Workshop #9 was about many things, in truth, and the largest part of the class was given over the peer editing. This actually went better than usual, because I gave them detailed questionnaires to fill out about the stories--no matter how many times I told them "Really great!" was not a constructive comment, they were insisting on using it before. In fact, although none of the questions I asked on the sheet could grammatically be answered with "Really great!" some of them persisted in putting it anyway, in response to things like "What part of the story did you like best?" and "What parts did you find confusing?"
Anyway, it went well (I made them erase all the "Really greats!"s that I saw) and I think a lot of the kids got a lot out of it. But maybe you can tell from the above that I'm having a bit of a tough time this semester, and I don't at all think the whippersnappers are at fault. I think they don't want to write stories, most of'em, and heaven help us, that is a defensible position.
So part of Thursday's class was spent brainstorming how story-writing works as a transferable skill--how learning to write a short story full of characters and problems and settings and emotions--could help them in a job that would (I don't know why I didn't guess this would be a high priority in a low-income area) pay them a living wage.
It is the luxury of the middle-class to go to school hoping to expand one's mind and interests and range of friends and readings. Kids in precarious financial situations want the value-add, the curriculum correlation, the job skill in their lessons, because the need to get that damn job looms large. And they don't necessarily see the use in learning to write fiction. In fact, one of my students actually announced this in class--a low point for me.
I like to write stories because I like to write stories--full stop. It's fun for me, and every now and then I get a little bit of attention or praise or money for doing it, and that's enough for me. But I actually think writing helps me in every other facet of my life, too, and I was eager to tell them that--I thought they might really not know.
It seemed, though, as soon as I asked the question, that everyone *did* know how stories could help them. They brainstormed the following list:
teacher
editor
journalist
police officer (every class mentioned this one)
doctor
lawyer
social worker
They also put secretary, which I didn't get, but whatever--it's a really good list.
They were a bit weaker when I asked "Why do these people need to know how to tell a story?" The three are obvious (how is a teacher or an editor going to recognize good work if she/he can't create good work, and journos do pretty much the same thing as fictos, only with the truth). What else? I asked. "They gotta write reports," was the answer.
Absolutely, of course--being able to write a coherent narrative of events or issues, not a list or a sketch, is so important in many roles, persuasive or otherwise.
But I think one of the reasons that so many of the jobs listed are so-called "caring" professions--because it if you are going to work with people, you need to be able to make a good solid leap towards understanding other people's points of view. What use is a doctor who cannot guess how a patient is feeling when in pain and be sensitive, or how someone will react to bad news. How can a social worker help kids or families in trouble if she or he can't imagine what they are going through?
I think too much emphasis on imaginary people could be a problem, sure, but too little attempt to imagine how it feels to be someone not-me, to get out of my own upbringing and situation and likes and dislikes and education and tolerances, can make it really hard to relate to anyone. Empathy helps life go on, and in many many jobs, a lack of it means you can't do you work.
Obviously, I could stand to improve this facility even more--to have known earlier in the semester that the kids wouldn't automatically see the links and extensions from my lessons, that I would have to *tell* them that I wasn't trying to train them to be writers but rather to train them to be people who could see a story from any angle, and find a story anywhere.
Someone complimented me recently on a story recently, and I said I greatly appreciated the compliment (I did!) because the piece had been very very hard to work on. He said of course, because it was so technically complex.
I was startled for a moment--I had meant that the emotions and events in the story were hard to deal with, and was about to say so, when I realized that we meant the same thing. There is only one way to express emotions, or anything else, in writing, and that is with words on a page, rhetorical devices, pacing and vocabulary, foreshadowing and description, all the skills I've been trying to teach the youngins. The story's emotion doesn't exist separate from my ability to tell it--just like so much of what doctors and teachers and advertisers tell us exists only in their words. So we'd better make it good.
I am really going to miss my smarty-pants students, though I doubt they'll miss me. A kid I like, who has been really alienated lately, was staring at the wall when I described how the last class would be organized. I could have sworn he wasn't listening at all, but when I asked if there were questions, he raised his hand and asked, "Did you say *cookies*?" I said yes, I plan to bake cookies for the last class, and he grinned.
I was pleased, not only because he'd was pleased, but because if he'd caught the word "cookies" buried in all that other stuff, he might have actually *heard* some of the other stuff. But I don't know--in truth, I have no idea what he was thinking.
RR
Showing posts with label Teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teaching. Show all posts
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
On Nostalgia and Homogeniety
AMT wrote a wistful post on nostalgia, which fit in perfectly with the current theme of my days lately, which is trying to remember what it feels like to be a teenager.
I keep thinking I do--all eager and nervous and twitchy and stuff--and then I realize that's me now. It is so hard to recall how you felt/acted/thought back when you were a different person, particularly if you don't think that person was all that different than your present day self.
But we are--I am pretty sure, though hazy, on this: people change more than they realize, and the parts of themselves they forget tend to be the ones that differ the most from the present day. This impression comes from having talked to a wide variety of people over the years, none of whom can recall being on top in high school. Everyone was teased, persecuted, trod upon, lonely and alone. I have rarely met anyone who says they were more or less fine in high school, and never to having been the sort of jerk that is more than fine and makes others feel bad about it--or wings French fries at their heads. Apparently, that's the sort of thing you rinse out of your consciousness when you hit your 20s.
So I'm going to come right and make this bold pronouncement, nearly damning for a writer: I was ok with high school. It was not the best 5 years of my life, but I had some fun, some good friends, some good teachers, learned some stuff. I vaguely recall being teased in grade 9 for wearing a ballet top I bought at the Bay (I still have it) and I certainly never got invited to the coolest parties, but...so? It would've been weird if kids I didn't know invited me to their parties, and anyway, I lived way out in the country and my dad would never have driven me. I hung around with folks I liked, ate lunch with them in the hall by the auto shops, edited the yearbook, and was left largely alone by everyone else.
I seriously worry this makes me a less interesting person to some people, which in itself is such a high school thought.
I am trying to get these memories back because I want to be able to "get" what is going on with my students. One of the hardest things to remember is conformity. It has been a very long time since I worried seriously about the ways I deviate from the status quo. I am not much of a rebel--I think I'm naturally a lot like the status quo--but not entirely, and who cares?
One of the great perks of one's twenties as that there are so many different things to do and ways to live that it's very hard to even *find* a standard to try to conform to. I know people who stayed in school for a decade straight after graduating high school, people who found jobs first and went to school when they could afford it, who dropped out immediately and those who never studied formally again after high school grad. I know people who married immediately after high school, after college, after travelling through Europe, after 6 or 10 or 2 years of dating, or barely any time at all. I know people who are politically opposed to marriage, who were fervently delighted when Canada legalized same-sex marriage, and those for whom the whole institution seems irrelevant. Friends my own age have kids in school, kids in diapers, kids in utero, cats, dogs, houseplants and (only one) guinea pig. People are cheerfully devoted to their jobs, wrathfully alienated from their jobs, climbing the corporate ladder, unemployed, underemployed, fascinated by their work or terrified of it. I know homeowners, couchsurfers (ok, we're getting a little old for that), rooming-housers, apartment dwellers, parental-home dwellers, and perpetual travellers. I know people who think of poverty as only one car, and people who think of wealth as ordering dessert.
How am I supposed to conform to that? I can't, so I don't worry about it (and feel happy I have such interesting friends). What makes conformity an issue in high school, I think, is that by nature of the age you have a certain amount of it. Almost everyone lives with their parents, has to be at school at a certain time, takes basically the same classes, and, due to how neighbourhoods tend to work, has basically the same amount of money. They are limited in who they meet beyond their families and classmates, and exposed to a tonne of marketing about music, movies, and fashion, not to mention fastfood, cosmetics, etc.
Even when I was a weird kid, I had basically the same sort of shoes as everyone else--not exactly, and believe me everyone knew it, but I did in fact like a lot of what everyone else liked. There was not much else available to like--not that I knew of, anyway--and those Birkenstocky sandals *were* very nice.
It is actually not that hard to recall that perfectly natural assimilatory instinct--I want clothes I see people wearing on the bus all the time. But it is harder to transer that into the classroom, where kids are reluctant to raise their hands, share their ideas, read their work, or even admit to liking something, if they do not already have pre-approval from their peers. In some ways, me being really impressed with a particular student's work is no joy for them, because it singles them out. There's nothing more depressing than realizing that your too-loud compliment is being met with a glare, and you might not be seeing any more of this student's so-good work. Argh.
This does seem to fade with the older kids--they're happier to talk about what makes them/their work unique. They're closer to their twenties, and the point in your life where it is not only acceptable, but desirable (positively ravenously so, at certain university parties) to be a touch odd.
Another weird part of my nostalgia is wondering if the decade without a status quo is coming to an end. I wonder because this nostalgic thinking led me check the Facebook profiles of a bunch of people I knew in high school (oh, what did we do with our creepy stalker tendencies before Facebook?) It's actually really hard to tell what people are up to with the standard privacy settings, but two things I can tell you are popular are getting married and having babies--almost everyone's profile picture was a wedding shot/ultrasound/baby pic. Intense.
The difference between grown-upitude and high school, of course, is that people care less what others do--both because they are more tolerant and openminded, and because they don't have a lot of time to invest in writing a mean little song about some other adult's lack of real estate savvy or whatever. But I'm trying to experiment with feeling a little bad about the ways I'm weird anyway--I thought it might bring me closer to my students.
I keep thinking I do--all eager and nervous and twitchy and stuff--and then I realize that's me now. It is so hard to recall how you felt/acted/thought back when you were a different person, particularly if you don't think that person was all that different than your present day self.
But we are--I am pretty sure, though hazy, on this: people change more than they realize, and the parts of themselves they forget tend to be the ones that differ the most from the present day. This impression comes from having talked to a wide variety of people over the years, none of whom can recall being on top in high school. Everyone was teased, persecuted, trod upon, lonely and alone. I have rarely met anyone who says they were more or less fine in high school, and never to having been the sort of jerk that is more than fine and makes others feel bad about it--or wings French fries at their heads. Apparently, that's the sort of thing you rinse out of your consciousness when you hit your 20s.
So I'm going to come right and make this bold pronouncement, nearly damning for a writer: I was ok with high school. It was not the best 5 years of my life, but I had some fun, some good friends, some good teachers, learned some stuff. I vaguely recall being teased in grade 9 for wearing a ballet top I bought at the Bay (I still have it) and I certainly never got invited to the coolest parties, but...so? It would've been weird if kids I didn't know invited me to their parties, and anyway, I lived way out in the country and my dad would never have driven me. I hung around with folks I liked, ate lunch with them in the hall by the auto shops, edited the yearbook, and was left largely alone by everyone else.
I seriously worry this makes me a less interesting person to some people, which in itself is such a high school thought.
I am trying to get these memories back because I want to be able to "get" what is going on with my students. One of the hardest things to remember is conformity. It has been a very long time since I worried seriously about the ways I deviate from the status quo. I am not much of a rebel--I think I'm naturally a lot like the status quo--but not entirely, and who cares?
One of the great perks of one's twenties as that there are so many different things to do and ways to live that it's very hard to even *find* a standard to try to conform to. I know people who stayed in school for a decade straight after graduating high school, people who found jobs first and went to school when they could afford it, who dropped out immediately and those who never studied formally again after high school grad. I know people who married immediately after high school, after college, after travelling through Europe, after 6 or 10 or 2 years of dating, or barely any time at all. I know people who are politically opposed to marriage, who were fervently delighted when Canada legalized same-sex marriage, and those for whom the whole institution seems irrelevant. Friends my own age have kids in school, kids in diapers, kids in utero, cats, dogs, houseplants and (only one) guinea pig. People are cheerfully devoted to their jobs, wrathfully alienated from their jobs, climbing the corporate ladder, unemployed, underemployed, fascinated by their work or terrified of it. I know homeowners, couchsurfers (ok, we're getting a little old for that), rooming-housers, apartment dwellers, parental-home dwellers, and perpetual travellers. I know people who think of poverty as only one car, and people who think of wealth as ordering dessert.
How am I supposed to conform to that? I can't, so I don't worry about it (and feel happy I have such interesting friends). What makes conformity an issue in high school, I think, is that by nature of the age you have a certain amount of it. Almost everyone lives with their parents, has to be at school at a certain time, takes basically the same classes, and, due to how neighbourhoods tend to work, has basically the same amount of money. They are limited in who they meet beyond their families and classmates, and exposed to a tonne of marketing about music, movies, and fashion, not to mention fastfood, cosmetics, etc.
Even when I was a weird kid, I had basically the same sort of shoes as everyone else--not exactly, and believe me everyone knew it, but I did in fact like a lot of what everyone else liked. There was not much else available to like--not that I knew of, anyway--and those Birkenstocky sandals *were* very nice.
It is actually not that hard to recall that perfectly natural assimilatory instinct--I want clothes I see people wearing on the bus all the time. But it is harder to transer that into the classroom, where kids are reluctant to raise their hands, share their ideas, read their work, or even admit to liking something, if they do not already have pre-approval from their peers. In some ways, me being really impressed with a particular student's work is no joy for them, because it singles them out. There's nothing more depressing than realizing that your too-loud compliment is being met with a glare, and you might not be seeing any more of this student's so-good work. Argh.
This does seem to fade with the older kids--they're happier to talk about what makes them/their work unique. They're closer to their twenties, and the point in your life where it is not only acceptable, but desirable (positively ravenously so, at certain university parties) to be a touch odd.
Another weird part of my nostalgia is wondering if the decade without a status quo is coming to an end. I wonder because this nostalgic thinking led me check the Facebook profiles of a bunch of people I knew in high school (oh, what did we do with our creepy stalker tendencies before Facebook?) It's actually really hard to tell what people are up to with the standard privacy settings, but two things I can tell you are popular are getting married and having babies--almost everyone's profile picture was a wedding shot/ultrasound/baby pic. Intense.
The difference between grown-upitude and high school, of course, is that people care less what others do--both because they are more tolerant and openminded, and because they don't have a lot of time to invest in writing a mean little song about some other adult's lack of real estate savvy or whatever. But I'm trying to experiment with feeling a little bad about the ways I'm weird anyway--I thought it might bring me closer to my students.
