Ayşe Papatya Bucak

Form vs Formula

This semester I’m teaching a graduate workshop called Forms of Prose. If you are a nonfiction writer, this suggests things like the lyric essay, narrative journalism, and the personal essay. If you’re a fiction writer, it probably suggests only short story vs novel. But I am teaching the class as an examination of any of the implied or stated rules imposed on a work of prose. Some might be arbitrary rules about rhythm, rhyme and repetition (as in much formal poetry), and others might be the unspoken rules of reader expectations. For example, we will look at how the workshop story bemoaned by the world at large (or just the anti-MFAers) might actually be a consequence of an abuse of form. That when form is poorly executed it becomes formula.

By way of example, let’s take the fad of six word stories and essays. I’m generally not a fan. Especially not of the possibly apocryphal Hemingway version: “For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.” Supposedly Hemingway said this is all the story you need to tell. But I suspect one of my finest teaching moments may have been when I said to a totally-disturbed class: that story is only interesting if that baby has no feet.

Listen, I get it. It’s heartbreaking; that story can make me cry, because anything suggesting the mortality of babies can make me cry. But a reliance on abstract emotional manipulation is not the same thing as great storytelling. Which is not to say a six word story couldn’t be great. Because herein lies the difference between form and formula. Form forces a writer to rise above restrictions to reach originality; formula allows a writer to rely on restrictions to be relieved of the burden of originality. Formula works on some readers, of course (including me: hello, Sophie Kinsella, I love you), but it isn’t what anybody enters an MFA program aspiring to, so my class is going to set all kinds of rules, just to show how well writers can surprise readers when we follow them.

The Originality Scale

Last year I traumatized my MFA students by inventing this thing I called the Originality Scale. At the bottom were stories we’d heard before told in familiar ways, and at the top—well, there was no top, because whatever would go at the top is so original we can’t even imagine it (yet). The middle, however, was filled with variations—old stories told in a new way, new stories told in an old way, new forms, new technology, history told with a new perspective, etc. For the rest of the semester, the students seemed troubled, taunted, tortured by where their writing would fit on the Originality Scale. I became so alarmed that I presented to the class the notion that human beings need to learn the same things over and over again, and that is perhaps why the same stories work over and over again. And could they please forget the Originality Scale.

Except I don’t really think they should forget the Originality Scale. The problem was not the Scale, the problem was the fear and paralysis induced by the Scale.

I think what my graduate students were really afraid of was that I might be telling them they shouldn’t be writers; that they weren’t original enough. But what I was really trying to say was they needed to work harder at it. To be conscious of it.

Originality matters.

So how can we teach it?

For me, quite simply, originality often boils down to the sensation that I haven’t read a piece before—but I’ve read a lot, too much. Beginning writers often have no idea what is unoriginal because they have not read enough. They struggle to recognize clichés and often seek out writing that is comfortable and familiar. And yet because they are often young, they are frequently early adopters of using new technology in writing. Texting, Facebook, 3D-printing all turned up in my students’ work long before I ever saw them in published pieces, and this is one of the things my students are better about bringing to their work than I am my own. And it is one way to encourage originality. Technology, after all, is the one thing that has changed writing time and time again.

Beginning writers can also be very brave about breaking the rules (they don’t know the rules!). And so it can be important to not “correct” them and bully them into a standard Freytag’s pyramid formation, but rather to talk about a writer’s intentions versus a reader’s response, and what readers look for when they don’t get what they expect. Surprising is not the same thing as original and neither is weird. What is original must still make the reader feel or think or see. But it doesn’t have to follow the exact format of inciting incident, obstacles, climax, resolution.

During workshops, students can be encouraged to choose more unusual or unexpected points of view, to set a story in a less predictable location, to embrace…drum roll, please…what they know (which in my (students’) experience has included the secret tunnels of Disneyland, roller derby, cattle ranching, and the behind-the-scenes life of pretty much any low-wage job you can imagine).

And, of course, they can be asked to read…to read and read and read until they know what is out there.

