From The Front Lines: Ten Things I Learned This Quarter

Another quarter of creative writing classes concluded last week and, as usual, I learned a few things that, heretofore, I did not know before about my students, their writing, and creative writing in general.

1. Generally speaking, if more than one creative writing teacher tells you that your talking dog should make an appearance before page 50 -- or at least that there should be a smidgen of foreshadowing prior to the appearance of said speaking canine -- take it not as an indictment on you personally, but merely a fine suggestion as it relates to talking dogs in fiction.

2. When you show up to class one evening with a young woman who you've purportedly saved from human slavery at the hands of jewelry repair store owner, you have to expect that I'm going to ask some follow up questions. Furthermore, when she ends up soliciting people in the class for a little freelance jewelry repair to get her through this difficult period -- no personal checks, she's quick to note -- you have to assume that I'm going to react poorly to that.

3. When you refer to another student's work as being like "three day old fish" you can't really expect the student to take that well. Of course, when I referred to a student's dialog as sounding like lines from a bad Chicago song, I might have been wise to pay attention to my own advice.

4. For a long time, the trend in my writing classes was that there were at least three deaths by drowning each quarter, be it a novel or short story class. This quarter, it was rape. My classes were filled with rapes. Date rapes. Violent anonymous rapes. Incestuous rapes. Rapes where the people didn't realize they'd been raped for 30 years and finally, finally, took their revenge. And a recent development were the amount of rapes I read this quarter between my three classes where someone was urinated on as well.

5. I'm not real big on telling my students their work is great unless I think their work is great, and so I encourage my students to do likewise, figuring that it's no use telling someone their work is brilliant when you really think it wasn't. However, this quarter there was a lot of, "I think this would be great as a movie" critiques. Or, "I think this would be great as a play." Or, "I think this would be great as a poem." Or, "I think this would be great as a continuing blog. Like a serial! Have you thought of that?' Or, "I think this would be great if there was a rape in it."

6. I invited Lee to come in as a guest speaker in one of my classes and what I found was that Lee likes to get up and pace around during the course of the class...specifically the class I was teaching. It was very unnerving. So, I learned that you don't want Lee to be a guest speaker in your class if he's going to start pacing around the room like a caged animal waiting to pounce on impressionable novel writing students.

7. Three classes. 35 students. Not a single mention of motif and, best as I can tell, not a single suffering soul because of it. There was a brief discussion of theme in one class, but that was quickly curtailed when it became apparent no one actually knew what the theme of the student's story was. Here's how the conversation went:

Student 1: Can I ask a question of the class, Tod?

Me: Sure, go ahead.

S1: I know I'm not supposed to ask this, but, well, I have to know because it's really important to me: Did you all get what the theme of my story was?

Me: Oh, this should be fun. Class, what was the theme of S1S story? Let's go around the room.

S2: Life is precious?

S3: Uh, gosh, I hadn't really thought about it, but I'd say that theme was invisibility.

S4: That you never find the one you want, but that you settle for what you find?

S5: I'm going to echo S2 -- life is precious.

S6: That people will only go so far before they go mad?

S7: Isn't it about race? Something about how race shouldn't define us.

S8: I'm not really sure, but I'm going to say that the theme is that we should all be able to become one.

S9: It's about love being the equalizer between the classes.

Me: I have no fucking clue what the theme is, S1, so I'd be fascinated to know.

S1 (clearly feeling a little stunned): The theme is that God can't possibly exist, because if he did exist, none of these people would act the way they do. I mean, God is dead is the theme. I can't believe no one saw that. I had it pinned to my cork board the entire time I wrote this. Don't you guys see that now? That God is dead theme?

Class: Uh, yeah, no, I mean, no, yeah, no, it's not very clear...

8. I have really perfected my ability to speak at great length about books and stories I've never read:

Student: Did you read Shalimar the Clown?

Me: Yes, yes, breath taking wasn't it? [I've never read a single novel by Rushdie. It's just one of those things, like not eating cole slau for no other reason than I just don't do it.]

Student: I love the way Rushdie crafts a sentence. He's so precise.

Me: Well, I think he's become more precise as the years have gone on. His first novel was much more loose, wild and free. But he was younger then, and didn't have the pressure he has now.

Student: Oh, like the jihad and everything?

Me: Yes, his writing really changed after that and you see it in Shalimar. The way the characters come alive. The way the plot moves so inexorably that it's almost like life, in a way. Each of his characters are as delicate as scrimshaw, really.

Student: I feel the same way. I really try to do that, too.

Me: It will come. It will come.

9. This is the honest truth: In my novel class at UCLA Extension, I'm willing to bet 2/3 of the class sells the novels they are working on and that the other 1/3 sell the next book they write, if that makes any sense. Sometimes, you can see that the book a student is writing is good, but not likely to garner a quick sale, but that whatever they do next is probably going to be the one that goes. Over the course of the last couple years, I've had something like 10 or 15 students sell novels or short story collections, which is a pretty significant amount. (Incidentally, one of my students has a book coming out next week -- Eduardo Santiago's Tomorrow They Will Kiss.)

10. If you happen to be one of my students, I'm totally not talking about you. It's a person in my other class. Really. I swear.

Comments

Great funny stuff and painfully accurate. Though I met some good writers (plain old good humans, actually) this quarter, I also learned from my class that there really is such a thing as a student with a head of rock.

Posted by: mernitman | June 27, 2006 at 12:05 AM

Posted by: mernitman | June 27, 2006 at 12:06 AM

"A bad Chicago song?" That's fine, of course, except we both know there is no such thing.

Posted by: Jimmy Beck | June 27, 2006 at 09:26 AM

I would like to go on record (re: the talking dog) that Christopher Moore, in "Island of the Sequined Love Nun," had a talking fruit bat. I don't remember if the bat was introduced before page 50 or not, but it didn't talk until page 139. It was hilarious.

If you're going to have a talking animal, I highly recommend reading Christopher Moore.

Posted by: Tanya Mravik | June 27, 2006 at 09:53 AM

Many so-called literary scholars are unaware that both "Gone with the Wind" and "Mein Kamph" originally featured talking dogs who offered counter point motif to the thema-schema,plus artful decopage to the structural underpinnings of these now-famed oft-adapted yet seldom equaled works. In "GWTW" first draft, a clever canine punctuated plot points by yelping "Give it a rest, bitch." In Hitler's Pre-Modernism diatribe, a German Shepherd tells him to kill Jews, invade Poland, and be reincarnated as George W. Bush. Hitler's first editor changed the breed to Daschound, but the final version was dogmatic enough without the prolix puppy.Tell that to your students and see if they (a) swallow it, (b) write to Parade for verification.

Posted by: Burl Barer | June 28, 2006 at 03:17 AM