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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this blog. and informally trading teaching information vs. formally publishing teaching research.

This blog began because in 2010, I wrote an essay about teaching. ��I realized that the default setting of all my classes–of most fiction-writing classes, really–was the short story. I wanted to tweak that default setting. Not just in my own classes. I wanted to inspire other people to tweak theirs, too.

(See, the thing you need to understand is that I wasn’t trying to help people write novels. I was trying to help teachers teach people to write novels.)

I sent this essay to the AWP Chronicle. It’s��the��one magazine in my discipline (that people actually read) that sometimes publishes articles about teaching writing–as opposed to say,��Poets & Writers or Writer’s Digest. AWP Chronicle accepted it provisionally, but said that my essay would be published behind a “paywall.�� Free, but with a password, available to AWP members only.

Now, this is true of most academic journals that publish articles about the teaching of writing. The problem is the paywall; you have to subscribe or be affiliated with a university to access the journal–which means that the publication has “prestige,�� but hardly anybody will read it.

I tell the whole story more fully. I talk about the problem , too.

Now, I could have submitted this essay to academic journals, the kind my Rhetoric & Composition colleagues submit to.��But the people I wanted to reach (creative writing teachers at universities and colleges) don’t (or won’t?) read those journals.��They also don’t tend to go to AWP panels with the word “Pedagogy�� in the title.

So I revised my essay, disguised all the pedagogy, made it funny and provocative instead of scholarly, and published it in The Millions, a.

A lot of people read it.

The Good News

Due to the visibility of that essay:

I met other writer/teachers who were also thinking about the topic, like Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Sheila O’Connor, Patricia Henley, and��.

We proposed an AWP panel and shared our .

I interviewed folks for this blog, like .

Via this blog, I started sharing my “research�� and course materials, and I know that �����Ի� �����Ի� Brad Watson have tried teaching novel-writing course. Maybe more?

As I kept trying new things with the course, I talked about it here on my blog. And I created a course blog called where I shared my syllabi and then, this semester, some of the course content.

So you see, the thing I wanted to make happen actually happened.

I questioned the accepted pedagogy of fiction writing instruction. I humbly suggested some alternatives via this blog, which now receives about 300-400 page views a day.

It’s been three years since I published that essay in The Millions and started this blog. Things are just a little bit different in my discipline, and I’m proud of that. I’m also amazed by how quickly that happened.

The Bad News

Here’s the thing:��this work hasn’t counted much for me as an academic. I know this because I just had to input my last six years of publications and professional activities into a database called Digital Measures.

When I add a publication to the database, here is the drop down menu.

��

The default setting of academia is peer-reviewed scholarship.

Am I supposed to count my short story published in PANK as a journal article, a magazine/trade publication, or as “other��?

And it goes without saying that my blog–a form of non-refereed scholarship–doesn’t count in this menu at all. At least not in Digital Measures.

Instead of blogging about teaching novel writing, I could have/should have? written journal articles and submitted them to��College English,��Pedagogy, or��College Composition and Communication.��If they’d been accepted, I would be sitting pretty right now as far as Digital Measures is concerned. My “research,�� the work I’ve invested into this blog, would “count.��

But I didn’t do that.

Instead, for the last three years, I wrote and published short fiction and essays and worked on my novel, and��each week, I found time to share my��teaching��research with you via the blog–although “real�� researchers would certainly not call this blog “research.��

Please note: I wouldn’t call it that either.

My Three-Year Output

Here’s what I have written over the last three years.

In Progress

In the last three years, I’ve been working steadily on my novel about Linda Lee Thomas Porter, and I’ve got about 300 pages I’m happy with. I’ve also written about 100 pages of related nonfiction which I hope to place when (and if) I publish the novel.

In Print

In the last three years, I’ve published two short stories�����Ի� seven essays.

My Blog

I started blogging in October of 2010 on Blogger, getting my feet wet. I paid my friend Cynthia Closkey, owner of the web communications firm��, to help me design this website and blog, and we went live in January 2011.

Since then, I’ve published about 200 blog posts.

If you’re reading this, it’s quite likely that you know me via this blog only, not The Circus in Winter or Comeback Season, which I published before I started blogging.

If you compiled all my blog posts, the word count would be about the same as my novel-in-progress. I’ve “written�� as many blog posts as pages of imaginative writing over the last three years.

