Tiffany Fritz
Teaching Beyond Workshops: Skill-Based Instruction in Creative Writing Pedagogy
Overview:
Iowa’s Milford-style workshop, wherein writers sit silently as one-by-one their peers share critiques, dominates the creative writing classroom due to its familiarity and utility. However, because an overreliance on workshops neglects the development of craft skills and recreates structural violences against marginalized writers, many researchers propose a shift. Though the institutional limitations of academia make one-on-one conferences and apprenticeships impractical for the traditional secondary and postsecondary classroom model, a number of alternatives are still available.
To develop students’ ability to astutely critique and revise their own work, instructors can teach them to synthesize structural critique and reader response. Mary Ann Cain’s OIE (observation, interpretation, and analysis) approach flags where and how a story conveys its ambitions, then meets or falls short of those intentions, which students can apply to their own or model texts.
By selecting suitably diverse and experimental model texts, instructors provide the opportunity to rehearse and develop the necessary emotional skills to respond to unfamiliar cultural content and narrative risks, reducing the harm done by the Western canon’s hegemony. Instructors who help students find and select their own model texts can teach students the research skills involved in joining the conversation of their field.
We can also reimagine the workshop. Instead of requiring workshops, Leslie Kreiner Wilson leaves empty spots in her syllabus for students to sign-up for Anonymous Floating Workshops, then anonymizes their submissions for distribution and discussion. Alternatively, Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process empowers writers to present questions about and steer the discussion of their own work following their peers’ blind reading.
Annotated Bibliography
Dai, Fan, and Ling Li. “Workshopping to Better Writing and Understanding.” 21994936, edited by Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pp. 31–44.
Donnelly, Dianne. Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? Multilingual Matters, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ku/detail.action?docID=543899.
In this book, Donnelly collects essays by seventeen different writing instructors to interrogate the modern utility of what Phillip Gross defines as the “open workshop” (where participants bring work-in-progress stories and each piece is critiqued as if it were a finished work). Although Anna Leahy notes that AWP surveys consistently find that “most teachers of writing find they are most effective in the workshop format” and that AWP’s handbook lists “‘Peer Review or Workshops’ as one of 12 instructional methods recommended for undergraduate programs,” together, these writer-scholars paint a picture of workshops as brutally discouraging at worst, and outdated at best, stagnated in the period and culture that originated them (Iowa in the early 20th century) and perpetuated based on tradition alone, like a kind of institutionalized generational trauma (63, 75). The aimless yet proliferate democratization of creative writing workshops over the kind of scaffolded curricula prevalent in the instruction of other fine arts “suggests that there is no way to teach creative writing,” a failing which the book’s various authors frame as a symptom of lean research on creative writing pedagogy resulting from a field that treats teaching as secondary to the writing itself (in part as a result of the fixation on assuring instructor credibility, given the lack of objective measures for student outcomes — as Sue Roe says, “no one has ever been able to prove what makes a gifted and successful writer”) (33-34). In pursuit of alternative workshopping methods, contributors arrive at a few notable possibilities: (1) Due to the perceived value of workshops as ‘try-outs’ for a real audience and their ability to teach students to accept criticism and to criticize themselves, instructors might employ nontraditional workshop frames which invite rather than require student-authors to workshop their writing in a framework that allows them to either (A) guide and participate or (B) remain anonymous in order to minimize competition and insecurity, per Leslie Kreiner Wilson’s data-based Floating Anonymous Workshop method; (2) Regardless of whether they themselves implement workshops, instructors should explicitly teach students the necessary skills to become good reviewers of their own and others’ work through (A) using a framework for feedback (like Mary Ann Cain’s OIE — observation, interpretation, analysis) to help readers pinpoint where lapses are occurring; and (B) incorporating the study of (diverse) literature as a model from which to learn craft by analysis and imitation, so student reviewers have relevant and useful commentary to make and a shared vocabulary with which to discuss narrative elements. Notably, the book’s contributors agree that none of these approaches can mitigate the vulnerability and potential harm associated with the way a collective adherence to the often-implicit canon of ‘literature that works’ can Other and thus stomp out student writers’ risks, innovations, and sense of confidence in representing their own experiences as a minority or marginalized group, which further research into an ideal approach to workshopping would need to reckon with.
