By Elise Blackwell
Introductory creative writing courses and fiction workshops fill quickly here. Most semesters my In box swells with requests for overrides before registration closes, sometimes within hours of its opening.
Students sign up for a workshop for myriad reasons. A few are born writers or think they are, but most students who take an introductory course aren’t planning a literary career. Sometimes their reasons are less than high-minded. One young man informed me the first day of class that he hated to read and couldn’t name a single author he liked. When I asked, “but you’re interested in writing?,” he told me that he was not in the least but that class facilitated a no-Friday schedule in a university city with a lot of Thursday-night drink specials.
Other students assume the class will be easy: a gut course with no “real” work. Some believe the rumor that ripped through fraternities at Tulane and other campuses a few years back that taking creative writing automatically raises your LSAT score 20 percent. A very different type of student—perhaps the most problematic across the semester—views writing as therapy and enters workshop seeking a support group. But most students sign up for vaguely well-intended reasons: The class fulfills a distribution requirement and sounds interesting, they like to read and so want to try their hand at writing, writing is something they enjoyed as a child and would like to give another go, the class will be a change of pace in a semester filled with lectures, and so on.
Naturally I want to identify and encourage those few students for whom fiction writing will be a long-term vocation. Even as I fear the angry phone call from a parent whose daughter has decided to apply to M.F.A. programs instead of medical school, informing and nourishing unmistakable talent is one of the job’s joys. But it’s important to me that the rest of my undergraduates, which is most of them, also have a valuable semester and leave in some way better for having studied creative writing. Tricking them into thinking they have more talent than they do and should become writers would be a disservice. When asked if universities discourage young writers, Flannery O’Connor famously said, “My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
While I would never want a student to give up writing because I told her it wasn’t her calling—she should seek a second opinion—the reverse is the greater cruelty. Still, there’s much a student who will never write another story can gain from a fiction writing class. Creative writing teachers are often asked whether writing can be taught, and the best answers are some fleshed-out version of “yes and no.” Equally important to ask is this: “What else can you teach students?”
Most semesters I face some initial anger as students figure out that writing fiction and critical analyses is incredibly demanding, that I’m willing to use the full grading scale, that I fail to recognize the next Tolstoy, and that I have no patience for the group-therapy model favored by some community-based writing workshops. By the end of each semester, though, most students walk away having learned something and—sometimes to my surprise—pleased with the experience.
Most obviously, the practice of creative writing develops an appreciation of what goes into making literature and deepens close reading and writing skills in ways that serve students going into nearly any profession in which writing precisely and reading between the lines are useful, not least business, law, politics, advertising, and journalism. As a form of world-building, fiction stimulates imagination, makes students ask “why? and “what if?” I’m not naïve enough to argue that writing fiction makes someone a better person—I know far too many misanthropic, narcissistic, besotted, and otherwise atrociously behaved writers to make that case—but the attempt to create original fiction encourages students to imagine in detail what it might be like to live another life. This form of role-taking can foster their capacity to engage other people with imagination, openness, and empathy.
Writing workshops also give lessons in group dynamics, self-control, delivering and receiving well-intended criticism, and building an atmosphere in which good work happens painlessly. Due to the relatively small class size and fact that the students themselves produce the texts under discussion, the students have one of their most intimate and interactive college experiences. It’s not just that the professor knows their names but that they know each other’s names—and much more. When students with divergent backgrounds and sensibilities respond to each other with generosity and intelligence, much is learned not just about fiction but about living well in a world populated by other people. (Potential employers take note: Students in workshops report a sense of responsibility to the group to show up prepared and meet their deadlines.)
Perhaps most valuable, if hardest to pin down, is this: Writing and discussing literary fiction can shake loose the conviction that life operates by clichés and that human behavior follows simple psychological formulas. Milan Kundera has argued that the novel is the art form best able to depict ambiguity and that its spirit of inquiry is its great value. The scholarly study of literature teaches ambiguity, too, and well, but writing students tend to engage with their own work and the unpublished work of their peers more personally and with a great sense of contingency. When I hear a student in workshop say, “But that’s not what I would do in that character’s situation,” it always means the student’s critical vocabulary needs sharpening and it often means the story up in workshop has an implausible plot or unconvincing characterization. But sometimes it also signals a nascent understanding of human difference and complexity.
When I hear a student point out where another’s overextended metaphor stumbles, I hear someone discovering that language can mislead. When another says, “So she got the guy, but isn’t the most interesting part of the story what comes next?,” I hear a student realize that marriage is about more than wedding planning. And when I hear a student who is asked whether his narrator is “bad” or “good” answer “both,” I recognize an increased tolerance for answers that aren’t easy and a real effort to understand the human condition.
When the student who says this is the least skilled fiction writer in the class, or the one who enrolled to leave his Friday mornings free for sleeping, it makes my day.
Elise Blackwell is the author of four novels and directs the M.F.A. program at the University of South Carolina, where she also teaches undergraduate creative writing.
(A&A illustration derived from photos by Flickr users Marcie Casas and darkpatator)
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