Here are my blog stats.

I’ve met so many people through this blog: 77, 897! And I’ve generated so many ideas through this blog.

But I have to ask myself some hard questions.

The Hard Questions

Producing refereed scholarship (whether it’s a historical novel or a book on creative writing pedagogy) takes a lot of time.

I feel strongly that I don’t have time to do both. Do historical research and pedagogy research. Write good fiction and good pedagogy.

So, instead, I’ve been choosing to write my novel and simply blog about teaching.

Every time I post to this blog, I’m taking time away from my fiction and nonfiction, from work that “counts�� for me–both institutionally and personally. Even now, as I write this, I’m not working on my novel and other projects.

I ask myself:

Would I be done with my novel by now if I wasn’t blogging?

Should I turn my post ideas into articles and submit them to academic journals rather than sharing it here with you?

Do I have time to interact with all these people?

Do I want to shift from the scholarship of discovery to the scholarship of teaching? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are Boyer’s four models of scholarship.��.

Am I a writer or a teacher?

Do I think too much?

To what good use can I put all this thinking?

Hiatus

Certainly, the blogosphere will hardly notice if I take a break. I don’t have tons of readers, but those I do have are loyal, and I’m very very grateful for your readership.

I’ve probably been working up to this ever since I did . That was a wake-up call.

.

I need to think about those other forms and to what good use I can put these energies of mine.

If you follow me on Facebook and Twitter, I plan to highlight one post a week from my archive; I’ll start with and work my way down.

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’ll be back.

This is me in 1997 when I got my first TT teaching job at Mankato State University.

This blog began because I like to talk about teaching. I always have.

I stepped in front of a class for the first time in 1991.

I was a rookie grad student, and once I got over my stage fright, I realized that teaching is like an incredibly interesting puzzle or math equation that always needs solving.

It’s absorbing, fascinating work.

And I love to talk shop. It’s my virtual teacher’s lounge.

Teaching Creative Writing

Next semester, I’m teaching a grad course called “Teaching in English Studies: Creative Writing,�� which is offered every other year.

Given how much I like to talk teaching, you’d think I’d be really into teaching this course, and I am! But it troubles me, too, and it relates to the things that trouble me about the position of creative writing in English departments, and the things that trouble me about the work I put into this blog.

Let me explain.

I took no course on teaching creative writing in my graduate training. I took a course on teaching composition. This isn’t unusual. Few graduate programs require a creative-writing specific teaching methods course before placing students in undergraduate creative writing classrooms; however, it’s wonderful that more and more schools ARE offering and/or require such a course.

But anyone who has been charged with teaching a course on “Teaching Creative Writing�� is confronted by the problem of how to teach it. How do you teach a course you never took yourself?

Normally, you look for models that already exist.��I could draw from the companion course in my department, “Teaching in English Studies: Rhetoric and Composition,�� which is also being offered next semester.

Here is the description:

Any reflexive writing teacher wonders how to get better at teaching. Daily, teachers confront issues, questions, and situations and need to make informed choices on how to act. This course gives students two key tools for addressing pedagogical questions. First, students will be acquainted to the rich field of Composition Studies and will learn how to look to the existent literature to put their current queries into the context of the field. Specifically, students will learn about major theories, pedagogies, and epistemologies of writing from the past half century. Secondly, students will learn how to shape a research question and conduct qualitative (teacher) research to study classroom environments. Learning how to study one’s own teaching is invaluable in improving one’s craft.

The problem I face as the teacher of the creative writing version of this course is that there is no “rich field�� of Creative Writing Studies from which my students can draw.

Another is that I won’t be teaching my grad students how to shape research questions and conduct qualitative research.

Because the “research�� that creative writers in the academy are expected to produce is their own imaginative writing.

Novels. Stories. Poems. Essays. Memoirs. Screenplays.

How did you learn to teach creative writing?

A few years ago, I had that was published by the Fiction Writer’s Review. My friend Anna Leahy said:

I hesitate to turn to composition studies for guidance because that field is heavily influenced by social science methodology (and also because there’s a practical risk in aligning with a so-called service discipline, or one often without a major). We shouldn’t start with the tools of another trade. Instead, we should begin with issues in our body of knowledge, then develop methods and tools to answer our field’s questions.

I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about this blog, what it’s for, why I do it. In essence, I love to “swap recipes�� about teaching.