This is definitely a very odd thought experiment. Thanks for reading.
RR
Monday, April 19, 2010
Workshop #7: Grammar
Workshop #7 was actually mainly about Images and Imagist poems, as I think I mentioned somewhere earlier, but we actually covered lots of other ground. Although it is really outside of my purview as the creative-writing person, I snuck in a grammar lesson. I really really want them to stop smudging stellar work with dumb grammar mistakes. I also want to put my foot down with the kids who say they are not "good" at grammar.
I think so many of these rules are like learning the multiplication tables or the provincial capitals--either you had a good teacher in grade 3 who made you memorize them, or you didn't... The teacher I'm working with certainly does give some excellent grammar lessons, but the kids seem to have a deficit of years. You can get by in conversation a lot of the time--maybe always, depending on what career you choose--just by listening to how others talk and emmulating them, without knowing most of the rules of grammar. But it is much much harder to get written grammar in this way, especially for kids who don't read except one forced. Lovely as it is to get self-righteous and say that reading for pleasure is a gift and parents just have to show kids blah blah blah, it doesn't always happen. This is also an issue for kids who grow in homes where English is not the first language. They might hear tonnes of very erudite conversation, read books and watch high-end tv (or they might not), but if it's not in English, it's not helping them with their grammar.
So schools don't teach grammar (I guess I can't generalize, but mine certainly didn't and I don't know anyone else who learned English grammar in a systematic manner--do you?), and kids don't always have the opportunity to pick it up elsewhere, and I end up with bright, engaged, insightful students who write things like, "She weared her prettiest dress," and were genuinely startled to find out the past tense of "to lie down" is "to lay down."
I am into good grammar, but I'm not fanatical about it--I roll my eyes when the grocer advertises "fresh" fish, but c'mon, do I know how to fillet a pickerel? He has his knowledge base and I have mine, and as long as we can understand each other, I don't see myself as being in the position to make further demands. Chefs can't make me stop putting barbeque sauce on my salad, and personal trainers can't stop me from over-emphasizing cardio in my workouts, and fashion designers can't make me stop wearing those turquoise fishnets I bought for $3 and which don't fit...we can't all be experts in everything, and sometimes, we don't even want to be.
I am in favour of good grammar the way I am in favour of good etiquette--not as an end in itself, or as a stick to beat people with, but as a means of facilitating clear communication and conveying respect to the reader/person you are speaking to. Setting the table neatly shows care for your dinner guest's ease and pleasure of dining. Yes, he could probably have gone and found a fork in the kitchen, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and yes, you do know what I mean when I say "I teared it open", but it's just that much more confusing, difficult, and less fun.
In class last week, I told the kids, "No one ever won a Nobel Prize for grammar": it's just a tool to get your point across. But they really need to get the tool--it makes their (good) work so inaccessible when I have to puzzle over when it takes place because the tenses are inconsistent, or who did what because the pronouns don't match. I told them also that grammar is *not* a smart/dumb issue--if you've had less exposure to it, you know less, and it's annoying that you have to make up for that, but all they need to do is sit down and memorize this stuff. Unfortunately, if they don't bother, they will *look* dumb--I hope it wasn't inappropriate to use that phrase with my students. Grammatical errors, being mainly simple and easily avoided if you just memorize the rules, look like they are made by dumb people when, in fact, they are mainly made by lazy people.
And then we did a bunch of conjugations and they had to copy things down off the board and everything--it was way old school. I hope it helped. I really think that good grammar will make their lives a lot easier--on resumes and cover letters, on school papers, work emails--people respect good grammar, because reading it is a lot easier than reading garbled stuff, and clean writing conveys respect for the reader.
All that said, in my little heart, I love language rules and am always eager to learn a new one, and to discuss and debate their usefulness and implications. I could talk your ear off about transitive and intransitive verbs, a topic very few people know about and yet very few people get it wrong in everyday writings. I don't get to be smug, despite my copyediting classes and fervent adherence to the Chicago Manual of Style--I make tonnes of sloppy mistakes on this blog (as you likely well know) and in many other scarier places. The trick is not to just know a lot of stuff about grammar, but to know enough grammar to make clear all the other stuff you know.
RR
I think so many of these rules are like learning the multiplication tables or the provincial capitals--either you had a good teacher in grade 3 who made you memorize them, or you didn't... The teacher I'm working with certainly does give some excellent grammar lessons, but the kids seem to have a deficit of years. You can get by in conversation a lot of the time--maybe always, depending on what career you choose--just by listening to how others talk and emmulating them, without knowing most of the rules of grammar. But it is much much harder to get written grammar in this way, especially for kids who don't read except one forced. Lovely as it is to get self-righteous and say that reading for pleasure is a gift and parents just have to show kids blah blah blah, it doesn't always happen. This is also an issue for kids who grow in homes where English is not the first language. They might hear tonnes of very erudite conversation, read books and watch high-end tv (or they might not), but if it's not in English, it's not helping them with their grammar.
So schools don't teach grammar (I guess I can't generalize, but mine certainly didn't and I don't know anyone else who learned English grammar in a systematic manner--do you?), and kids don't always have the opportunity to pick it up elsewhere, and I end up with bright, engaged, insightful students who write things like, "She weared her prettiest dress," and were genuinely startled to find out the past tense of "to lie down" is "to lay down."
I am into good grammar, but I'm not fanatical about it--I roll my eyes when the grocer advertises "fresh" fish, but c'mon, do I know how to fillet a pickerel? He has his knowledge base and I have mine, and as long as we can understand each other, I don't see myself as being in the position to make further demands. Chefs can't make me stop putting barbeque sauce on my salad, and personal trainers can't stop me from over-emphasizing cardio in my workouts, and fashion designers can't make me stop wearing those turquoise fishnets I bought for $3 and which don't fit...we can't all be experts in everything, and sometimes, we don't even want to be.
I am in favour of good grammar the way I am in favour of good etiquette--not as an end in itself, or as a stick to beat people with, but as a means of facilitating clear communication and conveying respect to the reader/person you are speaking to. Setting the table neatly shows care for your dinner guest's ease and pleasure of dining. Yes, he could probably have gone and found a fork in the kitchen, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and yes, you do know what I mean when I say "I teared it open", but it's just that much more confusing, difficult, and less fun.
In class last week, I told the kids, "No one ever won a Nobel Prize for grammar": it's just a tool to get your point across. But they really need to get the tool--it makes their (good) work so inaccessible when I have to puzzle over when it takes place because the tenses are inconsistent, or who did what because the pronouns don't match. I told them also that grammar is *not* a smart/dumb issue--if you've had less exposure to it, you know less, and it's annoying that you have to make up for that, but all they need to do is sit down and memorize this stuff. Unfortunately, if they don't bother, they will *look* dumb--I hope it wasn't inappropriate to use that phrase with my students. Grammatical errors, being mainly simple and easily avoided if you just memorize the rules, look like they are made by dumb people when, in fact, they are mainly made by lazy people.
And then we did a bunch of conjugations and they had to copy things down off the board and everything--it was way old school. I hope it helped. I really think that good grammar will make their lives a lot easier--on resumes and cover letters, on school papers, work emails--people respect good grammar, because reading it is a lot easier than reading garbled stuff, and clean writing conveys respect for the reader.
All that said, in my little heart, I love language rules and am always eager to learn a new one, and to discuss and debate their usefulness and implications. I could talk your ear off about transitive and intransitive verbs, a topic very few people know about and yet very few people get it wrong in everyday writings. I don't get to be smug, despite my copyediting classes and fervent adherence to the Chicago Manual of Style--I make tonnes of sloppy mistakes on this blog (as you likely well know) and in many other scarier places. The trick is not to just know a lot of stuff about grammar, but to know enough grammar to make clear all the other stuff you know.
RR
Saturday, April 10, 2010
April is Poetry Month
But you knew that, I'm sure, and are probably well into a much-more-organized-than-mine celebration. But nevertheless, I am enjoying the poetic focus right now, reading the John Smith tribute issue of CNQ and Paul Vermeersch's Between the Walls (ok, so I read that at the end of March, but I'm still going to count it). Right now I'm in the middle of Skim by Mariko Tamaki, which is not poetry but a graphic novel, and also absolutely captivating (and funny!) so far (I knew it would be--not sure what took me so long to get to actually reading it!) But after that, it's back to poetry with The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley, another book everyone but me has already read and loved.
Also this week, I'm thinking I'll do a poetry class with the teens. The teacher recommended it, and if I weren't such a chicken it should have already been on the slate. But I'm actually really worried about this, because I am not a poet. I've studied loads poetry, mind, but I very much doubt what the kids want is help with scansion. They would like to know how to write the stuff--or really, since they are teens, they are probably already writing it and just want to get better. But I don't know that I know about that.
I think the easiest way into poetry is the Imagists. It was for me anyway--I think The Red Wheelbarrow was the first poem I really really *felt*--it didn't feel like an inept teen half-guessing at an erudite writer's goals, but like the poem was there to paint a picture in my head and it did that. Anyway, it's a happy memory for me, so I'm gonna try out some of that stuff on them, and use it as an opportunity to talk about finding the single *right* word, not 17 close-enough, out-of-the-thesaurus words (a problem my students are having. Let me know if you have any recommendations, even if they're not from that particular movement--my students aren't too fussy that way, and neither am I.
And one more bit of poetic news is that I received an absolutely lovely illustrated copy of Hillaire Belloc's *Cautionary Tales* as a gift this week, from someone who likely has no idea that it's Poetry Month, but it does nicely suit. I haven't read the whole of it yet, but as soon as I saw the title in the table of contents, of course I read this one (the poet's been dead more than 50 years, so I'm not violating copyright by sharing this, am I?) It's best read *aloud*!
Rebecca
Who slammed Doors for Fun
and Perished Miserably
A trick that everyone abhors
In Little Girls is slamming Doors.
A Wealthy Banker's Little Daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this Furious Sport.
She would deliberately go
And Slam the door like Billy-Ho!
To make her Uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild:
She was an aggravating child...
It happened that a Marble Bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the Door this little Lamb
Had carefully prepared to Slam,
And Down it cam! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.
*
Her funeral Sermon (which was long
And followed by a Sacred Song)
Mentioned her Virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her Vices too,
And showed the Dreadful End of One
Who goes and slams the door for Fun.
*
The children who were brought to hear
The awful Tale from far and near
Were much impressed, and inly swore
They never more would slam the Door.
--As often they had done before.
RR
Also this week, I'm thinking I'll do a poetry class with the teens. The teacher recommended it, and if I weren't such a chicken it should have already been on the slate. But I'm actually really worried about this, because I am not a poet. I've studied loads poetry, mind, but I very much doubt what the kids want is help with scansion. They would like to know how to write the stuff--or really, since they are teens, they are probably already writing it and just want to get better. But I don't know that I know about that.
I think the easiest way into poetry is the Imagists. It was for me anyway--I think The Red Wheelbarrow was the first poem I really really *felt*--it didn't feel like an inept teen half-guessing at an erudite writer's goals, but like the poem was there to paint a picture in my head and it did that. Anyway, it's a happy memory for me, so I'm gonna try out some of that stuff on them, and use it as an opportunity to talk about finding the single *right* word, not 17 close-enough, out-of-the-thesaurus words (a problem my students are having. Let me know if you have any recommendations, even if they're not from that particular movement--my students aren't too fussy that way, and neither am I.
And one more bit of poetic news is that I received an absolutely lovely illustrated copy of Hillaire Belloc's *Cautionary Tales* as a gift this week, from someone who likely has no idea that it's Poetry Month, but it does nicely suit. I haven't read the whole of it yet, but as soon as I saw the title in the table of contents, of course I read this one (the poet's been dead more than 50 years, so I'm not violating copyright by sharing this, am I?) It's best read *aloud*!
Rebecca
Who slammed Doors for Fun
and Perished Miserably
A trick that everyone abhors
In Little Girls is slamming Doors.
A Wealthy Banker's Little Daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this Furious Sport.
She would deliberately go
And Slam the door like Billy-Ho!
To make her Uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild:
She was an aggravating child...
It happened that a Marble Bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the Door this little Lamb
Had carefully prepared to Slam,
And Down it cam! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.
*
Her funeral Sermon (which was long
And followed by a Sacred Song)
Mentioned her Virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her Vices too,
And showed the Dreadful End of One
Who goes and slams the door for Fun.
*
The children who were brought to hear
The awful Tale from far and near
Were much impressed, and inly swore
They never more would slam the Door.
--As often they had done before.
RR
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Workshop #6--Dialogue
When I taught creative writing for the first time, last year, I didn't teach dialogue. I claimed to have run out of time, and more or less had, but in truth I didn't shift the schedule to accomdate dialogue because I had no idea how to teach it.
I think it's inappropriate to relay compliments about myself, but a number of people have told me I write dialogue well, and most of the time I believe them. It seems logical that I would be good at it, since I love it! Definitely I've found that the things I find fun are also the things I can do well, but I've also find that people who are good at things can't teach them. Did you ever have your math-brained friend try to tutor you in algebra? It's horrible, right? Because they keeps saying like, "ok, and obviously the vector would go this way," and they actually have no way of explaining it if its not obvious to you. Mathy people's brains make too many math leaps and they can't retrace their steps for someone whose own brain doesn't leap.
What you want is a teacher who struggled and struggled and struggled with something, and eventually achieved some (possibly low) level of mastery. That person remembers every step of the process and is able to explain it clearly to the novice--a teacher that remembers what it is like to learn. Which is why I think my most useful lessons are on plot structure or self-editing or things of that nature--I struggle with those still, and my memories of my learning process are as recent as last night, so I can bring the kids some very well-rehearsed tips.
I am not saying I've "got" dialogue or am not constantly trying to improve--certainly I am, and there's plenty of room to do so. But dialogue is the fun part for me and I do bounce along more easily with that stuff than anything. And it's really hard to say why or how!
