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December 15, 2005
OGIC: Workshops redux
Readers write in with two different points of view on the MFA and its rather blunt instrument, the writing workshop. First, a quarrel with my cynicism:As a veteran of a famed MFA program in theatre directing and several playwriting workshops, I must take issue with your complaint against MFA programs. Granted, some of the craft "rules" taught there are arbitrary, based on the instructor's whim (for example, one of my favorite playwriting teachers hated all plays set at Thanksgiving). But such "rules" are made to be broken when the artist does so for an effective artistic reason. The point is, master the form first, then learn how to bend it to your own ends.
I can't tell you the number of scripts I've read in which the writer can't begin to tell a cohesive story, or plants obvious and sloppy exposition (often having people who have known each other all their lives suddenly rehash background information they both know), or fills the script with clichéd acting directives (e.g., angrily, despairingly, sadly, laughingly, etc.), and so on. The point is, learn how to write a coherent play, then decide you're a revolutionary and write the new Waiting for Godot.
I often tell people considering MFA programs: try to find one in which the teachers are successful professionals. The point is something approximating the master/apprentice relationship, where you learn from someone who daily deals--and deals successfully--with the problems of actually writing. Unlike, say, literature, which can be well taught by an academic who studies it for his or her livelihood, writing is a craft discipline. Those who do it well often have craft knowledge that you can't learn in purely academic study.
I'm sorry that this is all to the point of taking issue with me, because it sounds so really sound and persuasive. But I'm not at all certain this reader and I are in any too-great disagreement. He is describing what should ideally happen and in fact sometimes does happen in MFA coursework--more times than I am apt to credit, I'm sure. I was lamenting what too often actually does happen when a teacher is insufficiently attentive or not a talented teacher or simply not the right teacher for a particular student, which it seems to me more the rule than the exception for the simple reason that mentoring cannot be effectively accomplished en masse.
This also makes a good case for teaching the rules. Indeed, if the "rules" are taught with some nuance and flexibility, and as a foundation rather than an ultimatum, they should do more good than harm. Sam Sacks's case, however, was that, in his own experience as well as on the evidence of Best New American Voices 2006, the rules are more often taught lazily and rigidly. I think the great hope embodied by MFA programs is that the right student will encounter the right teacher, and the apprenticeship my correspondent describes will spring forth, throwing sparks. The problem is that this doesn't happen very often, nobody has thought up a good way to raise the success rate, and I don't think they can. So a lot of pallid if technically unimpeachable writing results, and some varieties of genuine talent are probably strangled outright.
Another reader writes in agreement with Sacks and with me:
Followed your link to the Sam Sacks article and found it really interesting - what you have to say about it too. I couldn't agree more about great writers not necessarily being great teachers, and vice versa. I haven't done a formal writing course (there's not many of them around for poetry, which is all I write) but I've been to various short classes and workshops over the years, some of them headed by biggish names, and the one which was (and still is) most useful to me was an evening-class run by a woman who had never written a poem in her life: she'd published some short fiction, but most of her experience was as a schoolteacher (English literature) and a journalist on regional papers and magazines.
What she did for us was to act as an intelligent common reader: her constant questions were "who is this for?" and "this is what I get from the piece: is that what you're trying to get across?" When she made suggestions they were focused on the piece itself and how to get it to work for its intended audience, rather than on The Rules. She wasn't remotely snobbish about market, having written for women's magazines herself for many years: she was happy with memoir, genre fiction, romance, comedy, experimental writing, anything, as long as it worked. And she was widely-read enough to be able to give you examples you could look at by writers who did make it (whatever it was) work.
But where her teaching skills really came in was that by shrewd (and sometimes tough) moderation of the group, she made us act as intelligent readers for one another too. She wouldn't let us score points or talk nonsense, but she wouldn't let us off with not saying anything either (it's particularly annoying for poets in mixed groups that prose writers expect us to critique their work but, when ours comes round, go "oh, I don't know anything about poetry" and sit and doodle on their notepad until it's all over. Shocking bad manners if you ask me. Nobody got away with that on Esther's watch). This is what I've found most lacking in other workshops--the inability of the leader to moderate discussion well. Suggesting revisions to others' work is extra practice for revising your own, and it's at the revising stage that I most go back to what I learned in that class. None of what she taught came from her being a great writer: it came from her being a great reader, and a skillful teacher.
And as far as Show Don't Tell goes, the poet Don Paterson was laying into that one in a recent interview in Magma (sadly, not available in their online content), saying that it was a useful corrective to a particular tendency in poetry in its day, but as a general maxim it's too limiting and long overdue for a rest (likewise "No Ideas But In Things"). He reckons you can refute it in two words: John Donne.
Excellent lesson in how to run a writing workshop if run one you must, and nice tip on the poetry journal. Just to be clear, I think MFA programs neither can nor should be abolished. I would just think twice or ten times before recommending a young writer to enroll in one. If they can get a felowship and thus dedicated time to write, that's all to the good--but again, in some cases not. And if they can make the right connection with the perfect mentor, fabulous. On the other hand, the pipeline from places like Iowa to the desks of New York editors is swift and direct, so you can't responsibly nudge a talented writer in a different direction if you care at all about their professional prospects. So, if you're like me, you just end up sort of loathing the whole enterprise.
Do check out some other bloggers' reactions to the Sacks piece: Dan Green, and The Mumpsimus, and Miss Snark.
Posted December 15, 2005 12:45 PM