And I’ll bet that’s how you learned to teach, too. You incorporated the “best practices�� of your favorite former teachers. Borrowed a few syllabi. Did a little Googling.

If someone asks you, ��What do you do in the classroom, how do you do it, and why do you do it that way?�� what is your answer?

A lot of creative writing teachers can’t answer that question very well.

That’s what brings many of them to this blog.

Except that this blog is not “contributing to the rich field of Creative Writing Studies.�� Because these posts aren’t vetted. In essence, I’ve been self-publishing creative writing pedagogy for the last three years.

Creative writing is a marginalized discipline in the academy and in English departments. When I blog about teaching creative writing rather than publish scholarly articles about it, I become part of the problem rather than the solution.

This blog, you see, is lore. And lore is a tricky issue–not just for me, but for my discipline as a whole.

What is “Lore��?

Lore, according to Stephen North in��The Making of Knowledge in Composition��(1987),��is the “accumulated body of traditions, practices, and beliefs that influence how writing is done, learned, and taught.��

Lore is the teacher’s lounge. Lore is sitting around talking about what works. It’s a kind of recipe swap.

Lore is how knowledge is passed down in creative writing.

Lore isn’t academic. Lore isn’t serious. Lore isn’t scholarship.

Let me illustrate.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Anyone who has ever applied for an academic teaching position has had to compose a Statement of Teaching Philosophy.

A job applicant with a PhD in Rhetoric & Composition goes about the task of writing it by situating her teaching in relation to the body of published work in her discipline. She believes in A because of her understanding of Peter Elbow and does B in the classroom because it combines Donald Murray and Linda Flower. Another job applicant defines himself in relation to Paulo Freire or James Berlin.

(If you don’t recognize these names, they are Rhetoric and Composition theorists. Forgive me for��, but it offers the simplest explanation.)

Like I said, there’s no equivalent body of published work on teaching creative writing that the MFA graduate can draw upon.

In order for creative writing to have that body of work, at least half of us would have to stop (or slow down) publishing fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction and start publishing articles about pedagogy, move away from “Creative Writing�� towards something like “Creative Writing Studies.��

There are quite a few people who believe we should do that.����you can read (if you have a way to access JSTOR).����doesn’t require a password.����else, too.

In��Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice argue that:

most scholarship in creative writing either has focused on practical lesson plans or has simply cataloged the history of the discipline. Both approaches fail to interrorgate that pedagogy and history in relation to graduate program design, undergraduate curriculum development, and professional development for teachers in the field.

When my colleagues in Composition “talk to each other�� about teaching writing, they write articles that are published in journals. These articles “count�� in the academy.

When creative writers in the academy “talk to each other�� about teaching writing, they talk on Facebook or Twitter, or they blog, which produces almost immediate results, but doesn’t count in the academy and doesn’t contribute to the discipline, doesn’t produce a theoretical well from which we can draw.

Nobody I know wants to stop writing novels or poems in order to be the next James Berlin or Peter Elbow.

In order for you to reference me in your Statement of Teaching Philosophy, I would need to stop blogging about all this stuff and publish an article or a book.

But can I give you that AND the historical novel I’m trying to finish?

I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.

What do I do with all the stuff I write about teaching?

The way I see it, if you want to share your thoughts/research/ideas about teaching creative writing��and��have some sort of influence on the discipline, you’ve got a few choices:

Blog about teaching–what I’m doing
Talk about teaching at AWP–what I’m doing, but then I “publish�� my talks on my blog rather than in magazines or journals, which isn’t smart.
Publish pedagogy articles in academic journals–think Wendy Bishop
Publish craft articles in trade magazines–think Benjamin Percy, who, being the smart fellow that he is, has turned his essays into a book called��Thrill Me��forthcoming from Graywolf
Write a textbook–think Janet Burroway
Write a craft book–think Charles Baxter or John Gardner
None of the above. Write fiction and creative nonfiction, damnit. That’s all you’ve got time for, and please note that #1 doesn’t count (much) for promotion and tenure, nor does it make you any moolah, which numbers 4, 5, and 6 do.

Most writers who move in the direction of pedagogy “go trade�� (4, 5, and 6) instead of “going academic�� (2, 3).

��are people with a foot in each world–scholarship of teaching, scholarship of discovery–but it’s really, really hard to remain highly visible in both disciplines at the same time.