But for my students, I'll try. Start with the thing that every creative writing teacher--and anyone who has even heard of the process of creative writing--would advise is that if you want to write dialogue, listen to people talking. Absolutely! And not just your friends--listen to as wide a range as possible. Eavesdrop in restaurants and on transit. Make note of how people use certain words and how they vary--dresser or bureau? Snow machine or skidoo? "Bay-gal" or "bag-el"?
Of course, the flip side of this is that really good, really readable fictional speech is highly stylized, and if you use real speech to convey character you would need the length 0f an evening (a whole first date!) to catch an even slightly accurate portrait. I don't take notes and don't record--indeed, I never quote directly from strangers. When I listen, I just want to get the rhythms of their speech, turns of phrase, that sort of thing.
What to leave out? Sneezes, burps, apologies for dropping things on the floor, long descriptions of what a mutual friend is up to, repititions, speakers losing their place in the story for no reason, giving of directions, self-absorbed monologuing (unless it both a. reveals a lot of character and b. is funny), conversations about the weather that are actually about the weather, way-too-plot-heavy-garbage (some people probably actually say, "I don't think you love me anymore, Bruno. I think you have played me false" but they do not need to be immortalized in fiction).
In short: dialogue in realist fiction is *like* real speech, but *better*. So I brought hyper hyper stylist stuff--Pirandello, Beckett, Abbott and Costello. Oh, and it was funny stuff, too, at least in my opinion. I'm finding that the students feel the weight of "writing a story" really a lot--I wanted to remind them there's supposed to be some entertainment value here.
And then I taught them how to punctuation dialogue and then...well, it was a short day so then we were out of time, but that was pretty much all I had anyway. How *do* you teach dialogue?
RR
I think it's inappropriate to relay compliments about myself, but a number of people have told me I write dialogue well, and most of the time I believe them. It seems logical that I would be good at it, since I love it! Definitely I've found that the things I find fun are also the things I can do well, but I've also find that people who are good at things can't teach them. Did you ever have your math-brained friend try to tutor you in algebra? It's horrible, right? Because they keeps saying like, "ok, and obviously the vector would go this way," and they actually have no way of explaining it if its not obvious to you. Mathy people's brains make too many math leaps and they can't retrace their steps for someone whose own brain doesn't leap.
What you want is a teacher who struggled and struggled and struggled with something, and eventually achieved some (possibly low) level of mastery. That person remembers every step of the process and is able to explain it clearly to the novice--a teacher that remembers what it is like to learn. Which is why I think my most useful lessons are on plot structure or self-editing or things of that nature--I struggle with those still, and my memories of my learning process are as recent as last night, so I can bring the kids some very well-rehearsed tips.
I am not saying I've "got" dialogue or am not constantly trying to improve--certainly I am, and there's plenty of room to do so. But dialogue is the fun part for me and I do bounce along more easily with that stuff than anything. And it's really hard to say why or how!
But for my students, I'll try. Start with the thing that every creative writing teacher--and anyone who has even heard of the process of creative writing--would advise is that if you want to write dialogue, listen to people talking. Absolutely! And not just your friends--listen to as wide a range as possible. Eavesdrop in restaurants and on transit. Make note of how people use certain words and how they vary--dresser or bureau? Snow machine or skidoo? "Bay-gal" or "bag-el"?
Of course, the flip side of this is that really good, really readable fictional speech is highly stylized, and if you use real speech to convey character you would need the length 0f an evening (a whole first date!) to catch an even slightly accurate portrait. I don't take notes and don't record--indeed, I never quote directly from strangers. When I listen, I just want to get the rhythms of their speech, turns of phrase, that sort of thing.
What to leave out? Sneezes, burps, apologies for dropping things on the floor, long descriptions of what a mutual friend is up to, repititions, speakers losing their place in the story for no reason, giving of directions, self-absorbed monologuing (unless it both a. reveals a lot of character and b. is funny), conversations about the weather that are actually about the weather, way-too-plot-heavy-garbage (some people probably actually say, "I don't think you love me anymore, Bruno. I think you have played me false" but they do not need to be immortalized in fiction).
In short: dialogue in realist fiction is *like* real speech, but *better*. So I brought hyper hyper stylist stuff--Pirandello, Beckett, Abbott and Costello. Oh, and it was funny stuff, too, at least in my opinion. I'm finding that the students feel the weight of "writing a story" really a lot--I wanted to remind them there's supposed to be some entertainment value here.
And then I taught them how to punctuation dialogue and then...well, it was a short day so then we were out of time, but that was pretty much all I had anyway. How *do* you teach dialogue?
RR
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Workshop #5: Writing about the senses
Something weird has been happening to me--my senses are getting sharper! Not vision, unfortunately; a few days ago, I took my contacts out and then mistook an empty toilet-paper roll lying on the floor for a mouse (and what was it doing on the floor, we wonder). But hearing and smelling, yeah, it's getting intense! Does this happen regularly to women in their thirties? It's sort of an unlooked-for, and in someways unhelpful, bonus. I had a near meltdown at a meeting because someone was twisting her pen barrel against the nib, and the rubbing made a very high-pitched squeaking noise. Apparently no one but me could hear it, but I eventually had to halt the meeting and request that the pen be quarentined, lest my brain explode. I'm sure all neighbouring dogs were very grateful. And I swear I can smell supper cooking in every house I pass at a certain hour, and you wouldn't believe the number of people in this city who get on the bus smelling of pot. I also uttered the words, "You bought a new brand of deoderant!" in an accusing voice, which is really something that, if you told me ten years ago I would be doing, I would have been profoundly shocked (and still sort of am).
Wow, everything I post has to have this big long personal preamble--sorry! What I'm getting at is, now is a good time to be doing the workshop I'm doing tomorrow, which is writing about sensory perceptions. I marked the first batch of assignments this week, and I can see that, as per usual, it's the visual that reigns supreme. Not unusual, even with mature writers, but I really do want them to broaden out. I'm going to be doing the same exercises as last year, which involve giving them a specific sensory stimuli, and one that lacks obvious references (unlike say, the scent of roses or the taste of honey, there are few obvious cliches about the flavour of Bubblemint gum or the sound of Leonard Cohen's voice) and inviting them to write about.
I think those exercises are useful for any writer to do at any age (and prettymuch always listening to Leonard Cohen is helpful) but the lesson I'm going to do beforehand is probably of less use to adults--a bit too elementary. But it's going to be on to the difference between subjective and objective adjectives.
It's so hard to remember being a kid and having a really narrow frame of reference and experience, mainly within the family and a group friends that might all have a similar narrow frame. It's so hard to remember when I thought a word like "beautiful" or "fascinating" or "boring" had a universal, unassailable interpretation. I'm not looking forward to breaking it to the whippersnappers that they can't say, "ugly wallpaper" and leave it at that, because every reader will have a different interpretation of the word "ugly." Better to describe the brown and gold flocked velvet wallpaper objectively, and leave it to the readers to conclude for themselves that it is ugly...some might not do so (!) but that's their perogative--perception is complicated.
I am so sure they are going so say, "But you say 'awesome' and 'amazing' and 'super' all the time. Those are totally subjective words." Fine--so they are. But me talking (or blogging) is supposed to be subjective, or that's how I justify it. And I'm also available to fill in the reasoning behind my judgements in person (or on the blog--really, just comment) whereas a narrator is not available to the reader beyond the last page of the story--it's got to be all in the writing. Anyway, that's what I'm going to tell them, and I hope they buy it, because then I'm going to ban all subjective adjectives.
I'll let you know how it goes.
RR
Wow, everything I post has to have this big long personal preamble--sorry! What I'm getting at is, now is a good time to be doing the workshop I'm doing tomorrow, which is writing about sensory perceptions. I marked the first batch of assignments this week, and I can see that, as per usual, it's the visual that reigns supreme. Not unusual, even with mature writers, but I really do want them to broaden out. I'm going to be doing the same exercises as last year, which involve giving them a specific sensory stimuli, and one that lacks obvious references (unlike say, the scent of roses or the taste of honey, there are few obvious cliches about the flavour of Bubblemint gum or the sound of Leonard Cohen's voice) and inviting them to write about.
I think those exercises are useful for any writer to do at any age (and prettymuch always listening to Leonard Cohen is helpful) but the lesson I'm going to do beforehand is probably of less use to adults--a bit too elementary. But it's going to be on to the difference between subjective and objective adjectives.
It's so hard to remember being a kid and having a really narrow frame of reference and experience, mainly within the family and a group friends that might all have a similar narrow frame. It's so hard to remember when I thought a word like "beautiful" or "fascinating" or "boring" had a universal, unassailable interpretation. I'm not looking forward to breaking it to the whippersnappers that they can't say, "ugly wallpaper" and leave it at that, because every reader will have a different interpretation of the word "ugly." Better to describe the brown and gold flocked velvet wallpaper objectively, and leave it to the readers to conclude for themselves that it is ugly...some might not do so (!) but that's their perogative--perception is complicated.
I am so sure they are going so say, "But you say 'awesome' and 'amazing' and 'super' all the time. Those are totally subjective words." Fine--so they are. But me talking (or blogging) is supposed to be subjective, or that's how I justify it. And I'm also available to fill in the reasoning behind my judgements in person (or on the blog--really, just comment) whereas a narrator is not available to the reader beyond the last page of the story--it's got to be all in the writing. Anyway, that's what I'm going to tell them, and I hope they buy it, because then I'm going to ban all subjective adjectives.
I'll let you know how it goes.
RR
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Workshop #4: Plot
Today's workshop is on plot! Boo, I say, but I've found kids really do need this kind of structure--you need to learn the dimensions of the box before you can think outside of it. And it is kind of interesting for me to review the standard plot graph--it's good to remember that that's at least a possibility when I'm writing, and if I choose not to use it I should at least acknowledge that I'm choosing.
But I actually wouldn't really suggest grown-up writers try writing an entire story by the graph--it's not a terrible idea, but it's a lot of work if you are in the middle of a project--to make it worthwhile you'd have to really invest some time in the story, so that the graph didn't just dominate it. But, heck, if you are more disciplined than I, it probably would be illuminating, what you can do with that inverted tick mark.
Instead, here are a couple less ambitious exercises I often do with stories I'm working on, which I found help immensely plotwise. Maybe they'll help you too:
1) Graph your plot *after* you get to the second draft. If you are finding that there's something wonky about the pacing, graph the amount of event/dialogue/description per page and see if you are finding bits that are overloaded versus bits that are slack. In my classes today, we'll definitely be talking about non-standard plot graphs--flat lines, loop-de-loops, parallel arcs, connect-the-dots...all work if you work them, natch, but I find I often don't even know I'm doing these things until I write/draw it out. And it's easier to improve the structure once you know what it is.
If the sketch seems to gimmicky, simply write yourself an outline--Jenny walks to the garden supply centre (two pages), Jenny remembers Derek ski accident (1/2 page), Jenny runs into Derek in the parking lot (4 1/2 pages)--to see if you can spot pacing errors. I never ouline at the beginning, but I find at this point it is really helpful to see where I'm spending my pages. This is especially helpful if it's a double (or more) narration, or a story with a lot of flashbacks, or anything that's important to keep balanced.
2) I'm going to have the kids base their first round of plot graphs not on their own stories but on back-jacket copy from novels--they'll have the basic plots from those, and fill in the rest from their own brains (at least, this is the hope). For an adult, I would suggest doing this in reverse--writing a book-cover blurb for you own story at the midway point in the process. I find that summarizing a story in the manner of back-jacket copy is...well, just as horrible and painful as summarizing in any other context. When asked to summarize, my instinct is always, "I can't, the story doesn't work that way, if you want to know what it's about read it, bah I don't wanna I hate you." And it devolves from there. But at least thinking about the book cover reminds me that this is a necessary process--someday, I hope to have the story *in* a book, and that book will need to have some sort of description written on the cover. Sometimes, the push helps.
If I'm *really* struggling with the summary, that's probably a sign that there's something wrong with the story--there should be a few elements that can be easily described, at least. You're going to judge me for being self-indulgent, but sometimes I also try writing these summaries as reviews--glowing ones. And that of course *is* self-indulgent, but it is also true that if I write down the nice things I want people to say about the work, it reminds me of what my goals for the piece actually are--which is not always so apparent on the page. And, also, on a tough day, it's nice to imagine someone saying nice things about my work.
So...that's a few suggestions on working with plot. Feel free to add more if you have your own better/different plotting exercises, or to let me know if these work or don't work for you. I hope the kids like'em.
RR
But I actually wouldn't really suggest grown-up writers try writing an entire story by the graph--it's not a terrible idea, but it's a lot of work if you are in the middle of a project--to make it worthwhile you'd have to really invest some time in the story, so that the graph didn't just dominate it. But, heck, if you are more disciplined than I, it probably would be illuminating, what you can do with that inverted tick mark.
Instead, here are a couple less ambitious exercises I often do with stories I'm working on, which I found help immensely plotwise. Maybe they'll help you too:
1) Graph your plot *after* you get to the second draft. If you are finding that there's something wonky about the pacing, graph the amount of event/dialogue/description per page and see if you are finding bits that are overloaded versus bits that are slack. In my classes today, we'll definitely be talking about non-standard plot graphs--flat lines, loop-de-loops, parallel arcs, connect-the-dots...all work if you work them, natch, but I find I often don't even know I'm doing these things until I write/draw it out. And it's easier to improve the structure once you know what it is.
If the sketch seems to gimmicky, simply write yourself an outline--Jenny walks to the garden supply centre (two pages), Jenny remembers Derek ski accident (1/2 page), Jenny runs into Derek in the parking lot (4 1/2 pages)--to see if you can spot pacing errors. I never ouline at the beginning, but I find at this point it is really helpful to see where I'm spending my pages. This is especially helpful if it's a double (or more) narration, or a story with a lot of flashbacks, or anything that's important to keep balanced.
