How Creative Writing Programmes Shaped the American Literary Landscape

For those interested in the debate about whether creative writing can be taught or not, and the effectiveness of such courses, there is a fascinating (but very lengthy) overview of the impact of such courses on the American writing landscape at The New Yorker. Lois Menand, himself the product of a creative writing course (an experience he says he would not trade for anything) draws on Mark McGurl's The Program Era : Postwar Writing and the Rise of Creative Fiction . This book is also reviewed at Conversational Reading where Andrew Seal finds it :

... a book that is very likely to matter, and a book that is very likely to lead to some very exciting and productive conversations about how American literature should be mapped and how it should be read—and written.

How Not to Write a Novel

As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn't matter if the plot is emotional (“Will Jack's fear of commitment prevent him from finding true love with Synthya?”), intellectual (“But Jack, Synthya's corpse was found in a locked room, with nothing but a puddle on the floor next to her and a recently thawed leg of mutton on the end table!”), or physical (“Will Jack's unconstitutional torture of Synthya Abu Dhabi, the international terrorist, lead to the location of the ticking bomb?”) - as long as it compels the reader to find out what happens next. If your reader doesn't care what happens next - it doesn't.

Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem, while shocking developments and startling new information help or hinder her on the way. Painful inner conflicts drive her onward but sometimes also paralyse her at a moment of truth. She finally overcomes the problem in a way that takes the reader by surprise, but in retrospect seems both elegant and inevitable.

The plot of a typical unpublished novel introduces a protagonist, then introduces her mother, father, three brothers and her cat, giving each a long scene in which they exhibit their typical behaviors one after another. This is followed by scenes in which they interact with each other in different combinations, meanwhile driving restlessly to restaurants, bars, and each other's homes, all of which is described in detail.

There's a delicious extract from How Not to Write a Novel :200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs If You Ever Want to Get Published by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark on The Times website, with much more sterling advice for the wannabe.

The authors have more on their website, including this rather nice post called What About I, The Literary Novelist - which shows that writing crap is within anyone's grasp, MFA or not.

Oh, and then there's the "bookfomerical" (nice way of getting around saying "book trailer" which is copyrighted elsewhere) :




This is on my want list!

Lamott - Telling The Truth

Anne Lamott is a brave woman. At her next writers' conference, she's going to tell her students to give up and go home. They probably don't have much talent and they probably won't get published. And even if they do, it won't make them happy. ... This is just what creative-writing students don't want to hear, but Lamott says that anything else is lies. She's tired of students who want to get published but don't seem to want to write, so ... she said she was going to tell them the truth.

Jane Sullivan in the Age doubts whether Lamott, author of one of the seminal and most inspiring works on creative writing, Bird by Bird : Some Instruction on Writing and Life (a must read for the new writer) would really have the heart, because she herself had to struggle painfully to become an author :

The odd thing is that despite all the angst, Lamott does succeed in making the reader feel that just possibly spending your life writing every day is a noble, worthwhile and even joyful occupation, even if you never achieve any worldly success. In that sense, she's deeply inspiring. ... With writing, she says, "we are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."

You can read Lamott's columns for Salon.com here and I thought you might enjoy this interview from the 2007 Writer's Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University.

Getting Started

I very much enjoyed Lydia's post about how she got started as a writer and thought I'd respond. I did try to leave a comment over there, but it somehow disappeared into the ether. And anyway I'd rather like to run with the ball!

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to write. At school I had this great running rivalry with my best friend Helen to see which of us could write the best composition for English classes. I ignored all other homework completely to put aside time to write because my poem or story had to be the best. We both wrote well above and beyond the call of duty, pages and pages where one or two would have sufficed. Helen always got a slightly higher grade though (and is now a published poet).

I still have my English exercise books (below) filled with my scribblings. My writing was frequently melodramatic and wonderfully florid! And always full of spelling errors. (Mild dyslexia?) It's pretty embarrassing to read them now.

I also started a diary in 1969 and kept it right up to the time I got married in 1990. (Too much honest writing left lying around probably wasn't a very good idea ... particularly as a diary is always a space for a good sound off! Keeping an online password protected journal was a substitute later on.)

But I digress.