Where am I going with this?

Suffice it to say, I’m thinking a lot about the purpose of this blog and the purpose of the class I’m preparing to teach. If you’ve been following me for the last year, you know I’ve been thinking a lot about how I spend my time, too.

I’ll continue this discussion next week.

The title of that post is: “This Blog is a Waste of My Time: Thoughts on the Three-Year Anniversary of The Big Thing.��

Don’t worry. I’m being ironic. Sort of.

It’s almost the end of the year, plus I’m nearing the third anniversary of The Big Thing, a blog I started so that I could talk more about teaching writing.

I’ve been looking at my stats, seeing what I can learn.

Here are my most popular posts, according to Google Analytics:

��about visiting Linda’s grave.

Why is it so popular? Every time someone sees��De-Lovely, they Google “Linda Porter Rose�� and boom, they find me. I get at least one comment on that blog post every other week.

This�������Ի� this����about applying to MFA programs.

Why are they so popular? Every time an MFA hopeful Googles, “How do I write a statement of purpose?�� or “How do I ask for a letter of recommendation?�� they find my blog.


I have no idea why this information isn’t available anywhere else. Probably because all the other people who could write these essays (writers my age who are academics) don’t blog.


Here’s the rub:��I should really repurpose these essays and submit them to��P&W��or the��AWP Chronicle. Then they would count for me as “real�� publications, but they would also be harder to find and therefore less helpful.


Basically, I’m “giving away�� these two essays. You could say they’ve helped me to extend����as a writer, or that they’ve helped me to meet a lot of new people. The fact that I have opted��not��to repurpose and publish these essays but rather keep them on my blog is a form of literary citizenship.


That’s what I think on a good day. On a bad day, I think I’m a chump.

This����about period dramas that are like��Downton Abbey.

Why is this post so popular? Duh. Because people Google “What can I watch that’s like��Downton Abbey?�� and��those��Googlers are my potential readers, since the novel I’m writing is set in the same period as��Downton Abbey.

This����about what to blog about.

Duh. Because every time someone Googles, “What should I blog about?�� they find this post.

This����about how the hell you’re supposed to know if you’re really a writer or not.

Because, yeah, because people Google that shit up all the time.

Please note that��none of these posts are about teaching, which is what this blog was supposed to be about.

You have to go down to the 15th most popular post on my blog–and it isn’t even something I wrote! but rather��.

What does this mean?

Over time, I’ve learned that if I frame a post toward teachers, about the classroom, it will not reach as many people as if I frame it towards writers looking for writing tips.

Simply, there are more writers out there than there are teachers of writing.��

Hmmm.

Stay tuned for the next few weeks as I continue to work through my issues re: this blog.

And Happy Holidays!

Beta Group 1 meets while the rest of the class gets some writing done.

End-of-Term Observations

As you probably noticed, I didn’t blog much about teaching this course this semester.

I think that’s because I’ve almost got it “down�� now, which is a relief after three years of tweaking!

What They Wrote

This is the seventh straight semester I’ve taught this course, and it always works out that:��of 15 students

about a third write realism
about two thirds write something else

This semester, the groups were:

Fantasy (entirely made up worlds)
Realism (coming-of-age, historical fiction, thriller, satire, a memoir)
Supernatural (part our world, part not our world)

I don’t know why it always works out that way, but it does. Seven semesters.

Research.

If you follow me on��ŷ������, you’ll see that over the last few years I’ve been reading a lot more YA and fantasy. ��I feel like reading the George R. R. Martin books this summer and fall, for example, helped me be a better reader of the fantasy novels in my class. I know squat about fantasy–and I always tell them that.

But let me say this: you don’t need to have read ANY fantasy in order to read someone’s fantasy novel and offer an opinion. The only trick is whether the student is smart enough to still listen to you even after you admit that you’re unfamiliar with the genre.

What I Wrote

I wrote about 5000 words over Fall Break in my parents�� camper. A great little writer’s retreat.

I wrote 2000 words a week along with my students. See, it’s all . I ended up writing about 20,000 words this term, including a few new chapters for my novel, so that makes me happy.

I learned that I must stop waiting until the weekend to write. I have to open up the document at least a few times a week, even if it’s only to play with a few paragraphs.

Practice what you preach and all that.