Eggert, Amy L. Writing Ugly: Inciting Dissonance and Discourse through Trauma Narratives. Illinois State University. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/1498560227/abstract/2CDFB6D159A14EFAPQ/1. Accessed 4 Oct. 2022.
Glover, Stuart. “Cohort-Based Supervision of Postgraduate Creative Writers: The Effectiveness of the University-Based Writers’ Workshop.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 7, no. 2, July 2010, pp. 123–36. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2010.482670.
Hauptle, Carroll. “Liberating Dialogue in Peer Review: Applying Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process to the Writing Classroom.” Issues in Writing, vol. 16, no. 2, Spring 2006, pp. 162–83.
(Note: This source provides information on how to apply Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process to workshopping activities, which may be useful as a response to the Huang source.)
Huang, S. L. “The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing.” Tor.Com, 17 Aug. 2022, https://www.tor.com/2022/08/17/the-ghost-of-workshops-past-how-communism-conservatism-and-the-cold-war-still-mold-our-paths-into-sff-writing/.
Hugo award-winning writer S.L. Huang redefines Iowa’s bootcamp model of workshopping (the ‘Milford’ model, reproduced in all the major professional science fiction and fantasy workshops) as a form of institutionalized violence against marginalized writers. To writers who have been institutionally silenced and othered, the Milford procedures, which demand the writer sits in silence while their peers mark up the document like a group of high school bullies circling their target’s every pimple, recreates the violences of western society at large. Huang questions how writers of color, queer writers, and disabled writers can feel empowered to take risks in their work when the process designed to strengthen it involves recreating societal trauma that silencins them while their Otherness is made into a problem to be solved by peers who are taught to nudge their work towards a hegemonistic understanding of literature defined by an inequitable literary canon. She cites the organizers of notable SFF workshops (Viable Paradise, Clarion, Clarion West, Futurescapes) as they reconsider their commitment to the Milford model based on these critiques, and even those who intend to still (cautiously) conduct their workshop according to Iowa’s model note that they do not support its ubiquitous use. Rather, Huang and the conference organizers agree that the introduction of nontraditional methods such as Odyssey’s new one-on-one custom online course and Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process are essential to welcoming diverse writers into the field.
Hunley, Tom C. “It Doesn’t Work For Me: A Critique of the Workshop Approach to Teaching Poetry Writing and a Suggestion for Revision.” Writing on the Edge, vol. 13, no. 1, 2002, pp. 59–77. (link)
Hunley argues that the prevalence of workshop-style creative writing courses are a product of a kind of academic pyramid scheme, whereby MFA students learn by taking workshops and then go on to teach via workshops primarily due to a lack of explicit pedagogical training in the degree programs which ostensibly prepare them to teach the content. He cites a quote from David Starkey lamenting his lack of preparation for his job as a creative writing instructor, given that his introductory poetry students' work reflected his neglect of invention exercises and formal instruction. Marie Griffin further argues that reliance on the workshop reflects the pedagogical laziness of instructors' desire to perform the student-centered classroom while reducing their own lesson planning workload. Hunley proposes an alternative approach in which instructors use the five canons of rhetoric to offer invention activities to students who need help producing drafts and learning, plainly, how to write — generation exercises, figurative language exercises, imitation (especially when focused on researching and developing a specific technique), etc. When workshops are used, Hunley suggests reducing their imposition on class time and student grades, as well as explicitly teaching students the process of both how to provide useful feedback and how to revise. Even better, eliminate workshops and focus on providing feedback instead through one-on-one conferences. This source also includes sample poetry lessons for incorporating the five canons of rhetoric. Taken together, all these considerations can help teachers of creative writing find ways to develop a curriculum that is less dependent on the workshop structure and more tailored towards the instruction of craft.
Kostick, Lila. “Undergraduate Workshops in Creative Writing.” College English, vol. 13, no. 6, 1952, pp. 334–36. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/371794.
