Every semester, in
my first-day introduction letters from my composition students, many of them
tell me how they “hate” English, some even say that they learned to hate English in high school, by being made to write
standard, formal five-paragraph papers. Yet in these same letters, some of
these students go on to say that they still write poetry, short stories,
comics, and lyrics (to name a few genres), but they consider this ‘creative’
writing completely separate from English. After I started teaching composition
at Jackson Community College, I also had the opportunity to teach a creative
writing class, in which many of my best composition students enrolled. I
suspected that they were some of my best composition students because they had
already been interested in creative writing, and had a confidence in themselves
as writers, and even as thinkers, that some of their composition classmates
didn’t have. Not that they didn’t work hard in the composition classes, but
they had had at least a ‘head start,’ building skills which they could apply in
any other genre, including editing (or correcting surface convention errors),
genre and model recognition, and revision.
My experience
writing both in creative genres and in the academic world seem to confirm this
idea. That is, my own explorations in creative writing have given me the
survival skills for writing in an academic setting because those skills
transfer: The strategies and knowledge students develop in one genre of writing
can be applied to any other genre, regardless of context or situation. Not
necessarily at the same level, but this knowledge gives them that ‘head start’
in the unfamiliar genre. For example, someone who is familiar with writing in
the genre of poetry will be able to ‘adapt’ to the genre of a biology lab
report more easily than someone with little writing experience at all. Note
that this works both ways: A person skilled in writing biology lab reports has
a certain knowledge of writing that would give her a ‘head start’ in writing
poetry. In either case, she will be using strategies such as revision, model
recognition, editing, experimentation, invention, and metacognition.
In a sense, this
idea is summed up in the phrase, “all writing is creative writing,” which gets
passed down from comp teacher to comp teacher as some kind of mantra. I have
explored this idea by having my composition students write in creative genres
in order to improve their skills in writing considered more ‘academic,’ with
some success, but I also wanted to determine why this ‘transfer’ wasn’t
absolute, and what other factors there are in learning how to write in a(ny)
genre.
Using creative
writing in the composition classroom seems to have other advantages too, like
building classroom community, and building students’ confidences in themselves
(and each other) as writers and thinkers, which in turn empowers them in
college and out the real world. Last but not least, giving them the opportunity
to experiment in creative genres may help alter their attitudes towards writing
in general, and may give them a love for writing for the rest of their lives.
Or, at least not make them hate it. In exploring these ideas and questions, my
(potentially subversive) goal is to argue for making creative writing genres an
integral part of composition class assignments.
The Split
When I started teaching at Jackson
Community College, I became aware of not just a mental split between creative
writing and academic writing among my students, but also a split among the
faculty: Only about three of us, including me and another adjunct, had any
interest in even teaching creative writing, and when us two adjuncts moved on,
the two creative writing classes were cut down to one: not for lack of student
interest, just no one else wanted to teach it. At Eastern Michigan University,
where I was a full-time GA earning a degree in Written Communication: The
Teaching of Writing, this ‘split’ is even more obvious: Although technically
part of the English department, creative writing classes come under their own
letter designation, and are even listed on a separate section of the catalogue.
Teachers in the two disciplines, though sharing the same halls, rarely even
talk to each other, and the only graduate students who see both worlds are a
few graduate creative writing majors who teach intro composition courses (and
not the other way around!).
This Split (which
I’m starting to think of with a capital ‘S’) between creative writing and
academic writing has always existed, starting at least back with Plato, especially
in the Dialogues Phaedrus, Gorgias and The Republic. Plato took as a given that there was a difference
between rhetoric and poetry (in which in he includes storytelling and drama
(Republic Books II and III)), and while he never discusses whether there’s a
different process between rhetoric
and poetry, he obviously considers them different ways of thinking. Rhetoric,
the form of communication used by philosophers, is used for something, to argue, in a logical manner, for how a person
should act, or “pointing to what is just” (Gorgias 138). In other words, to
prove something. In Phaedrus, Plato
ranks the philosophers/rhetoricians as those people who have been closest to
God, and therefore closer to truth, followed by kings as second closest, with
the poets way down at seventh, just two places up from tyrants. A little later
he claims that poetry doesn’t do anything more than “educate” people, by
chronicling something that has happened in history (150), meaning, I guess,
that The Iliad is nothing more than a
history lesson!
But even Plato
admits, implicitly, that this is not true, because he spends half The Republic going after the poets. What
he doesn’t like about poetry is that it can portray gods and heroes as less
than ideal—for example, afraid, or acting unjustly. That is, human. In short,
poetry doesn’t necessarily act logically; it doesn’t argue for acting justly; it just represents gods and heroes doing
ambiguously human things. Very dangerous, especially for his
guardian-philosophers, for whom bravery and acting justly seem to involve
ignorance more than logical thinking.
The Split Today
In modern times, even though most
people would now view at least the reading
of creative texts as valuable, the Split between creative and academic writing
still exists, and is still based on the idea that certain types of writing are
‘useful’ and other, creative types, not so. The most famous example of this in
composition studies is the (in)famous exchange between David Bartholomae and
Peter Elbow that appeared in College
Communication and Communication in 1995. Though they both agree that the
preparation they hope to give their students is a way to empowerment, a way to
learn how to survive in the academic world, their debate is over the best way. Should students “be suspicious
of writing” (Bartholomae “Responses” 85) or learn to “trust language” (Elbow 78)? Elbow claims that students need to
write from personal experience first, in order to feel like they, and not the
teacher, are the expert on the subject. Any kind of formal writing, in the form
of arguments, or research papers, holds the problem that the teacher may
automatically know more than the student, thus the student feels like he or she
is trying to write to some ‘standard’ determined by the teacher.
