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Using creative writing strategies
in the teaching of literature courses*
by J.
Neil C. Garcia
At the outset, it needs
to be said that courses in creative writing and in literature
are not exactly dissimilar things: both locate the literary
text—poetic, fictional, dramatic—at the
center of their attentions, even as the privileged perspectives
between them are admittedly different.
A creative
writing class, simply because it intends to make writers
out of its students, looks at texts from the vantage-point
of their production. In other words, as a discipline
creative writing, by its very nature, aims at an awareness
of literature as a species of artistry, an imaginative
process whose workings can to a large extent be identified
and discussed, duplicated.
On the other
hand, a literature class can and does, depending on
the persuasion of the teacher or perhaps even the student
herself, choose to look at a literary text's meaningfulness
in light of any number of concerns: its formal attributes,
its writer's life and times, the reading practices of
its intended and/or apparent audience, its artfulness,
its thematic affiliations, the students' impressions
or subjective "feelings" about it, etc.
Here we can
see, upon closer scrutiny, a basic and even antagonistic
divergence of interests presenting itself: while a creative
writing class encourages students to revise the literary
texts they themselves create, a literature class invariably
treats the text as a kind of "self-contained" object
of study, one which doesn't need to be "improved," since
the assumption behind its being read and discussed at
all is that precisely it is already "good" anyway, or
at least it already finds itself falling within the
teacher's own idea of a "canon."
I do not,
however, wish my lecture to get embroiled in what is
always a torturous and finally futile subject—namely,
the question of the "Canon." What I wish to propose
is this: the teaching of literature can be greatly enhanced
by employing certain creative writing techniques and
strategies. In particular, I am interested in advancing
the old argument that creation is the highest form of
appreciation.
Insofar as
a literature course is ostensibly about the activity
of reading and appreciating literary texts, we might
wish to consider how we, as literature teachers, can
best instill the love of reading in our students. In
teaching the short story, for instance, we might now
consider taking our students through the process of
story-telling, by not simply enumerating its elements,
but by letting them experience these on their own: with
our guidance, they can make up plots, think up characters
and dialogue, imagine settings, play around with points
of view, contemplate ideas or themes.
In teaching
poems, on the other hand, the teacher might wish to
end or emphasize certain lessons with a poetic exercise
that may or may not eventuate in the writing of a poem,
but at least a kind of demonstration of certain poetic
skills: poetic description or metaphor-making, for instance,
the correct use of other figures of speech, or even
an illustration of certain rudiments of versification.
In short,
we can encourage them to tell stories (for poems also
tell stories)—either as "re-tellings" of stories
they already know, or if the gods are being kind, original
stories. Rather than alienate them from literature,
we can enjoin our students to actively participate in
its production by writing texts, and not merely passively
reading them.
There are
several fallacies that need to be unpacked here. One
of them is that a teacher has herself to be a seriously
practicing creative writer to be able to teach her students
how to write poetry or fiction. This is obviously not
correct. The requisites of teaching creative writing
are, to my mind, the very same requisites of teaching
literature: passion, method, observation, sympathy (which
can sometimes take the form of patience—an inexhaustible
supply of it), fairness, a courageous love for the written
word. Off the cuff, I can only make one addition to
this list, and if anything it's what a teacher of creative
writing might need to have in greatest abundance: humility.
It's no mean
feat: accepting the challenge of allowing our students
to write, to create, to out-perform or go us the one
better, so to speak. Thinking back, I cannot say I had
a whole lot of literature teachers who possessed enough
humility to allow their students to write creatively
in the different English and literature classes of my
youth. One teacher who did allow us to write I had when
I was in fourth-grade—in Reading and Phonics,
if I'm not mistaken. And what a difference this made
in my life: the poem about my best friend whom I needed
to say good-bye to (because she and her family were
moving to another neighborhood far, far away) was the
very first poem I ever wrote, and I can safely say it
wasn't such an inauspicious start, after all—for,
indeed, look where it's gotten me? To be honest, I
am shocked that English and literature teachers in elementary
and high school in our country generally frown at the
idea of incorporating creative writing into their classes,
when—let's be frank about it—it's what makes
their disciplines, their occupations, possible to begin
with.
A related
fallacy has to do with the fact that most teachers—not
just literature teachers—have been made to believe,
rather self-importantly, that they always need to be
the unassailable authorities in their respective classes.
This imperative sometimes gets in the way of true learning,
which should ideally be a dialectical, mutually beneficial
process: students are supposed to learn from their teachers,
true, but the great joy of teaching—a secret one,
for I can see how revealing it can get the whole profession
into an awful lot of mess—is that, unwittingly,
our students teach us, too.
What I mean
here is this: there is no reason why the writing activities
we give our students shouldn't be activities we ourselves
perform—either in advance, or perhaps, alongside
them. I am thinking in particular of the various "pre-poem"
exercises I have used and found rather effective, a
couple of which I will describe later on in my lecture.