McAbee, Donovan. “Shifting the Power Dynamics in the Creative Writing Workshop: Assessing an Instructor as Participant Model.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 17, no. 3, Aug. 2020, pp. 244–52. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2019.1586959.
McKenzie, Vahri. “The Other Writing Group: An Embodied Workshop Abstract:” TEXT, vol. 23, no. Special 57, Oct. 2019. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.23586.
Ristow, Ben. “Performances in Contradiction: Facilitating a Neosophistic Creative Writing Workshop.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 11, no. 1, Mar. 2014, pp. 92–99. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2013.871040.
Stoll, Patricia. “You Must Begin at Zero: Story Workshop.” College English, vol. 35, no. 3, 1973, pp. 256–66. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/374973.
Stukenberg, Jill. “Deep Habits: Workshop as Critique in Creative Writing.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 16, no. 3, July 2017, pp. 277–92. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022216652770.
Thomson, Lesley. “Learning to Teach Creative Writing.” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, vol. 20, no. 1, 2013, pp. 45–52. ProQuest, https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2012.757060.
Thomson argues for the effectiveness of student-driven one-on-one conferencing in creative writing pedagogy by comparing teacher-led conferences (featuring line-by-line discussion of the instructor’s marginal feedback on student stories, including exercise suggestions) to student-driven conferences (where students prepare questions and focus areas that student and teacher can dig at together to discover ways to better tailor the text to the student-writer’s intention). After reflecting on her personal experiences with two students, Thomson concludes that empowering students to self-analyze produces better learning. However, this approach to creative writing instruction has two major limitations: (1) like workshops, student-centered conferences can make students anxious — in this case, about the practical academic concerns of the course — therefore, Thomson highlights the need for instructors to account for these anxieties in framing their work; (2) institutional limitations on class size and student load may substantially limit the practicality of a one-on-one approach. I notice that conferencing incorporates many successful aspects of the traditional workshop — feedback, analysis, reflection, and revision — and that group workshopping can theoretically address the workload limitations of one-on-one.
Overview:
Iowa’s Milford-style workshop, wherein writers sit silently as one-by-one their peers share critiques, dominates the creative writing classroom due to its familiarity and utility. However, because an overreliance on workshops neglects the development of craft skills and recreates structural violences against marginalized writers, many researchers propose a shift. Though the institutional limitations of academia make one-on-one conferences and apprenticeships impractical for the traditional secondary and postsecondary classroom model, a number of alternatives are still available.
To develop students’ ability to astutely critique and revise their own work, instructors can teach them to synthesize structural critique and reader response. Mary Ann Cain’s OIE (observation, interpretation, and analysis) approach flags where and how a story conveys its ambitions, then meets or falls short of those intentions, which students can apply to their own or model texts.
By selecting suitably diverse and experimental model texts, instructors provide the opportunity to rehearse and develop the necessary emotional skills to respond to unfamiliar cultural content and narrative risks, reducing the harm done by the Western canon’s hegemony. Instructors who help students find and select their own model texts can teach students the research skills involved in joining the conversation of their field.
We can also reimagine the workshop. Instead of requiring workshops, Leslie Kreiner Wilson leaves empty spots in her syllabus for students to sign-up for Anonymous Floating Workshops, then anonymizes their submissions for distribution and discussion. Alternatively, Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process empowers writers to present questions about and steer the discussion of their own work following their peers’ blind reading.
Annotated Bibliography
Dai, Fan, and Ling Li. “Workshopping to Better Writing and Understanding.” 21994936, edited by Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pp. 31–44.
Donnelly, Dianne. Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? Multilingual Matters, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ku/detail.action?docID=543899.
