Word After Word

I was taught creative writing two ways. In one sequence of classes, I learned about character, plot, point of view, theme, and irony.  In these kind of creative writing classes I learned to read and my writing absolutely improved. I could not figure out how to do the character concepts, the plot planning, etc. And point of view—it seemed like a mind-bending made-up muddler. I never believed you really needed point of view. Couldn’t I just write? Wouldn’t POV happen, anyway, and then other people could figure out what I had done? Couldn’t my teacher, who kept writing POV! in my margins simply shift her own POV and quit hacking away at mine? Craft worried me. And my writing got better. But I didn’t see a correlation. I never knew what I was doing differently. I never knew what I was doing at all. I was scared to investigate the process. I was scared to do exercises for plot, point of view, character, and theme; couldn’t exercises ruin my sparky natural genius? Waste my time? I wanted to stay pure. Or, be an outsider artist.  I was always afraid writing exercises would teach me to be really good at doing writing exercises.

In another sequence of classes we were asked puzzling Zen-like questions and the teacher drew inscrutable, hilarious diagrams on the board and pointed out what was interesting (art) and what was instructive (bad art). There wasn’t a textbook. The indication was life was the textbook, or the class, or our own depressing stories, or our responses to them or maybe the teacher conferences. The word “craft” was replaced with the word “shape.” Again, I didn’t really know how to apply what was discussed in class, but I wrote and wrote and I accepted that the point of view rules mattered a lot to some (much older) people. I decided to conform to the rules, as one conforms to the conventions of capital letters and lower case.

 About how to learn creative writing. What was it we were actually trying to sit down and do? 

When I was in junior high and failing math (for reasons that had more to do with missing a lot of school because my mother was very, very ill—I liked math and the idea of math, making stuff out of math) I remember telling my mom one night that I was going to write a textbook. I would have all the classes in one book. “If they’d just explain the whole system, and how it all relates and builds on concepts from other classes. If they’d tell you up front where it’s all headed, what the big picture is, then I think I’d get it.” My mom thought this was a great idea for a textbook. 

I wrote The Practice of Creative Writing.  In my textbook, I want the student to learn character, plot, theme, and point of view, but from the inside out, not top down. I wanted to marry the two ways of teaching creative writing into one helpful, practical course. Students have better luck when they write, and then read. They write a story, leaning into layers, working on tension, and then in class the teacher says “This is a great example of point of view. See what happened here?” Aha!

But what might have helped me become a writer, as much as anything else, I could not put into my textbook for new writers. The secret classroom was parties. The craft teachers and the funny diagram teachers all had us over to their generous beautiful professor-y homes for wonderful parties (the craft teacher liked a theme, such as Red; her parties had a terrific point of view). Newspaper writers, sexy history professors, graduate students, editors, random neighbors, speech writers, ex-spouses and pets and long sofas: in the living rooms of our teachers, we tried to converse. They pretended we would be writers and we pretended to be grown ups. That’s craft.