I got my first poems published at 13 in the Coventry Evening Telegraph and my first boyfriend, a gardener called Francis, was one of my fans ... although on the two occasions we actually met up for a date, I was so much taller than him that I walked in the gutter while he walked on the pavement!

Although I'd always told myself one day I'd love to write. I didn't start writing seriously until I was in my 40's. I guess that's a good point at which to evaluate your life since it hits you that the sand is slipping through the hour glass (speeding up, even) and if you don't do the things you want to do now, you're probably never gonna.

But there was always the fear - would I measure up or end up disappointing myself in an area that meant so much to me? My favourite writers like Annie Proulx wagged their fingers at me saying "You'll never measure up." Spoilsports!

I also didn't know how to "get into" writing.

So when I saw an ad for a correspondence course with The Open College for the Arts, I decided to give it a go. I found the materials they sent very useful, and the tutor I was assigned to gave me excellent feedback. But I didn't finish the course because:

First of all, I lost my nerve several units in when there was a big jump from simple exercises involving description to suddenly writing a complete short story. (How the hell do I think up a plot, I thought, in the days before I realised that plots can just happen onto paper if you let them.) Looking back, I think the course was aimed at more experienced writers.

Secondly, because this was in the days before the internet had really taken off (and OCA was a particularly slow adopter!), each assignment had to be mailed to the UK (with an international reply coupon inside it for the postage), and then there was a long wait for it to come back to me. My tutor felt so far away!

Thirdly, only my tutor saw my assignment and (afraid to show my efforts to those close to me)
I had no chance to see how other readers reacted to it. I felt so lonely!

Much more helpful to me was a book I found in a bookshop in London: Writing for Self-Discovery: A Personal Guide to Creative Writing by Myra Schneider and John Killick which is a fantastic collection of exercises for exploring the material from your own life and experience. (The book appears to be currently out of print, but you can buy it from Abebooks for as little as US$1.)

I went crazy, filling notebook after notebook with recollection and thoughts and fiction and dreams. I never knew I had so much inside that wanted to break free.

There were many other useful books, and I should say more about these, but this one was my catalyst, my turning point.

I signed up with Writers Village which offers a whole range of short courses for one very reasonable joining fee and found friends and support. The course material is online, and the work posted to a bulletin board and feedback given by your coursemates rather than a tutor. The atmosphere was supportive and friendly, I made some writing buddies across the world (Most of the participants are from the US.) and the first two short stories I had published grew from assignments I posted there.

I also did a creative writing course organised by author Chuah Guat Eng at Silverfish. This was the first time I'd written with others and my - what a heady experience it turned out to be - with moments of real magic when we read back our pieces. Much much better than scribbling away lonely and alone!

But the teacher/trainer in me said ... hey ho, I want to encourage others to write and think I can do this better ... and that's why and how my own course for beginners was born. (And it sounds as if Lydia is thinking along these lines too ... good for her!)

I've just finished one run of it at the British Council and hope that the next will be in November, when I finish the project I'm currently involved with and have had a chance to rediscover my Mat Salleh roots in the UK for a few weeks.

There are lots of threads here I might pick up on another day.

But like Lydia I'd love to know, what got YOU writing?

Cut and Paste Poetry

Oshun sent me this link to the Altered Books website a few days ago and I thought it looked such fun I'd have a go at it sometime soon. (Once I've got over the psychological trauma of actually cutting up a book!)

The instructions are these:

Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration. Put pages in the mail and send them all around the world. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And the results are as visually interesting as they are poetically:

I tried a similar exercise some time ago from the excellent In the Palm of Your Hand: A Poet's Portable Workshop by Steve Kowit. (If you want to write poetry, I think this is a must-buy!)

Basically, you take a text and chop out of it any words or phrases that sound interesting. Then you reassemble the cut-out bits into a poem. Simple.

To prove it, here're my own experiments! (I feel like the Blue Peter team saying "Here's One I Made Earlier" - forget the reference if you're not British of a certain generation!)

The first came from a page in New Scientist, the second from an article on an Egyptologist in the Sunday Times Magazine.


(1)

Dull middle-aged scientist
Creates
Slippery concepts.
Slips unnoticed into
The mystery of consciousness.
(How deep the mystery is!)
Brainspace
Mindspace
Impenetrable language.
“This is what I am,” she cries “inside my head
A virtual world of spaces of the mind
An ever shifting pattern in the dark …
Brainspace is also mindspace!”


