Teaching Creative Writing

by ROY COWDEN

1

IN THE course of more than forty years of teaching I have often been asked, “When you teach creative writing, what do you teach?” Books dealing with technique have their function, no doubt, in a course in creative writing, although many of them are filled with matters much too general for the needs of any one writer. The best books to study are the books of prose, prose fiction, and poetry written by the great ones, but even they will not make a writer. The only way to learn to write is to write and write and write and write. Practice is as essential to the great writer as it is to the great violinist. Lack of practice results in the same clogging of the spirit in the one case as in the other. The creative writer must write, and he will find the task easier if he makes a habit of it and it becomes a regular and natural element of his living.

I must now make clear the difference between what looks like writing and what is writing. The story is told of a teacher who once collected the compositions from a roomful of students. Walking to his desk with the papers in his hand, he turned and said, “All of you who care enough for what you have written to wish to have your papers returned to you, please raise your hands.” He waited and waited; and when he saw that no hands were going to be raised, he tossed the papers into the wastebasket saying, “Why should I read them?” Why indeed? Where there is no caring, there is no real writing. If the caring is not there, both the student and the teacher are wasting their time. Even if it is there, it may not result in real writing; but when it does, it will eventually lead the writer to a full recognition of his talent.

A few years ago, a young man sent me several pieces of short fiction. He wished to enter my writing course and he knew I required a look at what he could do before letting him in. A day or two before the first meeting of the class he came to my office to know my verdict. I had read his manuscripts and found them far from promising. As we examined them together, I sensed an unusual degree of tension on his part, and I finally turned to him and said, “How much interested are you in becoming a writer?” Without raising his voice he looked me in the eye and replied, “I’ll starve for it.” In the class he wrote a novel that has been published, and he is now working on another.

As I have already suggested, the caring may be so little that no writing comes from it and the individual lives in a vague unhappiness, often getting a vicarious satisfaction from associating with those who do write. Or it may be strong enough to rouse him to try and he may continue his effort until he becomes aware that he does have a talent for writing, but in the end he finds it easy to lay the writing aside and turn to other interests. The most talented first-year student I ever had took up interior decoration upon graduating. Or the caring may be stronger and the writer may find a publisher for what he has done and be satisfied with the precarious success of his first published work. He may go as far as this without finding out the extent of his capacity. Only the greatest caring can bring the full revelation of a talent.

When the caring is there, one of the concerns of the writer is with the means he is using to attain his ends. He may be troubled about words. He sometimes has the idea that the larger his vocabulary the better his chance to communicate his meaning. He needs to know that communication depends not so much upon the number of words in his vocabulary as on where he places those he does happen to have.

Or the writer may be concerned about the way his sentences are carrying his meaning. He may have noticed that they are sometimes short while his meaning is long. He can be made to see that the repetition of short sentences — cartridge sentences, a writer once called them —may put his thought and feeling in a strait jacket. He should note the effect of long sentences as used in John Donne’s sermons or in Thomas Wolfe’s fiction.

Or he may have become suspicious of figurative expression and feel that his pages are so drenched with the indirect language of metaphor and the half-truths that metaphor conveys that they have lost much of their vitality. The appeal of plain statement to the reader’s imagination as Edwin Arlington Robinson uses it could be pointed out to him. I have always thought it especially alive in his Tristram.

Or, finally, he may be concerned with the general problem of technique, as though technique would solve all his difficulties. It doesn’t occur to him that he may, at a given time, be too conscious of it. Sometimes a student has read so much about the technique of writing that, when he comes to write, all that his mind knows about it stands between his spirit and his pen, and his writing is as tortured and wrinkled and dead as an Egyptian mummy.

Matters such as I have been indicating can be taught and should be taught, but they do not form the central problem in a creative writing course.

I am now back to the original question: “When you teach creative writing, what do you teach?”

My answer is that I help the student to see in a given attempt what it is he wishes to write about and help him to discover and reveal to his reader the writer lying concealed in himself. In practice these two procedures overlap, but I can make myself clearer if I consider them separately. To the first then.

Often the instructor is aware that the young writer is timid. He dreads to know the extent of his own bare capacity. It may not be enough and he does so want to succeed. In the end he may evade the issue and come to hate himself for his weakness. Every young writer is an individualist and the more rugged the better. He does not know himself very well, but he must have the faith, the courage, and the daring to discover himself.

On such a journey his chances of success are best if he does indeed hitch his wagon to a star. No attainment will do except the very highest. Great writers are few in the world, but no writer will do as well as he can unless he aims to be among the great ones. The lift of his desire will have an influence upon his attainment.

Once the young writer has something of this high desire and faith enough to use his capacity, he begins to write, only to find his thoughts and feelings in such a confused if not amorphous state that he is unable to see clearly his own angle of interest. Often that angle is concealed from him under the attitudes of writers whom he admires and whom he will end up by imitating if he does not find himself. In some strange way he has become aware of a meaning and from his subconscious has arisen the desire to communicate it. That desire is his own, and if he will continue to cling to it, it will in time help him to clarify his own sense of the meaning. I am inclined to the belief that latent in the source of his desire lies all that he wishes to communicate. He may never make use of all of it, but it is all there, rounded and waiting like a fertile egg.

Seeking help, the student may try to tell the instructor what it is that he is going to write about, and by so doing he may clarify his meaning and his feeling for it. Much more often his attempts to write it down will help. Many times he will be astonished at the obviousness of his failures and he may fail and fail before he can decide what he means and how he feels about that meaning. I am indicating here a kind of activity on the part of the writer to discover what it is that he has such an urge to communicate. Although the final steps in this procedure may accompany actual writing, the student should not confuse the two.

