Creative writing considered as an industry

To some extent it's an easy target, but I really am concerned that a fair number of young writers will never hear that there are other paths to being a writer than the cloister of a university creative writing department.

For the record, I did spend a short time in that world as an undergraduate, and thought it was the cat's pajamas for a while. I was fortunate enough to escape into magazines.

The quality of the class then depends to a large part on the quality and investment of your classmates and intructor. It can be wonderful or miserable or vary from week to week.

The one thing it can't be, at least in my experience, is an environment wherein play and genre experimentation go down well. And this is how it contributes to a homogenization: generally, well-crafted, "realistic," New Yorker/Story type fiction is held as the standard. Forget like pomo experimentation and fantasy trilogies or writing as a fun pastime--it's a craft you as a professional hone to demonstrate your mastery of current fashion.

I wrote a long essay about this kind of fiction as the genre that denies it's a genre -- "litfic," I called it -- for the Chicago Reader a couple-few years ago if anyone wants to be e-mailed a copy.

I've sort of come to consider "literary fiction" a useless and misleading classification...too often there's no actual literature in it, just as there's no milk in a "shake" at McDonald's...

Also, since it was a university degree (vs a diploma or 'course'), one had to take non-writing classes, which rounded the education out, gave varying perspectives, etc.) I also managed to do a co-op program, so I was writing poetry but also working in 'communications' and journalism. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe I just saw that one has to stay practical/realistic with such a program - university wasn't an escape or a break from the 'real world', but it did give me the space/time to write and read and think about writing, which might not have a happened (to the same extent) had I done a different degree (eegh, like my orig choice - biology/premed) or worked.

I could go on and on, arguing both sides, but hey.

I also managed to do a co-op program, so I was writing poetry but also working in 'communications' and journalism.

That addresses one of my objections to the current situation: IME there is plenty taught about how to run the business side of writing (submissions, queries, copyright, etc.), but the economics of the endeavor is the elephant in the room that few will speak of.

The truth is that most of the people employed in the CWIC are employed as teachers of it. So they would naturally tend to obscure the role that the teaching itself plays in their ability to make a living. I'll wager that most teach because they have to, not merely out of love of teaching or a desire to pass on their wisdom. It's natural for them to want to downplay the fact that teaching is their main source of income, their benefits, their job security. But they're not, by and large, there to teach pedagogy--they're there to teach writing.

And writing, as practiced by those in the CWIC, is not a money-making proposition. Cheerful old Writer's Digest will not tell you that. Sure, a novelist can make $20,000 in a year--but that's for five years' worth of work. Sure, you can sell a short story for $2,000 (pre-tax), but how many writers will be able to do that 50 times a year?

In contrast, writers who are willing to whore their golden talent for filthy lucre--writers like, well, me--can live quite comfortably. Trade magazines. Association newsletters. Press releases. Business proposals. Government brochures. Ads for pharmaceuticals. This is how I've paid the bills for the past decade. But the willingness to do this sort of thing is low on the part of the CW students I've known.

you seei think that ilb should be to the new yorker what ilm is to the village voice. that is, we each submit and publish fictions with the magazine until we are known as a collective of supertalented writers. that obviously has certain benefits common to all collectives.

it is surely not that hard to get published in the new yorker. have you seen some of the stuff in there? i could write it with my toes.

the swilling seas shared the dawn with the seagulls.

not many people can write a sentence like that.

now multiply that by several thousand, add a watertight plot with more hooks than an early beatles single (or a uh, im thinking of some kind of fish-catching mechanism with lots of hooks, one of those if they exist and i don't see why not), and some incredible insights into this twisted society we live in and well, you can see where i'm coming from, it's a given. i just need to put it in the mail baby. BOOK IT.

How about:

The seas were swilling. They swilled with weary ennui. Even though they shared the dawn with the seagulls, they didn't really love the seagulls. In fact, nobody loves anybody. The seagulls lit another cigarette and said, "I'm so bored with the sea."

the swilling seas shared the dawn with the sunlit seagulls. look at all those s's. you know what they call that. silibancy. silabincy. sibilancy. sibalant, sibilant. silibant? sibilant. silibancy. er sibilancy. right, sibalancy. i don't know. it's funny though, when you think about the s sounds, and the s sounds. very clever, that word.

i can write these gorgeous sentences at will. here is another for you all to cherish:

the compaq hummed in the harsh-lit room.

that sentence is simply bursting with potential. i love it.

post-it notes lay scattered about the cluttered desk like landmines in a field of paper-death.

