Some Thoughts on Teaching a Writing Course

Some time ago I discovered that assignments could teach. If I could design a writing assignment that caused a learning writer to write in scenes or to focus first on character, I could stop talking once I had described the assignment. I designed such assignments, and they taught the learning writers more in the doing than any lecture or lesson or post-story criticism could have done.

That was interesting: start from the beginning rather than the end of the act of writing. Most of my experience in class had been with workshops where we wrote stories, turned them in, and then received critical commentary, often called constructive criticism. In these critical sessions we received correction on what we had not done and congratulations on what we had done.

These sessions became an art form in themselves, capable of teaching a great deal. Some of our fellow writers even became quite proud of their ability to provide critical commentary, rightly so. For someone like me who could not be stopped--at least not right away--the commentary provided some interesting discussion of writing that might well come into play on the next thing I wrote--rarely on the piece under discussion.

We tend to continue methods and lessons we learned from our best teachers and our favorite writers. But then I asked myself, what is it I most want to teach to learning writers? What do learning writers most need to learn? I had been reading books on writing and reading stories and novels with an eye then to what learning writers most needed to learn.

For example, John Gardner, in a generous paraphrase of E.M. Forster, said that plot is more than just one damn thing after another. He also said that every writer needs to learn how to create profluence, the ability to make readers want to turn pages and keep reading. You have to find a way to interest readers. That's natural enough, and clearly something every writer ought to know in their bones if not their heads.

Could I make an assignment that taught students, in the doing, that lesson? I thought probably so, and I tried it. Gardner also said the most basic plot is that someone desires something, goes after it, and gets it or doesn't get it. This creates profluence. Once we know what the character wants, we wonder whether or not he or she will get it. By the end of the story we should probably know this or know why. Further, we should have an idea of what it means, of what kind of loss or gain is involved in the getting or losing.

Kurt Vonnegut said that every character in a novel should want something, even if it's just a glass of water--if the world is to be whole and true. Desire and frustrated desire seemed to me a significant aspect of our lives. What we want and what we'll do to get it, and what will be done to us in the getting or losing. So I thought, here's the form of an assignment: Someone (a character) wants something, goes after it, and gets it or doesn't get it.

But that didn't cover all of the possibilities. What if the character decided not to go after it, that the prize was unattainable, wasn't that a story? And in any event, wasn't it possible that such a character might attain the desired object in spite of not going after it? Why should I want any learning writer to produce exactly the same form of desire? Isn't that what makes differences in characters, the very lifeblood of fiction--or one vein in the lifeblood?

What if the character got the desired object but discovered he didn't really want it, or she had mistaken what it would mean to possess it? So here's how the assignment was shaping up, more or less: Someone wants something, goes after it or does not go after it, attains it or does not attain it, and knows or does not know that he or she has attained the object.

That began to imitate the act of fiction as Gardner describes it: choices made along the way. Character is fate. Will the character take the meatball from the offered platter or not? But there are other aspects to the writing of fiction. Let's reduce this to absurdity and say that the character, a young man, wants a saxophone that sits in the window of a music shop. How do we convey the desirability of the object, or even the obvious lack of desirability?

What comes along with the sax? The color, the shape, the musical tone, the dent in the bell, and so on. Recordings of great saxophonists, the posture of those who play the saxophone under a spotlight on the stage, the lives and excesses of the sax world. All of these are part of the desirability and dangers of the saxophone, and the writer should at least think about these threads of imagery that might be strung through the story of the man who desired a sax.

But that's not quite enough yet, because there has to be a world for this character to inhabit, someplace he lives, his pad, his room, his apartment, his home, and this will tell us something of the nature of his desire. There must be space between his home and the music shop, and in that space there must be streets and sidewalks, dogs and people, and, most of all, there must be weather. There must be somewhere sun and moon, sky and cloud, tooth and nail.

Here is the assignment so far: Someone wants something. Goes after it or does not go after it. Gets it or does not get it. Knows it or does not know it. Be aware of all of the potential imagery, visual, aural, tactile, and so on, that comes out of the desired object, whatever it is. These should recieve some attention throughout the story, as if it were a ribbon threaded through the length. Let us know through what kind of weather the character moves, and something of the world in which he lives, including sun, moon, sky. An animal should make a brief appearance.