(2)

A commoner
Tomb-by-tomb
recording her quest (so secret).

Every movement:
swirls of ancient dust -
tomb dust.

Every footfall
on time-worn scrap:
dynastic detritus.

In the two-pillared antechamber,
the mummy - a flame-haired royal beauty
Eloquent as a hieroglyph.

Grasping her enemy by the shortened forearm
She threw her into the darkened void beyond.
(Sex always was a problem for Egyptologists.)

Write a Novel in a Month

This month's Writer's Circle meeting at MPH will be a little different. This from the MPH website:

The Writer's Circle: Write A Novel in A Month
A meeting for anyone interested in the idea of writing a novel in a month. (Yes, it is possible!) Also an invitation to take part in the largest creative writing competition on earth - the annual Nanowrimo. Last year 40 Malaysians took part with ten winners. This year we hope to encourage many more.

The fictionators are beginning to infiltrate and hopefully will take over the earth!

Chet and I have roped in other friends to talk about the Nanowrimo and their experience of doing the competition in previous years.

Last year was the first time I'd attempted it. But I had a lot of fun, made friends, learned a lot about myself as a writer, and ended up with some good material for the novel I'm writing. (Here's the entry I wrote just after I'd completed the Nano last year.)

I know an event is not for everyone. Someone on an e-group I belong to asked why we needed this and why can't we organise an event like this on our own? Good point and I hope that we will have more locally organised writing events. I have some ideas and I'm sure the readers of this blog have too. But this event is a great starting point to pull together folks who are interested in writing and first-time dabblers ... and maybe from this local involvement, the impetus for other local events will emerge. And besides, the infrastructure for the event is already set up - there's a website and bulletin boards and home pages and advice at the Nanowrimo website.

It would be very nice to get some schools and colleges participating too this time ... get 'em hooked and writing while they're young!

There may be folks who don't want to join the Nanowrimo but who are interested in the whole idea of writing a novel in a month, so the MPH meeting will be geared to that too.

Dunno if I will be able to write as much this time round. Last November was pretty free but this year I will be away at a conference in Manilla and then there's everything else I've taken on. But yes, even if I can't reach the 50,000 word target, shall be writing alongside everyone else to see how many words I can produce.

Anyway, if you're interested in joining us, then please register by calling MPH Customer Service at 03-7726 9003 or e-mail csoneutama@mph.com.my. There are limited seats.

And here's a book you might want to buy:

I saw autographed copies of it in MPH Midvalley yesterday!

The Power of Dreams

I'm a great believer in the power of dreams. Have had many which have told me truths about myself that I hadn't got round to facing. Have had others which have told me the truth about relationships I was in. (I wish I had listened more carefully.) Have recognised a soul-mate from a dream and wasn't wrong. Was told in another that someone needed my help even before my waking self had recognised it.

I write my dreams down as soon as I wake, because I know they are important.

I keep dipping into Naomi Epel's book Writer's Dreaming, and in fact have used extracts from it on my course where I do a writing-from-dream-exercise.



Epal interviewed 26 writers about their dreams and their creative process what is facinating is how many of the writers featured have used dreams to help them in their work. Many more writers talk about entering a "dream-like state" when they write.

William Styron saw the heroine of his novel in a "waking vision" standing in a hallway of a boarding house in Flatbush, a number tattoed on her arm.



And Bharati Mukherjee (a writer I was lucky enough to meet not long ago) has dreamed the endings to stories and to her novel Jasmine. She says:

As I'm getting to the end of a story, the ending that, during my waking hours, I think will happen is sometimes subverted or obliterated by the dream. It happens as I'm just about to write that scene. ... In many of the stories in The Middleman, the endings are not the way I had planned them.

(The Middleman is one of the best collections of short-fiction I've ever read. Just don't know how Mukherjee can get so far into the heads of all these so different characters ...)



Just for fun, dear readers, here's a little quiz for you. A famous writer had the following dream. At the time that Epel's book went to print, this writer had not yet used the material in his writing. Later it became the basis of a novel.

Now then, can you name the writer and the novel. (Anyone who has done my course is not allowed to answer!) First prize as usual is to buy me lunch.

