Writing and the critical faculty

Reading the notes of Nurse Fusion about her MFA residency (here), I find myself worrying about the direction of MFA programs. Her notes read like notes from a literature conference, notes after listening to literary critics, not writers. Maybe I misread her shorthand notes (I hope so), but I think young writers need an MFA program (like mine, of course) that focuses on what makes writing tick, not what writing means. Maybe these talks are meant to be inspirational, to urge high goals. But there's a huge difference between what writers need to know to become storytellers and what they need to know to explicate the "meaning" of a literary work.

Writers who first worry about the latter put the cart before the horse. Writing begins as a much more practical matter, and you learn the mechanics of storytelling and therefore literary writing through a process that's close to reverse engineering. Look at this! Now how did the writer do that?

My MFA in playwriting came after a great controversy at the University of Oregon about which department, English or Theatre Arts, should offer the degree. English won. This is unfortunate. Theatre Arts should own the degree. But the English folks thought T.A. was filled with unintellectual blue collar theater workers, and T.A. thought the Eng. Dept. was filled with theoretical impractical theorists. Truth in both views. Better to learn from the mechanics than from the theorists! Better to learn craft as a practical matter before getting fancy with the tools! I made up for the wrong decision by taking tons of theater courses and studying under a theatrically trained playwright. But the English department still owns the degree. Here at Portland State, playwriting is taught rightly in the theater arts department.

We study screenplays in my screenwriting class but I emphasize that we are not going to study them the way they would be considered in a class on Film As Literature. Instead we are going to ask the questions: how are they put together? Why do they work? When does the beginning end and the middle begin? When does the middle end and the ending begin? What does this tell us about dramatic structure?

To engage the critical eye that looks for metaphor and meaning early in the writing process is to let a didactic bias enter the process too early. You can spot writing that is trying too hard to be "meaningful" a mile off. The writer should not be a philosopher or politician or guru, trying to change minds or sell an idea, but a magician who dazzles and engages us with tricks so we can't turn away from what is happening. Meaning is in the sugar pill s/he makes us swallow. Meaning comes after the dazzling, not before. Nothing is more boring than didactic writing.

In the 30s, writers learned their craft not in MFA programs but in the school of hard knocks, writing for magazines or newspapers or pulp publishers. I think it was a far better way to get it right.