How people have learned to write

[mouseworks]

1. By reading and transcribing the classics. To have a manuscript of your own, you had to make a copy or pay someone to make a copy of the original. Copying errors happened.

2. By translating classics. This was most common in Europe (including the UK) from circa Chaucer to present, though somewhat deprecated in the present for various reasons. Rita Mae Brown and Ron Silliman still see translation (or learning Latin) as the thing that divides wannabes from real poets (I know people who I think Silliman would consider real enough poets who don't do this).

The advantage of translating classics is that it gets the authorial narcissism out of the way. You take text A in some other language and re-write it into English, French, German, Russian, whatever, and learn from this how your language works and how another language works, and what elements can be brought from one language to another -- pacing, plot, character, POV.

3. By taking creative writing workshops. This tends to be very uneven, but appeals to authorial narcissism by making this about the individual student's work and how to make it better. It doesn't work if the various members of the workshop don't really know how writing is constructed. Unlike the translation method, which tends to be instructor independent absent a real dunce, this one tends to be highly instructor dependent.

4. By reading and writing criticism. This seems to not work as well as might be hoped, as criticism tends to look at meta-issues within a work and not as much with the way various things are structured (Kinneavy's Universe of Discourse and Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction are more useful than a lot of academic criticism). Very instructor dependent and most instructors are going from their college notes.


Writing fan fic seems to have become a possible 5th way. It's an engagement more precisely focused on the structural issues within fiction than in meta issues about fiction. We'll find out in the next 10 years whether it's better than translation, which at this point, looks labor intensive but more useful than many other ways of teaching creative writing.

Comments

[eagle]

One of the things I find interesting about fanfic in this context is that, unlike those other paths, many (I would say most, possibly even nearly all) of the people writing fanfic are not doing so to learn how to write. They care about improving their skills only to the extent that it helps them tell better stories, but they're doing it as a hobby. They're not planning or intending on making it a profession. It's filling in the corners of lives devoted to something else.

My personal feeling, heavily influenced by free software I'll admit, is that this makes it a better teaching method, if a more scattershot one, since the people who really learn from this and who go into writing despite not having intended to do so would be doing so out of love. They would have found they loved writing by writing, doing it strictly because they wanted to. I think the most effective early learning is often the kind that sneaks up on you and ambushes you when you're just playing.

Of course, if they want to go on to be professional, some amount of follow-up structured learning is probably also required, even if that structure is just thinking hard about what you write and reading lots of what other people write and working out your own toolkit. But I think that can happen later.

[mouseworks]

In the days when people who were educated at all learned Latin, students just did the translations. One of the interesting things about the Renaissance in general and in particular in England was that a lot of the Greek manuscripts were only rediscovered in the West at a time when education for nation states was more critical (more correspondence, more record-keeping, for larger political entities). So a lot of people were trained this way -- and not all of them became creative writers, but the per capita numbers were huge.

It's just not that common these days. I'll probably do translations if I end up in Nicaragua, but it won't be the same as if I started learning a foreign language in grade school.

When I was a high school poet, I was very interested in formal verse -- one of the books I had was a prosody book. Most creative writing teachers never went there (though Judith Sherwin and Kenneth Koch, in a idiosyncratic way in Koch's case, did. When I taught creative writing, I taught strategies, including formal verse.

My very first creative writing teacher, in high school, assigned imitations of Hemingway, Henry James, Salinger, for fiction, but was all loosey goosey about the poetry, didn't like formal verse.

Most people write avocationally, even some people who are in commercial print. :)

What's cool about this is that it's outside the whole MFA industry (someone I've talked to recently said the universities would probably figure out a way to give MFAs in this, too). MFA programs in general tend to produce people who are hysterically concerned about publishing, not in finding or building a real audience for what they're doing.

And fan fic writers are willing to use their own writing to become better readers of the text they're riffing off of, not as the goal of an MFA program that confuses its needs for full classes with student needs. Nobody goes into an MFA program just to become a better reader.

I'm not sure I completely get it, but it's fun to watch.

[eagle]

Yeah, I'm watching from the sidelines of the current fanfic discussion and thinking that a lot of authors seem to be completely missing something special here.

I totally understand the dislike of fanfic. My own personal writing background grew out of role-playing games heavily influenced by the shared universes created in superhero comics, so it had very different expectations and standards. Everyone made up the NPCs and shared them around, but the core protagonists were yours, often even considered some aspect of yourself (as is typical for RPG PCs), and there were huge, very angry flamewars when people used them without permission. I was dead-set against fanfic for a long time because of that background and set of assumptions.

What convinced me on the moral front was looking at how much recasting and respinning other people's stories has been part of literature for as long as we've had literature, and getting more political about my dislike of the collapse of the informational commons. But what convinced me on more of a gut level was, I think, having a deeper understanding of fiction as art and artifice, as opposed to ego projection.

Those fanfic writers that published commercial writers are so upset about are a gold mine as readers; they're critical, engaged, building and maintaining their own enthusiasm about the world, and highly likely to both purchase new works and to encourage other people to do so. As with all kinds of fame, that comes with a price, but someone who was deeply reading the text and playing with it and writing around it to look at it from different angles sure sounds a lot more appealing to me than a fan who was equally avid about wanting to get to know the writer as a person and get involved in their personal life. At least the fanfic folks are both engaged and engaged on the right thing.

[mouseworks]

I agree with what you're saying.

Some of what caught my attention was the "pro" writers' assumption that fan fic people wanted to move into the big time. I get the impression that fan fic writers are all over the place with that one, but mostly it's about using fiction to explore fiction, which is really quite okay.

People who want to get into the writer's personal life, that's really different. I don't think the worst of them want to get to know the writers as people. It's more like "if I can get this person to listen to me, take me seriously, I'm validated" on one hand and trying to knock the other person off the pedestal the fan put them on in the first place on the other.

It's certainly not unique to s.f. fandom, or even the arts.