Among other things, these exercises aim to cultivate
in students a stronger sense for language, as well as
to tap the various sources of writing—chiefest
of which, based on my own short and sometimes unsweet
experience, are memory and observation.
I also want
to say this now: teaching, like all meaningful undertakings,
needs to be earned. I know I am being extremely optimistic—if
not cruel—when I insist that every literature
teacher write at least one poem or story in her life,
but it makes sense, doesn't it—a math teacher
is routinely required to solve equations, a chemist
to combine and recombine chemicals, a doctor to heal.
So why shouldn't we wish every teacher of literature
to prove her mettle, no matter if only privately and,
indeed, partly successfully, by attempting to produce
literature as well? Again, I need to emphasize that
it's the attempt—not so much the success or failure
of the outcome—that matters in this respect,
for all I'm really interested in here is the idea of
having a commitment to writing, and being able to concretize
this commitment, to lay claim to it and to prove it
some way or other.
Short of writing
a complete short story or a poem, there are any number
of creative "pre-writing" exercises the teacher may
avail herself of. I shall be discussing two of them
presently—but since poetry's been rumored to be
my unfortunate specialization, I'm afraid my declared
bias will be toward the finished poem, the writing of
which being, to my mind, one of the best ways to end,
summarize or highlight any significant discussion of
poetry.
Strangely
enough, the two poetic exercises I give students in
the initial stages involve the writing of prose. The
first aims to test and hone their skills in description,
the other their ability to imagine from, or to make
creative use of, memory. In both exercises, an implicit
principle that I do not quite spell out until a little
later in the semester is one of "design" or "order"
—otherwise called "concept." I don't commence
the reading or writing of poetry with a discussion of
theme, because, in the early stages of the course at
least, I am more interested in getting my students to
write in as free and unhampered a manner as possible,
for fluency in the language is, in my opinion, the bedrock
of all learning.
Message or
theme, on the other hand, is something a student must
arrive at on her own—through the interimplicating
processes of reading and writing, through her increasing
awareness of the world she inhabits, through life. What
I find to be lacking in most students is the simple
ability to use words to describe what they perceive
around them—even, tragically sometimes, what they
feel. It seems the world and their very own lives have
become, to many young people nowadays, most difficult
things to articulate.
I must qualify,
at this point, that my experience in this university
as far as students' facility in the English language
is concerned has been, in the main, not all that dismal.
This, despite the much bewailed deterioration of verbal
aptitudes—both in English and Filipino—among
our youth already famously noted by language departments
in many Philippine colleges and universities, including
the English department of this school. I don't know
if I've simply been lucky or if the innate cheerful
recklessness of youth (one quickly passing me by: ahh,
the bloom is off the rose!) has something to do with
it. I suppose I've been able to cope better with this
worsening national crisis (a crisis, I sometimes like
to put it, of "a darkly encroaching wordlessness") because
I am willing to be convinced of anything—even,
you might be surprised to find out, of the idea that
young people are not hopeless, that they do dream of
better things to come, and that they are worth educating,
still and all. In other words, I confess to being of
the deluded opinion that students will heartily take
to literature only if they are shown the good that they
can get from it. And this can only happen if the teacher
can bring herself to care enough to show them how.
Certainly,
I've not always been able to prove myself equal to this
challenge. There have been dark and dreary days. There
have been days of abject frustration and despair. But
what I will share with you this morning is not the bitter
sap of any of those days—but, rather, the sweet
nectar of the good days, the days when success seemed
easy enough to achieve. Over the years I have been able
to evolve a personal "style," one might say, of teaching
poetry, and to a great extent it involves getting the
students to write—not just reactions or themes,
but still other examples of creative or imaginative
writing.
As I mentioned,
the first activity I give my students serves to complement
their reading: literature distinguishes itself from
other kinds of writing because it trafficks heavily
in image-laden words—words that renew our awareness
of reality, of the world. Thus, unlike abstract argumentation
or bare exposition, literature makes use of a whole
lot of description. A simple way of putting it might
be: where an essay will say that one is sad, a poem
will show the sadness—by evoking it in the figures
that may be found in the landscape where the persona
happens to be, for instance.
This first
activity doesn't have to be exhausted all at once: in
certain instances, it might be wise to spread out a
number of cumulative "description exercises" all throughout
the semester. Since my students are lucky enough to
be studying in a school whose campus is the last green
place in the mega-city nightmare of Metropolitan Manila,
there isn't a paucity of beautiful things they can describe.
Weather permitting, I sometimes hold sessions outside
the classroom and under the generous shade of UP's wizened
trees, where I instruct my students to describe any
particular scene or image that appeals to them then
and there.