Bartholomae argues
that learning to write to a standard is just the reality of college life. In
his debate with Elbow, and even more so in his essay “Inventing the
University,” Bartholomae argues that unless students get some exposure, or
practice, at the types of writing they’ll be expected to do in later classes,
they’ll be at a loss in how to begin when they get there, and end up excluded
from the “specialized discourse,” or discourses, of the university (60-61). To
him, power is the key, and the university is the representation of power. When
and/or if students learn the way people, we instructors, talk and write, they
begin to have access to, and control of, that power. Without being able to
navigate in the academic world, students are outsiders, powerless:
Our goal is to make a writer aware
of the forces at play in the
production of
knowledge...[and]...there is no better way to
investigate the transmission of
power, traditions and authority
than by asking student to do what
academics do: work with
the past, with key texts...working
with other’s terms...struggling
with the problems of quotation,
citation and paraphrase....
[to] argue. (Writing 66)
And while I do think the ability to critique a text, any text, is useful,
perhaps even a survival skill, and empowering,
I don’t think students, or anyone, can get to that point without first feeling
confident as a writer, and I lean toward agreeing with Elbow in his “Response”
to Bartholomae that critical-type academic writing “isn’t feasible or desirable
in one semester first year introduction to writing courses” (87).
This is the
problem: Time. For most schools, there’s only one semester in on composition
class to do anything. If Elbow had more time, I think he’d be willing to agree
with Bartholomae about working towards giving his students more experience with
academic type writing. But, there seems to be room to wiggle between the
Elbow/Bartholomae poles, even in one semester, and have students have some fun
and gain some confidence in themselves as writers, then on the last paper of the semester, move them a little further
down the continuum with an introduction to critical writing and/or working with
an outside text. Any more ‘academic’ writing than that, Elbow argues, though
probably an intense writing experience, and a good preparation for future
academic assignments, sounds discouraging, for my students and me, and I just
can’t have my students associating writing (and thinking and using language)
with the word “discouraging.” I firmly stay in agreement with Elbow when he
says that his
goal is that students should keep
writing by choice after the course is over—because...the process itself of
engaging in writing, of trying to find words for one’s thinking and experience
and trying them on others—will ultimately lead to the kind of questing...that
[he and Bartholomae] both seek...by a path where the student is steering.” (92)
Is this ideal
thinking? Yes of course. But it resonates with me because I’m pretty sure that
that’s how I learned to write in the
Star Wars Cantina of Bartholomae’s Academic Discourse.
Long Ago: K-12
It took me a long time to
disassociate academic writing from the “school writing” I grew up on, which was
nothing ever more than regurgitation of facts. I don’t think my school system
was the best nor the worst, but any writing assignment I ever had, a so-called
“report” was no more than what was expected on a history test: just a listing
back, supposedly in my own words, of information. Nothing more than summary. I
don’t blame my teachers, they had five classes of 30+ students, and were
probably just grateful that I could construct a sentence and have a paragraph
every now and then. It’s at this point where I do think my own creative writing
(done, of course, outside of school) helped me ‘get by,’ because I was very
content to ‘get by’ with a B with minimal effort than be one of those nerds who
worked hard to get an A (my nerdiness and cravings for A’s came much later in
grad school). At the very least, the idea of putting words on a page was not
new, or foreign. I had some
confidence in just writing.
The Discourse Strikes Back: College
I realize now that, back in 1990,
the instructors I had at Jackson Community College, and the department itself,
were under the influence of Elbow. In neither of the composition classes that I
took there did I do any research or citation. In fact, because I wanted to be a
writer, I decided to take one writing class every semester, and, when I ran out
of composition and creative writing classes, enrolled in an independent study
class called Research Writing. There I got my first experience with research,
and citation, both of which I explored more or less on my own. The instructor
never ‘taught’ me how to do either of these things, because, after I showed
that I was willing and able to learn by myself, he didn’t have to. I only
worked on one paper the whole semester, on cockroaches, for a grand total of
seven pages, which was huge for me back then. I have always remembered that he
left the decision of what to write about up to me, which made the ‘assignment’
actually interesting: I’d lived in a roach-infested apartment building out in
Los Angeles for a year, and just wanted to know more about the damn things,
especially after seeing one of the guys across the hall put one in a microwave
for two minutes and it survived!
I don’t have the
paper anymore, but I know it was still in the regurgitation style: just copying
interesting things I’d found out about cockroaches (like that there are flying
cockroaches in Florida! I remember that!) But, I learned how to cite: I just
found a book that used citations, I don’t even remember what it was, and copied
how that writer had done it. I didn’t know at the time, but I was actually
learning Chicago Style. I didn’t even know then that there were different types
of citation, I just assumed that since this way of citing was in a book, that
must be how everyone did it.
At Michigan State
University, as an academic writer, I was almost a complete failure. I look at
my transcripts from that time and it’s glaringly obvious there was a problem: I
was an English major, yet in all my literature classes I was getting 2.5’s. I
was reading the books, coming to every class, listening (passively) to the
professors lecture me on what the books meant, but writing anything meaningful,
to me or my professors, seemed impossible. I didn’t know what “writing anything
meaningful” meant. Only my creative writing classes, in which I was receiving
4.0’s, saved my GPA (plus, curiously, Spanish and physical education). I now
remember how disillusioned I was with college, wanting to keep learning, but
feeling I would never fit in as a grad student because I knew I’d have to do
more of that writing that I didn’t like, and wasn’t good at, which sounds
exactly like what some of my students say to me, and which I see might actually
be related in the opposite way: I wasn’t good at it, so I didn’t like it.
I just didn’t get what was required. I was doing what
I’d been taught to do, regurgitate info, when I could remember it. Not that I liked doing that, but my other, natural,
response to reading a text, emulating it, trying to write something similar,
didn’t count at all in that world (Notable exception: This TA teaching a
British Lit class who actually accepted a poem I wrote in response to Keat’s
poem “To Autumn” in lieu of an essay, and gave me a 4.0 on it. A thousand
blessings on you Tony, wherever you are now).
