Welcome to my new series, “imagination||craft”! Every week, I will send along a piece on Saturdays in which I think through some issue of creatitivity, writing craft, imagination, or inspiration. I am also planning to send “Monthly Inspiration” posts to paid subscribers, discussing conversations, thoughts, and cultural texts (books and movies, mostly) that have been personally inspiring to me in the previous month.
In this first installment, I wanted to spend some time reflecting on what I’ve learned about writing in teaching it. This series is inspired by what I see as the interaction between open play and structure in creative writing, a concept that’s central to my teaching practice. Here’s how I describe it in the introductory comments of one of my courses, Approaching Mystery:
Creative production works in a cycle of play (learning to be expansive) and revision (learning restraint). We will spend much of our time working in the expansive mode—being playful and open to see what comes of that. You will then work with the material to craft it into more polished pieces.
As a creative writing instructor, I’ve found that one of my strengths is helping people loosen up and creatively play in a way that allows them to access new angles for writing (meaning new ways to approach the material of their lives and imagination). I enjoy the process of watching people begin to trust themselves and what they are intuitively drawn to. It’s gratifying to see students come into a new connection to their voice and material as they take leaps and try new approaches.
On the other side of that expansion/restraint equation, I have often helped students and editing clients find a throughline and structure for essays, and I enjoy that process, as well. In reading closely and attentively, I can sometimes see the “thread” with the most energy in a way that the writer initially can’t. In this way, our best readers (whether teachers, editors, or writing friends) give us useful perspective on what we are doing intuitively as writers, even when we can’t fully articulate it—or see it!— ourselves. And at their best, such readers help train our eyes and ears to see and build on the strengths in our writing for ourselves.
Still, in thinking through issues of form and structure, both as a writer and instructor/reader, I rely a great deal on my intuition. I have a complicated relationship to structure, as it relates to writing. (And maybe as it relates to other areas of life?) In my years in the academic world, earning a PhD in English and teaching American literature, I became adept at writing in relation to specific conventions, and in some ways the structure of the scholarly essay pleased me, allowing me a container for presenting my insights and the evidence for them. At the same time, as I turned my attention back toward writing creative pieces, I reveled in the intuitive process of crafting writing and organically finding structure.
But whether organic or not, writing is a container for imagination, and making our way toward a form that feels like “ours” can click a project into place. It’s the constraint that helps us find our way into our work.
One of the most exciting things about having brought in some of my former Creative Nonfiction colleagues to work with me at Muse is that we’re building a team of seasoned instructors whose strengths complement each other. Take for example Nancy McCabe’s upcoming course Shapes of Stories, a ten-week exploration of form and structure as it pertains to personal essay. Students in the class will experiment (play!) with a variety of essay forms, such as the hermit crab and the braided essay, and they will also learn strategies for mapping and modeling the narrative structure and “shapes” of their own essays during the revision process. As a teacher, Nancy has thought about narrative structure in ways that I haven’t, and she empowers students with tools for finding the right form for their emerging pieces.
As Nancy explains in her recent piece for the Brevity blog, “Many Ways of Visualizing Story Structures,” “there’s a longstanding tradition of writers sketching out the shapes of their stories as a tool for understanding them.” Read Nancy’s great piece to learn some of the history of these visualizations, whether Freytag’s Pyramid, the quilt, the leaky faucet, or structures of the student’s own making, such as a flower in which “each petal represent[ed] … [a] separate version of events.” And if you’d like to learn more about what will be covered in her upcoming course, check out the breakdown of weekly lessons for the course here.
Our two fall classes on the Wet Ink platform, Shapes of Stories and The Writer as Researcher, begin Sept. 10th at Muse. And the next series of drop-in generative writing workshops on Zoom starts next week on Saturday Sept. 2nd! For more information about our Fall courses at Muse Creative Support, you can visit the website.