The workshop model of the fiction writing class is beginning to meet with (appropriately enough) critiques. Of course most teachers find the workshop model far too valuable to discard, but some may suspect that there is a kink somewhere in the system. Rather than the format, however, I suggest that the problem may be the form. Rather than the workshop model, perhaps what teachers need to reconsider is what lies at the center of every traditional fiction writing workshop: the short story.
Man forging a chain
I took a graduate fiction writing class at Ball State University with Cathy Day, and her approach, instead of teaching the short story, was to teach the linked story collection. A “linked story collection” is any group of stories that are tied together with certain common threads, (which can include place, character, theme, image, etc), but in which each piece has its own basic story arc. It is a broad category, and during the first half of the semester we read a number of books that fell somewhere in the middle ground between “short story collection” and “novel.”
For our one workshop time during the semester, we turned in 20-35 pages of our own linked story collection, defined flexibly. Our pages could have consisted of two stories or twenty. They could have related loosely to one another (as independent short story plots taking place in the same small town, for example), or very closely (as chapters of a novel-in-stories).
To teachers interested in the linked story workshop model, my advice is, as a student who lived through it, do it. Though workshopping a single short story has its pedagogical advantages, workshopping a linked story collection has more. The following are, in my experience, the benefits of the linked story workshop:
1) First, since it includes two or more short stories, all of the pedagogical advantages of the short story are still present in the linked story collection. Every individual story in the collection will contain a complete story arc, as well as characterization, and some clear consistency (or deliberate inconsistency) in narrative perspective, tone, image patterns, etc.
2) Although it includes two or more complete stories (with a beginning, middle, and end), the linked story collection is NOT a complete work. It is 20-35 pages of a vision designed to include many more chapter-stories and many more pages (in Cathy’s class, our final project—not submitted for whole-class workshop—was 35-50 pages). The fact that these initial pages confess to their unfinished nature is extremely beneficial in the workshop. Instead of looking at the problems, workshoppers will look at a manuscript’s potential. They will get a glimpse of the author’s vision and try to help the author reach it.
3) Catching the author’s vision is far more likely to happen if the student writer is also assigned a project proposal. This proposal helpful for professional practice, and, since the critiquers will read it in order to understand the overall vision, students will write proposal’s with a clear sense of audience and purpose in mind. Hence, this exercise in professionalization will not feel like busywork.
4) Students are more likely to write the kind of work they want to write. Students who love short stories will have the opportunity to write and submit several at one time. Students who are less attached to the short story and more interested in longer forms will be able to work on bigger, more sweeping visions. It will be a once-in-a-college-career opportunity for them to write in the longer form that (for some) was the reason they chose to be creative writers.
5) Finally, students will be more deeply invested in their projects. This is partly because of #4, but partly because the page length is longer than a typical short story assignment. Take it from someone who has sat through years of graduate and undergraduate writing workshops: when workshop time comes around, many a good student will throw together a story that they don’t care about so they have something to turn in to the teacher and to the workshop. Yes, the pressures of school work affect creative writers as well. Even though more pages means more work, it also means that the project itself must be taken more seriously. The idea that these 20-35 pages are part of a larger work also helps to persuade students that they are working on a serious artistic undertaking. They will plan and invent more than they would on a single short story. They will work ahead and revise more. They will carefully develop the threads that tie their stories together.
Yes, a single short story allows for a keen focus on some key elements of craft, because it allows professors an opportunity to talk about strengths and weaknesses in execution. Meanwhile, the linked story workshop pushes students to the point where they—on their own—deliberate over those elements of craft, weighing the strengths and weaknesses on their own as they build their fictive worlds.
The goals of creative writing pedagogy are not always easy to define, but surely these items will top anyone’s list: to give students a stronger sense of the elements of craft, to train them in those elements, to see the potential that exists within their stories, to critique their own fiction on the sentence-level and on the story-level, and to write what they love to write.
In my experience as a student, it has not been the occasional short story that I have written that has pushed me most effectively toward these goals, but the broad vision that I built and rebuilt and transformed into Story in the linked fiction workshop.
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