February 2008 Archives

Last night, I announced that I planned to play a game at the end of class. Around 8:30 pm, after we had written several exercises from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, I explained the rules: The class is divided up into two teams, Right Team and Left Team. I flipped a coin to see which team would send up a player first. Let's say Jack was chosen. Jack and I go out into the hall for a minute, where Jack chooses some popular or historical figure: Mark Twain or Gary Kasparov. Mark Twain can be our example. So Jack settles on Mark Twain, then he and I go back in. "I am a dead American," he tells the class.

The game, which John Gardner claims was played by students in the 1950s at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is called Smoke.

Each team takes turns asking questions that strain metaphorical intelligence: For example, "What kind of smoke are you?" If Jack answers, "Cigar smoke," that's cheating. Jack can't answer what kind of smoke that person would enjoy, if any, but Jack must answer what kind of smoke that person would actually be. Other questions might be "What kind of hairstyle are you?" and "What kind of footwear would you be?" And so on.

In the example of Mark Twain, a proper answer might be, "I'm smoke from a campfire you cook on in the country, sweet with the smell of wood chips and the spice of cooking meat, but if you breathe too deeply of me I'm caustic." Last night, one student who was particularly good at the game said Hunter S. Thompson would be a prematurely balding hairstyle. Hilarious and so true, don't you think?

Whichever team shouts "Mark Twain!" or whatever first gets to send up the next player. That team also gets a point.

The game tests intelligences that are hard to stretch. The students grasped quickly the rules of the game, and although some of them hinted too strongly at their person's identity, a few had quite a long, good run. As Gardner suggests, the more pointed and accurate the metaphors, the more likely people will feel right about the answer. If someone suggests Roger Clemens is a jungle cat (like a tiger), people will say, "You misled us when you said he was a tiger," because let's face it, Clemens is more of a coyote (predatory, powerful, and violent, king of his domain, but not above scavenging, or being a trickster, even a liar). It's amazing how accurate some of the questions can be, even though they translate, let's say, Vladimir Lenin into a hairstyle or a type of footwear.

I am having trouble not writing a book on critical theory. The book keeps insisting I write it, and I think I have the smarts (I can say some things about teaching writing that won't be completely moronic), but I'm overwhelmed by the ideas. I teach writing, but I don't teach it in a conventional way. Even when I was teaching "Freshman Composition," I strayed away from the generally accepted rules about what would and wouldn't help the students write well. I am confident that the students learning to write well is the point of the class.

Three or four aspects of teaching writing haven't been discussed enough. The first is writing as an Art. Just as with drawing and playing the piano, writing is accepted throughout history as an Art. This isn't to say that writing is in conflict with science (preposterous) or craft (downright stupid). Art needs Craft, as Aristotle says, "Art and Techne." As Rollo May says in The Courage to Create, the power of a raging river depends on the river's banks, or its form. Without banks, the potential and kinetic energy of a river becomes the tranquility of a rather expansive lake.

I need a word for this kind of hollow, tinny writing (what Richard Lanham called "The Official Style"). The word mechanical is too close to grammar. Clockwork might serve the purpose. I just need a word to describe writing without heart, soul, or compassion: the kind of writing we teach too often without meaning to, either because we don't know any better (we buy into the socially constructed wall between Art and Writing), or because we're lazy (John Gardner points out in On Moral Fiction that certain types of writing are easier for professors to evaluate).

Clockwork writing also gets more funding, because it seems to work well across the disciplines. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Teaching a student to be creative works across disciplines better, involving a special kind of intelligence. Art teaches subtle associations and flexible thinking, in the sense that after a more "creative" freshman composition class, a student can later think around corners, solve problems in real time, etc.

I object to adjectives in front of the word "writing." To borrow a joke from Douglas Adams, Academic and Creative will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes. This doesn't even touch on the implications of Positive Psychology for the Creative Writing classroom, which also ties nicely in with this problem.

I propose that in the future, we talk about the big issues, the ones that matter to the students: Students come to a writing classroom to learn to write. We know how, at least on a subconscious level. We should focus on teaching them.

Last night, with very little to occupy my mind, I pulled down John Gardner's The Art of Fiction and thumbed through the back part, "Exercises." I thought some more free writing exercises in my class would be nice, and sure enough Gardner had some great ideas. For example, 24. Without an instant's lapse of taste, describe a person (a) going to the bathroom, (b) vomiting, (c) murdering a child.

