[CW-Grad] Can Creative Writing Ever be Taught (Rachel Cusk)

[Adrienne Thomas]

*	The <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian>  Guardian, Saturday 30
January 2010 


Rachel Cusk


Can creative writing ever be taught?

Any writer who teaches in a university creative writing department will have
been asked (many times) the apparently well-meaning question: "Is it really
possible to teach people how to write?" Actually, I don't think it's as
well-meaning as all that: there's an edge to it, as though the
writer/teacher might be tricked into saying something hypocritical. No, I
don't think it's possible. (In that case why are you accepting money to do
it?) Yes, I think it's possible. (In that case what is the value of your
art?)

The suspicion that it's all a ruse does not, I think, adhere to any other
academic subject; and nor does the -notion - the question implies it - that
the student will arrive at the university's gates in an absolutely untutored
condition, a virtual savage requiring to be "taught". A person doing a
-degree in French or history or maths is -assumed to have some familiarity
with the subject before they start, and in fact to be already rather good at
it. The teaching refines and builds on what is already there. And if the
difference is supposed to be that writing depends on talent, well so does
every intellectual and practical pursuit. Some people are better at maths
than others: no one thinks you can be "taught" to be a mathematical genius.
And no one thinks of teaching, in that context, as a kind of forcing of the
will. But there seems to be an idea of writing as an intuitive pastime which
is being -dishonestly subjected to counter-intuitive methods.

It strikes me, though, that people really ask the question out of a need to
refer to their own lost creativity. They feel critical of a world that
remains compelled by this loss: it reminds them that they used to possess
something that doesn't seem to belong to them any more. The creativity of
childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea
that -others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is
disturbing. And writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the
worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with
emotion. When a child writes a story she experiences her personal world as
something socially valuable: her egotism, if you will, is configured as a
force for good; by writing she makes herself important, she asserts her
equality with - and becomes conterminous with - everything around her.

But as she grows older this situation changes. She is no longer "good" at
writing. This is partly because she sees that its representational burden
has become more complex. But it is also because the nature of her own
importance is no longer quite so clear. The private and the public have
become uncoupled; and consequently there now appear to be two kinds of
writing where before there was one. There is the private, emotional writing
and there is the public, representational writing. The first is too
subjective to be anything other than a secret; and the second is too
daunting, too objective, to attempt.

The creative writing student is often looking for a way out of this
deadlock, and it is interesting to notice that the second - the public -
kind of writing is the place they think they are going to find it. Yet it is
from the private world that their writing motivation comes; it is the
pressure of an emotional need that has driven them to fill in forms and sign
up for classes. It is as though the bridge between the two were broken, or
unsafe. It is that connection, that pathway, that has been lost. And the
creative writing class itself acts as a temporary walkway. By being present
there, the student is learning to reunite the private with the public. She
is perhaps also returning to the place - the schoolroom - where she believes
she first mislaid her primal expressive joy.

There is almost as much suspicion about this therapeutic aspect of creative
writing as there is about the claim that writing can be taught. The
"hard-man" culture of the writing workshop, where students make themselves
vulnerable in order to have their work ripped to shreds by their tutor and
peers, owes its existence to the generalised terror of therapeutic values
and their putative contamination of the intellect. Yet it would not surprise
me to see this method fall out of -fashion. It seekes to emulate the big,
bad world of the literary lion's den, the loneliness and the competitiveness
that are the driven artist's portion, the hurly burly of the critical round.
But in my experience, very few students really want or take pleasure in this
elaborate simulation. Often, it merely deepens the sense of division in
themselves: the private world seems more incommunicable than ever, the
public world more daunting and hostile. And the reason for this is that,
even in the best-intentioned workshop model, the writer's greatest asset -
honesty - is placed in the hands of her critics, and of herself as a critic.
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely
more valuable.

At the start of last term, I asked my students a question: "How did you
become the person you are?" They answered in turn, long answers of such
startling candour that the -photographer who had come in to take a couple of
quick pictures for the -university magazine ended up staying for the whole
session, mesmerised. I had asked them to write down three or four words
before they spoke, each word indicating a formative aspect of experience,
and to tell me what the words were. They were mostly simple words, such as
"father" and "school" and "Catherine". To me they represented a regression
to the first encounter with language; they represented a chance to
reconfigure the link between the mellifluity of self and the concreteness of
utterance. It felt as though this was a good thing for even the most
accomplished writer to do. Were the students learning anything? I suppose
not exactly. I'd prefer to think of it as relearning. Relearning how to
write; remembering how.

 

 

Adrienne

 

Adrienne L. Thomas

MFA Coordinator

Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts

University of California, Riverside

900 University Ave

4145 INTS Building

Riverside, CA 92521

Voice: (951) 827-5568 

Fax: (951) 827-3619 

 

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