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Introductory Creative Writing Class: A Critique

blueshiftjournal
May 30, 2015
7 min read

by alex arbeitel, blog writer

My first semester of college I signed up for an introductory creative writing course. I dropped it immediately after the first class. By now I’ve all but completely suppressed the experience, so I spent a solid fifteen minutes searching through old Facebook chats to see what actually went down that day. Apparently I was given an absurd prompt (“I need the help of the weightlifters.”) and a short period of time to free write. Then I was forced to listen to five or so short short stories about truly memorable trips to the gym. Afterwards, we discussed the previously assigned reading— a printout from a book we were to buy which was definitely the authority on how to write creatively as long as you adhere to carefully constructed rules which in no way impede your creativity whatsoever, which taught us how to recall memories in twelve easy steps, and warned us not to rhyme when writing poetry because we had “inexperienced hands.” To complement our newly-acquired knowledge of how to tap into that previously unexplored resource known as memory, we read a selection of poems that had to do with (you guessed it!) remembering. The discussion was truly remarkable and the point at which I almost walked out of the class. The professors asked us to name some poetic devices in the poem, and he received a colorful array of answers including “commas” and “images.” He agreed that, yes, those were poetic devices we inexperienced-handed writers could identify.

This isn’t a post about a terrible class I took eight months ago and can hardly remember.

My second semester of college I signed up for that same introductory creative writing class, this time with a different instructor. I searched her name on Google and read through her work. She was a modern poet through and through; she referenced technology in her pieces and used words like “jpeg” casually. I cross-checked on Rate My Professor to make sure she wasn’t the hardest grader in the entire department. I didn’t want to repeat the experience I had the semester before, and I was sure this time with this instructor it would be better. The first class we learned about Internet poetry and went on Tumblr. I submitted my assignment not only to her, but also to the Tumblr that we had looked at. The next class I excitedly told her that I had been published on the site, and she seemed just as thrilled, pulling up the Tumblr and showing the rest of the class.

This isn’t a post about how my second creative writing instructor got it right. She didn’t.

One of the first things she said to us was that we wouldn’t be graded on how good our writing was, good being a meaningless word, of course, because quality is subjective. It isn’t, though. If I gave you two stories, one written by a sixth grader and the other written by a college student—actually, scratch that. You might not be able to tell the difference, particularly if the sixth grader had a mediocre vocabulary and a decent grasp on punctuation. Chances are, that sixth grade prodigy has way more exposure to the written word than the average student who was in my class. Ignoring natural talent, the best way to learn how to write is to read a variety of works and to actually practice writing. About half of the students in my class admitted on the first day that they enjoy reading, so I imagine when they did get around to reading it was largely on SparkNotes. Those are the students my creative writing instructor walks into each class. I don’t blame her for feeling a bit defeated right off the bat, but she was wrong when she said that quality is subjective. If you’re reading a piece by an author with a decent grasp on writing then, sure, you might have a different opinion on it than the person sitting next to you. But if you’re reading a poem that clearly has an addiction to end rhyme and concludes every line, complete thought or not, with a comma, there isn’t a ton of room for discussion. The real reason we weren’t being graded on quality was because quality wasn’t expected. The only thing expected of us was to be quiet when our instructor spoke, raised our hands, and handed in our assignments on time. Knowing subject-verb agreement or, my favorite, that you’re supposed to place commas between adjectives instead of slashes was just a great/wonderful/excellent/fantastic bonus.

So my instructor, a published poet, was tasked with teaching a handful of college students, some of whom probably couldn’t correctly construct a string of sentences, “how” to write creatively. For each genre (fiction, poetry, and nonfiction) we first went through some basic vocabulary that should have been covered in elementary school (think: plot) and then read a selection of modern writers that experimented with the basic forms we had just gone over. Only after we learned the basic model and how to subvert it were we allowed to write. If you don’t see the problem with this, I’ll give you an example. One of the texts we read was a collection of one line summaries of Emily Dickinson’s poems, but we didn’t actually go over Dickinson. Yes, it’s innovative to write a parody of a famous poet’s work, but why did we completely ignore that Dickinson herself was an innovative writer? Why didn’t we talk about her use of capitalization and punctuation and what that did for her poetry? Look, I’m not a huge Emily Dickinson fan, but if we’re going to talk about innovation we don’t have to fast forward all the way to the twenty-first century. That being said, we never discussed smaller scale choices like the ones Emily Dickinson is famous for. When it came time to workshop our poetry, punctuation slid across everyone’s pages. Nobody knew what to do with their commas and periods and dashes.