Before the teacher can be of much use to the young writer groping to find himself, he must realize that no two students are going the same way. Each has his own path to follow, a path peculiar to his own nature, and he must somehow become aware of it. The most vital teaching is likely to come when the instructor who has already been over the manuscript, and the student who has written it, sit down together with the manuscript before them and begin to look at it page by page, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word. In such a conference the desires of the student should be considered above any wishes of the instructor. The instructor may, now and then, see more clearly than the student the way the student wishes to go. Whatever the instructor says or does is of little value unless it helps the student become more aware of himself with a clearer conception of his meaning in his capacity as a writer. I keep thinking of Flaubert and Madame Bovary. He saw so clearly what he wished to do. His difficulty lay in communicating what he saw. When the student can feel his own meaning so sharply that he knows when he is thinking about it, he is ready to try to communicate it.

2

I FIND that it takes the young writer a long time to become aware of what language really is as a medium of communication. He thinks he should be able to put down his meaning at once and be done with it, and he puts it down and releases his feeling for it in language that is meaningless to anyone else. He has to learn that he can load almost any form of words with his meaning and be expressing himself but communicating nothing. He has to learn that language has grown naturally out of the human need to communicate, that it belongs to all those who use it and its communicative capacities have developed to meet the general need, that it is most alive when it comes off the tongue supported as it always is by the look and action of the speaker, that the tongue use of it is universal but the written use of it is relatively rare. Be must come to see that the tongue use is filled with clichés which are the common counters best serving the general need. Words and phrases that come off his tongue made alive by the living presence of himself become on paper dead transcriptions. Somehow he must overcome the capacity of words to remain dead symbols of meaning as they are in the dictionary. He must breathe life into them as he sets them on paper.

It is difficult for a young writer to see that he is in conflict with his medium. The language has never before been asked to do what he is asking of it and it becomes at once his enemy. It will have nothing to do with his meaning, and it will defy him at every turn. The conflict here between the writer and the language is unlike the struggle the writer has already been through to find out what he wished to communicate. The difference lies in this: that he now sees clearly what Ids essential meaning is and is aware of his feeling for it. He is facing a conflict similar to the one Flaubert engaged in so stubbornly in writing his great novel.

How may a teacher be useful in such a struggle? He can at first point out that only when a writer has something down on paper is he in a position to judge his control of the language. The student puts his thought on paper and hands his manuscript to his instructor. At their conference the teacher asks him if he has any questions to raise about his work. If the student is one who has only recently begun to take his writing seriously, he usually has so little objectivity toward what he has done that he has no questions and is content with the result of his effort. He is, however, eager to have his instructor share with him his feeling of accomplishment. The teacher reads one of the sentences in the manuscript before him and gives the meaning he takes from it. The student is shocked. Be had not seen that meaning in what he had written. The teacher points out that the meaning he has taken is the obvious one any reader would take rather than the one the student intended. The conference continues, the instructor touching upon words, phrases, and sentences that fail to carry the writer’s meaning. I have known a student at the end of a conference to pick up his manuscript and say, “I shall try again. Why is it that most of what I have written is not what I want?” Once more the language has successfully defied a writer.

When the student has finally written something having in it an expression here and there that has come from the right place in himself, he may still be unaware of the fact and have to be told. He then shares with his instructor the excitement and the pleasure in feeling the strange new touch of his own way. Once he begins to recognize himself on paper, he is on his way to a development of a style of his own which is not as Buffon once said the man himself, but only the man who writes.

At this point the instructor may again be helpful. He must not permit the student to think his first victory over the language is a final attainment. Over and over again as the young writer continues his effort, he loses the intimate contact with his meaning so necessary for his success, and what he writes is not his own. The instructor, since he is in the more objective position, is likely to see these failures before the writer does. Many times he finds himself saying, “That way is not yours. I could have written what you have here as easily as you have. It is everybody’s language. How would you put it?”

The struggle must continue, and the writer will emerge victorious only through a series of evolutions of communication each of which has in it elements of failure until his own intimate feeling for his meaning takes full control and he does at last bend the language to his peculiar need.

Once he has won his first real victory with the language, if he is wise he will never let himself do less, but he will find that each time he tries to put his own meaning down in writing, the language stands cold and aloof, challenging him to beat it again. One of the best examples of this struggle that I have ever happened upon is in the following excerpt from a letter of Cardinal Newman to Mrs. John Morley in 1838. In this letter he is considering his difficulties in doing his manuscript oil Justification. He says: “I write, I write again, I write a third time in the course of six months. Then I take the third: I literally fill the paper with corrections, so that another person could not read it. I then write it out fair for the printer. I put it by: I take it up. I begin to correct again: it will not do. Alterations multiply, pages are re-written, little lines sneak in and crawl about. The whole page is disfigured: I write again. I cannot count how many times this process is repeated.” It will be remembered that Newman is the man whom Walter Pater once called the perfect essayist.

To help the student to discover himself and his own thought, to help him put down on paper and recognize his own private vision of a meaning, is to me sufficient justification for the teacher of creative writing. I have sat beside a student with his manuscript, of a lyric before us and watched him discover that only in a phrase or two has he managed to force the language to catch the magic of himself. And I have seen him take the manuscript away and bring it back again and again until his way has dominated the language and he has possessed his own poem. For the teacher, here lies the ultimate delight.