Inside and Outside

The students in the class (inside the fishbowl) blogged each week about what we did for the benefit of the hundred or so people who subscribed to the blog and followed along (outside the fishbowl). You can sort of take the class–emphasis on sort of.��

Note: I will not be offer a class transparently like this again.��

I’m glad that a few very dedicated people followed along and got well into their novels.
I’m glad that my students learned a little about blogging.
I’m glad that the class is archived for anyone else who cares to “take�� it.

But no, I will not ever try that again. My energies were spread so thin I don’t know if they really benefitted anyone.

Lower Word-Count Quotas

A big change this term was that I required only 2000 words a week from students.

My first year, students wrote about 3500 a week.
The second year, students wrote 3000 a week.
My third year, students wrote 2250 a week.

Ultimately, I decided that it’s important not to assign students more than the AAUP-recommended 6 hours of work outside class each week.��, as you know. I decided that 2000 a week was more realistic given the other demands of the class (reading novels, writing papers, etc.).

Despite the lowered quota, many students in this course struggled to get the writing done–more so even than when the word-count quotas were higher. I’m not sure how to explain this. If you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

Changes that are working well

I include myself in the Beta Group meetings and read 5 partials a week for three weeks rather than trying to read all 15 at once.

Ending the semester with a simulated submission process (using the students in another class as faux agents) has been very popular with all students involved and has provided a great occasion to talk about how vetting in publishing works.

Changes I’ll try next time

��Beta Group Bonding: putting students in their Beta Groups by genre interest right away AND making them sit together AND creating occasions for them to share their work with each other (either by trading pages or by getting them talking).

��Fewer novels. We did four. It was too much.

��The Reverse Storyboard Project��remains one of the most significant challenges of the semester. They do the activity well, but they struggle to write the paper that articulates what they learned and how they learned it. Probably because they aren’t giving themselves enough time to write the paper after completing the activity. Next time, I’m going to create two deadlines: one for the activity (the cards) and one for the paper.

Looking forward

I can’t believe I’ve taught this class seven times.

Honestly, I think I need to take a break. The course is “Advanced Fiction,�� and I teach it as novel-writing, although I could just as easily teach it any number of ways, or simply as an advanced-level workshop, just like I did for a long, long time.

Hmmm.

This is what I do, you see. Do something for a few years, figure it out, and then change things up again.

But this is very very bad for my writing. Every time I give myself a new class to figure out, that takes a lot of time away from writing.

We shall see��

Here are the winners of the Most Words Drafted competition in my novel-writing class. The whole semester of this course is .

First place: Liz Winks

Liz wrote 64,309 words this semester. Her satirical novel is entitled The Grand War: or,��How We Screwed Over the World to Get What We Wanted.��She plans to keep writing during the break and the spring semester until she’s got a first draft–and given her amazing productivity, I have no doubt that she’ll do it, too.

You can follow Liz’s . He’s a scientist.

I asked Liz to talk about how she got all this writing done this semester. Here’s what she said.

The Key to Writing a Novel:

Love Your Characters and Have Fun

At the beginning of this semester, I was terrified at the thought of having to write 2000 words a week when I still didn’t have an idea for a novel. Somehow, eventually, an idea hit me (still not sure how or when) and it stuck. I wrote arduously, almost obsessively, trying to capture every moment my characters wished to share with me.

I wrote during my night job. As I sat at the front desk of my dorm for three and a half or four hours, it helped keep me awake.

I wrote in between classes because I was bored and knew I would get entertainment from my characters.

I wrote when I didn’t feel like it, scrap it, and do it again until I got it right.

I wrote when sleep deprived because that’s when I was the most carefree and, in my loopy state, I actually stumbled upon some ideas that have been permanently incorporated into my novel.

My advice to you is to first and foremost love your characters. If you love them and truly care for them, they will speak to you and reveal themselves to you. If you are able to obtain that relationship, you’re basically set.

Don’t force it. If writing feels strained or not right, then it isn’t. But don’t worry, you will be able to return to that state of writing ease, I promise. When you feel stuck, just breathe, walk away, and remind yourself why you love your characters in the first place.

Always keep a notebook with you at all times. You never know when inspiration will strike you or when you will get the itch to hash out ideas.

And, maybe most importantly, have fun. That’s what I’ve learned the key to writing a novel is: having fun with it. Enjoying it and appreciating for the challenge that it is. You’re creating your own world filled with “real�� lives. How could it get any cooler than that?

