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sub_dividedFrom The London Review of Books:
Quoted because I like these sections a lot. Elif Bautmen is arguing that the weakness of Creative Writing programs is that they teach technique and "originality" but don't teach anything that can be made into interesting material - "all that great writng, trapped in mediocre books!" Going all the way back to the beginning of the novel seems maybe a little excessive - if it's a mistake for McGurl to only look at postwar fiction, is it a mistake for Bautman to only look at foundational literature? - but the idea that the purpose of the novel is to contrast reality with fiction, even if it is a well-known idea, is new to me, and I like it.
Bautman then he goes on to say that Creative Writing Programs also fall down because they result in people who haven't read enough spending all their energies reinventing the wheel. But then, I wonder, wouldn't someone writing on their own without a program, with only novels for company, also be in danger of reinventing the wheel? Through the laborious, individual process of working out what the authors of their favorite novels had done to produce those effects? Whereas you can go to a creative writing seminar and someone will tell you why your prose or structure isn't working. Maybe working out your own technique produces better, more individualistic results than applying a set of technical rules. But until we invent the sci-fi headphones that perfectly transmit knowledge to the next generation through electric waves, it's inevitable that we'll spend time reinventing.
I get even more lost on her subsequent points. Bautman goes on to say that this model privileges ethnic outsiders, who have a past to mine, more than it privileges White People, who don't have anything to contribute because their story is assumed to be known already. And maybe there's something to this, but I have to ask: if we just assume that writing is "an inherently privileged activity," as Bautman suggests - and if we start requiring authors to be very highly literate people - then aren't we necessarily raising a barrier to entry that is going to keep out a lot of people who could have been very good writers? Because the classics don't teach themselves, you know.
Also, if the rest of the world is a place where your background is a disadvantage, and the Creative Writing Workshop is the one place where it is an advantage, should we take THAT away too?
In other words, I don't think that there's anything wrong about finding inspiration in literature, as well as in lived experience. But why dictate that's got to be the one, and not the other? And anyway, if mediocre white writers can be published, why not mediocre writers from other backgrounds?
Here's the same book reviewed by the New Yorker:
I love that!
Generally, the New Yorker review is more sympathetic and spends more time conveying McGurl's points to the audience, rather than picking out a few to contest. And it ends with this:
Creative Writing Workshops flip the switch from "reading" to "writing". You can, as Bautman recommends, possibly learn enough at university to free yourself. Or you can get lost in the stacks and spend your whole life as a consumer of other people's content... I think the switch is probably flipped too early for a lot of the "producers" of vlogs on Youtube, but there's a certain kind of personality that needs the switch flipped or it will just study and study and read and read, forever.
Or will it? Reading idea-dense stuff always makes me want to write. It sparks ideas. Reading "literary fiction" that is short on ideas but long on execution doesn't make me want to write, it makes me want to critique. Hmm.
Both very good essays. I might pick up the book too.
Formed in the shadow of New Criticism, the creative writing discourse still displays ‘not a commitment to ignorance, exactly, but...a commitment to innocence’. This commitment, this sense of writing being produced in a knowledge vacuum, is what turned me off the programme to begin with. Contemporary fiction seldom refers to any of the literary developments of the past 20, 50 or a hundred years. It rarely refers to other books at all...
Diachronicity is cheaply telegraphed by synchronic cues, and history is replaced by big-name historical events, often glimpsed from some ‘eccentric’ perspective: a slideshow-like process, as mechanical as inserting Forrest Gump beside Kennedy at the White House...
What was missing from the older literary forms, in other words, wasn’t social justice, but the passage of time – a dimension the novel was specifically engineered to capture. The novelistic hero is by definition someone whose life experience hasn’t yet been fully described, possibly because of his race or class, but more broadly because he didn’t exist before, and neither did the technology for describing him. The durability and magic of the novel form lies in the fact that, having gained a certain level of currency, the latest novel is immediately absorbed into the field of pre-existing literature, and becomes the thing the next novel has to be written against...
Quoted because I like these sections a lot. Elif Bautmen is arguing that the weakness of Creative Writing programs is that they teach technique and "originality" but don't teach anything that can be made into interesting material - "all that great writng, trapped in mediocre books!" Going all the way back to the beginning of the novel seems maybe a little excessive - if it's a mistake for McGurl to only look at postwar fiction, is it a mistake for Bautman to only look at foundational literature? - but the idea that the purpose of the novel is to contrast reality with fiction, even if it is a well-known idea, is new to me, and I like it.
Bautman then he goes on to say that Creative Writing Programs also fall down because they result in people who haven't read enough spending all their energies reinventing the wheel. But then, I wonder, wouldn't someone writing on their own without a program, with only novels for company, also be in danger of reinventing the wheel? Through the laborious, individual process of working out what the authors of their favorite novels had done to produce those effects? Whereas you can go to a creative writing seminar and someone will tell you why your prose or structure isn't working. Maybe working out your own technique produces better, more individualistic results than applying a set of technical rules. But until we invent the sci-fi headphones that perfectly transmit knowledge to the next generation through electric waves, it's inevitable that we'll spend time reinventing.
I get even more lost on her subsequent points. Bautman goes on to say that this model privileges ethnic outsiders, who have a past to mine, more than it privileges White People, who don't have anything to contribute because their story is assumed to be known already. And maybe there's something to this, but I have to ask: if we just assume that writing is "an inherently privileged activity," as Bautman suggests - and if we start requiring authors to be very highly literate people - then aren't we necessarily raising a barrier to entry that is going to keep out a lot of people who could have been very good writers? Because the classics don't teach themselves, you know.
Also, if the rest of the world is a place where your background is a disadvantage, and the Creative Writing Workshop is the one place where it is an advantage, should we take THAT away too?
In other words, I don't think that there's anything wrong about finding inspiration in literature, as well as in lived experience. But why dictate that's got to be the one, and not the other? And anyway, if mediocre white writers can be published, why not mediocre writers from other backgrounds?
Here's the same book reviewed by the New Yorker:
On the contrary, university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace. Sticking writers in a garret would isolate them. Putting them in the ivory tower puts them in touch with real life.
I love that!
Generally, the New Yorker review is more sympathetic and spends more time conveying McGurl's points to the audience, rather than picking out a few to contest. And it ends with this:
Did I engage in self-observation and other acts of modernist reflexivity? Not much. Was I concerned about belonging to an outside contained on the inside? I don’t think it ever occurred to me. I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other’s poems, seemed like a great place to be. I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.
Creative Writing Workshops flip the switch from "reading" to "writing". You can, as Bautman recommends, possibly learn enough at university to free yourself. Or you can get lost in the stacks and spend your whole life as a consumer of other people's content... I think the switch is probably flipped too early for a lot of the "producers" of vlogs on Youtube, but there's a certain kind of personality that needs the switch flipped or it will just study and study and read and read, forever.
Or will it? Reading idea-dense stuff always makes me want to write. It sparks ideas. Reading "literary fiction" that is short on ideas but long on execution doesn't make me want to write, it makes me want to critique. Hmm.
Both very good essays. I might pick up the book too.