Over at The Millions, Cathy Day complains that writing workshops are difficult to run unless the students write short stories, but who really cares about short stories?
There's a lot to agree with in the essay—I too am deeply suspicious of the notion that writing short stories teaches one how to write a novel, and certainly there are few enough people who like to read short stories that the practice is not worth formalizing through academic training. The students don't like short stories, and the readers out there certainly don't like student short stories, so why bother?
Day also notes some practical, rather than ideological reasons, why workshops in colleges often loathe genre fiction: "Please don’t write a story that is nonrealistic, because genre fiction makes us nervous and uncomfortable." This is totally fine as well, given that many many writing teachers aren't really familiar with genre fiction except for the moth-eaten classics and the most popular (and thus, often the worst) stuff. They can't teach genre any more than they can teach work in a language they're not familiar with.
Then there's just the practical level—semesters are short, classes are often crowded, nobody does the reading in literature courses and in those the assigned novels are actually good, generally speaking. Forget digging through 300 pages of crap specifically in order to highlight the crap.
But then Day stops short, and of course she stops short because it is in her material interest to do so. The obvious solution is simply to understand that one cannot workshop a novel. Tada. If the semester system doesn't work and workshopping doesn't work and the short stories that actually do come out of workshops fail because nobody is really interested...then, just get rid of them. A better way to create novelists is just to hand them they keys to a very well-stocked library and let them have at. The one thing that workshops do well is train the discipline of the deadline, but so does working for a newspaper. Schools have newspapers, and they have more frequent deadlines than the student literary journal (plus, people read 'em).
If teachers must be involved, than a low-residency system works well: faculty instruction in these program is often based on the mentor strategy rather than lecturer strategy, and one person (the mentor) can read one individual novel and suggest revisions. A relationship over the course of a couple of semesters can be built up, so revisions can be described and themselves critiqued fairly easily. In fact, virtually every novel ever published has been published via this method, which goes by the occult name of "editing." It's perhaps also no surprise that low-residency programs tend to be more open to genre fiction as well; the faculty are somewhat more likely to include real writers teaching on the side, rather than teachers engaging in what is primarily a cargo cult of what kind of looks like publishing, but ain't.
But then, low-res programs generally don't offer to faculty full-time salaries, a life in a college town, or expansive health and retirement benefits. Well, that's no good, is it?? Indeed, Day even found the essay difficult to publish in The Writer's Chronicle and other AWP organs because, I suspect, of the obvious implied conclusion—death to the workshop, drive the faculty writers from the temple! (Even I've published in The Writer's Chronicle—can't be that tough!)
If there is a way to teach novel-writing in the academy, it's not via methods found in the humanities or in undergraduate studio art workshops ("Today we'll write a short story in the manner of Kafka!"), but in the social and natural sciences. Let us be done with workshops. Writing novels in writing programs should be treated like lab work and research, not like classes. Creative writing faculty should be advisers to students writing theses over a term longer than a semester or two–this will at least keep publishers from being brutalized by submissions of "Every Story Since 2007" collections disguised as real books. Students should, after some initial dicking around in a single basic workshop, should announce their intention to write Novel X (as one might declare a dissertation topic or area of research) and spend their time doing that, just as one might do if getting a PhD in psychology. Classwork can be about pedagogy or literary history or the publishing business and the production of a novel should be on a different track, on one's own time, with one-on-one instruction and ad hoc study groups/reader circles only. This adviser-advised system is already in place in low-res, so it shouldn't be too difficult to use in mainstream writing programs, once the faculty who have never actually done novels of their own are driven from campus in the night by pitchforks and flaming torches.
We might even see some interesting novels out of it.
There's a lot to agree with in the essay—I too am deeply suspicious of the notion that writing short stories teaches one how to write a novel, and certainly there are few enough people who like to read short stories that the practice is not worth formalizing through academic training. The students don't like short stories, and the readers out there certainly don't like student short stories, so why bother?
Day also notes some practical, rather than ideological reasons, why workshops in colleges often loathe genre fiction: "Please don’t write a story that is nonrealistic, because genre fiction makes us nervous and uncomfortable." This is totally fine as well, given that many many writing teachers aren't really familiar with genre fiction except for the moth-eaten classics and the most popular (and thus, often the worst) stuff. They can't teach genre any more than they can teach work in a language they're not familiar with.
Then there's just the practical level—semesters are short, classes are often crowded, nobody does the reading in literature courses and in those the assigned novels are actually good, generally speaking. Forget digging through 300 pages of crap specifically in order to highlight the crap.
But then Day stops short, and of course she stops short because it is in her material interest to do so. The obvious solution is simply to understand that one cannot workshop a novel. Tada. If the semester system doesn't work and workshopping doesn't work and the short stories that actually do come out of workshops fail because nobody is really interested...then, just get rid of them. A better way to create novelists is just to hand them they keys to a very well-stocked library and let them have at. The one thing that workshops do well is train the discipline of the deadline, but so does working for a newspaper. Schools have newspapers, and they have more frequent deadlines than the student literary journal (plus, people read 'em).
If teachers must be involved, than a low-residency system works well: faculty instruction in these program is often based on the mentor strategy rather than lecturer strategy, and one person (the mentor) can read one individual novel and suggest revisions. A relationship over the course of a couple of semesters can be built up, so revisions can be described and themselves critiqued fairly easily. In fact, virtually every novel ever published has been published via this method, which goes by the occult name of "editing." It's perhaps also no surprise that low-residency programs tend to be more open to genre fiction as well; the faculty are somewhat more likely to include real writers teaching on the side, rather than teachers engaging in what is primarily a cargo cult of what kind of looks like publishing, but ain't.
But then, low-res programs generally don't offer to faculty full-time salaries, a life in a college town, or expansive health and retirement benefits. Well, that's no good, is it?? Indeed, Day even found the essay difficult to publish in The Writer's Chronicle and other AWP organs because, I suspect, of the obvious implied conclusion—death to the workshop, drive the faculty writers from the temple! (Even I've published in The Writer's Chronicle—can't be that tough!)
If there is a way to teach novel-writing in the academy, it's not via methods found in the humanities or in undergraduate studio art workshops ("Today we'll write a short story in the manner of Kafka!"), but in the social and natural sciences. Let us be done with workshops. Writing novels in writing programs should be treated like lab work and research, not like classes. Creative writing faculty should be advisers to students writing theses over a term longer than a semester or two–this will at least keep publishers from being brutalized by submissions of "Every Story Since 2007" collections disguised as real books. Students should, after some initial dicking around in a single basic workshop, should announce their intention to write Novel X (as one might declare a dissertation topic or area of research) and spend their time doing that, just as one might do if getting a PhD in psychology. Classwork can be about pedagogy or literary history or the publishing business and the production of a novel should be on a different track, on one's own time, with one-on-one instruction and ad hoc study groups/reader circles only. This adviser-advised system is already in place in low-res, so it shouldn't be too difficult to use in mainstream writing programs, once the faculty who have never actually done novels of their own are driven from campus in the night by pitchforks and flaming torches.
We might even see some interesting novels out of it.