They're sticklers over at the New Yorker.

the pen's tip, blackink-spotted metallic, gleamed under the white lights.

now wait until you see what's coming next. it will throw you for a loop my firends.

Further derailing of a once-interesting thread? (xpost)

just a min im cookin up somethin and it smells GOOD.

I'm just not sure that your analogy works. I'm not sure The Voice:music journalism::The New Yorker:short stories. But either way, ILB was not started as a place for short story writers to hang out. (Thank goodness.)

glass shattered two floors down as black death ambled, slightly tubby, into the dawning fray.

I can't speak to how poetry is taught, but my impression as regards prose is that focusing on style or language itself is out of fashion. Caring about words = writing self-consciously literary prose = writing prose that "calls attention to itself" = breaking the "vivid and continuous dream." All these are sins under the Gardnerian worldview. The focus has to be on character and plot and theme.

You can care about language in grade school, and you can go back to caring about it in grad school, but in the undergraduate world it's the province of the linguistics department.

Well, in defense of the Gardnerian position, a lot of 19-year olds take a few bong hits and write everything that comes to mind into a notebook and call it "stream of consciousness." Doesn't make it art. Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner got away with it by being genuises, basically. Try telling a 19-year-old with a few bong hits in him that he's not a genius; you won't get very far.

Better to tell them to focus on following the rules before they try to break them.

If you look at the poetry published in small magazines, you soon see that editors, too, are weak in these areas. It has always been thus, so far as I know.

One of the major difficulties is that there are no theories of prosody that are as well accepted as, for example, color theory. One of the lasting side effects of the modernist rebellion against rhyme and meter has been that even such theories as once existed are now discredited and largely forgotten. Even then, what usually passed for theories were largely canons of taste.

The best thing you can do is read constantly, recognize what works, collect a personal anthology and do your own analysis of the elements in individual poems you find to be effective. This at least trains you to reject your own weaker efforts and gives you a tenetive understanding of what they lacked. It can't make you write good lines, but it can let you test what you write to see how it breaks.

Every good poet eventually strikes out into territory where theory falters and the only reliable guide is some shadow of Virgil who accompanies and advises you.

hee that tickles!

I remember reading some Vonnegut interview or quote in which he defended workshops, saying that when they're really good -- when you're surrounded by other gifted writers -- they perform a similar role to that of a great editor.

Aimless: I'm not so sure it's a full-blown "theory of prosody" (or rhyme, or whatever) that I'd be interested in, but, you know, at least an investigation of different types of rhyme and how they've been used, a dissection of works by these physical qualities, etc.

(Perhaps this is why so much of what is called poetry these days reads like tepid enjambed prose? Well, OK, probably not.)

the thought of majoring in, not poetry, but poetry-writing, is kind of incredible. possibly in a bad way.

People get MFAs in poetry-writing all the time, of course.

(The thought of me being the PR person for a short-fiction machine is pretty great. Playing to my strengths, there!)

The aesthetic that emerges in many in them, though, does tend to discourage experimental writing. Which is not to say that no good or unusual writing will come out of them--just that it seems to be a lot easier to get praise in a workshop for a sensitive mood piece about demiurban neurotic people who don't really love each other. As opposed to, say, a story where a woman believes that she is a toaster oven.

Hence the pervasive sense that there is a type of story that can be called "workshoppy."

I disagree with a lot of things said here but I feel like I've fallen into some weird ILX role as the defender of studying creative writing, and it's not a role I particularly relish. That said, what's with this weird idea that Iowa (aka "the only writing program I've heard of") is the only thing going? It's arguable whether it's good at all, depending on what kind of writer you are.

I don't think anyone who understands writing would say that it does not require study. It requires study in depth.

The difficulty I identify with programs is that they tend to be programmatic. This is not bad in itself, it simply increases the chances that the particular program of study that you may find yourself in may be ill-conceived or ill-taught, or it may simply be designed to solve a set of problems not central to your own needs, or it may ignore information that would be of greater value to you in favor of information of lesser value.