Another one I noticed was, 28. Write a short story about some well-known, legendary figure, which I have done before (Ben Franklin) and will be doing again soon (Grigorii Rasputin).

I find it hard not to look up to John Gardner, or at least to his implied author, the ghost he left behind in his books (both novels, such as The Sunlight Dialogues and Grendel, and also books on writing, such as The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist). He writes straightforward, mindfully, aware of the subtlest undercurrents in fiction. He has little if any patience for stupidity or pretenders. He is thoughtful and fair. He requires no explaining, though, and wrote in the 1970s, which dates his rhetoric a bit and makes him accessible more to serious authors and less to students. I also wonder that, having exposed some of the worse bits about universities, Gardner alienated himself from being taught in classrooms. I'm told that he could be quite aggressive in life, and that another of his books, On Moral Fiction, ruffled quite a few literary feathers and probably set his career back decades. All this before he died in 1984, of course.

This semester, to change the topic slightly, a student gave me another book called The Art of Fiction, this time by Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead, and that got me thinking: Why The Art of Fiction and not The Science of Fiction? In most of my graduate seminars, writing is approached very much as a science. We don't ever discuss writing as an art. Not once have I heard that kind of talk. It irritates me and at the same time disappoints me. Drawing classes, of course, can't hide the art portion of their curriculum -- or can they? A drafting class is a class where students learn to draw, after all. Do schools of architecture and drafting receive more funding than schools of illustration?

Art, especially art with a capital A, makes people nervous. It is more difficult to fund an Art than a Science, generally speaking. Most people sense that art is important, and yet few understand why, even going so far as to doubt that importance. So writing becomes a science, but it isn't writing any more, it's composition.

Now, writing contains an elements of science just as surely as drafting contains elements of art -- creativity, I mean. I would call these science elements of writing craft something like that. There are conventions, rules to break, theories, laws, etc. But writing is an art, in the end.

As a teacher of writing, I hear a lot of talk about finding the authentic voice. How do we help students find their voices? Especially without imposing our own? This kind of speculation leads to exercises, worksheets, and so on. It makes a lot of work both for the instructor and the students. And, if viewed from the wrong angle, such a quest - the quest to find the Authentic Voice - can harm student's interest in writing and cause a lot of heartbreak.

Since that heartbreak remains avoidable, I suggest that those who want to "Find their voice," especially in writing or some artistic medium*, start by not chopping out the voices that "don't sound" like his or her voice. According to Mikhail Bakhtin (Бахти́н), the identity - he uses the term "consciousness" - does not exist except in dialogue with one another. That is, we don't exist except for what we've consumed. To put it bluntly, I can't write if I've never read.

This explains the number one advice aspiring writers receive from professionals: read, read, read. It also makes sense on an instinctual level. How can anything come out if nothing has gone in?

In an essay I once read by James Whitehead, a beloved creative writing professor at the University of Arkansas and author of Joiner, a New York Times bestselling novel, the author explains what a terrible time he had, once, explaining to a student the difference between plagiarism and imitation. The student could not, or would not, see the difference. If I try to write like Hemingway, the argument goes, then aren't I just a copycat, a Hemingway ghost?

No, no. To write exactly like Hemingway would be impossible. No matter how much a young writer tries to imitate his or her favorite authors, he or she will always come up with a unique piece of writing. Always. This is especially so if the writer has read a lot of well written books. The voices become a synthesis, an amalgamation of voices.

To help a student find his or her voice, I would encourage patience and practice drawing all the voices together; I would hate to say "crystallize" the voices, although that's what comes to mind. Of course, the voices must move fluidly together, a seamless Amalgam, shifting in tone appropriate to whatever the student is writing. What is important is there is no  cutting away, no stripping down, and no "turning off" the white noise. Instead, put the white noise in a bottle and see what happens.

For an exercise, I would have students read samples of authors they love, then write a story in that style. A story in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, or in the style of Isaac Babel or J.K. Rowling. Or Stephen King, or Henry James. It doesn't matter. Then, I would have them write another, basing their work on a different author. And another, until they've worked with at least three. Then I'd tell them to keep reading, and leave the rest up to determination and hard work.

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*Whatever anyone says, writing is an art. Composition professors tend to willfully overlook this, since talk about art tends to lead to talk about Art (with a capital "A"), but drawing professors have somehow found a way to strip away the mystifications, haven't they? I don't see any reason to deny that writing is an art, unless its a political reason, and jockeying for position at the university (we deserve a bigger budget, because we're a science with a paradigm shift, and not a boring, nonessential art class) bores me and, worse, makes me a little angry.

