Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Doris Betts
Director of Freshman-So phomore English
at U.N.C., Chapel Hill, N.C. Her fifth book of
fiction, The River to Pickle Beach, was
published by Harper and Row in 1972.
Early each semester in a new creative writing
class , 1 glance around the se minar table and
try separating by visual clues the deductive
from the inductive reasoners. I can almost do
this by applying syllogisms of my own.
That one : pencil poised over page one of a
new composition notebook. He will want a
short story chalked out with rising action,
climax, and denoument on my blackboard,
and he will copy it with straighter lines than
mine. The hairy student likes Allen Ginsberg
and Watts, reads Farina; he'll sketch Thor and
Spider Man during class on a sheet of paper
he borrows from the first. Wh ile I discourse
on Wayne C. Booth , he wi ll scribble adjectives about orgasm.
Beside him sits a girl who plans to recite
Kahlil Gibran at her outdoor wedding ceremony. She will marry someone very much like
the nearby nailbiter. I picture the pair teaching crafts in a summer camp , reading each
other's haikus about the Appalachians .
P H OO
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276
---- ---- - -
and thus discover how. What is t he difference between slick and literary? Art and
entertain ment? I write for myself. I write for
a reader. I write for a certain reader. I write
for the page itself.
The on ly correct answer to this confused
chorus is: No. And every Septemb er brings
the challenge to devise a sy llabus which will
convey to each student that, in writing fiction,
the aim of the soloist is to sing in unison while
standing at the North and South Poles .
(And no mixed metaphors, either.)
All writing courses have to start somewhe re
among the choices of extremes , and most
begin from freedom. Most of the teachers,
after all, are also writers who conside r themselves self-eman cipated. Early assignments
will be open-end ed. A characte r sketch. A
descriptio n. Read Welty , Mansfield, Chekhov,
Porter, Plath , Barthelm e, Oates , Kafka, Joyce,
and Fitzgerald. Bring in a poem. Keep a
notebook of ideas. Without much guidance or
advice stude nts will plunge into their own
first stories and sink or swim there. They
read these first efforts aloud; classmate s
debate the general effect. Broadly , very
broadly. With second stories, the criticism
becomes gradually more precise. The spiral
of the syllabus tightens as that manuscri pt is
revised. Perhaps the student feels it comes
right with a click, as Yeats said a poem would,
like a c losing box. Ideas about the nature of
fiction emerge from the stories themselves.
The teacher-w riter, suspiciou s of rules and
fearful of discoveri ng that he has always been
Lower Left:
Drawing by
Top right
Drawing by
Lower right
Drawing by
Top right
Drawing by
Lower right
Drawing by
R~GER
277
a secret hack and betrayed this by an involuntary scent which Kenyon and Sewanee
unerringly pe rceived on his manuscripts, says
very little. When he does speak, it is to recite
parables about writers who are not suspect.
What Hemingway said. Faulkner at the
University of Virginia. Tidbits from the Paris
Review interviews. There is a temple, his
attitude implies, and he a votary. I had such
writing teache rs in my own college years and
the method often worked.
But my own syllabus, though also shaped like
a spiral, is tight in September and wheels
out in wider and wider rings. My premise is
that most writers trained in the public schoo ls
can only write fiction by regressing from
deductive to inductive reason ing, from the
safety of adulthood to the precarious whatcan-happen-next life of a child, and then at
last must fuse both methods and habits of
thought.
I begin, then , by offering prem ises about fiction which will be of no value at all until time
to revise a first draft. (Relieved deductive
reasoners write down these premises and
number them as carefully as if they were commandments. The others absorb, perhaps, as
much as they can tolerate knowing.) We then
practice the separate parts of a short story
as if we might assemble one there on the
table from jigsaw fragments. One month later,
students are urged to forget all this entirely ,
drop those premises and household hints out
of sight into the unconscious, and free float
into a first draft. (The deductive reasoners
complain and feel cheated. The others decide
not to drop the course after all .) When the
story manuscripts are written- but not done,
not finished-we resurrect at last those early
weeks to see if anything was in them which
would help us now " to do justice," as
Marianne Moore said, " to first intention." (At
this point the deductive reasoners lend their
notebooks to those who have lost the napkins
and envelopes on which they scribbled code,
and adjectives about orgasm .) The syllabus
lurches from left to right to middle because
fiction is written by induction and revised by
deduction and students need to use and blend
both processes.
Why start by separation, then ? Perhaps in
the hope of asking Blake 's question, " How do
we distinguish the oak from the beech, the
horse from the ox, but by the bounding out-
278
280
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