Or sometimes,
I decide to make the class stay in the classroom, and
bring an interesting, usually mysterious picture—a
person, a flower, a landscape, whatever—instead.
At other times, I ask the students to each bring a picture
or an object to class, and I raffle these off back to
them: whatever a student gets she is asked to describe
it in writing before the end of the meeting. Depending
on what I wish to accomplish, I may or may not ask them
to have a "direction"—which is to say, to be "meaningful"—in
their descriptions. Thus, I cannot really say I require
that their descriptive passages have a point right
away. The more important point of this activity is
to help them bridge the gap between words and things,
between language and the world it both serves and brings
into being.
As a supplement
to this, I ask my students to keep a journal which I
collect at the end of every week and try to read and
scribble feedback in over the weekend. Problems relating
to grammar invariably present themselves on these occasions,
and if the errors prove systemic¾which is to say, enough
students share them—I sometimes decide to devote
a few minutes in the subsequent meetings to a quick
review of these problem areas. (Offhand, they never
fail to include varying combinations of the following
grammatical topics: Subject-Verb Agreement, Tense,
Pronouns, Prepositions and Idioms). My idea is that
by asking students to write more or less constantly
and with a generous amount of friendly supervision,
these problems will resolve themselves somewhat. After
all, the acquisition of language is necessarily a solitary
thing—and as in any other skill, there is no substitute
for hard and painstaking work, for practice.
I need to
remind you that these exercises are meant to complement,
not replace, the usual analysis we carry out in our
literature courses. As far as I'm concerned, reading/appreciating
texts is still the primary occupation one expects of
a literature class. The idea behind incorporating creative
writing techniques and strategies in such a class rests
on the assumption, let me repeat, that writing or "creating"
is already, in itself, the clearest and highest expression
of literary appreciation. In other words: a good writer
is necessarily already a good reader. Likewise, encouraging
students to write imaginatively inevitably leads to
their having a stronger grasp of ideas, which should
prove helpful to them in their literary analyses, as
well. In fact, I believe that as long as a student cannot
use words to describe ordinary objects, she cannot be
expected to use words to argue by or communicate complex
ideas with.
The second
activity I thought of telling you about today builds
on the strengths that should've ideally been effectuated
by these different exercises in description. It involves,
this time around, the telling of a story—in particular,
a story about a secret. It remains a poet's exercise,
however, and in this case, the poet who suggested it
to me is the Hawaiian American Garrett Hongo. I call
it, simply, "Secrets," and what it does is to drive
home the point that poetic writing involves imagining
as vividly, as concretely, as meaningfully, as possible—a
task admittedly difficult for beginning writers, who
can only write about themselves, about experiences they
themselves go through.
The activity
goes this way: you ask your students to put down in
writing, in a single, complete sentence on a small piece
of paper they shouldn't write their names on, a secret
about themselves. Because of the potentially scandalous
nature of this exercise, I like to insert a proviso
into this uneasy bit of instruction: the secret they
write may not be completely accurate, even as it should,
in essence, be "true." At this point the class becomes
evidently excited.
The twist,
however is this: after the class have finished writing
their secrets down, you ask them to fold the pieces
of paper once or twice and to put them inside a box
or a hat (I bring my baseball cap to class just for
this purpose). Everyone then gets to pick out a secret
from this common repository—the moment a student
happens to pick out her own secret, she is asked to
refold it and put it back in, and to pick out another
one. In the end, everyone should have someone else's
secret in her possession.
The final instruction is a simple one,
although it never fails to elicit a collective moan
of despair from the class: they are now to write, in
a page or two, the story behind and around that secret—a
story that should be told in the first person, by the
person (more accurately, persona) whose secret it supposedly
is. The story doesn't have to be complete. It can end
in the present or in the past. The important thing is
that the secret gets to be revealed—and revealed
in a well-described and interesting way.
I usually turn
this exercise into an assignment, although once or twice
in the past I made my students do it in the classroom—or
at least, they wrote their first draft of it in my presence.
Whichever it is, the following meeting, I ask someone
to begin the session by reading her work out loud in
class, and after this, I ask the student who believes
it is her secret that has just been told to come up
front and tell us her own version of it. Very rarely
does it happen that the original owner of the secret
is completely in agreement with the way her classmate
has narrated it, and it even happens that two or more
students believe it is their secret they thought they
heard being read. (In any case, this first reactor starts
the ball rolling, for now it is her turn to recite her
story of the secret she picked out last meeting, and
so on...)
The message
is brought home: when we write about our own lives,
our memories may be very clear and unmistakable inside
our minds, but we fail to appreciate the fact that these
memories need to be re-imagined—"re-imaged"—as
it were, so that others may see them, feel them, hear
them, taste and smell them, touch them; so that they
will become real. A student, remembering what
she did last summer, would typically write in an informal
composition: "Last summer I stayed with my lola
in her big old house in the province." For such a student,
just this sentence is enough to evoke the cherished
house inside her mind, probably in all the fond textures
of its specificity. But what about us? Is this house
real to us? How can it be if it's not yet been imagined
for us¾if it has yet to be written?