Is this too restricting? Not at all. In fact, as Richard Hugo says in The Triggering Town, such limitations distract the conscious mind long enouigh to allow the unconscious mind (Jung's theory at the heart of the operation) free reign. While the dog is chewing on the bone, the thief gets into the house. These limits and structural columns in the fiction actually help the learning writer to shape something that looks and feels like a story, that makes the reader turn the page, and engages our apetite for suspense.

What is the benefit of this? Nothing teaches a writer how to write a good story so much as writing one. Nothing benefits a learning writer more than having the direction on the front end of the story rather than after the fact. No sense of failure can be implied or imputed. Did you do the assignment? Yes, you did. All of the elements are there, and, moreover, it sings a little in the process. And furthermore, the assignment has left no mark on the story; no reader would know from what's on the page where it began--what Eudora Welty calls the jumping off place.

The release and confidence the assignment gives the writer reaches into language. Everything is better than what the learning writer could have accomplished before he or she began. At the end, no one needs to tell the writer to develop a plot, that the story lacks shape or life. The teacher is freed to be a studio art teacher: Look here, at this bit of sky, think you could accentuate that? How can we make this a better one of those? I like the bird chirping in that tree. There is no need for criticism that makes the writer feel a failure and wonder why he tried in the first place.

And in fact less criticism encourages the writer to think for himself or herself, and encourages the writer to reach once more into the void and pull out a story. On the down side, for some, there is no lording it over the learning writer. No one has the power over the writer's work but the writer. We don't say, now that you have written a story, I will tell you what is wrong with it. We say, look how that worked? Wasn't that fine?

This is essentially the process I followed in creating assignments. Another, for example, came from stumbling on Anne Beattie's "The Burning House," which is startlingly wonderful in the creation of a single evening, essentially one scene with a few rhythmic breaks. Weather comes in the door and through the radio. The world is breaking down even as it is beautifully depicted in its nature and context. And nothing is more important for a learning writer to learn than that the basic syntax of the language of fiction is the scene.

I don't have them read the story--at least not yet. I really don't like to be leading. Instead, I tell them to write a scene that takes place indoors. Three characters are involved in some activity. One of them is related to another though you shouldn't tell us how. You should just know it. During that activity, a fourth character arrives carrying or wearing something unusual.

Throughout this scene, the flow of time should be unbroken. One character may leave the room or scene or building, but we should continue with the main character in an unbroken movement of time. Though we are indoors, you should bring in the weather outside in some natural way. You may even take the main character and one other character outdoors in the same movement of time. Use one color three times, though you may vary the word or the hue.

This accomplishes something else the Beattie story demonstrates: how to handle more than one or two characters naturally, how to get them on and off the stage. The assignment doesn't follow the Beattie story strictly, but it uses some of the basic elements. I also add that someone should say something that surprises the main character, though you shouldn't point out that the main character is surprised except through some action, gesture, or response--and it should be subtle.

The learning writer sets out to accomplish this task and in the process learns or tries out what it is to make a scene, handle characters, and move through time and space. This is what I mean by the assignment teaching the learning writer, and, again, it doesn't require that we then tell a student that he needs to show, not tell, that she needs to write in scenes. It takes us at our word and shows rather than tells what this means.

I have seen that this works and that the writing of learning writers is better when you teach with the assignment rather than post-story criticism, which may have the unintended effect of teaching learning writers that what they do well is not as important as what they don't do well. And that the act of reading is essentially looking for mistakes. This approach tells the writer what kind of object they are making beforehand, and then looks to see how it works after.

I suppose one assumption from which I work is that it is better for a writer to be confident in his abilities and imagination than hesitant--though I am sure that there are those who think every speaker should be made to stutter. I'd like the learning writer to know the shape of the thing she's making. And I think it's important for the writer to depend more on himself for judgment than on me. That's what's necessary in a later stage, when you confront the bare page and start the story, knowing now what it is, and having been introduced to the language of fiction.

That's the idea of the studio teacher, and it's a good one.