How to Be a Better Writer

Show Notes

• Once Upon a Trope  
• Ryan George: If Cats Had a Podcast 
• Zeugma 
• Cathedral 
• Iowa Writers Workshop Model 
• A Complete Guide to Beta Reading 
• Should Writers be Silent? 
• Magical Realism 
• The Charterhouse of Parma 
• Tech Bro Invents Hanging Out

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

[Intro Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris. And as a heads up, you’ve got just one more day to get our feedback on a thousand words as part of our 10 year celebration. So if you haven’t yet, go to patreon.com/mythcreants and sign up for that $10 or Pegasus tier.

Oren: And speaking of celebrating, I would like to introduce our special guest, Bunny.

Bunny: Woohoo! Who’s this?

Oren: A new challenger!

Bunny: Is that a boing boing I hear? Wow, it must be a bunny coming around the corner. God, that was awful.

Oren: That’s the sound that bunnies make. It’s just science.

Bunny: I see, you know, Bugs Bunny.

Oren: And you may have seen Bunny’s work on the site. She does our excellent comic illustrations and has also done a few posts for us and has in general just been part of Mythcreants for quite some time now. And we appreciate having her in general. And she was kind enough to come onto the podcast to guest a few episodes with us.

Bunny: Well, thank you. I’m happy to be here. I’ve been listening to the podcast for as long as I’ve been helping out with Mythcreants and probably longer because I was a commenter before that. So it’s exciting to finally ascend to the throne of actually podcasting.

Oren: Yeah, this is the magic of podcasting. Just chat about various things.

Bunny: I love things.

Oren: People like things. We could do an offline podcast like that one tech bro got made fun of for suggesting, which was just hanging out.

Bunny: Copyright, trademark!

Oren: It’s like, what if you did a podcast, but there were no microphones and no one was recording? It’s like, that’s just called having a conversation with a guy.

Bunny: And if you do it in front of people, it’s called a panel.

Oren: I guess a TED Talk at that point.

Chris: We did a panel once and audience members told us they could tell that we had a podcast.

Bunny: I guess I’d take that as a compliment.

Chris: I think it was. I think it meant that we blended our conversation together fairly naturally because we were used to all chiming in and then letting somebody else into the conversation and trading off and they could tell that we had that podcast camaraderie.

Oren: Although we don’t say 100% or people don’t realize that much. We’re letting Ryan George down on his excellent podcast skits. I feel like we’re not living up to expectations.

Chris: 100%.

Oren: People don’t realize. Today, the topic is, school is now in session. We’re going to do writing school. And I’d say no sci-fi or fantasy. But surely that’s just a stereotype of creative writing programs in schools. Or is it?

Bunny: Dun dun dun! [sarcastic] They never say that!

Oren: Because we have people with various experiences in learning storytelling in school. Bunny is a little closer to it right now than either Chris or myself. So we figured this would be a good topic now that she’s here to guest with us. Bunny, why don’t you start? Tell us what kind of storytelling instruction you’ve gotten at your educational abode.

Bunny: So I’m currently in college. So I’m going through it at the moment. And since I am majoring in creative writing, I’ve taken a few creative writing classes. And I don’t remember, going back all the way to elementary school, if there was any instruction then. I highly doubt it. Mostly I was writing Warrior Cats fanfic then. So maybe that counts as instruction. Nobody saw it.

Oren: That’s self-taught is what that is.

Bunny: Yeah, I guess I was self-taught. And then I got to high school. Through my high school, which is a public high school, I had exactly one opportunity to write anything fictional. Exactly one. I wrote some weird Greek myth thing, and then I didn’t get feedback on it. I also had to write it with two other people, which was a bit of a mess. And I think I might have been that group member who took over because I was sort of the only person who’d written anything like that before. That’s not like I knew what I was doing. Again, still writing Warrior Cats fanfic. Other than that, the high school proper program itself, we learned literature, we learned rhetoric, and pretty much just stuff that would help us do well on the SAT or the AP test. One of which, let me just say something about AP. AP is a lie. It’s like, “you can get college credit through this class.” No you can’t. No you can’t.

Chris: I will have to admit, Bunny, it worked for me.

Bunny: Okay, not all colleges take it.

Chris: Yeah, I had an issue where I had two English AP tests, and yet I was required to still take English 101 at one of the schools I went to. I went to three different colleges. So they didn’t fulfill a requirement, but I actually was able to cash out that credit. But again, the school has to support it, right? If they sell you on it as a universal thing, and then you go to school and the school’s like “no,” that’s what you got.

Bunny: Then you’re the first person I’ve heard who’s been able to put AP credits to use.

Chris: Maybe it’s changed, because I went to college 20 years ago.

Bunny: Took three different AP classes, did pretty well in all of them, and was able to use none of them. What a waste. Yeah, another part of that waste is just that I didn’t get to learn anything creative because we were studying what a zeugma was.

