Learning to Rewrite

[sartorias]

and plagiarism.

Forty years, the needle of guilt--and the smothering pillow of that internal sense of mediocrity--I figure, why not tell this story.

Comments

[steepholm]

Thanks for that. While I admire your professor's honesty, did anyone leave the class feeling other than crushed, do you suppose? Was he really a great writing teacher, or was his medicine purely the preventative variety?

Now I want to know which line from CSL it was...

[sartorias]

I've looked for that line. I just don't remember which book it was in.

Re the prof, there were two or three of the nine or ten students who Got It, and of course got nothing but praise from then on, or else engaged in learned discussions, which in turn made the rest of us feel even more like losers.

Really, that class brought home hard the inescapable truth that passion does not always equate talent.

[coneycat]

Well, I'm glad you didn't let that experience put you off writing entirely. Please tell me the prof at least tried to work with the students who didn't already "get it," rather than just making a little gang of insiders and purposely making everyone else feel like losers. (There are people who believe writing can't be taught. I mostly take exception to that attitude when it is held BY WRITING TEACHERS.)

[sartorias]

Well, looking back, I think he was trying hard to stay neutral, but those of us who didn't get it knew we were losers. It was a whole lot like math. The prof doesn't have to tell you you're stupid (though I had one who did--repeatedly) when you keep getting Fs and everyone around you finishes the work in a tenth of the time and gets As.

[cakmpls]

I meant to comment here, and wound up doing it on the blog--sorry!

“But now I began the long process of comprehending that what is so vivid in your head doesn’t automatically zap into the reader’s head.”

That’s why I don’t write fiction. Had I known, early enough in life, that the possibility existed, I might have tried to write scripts, or maybe even to direct. But I am simply incapable of translating the movie in my head into words and words alone.

[sartorias]

Hey, commenting on the blog is okay!

This is the real struggle for the visual writer, I think. The fun part of being visual is the gift of that movie running through your mind. The struggle is to translate it out into readable prose.

[green_knight]

At least you *have* a movie!

I need to imagine that movie before I can describe it - my readers (including myself) are no less dependent on vivid imagery, but it's not my naive language: for me, 'she was really annoyed with him' conveys what is going on, because I have a mental image of the _feelings_ associated with that. The body language, the gestures: they don't exist in my head unless I work at them.

Strangely enough, I prefer to _read_ books that put me on the spot with vivid description; it just means I need to work harder at providing the same experience to others.

[marycatelli]

Hmm. When I first started writing, the vivid dream was so frustrating because it took so much to get only some of it down.

Nowadays, I find that plunging into the story is so exciting because it fleshes out the dream with all the vivid details.

[kalimac]

Isn't there some way the professor can let you know your writing is inadequate without crushing you into the dust? This isn't the Marines, you know. Sure, there may be some who come roaring back with a determined "I'll show him!" (but will they succeed in doing so? as you point out, passion does not always equal talent), but others may be set back by years or put off altogether. Again, that doesn't mean the alternative is to praise or coddle that which doesn't deserve it! But surely there's a positive way of doing this, to steer the students right instead of just saying wrong wrong wrong all the time.

What intrigues me is your mortal embarrassment on being complimented for something you knew you hadn't written. There's no sense of accomplishment in that, just the awareness that one is a fake. A real plagiarist wouldn't care. The praise is all they want, not the knowledge that they did something, and I suspect they think that everybody's really a fake to some extent.

[sartorias]

For the first, some of it was the way learning was perceived back then--like teaching math, if you didn't get it, you were stupid. Period. Now we know there are differing learning processes, and also, what one perceives as excellent writing isn't excellent to another person

[negothick]

I have never taught "Creative Writing" for college students, nor would I want to. At my institution--and at many others-- some students take the course because they see it as an "easy A"--especially if they've been praised in earlier classrooms that operate on the "We're all above average" principle. In the same section, one might find a budding Sherwood or Delia, but not have enough time to help them because the first group take up all the air.
Grading is another nightmare: if everyone takes it Pass/Fail, that's fine, with failure defined as not completing the assignments. But these days, some MFA program grads believe that grading should simply be on effort: So many poems or pages of prose completed. I can see where that approach would be easier than deciding whether someone's poem rates an "A" or a "C."

[sartorias]

Well, the attitudes toward learning were different then. I don't think given the prevailing climate, that he was a poor teacher at all. He tried and tried to get through to me, but it just wasn't happening--any more than my algebra teachers could get through to me when I flunked Algebra 1 twice.

[muuranker]

A way of reframing this is: it was an exercise in found poetry.

One of the worst things I ever wrote was a found opera libretto (in which a random number generator was used both myself and the composer), and I have only, by reading your post, realise what I should have learned from my experience: found poetry/librettos are a good exercise for those with a well developed internal sense of mediocrity. Because it isn't _your_ words, you are free to think critically about the words you come across, and assess them for their strength in poetry without having the nagging doubt that, because they're your words, they're weak.

[sartorias]

Oh, that's an interesting observation, yes!