2) I'm going to have the kids base their first round of plot graphs not on their own stories but on back-jacket copy from novels--they'll have the basic plots from those, and fill in the rest from their own brains (at least, this is the hope). For an adult, I would suggest doing this in reverse--writing a book-cover blurb for you own story at the midway point in the process. I find that summarizing a story in the manner of back-jacket copy is...well, just as horrible and painful as summarizing in any other context. When asked to summarize, my instinct is always, "I can't, the story doesn't work that way, if you want to know what it's about read it, bah I don't wanna I hate you." And it devolves from there. But at least thinking about the book cover reminds me that this is a necessary process--someday, I hope to have the story *in* a book, and that book will need to have some sort of description written on the cover. Sometimes, the push helps.
If I'm *really* struggling with the summary, that's probably a sign that there's something wrong with the story--there should be a few elements that can be easily described, at least. You're going to judge me for being self-indulgent, but sometimes I also try writing these summaries as reviews--glowing ones. And that of course *is* self-indulgent, but it is also true that if I write down the nice things I want people to say about the work, it reminds me of what my goals for the piece actually are--which is not always so apparent on the page. And, also, on a tough day, it's nice to imagine someone saying nice things about my work.
So...that's a few suggestions on working with plot. Feel free to add more if you have your own better/different plotting exercises, or to let me know if these work or don't work for you. I hope the kids like'em.
RR
Friday, March 12, 2010
Workshop #3: Setting and real estate
I am once again a day late (a buck short?) in posting my workshop for the week, but most of what we were working on was actually not stuff I would recommend writers over 18 do. It's not because it's "too elementary"--I've found it very useful to do things that are so basic I usually skip, like write character sketches, graph plots (if only to see that they graph as pentagrams or loop-de-loops), read dialogue aloud, etc.
But this week we were working on settings and, knowing that I mainly draw on experience for setting, and know that teenagers often have not been to a lot of different places, I brought in real-estate mags so they could look at the pictures and try to imagine where their characters would live.
This worked only sorta--kids got way too enthralled trying to find their own dream homes. Not that I blame them--that's what I was doing the night before instead of class prep. Besides, this stuff is really too research-y to be much good--what can you really tell from a couple artfully staged photos and a floorplan? I draw almost all my settings from places I've been, reconfigured in my imagination to suit the characters' lives and budgets.
But teenagers haven't been many places, at least relatively. Although my students are a wildly international lot, I'm pretty sure that certain childhood limitations hold true--you are mainly in your family's home, and even if you move, you'll often move to a similar sort of dwelling. And the family and friends you visit, their homes will be in the same ballpark. What I'm basically talking about here is class--though I'm sure many people are exceptions, the way neighbourhood schools work, you see a lot of people in the same tax bracket as your own family, and so small distinctions get blown out of proportion--you think the family with a carport instead of a garage is "poor" and the ones with a swimming pool are "rich."
Then your circle gets a little wider in your late teens, you meet people who more properly qualify as "rich" and "poor" and the scales fall, little by little, from your eyes (this takes longer with some people than others). And until that process is fairly far along, it's really really hard to imagine even basic aspects of how people with different amounts of money live. Yesterday, when one of the students suggested that the "Homes and Land" booklet she was looking at was too ritzy for her characters, I suggested she might want to look at the booklet for the rental market instead. She was horrified and her friends all teased her--"Oh, snap!" So apparently, in that neighbourhood, "poor" people rent.
I really want them to get a sense of the diversity of what goes on in a city, but I'm not sure they did. I keep emphasizing that it's great if they want to write about their own experiences and/or their own context, but they still need to realize that's only one of many many many.
I think one of the wonders of being a grown-up is starting to know about those many, and being (a little) less constrained by where I started. There are aspects of this teaching gig that make me nostalgic for my youth, but I really don't want to be 16 again.
RR
Friday, March 5, 2010
Workshop #2--Character
Well, I'm completely not making good on my plan to post lesson plans ahead of the actual lessons to get your feedback on'em, but considering that on Wednesday I briefly stopped walking in the middle of the sidewalk because I'd jammed two fingers into one glove-slot and wondered how I was going to cope (I worked it out) we're lucky I managed to get the lesson together for the actual students.
And, when it came time to deliver said lessons, I also count myself lucky that my energy miraculously returned. There's something about those eager, curious faces, their great willingness to learn and/or to laugh if I fall down...
So the character workshop was similar to last year's except the kids took it in a different direction. When I asked where they have seen character descriptions before, they said the usual "in books" stuff, but also, on the backs of movies, on the backs of video games, on plaques at a museum, in biographies (one long character sketch), and then, even more interesting, on your passport or your driver's license!
I love that, because sometimes I do get lost in the "big" "emotional" issues of character development and not bother about "little" details like how old someone is--not "early twenties" but birth year and date. Not, "from southern Ontario" but pick an actual town on a map. These things make a difference to character icebergs, I think--although it sure would be odd if my students think they have to actually use all this stuff in their stories and start describing every character with height and weight!
So, yes, upcoming, a very dates/places/numbers intensive character sketch from me--I'm not sure what style, but maybe a la fight stats in a video game--which actually, come to think of it, probably won't be entertaining at all to you guys, but might be useful to me.
And maybe then I'll get some sleep. Have a good weekend, all!
RR
And, when it came time to deliver said lessons, I also count myself lucky that my energy miraculously returned. There's something about those eager, curious faces, their great willingness to learn and/or to laugh if I fall down...
So the character workshop was similar to last year's except the kids took it in a different direction. When I asked where they have seen character descriptions before, they said the usual "in books" stuff, but also, on the backs of movies, on the backs of video games, on plaques at a museum, in biographies (one long character sketch), and then, even more interesting, on your passport or your driver's license!
I love that, because sometimes I do get lost in the "big" "emotional" issues of character development and not bother about "little" details like how old someone is--not "early twenties" but birth year and date. Not, "from southern Ontario" but pick an actual town on a map. These things make a difference to character icebergs, I think--although it sure would be odd if my students think they have to actually use all this stuff in their stories and start describing every character with height and weight!
So, yes, upcoming, a very dates/places/numbers intensive character sketch from me--I'm not sure what style, but maybe a la fight stats in a video game--which actually, come to think of it, probably won't be entertaining at all to you guys, but might be useful to me.
And maybe then I'll get some sleep. Have a good weekend, all!
RR
Monday, March 1, 2010
Endings
I'm off to Waterloo tomorrow to do a reading for and have discussion with a group of high-school students who have been studying one of my stories, "Fruit Factory." Doing such a talk is a rare honour and a treat for various reasons, many obvious, I'm sure (what human doesn't like it when people pay close attention to something that that human has worked very hard on?) One that might be less obvious is that, since the teacher can guarantee that (at least most of) the students have read the entire story, I can read and discuss the ending.
Endings are very very difficult to write--Sam Shephard said in the New Yorker that, “I hate endings... Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing, and endings are a disaster.” And he's been writing for 30 or so years and is thought to be one of the foremost playwrights of... Oh, despair. What hope is there for the rest of us?
Obviously, the rest of us struggle on, and when we hit on an ending that we think is good and resonant and true to the rest of the story while also surprising and maybe even illuminating in some way, we are damn proud of ourselves--it doesn't happen very often. It'd be nice to get to share it your own self occasionally.
Of course, I'm not kidding myself that my stories are rife with suspense, nor am I of the opinion that knowing the ending of something "ruins" the pleasure of reading the rest. But structuring a story, arranging what happens when, is hard too--almost as hard as writing an ending. In separate places, I've seen story experts as impressive as Alice Munro and John Metcalf say they don't necessarily read stories from beginning to end in sequence, but rather jump around, like moving from room to room in a house (that's Munro being paraphrased there--I'm sorry but I'm not going to be able to find these citations).
That makes me sad, although it makes some sense, too. Certainly I can gauge the emotional tension and intensity, the sense of humour, the clarity and poetry of language if I start in the middle, but I don't get the events as the writer lived them with the characters, and how he or she wanted to place them in my imagination. You can take someone's temperature in lots of places on their bodies, but if you want to know how that person is actually feeling, it's best to just let them tell you (hmmm, is that metaphor working?)
I put a lot of deliberation into making the order of the story make sense to the characters and their worlds--so that's how I want it to make sense to the reader too. There's no reason why a story won't be enjoyable or interesting or perfectly understandable out of order--but that's not how I meant to do it. You might not love it, like it, or even get it the way I did, but I want to give you every chance.
So I don't read endings aloud at events where I assume no one's read it. They might not be going to read it, actually--this might be our one and only encounter--but I'd generally like people to enter the story at the point I worked out as the beginning. So I read beginnings, for the most part, or whole stories if they're short enough, when I do public readings.
But! I like my endings, too! Some of them took a dozen drafts and years of work--if I feel like I finally got it, I take a lot of pleasure in the words as they fell into place and I enjoy sharing them aloud. And even if I do feel like I nailed it, I am very much open to feedback to the contrary--there's always next time--and there's nothing like reading aloud to elicit an honest answer from some people.
So whenever I know the audience has read the work, I choose the ending as my selection to read aloud. This has only happened a few times and I've never done "Fruit Factory"'s ending before. So this evening will find me at home standing on a chair, praticing and tomorrow--who knows what they'll think!
RR
Endings are very very difficult to write--Sam Shephard said in the New Yorker that, “I hate endings... Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing, and endings are a disaster.” And he's been writing for 30 or so years and is thought to be one of the foremost playwrights of... Oh, despair. What hope is there for the rest of us?
Obviously, the rest of us struggle on, and when we hit on an ending that we think is good and resonant and true to the rest of the story while also surprising and maybe even illuminating in some way, we are damn proud of ourselves--it doesn't happen very often. It'd be nice to get to share it your own self occasionally.
Of course, I'm not kidding myself that my stories are rife with suspense, nor am I of the opinion that knowing the ending of something "ruins" the pleasure of reading the rest. But structuring a story, arranging what happens when, is hard too--almost as hard as writing an ending. In separate places, I've seen story experts as impressive as Alice Munro and John Metcalf say they don't necessarily read stories from beginning to end in sequence, but rather jump around, like moving from room to room in a house (that's Munro being paraphrased there--I'm sorry but I'm not going to be able to find these citations).
That makes me sad, although it makes some sense, too. Certainly I can gauge the emotional tension and intensity, the sense of humour, the clarity and poetry of language if I start in the middle, but I don't get the events as the writer lived them with the characters, and how he or she wanted to place them in my imagination. You can take someone's temperature in lots of places on their bodies, but if you want to know how that person is actually feeling, it's best to just let them tell you (hmmm, is that metaphor working?)
I put a lot of deliberation into making the order of the story make sense to the characters and their worlds--so that's how I want it to make sense to the reader too. There's no reason why a story won't be enjoyable or interesting or perfectly understandable out of order--but that's not how I meant to do it. You might not love it, like it, or even get it the way I did, but I want to give you every chance.
So I don't read endings aloud at events where I assume no one's read it. They might not be going to read it, actually--this might be our one and only encounter--but I'd generally like people to enter the story at the point I worked out as the beginning. So I read beginnings, for the most part, or whole stories if they're short enough, when I do public readings.
But! I like my endings, too! Some of them took a dozen drafts and years of work--if I feel like I finally got it, I take a lot of pleasure in the words as they fell into place and I enjoy sharing them aloud. And even if I do feel like I nailed it, I am very much open to feedback to the contrary--there's always next time--and there's nothing like reading aloud to elicit an honest answer from some people.
So whenever I know the audience has read the work, I choose the ending as my selection to read aloud. This has only happened a few times and I've never done "Fruit Factory"'s ending before. So this evening will find me at home standing on a chair, praticing and tomorrow--who knows what they'll think!
RR
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Workshop #1: Ideas
So I'm back to teaching with the very wonderful SWAT program this week, and those who were around for last year's term will know that I am a bundle of nerves and excitement, and massive lesson-planning.
I thought I would put my lesson notes on Rose-coloured this year, in the hope that we could live that bloggy interdependent dream--maybe you guys would find some of my ideas interesting, and at the same, you might have more/different ones that could help me. Or maybe you will find this boring--either way, let me know!*
I should note here that I massively over-prepare, just in case the class is incredibly surely and won't talk and I have to resort to lecturing. This has never happened, and I vastly prefer to run a class by discussion, with a few longer bits of explanation from me. In a typical class, I use about a quarter of what I prepared, sprinkled throughtout the hour. It's a little random, but it works out. Anyway, onwards, any of this material below will come after introductions, a discussion about what they might like to write about, and how to figure that out.
---
Writers constantly get asked in interviews "where do you get your ideas?" It's not a very original question, but I am always interested in the answer--it's rarely straightforward. Sometimes it is--an event in one's own life or in history that seems like it could be molded into a story, a bad book or movie that the author read that made them think "I could do the same thing but better!"
Sometimes it's a character you've created, and think about, and imagine out his or her life, and then you find an incident in the imaginary life you've created that might work as a story. Sometimes you want to capture a feeling you've had, a person you knew, a neighbourhood you've lived in. Sometimes you want to write a story as a caricature or spoof, as revenge (that often works very poorly), as a love note. Sometimes your idea for a story is to try to write the thing a given audience wants to read: your teacher (this also doesn't work well, mainly), a publication, someone you want to date.
Sometimes you have no idea where the idea comes from, you just start writing because you're bored, or lonely, or your teacher told you to, and something comes from nothing and you realize you are writing a story. Sometimes by the time you have a story, you have no idea where the idea came from. The piece I'm currently working on is structured around a set of reworked advertising slogans, but it's certainly not about them. It's set where it is because I had wanted to return to a place I'd created in another story, and make better use of it, but the story's not really about the setting. Now that I'm in the thick of it, I have no idea what led me to these people doing this stuff...though I'm (mainly) glad I got here. It was a long slog to figure out what the story was even about--I didn't really know before I started writing where I was going to end up.
My point? Is that ideas are what you make of them. I think the only thing an idea needs to be to make it a good one is that it's something a writer likes enough to start writing and keep writing. The rest will work itself out on the page (well, *the writer* will work it out, but it'll feel natural).
There are so many good things about being a writer that I don't like to dwell on the negative, but it does drive me crazy when I meet someone at a party and they say, "It's great that we ran into each other because I have the best idea for a story/novel/series of 14 interconnected novels." They have inevitably never written anything before, but after explaining the book to me at length (it's always at length) they say, "It's practically written! I have it all worked out inside my head; I just have to get it down."