In this book, Donnelly collects essays by seventeen different writing instructors to interrogate the modern utility of what Phillip Gross defines as the “open workshop” (where participants bring work-in-progress stories and each piece is critiqued as if it were a finished work). Although Anna Leahy notes that AWP surveys consistently find that “most teachers of writing find they are most effective in the workshop format” and that AWP’s handbook lists “‘Peer Review or Workshops’ as one of 12 instructional methods recommended for undergraduate programs,” together, these writer-scholars paint a picture of workshops as brutally discouraging at worst, and outdated at best, stagnated in the period and culture that originated them (Iowa in the early 20th century) and perpetuated based on tradition alone, like a kind of institutionalized generational trauma (63, 75). The aimless yet proliferate democratization of creative writing workshops over the kind of scaffolded curricula prevalent in the instruction of other fine arts “suggests that there is no way to teach creative writing,” a failing which the book’s various authors frame as a symptom of lean research on creative writing pedagogy resulting from a field that treats teaching as secondary to the writing itself (in part as a result of the fixation on assuring instructor credibility, given the lack of objective measures for student outcomes — as Sue Roe says, “no one has ever been able to prove what makes a gifted and successful writer”) (33-34). In pursuit of alternative workshopping methods, contributors arrive at a few notable possibilities: (1) Due to the perceived value of workshops as ‘try-outs’ for a real audience and their ability to teach students to accept criticism and to criticize themselves, instructors might employ nontraditional workshop frames which invite rather than require student-authors to workshop their writing in a framework that allows them to either (A) guide and participate or (B) remain anonymous in order to minimize competition and insecurity, per Leslie Kreiner Wilson’s data-based Floating Anonymous Workshop method; (2) Regardless of whether they themselves implement workshops, instructors should explicitly teach students the necessary skills to become good reviewers of their own and others’ work through (A) using a framework for feedback (like Mary Ann Cain’s OIE — observation, interpretation, analysis) to help readers pinpoint where lapses are occurring; and (B) incorporating the study of (diverse) literature as a model from which to learn craft by analysis and imitation, so student reviewers have relevant and useful commentary to make and a shared vocabulary with which to discuss narrative elements. Notably, the book’s contributors agree that none of these approaches can mitigate the vulnerability and potential harm associated with the way a collective adherence to the often-implicit canon of ‘literature that works’ can Other and thus stomp out student writers’ risks, innovations, and sense of confidence in representing their own experiences as a minority or marginalized group, which further research into an ideal approach to workshopping would need to reckon with.
Eggert, Amy L. Writing Ugly: Inciting Dissonance and Discourse through Trauma Narratives. Illinois State University. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/1498560227/abstract/2CDFB6D159A14EFAPQ/1. Accessed 4 Oct. 2022.
Glover, Stuart. “Cohort-Based Supervision of Postgraduate Creative Writers: The Effectiveness of the University-Based Writers’ Workshop.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 7, no. 2, July 2010, pp. 123–36. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2010.482670.
Hauptle, Carroll. “Liberating Dialogue in Peer Review: Applying Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process to the Writing Classroom.” Issues in Writing, vol. 16, no. 2, Spring 2006, pp. 162–83.
(Note: This source provides information on how to apply Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process to workshopping activities, which may be useful as a response to the Huang source.)
Huang, S. L. “The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing.” Tor.Com, 17 Aug. 2022, https://www.tor.com/2022/08/17/the-ghost-of-workshops-past-how-communism-conservatism-and-the-cold-war-still-mold-our-paths-into-sff-writing/.
Hugo award-winning writer S.L. Huang redefines Iowa’s bootcamp model of workshopping (the ‘Milford’ model, reproduced in all the major professional science fiction and fantasy workshops) as a form of institutionalized violence against marginalized writers. To writers who have been institutionally silenced and othered, the Milford procedures, which demand the writer sits in silence while their peers mark up the document like a group of high school bullies circling their target’s every pimple, recreates the violences of western society at large. Huang questions how writers of color, queer writers, and disabled writers can feel empowered to take risks in their work when the process designed to strengthen it involves recreating societal trauma that silencins them while their Otherness is made into a problem to be solved by peers who are taught to nudge their work towards a hegemonistic understanding of literature defined by an inequitable literary canon. She cites the organizers of notable SFF workshops (Viable Paradise, Clarion, Clarion West, Futurescapes) as they reconsider their commitment to the Milford model based on these critiques, and even those who intend to still (cautiously) conduct their workshop according to Iowa’s model note that they do not support its ubiquitous use. Rather, Huang and the conference organizers agree that the introduction of nontraditional methods such as Odyssey’s new one-on-one custom online course and Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process are essential to welcoming diverse writers into the field.
