Once & Again: A Workshop in Creative Revision

(this post was written by Kyle on January 29, 2008, and it concerns & & & & )

Last night, I began teaching my first college-level class as part of my graduate program’s degree requirements. I’m running a small workshop in short-story writing entitled, “Once & Again: A Workshop in Creative Revision.” I’ve got five undergraduate students and one post-grad student who will be participating in the class over the Internet. They’ll each work on a single story throughout the semester, turning in six drafts over 15 weeks, and at the end, they’ll each have a story of publishable quality.

The first class was pretty basic. I introduced myself, went over the syllabus, and then each of the students talked about their history with writing and what they hope to achieve in the class. The range seemed pretty interesting. Some students felt they were successful short-story writers already and are hoping the class can bring them to the next level, while others are fine writers but have trouble seeing their stories through to the end. I’m looking forward to helping each of them achieve their goals.

I’ve designed the class to be like a studio class in the visual arts, which means that each student will be expected to write during our ninety-minute meetings. Some might balk at the suggestion that you can whip the Muses into starting their labor at a specific time, but in her book, Becoming A Writer, Dorothea Brande writes:

There is a deep inner resistance to writing [on a rigid schedule]. This will begin to “look like business” to the unconscious, and the unconscious does not like these rules and regulations until it is well broken into them; it is incorrigibly lazy in its busy-ness and given to finding the easiest way of satisfying itself. It prefers to choose its own occasions and to emerge as it likes. You will find the most remarkable series of obstacles presented to you under the similitude of common sense…But you must learn to disregard every loophole the wily unconscious points out to you. If you consistently, doggedly, refuse to be beguiled, you will have your reward. The unconscious will suddenly give in charmingly, and begin to write gracefully and well (78-79).

Or as I told my class: “If the Muse knows you are ready to write at 6 P.M. every Monday evening, then the Muse will keep her appointment.”

Next week, each student will be expected to turn in a first draft of their story that is, at minimum, 500 words long. My only instructions for this week were to seriously consider which story idea they’d like to work on, because once they turn in that first draft, that’s the story they’ll be working on for the next 15 weeks.

I hope they know how serious I am.

~~~

Fair Warning: I have to write a long essay about my teaching experience for one of my packets this semester. To keep a running journal of the experience, I’ll probably be writing blog posts about each week’s class. So, every Tuesday, you’re probably going to find a new post on Fluid Imagination that reads pretty similar to this one. I hope you don’t mind too much. Fair warning is all I’m saying.