The need to communicate is a need that
writing, when it is any good, amply fulfills. Ultimately,
this activity benefits every student in a quiet and
personal way, for the way her secret has been "told"
automatically alienates her memory of it from someone's
else's imagination of it—and thus makes it clear
to her that she needs to do a similar creative "invention,"
even or especially where her own memories are concerned,
which to her may be plain and needing very little elaboration,
but which cannot be communicated to her readers except
in and as form—except in and as "art."
What I also like about this exercise
is that, already, the idea that writing must have a
point is made clear by it from the very beginning: a
secret is just as good a reason to write as any I can
think, and in fact, we might argue that the sudden appearance
of insight, the unexpected proffering of an offhand
piece of knowledge, the "rare and random descent" of
revelation, is invariably the purpose of all literature,
whether poetry or prose. It's almost like everything
in this world can be seen to harbor in itself a secret—which
is another way of saying that metaphors lurk in the
shadows of the visible universe, and all we need to
do is to look for them.
Czeslaw Milosz, in his beautiful anthology,
A Book of Luminous Things, groups some poems
under the heading "The Secret of a Thing." In his introduction,
he writes that "poetry has always described things surrounding
us... but the contemplation of a thing—a reverent
and pious approach toward it—is a prerequisite
of true art." This activity, I find, is useful in letting
students think of writing just in these very same terms:
writing as uncanny epiphany, as a respectful attentiveness
toward life, as a generous unbosoming of a secret.
A reminder: this, once again, is not
a strictly poetic activity, and, indeed, the output
one expects of one's students with this exercise is
not going to resemble—not even remotely—a
poem. But I find it's a very effective means of introducing
to my class the idea of poetry or literature as being
first and foremost an act of the imagination—an
act that is necessarily grounded in experience even
as it surpasses it, simply by ordering it and making
it more meaningful, more sensorily satisfying than it
may have actually been. The poem can come later: in
the first place, I prefer to look at this exercise as
a "pre-poem"—one out of many I will be making
them write.
The question
comes wriggling—I can almost feel it—in
most of your minds: Just where does an activity such
as this fit in one's syllabus for a class on literary
types and forms, or in Humanities I (which in the UP
comes under the politically correct official description,
"Literature, Society and the Individual")? I leave it
up to the teacher, in the end. However, in my case,
I can think of holding this exercise during a session
immediately following a discussion of some contemporary
poems¾poems that shouldn't sound too difficult or mannered
in expression, I believe, and, if possible, poems by
Filipino writers that talk about secrets. (If I have
to be ministerial about anything in this lecture, it
is in regard to this: a good reading list—a good
textbook—is nearly half the battle. Since we can
only write poems in the way that the poems we have read
and liked were written, I will insist that my students
read poems that I am convinced they can or should emulate.)
I'm thinking
of one poem in particular, and indeed I was able to
use it in a class two semesters ago. I should like
to end my lecture with a reading of this poem, one that,
I believe, exemplifies the very same qualities of literary
writing I have tried to explicate in this talk. Not
incidentally, it's called "The Secret Language," and
it's by one of my favorite poets, Ma. Luisa Aguilar-Cariño.
The Secret Language
I have learned
your speech,
Fair stranger; for you
I have oiled my hair
Into a braid as thick
And beautiful as the serpent
In your story of Eden.
For you,
I have covered
My breasts and hidden,
Among the folds of my surrendered
Inheritance, the beads
I have worn since girlhood.
It is fifty
years now
Since the day my father
Took me to the school in Bua,
A headman's terrified
Peace-gift. In the doorway,
The teacher stood, her hair
The bleached color of corn,
Watching with bird-eyes.
Now, I am
Christina.
I am told I can make lace
Fine enough to lay upon the altar
Of a cathedral in Europe.
But this is a place
That I will never see.
I cook for
tourists at an inn;
They praise my lemon pie
And my English, which they say
Is faultless. I smile
And look past the window,
Imagining father's and grandfather's cattle
Grazing by the smoke trees.
But it is evening, and these
Are ghosts.
In the night,
When I am alone at last,
I lie uncorseted
Upon the iron bed,
Composing my lost beads
Over my chest, dreaming back
Each flecked and opalescent
Color, crooning the names,
Along with mine:
Binaay, Binaay.
In the end,
literature becomes a question not simply of reading,
but of writing. And of course, we've all heard that
old writer's boast: only when there is writing does
a true encounter with and understanding of literature
occur.
That there's truth to this boast is plain
enough to see—though I hope I have, in and through
this lecture, made it even plainer.
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