Creative Writing as a Liberal Art

My senior year at Thomas Aquinas College, a professor, let’s call him Mr. Durand, asked me, “What are you writing your thesis about?”

“Literature,” I said.

“Oh….” He frowned a little. After a second, he looked over his shoulder, then turned to me half-mumbling, “I hate being on literature thesis boards. Every time I read through their argument, I just think, ‘Oh, yeah, sounds probable that Peter is the most virtuous character in War and Peace, or Alexi is a symbol of mysticism.’ It’s all probable, so I don’t know why we waste time arguing for it or against it.”

“Mine isn’t about that. It’s more general. My thesis question is: does Aristotle’s Poetics apply to the contemporary novel?”

“Huh. That sounds different.”

In subsequent conversations with Mr. Durand, he explained that my thesis was different from other literature theses is because it was concerned with the “principles” of literature. I found it hard to believe that it was rare at a liberal arts college for a student to be concerned with the principals of literature, so I asked around, and found many other theses that were concerned with beauty, criteria for beauty, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle’s discussions of aesthetics. However, few of these theses mentioned plot or narration.

My education as a writer has continued beyond Thomas Aquinas College and that senior thesis. I have since studied at Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop, been accepted to study at Macondo Writers’ Workshop later this summer, and today I pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Reflecting on my experience at TAC, I know what purpose my thesis served in my writing life: it was my first step in developing a critical process. This is what Mr. Durand noticed about my thesis. Not that it was more concerned with the principles, but that it was a discussion about how literature ought to be read prior to the reading of literature.

In a previous essay, I explored how interpreting literature without engaging with craft leads to random guesses at the meaning of the story. To interpret literature, the tools by which the story was constructed must be considered. Without considering craft, one falls into the “ancient aliens” logical fallacy. This is what Mr. Durand was frustrated at when he noted that literary theses argue for the “probable” but not for the “necessary.” The authors of said theses did not outline any critical process. They failed to determine what elements of fiction they would analyze. If scientists must outline their methods, literary critics must account for their critical processes.

How, then, ought a Catholic Liberal Arts curriculum encourage its students to develop their critical processes?

The easy answer is to incorporate literary criticism into the curriculum. Throw in some Proust here, some Jacques Maritain there, a little bit of Sartre, Newman, and Auerbach in between to spice things up. Voila, students now know what a literary process looks like. However, this gives them no practice in doing it themselves. Imagine a science curriculum without a lab, or a math curriculum where the students aren’t given problems to solve on their own.

The less obvious option is to teach Creative Writing as a liberal art.

My first experience workshopping at Lighthouse was in a class led by Benjamin Whitmer. One student submitted an excerpt from his novel. It was wonderful. I enjoyed it just as much as I enjoyed many published works. I read it twice, both times totally absorbed. At workshop, everybody went around the table and provided their criticism of the piece. When it was my turn, I said, “Honestly, I have no feedback. Really, this was good. I liked it. I wish I could say something helpful, but I can’t.”

“Well,” Ben said, “What did you like?”

“I don’t know. I liked the dialogue about the dog that ran away.”

“Alright,” Ben said. “Thanks, Oso.”

After everybody went around and said their first impressions, we broke out into group discussion. I didn’t participate. I couldn’t participate. I just wrote down what others said.

After workshop, peers give the writer who submitted a “workshop letter.” The letter is meant to give the author written feedback on their work. It should be personal. It helps the author that submitted understand the problems with their piece as seen by their peers, and it helps the writer of the letter “develop their critical process.”

“It’s good,” I wrote. “I don’t know what to say. I wish I could be more helpful.”

The more I workshopped, the more I learned to identify the problems and strengths of stories. I learned to read for craft. My feedback looked less like: “I liked it, good job!” and more like: “On page 12, your character’s conflict totally disappears with an apology that doesn’t feel sincere. It feels like a cop-out, so you can drop it as a plot point,” and, “The mother character is cliché because we never see her in scene. We only see what her daughter thinks of her. So, either your narrator is a narcissist, or you need to go in scene to properly characterize the mother.”

It looks small, maybe even petty, but receiving this feedback and learning to give this feedback has taught me to read in a way that is helpful in communities of writers’ I have had the pleasure of being a part of.

This is not the kind of feedback I received at Thomas Aquinas College when I gave my MFA writing samples to professors. I got feedback more like the feedback I gave at my first workshop. “I liked it,” or “I didn’t like it,” with, “I don’t know why,” and no actionable mention of how to improve it. Needless to say, I wasn’t accepted to any MFA in Creative Writing program that year.

I learned the basic rules of writing fiction at Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop. I learned the basic rules of reading fiction at Lighthouse. In my first workshop with Ben, I workshopped two stories. One became my first publication. The other became my first prize.