Return of the Poet: Grad School #1: The New School for Social Research
After my horrible experience with
lit classes in college, I knew there was no way I wanted to go on to a Master’s
in English and be what I now call a “lit critter.” I had no idea about
composition studies at the time, all my comp teachers had been lit majors,
which is probably significant, but I still had a desire to study writing, so I
eventually decided to try a MFA. The New School for Social Research (now New
School University) accepted me in their Poetry Writing Program and off I went
to New York. And, despite the reputation MFAs have with some folks as just
money makers, which I even sort of agree with now, at the time it was the right
thing for me: I was writing and reading, and although we discussed what we were
reading, I was with people, including the instructors, who also felt that
natural way to respond to a creative text was to write a creative text of one’s
own.
Did I have
problems there? Yes. Language Poetry was in vogue, so the young Language poet
wanna-bes wasted a lot of time telling the rest of us we shouldn’t write
personal poetry. I digress, but I had my revenge when our Master’s projects
came around and everyone had to write a critical essay in addition to a
portfolio of creative work. The Language poets didn’t have such an easy time, I
think (now) because they had no experience in narrative, or even revision, or
even making a coherent sentence. Not that what I wrote felt easy, and it took
time and effort, but it was ‘do-able’ and I had confidence in myself. My
critical essay compared Gary Snyder and James Dickey, who, I realized were both
considered “nature poets” but who had very different views of nature. And to my
surprise, I did a pretty decent job of it while actually learning more about
both writers. By that time I’d been reading more non-fiction critical writings about
writers and writing, both in school and out, and I felt more comfortable using
the discourse language, and emulating how others discussed texts. And, my
experience back at JCC with the research paper on cockroaches had at least
prepared me for citation: It was not a new concept to me by then, even if I
probably wasn’t proficient.
Each of us
students worked with one of the faculty. My advisor was David Trinidad, a funny
intelligent guy who had really helped me fit in, and I remember talking to him
on the phone the first time after I’d sent him my first rough draft: There was
actual relief in his voice when he told me I was doing a good job, letting slip
that other folks he was working with, college graduates like myself, were doing
things like calling poets by their first names in their papers, and had no clue
how to cite.
Grad School #2: St. John’s College
Even after my Snyder/Dickey paper
for the New School, I now know that I still did not understand academic writing
until I entered the Eastern Classics MA Program at St. John’s College in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. The actual revelation actually came from the admissions
counselor when I called him for advice on what to do for the sample essay
required with the application. The main idea of the essay was to write about a
favorite book, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do, except that I knew it should
be nothing like I used to write back in college. He broke down the three basic
ways a person can write about a text: Regurgitate, Compare, or Ask a Question.
The first,
regurgitate, is what I had done, and all that was required of me, all the way
up into college. Even my “research paper” on cockroaches at JCC was just a
listing of info I’d found on them. My essays at MSU were just summarizing of
the text (literary or critical), or what the professor said in class. The
second, comparing one text to another, is what I’d figured out how to do at the
New School, though it was really just a step up from regurgitation because
still none of my own thinking was required: I just came up with a list of
common ideas and summarized what each poets had to say on them.
What the counselor
at St. John’s told me to try was find something in a text I really didn’t “get”
and make it into a question. Then, go back into the text and try to answer it.
This may seem obvious to some folks, but it was a revelation to me: To actually
admit to myself and others that there might be something I didn’t understand
about a text, when my whole academic career (such as it was) I felt I was
expected to understand a text completely, or at least act like I did when I
wrote a paper on it. The result of trying to answer the question, whether I can
or not, is that I come away with a deeper understanding of the text. I also
loved the St. John’s approach (sometimes called the Great Books approach) of
engaging in just (and only) a text, by myself, without consulting the so-called
experts. This forced me to defend myself, and quote and cite a text well.
I don’t know why
it took me so long to learn how to have a question about a text, except that in
my literature classes I learned that I shouldn’t do that. I had always felt
that everyone was just expected to know
what a text was about, and that there was only one thing that a text was about:
what the professor thought. Do I think now that’s how the really good lit
critters think and work? No, but nobody taught me that that was part of the
academic process, perhaps because for a professor to admit that they had
questions about a text would be some kind of weakness, to their students, but
maybe also to their colleagues and employers. If the university is based on
‘publish or perish,’ then to survive professors may have to be ‘experts,’
meaning seeming like they know everything. And this attitude gets passed on to
their students.
Teaching Academic Writing? Me?
Another big plateau in learning
academic writing was teaching it. When I returned back to JCC, this time as a
supposed authority figure, I was given English 131 classes, which every
student, in every department, had to take. The Bedford/St. Martin’s book we
were using had chapters basically laid out so that I could’ve had my students
writing different forms of personal essays the whole semester, and I was
strongly tempted to do that. Personal writing seemed more creative, more human,
and something I felt I might be able
to help my students with. I also felt that they
would like those types of writing better, i.e. it would be fun writing instead
of “work.” Then my friend Dave, who had been teaching there a couple years
already, pointed out that many of my students would not go on to English 132,
the class needed for those transferring to a four year college, in which the
main emphasis was research and citation. English 131 didn’t have that
requirement, yet many of my students were going into JCC’s nursing program, in
which they would have to know how to cite and research sources. I realized I
couldn’t in good conscience send my students off having only written personal
narratives. So, I decided, anticipating Bartholomae, that I had to have at
least one paper in my classes which needed to be a research paper, so that my
student would be (a little) prepared for potential assignments in future
classes. Note that I didn’t think any
kind of writing would prepare them: To be prepared for citation, one needs to
actually cite. Or that seemed true at the time.