The final irony is the thing that makes a piece of writing original may not actually be the thing that makes it great, and yet if a piece doesn’t have some unexpected, previously unseen something, it probably won’t be great. Good maybe, but not great. And sometimes students just need to know that.

When is a Mistake Truly a Mistake?

Sometimes, as a creative writing professor you just want to put your foot down. My colleague, Kate Schmitt, told one workshop if any of them used the word flow again, they’d have to go stand in the corner. One of my beloved professors, Ron Carlson, told us we weren’t allowed to put clowns in our stories. Continue reading “When is a Mistake Truly a Mistake?”

Why I Teach

The final assignment I give my MFA students is one they often hate, to write a “Why I Write” essay. Lately it seems the “Why I Write” has become a genre onto itself, a rite of passage for amateur and professional alike. And even a cursory reading in the genre suggests many of us write for many of the same reasons:

To learn
To leave the world better than we found it Continue reading “Why I Teach”

A Simile is Like a Metaphor

Textbook discussions of figurative language tend to insist that similes and metaphors deepen a reader’s understanding of what they are describing. But if you look at how most writers employ similes and metaphors, they don’t so much deepen the meaning of what is being described as they change it. Much like you wouldn’t use an adjective or an adverb unless it changed the meaning of a given noun or verb, you wouldn’t use figurative language to say the same thing your literal language is saying.

Instead, figurative language is one of the best tools for writers who want to add emotional connotations, tone, and atmosphere, to a thing that might not otherwise have these features. Continue reading “A Simile is Like a Metaphor”

The Tallest Men on Earth

There’s a band called “Tallest Man on Earth” that for quite awhile I thought was called “Tallest Men on Earth.” And I was disappointed to realize I was wrong (never mind that the band is just one guy and so the singular is appropriate), because Tallest Men on Earth just sounds so much more interesting than Tallest Man on Earth. This to me is the perfect lesson on titles. When you see something titled “The Tallest Man on Earth,” you know, or at least you assume you know, exactly what it’s about (he’s a Turk named Sultan Kosen, and he’s eight foot three). But if you see something titled “The Tallest Men on Earth,” that sets a greater mystery—it raises a reader’s curiosity right away.

At the moment, in fiction, nobody is coming up with better titles than Karen Russell. Her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, establishes her sense of humor, the stories’ strangeness, and their originality. But she topped that with her second book, Swamplandia!, a title that I sometimes call out just for the fun of it. Never have I loved an exclamation point more. It’s a title that actually gets stuck in my head. Easy to remember when you’re in the library or the bookstore or recommending things to friends. And like St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, it sets the reader up for what’s to come—a strange, atmospheric novel set largely in an alligator theme park.

Students often struggle with titles. They use a lot of clichés. Or puns. Or abstractions. They often use words that appear in the very first sentence or line of the piece. My advice to students is twofold:

1) You want a title that will draw readers into the poem/story/essay before they read it.

2) You want a title that helps readers see the poem/story/essay in a new light after they’ve read it. Continue reading “The Tallest Men on Earth”

Things My Teachers Taught Me

Recently a former student of mine wrote me a nice thank you note in which she mentioned how she would never forget the moment I told the class that I averaged thirteen major drafts per story. This—a casual remark I happened to drop in my lecture—was the most illuminating moment of the semester for her. I remember mentioning the number not because I find it revelatory, but because I find it amusing: Thirteen! So unlucky! And so weirdly consistent. The remark certainly wasn’t written into my lesson plan, and it wasn’t one of the sound bites that I’m careful to repeat all semester. It was tossed off, the kind of thing I don’t usually say because it’s about me rather than them. And yet, out of the whole semester, that was the lesson this student found most important. Teaching is like that much of the time. The off-the-cuff remarks, the of-the-moment lessons, the things you didn’t notice much are the things that strike chords with students.

I haven’t been a student since 1999, so this incident made me think: what things do I remember?

(I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so I’m mentioning names. I know I have been absurdly lucky to study with these masters, and I give thanks for it.)

