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…
- “How many of you find it easy to fix all the mistakes I mark?”
- “How many of you find it easy identify and fix errors in the passages that I haven’t marked?”
- “How many of you prefer to have someone else catch the mistakes for you?”
- “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.
Okay, for “art” can we swap in the term “talent” or “inspiration” or “a poetic soul” or “intelligence” or “wisdom” or something else like that.
I can teach methods, I can encourage a habit of experimentation, set up things so that they can experience for themselves the benefits that come from diligence or long unbroken spans of concentration.
I can expose them to “art” in many ways, but I can’t pour it into their being — they have to take advantage of the opportunity to work for it.
I can try to teach all those bits and pieces, and provide the blueprints for assembling them in useful ways, but the student has to throw the switch.
Can I argue playfully a little bit? I think you’re dead wrong on this score, Dr. Jerz. There is no distinction between an artist and a scholar: ALL ART IS INQUIRY and involves the same processes you list, albeit often — but not always — turned inward/private rather than outward/public. Art is simply an alternative discursive form to get at the very same ideals you espouse as a scholar. And, conversely, perhaps there’s an art to your scholarship, as well.
That’s another good distinction. I’m not really in a position to teach “art,” or even really discuss the creation of art much… the course is really designed to introduce students to the writerly and scholarly virtues (critical thinking, self-motivation, the writing process) they’ll need to develop as English majors and as college students.
I suspect one of the hardest things to teach beginning and early career writers is the difference between the “art” of writing and the “business” of publishing. I learned long ago–and much to my own dismay–that I was never going to be an “artist” that other writers hold up as an example of literary brilliance, but I could be a “businessman” who produces clean copy, meets deadlines, and works well with others. If I do all that on a consistent basis, my primary “audience”–editors–will ensure that my work is seen by a broader audience.
Anyhow, thanks for using one of my blog posts to spark one of your own.
Yes, I found Bracken’s name because he mentioned Seton Hill University in a recent blog entry. I’ve heard many students reporting that at first they didn’t expect to get much from peer review (either online or in groups). In a drama as lit class that was mostly full of first-semester freshmen a few years ago, our first big breakthrough of the class was a day when students were supposed to give oral presentations, I split them up into small groups and sent them outside so that they could deliver the speeches to each other. Despite the fact that I told them their oral presentation was simply an opportunity for them to collect their thoughts, not a performance that was going to be graded, some of them didn’t really internalize that message until they realized I was splitting the class into three groups. Although I circulated in order to get a sense of how the presentations were going, there was no way I could be present for all the speeches, and that (I think) really drove home the idea that the students were presenting for each other, not for themselves. They really got to see how their peers were connecting the material.
That’s a very useful distinction — that our job as writing teachers is not to evaluate talent, but rather look for signs that the student-writer is putting the needs of the audience first, rather than his or her own emotional need to “express” a feeling or idea.
GREAT entry. How to inspire the desire for revision? That’s the rub. It always comes back to what’s at stake for the student, I suppose. Bracken (who was a guest at our Writing Popular Fiction alumnae workshop last year, by the way) is addressing writers who want to publish, and already have that stake. But students? It takes pushing beyond the investment in grading and career angst and getting into fuzzy areas like the desire to be heard clearly or the reward of clarified thinking through critical expression. Too often we settle for “expressing” ourselves in one emotional burst, and then assume that the organicity of that expression should not be tampered with in revision. But that’s only half the battle; the other half is “audience” need. Group work, as you point out, can help cultivate that investment in clear communication. When I grade creative writing, I don’t judge talent; it is all about “audience”. So I applaud what you’re doing by having interpersonal critique sessions or “workshops.”