I guess it didn’t matter, though. The grade was based on how much you revised your pieces. If you backspaced your entire first draft and handed in a completely new piece, you received a check-plus (translation: A) regardless how typo-ridden and nonsensical your final product. Revision is essential to the writing process, but scrapping the original piece in favor of something equally unintelligible is not the same thing. I would argue that the entire writing process is revision—revising thoughts into sentences, formatting them to convey what you mean. My class didn’t teach revision. My instructor didn’t even reward revision. She never taught us how to make our writing better, and the few notes she scribbled on our first drafts weren’t exactly helpful. She just threw us into a circle and told us to workshop, but asking a room of inexperienced writers to critique each other’s writing shockingly doesn’t significantly improve their pieces. Generally, the students that were really loud (often closet poets who couldn’t take criticism themselves because they were always right) dominated the conversation and steered it in directions that were not only irrelevant to fixing the piece, but often had to do with their personal beliefs. We had just as many conversations about is this piece racist? sexist? offensive? (which more often than not it was) as about how to edit the piece itself. The fact of the matter was, though, that we didn’t know how to edit— how to move the characters beyond one-dimensional caricatures or include an actual plot. We didn’t read or write enough to get to that level of workshopping. I’m not sure that it’s possible to make up for years of not reading or writing consistently in one semester. You can’t just “introduce” creative writing and expect the rest of the pieces to fall into place. Achieving decent creative writing is far more difficult than it was for someone in my class to get an A.

After a semester in the most introductory creative writing class possible, I’m really struggling to figure out how it can be done right. This wasn’t a class made for me, someone genuinely interested in writing. This was a class made for people trying to fulfill a specific requirement with whatever class sounds the easiest. They aren’t wrong—the class itself is a joke. How do you fix that? If the class is too difficult, no one will sign up besides the people who actually want to write. But what about students who are first exposed to creative writing in an introductory class and realize they love it? If assignments are graded based on how well-written the pieces are, people will actually try on the assignments. But what about the students who aren’t technically amazing writers? And, after all, isn’t quality subjective?

I do have some suggestions, though, for those of you ever in the position to teach a creative writing class.

Have your students write before and after you teach them how to. If you show them examples right away, they’re going to copy them. You’re giving them what looks like the correct answer. Make sure they know there isn’t a right way and a wrong way to write.
Don’t tell them not to rhyme. For some reason many students are taught that all poems rhyme, so it will be confusing at first. Chances are that they’ll rhyme anyway, and, in any case, there’s nothing inherently wrong with rhyming. Show them poems that are successful without end rhymes. Show them poems that use internal rhyme and slant rhymes. Let them experiment. Don’t just say no.
Introduce them to free writing. Stress that the first form a piece is written in is not its permanent form. Encourage them to experiment. Encourage them to write unfinished pieces. Have them write pieces that no one else is ever going to read. Have them write something honest.
Be very careful when writing your prompts. Make sure they aren’t too vague, and, more importantly, that they aren’t too constricting. The point is to be creative, not to adhere to the rules. Definitely don’t assign a five to seven word erasure poem. That’s a waste of ink. At least let the students pick the length.
Teach your students how to workshop before you throw them at each other in the circle. Some people criticize the author instead of the piece. That’s not okay. Step in if someone is getting visibly upset.
That being said, teach students how to take a critique. One girl blew up at me during a small-group poetry workshop for suggesting the word "and" didn’t need to be on its own line. She said I just didn’t get her because she’s an “avant-gardist.” Let that sink in.
Tell your students that everything can be critiqued. Have them critique famous poems. If you’re feeling crazy, have them critique Shakespeare. Better yet, have them critique one of your pieces, but don’t tell them it’s yours beforehand. During the big reveal, let them know that no piece ever reaches a perfect finished form.