I've been going to Cross Fit classes for five years now, and even though I'm deep into my fifties, I have become stronger and have learned a number of skills, outcomes that have surprised me.
If they put me in charge, MFA programs would be roughly 1/3 the way they are now (work on your thing, share some of it now and then, etc.) and 1/3 "reading like a writer" courses and 1/3 "fitness building," full of exercises designed just for trying and building writerly muscles.
E.G.: Read some Faulkner, dissect what's going on in the writing. Read some Barthelme, dissect what's going on in the writing. Identify the bare bones of a scene ("a father talks to his daughter about the human potential for violence"). Now write it like Faulkner. Now write it like Barthelme.
E.G.: Identify the bare bones of a scenario. (A parent is grieving the loss of a child.) Write a two-page version where the grief and loss are described directly. Write a two-page version where the grief and loss exist entirely to the extent that they are suffusing description of other things. Now write it like Woolf. Now write it like O'Connor.
A million permutations of this. Put otherwise: make creative writing instruction just a teensy bit more like ... instruction in every other form of art? IF THEY PUT ME IN CHARGE!
They should put you in charge! I think Kenneth Koch used to make his poetry students do parodies of poets they admired, in order to learn their style from the inside. IIRC in one of his (heavy-handed) books about fiction, John Gardner assigned the task of describing a barn as seen by someone in mourning without giving any details of the loss.
Great topic. Art might be too ineffable to score but the analogue that springs to mind is screenwriting. Because streaming services can figure out exactly where masses of viewers trail off or stop watching, screenwriting as a craft might be taught with this in mind. How can a genre film delivered to, say, rom-com consumers be most effectively constructed so that the greatest share of the potential rom-com audience gets everything they need, during every minute of viewing, to keep from clicking away?
There's a great piece in the new n+1 about how, counterintuitively, Netflix chose to use its wealth user data to *not* do that—to make, instead, reams of content that no one needs to pay full attention to
If they put me in charge, MFA programs would be roughly 1/3 the way they are now (work on your thing, share some of it now and then, etc.) and 1/3 "reading like a writer" courses and 1/3 "fitness building," full of exercises designed just for trying and building writerly muscles.
E.G.: Read some Faulkner, dissect what's going on in the writing. Read some Barthelme, dissect what's going on in the writing. Identify the bare bones of a scene ("a father talks to his daughter about the human potential for violence"). Now write it like Faulkner. Now write it like Barthelme.
E.G.: Identify the bare bones of a scenario. (A parent is grieving the loss of a child.) Write a two-page version where the grief and loss are described directly. Write a two-page version where the grief and loss exist entirely to the extent that they are suffusing description of other things. Now write it like Woolf. Now write it like O'Connor.
A million permutations of this. Put otherwise: make creative writing instruction just a teensy bit more like ... instruction in every other form of art? IF THEY PUT ME IN CHARGE!
They should put you in charge! I think Kenneth Koch used to make his poetry students do parodies of poets they admired, in order to learn their style from the inside. IIRC in one of his (heavy-handed) books about fiction, John Gardner assigned the task of describing a barn as seen by someone in mourning without giving any details of the loss.
Great topic. Art might be too ineffable to score but the analogue that springs to mind is screenwriting. Because streaming services can figure out exactly where masses of viewers trail off or stop watching, screenwriting as a craft might be taught with this in mind. How can a genre film delivered to, say, rom-com consumers be most effectively constructed so that the greatest share of the potential rom-com audience gets everything they need, during every minute of viewing, to keep from clicking away?
There's a great piece in the new n+1 about how, counterintuitively, Netflix chose to use its wealth user data to *not* do that—to make, instead, reams of content that no one needs to pay full attention to
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/