Personally, I
wasn’t happy with that because the thought of reading dry sterile research
paper horrified me (still does), and I wasn’t sure I would be able to ‘help’ my
students write them, because I knew I was no expert and, unlike my MSU
professors, I didn’t feel right to pretending. I was saved again by Dave who
showed me Ken Macrorie’s I-Search paper, which I loved (and still do) because
it ‘scaffolded’ off of the personal essays my students had already done, gave
them experience in working with sources and researching and citing, and still
gave them the opportunity to be human. One humorous note: Although I didn’t
want to pretend to be an expert, I surely didn’t want to come off as an idiot
either, so I had to give myself a crash course in research and citation, since
it had been years since I’d used a citation system, and that had been Chicago
Style. I also finally learned about databases and how they worked. Embarrassing
to say, but in a sense I was returning to my St. John’s roots, where the
instructor comes to a subject not as an expert, but as someone with questions
too.
By my second year
I was given the opportunity to teach English132, which I knew would be a
challenge, since the corresponding chapters from the Bedford/St. Martin’s book
were writing assignments like literary analysis, arguments and “proposing a
solution” to something. I kept the I-Search assignment, for the same reason I
used it in English 131, to still give me a personal connection, a human element
to my students. The Argument Paper seemed practical to me, applicable to both
academic assignment and also to real life: for some reason I had visions of my
students standing at one of the bars in Jackson, The Hunt Club, arguing about
politics, or at least tv shows, and doing so formally and logically while their
less fortunate friends resorted to yelling and name-calling.
And, since these
were students transferring to a four-year school, I figured they would get some
kind of literature class, so I wanted to prepare them better than I had been.
Maybe too I dreamed of helping my students become more critical readers of any
text and they would all give up watching television. And I failed miserably:
the literary analysis was the hardest essay we did, for both them and me. I was
trying to teach them something it had taken me until my thirties to learn. Were
they better prepared? Maybe. Did we have fun? No. Did they walk away with a new
found love of reading or writing? Hell no.
I learned more from the argument paper
than my students. I’d never had to formally argue anything, so again I was
frantically reading everything about arguments before class. But, those papers
went better. Once my students got that an argument is made up of claims,
everything clicked. Not a very creative way to write, but 132 wasn’t about
creativity I realized. They had total choice on the topics they were writing
about, but the structures of the writing genres felt stifling. Again, at the end
of class, were they more ‘prepared’ for possible future writing assignments?
Yes. Did they have fun? Well....
Which was my
reaction to the class as whole, even though my students were great. They seemed
to accept better than I did that the class wasn’t supposed to be fun, but
though some teachers at JCC prefer to teach 132 exclusively, I knew I couldn’t,
at least not how it was set up. Even though I wanted (and still want) to
prepare my students for future writing assignments, if that meant reducing writing
to impersonal arguments then I kind of felt like I was preparing my students to
hate writing, and preparing myself to hate student writing. Nor did I like the
set up of JCC classes and the Bedford/St. Martin’s book, which implied that
literary analysis and arguments are somehow at a higher level than personal
essays. Meaning, I guess, that they are both more difficult and more important.
That’s just not true.
Grad School #3: Eastern Michigan University
My most recent academic plateau
(and at this point I know it’s plateaus all the way up) was going to grad
school, yet again, this time at Eastern. The big difference between St. John’s
and Eastern is that at St. John’s I learned to come to a text with questions,
while at Eastern I learned, and was expected, to come to texts with opinions.
The two ideas are interrelated, of course, and probably most people would learn
that faster than I have. I was even trying to get my students to have an
opinion about a text at JCC (which is very very difficult, because, like me,
that had learned that what is expected of them is regurgitation) but the point
is, I felt prepared going in. Finally, only after years of academic writing,
did I feel prepared for academic writing. And, feeling prepared has made it
fun, or at least highly interesting. I find I worry less about format or
audience, and can concentrate on thinking. I’d rather be writing poetry, but
yes, I find myself turning into an academic nerd. Note to self: Writing is fun
when you feel prepared.
Like I said, if it
took me this long to feel comfortable in academic writing, is there any way I
think I can teach my students in one semester how to survive in Bartholomae’s
Academic Discourse? Well, no. But, like with my JCC nursing students, if I
could give them a couple of clues to help them on their way, that might be more
than I got and might provide them with a beginning. In valuing that, I feel
like I’m starting to argue for the teaching of academic writing over
everything. And, if learning the Academic Discourse were only about the writing
and thinking that goes on at the university, if it were only something that
existed in a vacuum, then I’d be less inclined really give it importance. But
it doesn’t, and I don’t think Bartholomae emphasizes that enough, that the skills
we learn in the Academic Discourse are directly applicable to the ‘Public
Discourse’ outside of the university. Engaging with texts is something people
do every day. The most obvious example of this, which goes back to Plato, is in
politics, and with politicians, and how important it is to be able to engage
with politicians on what they say and do (which are not always the same thing),
rather than sitting back and passively watching. Being able to ask questions,
disagree, argue with/for, have opinions, are survival skills for life. Without
those skills, our students will end up feeling helpless about life just like
they may have been in the university.
But my question
still remains: are some basic
principles, like revising, editing, appropriate use of mechanics, setting aside
a regular writing time, using models, and getting peer response, transferable
between creative writing genres and academic genres? Because if they are, I and
my students will have a lot more fun. So, in order to help myself understand
the transfer of skills, and perhaps strategies also, between creative writing
and academic writing, I went back and analyzed my own, creative, writing
process.
My Own, Creative, Writing Process
I looked at three different genres
of creative writing that I’ve done, a poem, a short story, and a novel, first
comparing those processes with each other, then examining my writing process
with an academic paper I wrote, to see if I was actually doing the same
‘things,’ and if not, why not. What I found, which may or may not be a
revelation to anybody, is that my writing process is basically the same for all
the creative genres I work in. All of my writing begins with reading, and is a
reaction to, or reply to, or an emulation of, something, or some things, I’ve read.
