Teaching Creative Writing

A reader followed up my post on Colm Toibin, author of "The Master," by an e-mail asking me to comment on encouraging students to publish the work they do in Creative Writing classes.  I shot her off a hurried note on my way to work this morning saying that I can't say much about this not knowing the particular class, its objectives, etc.   

   But I found myself, after mulling it over, with more to say, which I'll try to summarize here, since many bloggers have an interest in traditional publication (in print venues).  In my twenty or so years of teaching creative writing, I occasionally encouraged students to send their work to the campus literary magazine, but rarely beyond that.  I taught at our local branch of the University of Maine, so students were there to get credits towards a degree; not - for the most part - with ambitions to be published writers.  Even so, a few students came and asked me if I thought they should consider writing as a career.   

   I told them that I couldn't answer that, because I'd only known them for one semester.  I didn't know if they had the invisible qualities that go far beyond the page, enabling them to withstand years of rejection while sending their work out for more, and somehow making a living at the same time.   

   I didn't go into detail about this, because nobody wants to hear about rejection, especially people considering sending their work out, who are - by definition - inspired and hopeful about their writing.  So a writing teacher has to tread a fine line between encouraging students, yet being authentic with them.  That's probably why most writing teachers I've known didn't volunteer much on the subject of publication. 

   To the reader who asked me to elaborate on this subject, I guess I feel that if I were in my first creative writing class and a teacher plus others in the class told me to send my work out to publishers, I'd want to know if they themselves were regularly sending out work.  I'd want to know if they know anything about the world they're asking someone else to enter.    

   Besides being better judges of who should try to publish, people who regularly send out work can give you an effective stance to acceptance and rejection.  They know that above a certain level of literacy, publication is a crap-shoot.  A work must be grammatical, the writer should have hacked his/her way through the jungle of cliches, and say something, to keep an editor reading.  But beyond that, there is the whole unpredictable realm of what the editor just had for lunch - oh God, bad fish, and she has to be rushed to the hospital.  Your manuscript gets thrown in the wastebasket by a paramedic.  Or you wrote a great story about a person who gets caught in a dumpster and ends up buried in trash in the town dump, but the editor just read three other stories about the same thing and took the second one - so your story, even though much better, gets rejected.   

   A class with people who know this can be truly supportive.  It can teach writers to move on from rejection and can even give tips on how to case out the market before you commit a lot of time to an idea or story that's already out there.  (This last is limited to short works).   

    But the subject of publication - because it's so arbitrary - is hard to communicate effectively in a class.  A safer subject is all the benefits we get from writing, whether we publish or not.  The wonderful New Hampshire writer Andrea Barrett, author of the great reprise of the explorer Ernest Shackleton's story Endurance, was recently featured on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac," and said that if the great secret of writing got out and people found out what a pleasure it is, everyone would be doing it.

 

                   

Comments

[joared]

Your observations and suggestions make sense to me. As for "everyone doing it," I'm beginning to think everyone is with all the blogs and new ones constantly starting. ;-)

[notdotdot]

Once upon a time. . .I wrote a children's story and submitted it. It was rejected but by a real person (editor) who said that they were not publishing what I had written at that time but that I should submit it elsewhere. I thought that that was a regular rejection, and life with a husband and three kids (plus pets) was on my mind and so I forgot all about it. Some time later my sister pointed out that my "rejection" was "special" because of who sent it and what the person said. That surprised me. And still I did nothing. I was busy. Hmmmmm.

[Chancy]

Interesting advice. Perhaps many of us who blog are frustrated writers in need of an outlet and feed back.

Would you ever consider teaching a mini creative writing course via a blog?