I would really love to keep messing around with Movable Type; I could work on it for hours. Unfortunately, slogging through code and forums is impairing my ability to write anything. I had considered continuing to work on it, but I just can't. I'll stop writing if I do, and professionally writing is what's important. So I'll probably stay with simple templates until I can set up something better. MT is wonderful, but I think that http://www.movalog.com/ will be equally so.

In other news, I'm still working on the project Grigorii, which it now appears will be part of a larger work. I'm going to write it as a short story first and then work with Andrew Paul Jackson to make it singable. I'll let you know more soon.

Also, it looks probable that I will be helping with Composing Ourselves, Missouri State's textbook for Freshman Composition. I will be working not only with the text (editing, composing, and layout) but also with the DVD supplement, which will feature authors talking about their experiences and techniques. The most important thing is that the ultimate content is 1) Well Made and 2) Engaging for Students.

More when I get the chance.

This weekend, tired of posting on a blog not integrated with my website, I spoke with my close friend Shan Pesaru at Sharp Hue, Inc. about my options. Today, Shan e-mailed me back and said that, despite a somewhat tricky installation, he had set up such a blog for me, powered by Movable Type, the same program that powered my blog on Typepad. As it happens, Shan has just finished re-launching his own site, which is available from the link above. And it is amazing. If you want to be wowed by a web design genius (or need help with your personal website), then Sharp Hue is the company to call.

The new blog format allows for more interactive discussion, including forums and a community blog which my students may be able to use in the future as a tool to discuss composition.

In the meantime, I have been working feverishly on stories. I received another rejection letter, this time from The Paris Review, but I put it in my binder with the others and tried not to let it slow me down. I have an appointment to meet with the Ph.D. program coordinator at the University of Missouri, Kansas City on February 22nd. I am traveling to Las Vegas in March, and then hopefully to Boston in April, if I can scrounge up the money.

My fiancé and I will fly to Boston, both of us to work. For my part, I'll be working with Andrew Paul Jackson, a contributor to The Red Ink Journal and student at the Boston Conservatory, on a  performance piece dealing with the assassination of Grigorii Rasputin, the spiritual adviser to the final generation of the Romanov family, autocrats of Russia. Rasputin was known for his lechery, his alluring personality, his political influence, and his miracle cures concerning the hemophilia of Tsarevich Alexii Romanov. Some of these have never been explained by science.

The main concern of this story is portraying all the people involved not as caricatures, but as flawed human beings. Easier said than done, when so much history has passed and the legends of early-century Russia obscure most facts.

So Andrew and I face a serious problem: How do we make Grigorii Rasputin human again, when he is now so closely associated with the Devil Incarnate?

For that matter, how do we tease out the subtleties of Russian politics? The plot carried out by Felix Yusupov and Dmitri Pavolvich, the self-righteous assassins, best friends, and (perhaps) homosexual lovers who ultimately confessed their part in the murder? The hysterical Tsarina Alexandra, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who's reliance on mysticism, hysterical codependency, and dominance over her husband (not to mention her disdain for popular opinion) ultimately led to her family's grisly end?

That's to say nothing of England's MI-5 and MI-6, the secret service, who may have helped to end Rasputin's life, or at least to hasten it. What of the disfigured ex-whore, Khiona Gusyeva, who tried to kill Rasputin first? Disfigured by syphilis, Khiona stabbed Grigorii - and almost succeeded in killing him - long before the monk met his final death. What of Fyodor Kyzmin, the patrolman who found Rasputin's boot washed up against the icy latticework of an iron bridge - long before Grigorii's body was recovered.

And what of the miracle? When the Tsarevich suffered a blow that should have killed him, lying near death, blood clotting in his groin and hours from expiring, Grigorii Rasputin prayed feverishly from 1,000 miles away, prayed so hard that he 'turned gray' and nearly passed out himself. The Tsarevich's internal bleeding, which is the main concern of  hemophilia, stopped abruptly, as Rasputin predicted. Science never explained the episode. It is either a miracle or a coincidence. Rasputin is said to have 'truly loved' small children and animals, despite being a known criminal. Clearly this was a complex man.

All right, okay, enough is enough. I still have work to do today; let's fire this up and see if it works.