Hunley, Tom C. “It Doesn’t Work For Me: A Critique of the Workshop Approach to Teaching Poetry Writing and a Suggestion for Revision.” Writing on the Edge, vol. 13, no. 1, 2002, pp. 59–77. (link)
Hunley argues that the prevalence of workshop-style creative writing courses are a product of a kind of academic pyramid scheme, whereby MFA students learn by taking workshops and then go on to teach via workshops primarily due to a lack of explicit pedagogical training in the degree programs which ostensibly prepare them to teach the content. He cites a quote from David Starkey lamenting his lack of preparation for his job as a creative writing instructor, given that his introductory poetry students' work reflected his neglect of invention exercises and formal instruction. Marie Griffin further argues that reliance on the workshop reflects the pedagogical laziness of instructors' desire to perform the student-centered classroom while reducing their own lesson planning workload. Hunley proposes an alternative approach in which instructors use the five canons of rhetoric to offer invention activities to students who need help producing drafts and learning, plainly, how to write — generation exercises, figurative language exercises, imitation (especially when focused on researching and developing a specific technique), etc. When workshops are used, Hunley suggests reducing their imposition on class time and student grades, as well as explicitly teaching students the process of both how to provide useful feedback and how to revise. Even better, eliminate workshops and focus on providing feedback instead through one-on-one conferences. This source also includes sample poetry lessons for incorporating the five canons of rhetoric. Taken together, all these considerations can help teachers of creative writing find ways to develop a curriculum that is less dependent on the workshop structure and more tailored towards the instruction of craft.
Kostick, Lila. “Undergraduate Workshops in Creative Writing.” College English, vol. 13, no. 6, 1952, pp. 334–36. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/371794.
McAbee, Donovan. “Shifting the Power Dynamics in the Creative Writing Workshop: Assessing an Instructor as Participant Model.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 17, no. 3, Aug. 2020, pp. 244–52. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2019.1586959.
McKenzie, Vahri. “The Other Writing Group: An Embodied Workshop Abstract:” TEXT, vol. 23, no. Special 57, Oct. 2019. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.23586.
Ristow, Ben. “Performances in Contradiction: Facilitating a Neosophistic Creative Writing Workshop.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 11, no. 1, Mar. 2014, pp. 92–99. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2013.871040.
Stoll, Patricia. “You Must Begin at Zero: Story Workshop.” College English, vol. 35, no. 3, 1973, pp. 256–66. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/374973.
Stukenberg, Jill. “Deep Habits: Workshop as Critique in Creative Writing.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 16, no. 3, July 2017, pp. 277–92. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022216652770.
Thomson, Lesley. “Learning to Teach Creative Writing.” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, vol. 20, no. 1, 2013, pp. 45–52. ProQuest, https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2012.757060.
Thomson argues for the effectiveness of student-driven one-on-one conferencing in creative writing pedagogy by comparing teacher-led conferences (featuring line-by-line discussion of the instructor’s marginal feedback on student stories, including exercise suggestions) to student-driven conferences (where students prepare questions and focus areas that student and teacher can dig at together to discover ways to better tailor the text to the student-writer’s intention). After reflecting on her personal experiences with two students, Thomson concludes that empowering students to self-analyze produces better learning. However, this approach to creative writing instruction has two major limitations: (1) like workshops, student-centered conferences can make students anxious — in this case, about the practical academic concerns of the course — therefore, Thomson highlights the need for instructors to account for these anxieties in framing their work; (2) institutional limitations on class size and student load may substantially limit the practicality of a one-on-one approach. I notice that conferencing incorporates many successful aspects of the traditional workshop — feedback, analysis, reflection, and revision — and that group workshopping can theoretically address the workload limitations of one-on-one.
ASSIGNMENT: EXPERT STUDY
In addition to completing the readings assigned for class, you will select and read at least three texts of your own choosing.
As you read your chosen texts and the course’s assigned readings, you will use a pen to transcribe passages from your chosen texts that resonate with you into a journal. These passages might resonate because they are interesting, beautiful, surprising, informative, revealing, or even confusing. They may represent the kind of writing you aspire to, or the kind of writing that you dread producing.