For example, I use models. I might read one of Allen Ginsberg’s long-lined
poems, and then want to try something similar, like the long line format, or a
similar subject. Not that either would be an exact copy of any of his poems,
since I also have many other literary heroes and their influence goes into my writing also: Our styles are always a
mix of everything we read. I do find though, that is there is usually a
‘trigger’ that makes me want to write something at that time. The poet, and
teacher, Richard Hugo, most famously, describes this phenomenon in his book The Triggering Town, where that one
thing, that one trigger, be it a town, or a poem, or a conversation with
someone, “excites the imagination” (Introduction). I also like poet Denise
Levertov’s description of the elements (and I feel there are always many) that
lead up to this trigger. She’s talking about writing poetry, but she could be
talking about any type of writing:
first there must be an experience,
a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the
poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech. (629)
Another common,
and key, part of my processes is time, i.e. making it. When I set aside writing
time every day, I’m much more likely to be open to triggers, to feel ‘inspired’
to write something. I also write ‘on the fly’ sometimes, especially poetry,
since it’s short, usually, but knowing I have a space every day where I’ll do
nothing but write keeps my mind open to thinking about writing too, and keeps
me more ready to go. Time also is important in the revision/editing process.
Since my creative writing is for myself primarily, and I don’t have a deadline,
I can have the luxury to go back, again and again, to revise and edit various
pieces. Revision I think of as any kind of changing of the text, from moving,
to cutting, to changing words. Editing is surface convention stuff, like
correction spelling and punctuation (though even sometimes the change of a
comma can be an important revision). In any case, both functions generally
happen together, recursively, though at some point editing is that last thing,
one last spell check.
Peer response is
also a key part of my writing process, though unfortunately not always available.
Being out of school and not having many, or any, writer friends can be tough.
In addition to just ‘having another set of eyes’ on my writing, a perhaps even
more valuable part of peer review is just acceptance. As a writer I always
doubt whether what I’ve written is even worth anything, is even any good at
all, so just having someone read something and talk about it as if there’s
something there to talk about can be a relief, even if they’re also pointing
out parts that might need work. I would think that after years of writing now
that I might have a little more confidence in whether my writing is worthy, and
I do sometimes, with some of my texts, but I also sometimes just tell myself
that what I’ve written is ‘good enough,’ when it’s not. I also have to stress
that I don’t just include anybody as a peer, because, curiously, I’ve had a
couple writer friends who haven’t been as useful as I’d like. Also curiously:
One of my best ‘responders’ is a non-writer, non-English major.
Audience
consideration tends to not be important to me with my creative writing. I do start out with a sense of some kind of audience, just in what I
read and like. For example, I know if I like Beth Nugent’s short stories, my
stories are probably going to be in the same ‘audience type’ (if they’re good
enough). That is, “if you like that, you might like this.” Most writers do that
though. Not consciously, not like, “I like Nugent’s style, therefore I’m going
to attempt to write exactly the way she writes.” No, it’s that I already like
that stripped-down “iceberg” style (i.e. what we see/read is only the tip of
the iceberg, with a whole lot going on under the surface) in general, because
she was influenced by Hemingway and Marguerite Duras, also iceberg writers.
Audience
consideration only comes in after I
feel a text is ‘done’ and ready to be considered for publication. Then,
ideally, I try and find a market into which it fits. I do my share of sending
out stories and poems to random literary journals too, but I’ll always try the
publications in which I think I ‘fit.’ For example, if I have a story about man
in his twenties or thirties involved with a woman in some romantic way, I would
probably consider sending the story to Esquire
or Playboy (if they still even
publish short stories, but that’s another problem), since the people who buy
those publications might be
thirty-something men interested in women. Similarly, I know the New York Quarterly tends to print poems
in the Charles Bukowski ‘dirty realism’ style, and since Bukowski is a huge
influence on me, my poems have a better chance of getting in there than in,
say, The Paris Review. Point is, I
don’t ever modify my writing to fit an audience, I find the audience for my
writing.
This is one of the
big differences in academic writing, at least as I’ve learned it up to this
point: I have always felt that audience awareness is constantly part of my
process in academic writing, meaning that it ‘feels’ like it has a lot more of
what I call constraints: The language is different, more formal, less me, and
the organization and appearance of my ‘paper’ are going to have to be a certain
way. Yes, there is wiggle room, but for example, I know I’ll have to end an
academic paper with a conclusion-y sounding paragraph, whereas with a short
story I have no idea how it will end, except that it probably won’t sound conclusive. The opposite: it
will be ambiguous. Do I wish that I felt I had more freedom to experiment in my
academic writing? Of course, and now that I’m a more mature writer, I do. My point
is that I can afford to feel that way in graduate school, and now as an
instructor, but back as an undergraduate? Never. Even though I did have some
confidence on how to approach certain types of writing, the general expectation
for any kind of academic writing back then, for me and for friends and
colleagues, was to write within a given format, decided on by our professors,
and/or by ‘convention’ (I like to picture a Council of Twelve English
Professors dressed in dark robes in some secret chamber somewhere when I hear
this word). The most evil example of this being the five-paragraph essay, still
in use in high school, according to my students. Not much room for
experimentation there. How fun it that? And how much learning is going on?
The other big difference
between my academic and creative writing, and again this might not be a big
revelation to most people, is working with texts. With creative writing, other
texts are there in the background when I write, as the inspiration, and the
things I’m emulating. In the ‘big picture’ way of looking at it, I see creative
writing as a dialogue, or what jazz musicians call “riffing”: taking someone’s
idea and using it as the basis to create something of one’s one. Brief example:
Victor Hugo’s Les Miserà bles inspired
Tolstoy’s War & Peace which
inspired Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell
Tolls. With academic writing, all the background reading is still there,
for inspiration and emulation, but there is also a text the writer is thinking
about, responding do, arguing with. The key difference seems to be the writer
is engaging with a text, or texts, in the present tense, working with an
outside source, with ideas coming from the outside world, instead of the
inside.