It was my own experience that learning to write at a high level was a process that was greatly aided by self-motivation and self-direction. By setting my own problems and exercises, I could direct my learning to the problems that seemed most important to solve. By constantly addressing issues of personal importance, I never found motivation to be a problem. I put in very long hours very happily. I never felt like my efforts were a waste or a formality or an imposition. I very much doubt I would have had similar feelings in any formal program. I could be wrong there.

However much I might have learned from more formal instruction and direction, it is my belief that I learned all of this and more by harnessing my own drive and ambition directly. Without the opportunity to select my own direction as I thought most pertinent, I could not have been as motivated as I was.

Just like physics, there are no secrets in writing that are not open secrets, accessible to anyone practised in the craft. The way to become practised in the craft is to ask the right questions, experiment and think hard about the results.

I didn't mean to suggest that it's "the only thing going." Only that I get the sense that if you're not going to go to a top-notch program, then why bother. There might be five or ten or twenty good programs. I don't really know.

Can you imagine a film studies program that was built entirely around workshops, though?

http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?prmID=3333&CFID=30694304&CFTOKEN=64179148

Lots of the essays are in his lovely collection "Breakfast Served Any Time All Day"

What would be wrong with that?

-- Casuistry (chri...), March 21st, 2005.

Well, there wouldn't be anything wrong with having a distaste for terse prose, but that's not the same thing as saying Hemingway doesn't know how to write well (which is what calling Nabokov a "showy distracting jerk" means). Hemingway and Nabokov were both going for certain effects and developing certain techniques, and they very much knew what they were doing.

But then I've been known to buy books or albums because they got a bad review wherein qualities were derided that made me suspect I'd like them.

I should say that the first post was Way Cranky and in retrospect I would have toned it down or perhaps not posted it at all (but what fun would that be?). I think I was also conflating the commercial "let the novelist inside you OUT" books with creative writing as it is taught at a graduate level.

Most of nabisco's points are fair ones. A few points of clarification:

About aesthetic rigidity: It is heartening to hear that teachers work to overcome for this impression. And I acknowledge that students can put out frightfully bad failed experiments (I did enough of such, in my time). My main beef is, then, not with CW programs but with one specific aspect of the Gardner/Lodge aesthetic--mainly that "the writing shouldn't call attention to itself." That does make it pretty frankly opposed to metafiction and to authors having narratological fun (cf. Nabokov).

I'm afraid a lot of beginning writers read these maxims in On Becoming a Boring Novelist, then see them amplified in Writer's Digest and a million self-helpy-type books. They may come away with the notion that there is that one path to Good Fiction. But I'll grant that probably doesn't apply to someone who gets as far as an MFA program.

The point about a residue of self-importance stems mainly from conversations with the Artsy Crowd where I went to school. "Oh, how I wish our crass, materialistic society placed more emphasis on the arts..." That sort of thing.

SJ Lefty did a fine rebuttal of the economic stuff, which is conceded. I will say that among people who want to be professional writers--even some who are talented enough and driven enough--there are differences of opinion about how to make ends meet. IME, selling one article or one book at a time is a very very difficult way to survive. So I spend a lot of time telling people that they might be better off salaried, or working as a contractor--even if it means doing non-bylined business-to-business writing or association newsletters.

And as for feeding itself--well, "everybody does it" isn't much of a defense. I'm just as annoyed by the way the art world does that, or classical music, or ballet.

It's just that writing has such great potential to reach a wider audience and talk to them about their lives. Much as I dig metafiction, the subject matter of most literature is life--it can hit you where you live in the way that Brahms or Delacroix rarely does. I mean, people read Uncle Tom's Cabin and it contributed to the start of a freakin war. So why are so many good creative writers tacitly encouraged to mostly write for each other?

Sorry, the whole Hemingway thing was a tangent and I didn't mean to suggest anything about workshops by it. I was using it as an analogy for why it's wrong to immediately dismiss Nabokov (on having just started the first novel one has ever read by him) because of his "showy language" or whatever.

I’ve never seen anyone on ILX get skeptical about people going to film school, or studying dance, or anything like that—because it’s understood that these are crafts where a person benefits from study. To imagine that writing is any different is sheer romanticism...

I agree and as I've said, I am solidly for study and training. Heck, I'm a craft whore.

About the gender-dynamic. I have never been in a workshop run by a male. The three run by females I've attended wouldn't even consider anything remotely "generic": horror, fantasy, sci-fi. The published stuff they gave us to read was all weepy angsty upper middle class bullshit lit. This is potentially a sexist question but: those of you who know, is it any different when dudes run things?