I thought I would put my lesson notes on Rose-coloured this year, in the hope that we could live that bloggy interdependent dream--maybe you guys would find some of my ideas interesting, and at the same, you might have more/different ones that could help me. Or maybe you will find this boring--either way, let me know!*
I should note here that I massively over-prepare, just in case the class is incredibly surely and won't talk and I have to resort to lecturing. This has never happened, and I vastly prefer to run a class by discussion, with a few longer bits of explanation from me. In a typical class, I use about a quarter of what I prepared, sprinkled throughtout the hour. It's a little random, but it works out. Anyway, onwards, any of this material below will come after introductions, a discussion about what they might like to write about, and how to figure that out.
---
Writers constantly get asked in interviews "where do you get your ideas?" It's not a very original question, but I am always interested in the answer--it's rarely straightforward. Sometimes it is--an event in one's own life or in history that seems like it could be molded into a story, a bad book or movie that the author read that made them think "I could do the same thing but better!"
Sometimes it's a character you've created, and think about, and imagine out his or her life, and then you find an incident in the imaginary life you've created that might work as a story. Sometimes you want to capture a feeling you've had, a person you knew, a neighbourhood you've lived in. Sometimes you want to write a story as a caricature or spoof, as revenge (that often works very poorly), as a love note. Sometimes your idea for a story is to try to write the thing a given audience wants to read: your teacher (this also doesn't work well, mainly), a publication, someone you want to date.
Sometimes you have no idea where the idea comes from, you just start writing because you're bored, or lonely, or your teacher told you to, and something comes from nothing and you realize you are writing a story. Sometimes by the time you have a story, you have no idea where the idea came from. The piece I'm currently working on is structured around a set of reworked advertising slogans, but it's certainly not about them. It's set where it is because I had wanted to return to a place I'd created in another story, and make better use of it, but the story's not really about the setting. Now that I'm in the thick of it, I have no idea what led me to these people doing this stuff...though I'm (mainly) glad I got here. It was a long slog to figure out what the story was even about--I didn't really know before I started writing where I was going to end up.
My point? Is that ideas are what you make of them. I think the only thing an idea needs to be to make it a good one is that it's something a writer likes enough to start writing and keep writing. The rest will work itself out on the page (well, *the writer* will work it out, but it'll feel natural).
There are so many good things about being a writer that I don't like to dwell on the negative, but it does drive me crazy when I meet someone at a party and they say, "It's great that we ran into each other because I have the best idea for a story/novel/series of 14 interconnected novels." They have inevitably never written anything before, but after explaining the book to me at length (it's always at length) they say, "It's practically written! I have it all worked out inside my head; I just have to get it down."
"Just" indeed! I would love if the daydreaming out an interesting story to entertain myself on the bus were the hard part, but it isn't. I have never had an idea work out on paper they way it was in my brain. I'm not every writer, there must be some who can do that, but from what I hear, it's pretty rare.
My editor, John Metcalf, says, "Form is content." How you write something isn't just the petty details of getting it onto paper, it's the whole craft.
SO! When you have an idea, if I were you, I wouldn't spend much time worrying about whether it's a "good" idea--the only way to know if it is would be to try it out. Write a little bit, read it over, see if you like it. See if you want to write any more--that's the key to knowing it's a keeper! And if it isn't, don't worry--ideas are one thing the human mind is very good at producing. People find them everywhere.
RR
*Um, this post took so long to write that my first class is now 12 hours away, so if you send me good ideas I will work them in next week. Next week I will also plan better.
*Um, this post took so long to write that my first class is now 12 hours away, so if you send me good ideas I will work them in next week. Next week I will also plan better.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
In case you were wondering...
Sometimes I start off on things, and never let you know how they worked out. Probably, you don't care, but for the sake of completeness--
1) I now mouse exclusively with my left hand on desktop computers (ie., all day). On laptops (ie., at night and on weekends) I occasionally succumb to the lure of the central touchpad with my right hand, but the (fuzzy heartshaped) mouse is placed to the left of the computer. I consider Alzheimer's officially postphoned...for now.
2) I consider January's "writing in the morning"s a failure, but not a dismal one. I *did* sometimes write in the mornings, not every day and never for very long, but as it would otherwise have been time spent asleep, I'm counting this one as a win. But I'm also pushing it forward as a February resolution.
3) My *new* resolution for February will be to limit my cereal consumption to two bowls per day. This will be difficult--I really like cereal.
4) Remember when I was teaching last year and obsessed with my teenaged students? We about to start all that again, as through the graces of the SWAT/Now Hear This program, I have been named writer-in-residence at Jean Vanier high school in Scarborough. If you went to Vanier, know someone who did, taught there, attended an OFSA badminton championship there, anything at all--I want to hear about it. For though I am very excited about this new adventure, I am also very nervous.
5) So the ground hog says, six more weeks of winter (warning: disturbing groundhog-nuzzling picture at that link). I should be sad, but I seem to have pulled out of my seasonal-affective funk from early January. Now I’m just really grateful that it’s been so dry and nothing is slippery underfoot. If that keeps up…well, I guess it can stay cold. If, you know, the rodent says it has to.
6) Remember when I wrote short stories? Well, I actually still do that, I just haven’t mentioned it in a while. Forthcoming RR publications included “How to Keep Your Day Job” in the summer issue of Room Magazine, “Sweet” in the summer issue of Canadian Notes and Queries and “Far from Downtown” in The New Quarterly. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that I’m just thrilled to be working with such amazing mags, and very looking forward to seeing my work inside them.
There, now I think you’re just about up to date…
RR
1) I now mouse exclusively with my left hand on desktop computers (ie., all day). On laptops (ie., at night and on weekends) I occasionally succumb to the lure of the central touchpad with my right hand, but the (fuzzy heartshaped) mouse is placed to the left of the computer. I consider Alzheimer's officially postphoned...for now.
2) I consider January's "writing in the morning"s a failure, but not a dismal one. I *did* sometimes write in the mornings, not every day and never for very long, but as it would otherwise have been time spent asleep, I'm counting this one as a win. But I'm also pushing it forward as a February resolution.
3) My *new* resolution for February will be to limit my cereal consumption to two bowls per day. This will be difficult--I really like cereal.
4) Remember when I was teaching last year and obsessed with my teenaged students? We about to start all that again, as through the graces of the SWAT/Now Hear This program, I have been named writer-in-residence at Jean Vanier high school in Scarborough. If you went to Vanier, know someone who did, taught there, attended an OFSA badminton championship there, anything at all--I want to hear about it. For though I am very excited about this new adventure, I am also very nervous.
5) So the ground hog says, six more weeks of winter (warning: disturbing groundhog-nuzzling picture at that link). I should be sad, but I seem to have pulled out of my seasonal-affective funk from early January. Now I’m just really grateful that it’s been so dry and nothing is slippery underfoot. If that keeps up…well, I guess it can stay cold. If, you know, the rodent says it has to.
6) Remember when I wrote short stories? Well, I actually still do that, I just haven’t mentioned it in a while. Forthcoming RR publications included “How to Keep Your Day Job” in the summer issue of Room Magazine, “Sweet” in the summer issue of Canadian Notes and Queries and “Far from Downtown” in The New Quarterly. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that I’m just thrilled to be working with such amazing mags, and very looking forward to seeing my work inside them.
There, now I think you’re just about up to date…
RR
Thursday, November 26, 2009
This week in review
Of course, this week is not technically over yet, but rather a lot has already happened. I think it was enough to occupy an entire week if it was spread out, and I am rather hoping nothing further will happen until next. Thus, I dare to pre-emptively summarize:
Tuesday: I attended the Writers' Trust Awards. It is a pretty glitzy event, with roaming waiters and lots of excited chat before the ceremony. At the ceremony, the Journey Prize was the first to be awarded, which meant co-presenter Anita Chong and I could get our moment of stress out of the way early and enjoy the show! I had perhaps 200 words to say, and really people just wanted to know who won, but I was very worried about flubbing it, or not even making it to the podium because I had spotted a gap between the top of stairs and the stage where I could easily wedge my foot.
But nothing happened like that, and I was able to present the winner, Yatsuko Thanh, for her story Floating Like the Dead with no trouble. What an honour to do so, and what an incredible story. I was charmed by how sincerely stunned Ms. Thanh seemed, and was really glad I got a chance to meet her. And the other two incredible finalists, Dave Margoshes for "The Wisdom of Solomon" and Daniel Griffin for "The Last Great Works of Alvin Cale." An evening like this one really makes me feel alive to all the wonder and diversity of wonders in CanLit.
I was also happy to see that Annabel Lyon took the fiction prize though I have not read the celebrated book, *The Golden Mean*. But if my intense love of her first book, Oxygen is any indication, I should. And I was pleased to hear that, though Ms. Lyon was also pretty stunned by the win, she remembered to mention in her speech all those smaller literary magazines where she got her start, and to please for no further cuts to arts funding in Canada.
Wednesday: On Wednesday morning I went out to University of Toronto Scarborogh to do a guest lecture in my fellow UofT Creative Writing alumni Daniel Tysdal's short story class. I did, as promised read the end of a story, "Massacre Day." When I told the students that I would read the last three pages of that piece, I had the extraordinary experience of watching a roomful of students pull out copies of my book and prepare to follow along.
But that extraordinariness did not all compare with the level discussion after my reading and (very brief) talk. The students were reading intently and speaking insightfully, not just about my work (although I appreciated that very much) but about everything they laid their eyes and minds on. What a fantastic way to spend a morning.
That evening, was the Biblioasis fall poetry party, featuring Zachariah Wells, Shane Neilson and Robyn Sarah. The non-present presence of a 4th poet was Wayne Clifford, whose work was read by all three of the others to make up for his absense. It was really cool to get three interpretations of one voice.
Also last night, I got to meet London, Ontario, novelist A.J. Somerset who just won the Metcalf-Rooke Award. There's a lot of literary winning going on this week!
Today, is the real American Thanksgiving, I'm pretty sure, so I am wishing you all a happy one of those--I remain as Thankful I was last week, on fake Thanksgiving. Also today, due to a minor incident, I was without tights for a portion of the day, and it was actually warm enough that I didn't mind dreadfully, temperature-wise. The upside of global warming. What was strange is that I felt like a total scandal, bare knees and nothing under my dress but panties, when of course that is how I spent the entire summer. I think winter makes me puritanical.
I also spent part of today talking books with Kerry Clare while I lay on the floor eating scones and playing with her baby daughter. That was, as you might imagine, delightful.
To continued, low-impact delight.
RR
Tuesday: I attended the Writers' Trust Awards. It is a pretty glitzy event, with roaming waiters and lots of excited chat before the ceremony. At the ceremony, the Journey Prize was the first to be awarded, which meant co-presenter Anita Chong and I could get our moment of stress out of the way early and enjoy the show! I had perhaps 200 words to say, and really people just wanted to know who won, but I was very worried about flubbing it, or not even making it to the podium because I had spotted a gap between the top of stairs and the stage where I could easily wedge my foot.
But nothing happened like that, and I was able to present the winner, Yatsuko Thanh, for her story Floating Like the Dead with no trouble. What an honour to do so, and what an incredible story. I was charmed by how sincerely stunned Ms. Thanh seemed, and was really glad I got a chance to meet her. And the other two incredible finalists, Dave Margoshes for "The Wisdom of Solomon" and Daniel Griffin for "The Last Great Works of Alvin Cale." An evening like this one really makes me feel alive to all the wonder and diversity of wonders in CanLit.
I was also happy to see that Annabel Lyon took the fiction prize though I have not read the celebrated book, *The Golden Mean*. But if my intense love of her first book, Oxygen is any indication, I should. And I was pleased to hear that, though Ms. Lyon was also pretty stunned by the win, she remembered to mention in her speech all those smaller literary magazines where she got her start, and to please for no further cuts to arts funding in Canada.
Wednesday: On Wednesday morning I went out to University of Toronto Scarborogh to do a guest lecture in my fellow UofT Creative Writing alumni Daniel Tysdal's short story class. I did, as promised read the end of a story, "Massacre Day." When I told the students that I would read the last three pages of that piece, I had the extraordinary experience of watching a roomful of students pull out copies of my book and prepare to follow along.
But that extraordinariness did not all compare with the level discussion after my reading and (very brief) talk. The students were reading intently and speaking insightfully, not just about my work (although I appreciated that very much) but about everything they laid their eyes and minds on. What a fantastic way to spend a morning.
That evening, was the Biblioasis fall poetry party, featuring Zachariah Wells, Shane Neilson and Robyn Sarah. The non-present presence of a 4th poet was Wayne Clifford, whose work was read by all three of the others to make up for his absense. It was really cool to get three interpretations of one voice.
Also last night, I got to meet London, Ontario, novelist A.J. Somerset who just won the Metcalf-Rooke Award. There's a lot of literary winning going on this week!
Today, is the real American Thanksgiving, I'm pretty sure, so I am wishing you all a happy one of those--I remain as Thankful I was last week, on fake Thanksgiving. Also today, due to a minor incident, I was without tights for a portion of the day, and it was actually warm enough that I didn't mind dreadfully, temperature-wise. The upside of global warming. What was strange is that I felt like a total scandal, bare knees and nothing under my dress but panties, when of course that is how I spent the entire summer. I think winter makes me puritanical.
I also spent part of today talking books with Kerry Clare while I lay on the floor eating scones and playing with her baby daughter. That was, as you might imagine, delightful.
To continued, low-impact delight.
RR
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Excitement
I did complain about lack of mail in a previous post, but the fact is I get something interesting, if not something actually personal, almost every day. Of course, it helps that I have signed up for a lot of free-sample mailing lists ("oh, look, a package of egg-salad seasoning/skin cream/energy bars/tampons!") and have a low threshhold for excitement.
At the higher end of the scale, we have yesterday's arrival of the Fiddlehead's Summer Fiction Issue, which contains my stories "Tech Support" and "ContEd" (click the link to see an excerpt, as well as lots of other exciting stuff by Andrew MacDonald, Shane Neilson, Katia Grubisic and many awesome others.
