Writing: January 2008 Archive Page

Jennifer Howard (Chronicle)

The guidelines recommend 12 methods for achieving those goals. "Extensive and diverse reading requirements" leads the list. Instructors should also make sure their students study literary terminology and critical approaches, and that they practice critical reading as well as doing their own creative and critical writing.

"Close reading of literary works and student manuscripts is the central mechanism in creative writing courses," the guidelines say, and that skill should enable students "to learn craft strategies, discern authorial intentions, and deepen the pleasure they take in the work."

A bit more surprising is the next recommendation: memorization. "For the study of poetry," the AWP says, "memorization is the ultimate close reading."

The remaining recommendations cover familiar writing-program territory and include workshopping, revising, and the importance of written feedback from instructors. Grades "should be given for most assignments," the guidelines recommend. Students also should have a chance to experiment with new-media technologies.

The guidelines will be posted on the AWP's Web site sometime in February.

I'd love to link to the full guidelines directly, but it looks like we'll need to wait until they go online.

Yesterday, I beefed up an old handout as part of my effort to introduce "Close Reading" to my "Intro to Literary Study" class.

This message arrived in my in box today. The author gave me permission to answer it here.

It must have been fate that led me to your site which I perused with great interest. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a 57 year old male, separated after nearly 27 years of marriage, now retired due to a chronic disability. Formerly I was a high technology executive recruiter, prior to that radio disc-jockey. Graduating from Leland Powers School of Radio, Television and Theatre as class president. 

It was my ambition to become a stage actor.  Life had other plans for me. Always being smitten with the written and spoken word I began chronicling some of my adventures and experiences. More than one of my acquaintances suggested I submit my work to publishers. Having entered a small number of contests which have not resulted in lucrative six-figure advances striking fear into the hearts of John Grisham and J.K. Rowling, I quickly realized that I don't know what in the world I am doing.

Having a desire to use language effectively is not enough to be a published author I  soon found. I was told to submit queries, get an agent, find an editor... My question to you is how do I know if I should even go to all the toil and trouble when I don't even know if anything I have to say could be appreciated by potential readers.

As an avid reader with eclectic tastes I sometimes wonder how a given work receives the Nobel Prize in literature. "How can this be?" I wonder after reading some tedious, bloated never-ending tome of drivel.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to hear me out. Any comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated. -- Anonymous

I wrote several short stories and two novels as a young man, though I never made any serious attempt at selling them. All my recent efforts have been scholarly (where the rewards I sought were visibility and credibility, since part of my job description includes engaging in scholarly pursuits).

While I don't teach a whole class in creative writing, I do regularly advise creative writing majors to refer to a book like Writer's Market (updated with a new edition each year, listing the contact information for agents, the going rates for various publications, etc.). You can probably find a copy in a local library or you can pick up an older edition at a used book store.  Both the library and the local bookstore can help you find numerous other books that introduce the writing profession to curious newcomers.

A mid-range solution might be to look for a writer's conference in your genre (thriller, fantasy, etc.), and attend the workshops where you can hear from recently published writers.  Your local public library or a local community college might be a good place to start making local contacts.  It looks like the person who sent in this question has valuable experience in business and technology, which might be of great use to another writer who is working on a corporate thriller.  Local conferences are great opportunities to form a community of like-minded writers who can swap manuscripts and help each other develop their ideas.

You might attend a talk given by a local author (lots of bookstores or coffee houses will regularly schedule such talks), and just ask the guest speaker for their editor's contact information. (It would be polite if you also bought a copy of their book, too! Even if you don't like the genre, you can give it to someone who would.)

I would be cautious about publishers who promise to publish your work as long as you pay them a fee.  That publisher is more interested in making money off of you than in promoting and selling your book.

Nevertheless, a good editor's services are valuable, so if you are willing to pay an established editor to give you honest professional feedback, that would be a good way to determine your chances.

A long-term solution, which involves an investment of time and money, would be to go back to school and take some creative writing classes. My own school, Seton Hill University, has a master's program in writing popular fiction.  You meet in person for a week or so in January and July, but otherwise the program is online.

Sometimes the WPF program asks me to help evaluate student presentations, but I'm not otherwise involved with it. I do highly recommend it.

 

Michael Bracken offers practical tips to new writers. Later this week I'll begin teaching Seton Hill's "Intro to Literary Study" class again... it's often the first class in which the English majors get a taste of what it means to write fiction for a college-level class. That means I emphasize basic stuff such as how to punctuate quoted speech, and the difference between "correcting the mistakes your teacher has circled for you" and "improving a draft through revision."  But Bracken offers an even more basic set of gripes.

New writers often ask questions about how to format manuscripts, and established writers and editors provide a variety of opinions about the "right" way and the "wrong" way to do it. I happen to prefer the format established post-typewriter/pre-personal computer, but I realize time, technology, and training changes everything.