By the end of the semester, you will choose at least ten passages from your journal to respond to. Your response to a passage will consist of two parts: an analysis of the writing, and a writing exercise for yourself based upon it. You must complete the writing exercise.
CRITERIA
● Read 3 or more texts of your choosing (any length, any format).
● Choose at least 10 total passages from those texts (or our class readings)
for study and copy them into a journal in pen.
● Respond to each passage with:
EXAMPLE --
“These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file, to which we must return every waking hour to check reality against memory, and in sleep to check memory against memory, which means ghost against ghost, in order to exorcise them, if necessary” (Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury 33).
Bradbury uses repetition and parallel structure as a way to continue to connect, segue, and extend his ideas. He parallels the Muse against the writer by using the same listing parenthetical (“the stuffs, the foods, on which” and “the storehouse, the file, to which”) and then furthers the parallelism by repeating memory and ghost. In addition to creating a pleasant circuitous rhythm to the sentences, these terms thus feel like a logical progression leading to a simple conclusion: “to exorcise them, if necessary.” A complex, cumulative sentence similarly culminates in a simple, actionable idea that boils it all down, so the structure mirrors the thinking: in writing, we dwell and circle on memories that feed our creativity, then purge them onto the page.
Exercise: Imitate the syntactical pattern of the passage to trace the logic of Bradbury’s parallel structures and a feel for the balance of his repetition and rhythm.
Media was the idol, the calf, to which the public prayed. It housed the pride, the hubris, in which they persistently indulged in private reverie to feed urge into urge, and in public to seek validation after validation, that is indulgence after indulgence, so as to vindicate themselves, frequently.
In addition to completing the readings assigned for class, you will select and read at least three texts of your own choosing.
As you read your chosen texts and the course’s assigned readings, you will use a pen to transcribe passages from your chosen texts that resonate with you into a journal. These passages might resonate because they are interesting, beautiful, surprising, informative, revealing, or even confusing. They may represent the kind of writing you aspire to, or the kind of writing that you dread producing.
By the end of the semester, you will choose at least ten passages from your journal to respond to. Your response to a passage will consist of two parts: an analysis of the writing, and a writing exercise for yourself based upon it. You must complete the writing exercise.
CRITERIA
● Read 3 or more texts of your choosing (any length, any format).
● Choose at least 10 total passages from those texts (or our class readings)
for study and copy them into a journal in pen.
● Respond to each passage with:
- An analysis of the writing which suggests why you chose this text or how it has helped develop your understanding of effective writing.
- A writing exercise that you completed based upon the passage.
EXAMPLE --
“These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file, to which we must return every waking hour to check reality against memory, and in sleep to check memory against memory, which means ghost against ghost, in order to exorcise them, if necessary” (Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury 33).
Bradbury uses repetition and parallel structure as a way to continue to connect, segue, and extend his ideas. He parallels the Muse against the writer by using the same listing parenthetical (“the stuffs, the foods, on which” and “the storehouse, the file, to which”) and then furthers the parallelism by repeating memory and ghost. In addition to creating a pleasant circuitous rhythm to the sentences, these terms thus feel like a logical progression leading to a simple conclusion: “to exorcise them, if necessary.” A complex, cumulative sentence similarly culminates in a simple, actionable idea that boils it all down, so the structure mirrors the thinking: in writing, we dwell and circle on memories that feed our creativity, then purge them onto the page.
Exercise: Imitate the syntactical pattern of the passage to trace the logic of Bradbury’s parallel structures and a feel for the balance of his repetition and rhythm.
Media was the idol, the calf, to which the public prayed. It housed the pride, the hubris, in which they persistently indulged in private reverie to feed urge into urge, and in public to seek validation after validation, that is indulgence after indulgence, so as to vindicate themselves, frequently.
Why can’t I type this?
A 2009 study out of the University of Central Florida found that the complex task of handwriting results in better memory (Smoker et. al). In other words, if you want to study and internalize something in a way that sticks, write it by hand.
How should I select my texts?