You might say liberal arts are not meant to teach students how to write literature. However, Lighthouse taught me more about reading literature after one eight-week workshop than TAC taught me after a four-year liberal arts curriculum. At TAC, I was regularly invited to consider my methods for philosophy, theology, math, and science, but aside from reading Aristotle’s Poetics first semester of freshmen year, the curriculum never worked in a reflection of critical process for reading literature.

As a liberal arts curriculum, we thought about literature rather “slavishly.” We gave ourselves to assumptions about interpretation because we were ignorant of craft.

Teaching creative writing to help students write literature might not bear fruit in a liberal arts curriculum, but the point of an undergraduate writers’ workshop is not to make writers. Most students who attend an undergraduate writers’ workshop will not see publication outside of a college lit mag. However, creative writing as a liberal art helps students learn to read literature. You cannot participate in a writers’ workshop without actively developing your critical process.

Critical process aside, creative writing grows the soul.

My senior year, I had a reputation for being obsessed with Flannery O’Connor. I used Mystery and Manners not only as a text for my senior thesis, but also as spiritual reading. Despite this, I did not consider the works of Flannery O’Connor to be “Great Books.” So, one day I asked Mr. Cain, a professor who I greatly admire, “Why do we read Flannery O’Connor in a great books’ curriculum? Aren’t Borges, Hemingway, Marques, and many others, way more influential and generally considered better writers?”

Mr. Cain, in true Socratic fashion, answered my question with a question. “Why do you read Flannery O’Connor?”

“Because she draws attention to my atheism. Because I see myself in the grandma and the misfit. Because I would be a good man if only there was somebody there to shoot me every day of life.”

“As far as I’m concerned, if Flannery’s writing is less influential, but good for spiritual growth, than it’s an important part of a Catholic Liberal Arts curriculum.”

I continue to live by this guidance. Liberal arts are not just the occasion for reasoning freely, but the occasion for grace, for freely loving God. This, largely, is what writing fiction is to me.

The first short story I submitted to Ben’s workshop was The Last Real Cowboy. At the time, I considered it my best story. Friends at TAC said they loved it. They told me the ending made them cry. The story was about a boy who’s hated by all because of his struggles with anger and with understanding. After his mother spanks him, he goes to his room and kicks his pet puppy to expunge his anger. He cries, sits on the floor all night, and in the morning decides to run away.

I expected to receive small nit-picks of feedback. Instead, Ben said, “That last scene is a cliché. The puppy was random to the story, he was just there to take the hits of the ending emotion, instead of making the character grapple with it. Take the puppy out. Make your character turn in and grapple with his emotion. Then, when he’s horrified at himself, he decides to run away.”

Ben was right. I rewrote it. I took out the puppy. The boy behaved worse, which explained why his mother physically punished him. In the end, he imagined himself killing her, killing everyone. After one sleepless night, he hopped on his bike and ran away.

The new ending hurt to write. I was different when I was a child from this protagonist. I was calm, and generally quick to understand. I didn’t make friends with angry children. But you cannot write convincingly about a sinner without loving the sinner. I stretched my soul to love a boy who might kill his own mother. In spiritual contortion, in charity that I hadn’t experienced before, I saw Christ in him. I had the ending.

It's one thing to see Christ in the Misfit as a reader. It’s another thing to write the Misfit and love the Christ in him. Writing fiction grows the soul.

It’s because of these experience that I realize how important the writers’ workshop is to my life as a free thinker. Maybe a different way to think about “writers’ workshops” is as “labs for literature.” In my undergraduate science class, we occasionally spent time in the laboratory, trying to recreate experiments that (in text) we saw others perform. The workshop is that, but for the critical literary process. It actively engages students in the creation of a critical process—allowing them to test hypothesis about criticism with their own work and the work of their peers.

Including literature in a Catholic liberal arts curriculum is useless if students are not taught to think liberally, to think lovingly, about literature. This might be done simply by working literary criticism into the curriculum, but any science teacher knows that students learn better with a lab. The workshop is the lab of criticism. Today, it’s common to see aspiring agents and editors studying at MFA programs, not because they wish to be writers, but because they see writers’ workshops as a necessary step in developing a critical process—i.e. learning to tell good writing from bad writing and stating why it is so.

I assume this is something that would make Mr. Durand more comfortable with literary theses. He was more inclined towards the sciences. Not to say he couldn’t hold his own in a discussion about literature, philosophy, and theology. He absolutely could. He was a free thinker trained in the liberal arts, after all. But I think he’d be more excited to read literary theses if they laid out their methods—or if they had methods. Somehow, I know exactly what he’d say if I told him writers’ workshops should play a role in a Catholic liberal arts curriculum:

“Huh. That sounds different.”

"Don't Disturb! Writer At Work" by amypalko is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.