I on the other hand prefer to write my poems the morning before the Open Reading—and mention that before reading, proof they don't have any mold on them.

Another point that Hall made about the assigned writing exercises—have those "Write a poem from the point of view of your unborn child..." ever produced anything good? Maybe... but the idea that there are shortcuts and easy techniques to Access Your Creativity that everyone can use is pure snake oil. And I should know; I used them all the time while teaching kids. On THEM they work great.

i didn't mean to undercut what you were saying, by the way. those posts were pretty great. the one thing though that bugs me about the workshop genre is its propensity to take itself so seriously, as the teloic city upon the hill toward which benighted fiction has advanced o so achingly. that's so american. historically (beginning with the iliad, in fact) most great literature has been extremely playful, raging against the status quo, whereas your lorrie moores et al. seem to me to reinforce it, or at least celebrate as sophisticated an ironic resignment. exquisitely crafted fiction is a pleasure to read, don't get me wrong, but so is roger zelazny (who's no slouch, i might add), who i doubt gets much play at iowa or brown.

I think what I object to is this idea that workshops would somehow reject and fight against forms of writing that would be well-liked by readers in general. The people in workshops are readers, pretty much; it’s pure weird egotism to imagine that you’d “get” and enjoy forms of writing that your counterparts in MFA programs somehow wouldn’t. I mean, good lord, there are like ten people in the room: if someone writes something that’s working, in any way imaginable, it’s pretty much going to get support from a quorum, you know?

(And yeah, I know, I suppose there’s always the possibility that some writer could have a bunch of really failed and irritating techniques now, ones that everyone would tell him to give up on because they’re clearly sucking, even though maybe if left alone he’d keep at it and finally work out what he was doing and make it work in some wonderful idiosyncratic way—but what the hell is this, a movie? C’mon. Besides, anyone with a grand genius idiosyncrasy is going to keep pushing on toward it; he’s not going to let a couple groans from the workshop dissuade him. Which is maybe another thing I’m not stressing properly: do you have any idea how little the feedback you get from workshop affects your style? I mean, you check if people understood stuff, and if your pacing seemed to work, and stuff like that—you use them as lab rats, basically, and check that they moved through your little fiction maze in the way you wanted them to—but hell, if they have problems with your style, well, most people just go drinking with their friends and talk shit about whoever isn’t into their tics. The only people who sit around striving to meet the workshop’s demands are, well, either people who recognize that the workshop is right about them, or people who have nothing in particular that they’re driven to accomplish anyway, not for the moment, and are just trying to see how many people they can please.) (And that latter’s not a bad bit of “craft” to pick up, either.)

1) the portrait of america that contemporary naturalists paint, in comparison to my experience, is unnatural, and
2) a predominance of the privileged writing about their lives serves to establish norms that lazy workshops might bandy about as self-evident rules of naturalism

and uninteresting in general because we all know it's been mostly the well-to-do that have been our artists, at least until the 20th century, so, if you like art, why complain?

which in a sense, if you're still following this, brings me back to my original point--aren't precisely the people too thin-skinned (maybe too little confident?) ever to consider workshops what the start of the art could most use to shake things up? that's more of a rhetorical question than anything, really, as will this one probably end up being, since how do you draft the terminally shy into writing programs when so many little egotistical would-be jonathon franzens are fighting to get in and live the life?

He's also not opposing workshops per se, but the culture of poetry writing that enstructures them.

& again there are places where fiction should just *work* in a way that isn't the case with poetry -- there are just ways to get things *done* in fiction that ppl. need to work out and be attentive to, while the best poetry is usually empty of such moments.

(McManhire!)

peaches dropped from the orchard's trees like gifts from the necterous bounty of olympus.

our first battle may as well be fought man to man.

since you have come late to the scene i will choose the weapons.

i select: a sentence duel.

as you can see i have already demonstrated, throughout this thread, the format. but, i will let you fire the first shot here.

the rest of ilb shall serve as both witness and ultimate judge.

we will each write five sentences, you-me you-me etc, or, if you would prefer, alternating order, and ilb shall determine the winner in each case, who is awarded a point. highest score wins.

let us begin.

Nabisco, of course, can write all of his sentences taking the piss out of whomever he chooses, or not, as fancy dictates. Or ignore the challenge altogether as any gentleman would.