*
Not everyone came to the workshop every week, but by the end there was a core of about fifteen. I withdrew after eight months, without quite knowing why. I wasn’t convinced there was anything else I could give them, though why I felt I had to do more than listen and wait for something to occur, I don’t know. Teaching can be draining. You have to put other thoughts and preoccupations aside, which is not something I’m used to. I wouldn’t be able to do too much of it and continue to write.
As with some of my other groups, the workshop members continued to meet, at first in the theatre and later at someone’s house, to read and discuss one another’s work. Some students wrote together; one applied for writing jobs on soap-operas, and another found work writing erotic horoscopes. Two others gave up their jobs or went part-time in order to make time to write. Some joined or started other writing groups.
They were hard-working and committed. They knew that, despite its drawbacks, being a writer is a relatively free and rewarding life. Most of the group, by the end, were writing seriously and had embarked on substantial projects, whole plays, novels or films. Some were making films with digital cameras, using friends and out-of-work actors. Many of the friendships would continue; the students would send me work and invite me to readings and productions of films and plays.
Certainly many people attend evening classes and courses for some sort of community, contact and sustenance. Being an enthusiastic amateur is one of the most liberating ways there is of being an artist. Whether writing workshops are therapeutic, creative, good for making friends or useful in any other way, you can only ask the participants. There cannot and should not be any guaranteed outcomes. People meet to discover what they might do together, striving to get close to something that needs to be said, and to speak of difficult things in voices that have been muffled, ignored or silenced. There is always the need to speak and the need to be heard.
The Writer and the Teacher
If it is true, as I have read somewhere, that at any one time at least 2 per cent of the population are writing novels, then many questions about ‘creative writing’ courses, and their recent rapid proliferation are really about what you need other people for.
Is writing something you do alone, or do you need others to help? You can have both useful and repetitive conversations with yourself, and you can have sex with yourself, though it might cause alarm if you claimed to be making love to yourself. Conversation and sex are generally thought to be more productive and unpredictable with others. Several of the most significant art forms of the twentieth century — jazz, pop, cinema — have been collaborative. Is writing like this or is it something else altogether?
Some people become writers because they want to be independent; they want neither to be competitive nor to rely on others. For them writing is an entirely personal self-exploration, a way of being alone, of thinking through their life, and perhaps of hiding, while speaking to someone in their head. And certainly, without a passion for solitude no writer is going to be able to bear the tedious obsessionality of his profession.
Yet that’s not where the story ends, in solitude. Particularly when they are first beginning to write, some students like to show their work to their friends, and, sometimes, to their family, both as a way of informing them of certain truths, but also in the hope of a helpful reaction. Yet, however much the well-meaning reader might like the work, it doesn’t follow that he will have the vocabulary to be able to speak usefully about it, saying something which might help the writer move forwards. Kindness may be comforting, but it isn’t always inspiring.
Men and women have always searched for ways to enhance, modify or transform their states of mind, using herbs, nicotine, alcohol and drugs, as well as bolts of electricity through the skull, opium, baths, tonics, books and conversation. [Even ‘pearl cordial’ — powdered pearl — was popular in the eighteenth century, as a purported cure for depression.] There’s no reason why the practice of writing can’t help people see what’s inside them, as well as helping them organise and deepen their ideas of who they are. Reading does this too, providing a vocabulary of ideas which you might utilise to view your life in a new way. But a writing teacher is not a therapist, listening patiently for the unconscious in a free association or dream telling, and the student would be surprised to learn the teacher saw himself as a healer rather than as an instructor.
When necessary, and it is usually necessary, the teacher has to teach, to pass over information about structure, voice, point of view, contrast, character, or the discipline of writing. But, particularly on those occasions when faced with a mass of work she can’t understand, and doesn’t know how to begin addressing — particularly horrifying for a teacher who might be under the misapprehension that she must understand, and quickly too — she might use something like a Socratic method. By asking numerous questions, the teacher will give the student her work back in a different form, making it seem both clearer and more puzzling.
Students are often at a loss when you ask them what a particular image or piece of dialogue means, and whether it is doing what they believe it is doing. While it might be productive to write from the unconscious where the world is weirder and less constrained, the work has also to be assessed rationally. Discussing it is part of this.
In a short film he’d made, a film student had stationed two young men on a park bench where he filmed them from behind — the backs of their heads — for some time. When I asked him why the shot was so sustained, he replied that the moment — to me a considerable moment — represented ‘death’. He said he wanted the viewer, at this point in the film, to consider their own death. Always up for that, but trying to remain calm, and reminding myself of the nobility of teaching, I said it defeated me how he thought an audience would leap from the picture he presented to this thought. He seemed to see he needed more vivid and accurate images to convey what he wanted to say. It was also helpful for him to be told that he needed to develop a sense of story, rather than slamming scenes together in the hope the audience might notice some connection. If nothing else quite succeeds in a piece of work — humour, for instance, or the fascination of the characters — the story alone might still hold the reader’s interest, as it does with soap-operas.
This student might have also benefited from better authorities, from closer contact with other artists and dead poets, from whom he might learn more imaginative solutions as he strove to carry his internal world into the outside one. It is amazing that students are so rarely taught to see the connection between studying others and their own work. Borrowing a voice, or trying out new ones, isn’t the same as acquiring your own, but it’s a step in that direction. What you steal becomes yours when it is creatively modified. Since almost anything can usefully feed an artist, a broad humanistic education, a sort of foundation course involving religion, psychology and literature, would be a positive accompaniment to any writing course.