I have never, really, taken a creative writing class.
When I talk to people about writing, I think people always assume that I
studied creative writing, or that the whole graduate school thing was
about writing programs or some such.
And while I respect and a
number of
people who are involved in the
discipline of “creative writing,” I am not terribly enticed either by
the possibilities of the field as a dialogue, or by the utility of the
training for myself.
This might be a personal short coming, as I have always (since I was a
teenager) been pretty resistant to “formal writing education,” and it
might be a genre thing (science fiction doesn’t fare terribly well in
CW programs on the whole, often relegated to “children’s and popular
literature” tracks, if not totally spurned.) In any case this was
highlighted by an article I read last
week that
suggested, what I thought was an utterly flawed writing methodology.
The basic idea was that as a general practice, you rewrite everything,
on the theory that you basically can never get something right the first
time, no matter how much time and effort you spend on it, and that the
second time you sit down with a piece that you’ve written, only then
can you really get it right.
Now, the technicality is that she’s probably right on some level.
Ground up rewrite’s shouldn’t be feared, and there are a lot of times
when this can fix something that’s “stuck.” For example, I’m told
that Tolkein sat down and wrote the Lord of the Rings, (the whole
thing, not just specific books) until he got stuck. And then he started
over from the beginning. The entire trilogy, every time he got stuck,
until finally Frodo et al got to sail into the sunset. That might be
extreme.
The problem is, I think, that we are incredibly inaccurate judges of our
own work. This is why we have editors and readers, and that interaction
is so valuable. So yeah, if someone says “this doesn’t work,” sure,
rewrite rather than try and salvage, if that’s your speed. But as a
rule? I’m suspicious of such unequivocal methodological imperatives.
I’ve heard Cory Doctorow say something to the
effect of, “some days you write and it feels divinely inspired and the
words just flow out, and other days it’s like pulling elephant teeth,
but two weeks later, when you’re reading over the back you can’t tell
the difference.” This is, I think why editors of all sorts are so
valuable. And, since on the day-to-day level it’s probably crap shoot
anyway, the key is to try and try often. If you think that first drafts
are always to be thrown out, even after editing them as the article
suggests you may do, then--time being finite--you write less, but I
doubt that you write twice as well. And I am unabashedly of the mind
that practicing productivity and developing good habits and experiences
is more important than developing perfectionism. Your milage might vary.
And then it struck me--after the outrage passed--that this came from a
writer. Someone who is professionally obligated to be invested more in
the precession of words on the page than of the ideas that they
represent. Which is, the core, I guess, of my personal unease with
creative writing: I’m way more interested in studying the ideas, the
people, the history of what I write about than the words on the page,
again this arcs back to what ira
said the way to get
good at something is to do it, and do it often, and not always “getting
it right.” And maybe if an academic program is the way to motivate you
to write a lot, then that’s great but having a
blog might achieve a similar goal.