General Writing Advice, part 2

To continue the discussion I began last week about general writing advice, I offer the following narrative, which concerns two suggestions: that we need to allow ourselves to write badly, and we need to learn not to write generally according to set rules but to write for specific genres.

Playwriting in College

During my junior year in college, I took a writing workshop in playwriting being team-taught by a professor from theatre and the poet in residence from English. The course concerned writing for one venue, and week after week our scenes were read and commented on.

My first two scenes were miserable failures. 

Preparing to write my third scene, I jotted vague character notes. Then, a week before it was due, I got my notes out and improved on them. I went for a walk and then returned to my desk and the blank paper in front of me and began writing the narration to the scene, which established setting, characters involved, and background. Halfway through the writing of this, I read it back to myself as I thought my peers would have read it. And I was uncomfortable. I began combining the first two sentences there, and I felt a quickening, something clicking into place in the better sentence I wrote. Somehow, in that small change, I gained insight into the scene. I could, for the first time, see the end toward which my plan was leading, and I remember relaxing and thinking, I can see the whole. I know who these characters are and what they want here. 

I emerged from that afternoon of writing with the sense that this was what writers had to do to be successful. They had to tinker. They had to be uncomfortable with their work enough to feel out of harmony with it, and they had to be willing to change it. The next time the class met, I found in the reading of my work that I was right. My scene seemed to communicate what I meant it to.

What this All Meant

I’ve since tried to think about this. The tinkering I did with my notes and those first sentences was perhaps not just tinkering. I suspect it was a way of getting my subconscious mind to move into and sharpen the task. And my discomfort with my first lines was not something I had ever paid attention to before. I would just go with it. Neither of these habits were in line with what I was ever taught to do. But I saw it that day as I began mulling over things. Certainly, a larger influence on my writing that afternoon did have to do with the way that I was suddenly understanding the work of creating knowledge in my field, and it had to do with audience, with background, with the community I had studied with, and my deepening understanding of the particular genre I was working in. It might seem that I made these connections on my own, in isolation, but I am convinced that the community of my classroom and the mindset of my teachers also influenced me. In my solitude, the voices of this workshop formed an important influence as I was encouraged to change some fundamental behaviors. As we were required to read widely in drama and to see as many plays as we could, I began to read and think as a writer of drama—in one sense to think almost solely in terms of how a conversation really sounded, and how it was the only vehicle in a play or a script for everything else that was to unfold on a stage.

The Emergence of What Can’t be Counted

This writing experience marked the first epiphany I had about writing that involved invention. Suddenly, everything I’d heard about what it took to be a writer was taking place with me. Invention seemed to be not only a technique for generating ideas and thinking about audience. There was also a merging of identity, practice, and knowledge that came from the coaching and guiding I was getting in class.

I never found this in the creative writing magazines or books I read through later. What I saw and continue to see in the textbooks about the teaching of creative writing moves between two poles. The first concerns technique, which most agree can be taught—point of view, character development, plotting, and sometimes theme. The second is subjective, even intuitive, and remains mysterious. It certainly remained outside of the lectures and conversations of my literature professors. It had to do with an uncertain mix of a writer’s ideas, background, character, motivations, insecurities, and potential audiences, all of which are uncertain at best, and unquantifiable.

It was remarkable that in the confines of that one class, the unquantifiable and uncertain became manifest, became quite clear.  

I would be interested in hearing other stories like this, and not just about writing. I would love to hear of others who have had moments of epiphany when working on something that was challenging to them.