Brush Up Your Bile

I know it’s rather trendy—and easy—to slam the New York Times Book Review for its weekly head-slappers, but every once in a while there’s an article that’s so moronic that it still begs for critique.

Enter “Brush Up Your Chekhov,” Emily Barton’s review of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. Like so many of the NYTBR articles (main perpetrator: Donadio), this one skims along like a water bug on a surface of conventionally accepted ignorance. There is the obligatory slam against writing workshops, the obligatory self-questioning of whether or not writing can be taught, the obligatory by-the-way admission by the article’s author that she, too, is a self-hating instructor of such writing classes.

A few examples are in order: “Prose notes that the creative-writing workshop (which she brilliantly satirized in her novel Blue Angel) is a latecomer to literary culture, but that writers have always turned to their predecessors for inspiration.” First, writing workshops have been around for roughly 50 years, basically since the end of World War II and the advent of the GI Bill, but, for the love, English departments themselves have only been around for a little over 100. So, saying that the creative-writing workshop hasn’t been around forever is like saying, “You know, junior, there was a day when you had to change the TV channels by hand.” Second, shouldn’t there be a hierarchy for satire, as in Subject A is worth satirizing and Subject B not, because Subject B is so totally easy to make fun of that it’s like not even worth putting pen to paper? I have not read either Blue Angel or Reading Like a Writer so I can’t speak to how brilliant Prose’s satire is, but the whole idea, in the abstract, of satirizing a writing workshop is like—I dunno—punching puppies or something. Forget that it’s mean—why would you even go there?

“Useful teaching texts are few.” Barton goes on to dismiss Gardner for his “curmudgeonly tone,” Forster for “yellowing at the edges” and The Elements of Style and On Writing Well for being too, you know, grammary. Such illogic makes my heart hurt for her students. (It’s called Drop/Add, people. Use it!) First, if you’re going to dismiss various semi-canonical works of writing instruction, fine, just do it with actual logical reasons. For example, perhaps illustrate how Gardner’s thesis is wrong. Or, perhaps recognize that since The Elements of Style and On Writing Well are quite obviously not about fiction writing, then they might not be the best books to use in a fiction writing class. And to dismiss Forster’s book because it’s “yellowing at the edges”—in the same article that lauds Prose for focusing on the classics—is almost schizophrenically stupid. While we’re at it, let’s toss out that old maid Henry James and blind-as-a-bat Joyce while we’re at it—those Has Beens. Old Farts. Losers.

And then there’s the self-hating aspect. “Repelled by that sort of poisonous atmosphere, I used to inveigh against writing workshops—right up until the day I started teaching one. Now, like many of my colleagues, I find myself wondering just how much success I (and my students) can reasonably expect.” The poisonous atmosphere she’s describing is Prose’s take on how Kafka’s The Metamorphosis would have fared in a workshop. First, let me interject with some personal experience. In all my years of fiction workshops (and I’ve taken a lot of freaking workshops), I’ve never encountered this famed, brainless, everything-must-sound-like-Carver-or-Hemingway aesthetic that every writing program/instruction–bashing writer has used as their primary example. Perhaps I was unnaturally graced by excellent workshops every time, but in my experience anything that sparked of life, of real writerly talent and insight and energy, was eaten up like mad. It didn’t matter if the characters were ants. If they were interesting ants, everybody’s brains got cracking.

And what’s with the self-questioning of whether writing can be taught or whether or not the teachers will “have any success”? First of all, what does “success” mean here, exactly? Are we talking Man Booker Prize success? Then, um, no, Prof. Barton. Probably not. Are we talking practicing writing and reading a whole bunch in order to exercise one’s creativity in a way that makes one feel like they’re the agent of their own destiny? Then, yes, Prof. Barton, I think we’re onto something. I keep wishing I could see some other type of instructor go through these kind of tortured involutions, like a welding instructor, maybe. Or I wish I could read a good essay about pedagogical self-doubt by a football coach. That would be actually interesting. I wish that all writing instructors who were having doubts would do themselves and their students a favor: go home. Get another job. Try office work. It does the body good.

And to wrap up this bile-fest with a little service-oriented journalism, here are my “useful” teaching texts for the fine art of fiction writing. 1) Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Rust Hills. This is a good starter book: it gives you all of the good workshoppy terminology so that you can start to experience stories not just as one long stream of continuous prose but instead as a conglomeration of little moves and pieces of characterological machinery. A quick, smooth, unpretentious read that I’ve returned to again and again and again. Second, Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. This one is considerably less quick but well worth repeated rereadings because Booth, in clear, unjargoned language, tackles the life-sustaining riddle of all fiction—point of view, how it works, what it means, why it’s important, why it’s more important than you really thought, all of it. This is one to keep at your bedside table.

Also: Dan Green has another response over at The Reading Experience.

Comments

[Anna Clark]

Nicely put. I'm so tired of the can-writing-be-taught discussion. It's destined to go nowhere. That hell-bent focus on prizewinning and publications takes away from the sheer joy of writing, of storysharing, of imagination, that writing workshops can be, at their best.

And I did read "Blue Angel" and I did think the satirized workshop scenes were quite funny. But they were funny because I can't imagine any workshop, ever, being as bad as this fictional one. It was funny because it was exagerated, of course, but some people seem to have read it and to shake their heads knowingly, "Yes, yes, that's just how it was. Damn shame."

[David Milofsky]

Scott,

Nicely put. It always amazes me that the people who attack writing workshops for (well, for what, dunno) existing, seem to have no problem with sketch classes, dance classes, theatre workshops, all of which use much the same method. Also, the emphasis on results rather than process kind of misses the point. People who write want to be responded to and that's why workshops exist and will continue to do so. It is kind of pathetic that a person could make her living doing this kind of thing and then turn around and criticize it.

[Robert Nagle]

Mark my prediction: in 5 years, which was released a few weeks ago , will be considered the definitive guide to good writing. It's about journalistic writing, but with universal applicability. Clark's blog is here . His writing tips were all available online last year, but taken down for the book.