So, aside from
citation and responding to a text, the process and principles—using models,
making time, revising, editing, getting peer response, and audience
consideration—seem the same between creative writing and academic writing.
Therefore, they would seem to be transferable. And there are folks out there who
agree. What I’m finding is that these people are writing instructors who also
write in both creative and academic genres, and are working in the worlds of both composition and creative writing. The
biggest name in this hybrid field was of course Wendy Bishop. Almost all of her
writings, and all the ones I talk about in this essay, are based on the idea
that there is no Split between creative and academic writing. Originally, I
heard the mantra I mentioned earlier, “All writing is creative writing,” attributed
to her, though I haven’t been able to confirm it, but if she didn’t say it, she
should have. For example, in her essay, “Crossing The Lines: On Creative Composition and Composing
Creative Writing,” she takes the
“commonalities” between the creative writing process and the academic process
as a given and feels that the reason certain composition instructors favor
academic writing is because that’s the only writing they’ve ever done
(184-190). Whereas, people like Bishop, and me, who have done both, tend to
naturally see the similarities, and the value of each. And, in another essay
written ten years later, she goes even farther, by coming out in favor of using
creative writing genres in the composition classroom, saying that they allow
for just as much growth, in fact, maybe more, as more traditional essays
(Contracts 109). When I read Bishop, I start to lean more and more toward the
complete banishment of academic
writing from my classrooms!
Defining what
these commonalities are is the first step to showing they transfer between
genres of writing. Bishop doesn’t, but only because there are already other
people in the same crossover community doing so, like Evie Yoder Miller, who in
her essay, “Reinventing Writing Classrooms: The Combination of Creating and
Composing,” also takes as a given the idea that creative writing and
composition classes share “common goals and strategies” such as the
“development of ideas and appropriate use of mechanics” and that they share the
idea of “writing as a process” (39). She also agrees that students consider
creative writing “fun” and composition “drudgery” (41), and, more
interestingly, that they think writing creatively is something that they have
to build up to, after they’ve done their time ‘learning’ basic “skills” (42).
But Yoder Miller, like me, feels that fun writing, creative writing, is an
important way to learn those basic skills, and that it should be incorporated
at all levels.
Hans Ostram
co-edited two books on writing with Bishop. In his essay “Undergraduate
Creative Writing: The Unexamined Subject,” he argues that creative writing is
one of the most important types of writing students can experience in college,
and, like Bishop and Yoder Miller, that creative writing and composition
classes have much in common, and much to learn from each other, and that the
two fields should be doing what some of my students might call ‘conversating’
with each other more. He even demonstrates how, with creative writing classes
being so popular with students of so many different majors, that they are at
the center of Writing Across the Curriculum. It’s Ostram who goes into depth on
the commonalities, and how those commonalities imply transfer between genres of
writing:
much of what [students] learn may
be transferred to other
writing situations at the
university or in a career. For they
learn about the expectations of an
audience; they learn how
absolutely crucial revision is;
they learn the subtle matters
of structure, pacing, and
organization; and, by confronting
the clichés and stereotypes that
flourish in first drafts of
poems and stores, they learn to
become more independent
thinkers and writers. They learn
that they are responsible
for the values and assumptions
their poems and stories
project, and so, even though they
do not write argumentative
non-fiction, they learn a great
deal about persuasive writing.
Because of these transferable
elements...we should regard
these courses as...improving
students’ writing in general. (57-8)
He’s talking about creative writing
classes, but if I substitute the phrase “stories and poems” for “essays,” he
could be describing any instructor’s ideal composition class. His list of
everything he feels students learn is exactly what I want/expect/hope my
composition students to learn. The only difference seems to be the creative
writing students seem to be having a lot more fun.
The problem is
that I can find many people who agree with me, but we still can’t prove this transfer between creative
writing to academic writing exists. It isn’t quantifiable, and will never work
the same way for all people in all cases. It’s always going to ‘depend’ on the
‘context.’ The person who came closest to doing anything like this is Lucille
Parkinson McCarthy, in her essay/study “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College
Student Writing Across the Curriculum” which originally appeared in the journal
Research in the Teaching of English
way back in 1987, but which was also selected for the anthology Landmark Essays on Writing Across the
Curriculum edited by Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell. In it,
Parkinson McCarthy follows one student from his first year composition class to
two later courses, comparing his writing process in assignments for all three.
She does as thorough a job as anyone could in collecting data, interviewing,
and making careful observations, to the point of pointing out, to the surprise
of the student, that he is in fact using the same strategies and skills in all
of his writing assignments, even though
he doesn’t think so.
Unfortunately, all
this student’s assignments are of the academic type, i.e. critical response to
texts, even (and maybe especially) in his composition class. The scope, time
put in, and thoroughness of the data collection are beyond me, but I would’ve
loved if he had taken a creative writing course also, in order to see if he
would have used the same approach in those types of genres as well. My guess is
that yes, he would have. But of course, the weakness of using one student as an
example is that his situation, his context, might not apply to others, and that
some other student in his composition class might have given Parkinson McCarthy
a completely different response. Still, after reading her study, I think most
people, and I would put Bartholomae in here, would agree that what happens to
this boy, Dave Garrison, is typical,
and that skills and strategies learned in academic genres in academic genres
are applicable, and used, in other academic genres.
Which sounds like
an argument for giving some exposure in academic writing to students in first
year composition classes. And yet, I’m left wondering about this student Dave,
who says at the beginning of the study, “he did not really like to write and
that he was not very good” (130). Notice how those two ideas always seem to go
together. If he had had more exposure to creative genres, in which had had the
freedom to experiment with writing, especially with writing he had chosen to
experiment in himself, but also even the more traditional Elbow-esque personal essay,
might he have changed his thinking? As in, “I like to write, and I’m ok at it,”
the opposite of the above ‘equation.’ This confidence would be useful in his
later (academic) writing assignments. It seems
like this would have been the case, and the result would be the same: either
way he would be more confident and successful (read: empowered) in future
assignments, but in the latter case he would walk away with a ‘liking’ (or at
the very least a tolerance) of writing, which would be much more “useful” in
the long run, meaning in all the writing and thinking he would do beyond
college.