That’s up to you, but I suggest choosing texts that you believe can teach you something about the craft of writing — not necessarily by explicit instruction, but by example. Consider the following:
How many passages do I have to choose from each text?
You need ten total passages from across everything you read. There is no per-text minimum requirement; however, taken together, your passages should give me an accurate impression of what expert writing you studied this semester. Consider the rhetorical situation of your selections and what your choices demonstrate to me about your learning.
How long do my responses need to be?
There is no minimum expectation for the length of your responses, but I ask that you keep each under a page (double-spaced).
For some passages, an effective analysis can be done in a short (3-5 sentence) paragraph. For some passages, you may feel you need more time. Be specific and thorough in explaining to me what makes this passage useful for you to critically examine, either as a positive or negative example.
Similarly, some writing exercises may be a paragraph, others a page, and some a short story.
Again, consider both the rhetorical situation of submitting a number of easy, short, or low level exercises to me, as well as the impact on your learning of completing exercises that do not stretch your skills.
How do I come up with a writing exercise?
Use your analysis as a guide. If you have considered a quote for its syntactic properties, then you should challenge yourself with an exercise that will prompt you to produce similar syntax.
Consider, perhaps: what kind of writing prompt could have produced that passage? What limitations, prompts, scaffolding, etc. might you need in order to produce something similar or to learn how to apply the understanding you drew from your analysis to your own writing?
How will I submit my journal?
You can either use an app like Microsoft Lens to scan your chosen passages and responses into a PDF, or you can take pictures of your journal. Either way, you will upload digital copies rather than giving me your physical journal.
A 2009 study out of the University of Central Florida found that the complex task of handwriting results in better memory (Smoker et. al). In other words, if you want to study and internalize something in a way that sticks, write it by hand.
How should I select my texts?
That’s up to you, but I suggest choosing texts that you believe can teach you something about the craft of writing — not necessarily by explicit instruction, but by example. Consider the following:
- In general, find writers who are producing the kind of work that you want to do — if you are a poet, read poems. If you are a novelist, read novels. (Note: I strongly encourage you to pick at least one novel-length work or anthology, but beyond that, be responsible with your own time.)
- Target your weaknesses. If you feel that your ability to write concise yet vivid descriptions is lacking, find a text full of descriptions that you admire. To this end, one or more of your selected texts may be books that you have already read.
- Don’t limit yourself based on genre, plot, content, or theme — consider your sentence-level ambitions, consider mode. If you want to try writing a short story in the form of a Supreme Court decision, maybe you should read a real one. Struggling to use figurative language in your short fiction? Select a poem or collection of poems.
- You may choose texts with content to teach you that’s relevant to a project you have in mind. Perhaps you intend to write a historical novel set in pre-colonial Mexico: why not read a nonfiction text about that period and culture?
How many passages do I have to choose from each text?
You need ten total passages from across everything you read. There is no per-text minimum requirement; however, taken together, your passages should give me an accurate impression of what expert writing you studied this semester. Consider the rhetorical situation of your selections and what your choices demonstrate to me about your learning.
How long do my responses need to be?
There is no minimum expectation for the length of your responses, but I ask that you keep each under a page (double-spaced).
For some passages, an effective analysis can be done in a short (3-5 sentence) paragraph. For some passages, you may feel you need more time. Be specific and thorough in explaining to me what makes this passage useful for you to critically examine, either as a positive or negative example.
Similarly, some writing exercises may be a paragraph, others a page, and some a short story.
Again, consider both the rhetorical situation of submitting a number of easy, short, or low level exercises to me, as well as the impact on your learning of completing exercises that do not stretch your skills.
How do I come up with a writing exercise?
Use your analysis as a guide. If you have considered a quote for its syntactic properties, then you should challenge yourself with an exercise that will prompt you to produce similar syntax.
Consider, perhaps: what kind of writing prompt could have produced that passage? What limitations, prompts, scaffolding, etc. might you need in order to produce something similar or to learn how to apply the understanding you drew from your analysis to your own writing?
How will I submit my journal?
You can either use an app like Microsoft Lens to scan your chosen passages and responses into a PDF, or you can take pictures of your journal. Either way, you will upload digital copies rather than giving me your physical journal.