Since I’ve begun working a writing coach and developmental editor it’s been fascinating to ponder the differences between teaching creative writing in a structured academic classroom versus working with private clients.
When I prepare a creative writing curriculum or syllabus, I roll out a series of exercises, where students hone in on a particular aspect of craft—be it point of view, or dialogue, or three-dimensional characters. The beauty of this method is the lack of commitment. The very fact that students can dash something off, without pressure, is a sneaky way to learn craft and also warm up their writing muscles. These exercises are sketches, no different than what one might do in a drawing class, in preparation for a more elaborate canvas. Very often those small, inobtrusive exercises develop and grow into longer works that the students developed later on in the semester. Over the years I’ve had many students whose story collections, novels, and essays germinated from these brief sketches.
But there can be a downside to this way of teaching. Oftentimes, what students learn in the exercises doesn’t metabolize into the longer manuscript. That is, students may master a particular aspect to fiction writing in their short piece—say, heightened emotion through indirect, significant details—but when they are setting down their scenes with the manuscript they’ve committed to, none of what they’ve learned is on display. These craft lessons simply don’t carry over.
My colleagues in Rhet Comp used to speak of a phenomenon called “knowledge transfer” –apparently this is a whole field of research. Writing skills that are taught, say, in a freshman comp course don’t necessarily carry over into the next subject course where writing is required. For instance, one can teach how to write a topic sentence in an argumentative essay, but when asked to write one for their history course, they don’t ‘transfer’ the skill or knowledge for their history paper. It’s as if they’re starting all over again.
Now I don’t mean to shoehorn the associative, mysterious, creative alchemy of fiction and creative nonfiction into an academic, skills-based regimen. But I do think that the exercise-based way of teaching craft does mean that isolated craft lessons can remain a bit abstract for a fledgling writer. Those short sprints don’t fully sink in. They may understand an element of writing as a concept, but they don’t know how to activate it in a longer work. I believe this has something to do with knowing versus doing.
What the private coaching environment allows me to do is show these same lessons organically—they emerge out of the manuscript in which the writer is already invested. Their invented world, their remembered experiences, are already alive and vivid in their minds. So the teaching and learning process becomes very different. Our sessions become a kind of ‘real time’ lesson, a Deweyite ‘learning by doing’—a bit different than the exercises I would assign in an academic creative writing workshop. A client will send me pages of a work-in-progress and I wind up creating a lesson on the spot—sometimes several lessons, since many elements of craft are embedded within the draft.
For clients who have taken many writing workshops or read a lot of craft books, these sessions then function as a kind of ‘Aha’ moment. Yes, they’d heard about the concept of subtext in dialogue, but it isn’t until we drill down on the exchanges of characters they care about, that this starts to make sense. Yes, they’ve read about ‘significant detail’ but it isn’t until they are noticing how they haven’t activated all the juicy, telling bits of a world that is so clear to them, that the concept starts to click. The beauty of this model is their engagement—they absorb these lessons more because we are discussing a story, a set of characters, a world, that they are already deeply invested in.
Now there’s one caveat: the difference between undergraduate and graduate, young adults and adults. The exercise model that I designed worked very well for undergraduates, as they are learning to stand on shaky legs, like new foals starting to walk. Yes, the same issues crop up—once they begin writing full on stories we lose some of the elements we’d focused on earlier. But the method is worth it because these students are gaining in confidence to write more than a one or two-page exercise—they are starting to stride into the full-on arc of a narrative. I find my young writers especially need prompts and short inspirational assignments, as they are daunted by continuing with a longer manuscript. Short prompts, some of them done sequentially are the sneaky way of getting them to start building a full short story.
However, graduate students and coaching clients are adults, who often come with a burning fire for what they want to do or say. Maybe they’ve drafted a novel manuscript but stalled out,;or they’ve conceived of a series of short stories that are linked; or have a memoir about a particularly harrowing experience. I find, then, that I’m teaching and editing all at once—helping them wrestle down their ideas, while also showing them the micro elements of craft that they don’t yet possess. They are horses that have been running instinctively, often powerfully, but they don’t quite know how to move and pace themselves forward.
Thus, my own practice as a writing coach/developmental editor is a blend of teaching and editing. My interest, as an editor, is to not only diagnose, as a good editor does, but to show the how of craft, as any good teacher does.
Any thoughts from those who have taken workshops versus worked one-on-one with a coach or developmental editor?