And yet....
I still have
doubts about whether that confidence will be adequate, will prepare my students
for future classes, and/or the real world. Georges T. Kanezis, in his essay
“Reclaiming ‘Creativity’ For Composition,” shares my doubts, wondering if, by
emphasizing creative writing, and the personal exploration and fulfillment for
our students that we all hope comes from it,
whether I will ultimately
see...children in my classroom,
quite adept at narration and
description, but relatively
crippled and hostile when it comes
to writing of a different
and, probably to them, uncreative
sort. (31)
My initial,
subversive, wishful-thinking reaction to ‘boring’ composition essays was (and
still sometimes is) to replace them, get rid of them, and have my students
reading and writing in creative writing genres all the time. But Karnezis
reminds me that this “privileging of the ‘creative’” is actually what caused
FYW essays to be seen as a kind of “industrial art” in the first place (32),
perpetuating the Split. His response is to share with his students, and have
them write, examples of writing that blurs the lines: creative non-fiction that
informs and analyzes but which still seems creative (39), which I would like to
explore more in my classes, but his point sounds true: I have to make sure I’m
not ultimately reinforcing the split between creative writing and academic
writing.
And it’s not that
I think academic writing isn’t necessary,
but in my own academic writing I felt like something sinister was happening by
having to ‘play the game’ and learn other people’s rules and lexicons. I didn’t
want to lose who I was: I didn’t want to change into something I wasn’t sure I
wanted to be. Entering the Academic Discourse (cue sinister music) felt like
the ultimate ‘conformation’ at a time when I was building my identity around
trying to be unique. Meaning, learning academic writing felt like having to
conform to rules in order to be accepted into a group, a group that I wasn’t
sure I want to belong to in the first place. So, I also agree with William
Lyne, though surely he’s not the first one to say so, who in his essay “White
Purposes”, says that learning academic writing is a form of “cultural
assimilation” (73).
And yet....
Bartholomae’s
response, and, strangely, mine, is that our students can’t afford not to assimilate: Doing so is the key
to the power of access. Bartholomae is right: If they don’t, they will be,
excluded from the Academic Discourse, therefore from the public discourse when they get out of college. If they get out of college. The Academic Discourse doesn’t exist in
a vacuum. It feeds into the public discourse, or discourses, in real world
(paying) jobs including, but not limited to politics, law, the media, and even
medicine. The principles students learn in academic writing, such as the
ability to do research, to think critically and logically, and respond to
texts, and audience consideration, are used every day by the people influencing
what happens in the world. And if our students can’t communicate in that world,
they can’t participate in that world. They can’t even enter it. They will
remain outsiders. This is hard for me to write because I have always been proud
of my outsider status, and many of my students are, and I want to nurture that
too, but I only feel comfortable in my outsider status knowing I can slip in
like a spy sometimes and function in the real world, if I have to.
I want so badly to
say that creative writing assignments would be enough, and I think people can
go through life just writing and thinking creatively, but the reality is they
may be put in situations in which writing and thinking creatively won’t be
enough. It pains me to say this. And, even though there is some of Ostram’s “transfer,” some ‘bleed over,’ in the two types
of writing, and creative writing does give students a head start on handling
formal writing, they’re still outside, still excluded from the academic
discourse, and therefore from certain
form of power.
Is there an
alternative? I like Wendy Bishop’s response, building on an idea from Peter
Elbow, which is to get out of the dichotomy trap and not think of entering the
Academic Discourse as an either/or situation, but rather “both/and”
(Bartholomae and Elbow 90, Bishop and Ostram, “Understanding” 17). That is,
surely assimilating into the Academic Discourse, playing the game, must be
possible, while also keeping oneself true to one’s cultural background. To
borrow a term from the lexicon of Black English Vernacular studies, our
students (and we!) need to learn how to “code-switch” between different
discourses. Learning how to do so, they will feel empowered in both (or all?).
Creative writing
and academic writing do have differences, so there will always be the trap of
wanting to know which is best, so that we can concentrate on, or even teach,
that one ‘best’ way, when the answer is (always): it depends. Meaning, ‘best’
depends on context. The person/people, the text, the culture, the time, the
location. Creative Writing and academic writing are both ‘best.’ In addition,
“empowerment” is a vague term that people seem to think of as a singular goal
that, once achieved, remains constant for the rest of a student’s life. There
is some truth in that: students build a certain ‘base’ confidence, more so than
someone who has never written anything. But empowerment is really an on-going
process, and can come and go depending (there’s that word again) on the
situation/context (and those words
again too!). It comes from (at least) both types of writing, creative and
academic. Again, the problem is thinking of this problem as either/or. The
question is not which type of writing best empowers students. It shouldn’t even
be a question: they both do. Which means, our students need to do both.
So should we then
make both creative and academic assignments mandatory?
I have. As I said earlier, when I started teaching, my first assignments of the
semester were always personal narratives, and lately I’ve experimented with
poetry and experimental writing, like “crots” of 400 word essays, which I
discovered from the website 400words.com.
My students seem to enjoy these assignments, and I’m open to any kind of
experimentation they want to do, so even those that don’t feel comfortable
writing about themselves can write 400 words of anything. But I have become
more intrigued with the idea of students having even more freedom to choose
what they want to write. Given the choice, I’m fairly sure most, if not all,
students, would experiment and explore both (or all) types of writing, and
experimentation seems to be where people learn the most.
