Elbow: Bringing "Creative Writing" into the Academic Sphere

In presenting Elbow to the class, Tim Wenger focused primarily (and rightly I think) on Elbow's push for varying degrees and methods of applying freewriting at the beginning of the writing process.

One of the most interesting aspects of this presentation (and I've run into Elbow before as an undergraduate and very much like what he had to say then as well), is how much the varying degrees and methods of freewriting promoted by Elbow echo what I've encountered in recent ventures into a more formal study of "creative writing."

Tim Wenger outlined the process of freewriting employed by Elbow, which, depending on the specific adaptation described, amounts to either an exceptionally rough first draft or a long period of idea generating prior to a first formal attempt at an organized fully wrought draft of the piece.

In The Modern Library's Writers Workshop Stephen Koch, who taught in the creative writing and MFA programs at UNY-Stonybrook and Princeton University, and then spent twenty years in the program at the Columbia School of the Arts, repeatedly describes the process of discovering your story as a fiction writer in much the same way Elbow describes finding the arguments and essays of academic writing through his various freewriting processes. Koch argues for the necessity of discovering the story through a "closed door" first draft that delays taking notice of the audience (another Elbow tenet) and discovers the story as it goes along, without trying to outline it/plot it out first. He quotes writers from Eudora Welty to Stephen King in support of this idea of closing the door and diving in on that first situation, idea, character, etc. that is the first germ of the story.

I found it fascinating that the creative writing process so often divorced from the academic process in my experience. It seems, sadly, that they are treated like first cousins who shouldn't get too close lest they fall in love and have deformed offspring in which the writers analyze themselves mid-story/novel/poem. The reality, as echoed by the commonalities in approach of Elbow and these various fiction writers, is that a marraige of processes that already echo one another may lead to insights beneficial to both styles. Even in a place as seemingly unlikely as Graff and Berkenstein's They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Persuasive Writing," one can find the following quote emphasizing the connections between the genres: "It is our belief, that the "they say/I say" pattern cuts across different disciplines and genres of writing, including creative writing" (XIX). While, the argument is not directed as precisely at process as are the commonalities between Elbow and Koch et al that I am describing, it serves to underline the closeness of the genres.

Further along in the presentation, I found the idea Tim introduced as "planting seeds," and which Elbow described in the youtube video shown in the presentation as taking down notes and jotting ideas as soon as they come to you when you are in the first stages of a project are also echoed in Koch's text, where the enouragement to keep a writer's notebook and to instantly record story ideas and insights is echoed by Koch himself and a veritable army of professional literary figures.

In closing Tim addressed Elbow's critics by pointing out that he (that is Elbow) felt that they tended to ignore the other end of his process, the refining and critical aspect in favor of the beginning, where he comes off as an extreme expressivist with quotes like "make a mess." I agree. Elbow when fully studied argues as much for a polished and finished final product by applying tough critiquing and thorough reworking to any given piece before presenting it as a finished product. To reduce his thought to freewriting is a distortion along the lines of those discussed in Matsuda's "Process and Post Process: a Discursive History." As Matsuda indicates the variuos movements promoters have done, such a reductin exaggerates Elbow's ideas to cartoon like bubbles easily popped. They do no justice to the fullness of his practice and thought.

Finally, I remember the most powerful piece I encountered from Elbow focused not on the act of writing but the act of instruction. I don't have access to the piece itself and so I cannot quote from it, but in it, Elbow argues for the same separation of creator and critic in the teaching process that he promotes in the writing process. He suggests that if we (teachers) will prepare a final, in whatever form it takes, as difficult as justifiable, (being the critic first) we can then turn around in class and nurture and cheer and give everything to helping the students without fear that they will become to reliant on us or that we are giving some advantage that will make the assessment to easy, as we know that the students are going to need all they can do and all we can do for them to prepare for it. Then, switching from switching back to the critic (or from nurturer to gatekeeper as a colleague of mine calls it) we can grade the tests with out worrying about whether it is too difficult or an accurate assessment because we know that we have done everything possible to prepare out students for it. I loved this idea when I first encountered it, and it seems to me a brilliant and obvious extension of his writing process to instruction.

In the day to day of teaching, it is easy to fall into old ruts and run through the textbook without much thought and with little variation, to let the textbook become the defacto teacher of the course if we are too lazy, busy, or unaware. I think actively engaging in this bifurcated approach to course creation and instruction helps prevent that. I need to apply it more explicitly and effectively in my own teaching.