Oh, and while I'm on the topic of myself, and things I'm doing with awesome others, I should mention that on August 19, I'm participating in a Now Hear This! reading, as a part of the SWAT program (that I taught in last spring? remember last spring?) My fine fellow readers include Mariko Tamaki, Colin Frizzell and Andrew Daley. Note the the early start time--6pm! This event is *all ages* and friendly to the hungry, since you can order supper during the readings. Don't get anything crunchy, though, ok?
Yes the heart will always go one step too far
RR
At the higher end of the scale, we have yesterday's arrival of the Fiddlehead's Summer Fiction Issue, which contains my stories "Tech Support" and "ContEd" (click the link to see an excerpt, as well as lots of other exciting stuff by Andrew MacDonald, Shane Neilson, Katia Grubisic and many awesome others.
Oh, and while I'm on the topic of myself, and things I'm doing with awesome others, I should mention that on August 19, I'm participating in a Now Hear This! reading, as a part of the SWAT program (that I taught in last spring? remember last spring?) My fine fellow readers include Mariko Tamaki, Colin Frizzell and Andrew Daley. Note the the early start time--6pm! This event is *all ages* and friendly to the hungry, since you can order supper during the readings. Don't get anything crunchy, though, ok?
Yes the heart will always go one step too far
RR
Sunday, July 19, 2009
An honour and a privilege
I have ever maintained that the short story is thriving, as challenging, fantastic, funny, depressing, thrilling, shocking, entertaining and inspiring stories continue to be produced in this country at a fantastic rate. I read frequently and vigorously--journals and collections and online stuff--and still there's a million things about this tricksy form that I'm trying to understand.
This spring and summer have afforded me some marvelous opportunities to try to learn this craft. The first was teaching grades 10 and 11 to write short stories. Anytime you want to call everything you think you know into question, just try telling it teenagers. Even before the kids started their questions, the act of putting together my thoughts and beliefs about how something ought to work in a story showed me a lot of my limitations, and opened up doors I never knew existed. Of course I want to think that my teaching served the cause of the short story by showing kids how fun it is to try to write them, and how much can be gained by reading them. In addition to that, though, I do think that my own contributions to the genre will be shaped by what I learned from teaching.
The other thing I've been up to lately is acting as a judge for the Journey Prize 21. Obviously, it was a huge honour to be asked to take on this role, but also a huge privilege to get to immerse myself in some of the best work done in the form this year in Canada, and to then to discuss that work deeply with my inspiring fellow judges, Lee Henderson and Camilla Gibb. This was, once again, an opportunity to interrogate what I think of as a "good short story," why I think that, and how that might be limiting.
I plan to write more about this process around the book's release (October 6; the winner will be announced at the Writers' Trust Awards in November). This little post is just to say that I hope you are as excited about the upcoming anthology as I am--it's full of wonderful, challenging, weird, etc. stories that inspired us, and might inspire you, too. And also to say that I think I'm a lot smarter than I was six months ago.
Our still lives posed / like a bowl of oranges
RR
This spring and summer have afforded me some marvelous opportunities to try to learn this craft. The first was teaching grades 10 and 11 to write short stories. Anytime you want to call everything you think you know into question, just try telling it teenagers. Even before the kids started their questions, the act of putting together my thoughts and beliefs about how something ought to work in a story showed me a lot of my limitations, and opened up doors I never knew existed. Of course I want to think that my teaching served the cause of the short story by showing kids how fun it is to try to write them, and how much can be gained by reading them. In addition to that, though, I do think that my own contributions to the genre will be shaped by what I learned from teaching.
The other thing I've been up to lately is acting as a judge for the Journey Prize 21. Obviously, it was a huge honour to be asked to take on this role, but also a huge privilege to get to immerse myself in some of the best work done in the form this year in Canada, and to then to discuss that work deeply with my inspiring fellow judges, Lee Henderson and Camilla Gibb. This was, once again, an opportunity to interrogate what I think of as a "good short story," why I think that, and how that might be limiting.
I plan to write more about this process around the book's release (October 6; the winner will be announced at the Writers' Trust Awards in November). This little post is just to say that I hope you are as excited about the upcoming anthology as I am--it's full of wonderful, challenging, weird, etc. stories that inspired us, and might inspire you, too. And also to say that I think I'm a lot smarter than I was six months ago.
Our still lives posed / like a bowl of oranges
RR
Friday, June 26, 2009
What the last 10 years have taught me
What I mainly did on that dock, as I said, was read *The New Yorker* fiction issue, which I had been waiting for with avid enthusiasm (because I can't read magazines out of order, natch). Obviously, I was rabid for the stories, but I had also been forwarned by Facebook friends that there was an article on teaching creative writing that I would want to see.
The piece turned out to be a review by one of my favourite critics, Louis Menand, of a book called The Program Era by Mark McGurl. I haven't heard more about McGurl than what Menand wrote, and I have little intention of reading the book (beyond the vague miasma of "oh, yeah, I should probably read that" that I feel about most books). So on the one hand, it's pretty presumptuous and glib for me to respond to the article. On the other hand, Menand's piece is one of *The New Yorker*'s rambling "Critic at Large" pieces, which encompasses a lot of general thoughts on the issue. So maybe I'm responding to those general comments. Or, on yet another hand, this is a blog, and maybe presumptuousness/glibness is the least of the worries of the blogosphere.
So!
The book, and to some extent the article, deal with the rise of the university creative writing class and degree, and simply the increasing presence of the "certified" writer on the lit scene. It was indeed edifying and maybe mildly shocking to see how many names got listed here (nice to see Bharati Mukherjee's name in *The New Yorker*, whatever the reason). An interesting thesis of the book, and one that Menand deals scantly with, is how creative writing programs shaped the evolotion of later-20th-century prose--in fact, the subtitle of the book is "Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing."
Menand has concentrated much more on the ever-scandalous question, also inherent in McGurl's work, "Can creative writing be taught?" Both offer lots of fascinating "well, maybe" answers, well worth reading at least in the short review form. I've written about this here before, and so I'll add only my usual quotation of the immortal Judith Viorst--help helps--plus: Creative writing classes, and eventually an MA in the subject, helped me so much with my writing. The classes gave me the discipline, focus, friends, inspiration, connections, snack foods, mentors, party tricks, informal workshop groups, cold terror, and cheerful ambition to take the writing I was already doing to the next level. If that's not learning, I don't know what is.
But I also know there are other kinds of learning, and this is something Menand leaves to the very last paragraph. This is moving, but I think it elides something else:
"I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything."
The majority of people who take a creative-writing class in undergrad don't continue to write after graduation, he says. Well, I don't have the stats, but judging by the folks I know, that sounds about write (ahaha. I actually wrote that accidentally.)
So, maaaybe, if impermanent writers--elective takers, dabblers, interested experimenteers-- is who is in the classes, Menand and McGurl are missing the boat. Maybe what creative writing classes in universities do is not (only) shape the national fiction style or create silken prose out of sow's ears, but *teach 20-year-olds to think creatively and write coherently*. Transferable skills if ever there were.
I think this issue is actually larger than creative writing; it stems from a larger misunderstanding of liberal arts education, although I don't know that one is mine or society's. When I was wee, but after I figured out that being intelligent was not a profession, I asked my liberal-arts-professing father what he taught people to do--like, medical school taught people how to cut open bodies and fix them, and police school taught people to shoot guns. My father's response was that his sort of teaching wasn't about learning to *do* a thing; he taught people how to *think* about things in a certain way, and then they could apply that way of thinking how they liked.
Revalatory, when you're ten and trying very hard to learn to do a lay-up and spell "persimmon." (And the author will allow that she may recollect her childhood as slightly more Socratic than it actually was.)
I have a BA Hon. in English Literature and an MA in English and Creative Writing, and I swear to you, I use what they taught me every day of my life. No, no one has asked me about Grendel, Tess, or semiotics today. And yet, the skills of close and careful reading, of contextualizing what I read with as much related material as possible, of reasoned and elegant essay arguementation, and of clear and relentless questioning of whatever I think I know--well, thank you, liberal-arts education.
Of course, as you can see by my Facebook friends above, conversations about the nun's priest or Samson Agonistes are likelier to happen to me than perhaps to most. But I really do believe that folks in advertising and marketing, in law and government and even medicine are able to use reading and writing skills they picked up in liberal arts classes. Not to mention the endless insights into the human condition we are given in reading about humans, in fiction or in non-fiction. And the ability to not only answer questions but ask them intelligently. And to empathize with people so foreign to us they actually don't exist.
Most people know that learning to think in different ways is always to the good. But I worry they don't prioritize that good. Having TA'd a little, and generally being around academic life, I do worry about the vocationalization of university education. I worried that my Effective Writing students wanted only to work on resume cover letters and mission statements that would translate directly into career skills, rather than work on the whole craft of writing and then make the cognitive connections in the work world for themselves.
I did actually go to vocational school too, so please know I don't knock that course at all. It was interesting and stimulating and my publishing certificate leads more or less directly to me being able to eat food and sleep indoors in a relatively entertaining fashion. But those skills I learned there are rigid, specific, and date-able. Every time I switch software platforms, style guides or subject matter, I start over...not from square one perhaps, but certainly from a square nearby. Vocational skills are generally like this: welders certified to do stick welding have a fundamentally different skill than those who do pipe welding. The skills may have much in common, but you can't just extrapolate one to the other; you have to go back and learn again.
Which is, as I said, a fine way to learn, but fundamental different than the fluid (or, admittedly, amorhphous) skills of the liberal arts education.
What a very long way of saying I think that evaluating university creative-writing programs by the famous writers they've produced does many students a disservice. I spent this spring trying to teach 90 teenagers how to write a short story, and although I can see perhaps a dozen of them pursuing the craft, I truly truly believe many of those kids were a least a little smarter for having tried it. I think creating strong introductory creative writing classes, as well as Intro Psych, Philosophy and Film, can help a lot of people think a little bit different, and better.
But then, I would think that.
The eventual downfall / is just the bill from the restaurant
RR
The piece turned out to be a review by one of my favourite critics, Louis Menand, of a book called The Program Era by Mark McGurl. I haven't heard more about McGurl than what Menand wrote, and I have little intention of reading the book (beyond the vague miasma of "oh, yeah, I should probably read that" that I feel about most books). So on the one hand, it's pretty presumptuous and glib for me to respond to the article. On the other hand, Menand's piece is one of *The New Yorker*'s rambling "Critic at Large" pieces, which encompasses a lot of general thoughts on the issue. So maybe I'm responding to those general comments. Or, on yet another hand, this is a blog, and maybe presumptuousness/glibness is the least of the worries of the blogosphere.
So!
The book, and to some extent the article, deal with the rise of the university creative writing class and degree, and simply the increasing presence of the "certified" writer on the lit scene. It was indeed edifying and maybe mildly shocking to see how many names got listed here (nice to see Bharati Mukherjee's name in *The New Yorker*, whatever the reason). An interesting thesis of the book, and one that Menand deals scantly with, is how creative writing programs shaped the evolotion of later-20th-century prose--in fact, the subtitle of the book is "Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing."
Menand has concentrated much more on the ever-scandalous question, also inherent in McGurl's work, "Can creative writing be taught?" Both offer lots of fascinating "well, maybe" answers, well worth reading at least in the short review form. I've written about this here before, and so I'll add only my usual quotation of the immortal Judith Viorst--help helps--plus: Creative writing classes, and eventually an MA in the subject, helped me so much with my writing. The classes gave me the discipline, focus, friends, inspiration, connections, snack foods, mentors, party tricks, informal workshop groups, cold terror, and cheerful ambition to take the writing I was already doing to the next level. If that's not learning, I don't know what is.
But I also know there are other kinds of learning, and this is something Menand leaves to the very last paragraph. This is moving, but I think it elides something else:
"I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything."
The majority of people who take a creative-writing class in undergrad don't continue to write after graduation, he says. Well, I don't have the stats, but judging by the folks I know, that sounds about write (ahaha. I actually wrote that accidentally.)
So, maaaybe, if impermanent writers--elective takers, dabblers, interested experimenteers-- is who is in the classes, Menand and McGurl are missing the boat. Maybe what creative writing classes in universities do is not (only) shape the national fiction style or create silken prose out of sow's ears, but *teach 20-year-olds to think creatively and write coherently*. Transferable skills if ever there were.
I think this issue is actually larger than creative writing; it stems from a larger misunderstanding of liberal arts education, although I don't know that one is mine or society's. When I was wee, but after I figured out that being intelligent was not a profession, I asked my liberal-arts-professing father what he taught people to do--like, medical school taught people how to cut open bodies and fix them, and police school taught people to shoot guns. My father's response was that his sort of teaching wasn't about learning to *do* a thing; he taught people how to *think* about things in a certain way, and then they could apply that way of thinking how they liked.
Revalatory, when you're ten and trying very hard to learn to do a lay-up and spell "persimmon." (And the author will allow that she may recollect her childhood as slightly more Socratic than it actually was.)
I have a BA Hon. in English Literature and an MA in English and Creative Writing, and I swear to you, I use what they taught me every day of my life. No, no one has asked me about Grendel, Tess, or semiotics today. And yet, the skills of close and careful reading, of contextualizing what I read with as much related material as possible, of reasoned and elegant essay arguementation, and of clear and relentless questioning of whatever I think I know--well, thank you, liberal-arts education.
Of course, as you can see by my Facebook friends above, conversations about the nun's priest or Samson Agonistes are likelier to happen to me than perhaps to most. But I really do believe that folks in advertising and marketing, in law and government and even medicine are able to use reading and writing skills they picked up in liberal arts classes. Not to mention the endless insights into the human condition we are given in reading about humans, in fiction or in non-fiction. And the ability to not only answer questions but ask them intelligently. And to empathize with people so foreign to us they actually don't exist.
