Paperwallah. Teaching to tell a story

A few weekends ago, I was on a seminar panel discussing creative writing. We were at the University of Chicago Centre in Delhi, at a symposium organised in collaboration with Ashoka University, where I happen to teach creative writing. Our moderator opened with the basics: “Can creative writing be taught?” My fellow panellists, Sumana Roy (who teaches poetry at Ashoka) and Vu Tran (Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago), offered their own takes: Roy spoke of teaching students how to read as a writer, Tran brought up the importance of recognising “bad writing”. My reply, though, still echoed some of the doubts I had voiced in a Paperwallah column titled “Is it like a Hamburger?” published in April, 2014. In the piece, I expressed concern about how creative writing courses “may disallow creativity from flourishing outside the enclosure of a university curriculum” and how they may transform writing into a ‘skill’ that can be bought, sold and certified.

The irony, of course, is that I am now part of a creative writing department.

That I teach “writing”. I did struggle with this at first. What did it mean for me to do this? Was I part of the gatekeepers of “good literature”? Yet I found that not having a formal background in a creative writing discipline somewhat set me pedagogically free. Rather than soldier on, pretending I’m not niggled by these concerns, I try and bring them into the classroom. In the first class of the semester, we begin with a question: “why are you here?” By asking this, I hope for the creative writing course to become not just a space where writing is “taught” but also where we think about what it means to be a writer. How large (or small) a part these courses play in someone’s “writing life”.

A sliver, is what we usually decide upon. There’s reading, and listening, and reading some more. There’s the actual discipline of writing. The patience of editing. The literary conversations with friends, readers, mentors.

We also discuss what it means to be a writer today. Living and writing in times like these. Who are we writing for? Who is our audience? Or if writing is, above all, an act for the self.

And because there is no way we cannot, we discuss privilege. What does it mean for us to be here? We talk about the classroom we’re sitting in, the institute within which we’re placed. The fact that they — the students — have access to this kind of taught course at all. And because they do how it becomes all the more important that they also support and nurture other communal spaces — libraries, book clubs, writing groups, independent publishers and bookstores. Grassroot-level initiatives that are accessible to many more, if still not all.

At the seminar, our moderator moved to another pressing question: How does having an MFA, or not, affect how we teach creative writing? I would venture to say there is a difference. My colleagues with an MFA under their belt tend to be impressively far more methodical and “formal” in their approach towards teaching writing. Their syllabus is strictly structured, the craft techniques well-delineated, the course follows a carefully-thought-out trajectory. I tend to rely more on instinct. Or try to at least create a hybrid of the two approaches. To leave spaces in the syllabus for students to bring in readings, to share pieces they’ve found inspirational. For them, in a way, to be collaborators. I find I also tend to place greater emphasis on reading. For example, for a fiction workshop I’m teaching this semester, there wasn’t a requirement to bring in external readings. The focus could have been only students’ writing. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Perhaps because this wasn’t how I learnt how to write. My “teachers” were the words on the page. Every book I’d picked up serving as a piece of the framework within which my writing took place. So in class we’re also reading novellas — a handful of favourites — to begin discussion on point of view, and voice, and creating characters. To see how it’s been done. To learn how to do by learning how others have already done in the past.

What has also always been a concern for me is that creative writing courses somehow lift writing out of life. Not only that they might transform “‘autonomous zones’— temporary spaces outside formal structures of control — that exist for the development of the writing craft, into a bureaucratic system of accountability and control” but also rarify writing itself. Strengthen the mythical image of writer sitting in an ivory tower. Writing happens within the messiness, amidst the cluster and chaos, of living.

How can this be done within an academic setting? Perhaps by encouraging class discussion to spill beyond the literary?

By choosing what we read more carefully?

At the end of my craft of fiction course last year, a student declared that she was beginning to see why the most powerful short stories are ambiguous. “Because they’re like life.” In times like these, that’s the highest, most precious, praise.

Janice Pariat

Janice Pariat is the author of The Nine-Chambered Heart; @janicepariat