Of course, Wendy
Bishop weighs in on this question too. In “Preaching What We Practice as
Professional in Writing,” the first chapter in the book she (along with Hans
Ostram) edited, Genre and Writing,
Bishop argues that while compositionist study is becoming more open to
different styles of writing, composition teachers are still assigning the same
old “student papers” (4-5). She quotes another writing instructor,
Bradwell-Bowles, who says that many teachers are (still) not giving students
“permission to experiment” (13). In the same quote, Bradwell-Bowles goes on to
say that while some students still need, and want, to write in “familiar
forms,” other students, given the choice, will experiment, and she agrees with
the idea that students “learn ways of critically analyzing theoretical
conventions at the same time that they are being introduced to traditional
academic discourse communities” (13). Bishop qualifies this by saying that
including a traditional essay is important in order to contrast the
“traditional and experimental in dialogue...[to]...learn about convention
making and breaking” (13). But about a decade later, she seems to drop the
idea. Instead, she too emphasizes, in her essay “Contracts, Radical Revision,
Portfolios, and the Risks of Writing,” on giving control of what kind of text
to write, and how to write it, to the students. Given freedom to choose whatever
genre of writing they want, students begin to see “that writing can be
pleasurable” (115). Every writer/instructor I discuss in this paper emphasizes
that writing being pleasurable, or fun, is the best, and in my opinion the
only, way students will learn. I might have doubts if, given the freedom, a
student chose purely academic writing or purely creative writing, yet what that
student is interested in, at this time, in this class, might be vital to their
development, and I’d feel very weird assuming that I knew any better than they
what they needed.
So why don’t more
teachers and departments encourage creative writing as an option in composition
classrooms? In addition to the creative/academic split in English departments
already mentioned, there’s again the fact that composition teachers might not
have much experience in writing in genres other than the academic writing they
did in college. Which should not be underrated, but many of them might not feel
comfortable evaluating anything they would classify as on the creative side.
The trick is to change the way we evaluate: Kate Ronald, in her essay included
as the first chapter in Starkey’s Teaching
Writing Creatively, seems to have already walked a path similar to mine.
She describes her shift in thinking about composition classrooms. Originally
she excluded any genre beside traditional essays, but then decided, like
Bishop, to give students the choice to decide both what they want to write and
how they want to write it. What she discovered was “that genre doesn’t matter
so much” (4) because the focus of her teaching became the students’ writing
processes. When she realized that many of her students chose creative writing
genres to write in, she wasn’t sure how to respond to texts, like fiction and
poetry, outside of her comfort zone. As she proceeds to describe some sample
students, their chosen genres, and how she responded to each, she realizes that
she’s responding in the same way that she might have responded to essays, with
questions and enthusiasm.
Conclusion
There doesn’t seem to be any firm
conclusion I can come to on this
subject, and I’ll probably wrestle for the rest of my career with how much, and
what kind, of certain genres of writing to offer in my composition classrooms,
but what seems even more important than which
genres students should write in is that they
have a choice about it, since being invested in both the topic and the genre
seems to provide the best learning environment. Of course, I have one more ‘and
yet’ moment: There does still seem to be value in nudging our students towards
certain kinds of what is considered academic writing/thinking, to give them
some experience with, to better prepare them for, any writing challenge, in
school or after. If they’re more prepared, hopefully they’ll have, if not fun,
then at least a better chance to learn from these future experiences.
What I am
interested in, then, are hybrid type assignments, in which all of the above is
possible. Ken Macrorie’s I-Search paper is a good start, but an even less
formal way I’ve found to combine student choice in topic/genre while still
preparing them for research and citation (and to combine both creative and
academic writing) is the Multi-Genre Research Paper, also called the
Multi-Genre Researched Writing Project, that I learned about, and started
incorporating in my classes, at Eastern Michigan University: Students choose
the topic, and the different genres (the one time I actually give my students a
page minimum in order to ensure they’re probably try more than one genre),
while still exploring, in class, how to do research, and cite the information
they use. Building on the ‘code-switching’ idea mentioned earlier, students
start with a personal connection/interest, which provides them with a way to
explore, or ‘switch’ into, and between, different genres of writing that are
relevant to them.
The genres of
writing can, and do, range from the more ‘creative,’ like poems and stories, to
the more ‘practical,’ like resumes or magazine articles, though, for example, a
student researching the blues and writing a fictional resume for a blues
musician is writing (and thinking!) creatively, while still giving herself
practical experience in writing a genre that she’ll be needing soon. So far
I’ve had great success with this assignment. My students get experience in
using library resources for research, citation (including in-text citation and
constructing a Works Cited page for their sources), as well as experience in
the writing principles I’ve listed previously. Best of all, they have fun
learning (or are learning because they’re having fun? or are having fun because
they’re learning?) and I have fun, and learn from, reading their projects. I
also feel more comfortable evaluating their writing, not on any set research paper
‘standard,’ but from the time and effort they put in.
Works Cited
Bartholome, David. “Inventing the University.” Writing on the Margins: Essays on
Composition and Teaching. Bedford/St. Martin’s. Boston/New York: 2005.
60-85.
Bartholomae, David. “Writing With Teachers: A Conversation
with Peter Elbow.” College Composition
and Communication. February 1995 Vol. 46, No. 1. 62-71. JSTOR Eastern
Michigan University. Halle Library. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/358872>.
Bartholomae, David and Elbow, Peter. “Responses to
Bartholomae and Elbow.” College
Composition and Communication. February 1995 Vol. 46, No. 1. 84-92. JSTOR
Eastern Michigan University. Halle Library.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/358872>.
Bishop, Wendy. “Crossing The
Lines: On Creative Composition and Composing Creative Writing.” Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking
Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy, edited by Bishop, Wendy and Ostram,
Hans. National Council of Teachers of English. Urbana, Illinois: 1994. 181-197.
Bishop, Wendy. “Contracts,
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Matters LTD: Buffalo, 2005. 109-120.
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