The Oedipal cannibal says, “Nom-mom-mom.”
Monthly Archives: October 2014
I hate to keep harping on creative writing courses, because I think good writers certainly can benefit from the input of other writers. Some of the best writing comes from collaboration, and writers getting together to bounce ideas off each other has a long and honorable history.
Think the Algonquin Round Table.
I just don’t think there are enough good writers to justify the hundreds of creative writing programs out there. (An average of 20 new programs every year!) MFA alum Lev Raphael had some not-so-flattering things to say about his creative writing classmates : “Were they all good writers or even good critics of each other’s work? No.”
But, one of my more controversial takes on the academic field of creative writing is that it creates a pyramid dynamic, in which writers train other writers to be writers who train other writers, and so on, until saturation inevitably leads to market collapse.
Recently, one creative writing professor, Hanif Kureishi of Kingston University, called such programs “a waste of time” and the “the new mental hospitals,” and the commentary on it has explicitly invoked the dangers of the pyramid dynamic. Vindicated!
How about let’s stop misleading everyone into thinking they can be creative writers, if only they buy the right how-to book or take the right class. It’s a rare talent, and we should treat it that way instead of commodifying it for universal consumption.
Meh-phistopheles has a “devil may care” attitude.
Dr. Stephen Carver at Blot the Skrip and Jar It has laid down a list of the “Top Ten Writing Mistakes Editors See Every Day.”
They’re all pretty good, but the most striking bit of advice is number 5, failure to understand dramatic pacing. Carver turns the dead-horse cliché of “show, don’t tell” on its head by examining two complementary narrative styles, the mimetic (showing) and diegetic (telling). These two storytelling modes have actually been around since ancient Greece when they were known as μίμησις and διήγησις.
Just like yin and yang, these two must be in balance. In a good story, you have to go back and forth between the real-time narration of the mimetic mode and the explanatory narration of the diegetic mode.
cacochromy [from Greek κακός “bad” plus χρῶμα “color”] /kə-KOK-rah-mee/ Similar to cacophony (from Greek φωνή “sound”), which is a mix of discordant sounds, cacochromy is a mix of discordant colors.
EX: “His clothes were a cacochromy: lime green deck shoes with gray socks, powder blue slacks, dark purple t-shirt, and a sunshine yellow jacket.”
This introduces our series on phaticized work, a covert and often unconscious form of corruption in which organizational resources are diverted to personal ends by way of social instincts.
It’s an on-the-books form of embezzlement, because instead of shifting money outside the organization—requiring the books to be “cooked”—phaticized work commandeers official workplace activities for private ends that have nothing to do with the mission of the organization.
Nobel judge Horace Engdahl, while echoing some of my concerns about creative writing programs, had this to say about transgressive fiction:
Engdahl slammed novels which “pretend to be transgressive”, but which are not. “One senses that the transgression is fake, strategic,” he said. “These novelists, who are often educated in European or American universities, don’t transgress anything because the limits which they have determined as being necessary to cross don’t exist.”
As fans know, I’m not a big fan of consciously transgressive art, either.
I suspect Engdahl and I might disagree about which transgressions are fake and which limits don’t really exist, or (I would qualify it) which ones exist mostly as traumatic memories rather than overwhelming current realities. But the issue he’s raising is an important one. How transgressive can institutionalized writers really be?
I’m not really the kind of guy to bend over backward for the team. Unless it’s a limbo team.