I'm no Luddite. I worked for a large book and periodical publisher that was accepting electronic manuscripts back in the 1980s before Macintoshes existed and when electronic manuscripts arrived on 8" Wang disks that truly were floppy! I worked with and taught GenCode, a precursor to today's generic mark-up languages (HTML, SGML, etc.)., and today I write, edit, and design printed and electronic publications using a variety of word processing and page layout programs on both Macintoshes and Windows-based PCs.

So allow me a moment to play crabby editor while I bitch about a few of the most common mistakes I see writers make when preparing electronic manuscripts, and my complaints have nothing to do with font or typesize.

I've got a pounding headache and I'm typing this while stretched out on my sickbed in the basement (where my wife banishes me every time I get ill).  I'm sure this isn't a relapse of the pneumonia that laid me low last term, but I'm not at all happy that this is hitting me on the last weekend before the spring term starts.  When I'm sick, the part of my brain that does objective evaluation shuts down, so I'm no good at grading papers or figuring out whether this assignment should be worth 5% or 10% of the course grade.  But I can philosophize and ruminate.  I suppose this will help me deal with the anxiety I feel over getting sick (again).

After students have had the chance to revise a few essays, I ask for a show of hands as I ask a series of questions...

1. "How many of you find it easy to fix all the mistakes I mark?"
2. "How many of you find it easy identify and fix errors in the passages that I haven't marked?"
3. "How many of you prefer to have someone else catch the mistakes for you?"
4. "Now imagine you are the editor of a magazine, and you have two submissions on your desk. Both are about the same quality. One has typos in almost every line, and you'll have to spend hours getting it ready for publication. The other submission has no glaring technical errors, and looks like it would be ready to go almost immediately. Which one would you publish?"

I've done that in the past, as part of my attempt to get students to pay attention to, and take advantage of the opportunity when their professor gives them the opportunity to revise a paper. I first thought I should blog Bracken's essay because I wanted my students to be able to read it, but now I'm not so sure. 

One of the biggest frustrations about being a writing teacher is that many students don't take full advantage of the opportunity to revise.  If a student's draft is patchy and full of typos, then instead of spending my time engaging with the student's ideas, I spend it circling typographical errors and noting missing words, and I never get to spend that deep time talking about a student's ideas. (Yes, I can add a few lines after the final draft comes in, but I know students are most motivated to learn from detailed comments when they are working on a final draft. If they have, in their minds, "finished" a paper, I have to shift into a much more general "Next time, try doing more of this and less of that," rather than actually carrying on a conversation with them about the ideas they have raised.

But I worry that perhaps my desire to get students to value the revision process has instead come across as an attempt to tear them down. 

Making the shift to college can be shocking.  Many who have a talent for language have coasted through high school English -- where teachers rewarded students for using fancy vocabulary words, for being able to summarize the plot of the literary works they read and for demonstrating an ability to apply the stories to their own lives.  For many students who are just starting out college, only the dumb or lazy students have to work hard to earn good grades; the ones who are "bright" and "smart" get those good grades naturally. So they can be shocked to find out that being "bright" doesn't earn you many points, and even "smart" kids have to work to earn a B.

This lesson is not a particularly pleasant one to teach. Professional editors have every right to be frustrated by newbie authors whose simple mistakes waste time.  As a teacher, it's my job to help get those newbies ready for the real world, where crabby editors don't always have time to be nice when they say "no."  One of my teaching personas is the crabby editor, though I try to reserve that for the upper-level students who should know better.

I thought initially that Bracken's blog entry would permit me to say, "See, it's not just me being crabby, here's a successful author and influential editor saying the same things I'm trying to tell you."  But instead, I think I'll try to bring this idea out of the class via a discussion, where students call out ideas and I write them on the board.

Since it's a spring class, the students will already have had a chance to notice what their first semester was like, though they may not have had the chance to reflect on what their experiences mean. It would be faster to start with a list of dos and dont's, but rather than giving them a list of orders that they are compelled to follow, it would be much better if they could think of me as a resource for how to solve a problem.  

This kind of self-criticism is particularly challenging to students who haven't yet taken a creative writing class, and therefore haven't really experienced what a solid, meaty critique can do for their writing (once they get over the initial blow to their egos). But if I try to force this lesson on them before they're ready to hear it, they might get disillusioned, and they may not give me their best work thereafter (for fear that I'll respond too harshly).

Finding the right balance between crushing realism and uncritical praise is important enough that it's worth taking the time to do it carefully. So this year I will try drawing some collective wisdom out of the students' shared experiences.

When I went to grad school, I imagined that I would teach much the same way as I was taught -- via lectures.  But students today are far more connected with each other than students were 20 years ago.  My students are skilled at interacting with each other, and they regularly draw on their group communication skills to get all sorts of personal and social tasks done.

I feel like I'm doing my best work as a teacher when I find that the knowledge is already there, in bits and pieces, distributed across the student network.  The students may have never tried to connect the dots on their own, though they may have generated some tentative conclusions based on the parts of the big picture that they can see.

And the big picture that I need to see is that I've got to face the reality that I'm sick again, and that until I get better, I won't be able to make any meaningful progress on all the obligations I've put on hold.

Okay... now for some rest.