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mouseworks at 11:09pm on 08/05/2010
mouseworks at 11:09pm on 08/05/20101. 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.
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.
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