Most people know that learning to think in different ways is always to the good. But I worry they don't prioritize that good. Having TA'd a little, and generally being around academic life, I do worry about the vocationalization of university education. I worried that my Effective Writing students wanted only to work on resume cover letters and mission statements that would translate directly into career skills, rather than work on the whole craft of writing and then make the cognitive connections in the work world for themselves.
I did actually go to vocational school too, so please know I don't knock that course at all. It was interesting and stimulating and my publishing certificate leads more or less directly to me being able to eat food and sleep indoors in a relatively entertaining fashion. But those skills I learned there are rigid, specific, and date-able. Every time I switch software platforms, style guides or subject matter, I start over...not from square one perhaps, but certainly from a square nearby. Vocational skills are generally like this: welders certified to do stick welding have a fundamentally different skill than those who do pipe welding. The skills may have much in common, but you can't just extrapolate one to the other; you have to go back and learn again.
Which is, as I said, a fine way to learn, but fundamental different than the fluid (or, admittedly, amorhphous) skills of the liberal arts education.
What a very long way of saying I think that evaluating university creative-writing programs by the famous writers they've produced does many students a disservice. I spent this spring trying to teach 90 teenagers how to write a short story, and although I can see perhaps a dozen of them pursuing the craft, I truly truly believe many of those kids were a least a little smarter for having tried it. I think creating strong introductory creative writing classes, as well as Intro Psych, Philosophy and Film, can help a lot of people think a little bit different, and better.
But then, I would think that.
The eventual downfall / is just the bill from the restaurant
RR
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Professional Interviews: Ben Rosenblum, English Instructor
I've been wanting to teach myself rudimentary interview skills for a while now, much the same way I worked on a way to write reviews that worked for me in the Rose-coloured Reviews. Obviously, reviews and interviews are both things I read all the time, and I feel like I can judge the good from the bad, but writing such things myself is very different, and very challenging, for me.
Interviews are that much harder, because they involve another person. When I write a review, I am ever conscious of working with an object that a real thinking feeling person made, and trying to be as respectful of them as possible, but it's still not actually a personal interaction, the way reviews just are are are, no matter how scientific one tries to be with the questions.
I've tried to make this easier for myself in two ways. One, I'll be interviewing people about their jobs. This is a subject that's endlessly fascinating to me, so it's easy to come up with questions, so much so that often my cocktail-party and bus-stop and first-date chatter often becomes a kind of what-is-your-job-like interview anyway. And two, I'm going to interview people I know to start (although, if you have an interesting job, or interesting things to say about your job, feel free to get in touch, and if you don't seem scary, I will do my best to interview you!)
I'm starting with one of the least scary and most interesting people I know, my brother, Ben. I figured since we were in Japan together, I might as well make the most of the opportunity. Read and enjoy!
What is your job?
I am an English instructor.
Where do you work?
I work at an English-language studio in Tokyo. We give private lessons to clients, typically people who work in finance or other industries where the client or his company can afford to spend $80 to talk to me for 40 minutes. The world is strange.
What training or education or experience do you have that enables you to do that?
In order to get a job like this, you should have a Bachelors degree and at least moderately good hygiene. Sometimes, the Bachelors degree is not necessary. Personally, I have a little experience working with as a tutor at a community college, and also a certificate for having taken 40 meaningless hours of training for teaching English as a second language.
What personality traits do you have that enables you to do this?
The interesting thing about this job is that different teachers have drastically different styles. Clients can choose the instructor they want, so the important thing is to play to your strengths. Generally, I am a very patient instructor and I believe that I'm usually fairly aware if the client is confused, frustrated, nervous or sad. I think that having those qualities helps me to do this job.
Please describe a typical day teaching for you.
Typically I wake up at 4:45 am. Usually I mean to be very efficient but I'm often running down the strange Tokyo cityscape at 6am, trying to catch the Tokido Express which leaves at 6:11. Shortly thereafter, I arrive at work and trade insults with a 38-year-old Englishman who works 7 days a week and is fuelled purely by hate. Then I prepare for my lessons.
Each lesson lasts for 45 minutes with a five minute break at the end but it is very hard to get the students to leave so my lesson preparation, which is unpaid, is my last chance to come up for air for several hours.
The lesson begins; it is a private lesson. Sometimes the student has trouble finding my booth, which is actually a cubical. When he or she comes, I typically shake his or her hand, except not lately because everyone is scared of swine flu. Then they put their bag in a small basket and do something with their jacket; there is no hook. Then they look at me uncertainly, and eventually, we both sit down. I like to start with some small talk: "what's new?" is for some reason a terrifying question. The more I think about it the more I understand where they are coming from. But I ask it anyway, because I think it raises useful problems. After 3 or 4 minutes of this, I have to make a decision: should I try to fill in the entire lesson with conversation, or should I turn to the book? This depends on the student, the book, and my mood. Some of the books have us discuss topics like, if man will be on Mars by the year 2000. I like those books. I don't like the books where we endlessly practice the present perfect. Regardless of the choice, the important thing is to get the client talking.
What's the hardest lesson to teach in ESL teaching?
In general I enjoy dealing with shy students because I am somewhat shy myself, so I understand how to put them at ease. However, some students are so incredibly uncomfortable with the entire process, that I feel as though I have to spend the entire lesson trying to put the client at ease and failing. This is difficult.
Why do you call them "clients" and not "students"?
My company refers us as instructors and the people we teach as clients. In training they taught us that this was because we weren't some sort of nonprofit place of education but we were in the service industry and we basically have no goal besides satisfying the customer. So we have client-instructor studio. I suppose this somewhat removes the title of authority that a teacher might have but in the end, I think it's just gibberishy corporate speak. I have been working there for 8 months now so of course I use it, just like the other goons.
What have you learned about the English language from this job?
I suppose I haven't learned that much. What I have learned is ways of explaining the English language. I've gained a great deal of respect for people who are trying to learn the English language. At times, their style of Japanese-English has actually corrupted my own consciousness of the English language and I find myself saying phrases like, "Go to shopping," and occasionally mixing up my Ls and my Rs.
Any fringe benefits of this job that you didn't expect?
I wish I could could say there was.
What would be one thing you would change about the job if you could to make it better?
I would have preferred less unnecessary training.
What advice would you give to someone considering getting a teaching job in Japan?
It depends a lot on what they want. There are a lot more opportunities once you get your feet on the ground over here. For many people it's best to have this kind of maximum choice but some would prefer to have a job before they buy a plane ticket. In terms of teaching, I think that you kind have to jump in on the deep end and hope for the best. The first few weeks is a process of learning to make decisions quickly and creating a structure that reduces the number of decisions that have to be made. After that, the chaos recedes.
Any final thoughts?
Actually, overall this has been an excellent experience for me. There were problems with the way it's set up, but for me the pros have outweighed the cons greatly.
Interviews are that much harder, because they involve another person. When I write a review, I am ever conscious of working with an object that a real thinking feeling person made, and trying to be as respectful of them as possible, but it's still not actually a personal interaction, the way reviews just are are are, no matter how scientific one tries to be with the questions.
I've tried to make this easier for myself in two ways. One, I'll be interviewing people about their jobs. This is a subject that's endlessly fascinating to me, so it's easy to come up with questions, so much so that often my cocktail-party and bus-stop and first-date chatter often becomes a kind of what-is-your-job-like interview anyway. And two, I'm going to interview people I know to start (although, if you have an interesting job, or interesting things to say about your job, feel free to get in touch, and if you don't seem scary, I will do my best to interview you!)
I'm starting with one of the least scary and most interesting people I know, my brother, Ben. I figured since we were in Japan together, I might as well make the most of the opportunity. Read and enjoy!
What is your job?
I am an English instructor.
Where do you work?
I work at an English-language studio in Tokyo. We give private lessons to clients, typically people who work in finance or other industries where the client or his company can afford to spend $80 to talk to me for 40 minutes. The world is strange.
What training or education or experience do you have that enables you to do that?
In order to get a job like this, you should have a Bachelors degree and at least moderately good hygiene. Sometimes, the Bachelors degree is not necessary. Personally, I have a little experience working with as a tutor at a community college, and also a certificate for having taken 40 meaningless hours of training for teaching English as a second language.
What personality traits do you have that enables you to do this?
The interesting thing about this job is that different teachers have drastically different styles. Clients can choose the instructor they want, so the important thing is to play to your strengths. Generally, I am a very patient instructor and I believe that I'm usually fairly aware if the client is confused, frustrated, nervous or sad. I think that having those qualities helps me to do this job.
Please describe a typical day teaching for you.
Typically I wake up at 4:45 am. Usually I mean to be very efficient but I'm often running down the strange Tokyo cityscape at 6am, trying to catch the Tokido Express which leaves at 6:11. Shortly thereafter, I arrive at work and trade insults with a 38-year-old Englishman who works 7 days a week and is fuelled purely by hate. Then I prepare for my lessons.
Each lesson lasts for 45 minutes with a five minute break at the end but it is very hard to get the students to leave so my lesson preparation, which is unpaid, is my last chance to come up for air for several hours.
The lesson begins; it is a private lesson. Sometimes the student has trouble finding my booth, which is actually a cubical. When he or she comes, I typically shake his or her hand, except not lately because everyone is scared of swine flu. Then they put their bag in a small basket and do something with their jacket; there is no hook. Then they look at me uncertainly, and eventually, we both sit down. I like to start with some small talk: "what's new?" is for some reason a terrifying question. The more I think about it the more I understand where they are coming from. But I ask it anyway, because I think it raises useful problems. After 3 or 4 minutes of this, I have to make a decision: should I try to fill in the entire lesson with conversation, or should I turn to the book? This depends on the student, the book, and my mood. Some of the books have us discuss topics like, if man will be on Mars by the year 2000. I like those books. I don't like the books where we endlessly practice the present perfect. Regardless of the choice, the important thing is to get the client talking.
What's the hardest lesson to teach in ESL teaching?
In general I enjoy dealing with shy students because I am somewhat shy myself, so I understand how to put them at ease. However, some students are so incredibly uncomfortable with the entire process, that I feel as though I have to spend the entire lesson trying to put the client at ease and failing. This is difficult.
Why do you call them "clients" and not "students"?
My company refers us as instructors and the people we teach as clients. In training they taught us that this was because we weren't some sort of nonprofit place of education but we were in the service industry and we basically have no goal besides satisfying the customer. So we have client-instructor studio. I suppose this somewhat removes the title of authority that a teacher might have but in the end, I think it's just gibberishy corporate speak. I have been working there for 8 months now so of course I use it, just like the other goons.
What have you learned about the English language from this job?
I suppose I haven't learned that much. What I have learned is ways of explaining the English language. I've gained a great deal of respect for people who are trying to learn the English language. At times, their style of Japanese-English has actually corrupted my own consciousness of the English language and I find myself saying phrases like, "Go to shopping," and occasionally mixing up my Ls and my Rs.
Any fringe benefits of this job that you didn't expect?
I wish I could could say there was.
What would be one thing you would change about the job if you could to make it better?
I would have preferred less unnecessary training.
What advice would you give to someone considering getting a teaching job in Japan?
It depends a lot on what they want. There are a lot more opportunities once you get your feet on the ground over here. For many people it's best to have this kind of maximum choice but some would prefer to have a job before they buy a plane ticket. In terms of teaching, I think that you kind have to jump in on the deep end and hope for the best. The first few weeks is a process of learning to make decisions quickly and creating a structure that reduces the number of decisions that have to be made. After that, the chaos recedes.
Any final thoughts?
Actually, overall this has been an excellent experience for me. There were problems with the way it's set up, but for me the pros have outweighed the cons greatly.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Writing Exercise: Romantic Traffic
I'm reading reading reading student stories this week, and they are *good*! I'm exhausted, but intrigued, and thrilled by all I'm learning (and, sigh, wishing I'd emphasized how dialogue tags worked a little better). One thing I'm learning is that kids write the storylines everyone else does, and they care about what everyone else cares about--a lot of these are love stories, and even the ones that aren't have love interests in them. They aren't getting every detail of how grown-ups couple *quite* accurately, but actually, they aren't that bad, probably because things actually *don't* change that much, post-high-school.
One thing they all seem to know, and to relate with such consistency that I'm worried that they actually heard it in a Guidance class (better than my Guidance class, which mainly taught us about chlamydia) is that if someone is right for you, it's easy to talk to them. I've seen over and over, "the conversation was so easy and natural," "they could tell each other anything," "they talked about everything as if they had known each other forever." I, of course, am writing in the margin, "I'd love to read this conversation," "Would be nice to read what they say," "Show a bit of this!!"
Show, don't tell, central tenet of creative writing classes everywhere. And really, what's more fun than flirtation? Why *don't* they want to write about it? As soon as that thought strikes, it becomes pretty obvious--because it's *hard* to write that stuff, or at least hard to do well, so that a reader can feel the frisson that the characters are supposed to be feeling.
Think about the last time your own companion went to the bathroom in a restaurant and left you eavesdropping on the couple at the next table (I'm not even going to pretend there are people in the world who don't listen). So often, they're enjoying each other, charmed and delighted and intrigued by each new comment and insight, and I'm...a little bored? Happy for them, of course, but not really getting it when he simpers, "Wow, that's so right, what you told that prick. I'm so proud of you," or she squawks, "Oh, my god, that's the funniest thing I ever heard. Hah ha HAH!"
Flirting can be pretty inane if you aren't a participant, and even when people are "confiding their deepest secrets" it might not roll along punchily; one girl's deepest secret is another's boring angst.
So how do you write romantic banter that people will actually want to read? Obviously, it's been done, but it's hard!! I've been working on it for a while now!
So today's exercise is--one "I'm so into you" conversation that is neither dull nor nauseating. Situate it at any point in the relationship's trajectory that works for the characters: meet cute, first date, post-coital, whatever. Just make'em like each other, and make that charm evident to the reader. I'll post mine when I manage to write it. This is really harder than it sounds, even if you aren't 15.
She'd already taken all of the dye out of her hair
RR
One thing they all seem to know, and to relate with such consistency that I'm worried that they actually heard it in a Guidance class (better than my Guidance class, which mainly taught us about chlamydia) is that if someone is right for you, it's easy to talk to them. I've seen over and over, "the conversation was so easy and natural," "they could tell each other anything," "they talked about everything as if they had known each other forever." I, of course, am writing in the margin, "I'd love to read this conversation," "Would be nice to read what they say," "Show a bit of this!!"
