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Grading creative writing

Well at Sanyang

Grades are in for the semester! SO relieved.

Which means that the well’s rather empty for the moment. I should have more time and energy to write this weekend. But in the meantime, I have wondered: how does one grade creative writing? I’ve taken creative writing classes, but never taught one. One class was graded “pass/fail,” but the standards for the other classes were never quite clear to me.

My composer husband suggested that these classes might be graded as he grades musical compositions: risk-taking, originality, clarity, responses to feedback. I know that feedback is central to the writing process. But as I’ve played with creativity in the classroom through this seminar (both as teacher and student), I have also noted the importance of grounded encouragement in taking risks. The greater the student’s risk-taking, the higher their vulnerability.

How would you grade–or how do you grade–creative writing? Or did my professor have it right: is pass/fail the best option?

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Not the blue jeans, again

Here’s my claim for the day: good writers make the most out of the tension between structure and freedom.

My husband, who’s a composer, always tells me that the artist’s job is to play with tension and release. I’ll work with that idea in another post, perhaps even Assignment #2, but today’s lesson is about structure and freedom.

I was going to write another post tonight about fear (Internet trolls! Amazon reviewers!), but that topic is already starting to feel worn as the clichéd blue jeans. And I do know that creative writing’s not a linear process. Writing about fear for a few posts won’t clear away my fears forever, I’m sure.

In the meantime, what was originally a fun tag line has become a liberating way to think about this blog: as a private MFA. Heck, I’ve already applied and been accepted! With full funding! I get to decide when I’ve graduated! I can do whatever I want, whenever I want!

Uh-oh.

I can do whatever I want: the writer’s blessing and curse.

The teacher in me wants to begin with a syllabus, a reading list, a schedule of assignments, a final project. It’s an MFA, right? Semester 1: finish X. Semester 2, finish Y. Repeat for 2-3 years. Degree granted. Ah, the comfort of a schedule. I like schedules, and as you saw, I like lists. The Capricorn part of me wants schedules…and features…and regularly scheduled features, and featured schedules, and scheduled regularity. But phrased that way it sounds, well, boring, doesn’t it? Why do a private MFA if it’s where to buy ventolin inhalers boring?

Thus, because it’s against my nature, and I think it’s good for me, I won’t create a full structure just yet, to see how things develop. For now, I want to post several times a week. The posts will include these musings about my new writing life, and my self-assignments, and the results of those assignments. As a partial reading list, I’d like to revisit some books about writing, including Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and I’ve been told to pick up Stephen King’s On Writing. (Other suggestions and websites welcome.) However, if it weren’t so mid-90’s, and so ugly, and so distracting, I’d put up those pixilated flashing “Under Construction” signs all over this site. You’ll just have to imagine them whenever you click anywhere here. Or not.

And so I told you that I didn’t want to write about fear again, but I think my desire to hyperschedule may be another way of trying to control the fear, to dance the Procrastination Waltz around the fear. Hitting “publish” on this post was freeeaky, let me tell you. But it’s that kind of fear that pushed me to write creatively in the first place, to start this blog, and it’s that kind of parachute jump fear that artists take whenever they share their work. You get a rush from parachute jumps—or so I’ve been told. It’s the ultimate metaphor of structure, then freedom.

Enough procrastinating! I’ll have an assignment for you next time.

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Writing takes ego

So…what do you do when you’ve been introduced at a party by your cool popular friend?

If you’re like me, you duck your head, stare at the ground, and smile nervously: “Um, hi, everyone.” That’s me today. I’m so grateful to Shauna for urging me to start a blog, and chances are, if you’re reading this now, you’re here because of Shauna. (Or you’re one of my Facebook friends. Oh, and hi, Mom.) Welcome, each and every one.

But it does leave a certain amount of expectation: your friend’s cool, so you must be cool, too. Oh, the pressure.

I’ll be trying on different genres here (food writing’s up soon!), and I’ve got a number of blog assignments lined up. But for now the most comfortable genre, the one which gets me typing the fastest, is this one: the reflective, the notes-towards-my-memoir-project, the musings about this new writing life.

I’ve decided to write through the fear, and not apologize for this experimental space. I toyed with writing a separate entry about the first assignment. As in: “OK, yeah, I don’t think it worked, and here’s how, and I’m sorry that what you came for isn’t here, and ….”. This apology, of trying to speak for the work, is a no-no in writing workshops. I can see why.

Sounds like I’m back to some of my old writing neuroses, if not some of my old personality neuroses. This doesn’t mean that I won’t revisit that first assignment, and perhaps even post draft #6 of the poem, but as I retrain myself to think as a writer, I have wondered about my fear of writing. In my case I don’t think that fear is about writer’s block, or the inability to say something.

See, I used to apologize for myself ALL the time. You can ask my high school friends, my husband who I’ve known for more than half my life. I was Insanely Insecure Girl (IIG), the one who needed lots of ego uplift.
“Do these pants look terrible on me? I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry I keep order albuterol inhaler non prescription asking, but will I EVER find someone to love?”
If you met me about twenty years ago, I might not have met your eyes for longer than a second. Maybe two.

I didn’t realize how hard this trait was on my friends until I made friends with another IIG later on. Having to talk her up all the time was exhausting, to tell you the truth.
“No, those pants look really great on you.”
“Yes, you’ll find someone to love.”
And of course I did support her, and I did so sincerely. But I recognized some of myself in her, and tried to stop some of that insanity in myself, the incessant self-questioning and the hypercritical apology.

Happily, I’ve got both good pants AND the most wonderful person to love now. Not to equate the two. You know what I mean.

So this insecurity might have something to do with my latest theory: that writing, creative or argumentative —indeed, creating art at all—takes ego. By “ego,” I mean the belief I am Someone with Something Important to Say that Someone Else Would Want to Hear. And twenty years ago, ten years ago, perhaps even five years ago, it was hard for me to find that sense of ego.

[insert pause for soothing of a toddler nightmare. OK. Back to it]

Don’t believe me? Here’s a test: see all of those parenthetical phrases in my posts? They’re a stylistic tic. My dissertation reading group convinced me that I need to use parentheses less. (Doh! I’m still working on it, guys.) I adore parenthetical phrases, probably because of my first reading of this novel. And while I adore parenthetical phrases and their possibilities for multiple layered voices, sometimes the parentheticals represent me, trying to duck under my own words.

Now you see why I used that party analogy at the beginning of the post. I’ve been that girl.

Now I know I needed that kind of belief in myself in order to develop fully as a scholar, as a teacher, as a writer. And (gulp) now it’s here.

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Anne Lamott on parenting and writing

More later–with my first assignment!–but here’s my inspiration for the day.

It’s from the wonderful, hilariously comforting Anne Lamott, writing about her “Letter to a pregnant friend”:

“I couldn’t actually think of anything specific to share with her on pregnancy and parenting that didn’t also apply to writing — after all, both are elective courses in Earth School, and not things ventolin no prescription buy that everyone needs to do in order to feel fulfilled. But if you insist on doing either, you start where you are, and you let yourself do it poorly, you study the work of people you admire, and after some time, you’ll get better, and be insane for shorter periods of time.”