What do you tell young writers? A response to Nick Mamatas.

[ken_schneyer]

Although I think of myself as a writer, I am a teacher by trade. The ideal form of education, of course, is to develop the highest intellectual faculties of the students at all times -- to be Socrates to each student. There is an optimistic vision of pedagogy (I first encountered it in Postman & Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity,

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[ken_schneyer]

Interesting! An MFA program has the same pre-screening/master-class characteristics as a writers workshop, so maybe my observations about Clarion etc. apply to that situation as well.

I probably shouldn't have used the word "young" quite so often in the post. My students (I'm not a writing teacher) are mostly 19-to-22, but I have a substantial number in their 30s and 40s. Among both, I observe a similar difficulty with complexity in subjects with which the student is not familiar. Therefore I don't think it's a matter of brain development, but rather of experience with the material.

What we may be talking about, really, is the difference between whether to give advice in the first place, and how one follows that advice once it has been given. As a teacher of college students who submit written exams and papers (not creative writing), I have been driven nearly to distraction by two habits inculcated earlier in their training: The five-paragraph essay and the mirrored short-answer response.
(Sidebar: The "mirrored short-answer response" goes like this:
Question: What are the elements of negligence?
Answer: "The elements of negligence are duty, breach, damages or causation."
This is okay so far as it goes, but it gets used in situations where it makes no sense. For example:
Question: Explain the law that most strongly helps the plaintiff.
Answer: "The law that most strongly helps the plaintiff is this: a person owes a duty of care to all of those who could foreseeably be affected or harmed by the paintiff's actions."

In the latter case, the repetition of the question in the answer serves no function whatsoever, but is useless verbiage that wastes the student's (and the instructor's) time. End of sidebar)

My students use these tools in situations where they are neither helpful nor desired, and they do so because that's what they were taught earlier. It would take serious effort on my part to break them of it (effort I don't expend, because I'm trying to teach them something else altogether).

But I understand that both of these rules were taught to the students in order to develop certain skills and awareness that were/was not yet present. The five-paragraph essay sensitized the learner to the structure of arguments, the need for factual support and logic, the relationship between conclusions and beginnings, etc. The mirrored short answer sensitizes students to the use of actual sentences in their work rather than bullets or fragments. They are, in their time and place, useful and necessary steps.

The problem is not that they were taught in the first place, but that the students don't have the experience (or maybe the wit?) to realize when it's time to abandon or adjust those rules. One sees similar problems among inexperienced people in all areas: the basic principles become commandments rather than starting places. Show undergraduates the racial politics that underpin contemporary culture, and they react not by developing a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay of race, identity and ethics, but by reflexively calling everyone they meet a racist. (Then the press blames what it calls "political correctness" on the instructor who points out the racial politics in the first place, rather than on the intellectual rigidity of college students.)

[Continued in next comment]

[nihilistic_kid]

An MFA program has the same pre-screening/master-class characteristics as a writers workshop

Well, some do, and some don't. Clarion isn't actually all that difficult to get into at all; it's the commitment that keeps people away. Some MFA programs really aren't competitive-they're just small thanks to being out-of-the-way and having non-famous faculty like me. All that said, I've also taught at Grub Street Inc. in Boston, the Writing Salons here in Berkeley, and now online at the UCLA extension-the only screening in these sorts of writer's clubs is that you have to be able to write...a check. And I've not noticed a significant difference in quality of the students at all. Those that read deeply as well as widely are much much better than anyone else; some of them are just loonies and won't ever get anywhere, and most folks just muddle through. Of the three people to whom I've said, "You don't need to workshop this material; you need to submit it," all three have been here in Berkeley. The university and the dot.com economy just attracts smart and careful people who also read obsessively. At least two of my Salon students were Clarion grads who required further instruction.

Therefore I don't think it's a matter of brain development, but rather of experience with the material.

Ah, but any adult with a reasonable shot of being a writer is already familiar with the material-books! Remember, it doesn't take a class of any sort to be a writer-it just takes lots of reading, followed by some writing. The lots of reading should already be in place when a student enters a workshop, and when it isn't, it hardly matters how the advice is structured.

So I would say creative writing pedagogy is different even than composition-though I have enormous problems with the way composition is taught, as the students rarely get more than one or two samples of term papers before writing their own. Imagine a novel-writing workshop in which students who have never read a novel are still kept from reading novels, but rather go to class a few times a week and listen to someone simply describe what novels and the novel-writing process is like. Of course they'd end up slaves to whatever the teacher said, just as those poor five-sentence graf suckers you encounter are.

[ken_schneyer]

Clarion isn't actually all that difficult to get into at all; it's the commitment that keeps people away.

I feel obligated to correct this one, as this is a topic I know something about. Of course "difficult to get into" is a relative thing, but: the self-selection due to the commitment occurs before people apply, and currently the acceptance rate is about 18%. That's on a par with some of the most competitive colleges in the country (e.g., the current rate for my alma mater Wesleyan).

(Of course that rate is high compared to the acceptance rates for stories at magazines, but that's not a sensible comparison, since magazine submission is now easy and cost-free, while application to the workshops involves a fee, a lengthy application form and two stories from applicants who are bidding to spend $5,000 more dollars and six weeks of their lives.)

[nihilistic_kid]

If eighteen percent is the current rate, it certainly isn't the historical rate. In one early 1990s class, 24 people applied for 20 slots. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the acceptance rates I heard most frequently were never less than fifty percent. Clarion West in particular has taken to the blogosphere with promotional efforts and plenty of alumni turned goodwill ambassadors; it's no surprise that this has led to an increase in applications. However, from my reading of recent grad work, I have to say that I suspect that most new applicants aren't handing in very competitive applications. That is, I wouldn't be surprised if the tail is swelling rather than the head. Perhaps four years of economic doldrums has perversely made it easier to dedicate six weeks to a workshop as jobs are scarce and job-hunting often futile?