Beyond the Writers' Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction

by Carol Bly

Overview

An innovative new approach to teaching and writing creative nonfiction from veteran teacher and critically acclaimed author Carol Bly.

Teachers and writers everywhere are facing the limits imposed by the prevailing models of teaching: community or MFA “workshops” or, at the high-school level, “peer review.” In Beyond the Writers' Workshop Carol Bly presents an alternative. She believes that workshopping’s tendency to engage in wry scorn and pay exaggerated attention to technical details, causes apprentice writers, consciously or unconsciously, to modify their most passionate work.

Inspired by a philosophy of individuality and moral rigor, Bly combines ideas and techniques from social work, psychotherapy, and neuroscience with the traditional teaching of fresh metaphor, salient dialogue, lively pace, and analysis of other literary work in her pioneering new approach. She also includes exercises and examples in an extensive practical appendix.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385499194
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/17/2001
Edition description:	1 ANCHOR
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Carol Bly was a critically acclaimed short story writer and essayist. She was the author of many books, including The Passionate, Accurate Story, a writing guide; My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories; and an essay collection, Letters from the Country. She was a frequent and respected lecturer at conferences of the National Council of Teachers of English, Associated Writing Programs, and the National Association of Social Workers. She lived in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xvii
Chapter 1	Taking on Three Demanding Situations First	3
	Cultural Deprivation	4
	The New, Nontraditional Mission of Present-Day Writers	9
	Eight Elements of Bad or Scanty Teaching of Creative Writing	15
Chapter 2	A Fundamental Mistake in How We Learn to Write: Skipping the Long Middle Stage of Writing	33
	The Three Stages of Writing a Manuscript	37
Chapter 3	Using Empathic Questioning to Deepen Your First Draft	46
	Empathic Inquiry	48
	Some Final Thoughts	58
Chapter 4	How Stage-Development Philosophy Serves Writers	59
	A Basic Overview of Stage-Development Theory	59
	Assumptions of Stage-Development Theory	65
	How Two Authors Offer Us Stage Philosophies That Are Especially Pertinent to Writers	70
Chapter 5	We Have Pushed Off from the Animal Kingdom for Good: Good News for Writers from Neuroscientists	76
	Reentry and Literary Endeavor	82
	Becoming a Generalist	92
	The Love of Thinking	94
Chapter 6	Literary Fixes	100
	Driving the Exposition Inward	101
	Raising the Tone	109
	Changing Statement to Theater (Showing, not Telling)	111
	Combating Lying and Cowardice	113
	Removing Self-References	116
	Pushing Off from Mindless Male Realism and Mindless Female Realism	119
	Checking for the Skinflint Syndrome and Enhancing Your Manuscript as a Gift to the Reader	121
	Asking, for a Last Time, What Is Still Missing from This Manuscript?	122
	Small Language Fixes That Help Remove Humbug	122
	Starting Sentences with Dependent Clauses	126
	Getting Rid of We, Everybody, and All	127
Chapter 7	Seven General Issues in Teaching Creative Writing	129
	Writing Literature Can Be Taught	129
	Protecting Student Writers from the U.S.A. Junk Culture	133
	Curing Writers of the Bad Habit of Perseverating	139
	Convincing Writers that Surprise Is the Inevitable, Eternal Principle of Literature	140
	Practicing Professional Reticence	142
	Being Aware of Bullying	143
	Making the Classroom One of the Great Places on Earth	145
Chapter 8	Teaching Elementary School Children to Write	148
	Ways to Use the Appendix When Working with Children	148
	No Children's Writing Should Ever Be Subjected to Peer Review	155
	Validating the Serious as Well as the Fun-Loving Spirits of Children	157
	Offering Some Comment for Every Piece of Creative Writing a Child Does	160
	Giving a Child Two Opportunities to Answer a Question	161
	Teaching Children as Well as Ourselves the Psychological Skills that Protect a Person's Personality from Group Bullying or from Unfair Pressure by People in Authority	162
	Asking Children to Memorize One Hundred Stories by the Age of Eighteen	163
Chapter 9	Helping People in Middle and High School Learn to Write	171
	Adolescents and Monoculture	171
	Using the Appendix of This Book with Adolescent People	173
	No Peer Reviewing of Manuscripts	178
