Vanderslice, Stephanie. Rethinking Creative Writing. National Association of Writers in Education, 2015.
Vanderslice looks at the history of established creative writing pedagogy, much of which is based on the Writers Workshop established at the University of Iowa in the 1940s. The criticisms of the workshop structure are these. First, that the workshop was designed to be used with polished writers in an exclusive graduate program (and is now being used in undergraduate programs and with students who have far less experience and instruction in writing. Second, the workshop structure focuses on the product rather than the process of composing. Third, workshop rules (the writer does not speak, participants discuss a text, often without any input from the writer on their goals for the piece) can foster competitiveness and overly harsh criticism. Finally, some critics (including many editors) complain that the traditional writing workshop “norm” the writing being produced–critiques and feedback reward people who write “literary” prose on serious topics and discourage experimentation or writing “genre” work (romance, scifi, fantasy, westerns, etc).
Vanderslice notes many programs that are making changes, starting with expanding the number of genres offered from the traditional prose, poetry, and playwriting to include media arts, new technologies, creative nonfiction, graphic literature, etc.). Genres like new media often change the dynamics of the writing process because they encourage collaboration and early feedback (because it is cheaper to make changes in the planning level than the production level).
Another important shift Vanderslice advocates is using creative writing classes to teach students how to live a creative life — not in an existential way, but in a “pay the rent” way. College teaching jobs are scarce, as are editing jobs and staff writing positions, but the demand for creative minds who understand writing and narrative is out there if the writer opens their expectations and maybe learns skills beyond traditional writing–if not coding itself, for example, than at least an understanding of what coding can do.
Response: Many of the criticisms Vanderslice notes are relevant not only to new media but for traditional composition classrooms. Asking students to give each other feedback before all the writing can be finished seems a logical way to inspire stronger or less obvious ideas for the direction of a text-in-progress (before hours are spent on a less interesting path and before a writer becomes less entrenched in an idea).
Thanks for the article