I don't have repetitive dreams but I do have an anxiety dream: I'm working very hard in this hot little room where I lived as a teenager - and I'm aware that there's a madwoman in th attic. There's a little tiny door under the eave that goes to the attic and I have to finish my work. I have to get that work done or she'll come and get me. At some point in this dream that door always bursts open and this hideous woman - with all this white hair stuck up around her head like a gone-to-seed dandelion - jumps out with a scapel.

And I wake up.

I still have that dream when I'm backed up on my work and trying to fill all these ridiculous commitments I've made for myself.

Books for Writers

Kinokuniya has a special offer on writing books at the moment. If you snip the voucher from the Mind Our English page of The Star you can get 25% off a selected title. Went along to check it out for you (my excuse anyway!) and came away with two more creative writing books to add to my already burgeoning shelves.

The first is Writing About Your Life by William Zinsser, and is about memoir writing.

The second is A Lie that Tells a Truth by John Dufresne. The jacket describes it as "A truly creative - and hilarious - guide to creative writing, full of encouragment and sound advice". Well, we'll see.



There were plenty of other titles stacked on the table, many of them style guides which I'm not really so keen on, as they tend to be very prescriptive about what is and what isn't acceptable grammar. The book I really wanted, having seen it featured in the paper this morning was one called Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within by Barbara De Marco-Barrett, but Kino was already out of stock of that one, though they said they can order it. (And still give the discount when it comes.)

I collect books on writing. Already have quite a library and keep adding to it. It isn't at all that I buy them because I feel I personally need them as a writer. (I already have excellent books of prompts and on the writer's craft). But more out of academic curiosity. What's the angle? Is it helpful? Is there anything I can lift for my courses? Would my course participants/writing friends find this useful and should I recommend it?

And also because, in a strange sort of way, I find their presence on my shelves oddly comforting ...

The Right to Write

Just finished Julia Cameron's Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. It's one of those wonderfully affirming and inspiring books (much like Nathalie Goldberg's) to dip into and read as a meditation on writing.



Cameron's The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity worked very well for me and lead to real changes in my life and instances of uncanny synchronicity. I still go back to reread chapters from time to time to keep myself on the right track, and plan to run a creativity programme based around it.

Cameron in Right to Write and Goldberg in books like Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind focus primarily on the practice of writing as everyday spiritual practice (a kind of 'zazen', to borrow the term from Buddhism) and a tool for personal growth. Writing does not have to be about writing for publication, they say, the process is every bit as valid as the product.

Cameron talks about "connecting with the powers of the universe" when we write. And yes, there was a time when my more than cynical self would have laughed at such an idea. But truly that's what it feels like when writing goes well, when we lose self-consciousness and the ideas just ... flow.

Writing is about getting something down, not about thinking something up, she says. Creativity is a lamp, not a candle. Something wants to write through us as badly as we want to write.

This strikes me as very true. Time after time I see my writing friends come up with perfectly formed, heart-breakingly true pieces, after just a few minutes of frantically-paced "free-writing".

And I loved the chapter about taking your writing outside into your everyday world ... not making it too precious and serious and daunting:

Writing is about making brain children. When it comes to conception, it can but doesn't need to be in the missionary position. ... Don't make it so fancy. Do it on the kitchen table. Let your prose flash like Jessica Lange's white panties in the Postman always rings twice. Do it in the back pew at church. Do it outside next to the lilac bush. Do it in a cafe. On an airplane. Do it, do it, do it.

I'm not a flasher, but always have notebooks with me (different sized notebooks for different sized handbags) and often feel the urge to scribble things down. Cafes are great writing places and I love to people watch and play the sneaky spy. I've also written in long bank queues, at the check-out in Jaya Jusco, while waiting for friends to arrive at the airport, and once in the toilet during a formal function because the conversation on my table just had to be got down to paper as soon as possible!

I like to write on trains where there is a sort of enforced intimacy with strangers, and it's fun to try to get them down to the page without them suspecting what you're doing! Got the tables turned on me once though ... on a train from Plymouth to London, a young man, a student I thought, settled into the seat opposite. I was just wondering whether to take out my notebook and write a quick sketch of him, when he opened his bag, took out a notebook and proceeded to scribble something down in it, glancing sneakily at me from time to time though I pretended not to notice. I like to think that he was writing about me! A kind of writerly synchronicity.