By Iris Cushing
This semester, I have been fortunate to meet with writers who are in the process of drafting creative writing projects, and as a result, I have grown increasingly curious about the unique ways writing center consultations might serve creative writers. I wanted to share a few of the approaches I’ve taken in working with these writers here. In particular, I’d like to focus on how I frame the consultations—that is, with the goal of maintaining a writer-focused space, in spite of the fact that, as a creative writer myself, this change in genre can make me more directive.
As consultants, it’s impossible for us to be well-versed in all subjects. At best, we have a handful of things we know a lot about, and can choose whether or not to include our own expertise on a subject in a writing center consultation, depending on the writer’s needs. I find it very easy to let a student know that I hold no knowledge about something like stochastic modeling, or that I’ve never read Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and let my genuine blank-slate status play a role in the conversation that ensues.
But with a creative writer, I find that there is always a moment when I must disclose that fact that I also write creatively, and this moment usually comes early on. To withhold this information would feel, to me, a lie by omission. Part of the impetus for sharing this information about myself is a desire to let them know that I also love messing with language in a way that has nothing to do with grades, or even with making myself understood; I want them to know that we share a pursuit that is largely solitary, and that it’s actually a pretty rare and special occasion when you get to read and talk about this kind of work with another person.
As part of this disclosure, I also let them know that I’ve been in many creative writing workshops, and have a whole bag of tricks that I am willing to share if they would like to frame our conversation as a one-person workshop. Would they like to read something aloud, and then hear me read it back? Are they interested in hearing suggestions of writers whose work I think they might enjoy? Filling them in on this part of my background offers a kind of transparency, I think, not only about the ways that we might approach work together but about the ways that creative writing pedagogy differs from academic writing pedagogy. It can be jarring, for both consultant and student, to shift from thinking about academic projects to thinking about creative ones. Talking about my methodology with the student helps me formalize this shift and avoid falling into the same solution-oriented patterns I might use in another consultation.
Because they don’t follow an assignment (besides one a writer may have given herself), I believe that creative projects don’t bear the same relation to problem-solving that academic assignments do. Regardless of the writer’s intended audience, the person who will ultimately read and evaluate the piece of writing most closely is the writer herself. I make sure to let a creative writer know this as I introduce something that might ordinarily come up in an academic writing consultation, such as grammar: does the writer want to be grammatically correct in her piece? To what extent do things like clarity and order play a role in her aims for her writing? I also make sure to take time to talk about the “motivating” effect of assignments, bringing up the fact that things like due dates and parameters are often the very “generative limits” that get us to write in the first place. As part of every consultation with a creative writer, I include some discussion (often toward the end) about what parameters she might make for herself as a means to keep developing her writing.
Two of the creative writers I’ve been working with have been coming in to the Writing Center on an almost weekly basis, and so I’ve gotten to know them as writers better than I do many students. One of them is working on a play, and the other on a novel; I write poetry and work with poetry in a scholarly capacity, and my training in fiction and drama is very minimal. It’s a rich and continual learning process for me to witness these writers’ relationships to their work on a regular basis, and I’m grateful to them for sharing that process with me.
Published March 28, 2016