Second place: Chelsea Jackman

Chelsea wrote 32,595 words this semester. Her novel is Jumping Fences, a middle-grade book about a girl, a ghost, and buried treasure set in St. Augustine, Florida.

You can find her online , and check out the books she’s illustrated .

Third place: Rebecca Brill

Rebecca wrote 25,216 words this term. Her novel is Fever Queen’s Daughter, a fantasy novel she’s been working on for awhile; when I taught the class how to storyboard, she showed me her color-coded system for keeping track of her main POV characters.

You can find Rebecca online . She and Liz will both be in my Literary Citizenship class next semester, so I look forward to continuing the conversation with them.

Congrats to ALL my students for embarking on novels, and thank you to you, kind readers, for following along.

I attended the University of Alabama’s MFA program between 1991-1995. During that period, I took two workshops with writer��, a visiting writer who taught at Eastern Washington University. He made a great impression on both my writing and my teaching.

In fact, the title of this blog, “The Big Thing,�� comes from Keeble. I wrote about that , and how I might not have written The Circus in Winter had he not changed the default setting of a pivotal workshop.

Here’s something else I learned from him.

Plant the Seed of Your Story

In workshop, Keeble talked to us a lot about “planting the seed of your story.�� Once you figure out what your story is really about, you have to return to the the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence! and plant the story’s “seed�� that you will nurture and grow for the next 5-30 pages.

Consider, for example, the first sentence of Tim O’Brien’s story “The Things They Carried.��

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.

So many dramatic questions are introduced in that sentence–who is Jimmy Cross, who is Martha, why does he carry these letters? what will be the ramifications of his doing so?–and by the end of the story, we’ll know the answers. That sentence contains the entire story. The way the war and duty��pull him in one direction (“First Lieutenant,�� not just “Jimmy Cross��) and home�����Ի� love pull him in the opposite direction (she is not just “a girl�� but “Martha,�� a girl from a specific place).

Imagine if this story began instead with a scene between Jimmy and Ted Lavender? or with the list of what everyone in the unit carries? That would utterly change the way the story affects us as readers.

What I’ve learned since taking Keeble’s class is that a short story is a closed, complete narrative experience. Beginning. Middle. End. What makes a story “feel like�� a story is what happens inside the reader’s brain, the internal satisfaction that comes with closure. In genre theorist Susan Lohafer offers the best definition of the short story I’ve ever found:

“Unlike longer fictions—even the most artful and word-conscious novels—short stories do not offer vicarious experience of a surrogate world.�� They haven’t the time.�� Rather,��they put us through something…”��

I think that a story gives us many, many things to think about–a whole hothouse conservatory of plants–but when we come to the end of a well-constructed story, we realize that we’ve been watching one particular plant all along, and we derive enjoyment from the totality of that experience.

Watching a plant grow satisfies just like watching a child grow.

There’s a huge difference between being shown a plant and witnessing the course of its blooming–even if only in passing, in the middle of a busy, buzzing life.

So often, young writers begin a story in that hothouse conservatory, surrounded by possibilities. They plant a shit ton of seeds. They only discover what particular plant they’re really trying to grow at the end of writing their story.

But–don’t you see?–the way that a writer discovered that flower and what the reader needs in order to apprehend and appreciate that flower are two totally different things.

That’s what John Keeble taught me, and what I’ve tried to teach my students.

The other day, I was reading an undergraduate student’s novel in progress, and a thought occurred to me. As I often do, I shared that thought on Facebook:

I’ve never played a video game, but I recognize that it’s a narrative experience that lots and lots of people value. No judgement. But in my fiction-writing classes, I often read stories and novels that read as if I’m watching someone else play a video game. There’s plot, action, scene, all great, but virtually no interiority, which for me is *absolutely necessary* in fiction. My students have always used films and TV shows to talk about fiction, but now they also reference video games. “This is like Bioshock,�� for example, and I have no idea what that even means. I wonder if other creative writing teachers have noticed this quality in student fiction or these references? I wonder if people who play video games could give me some tips about how to help my students make the transition from gaming to writing narrative. P.S. Over the last few years, I’ve read lot more genre fiction (George R.R. Martin, Suzanne Collins, etc.) so that I could at least be familiar with the kinds of stories students borrow from, but I really don’t want to start playing games.

I made the comment public and a great conversation ensued. As of right now, there are 80 comments–from gamers and non-gamers, from creative writing professors and students, from friends and strangers. The conversation was passionate. I invite you to .

I encourage you to add to the conversation in a number of ways:

in
on your own blog, and link back to my post so I’ll get a pingback
in this Google Doc, ��which I will share with future fiction writing students
write an article or essay for online magazine, say, The Millions or Fiction Writer’s Review (see “further reading�� below!)

I spent a lot of time in that thread over the last few days! One of my last comments was this:

What matters to me is the fiction that my gaming students write. What matters to me is whether or not what’s on the page can be published as fiction. Many people who responded in this thread ARE gamers and they know exactly what you mean��about the cathartic experience of games. I am not denying that it exists! What I’m saying is that the way a fiction writer achieves that cathartic experience is different from the way its achieved in a game. I think that gamers create or recreate scenarios on the page that–were they in the game, would be cathartic. But on the page, their stories do not produce the effect they want to achieve.

My Two Cents

I don’t play games and have probably missed the boat on this narrative experience. The ship has sailed.

I have taught myself many other things in the last few years, but this is not an area I’m particularly interested in exploring.

I’m also not interested in become a writer of flash fiction, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not a valid mode of expression. I have a colleagues at Ball State who practice both these modes, and I’m happy to point students in those directions.

The crux of my initial question was not about the validity of games as narrative experience but about whether I needed to understand that experience in order to be a good teacher of fiction writing.

And I still say: No. I don’t.

And I’m saying: Yay for those who can!

What do you think? And please, for the love of god, if you’re going to respond, take some time to read my comments in the FB thread. Do not assume I’m against gaming.

Let’s also remember that this is an unusual situation in which students and faculty, people inside university creative writing programs and people outside those programs are all in the same “room�� talking. That doesn’t happen very often. Let’s all play nice.

Further reading:

Here are two interesting articles on this subject for further reading.

at the Fiction Writer’s Review site.

at the SFWA site.

Step right up and buy your tickets at the website.

Trust me. It’s amazing!

��

Summer 2001 at Sewanee. I started smoking again that summer just so that I could hang out with O’Brien a little more. I was young and foolish.

and this is the third in a series of posts on what I’ve learned from the writers I’ve studied with.

For the last two weeks, I talked about . This week, Tim O’Brien. During the summer of 2001, I attended the and spent two weeks in his workshop. Here’s some of his advice I brought back with me.

Writing doesn’t get easier.

Fairly early on, you have to get to the “aboutness�� of your story. We have to have a sense of the plot and the character’s central struggle or goal. What does the character want?

A good story is one in which a character wants two things simultaneously.

Simultaneity vs. Unidimensionality—Good stories have two or three things happening in them at once. Unidimensional stories may be entertaining, but they are utterly forgettable.

Avoid unintentional, unnecessary repetition, but don’t use silly synonyms to do it.

Beware personifying things.

Avoid using the same mechanical gesture over and over.

STORIES ARE NOT PUZZLES! (He was very emphatic about this!) The point of a story should not be trying to figure out what the heck is going on. A reader needs to know (most of the time) where she is, what’s going on.

Don’t explain away your story. Deepen the dark.

A story must have forward motion, forward thrust. It must keep moving and not spin and spin in the same place indefinitely. Each sentence should keep us moving.

Stories can be about ordinary things, but there must also be something extraordinary about them too, something to surprise us. We must balance the familiar and the strange. As Dickinson said, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.��

Details are important, but not at the cost of boredom.

Grammar and punctuation matter.

Characters are initiators, creating and responding to the world and people around them.

At the end of every scene, your character should be in a different place (physically or emotionally) than he or she was at the start of the scene.

Sentences have to sizzle. If he doesn’t trust a story on the level of the sentence—if the prose is sloppy, ungraceful, grammatically flawed—he doesn’t trust the story itself, no matter the idea behind it.

Use active verbs. Beware static language and ridiculous similes.

Avoid alliteration.

Use commas.

Know the difference between “each other�� and “one another��

Be precise.

Syllables matter. Rhythm matters.

Delete ugliness. Delete mediocrity.

Insert the glorious sunset of a period.

