In the mini-series Inventing Anna that recently aired on Netflix, there’s a long sequence near the end when, after months of research, the very pregnant journalist Vivian Kent (played by Anna Chlumsky) pounds out a longform feature in a single writing sprint. She sits at her computer for hours straight, inspiring music playing in her earbuds. Her colleagues look on pensively as she types non-stop, desperate to complete the story before her water breaks.
It’s a thrilling sequence–the virtuosic writer in a state of literary ecstasy composing a text as if she were playing a Rachmaninoff piano concerto from beginning to end. But most of us who have actually written a feature–or a TV show or a concerto, for that matter–know that’s not how writing actually works. We know that good writing generally happens not in a single contiguous draft, but over countless drafts and through rigorous revision. It’s a process that would look pretty boring on TV.
But what does this mean in the context of teaching creative writing?
In creative writing classes, we talk a great deal about what makes a good piece of writing. We tease out aspects of craft and create assignments for students to test them out. What we don’t talk about nearly as much is the process of writing–that mysterious journey from idea to publishable draft that professional writers go on over and over again throughout our careers. Yet over my years as an instructor and as a writing consultant, I’ve learned that often the support students need is as much about process as it is about craft.
You may already be familiar with the idea that writing scholars break the writing process up into 4 or 5 rough categories:
- Prewriting (planning, research, notes)
- Drafting (writing the rough draft, often a process of discovery)
- Revising (testing out different structures, focusing ideas etc.)
- Editing (tidying up the details)
As I’m sure you know from your own practice, writers rarely move through these phases in a linear manner–you might get all the way to editing only to realize that you need to generate more material. I find this sequence useful nonetheless as it helps us understand what kind of work a student should be doing at different points in the process. It would, for example, be pointless to give advice on sentence-level revision if they are still in the rough drafting phase where they don’t yet entirely know what they’re writing about.
Novice writers often get stalled precisely because they’ve jumped ahead in the process, ruthlessly editing themselves when they should still be playing around in a draft. As a TA, you will often come up against these kinds of process challenges in office hours. Below are some issues that I’ve seen students encounter at different phases in the writing process and the kinds of process-based support that can help them break through those barriers.
1. I can’t get started.
- This is the place where that image of the perfect first draft can really stall a new writer out. Novice writers who are accustomed to academic courses where they are given tight parameters for each assignment sometimes find the looseness of creative writing assignments daunting. They might also feel that nothing they start seems good enough, causing them to get trapped in the write-delete-write-delete cycle.
- While specific prompts can be a useful way to break through this, what’s more important is encouraging them to stay with a topic long enough to get to the good stuff. I find Anne Lamott’s concept of the “Shitty First Draft” useful to break through the perfectionism that often stalls new writers out at the beginning of the process. As she writes in her classic text Bird by Bird, “I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.”
- New writers need to understand that writing is a muscle, and like any muscle, you must warm up before you start the heavy lifting. Turning off the computer and moving into a physical notebook can be a great way to remove the urge to delete. Timed writing sprints, such as the Pomodoro Technique can help to filter out distractions and keep them on the page even when it’s painful.
2. My first draft is as good as it’s going to get, and I can’t see any other way to approach this particular topic.
- While it’s good to have confidence in one’s abilities, this belief is perhaps the biggest hurdle a writer can face in their development. In his book The Art of Revision, Peter Ho Davies argues that when we reify the first draft as THE pure expression of genius–as we so often do in our culture–it’s easy to get stuck on the idea that revision is somehow a dilution of that ideal, or worse, an admission of failure.
- To get past this, we must learn to see our writing not as a single immovable block, but as a series of moveable parts. I think of this as something like trying to redecorate a room that you’ve lived in for a long time–it’s hard to see different configurations for furniture unless you’re willing to start moving things around. Try a few new positions for that couch before you get to the right one. At first it might feel like you’re making a mess, but if you stick with it, you might find a new configuration that works better than before.
- A complete draft is something to celebrate, but we can learn a lot from pulling apart our work to see what else we can do with it. Visual artists do this kind of thing all the time, and so do writers–we just don’t talk about it as much.
3. The student is in the middle of the writing process and is feeling tired or frustrated with their current topic or story. They are thinking of starting from scratch with only a few days left before the assignment is due.
- What I first tell students who come to me with this problem is to honour the work they have done so far. A rough draft is no small feat!
- I then encourage them to stick with it. Maybe they feel like the work they’ve done so far is not as good as the work they’ve seen others doing in peer reviews. Maybe the writing of this piece has churned up some feelings they weren’t expecting. Maybe they’ve just fallen out of love with the topic. Whatever the reason they are considering changing topics, these are all normal feelings that many writers have in the middle of the process.
- That moment of frustration where the writer can see there is something that’s not quite working about an essay, short story or poem but doesn’t yet know how to fix it? That’s actually a sign of growth. But you can only clear this hurdle if you stick with the topic and give your brain the time it needs to solve those problems.
- Something I often suggest writers do when they are struggling with these feelings is to open a new document and ask themselves, “why is this so difficult for me to write about?” Having a conversation with yourself on the page can clear your mind and give you a bit of distance from the frustrating parts of the project. That writing might work its way into the piece or it might not, but it will be useful either way.
Above all, it’s useful to remember that the writing process doesn’t end with an assignment deadline or publication date. Each piece is part of a lifelong journey of discovery and growth. By teaching creative writing with an awareness of process, we can help new writers grow in ways that resonate beyond the classroom into whatever kinds of writing they choose to do in the future.