Mentors and Monsters

This week I've been reading a very interesting book of essays, lent to me by my friend, T. There are some great experiences between these covers - yesterday I read about a woman whose mentor/monster was Susan Sontag. It can be a crucial turning point in a writer's life, to have the kind of mentor who changes your writing, your way of regarding the life of writing, and how you put words down on the page. Mentorships have been gaining in popularity here over the past few years. First the Australian Society of Authors offered them, then the Victorian Writers' Centre. I read some of the early reports from the ASA scheme, and those being mentored talked of having someone experienced to simply engage with and bounce off. No manuscript editing was involved (a common perception of a mentorship - like having a personal editor).

One of my favourite essays was by Alexander Chee, whose 'mentor' was Annie Dillard. He uses the term loosely, as she was a teacher who had a great influence on him. What I found interesting was that, like many others writing for this collection, he didn't really understand her influence until later. I loved the line: "In that first class, she wore the pearls and a tab collar peeped over her sweater, but she looked as if she would punch you if you didn't behave." When told they had to hand in their drafts triple-spaced and questioned it, she replied, "I need the room to scribble notes in between your sentences."

Other contributors talk about famous writers as mentors who barely talked to them about their writing but nevertheless inspired them in some way. Joyce Carol Oates, as I imagine many writers would, talks about several different people who influenced her - The Rival, The Friend, and the early influences of particular books. Julia Glass talks of finding an editor who becomes a lifelong friend, mentor, muse and confidant, as well as editor of her novels. Elizabeth Benedict describes her relationship with Elizabeth Hardwick, as do several other writers in the book. Hardwick was a teacher at Columbia and seemed to have had an effect on many of her students, both positive and negative.

As well as finding this collection quite inspiring, it's also making me curious about the novels the various contributors have written. Alexander Chee appears to only have one novel published so far that is still in print; Mary Gordon has four or five. Without spending lots of dollars, I'd like to track down their work and read it. On the other hand, Jonathan Safran Foer's insistence on calling his early romances with girls attempts to "mate" sounded so weird that it coloured the whole essay for me! And set me thinking about another blog I'd read recently where a writer's performance at an event had put that person off his books forever.

This writing life can be so tenuous at times. And it's clear from this book that new writers can be so easily influenced by the literary and/or famous. While the ASA mentorships sounded helpful, I've heard of others where a new writer has been influenced by their mentor to change and rewrite crucial parts of their novels, damaging both plot and an original, vital voice. Is this the mentor's role? To me, this is the danger. One writing teacher here in Melbourne is notorious for creating whole classes of students who come out at the end of the year sounding just like him. How can this be a good thing?

Yes, it's easy to be influenced. What female poet (including me!) hasn't gone through a stage of sounding like Sylvia Plath? But if you read widely, and read as a writer, you move through it and past it, and your writing and your own voice grows and strengthens. What it takes is practice, weeks and months and years of reading and writing LOTS. Not just one piece, or one style, or even one genre. We have so much to draw on these days - it's like an incredible banquet. If all you do is stick with the chicken wings, you won't get far.

Can Creative Writing be Taught?

If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked this question (and $10 for every time there's been a newspaper or magazine/journal article about it) I could retire. Of course, as someone who teaches creative writing myself, in a Diploma level course, I'm going to say Yes, it can be taught. I wouldn't be doing this job if I didn't believe that. But there are always going to be arguments. I have a quote on my desk that says something like "A creative writing course can't teach someone how to write, but it can teach someone how not to write." To me, that's step 1.

We select students for our course. That means we read their folio of writing pieces, we make them sit a grammar and punctuation test (because we've discovered the hard way that someone who has no grasp of how to use the language will fail our course, and we do fail people, especially in the editing subjects, but it affects every subject they do), we make them do more writing after the test, and then we interview them. Does that make it sound hard to get in? It is. We have 25 full-time places, and we get about 120 applicants. So to be offered a full-time place, you have to show some kind of talent, a good grasp of the English language and a commitment to writing and reading.

I say "a good grasp of the English language" because far too many applicants coming out of Year 12 in high school have appalling grammar and punctuation skills. So we can't and don't expect applicants to be perfect in that area - that's why they have to do a whole year of grammar, punctuation and sentence construction, plus some editing. And why a commitment to writing and reading? Because if you want to be a writer and you aren't writing on a regular basis (even a journal) and you don't read, you're not on the right track. Maybe you should be something else.

So if step 1 is teaching people how not to write, what is the rest of it about? Teaching them to read like writers is step 2 for me. Asking 'what is this writer doing? how are they doing it? what can I learn from it?' is a huge, ongoing learning process. I'm still doing it myself after 20 years of writing and publishing, and I expect to be doing it forever. I want my students to do it too. We teachers aren't going to be at their shoulders after the course is finished.

Step 3 is writing. Lots. Not just the novel, or a short story or two, or a picture book or two. Writing every day. Writing many things. Writing in different styles. Writing background material and backstory in order to create a work that has depth and complexity. Writing poetry to increase language skills and appreciation. Writing scripts to improve dialogue (or if you want to write scripts, writing character backstory to improve how your characters speak). Writing to deadlines, because why shouldn't you learn to write under pressure? And editors expect you to meet deadlines in the real world. Creating your own deadlines and making writing contracts with yourself, so that you are writing thousands of words every month.

Step 4 is revision. Not just a little polishing and editing, but re-visioning the whole work, if it needs it. Learning how to 'see' your own work with a critical eye. In the course, we do a lot of workshopping and critiquing. In first year, everyone is more tentative, more fragile, and the teachers are firm but encouraging. In second year, I'm tough, and I expect everyone to toughen up. I'm not mean and nasty (and neither is anyone else allowed to be) but if something is not working, then the writer needs to address it fully and rethink what they're trying to achieve. Fiddling around the edges and changing half a dozen words very often is pointless. I try to teach students to be brave about their rewriting, and also to be tough on themselves. Many stories only truly find their full potential through the re-visioning process.

There are other things we teach - mostly to do with craft and how to write better, how to develop aspects you are weak in, how to outline and plot so your novel doesn't fall in a hole - but what we also teach is the industry. How publishing works, how books get accepted, what happens next, what marketing is all about, how to market yourself, how to be professional at all times. And how to stay motivated and set goals.
And after this long post, I still feel like there are a million more things I could say about what we teach in our course, but I'll stop here.