Why You Should Avoid Feedback-based Writing Programs
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Looking for strategies for developing your writing skills? Today, I’m diving into why you should avoid feedback-based writing programs.
When I was 18 years old, I signed up for my first college creative writing class, The Short Story.
The teacher was a North Carolina woman who'd published a collection of short stories—I didn't really read short stories except for the ones I'd had to in high school, and I had no idea what made a short story a short story. The only ones I could remember were Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (because holy *&^%, who doesn't remember that one) and Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", both of which I loved. Five years later I would read George Saunders' short story "CommComm" and have an experience I can only describe as religious, but even then, I wouldn't be able to articulate why.
I wanted to write them—that was all I knew.
I was bulimic at the time, rushing to the nearest campus bathroom after every meal to purge my food. I was also a public school kid from South Carolina certain that I was the least intelligent person at the university.
In the creative writing course, I wrote a couple of stories and got Bs on them. I don't remember what they were about—I'm pretty sure one was about a clown—but I do remember that, in the workshop-style setting in which the class provided feedback on each other's stories, my peers gnawed at them with such brilliance that it confirmed my inferiority.
Out of a desperation for an A (like Mark Twain, who said he could survive for two months on a good compliment, I've always been a glutton for affirmation, especially in the form of grades), I sat down and wrote a "short story" about a bulimic girl. It was entirely nonfiction, a litany of secrets I hadn't told a soul.
I got an A, to my relief, then promptly threw away the story so that no one would ever find it. I was sure that if, say, my roommate picked it up, or my mom during a visit, they'd recognize me as the girl.
What is the lesson here—to write what you know? To be vulnerable on the page?
​I don't at all take those lessons from this experience. This memory is an icky one for me, an experience that feels closer to being bullied into a corner than liberated into finding my voice.
I didn't find my voice that semester—I didn't find anything. I felt so clobbered by the feedback-based classroom that I resorted to an uneasy self-exposure out of duress, a kind of exhibitionist maneuver, revealing my most tender place to strangers before I was even ready to reveal it to the people I loved and trusted.
​Looking back, I now know that there is another way to deal with young and/or new writers, and it's radical: teach them to write fiction.
Imagine that.
Teach them to take the big questions in their hearts—in my case at 18, how to belong, how to live with fraud syndrome, how to feel like the world wants you here—and explore them through characters who aren't just like them. Because that's what fiction is. That's why fiction is—because it opens up reality and reaches beyond it. Fiction that's merely reality in a mask faces the same limitations that reality does. It isn't expansive for the writer, or for the world. It's just a foggy mirror that could use some Windex.​
Here's a radical suggestion: When you're trying on a new kind of writing, stop taking classes in which feedback from peers is the heart of the course.
That’s my suggested strategy for developing your writing skills as an aspiring author.
​I don't mean to be a jerk, but this is lazy teaching.
And I get why it's tempting for teachers—teaching writing is scary. It's scary because writing is mysterious, and ultimately no one is quite sure how it happens or happens well, and every writer, unless he is a sociopath, is plagued by self-doubts about his product and his process.
But for a teacher to deal with that insecurity by outsourcing the teaching to the students who are all new at this—which is what feedback-based teaching is—is destructive. It's toxic, wimpy, and lazy.
Imagine a flight school at which all the aspiring pilots get together and ty to figure out how to fly a plane while the only actual pilot in the room watches. Would you hop on that jet? I will drive, thank you.
So if you've felt discouraged by writing classes in which you've written your first ever thing (or your second ever thing, or your third ever thing)—a short story, a novel opening, a poem—only to be told by 11 other strangers everything that they didn't like about it, I'm sorry. Nothing is wrong with you. You just fell into a crappy system. And good news—now you get to crawl out.
You can rediscover your joy in writing, I promise. Seek out real advice from writers who've been at it a little while. George Saunders is an incredible teacher who just published an incredible book on writing. John Gardner's The Art of Fiction is fantastic.
Find others who are supportive and rooting for your success—join our book club for writers, in which we take popular novels and memoirs and take craft lessons from them (it's super fun!). If you're in a lighter mood, listen to my podcast.
Your creativity will come back, I promise. It's resilient that way. Just let it pick what parties it goes to from now on. It's an introvert, and it needs a little TLC that doesn't involve kegs.
I hope you found this strategy for developing your writing skills insightful!