Show, don't tell, central tenet of creative writing classes everywhere. And really, what's more fun than flirtation? Why *don't* they want to write about it? As soon as that thought strikes, it becomes pretty obvious--because it's *hard* to write that stuff, or at least hard to do well, so that a reader can feel the frisson that the characters are supposed to be feeling.
Think about the last time your own companion went to the bathroom in a restaurant and left you eavesdropping on the couple at the next table (I'm not even going to pretend there are people in the world who don't listen). So often, they're enjoying each other, charmed and delighted and intrigued by each new comment and insight, and I'm...a little bored? Happy for them, of course, but not really getting it when he simpers, "Wow, that's so right, what you told that prick. I'm so proud of you," or she squawks, "Oh, my god, that's the funniest thing I ever heard. Hah ha HAH!"
Flirting can be pretty inane if you aren't a participant, and even when people are "confiding their deepest secrets" it might not roll along punchily; one girl's deepest secret is another's boring angst.
So how do you write romantic banter that people will actually want to read? Obviously, it's been done, but it's hard!! I've been working on it for a while now!
So today's exercise is--one "I'm so into you" conversation that is neither dull nor nauseating. Situate it at any point in the relationship's trajectory that works for the characters: meet cute, first date, post-coital, whatever. Just make'em like each other, and make that charm evident to the reader. I'll post mine when I manage to write it. This is really harder than it sounds, even if you aren't 15.
She'd already taken all of the dye out of her hair
RR
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Writing Rubics and Evaluative Criticism
**Warning: I have a migraine, my shower only sometimes has hot water these days, and I'm freaking out about educational assessment...so, if there were ever a day to just keep on scrolling down the old RSS feed, this might be it. I'm just saying.**
The old-school way of grading school papers, tests and presentations was called "norm-based", and unless I wildly misjudge the Rose-coloured reader age demographic, most of us were graded that way. We're basically talking about the bell-curve, which means that the teacher reads all the papers and ranks them. Then a small top tier of papers gets A-plusses, a slightly larger tier gets As, with the graph belling out around the middle-range of C+/B-, and slimming down again for approximately as many Fs as As. Thus, if one class is a somehow sharper than another, or simply has a better teacher, in norm-based assessment, one A paper could be light-years better than another. It depends not on the work the student did, but on the competition.
Another, more current pedagogical theory suggests criterion-based assessment, in which a defined standard is linked to a each tier of grades. And if I understand correctly, there is no expectation of failure; every student is expected to achieve a minimum level of comprehension, and every teacher, to teach towards universal success. There is no "acceptable" number of Fs.
In order to understand what success looks like, teachers create or are provided with rubrics that describe specifically what student achievement will look like at *each level* of comprehension. For those of us who have marked as university teaching assistants, we usually have a basic idea of an A paper based on our own understanding of the material, and simply deduct marks for all the ways a student's paper fails to coincide with that A. Rubrics eliminate a lot of that subjective leeway by providing parameters for As, Bs, Cs, and so on (if you want to get technical about it, criterion-based learning and its accompanying rubrics often don't endorse letter grades, but some do, and sometimes teachers just write'em in anyway, and anyway that assessment structure is a bit beyond me to explain in my current state of migraine-induced malaise).
So, obviously, criterion-based rubrics offer a lot more structure and guidance for a teacher, while still leaving *some* room for subjective interpretation (what does "well-thought out" mean, for example? "some evidence of structure"). There is no substitute for a tough, smart, prepared and aware teacher; but rubrics offer support and keep you from going too far off the rails. Especially for someone like me, who is in the classroom without benefit of formal training, who is without the years of education and experience that would train my subjectivity to coincide with typical student achievement.
Except...I teach creative writing...isn't that *all* subjective? Can anyone ever really say what defines a "good" story? Should one even try, or does that just quash the students' experimental impulses? Shouldn't all creativity be encouraged?
???
I'm treading on sacred ground here, but I don't actually think that. I come from a family of opinionated people who mainly don't bother anyone with our opinions...unless we are fairly confident our insights are well-informed and might help. I don't venture advice very often, because, well, what do I know?
Except sometimes I think I do know about a few things. And sometimes, I think the person who might be on the receiving end of my opinion might actually hear what I'm saying and actually use it for the good. "Veer left or you are going to back into that pole," is a classic example, because sometimes the driver's side blindspot just hides the pole. Other than potential carwrecks, however, mainly I venture opinions on writing. I like to think I read deeply and carefully, and if a writer were interested in hearing what I thought, I might be able to tell things, both good and bad, that would give him or her a little insight into the work.
Mainly I keep quiet about my thoughts on my reading, because nobody asked me, because the writer is faraway and famous, because plenty of reviews have already been written, because I don't think anyone needs or wants to know what I think. When I'm not asked to read critically, I usually don't--I read happily, even if I do twig on things that aren't working from time to time.
However, I think my students are open to feedback--maybe more so than they ever will be again. And they expect my opinion and, mainly, respect it. I have trained them to answer the question, "What's a useless thing to say in workshop?" with,
"That sucks!"
"Or??"
"That's amazing."
"Why?"
"Because they don't help the writer improve the story."
Big opinions don't say anything that matters. A careful, detailed assessment of a work will improve it; a blanket compliment might encourage furture work, but does nothing for what's actually on the page at that moment.
It must be plenty obvious by now that I am knee-deep in marking short stories by grade 10s and 11s, that I have written an assessment rubric to help myself do this, and that I am plagued with doubts. Some good and dedicated students have worked hard on stories that miss the mark in a variety of ways, and I am surprised and sad to be writing that down in red ink (I'm switching to blue) on their pages. I wonder if my assessment of this one particular story will make students hesitant to write the next one, and that thought is terrifying--I want them to improve, but even more, I want them to *write.*
The thought that comforts me is that I am reading polished stories that I have seen in previous drafts and, in several cases, I can see exactly where my feedback and feedback from their peers has spurred the writer to new heights. That's thrilling, to see evidence of learning right there on the page. Some kids ignored me and found their own new heights, and some kids ignored me and stayed at the same level, but I do think most of my students are capable of hearing feedback and using it if it resonates.
And that makes me want to be stringent in my grading, to respect these young writers enough to ask for more than they've done so far and assume they are capable of doing it. I think they are; I hope I am.
There may be 10 or 12 things I could tell you / after that you're on your own
RR
The old-school way of grading school papers, tests and presentations was called "norm-based", and unless I wildly misjudge the Rose-coloured reader age demographic, most of us were graded that way. We're basically talking about the bell-curve, which means that the teacher reads all the papers and ranks them. Then a small top tier of papers gets A-plusses, a slightly larger tier gets As, with the graph belling out around the middle-range of C+/B-, and slimming down again for approximately as many Fs as As. Thus, if one class is a somehow sharper than another, or simply has a better teacher, in norm-based assessment, one A paper could be light-years better than another. It depends not on the work the student did, but on the competition.
Another, more current pedagogical theory suggests criterion-based assessment, in which a defined standard is linked to a each tier of grades. And if I understand correctly, there is no expectation of failure; every student is expected to achieve a minimum level of comprehension, and every teacher, to teach towards universal success. There is no "acceptable" number of Fs.
In order to understand what success looks like, teachers create or are provided with rubrics that describe specifically what student achievement will look like at *each level* of comprehension. For those of us who have marked as university teaching assistants, we usually have a basic idea of an A paper based on our own understanding of the material, and simply deduct marks for all the ways a student's paper fails to coincide with that A. Rubrics eliminate a lot of that subjective leeway by providing parameters for As, Bs, Cs, and so on (if you want to get technical about it, criterion-based learning and its accompanying rubrics often don't endorse letter grades, but some do, and sometimes teachers just write'em in anyway, and anyway that assessment structure is a bit beyond me to explain in my current state of migraine-induced malaise).
So, obviously, criterion-based rubrics offer a lot more structure and guidance for a teacher, while still leaving *some* room for subjective interpretation (what does "well-thought out" mean, for example? "some evidence of structure"). There is no substitute for a tough, smart, prepared and aware teacher; but rubrics offer support and keep you from going too far off the rails. Especially for someone like me, who is in the classroom without benefit of formal training, who is without the years of education and experience that would train my subjectivity to coincide with typical student achievement.
Except...I teach creative writing...isn't that *all* subjective? Can anyone ever really say what defines a "good" story? Should one even try, or does that just quash the students' experimental impulses? Shouldn't all creativity be encouraged?
???
I'm treading on sacred ground here, but I don't actually think that. I come from a family of opinionated people who mainly don't bother anyone with our opinions...unless we are fairly confident our insights are well-informed and might help. I don't venture advice very often, because, well, what do I know?
Except sometimes I think I do know about a few things. And sometimes, I think the person who might be on the receiving end of my opinion might actually hear what I'm saying and actually use it for the good. "Veer left or you are going to back into that pole," is a classic example, because sometimes the driver's side blindspot just hides the pole. Other than potential carwrecks, however, mainly I venture opinions on writing. I like to think I read deeply and carefully, and if a writer were interested in hearing what I thought, I might be able to tell things, both good and bad, that would give him or her a little insight into the work.
Mainly I keep quiet about my thoughts on my reading, because nobody asked me, because the writer is faraway and famous, because plenty of reviews have already been written, because I don't think anyone needs or wants to know what I think. When I'm not asked to read critically, I usually don't--I read happily, even if I do twig on things that aren't working from time to time.
However, I think my students are open to feedback--maybe more so than they ever will be again. And they expect my opinion and, mainly, respect it. I have trained them to answer the question, "What's a useless thing to say in workshop?" with,
"That sucks!"
"Or??"
"That's amazing."
"Why?"
"Because they don't help the writer improve the story."
Big opinions don't say anything that matters. A careful, detailed assessment of a work will improve it; a blanket compliment might encourage furture work, but does nothing for what's actually on the page at that moment.
It must be plenty obvious by now that I am knee-deep in marking short stories by grade 10s and 11s, that I have written an assessment rubric to help myself do this, and that I am plagued with doubts. Some good and dedicated students have worked hard on stories that miss the mark in a variety of ways, and I am surprised and sad to be writing that down in red ink (I'm switching to blue) on their pages. I wonder if my assessment of this one particular story will make students hesitant to write the next one, and that thought is terrifying--I want them to improve, but even more, I want them to *write.*
The thought that comforts me is that I am reading polished stories that I have seen in previous drafts and, in several cases, I can see exactly where my feedback and feedback from their peers has spurred the writer to new heights. That's thrilling, to see evidence of learning right there on the page. Some kids ignored me and found their own new heights, and some kids ignored me and stayed at the same level, but I do think most of my students are capable of hearing feedback and using it if it resonates.
And that makes me want to be stringent in my grading, to respect these young writers enough to ask for more than they've done so far and assume they are capable of doing it. I think they are; I hope I am.
There may be 10 or 12 things I could tell you / after that you're on your own
RR
Monday, April 20, 2009
Old School
Last night I dreamt that I was back in undergrad, and I had chosen a half-year course thinking it was a full-year. So in second term, I was a course short and somehow got thrown into a class not of my choosing, which I was completely unprepared for and hated* and was going to fail. Fairly standard anxiety dream, especially perfect given that I was going back to my old high school to speak this morning.
That's a pretty fun thing to do, actually--I was anxious mainly because this event was postponed once before due to my laryngitis episode a few weeks ago. I was pretty thrilled to be invited back to my high school by my Writer's Craft teacher, Pam North. When I was a whippersnapper, sitting in Writer's Craft class writing ghost stories, Rachel Preston came to talk to us about her writing career, and made a huge impression on me. One, because she was a real writer and she still assumed human form. Two, because she said, "If you put an action or expression by the person into the same line, you don't need a dialogue tag." Brilliant.
I don't think I said anything that wonderfully useful to this batch of whippersnappers, but my voice held up through the reading and my little self-intro, and then the Q&A did provide a number of quite insightful questions for me to work with. So I think we managed ok. More than anything, I wanted to convey that being a "real" (ish) writer is hard--endless drafts, rejection letters, balancing other work--but it's something one can do. I encouraged them to send their best work to journals, to attend readings and meet other writers, to join workshop groups (after Writer's Craft) and to take their work seriously enough to withstand the endless drafts and rejection. But not so seriously that they didn't have any fun with it. Because what would be the point in that?
Is your bed made? Is your sweater on?
RR
* The non-standard part of the dream was that it was a drama class called "Social Problem Dramas" and I had to star in one. I was furious, because the play wasn't even about any particular Social Problem but, rather, the concept in general. My dreams aren't usually so satirical.
That's a pretty fun thing to do, actually--I was anxious mainly because this event was postponed once before due to my laryngitis episode a few weeks ago. I was pretty thrilled to be invited back to my high school by my Writer's Craft teacher, Pam North. When I was a whippersnapper, sitting in Writer's Craft class writing ghost stories, Rachel Preston came to talk to us about her writing career, and made a huge impression on me. One, because she was a real writer and she still assumed human form. Two, because she said, "If you put an action or expression by the person into the same line, you don't need a dialogue tag." Brilliant.
I don't think I said anything that wonderfully useful to this batch of whippersnappers, but my voice held up through the reading and my little self-intro, and then the Q&A did provide a number of quite insightful questions for me to work with. So I think we managed ok. More than anything, I wanted to convey that being a "real" (ish) writer is hard--endless drafts, rejection letters, balancing other work--but it's something one can do. I encouraged them to send their best work to journals, to attend readings and meet other writers, to join workshop groups (after Writer's Craft) and to take their work seriously enough to withstand the endless drafts and rejection. But not so seriously that they didn't have any fun with it. Because what would be the point in that?
Is your bed made? Is your sweater on?
RR
* The non-standard part of the dream was that it was a drama class called "Social Problem Dramas" and I had to star in one. I was furious, because the play wasn't even about any particular Social Problem but, rather, the concept in general. My dreams aren't usually so satirical.
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