because most students lack the critical skills for interrogating fiction (at
first they even struggle with determining a story's literal sequence of
events), I created for them a new handout, a checklist of 24 crucial
questions they should ask in regard to fiction, not merely in terms of
"themes" but about how a document is made, the decisions that went into its
construction, and whether those were the best choices for fulfilling the
writer's intention. After the student critique and our roundtable
discussion, if time permits, the student critic and I lead a word-by-word
analysis of the work, always with an eye toward explaining the principle of
craft behind a correction or line that we praise.
To prepare my students for the next modification I made in my workshops, I
tell them about a wonderful event the Washington Commission for the
Humanities holds every September, called "Bedtime Stories." Each year for
five years now local authors (myself, August Wilson, David Shields, Steven
Barnes, Laura Kalpakian, and others) compose a short short story (about
2,000 words) based on a theme provided by the commission. The themes thrown
at us have ranged from "insomnia" to "a goodnight kiss." Like jazz musicians
(or medieval troubadours) responding to a theme, the old pros relish the
chance to test anew their storytelling prowess and hear what their peers
have produced.
To emphasize the importance of storytelling in addition to craft, I've
reduced the number of Gardner exercises I assign and replaced them with the
assignment that each student turn in weekly a complete, two-page plot
outline for a new story, my purpose being to nudge them beyond writing the
same semiautobiographical story over and over, to imagine other lives, and
to be raconteurs always ready to tell an engaging tale. (As one member of my
2001 graduate class, a retired English teacher who published his first novel
in the '60s, put it: "I'd rather have dinner with a storyteller than a
writer any day.") Students generate 10 outlines each term, enough to carry
them into future workshops. For my graduate students, five of those have
specific requisites: (1) One outline must use a classic reversal; (2) one
must be in a traditional or neglected literary form not used for a major
work of fiction in the last 100 years, a form students must go to the
library and research; (3) one must use a historical figure, living or dead,
as a protagonist or secondary character; (4) one must address some question,
problem, or theme that hasn't been dramatized in contemporary American
fiction; and (5) one outline must blend two or more traditional or
contemporary forms of fiction. Many graduate students have told me that
those weekly plot outlines were precisely what they needed to make them work
on their greatest weaknesses: plot and dramatic structure.
Over nearly three decades what I've discovered is that a writing workshop,
like everything else, must evolve. If it is to truly help apprentice
writers, it must deliver techne, what Gardner once called a deep
understanding of "poetic and prosaic form, entertainment, and the powerful
evocation of character and event." To internalize that understanding, I tell
my students, serious writers must be edacious readers their entire lives.
Yet, in the end, the galaxy of techniques and strategies we teachers provide
our students -- all that theory and practice -- must serve spirited,
memorable storytelling. It is toward that end that I've shaped, and continue
to shape, this rather uncommon course on the craft of fiction.
Charles Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Washington
at Seattle. His most recent book is Turning the Wheel: Essays on
Buddhism and Writing (Scribner, 2003).
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 10, Page B7