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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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| PAST INTERVIEWS | MORE INTERVIEWS |
MG: I absolutely agree. Writing can be taught or, at least, things that are useful to writing can be taught. But I also think that there’s a point after which you should just get on with it.
SS: I find myself giving my students a lot more specific feedback than my teachers ever gave me. Maybe that’s just my need for control, I don’t know. My teachers would always say, "this is good" or "this isn’t working," but almost never suggest how to fix it.
MG: I think I’m very specific without being directive—like Sheila’s teachers. I’m specific about what is and isn’t working, but I try not to be regarding ways to fix things. Usually.
SS: It can be hard to resist.
MA: But if your teachers didn’t tell you how to fix it, what exactly did they tell you beyond sort of good/bad types of judgments?
SS: They would say what they thought the story was about, what they thought was not credible given the character, where the language was off – things like that.
MA: So, big picture types of things? Would they line edit, would they say "cut this" or "expand that?"
SS: I remember once John Gardner sat there with me and re-punctuated my sentences in order to show me how they might have more rhythm and force.
MG: He’s a wonderful punctuator.
SS: Amazing. And he puts the parts of speech in a sentence in unexpected, powerful places. Or he would say something about an image that somehow spoke to the character or to the story. Maybe I wrote a story with a blue coat in it, and he wanted to see a refrain or a reprise of that image, things like that. He showed me how to make time pass more smoothly in a scene. But they were usually general comments, not directives.
MA: Was his class a conventional workshop?
SS: No. Nobody ever had a piece of paper in front of them. Everything was read aloud, and we were all hearing it for the first time. Your only task was to say what sounded good to you or what didn’t make sense or what didn’t you agree with. This didn’t leave a lot of room for comments because most of us weren’t very good listeners. But it left a lot of room for him to talk, and he was really good at it – that was all we wanted anyway. I remember being irritated hearing my fellow grad students say anything. "Get it over with - make your remarks and let’s hear John Gardner!" I don’t think I was alone in thinking those thoughts.
MA: That sounds like an exceptional class, in many ways. Would you recommend that approach?
SS: No. You have to be John Gardner.
MA: What about your own teaching styles? Are you enthusiastic proponents of the workshop method?
SS: With modifications. There was a semester where I didn’t feel like standing up in front of a class and having trouble start (laughs). I was going through a rough time and just didn’t want to deal with it. So I put the students in small groups, and they had to do their own critiques. Once they polished the remarks they had made to each other, and I found a draft that looked like it wasn’t going to get hit too hard in the workshop, then we’d all read it. I found that left room for talking about other stories.
This year I’ve been teaching an Intro to Fiction workshop. In it, I asked the students to generate a generic list of questions you might ask about a story. We started out with a list of questions I made up; later they made up their own lists, and we compiled those into a single list. I had people take home a manuscript, pick out a question or two and answer those questions. The advantage to this method is that it avoids a lot of (affects dewy-eyed undergrad voice) "Gee, I really liked this story, and I was so happy for you when I read it." We’d go around the room and everybody would read the answer to his/her question.
MG: That’s a really good idea. Because I’ve had groups where things have gone really well, people have been engaged in the work, but I’ve also had others where people have used the time to cement a flirtation or talk about sports or something. But your method requires focus.
MA: Is there a textbook you have found useful for teaching novice or intermediate fiction writers?
MG: I don’t really like any of them. I use Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction because it covers all of the basics, but I don’t require it.