	No Teaching of Literary Techniques	179
	No Asking for Rough Drafts of Creative Writing	182
	Never Failing to Comment on the Core Content of Students' Papers	183
	Teaching Adolescent Writers to Continue Memorizing Stories, if They Started in Elementary School, and to Add Poems	184
	An Ethics Code for Teachers of Adolescents	184
Chapter 10	Helping College Students and M.F.A. Candidates to Write	185
	Leaving Behind the Natural but Useless Attitudes Common to Any Enclave of Creative Writers	185
	Ways to Help College- and Graduate-Level Writers Experience a Literary Change of Heart	206
Chapter 11	Teaching at Writers' Conferences, Community Retreats, and Summer Short Courses	217
	What These Courses Are, and the Burgeoning Population Who Use Them	217
	Three Kinds of Populations We Don't Serve Well Enough So Far	222
Chapter 12	Some Issues of Aesthetics and Ethics of Writing Literature	235
	Some Psychological Dynamics of Aesthetics and Ethics	235
	Distinguishing Hack Work from Literary Artifice	246
	Normalized Indifference Is Our Comfortable Stance on Any Subject until Something Jars Us	247
	How the Old, Familiar Dynamic Called Pain Avoidance Affects Creative Nonfiction	254
	Falsifying What Could Otherwise Be Interesting Psychological Evidence about Homo Sapiens in One or Another Setting	261
	Hatred of Literature by Those Left Out of It and Sometimes by Those of Us Who Participate in It	267
	A Psychological Tool for Ethically Minded Writers	272
	Writing Creative Nonfiction for the 400,000	274
	Appendices
Appendix I.	Fifteen Writing Exercises	279
	Four Exercises about Background or Place
1.	Writing without Cliches about a Beautiful Place	281
2.	Ugly Place, Good Event: Ugly Event, Good Place	283
3.	Pathetically Shallow Use of Places Once Full of Serious Enterprise	284
4.	Paying Respectful Attention to Background Settings	286
	Easy Exercises
5.	Good and Terrible Qualities in Human Nature--An Exercise for People over the Age of Fourteen	288
6.	Ignatow Poem Exercise	289
7.	A Catty Vignette	292
8.	An Essay Pot--A Group Talking Exercise	295
9.	Writing about Work	297
	Elegant Exercises
10.	Attending to Other--Specifically Attending to Relatives, Nonhuman Creatures, or Plants	301
11.	Increasing One's Affection for Utterly Ordinary People	303
12.	A Writing Exercise for Extroverts	306
13.	An Irritating Person Exercise	309
14.	A Nearly Impossible Writing Exercise	311
15.	The Andover Format: Writing Your Life at Two Levels--One the Usual Sort of Memoir, and the Other Secret and Profound	315
Appendix II.	Usage Sheets	322
Appendix III.	Abbreviations and Notes for Referencing Margin Comment on Students' Papers	328
Appendix IV.	Formats and Strategies	330
	A Format for Writing an Essay	329
	The Vertical-Line Way of Taking Notes	331
	Analyzing a Literary Work of Art	332
Appendix V.	A List of Useful Sentences for Writers in a Tight Spot	335
Appendix VI.	Two Examples of Class Agendas for M.F.A. Students	340
Appendix VII.	The Robertson-Bly Ethics Code for Teaching Writing to Middle and High School Students	349
	Endnotes	355
	A Reading List	361
	Index	363
	Permissions Acknowledgments	373

Editorial Reviews

Bly provides excellent discussions…of the writer’s craft, but she also delves deeper…. She excels at coaxing writers…toward a larger vision of life and literature.”–The Plain Dealer on The Passionate, Accurate Story

From the Publisher

Prolific author Bly (The Passionate, Accurate Story; My Lord Bag of Rice), who teaches ethics-in-literature at the University of Minnesota, has written a useful analysis of the existing archetypes of creative writing programs. Bly looks at the many built-in problems of writing workshops whose dogmatic emphasis of techniques and neglect of ideas often prevent writers from creating their most passionate work. But Bly goes further than merely pinpointing the problems of the existing creative writing programs: this revealing study is replete with constructive advice on how to write meaningful nonfiction by incorporating techniques from psychotherapy and neuroscience. Bly also advocates giving school students, the poor, and the have-nots of society a forum through writing that will let them express what moves them. She ends the book with 15 writing exercises, usage sheets, and sample writing class agendas. Most suitable for writing teachers looking for something new to spark their students, this manual is recommended for all academic and large public libraries. Lisa J. Cihlar, Monroe P.L., WI Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal