Alicia Costello

4 December 2009

Essay #2: When Classes Unteach

            Looking over the course objectives the first day, I’m always excited to think that, in three months, I’ll learn all these things and be able to articulate the ideas.  The two course objectives for Creative Writing I most looked forward to were the “attitude that a draft or manuscript presented is always a work in progress” and “to use draft exchanges to learn disciplined routines and cooperative relations with other writers & authors” objectives.  Of course, both of these go into the “unlearning the popular idea of an isolated genius producing works overnight” by teaching the actual creative process, but we’ll get to that later.  In this semester’s class, I learned to look as drafts as unfinished work and how a community of writers should work in order to function well.

            There are two types of writers.  Those who, like JRR Tolkien who penned Lord of the Rings, write draft after draft after draft, and those writers who, like his friend CS Lewis, write it down, tweak it a little bit, then publish it.  I’m personally more of the CS Lewis type writer and so, when I finally get the whole story out on paper, go, “Wow, I’m done.  Thank God.” And then I read it and promptly delete the whole thing because I think it’s terrible.  I think writing so many papers for college has done this to me as well, as my busy schedule leaves little time for a second or third draft of any essay.  The course objective that drafts are a work in progress reminds us that not only should we judge others on their writing by simply a first draft, but we shouldn’t judge ourselves on writing by a first draft.  Throughout the past year, the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my writing is that a first draft is in no way final unless you never work on it again.  Throughout this year, I mostly test my drafts by changing the viewpoint and playing with the freedom each point of view offers.  A big help to do this was chapter 17 in Minot’s book, in which he pointed out very clearly the pros and cons of each viewpoint.  By playing around with certain aspects of fiction, my drafts became just what they were—drafts and I learned to be able to draw a line through something I’d written and write something better.  The spirit of the course objective is to remember that the work presented in the class is just a snippet of what most of these writers can do…but of course I had to be different and take away an idea from the objective completely out of left field.   Learning to work with drafts and to rip apart something you’ve bled out onto the page inherently smashes the idea of the isolated writer producing work overnight, because I’m not like that, and none of my classmates are like that. 

            The objective about draft exchanges really excited me because I had wanted try and start a writing group, because the other big writing lesson I learned this year is that writing groups are really really important.  Minot talks about the editor of The Atlantic giving him advice about cutting the two pages in the beginning of Sausage and Beer involving the sister, and how that completely changed the story in a way that Minot, now on draft 4 of his story, never thought about.  In this instance, a fresh set of eyes really helped the story become something greater than it was. Of course, I have no idea how to start a writing group, or how one is supposed to function, so I took some cues from the class as a rather large writing group and found out what I did and didn’t like.  I learned what comments seemed helpful to my peers and which did not, I learned generally how to keep a critique on track.  I also learned to read people to see how receptive they are to changes and corrections before I bother giving them ideas. 

            In Creative Writing, I learned much within the course objectives of the “attitude that a draft or manuscript presented is always a work in progress” and “to use draft exchanges to learn disciplined routines and cooperative relations with other writers & authors.”  Of course, these both help to also learn the objective to unlearn the popular idea of a writer being an isolated genius creating work overnight.  From what I’ve learned in this class, I plan to implement the tools of draft-work and a writing group to help better my fiction.