Joyce Carol Oates: “This is a good sentence. You don’t usually write sentences like that.” I actually remember the sentence, which was in a writing exercise, not a story, and was long, full of clauses, which I now know to call appositives, that went much further with description than I usually did. I’m sure I remember her remark because of the backhanded nature of the compliment, but it was one of the most helpful things a teacher ever told me. It showed me where to go as opposed to where not to go. Continue reading “Things My Teachers Taught Me”

Listening In

Young writers often get the advice—and sometimes the assignment—to eavesdrop. I’ve always found this a little funny, since after all, don’t most of us spend large portions of our lives in conversation? Why do we need to listen in on somebody else’s conversation in order to learn about conversation? I wasn’t sure of the particular value of being outside of the conversation. So I decided to try it.

Like many a writer, I often find myself in coffee shops. But I also happen to live in a town that is a prime destination for people in recovery programs, who also naturally find themselves in coffee shops. And so one of the first things I heard was one highly caffeinated young guy saying to another, “It was a tell-tale sign when we did free hugs and Ted wouldn’t hug anybody.”

A few days later, walking out of the gym behind a young woman and her probably four-year-old son, I heard this exchange:

Toddler: I want a snack.

Mom: I have something in the car for you.

Toddler: What is it?

Mom: Juice.

Toddler: What kind of juice?

Mom: Orange juice.

Toddler, with outright exuberance: Hallelujah, baby!

Later, sitting in a Barnes and Noble café near the customer service counter, I heard this:

Female customer, probably sixty-something, brandishing the bondage bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey: Do you think this would make a good gift?

Customer Service Rep: Well, I wouldn’t give it to someone you didn’t know well.

Next customer, a very thin woman around seventy in a denim mini skirt and high-heeled sandals: I need a ride home.

Customer Service Rep: But we’re a bookstore.

Continue reading “Listening In”

The Workshop Workout

As a student, I was never really a fan of writing exercises—they often seemed gimmicky or overly directed. Only once did an exercise ever turn into an actual story. (On my desktop I titled the exercise “Stupid Ron” because I so resented having to do it—I have since spent quite a bit of time apologizing to my then teacher, the beloved Ron Carlson; the story that resulted was published in Glimmer Train, served as the writing sample for my now tenured job, and won me a $5000 grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, which I used to go to Bread Loaf.) Despite that one success, when I became a teacher I remained suspicious of writing exercises; they seemed like an awfully convenient way to expend a chunk of class-time. But, mostly because my students say they value them, I have gradually come to use writing exercises in my workshops. I still don’t do them (I don’t eat lima beans either, now that nobody can make me), but I’ve come to believe in their value.

The student-me was only ever assigned one kind of writing exercise, intended to inspire—to lead to the creation of new work. And I have never really been short of ideas for new work. But I’ve found that there are really three types of writing exercises; those intended for:

inspiration
exploration and revision
fun

Inspiration exercises often work best for beginning students who haven’t discovered that they are allowed to write about all kinds of things. For example, in my intro class this semester, I had the students brainstorm historical and current events that they’d like to write poems about. This was a pretty surprising idea for many of them, even though they’d just read a host of poems about the Vietnam War. In the intro class, I’ve come to depend on writing exercises as a way to get students away from more clichéd topics and styles—to break them of habits they were somehow born right into. Continue reading “The Workshop Workout”

On Friday Night Lights and Teaching Character

I confess, I’m one of those writers with a deep and abiding love of the much-missed Friday Night Lights, a television show that not only entertained me, but made me think about how I want to live and who I want to be.

Now I admit, I have loved a number of shows of the young adult variety, starting with but not limited to Felicity; Gilmore Girls, seasons 1-5; Veronica Mars, seasons 1 and 2; and—surely you were expecting this—every all-too-short second of the single season of Freaks and Geeks.

I suspect young adult television, much like young adult literature, has such a hold on me because it is often about people building their identities, determining their values, and shaping their characters (as we are wont to do when we are young).

And this is why I mention Friday Night Lights in the context of teaching creative writing. More than any two characters on television, high school football coach Eric Taylor and high school guidance counselor Tami Taylor were working hard every week to shape the values of their daughter, their high-school-age-charges, their no-longer high-school-age-charges, and even themselves. Continue reading “On Friday Night Lights and Teaching Character”