We write to know what we don’t already know. Every day, you expend all your energy, all your brain power, all your bodily fiber to stretch yourself toward that which you don’t yet know, toward that new knowledge gained in the act of writing.

The Opposite of the Hypoxic Workshop

I’ve always been a firm believer in the power of critiques.��Lately however, I’ve started calling them “Critique Essays.��

“Don’t treat these like off-the-cuff responses,�� I tell my undergraduates. “You’re writing a paper about a work of fiction–only it’s still in progress.��

As much as I hate the word “paper,�� it’s a word that students understand. It means they have to analyze. They have to say what they mean as clearly as possible, back up their points, refer directly to the text, etc.

I give them a rubric, a template that describes in detail how critiques should look, what I want them to include.��Here is my assignment sheet for writing critiques.��

And then I grade them. I give out a lot more C’s and D’s on these than on any other assignment in the course.

My thinking about the value of critiques has been most informed by:

by Jeremiah Chamberlin, editor of Fiction Writer’s Review, “Workshop is Not For You,�� in which he says,��“You become a strong writer by��writing��critiques, not reading them.��


by , “Making the Most of a Writing Workshop; or,��Out of the Workshop, Into the Laboratory,”��in which he says, “One of the most useful things a workshop can do for the writer is to reflect the intention of the work back to her.”��

Paradigm Shift: The Hypoxic Workshop

A writer-teacher on Facebook was discussing a problem familiar to all creative writing instructors: in a class with 20 students, how do you schedule workshop slots so that everyone in the class can be “up�� more than once? Lots of writer-teachers discussed their strategies—and then Michael��Martone��chimed in with a comment that caught my attention:

Here’s the thing—give up the traditional workshop model. Come on over to the��hypoxic��workshop. I have 12 students in my workshop and they all produce a story a week. That way they have written 12-14 stories a semester. Critique is reduced to 5-8 minutes a class.

Michael went on to say: “After teaching the traditional workshop for years, I realized that what was being taught was criticism. The “writer�� in your class only gets to be writer twice a semester. Doing a hypoxic��workshop insists that the writer of stories write stories. Not criticize stories. Not read and critique classic stories or anthologized stories. A writer writes. A workshop should be a generative space not a curatorial��one. Other classes can teach how a story works via means of models. An��hypoxic��workshop teaches by doing. It is about process not product. Just saying. You don’t have to order textbooks for this kind of workshop. You are not “norming�� your students. Their work is the textbook.��

This sounded a lot like the “writeshop�� model that I’ve been talking about �����Ի� .

So I asked Michael if he’d talk to me about the pedagogical thinking behind the��hypoxic��workshop, and he kindly agreed.

Michael Martone’s Hypoxic Workshop

I took the notion of hypoxic training form athletic interval training and subtracted the contest for which athletes train. This is practice as practice. That kind of training forces the cross-country runner or swimmer to go “hypoxic,�� that is to be out of breath. Usually when you go hypoxic you must stop and “catch�� your breath, recover.

But in interval training you must recover while still running or swimming but at a lower pace. This increases endurance first and with the increase of endurance speed perhaps follows. I have all 12 or 15 writers in the class write a story every week instead of a story every 4th faced with this schedule often balk. They have never done it before and have actually been taught that it can’t be done.

The usual workshop imagines its job as creating perfect or wanting-to-be perfect stories. Everything goes into the two or three stories a term. There is much talk of revising them too. And in most traditional workshops, the writer acts more often as a critic anyway and not a writer.

The purpose of the hypoxic workshop is to write. Its purpose is to allow the writer to write what she or he wants to write in a space that is uncritical—no time to “workshop.�� The writer is concentrating on understanding, developing, creating process not product. It is to increase endurance and efficiency of writing. It seeks to make writing itself, the act of writing, as natural and necessary as breathing. Make it habitual.

My goal, and it is stated so on my syllabus, is that the writer will still be writing in 20 years. This workshop is not interested in winning the race, however. I have no interest in what is good or bad, what works or not, for anyone other than the writer. This is about the individual writer writing what gives him or her pleasure. It seeks to simulate that good feeling one has after exercising vigorously and is not interested in either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. It is not about winning a race, about being the best in a race. It is about writing itself and the discovery of each participant as to what he or she wants to do with his or her own writing.

What do you think?

It’s a real paradigm shift, isn’t it? What do you think?