Chris: A zeugma?

Oren: What is a zeugma?

Bunny: It’s a figure of speech in which a word applies in two different senses.

Chris: So a pun?

Bunny: Kind of? Apparently there’s a Zeugma Grill.

Oren: Maybe that’s a place where food means more than one thing. I don’t know. 

Chris: So the one thing that you learned about didn’t stick.

Bunny: I’m sorry, Miss Story. I’m sorry. I know the word, though. It’s a cool word.

Oren: According to Merriam-Webster, because we obviously have to solve this mystery right now, it specifically refers to a word that governs two or more things. And the example it gives is, “opened the door and her heart to the homeless boy.” Opened, in this case, is a zeugma and refers to both the door and her heart. That is apparently what it means, according to Merriam-Webster. And frankly, I’m just going to take that definition to the end of my days because the rest of this is too confusing.

Bunny: I remember we had little tests where we had to come up with one. I have no idea what I wrote for those. The only opportunity to be creative was coming up with zeugmas. I don’t know if my high school even offered creative writing classes, period, full stop. But there was a community college nearby that, high schoolers could take classes at this community college, and they did offer a couple of different creative writing classes. So I was like, oh, that sounds good. I’ll take these. And they were terrible. Unfortunately, I must reveal that the stereotype of being not allowed to write anything sci-fi or fantasy was fulfilled by the first of these classes that I took. I think I took three classes and two of them let me write whatever I wanted. But that first one was like, no sci-fi or fantasy because literary magazines don’t accept it. That was their excuse, that they don’t accept quote unquote genre fiction.

Chris: There’s always a very bad excuse.

Bunny: These classes, okay, so they were mostly for adults who were taking community college classes on the side, but they were also just general creative writing classes. They weren’t classes on literary writing or nonfiction writing. They were just creative writing 101s, essentially. I don’t know what they were on about. I remember going into my teacher’s office and getting frustrated to tears over this, which is a stupid thing to have a breakdown over, but still frustrating. Also, I need to make a special mention to a short story that we had to read in every single creative writing class through that college, which is Cathedral by Raymond Carver. Have either of you read it?

Chris: No.

Oren: I’ve never heard of this story.

Bunny: Oh my god. This story pursues me. Basically, the premise is a blind man, who’s the pen pal of the protagonist’s wife, comes to the protagonist’s house. The protagonist acts really weird towards him. The wife falls asleep. The blind man and the protagonist are watching/listening to the TV together. And then the TV is talking about cathedrals and the blind man asks the guy to describe a cathedral and he can’t. So then he draws one and the blind man holds his hand while he does it. So he gets a sense of what it looks like. I’m also haunted by the description of the wife having juicy thighs.

Chris: Eugh.

Bunny: That stood out.

Chris: [sarcastic] That was necessary. I’m sure that was a very important part of this story.

Bunny: Absolutely critical. The husband’s a weird jealous dude and I don’t know why we read this particular story so many times. Like, surely you have one other short story that we can read. That was the staple of my high school experience. And then when I got to actual college, where I am now, things are… they’re a lot better. I haven’t had any awful experiences. Creative writing classes are pretty good. And my biggest gripes, which I think will be echoed in both of your experiences, is just that nobody teaches you how to give feedback or how to edit. And so the feedback is extremely hit or miss depending on how much the student knows when they’re giving it. On some pieces, just people don’t know how to do feedback. You’ll get “this was good,” or “I’m confused.” Can’t do a whole lot with that.

Chris: I would like to just look at what is happening underneath this. The reason why feedback is so important is because so many courses are using the Iowa Writers’ Workshop model, where the idea is that you spend a lot of your class time with students reading each other’s work and giving each other feedback. I’m assuming that feedback came from other students.

Bunny: I think we did three workshops per workshop session in class. Everyone would read the piece, they would comment on it individually, they’d write a letter of feedback for the author, and then we’d sit around in class and discuss it. And for my particular teacher, I think this varies between teachers, he would have you read the opening section of your piece of writing and then be quiet, let everyone else talk about you in the third person, which struck me as a little odd. For some reason, it seems common in these types of workshops. Is that specific to Iowa? Is that like…

Chris: That’s where it comes from. It comes with a very Romantic mentality. Romanticism is very popular in universities, and that’s the influence. In the United States, I think this was a model that was originally imported from Europe, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s was the one that was famous in the US. This is an educational setup where students are expected to teach other students instead of… I’m sure you got some professor feedback.

Bunny: The professor basically did what the students did as well and guided the conversation. The professor was there, but they were doing essentially the same thing as the students. I think I did get the best feedback from professors because the professors knew how to give feedback, but I know other people have had poor experiences with professors. I’m sure you’ll get to that, Chris.

Chris: To clarify, this wasn’t because the professor knew how to give feedback, was it because the professor was more knowledgeable than the other students?

Bunny: They’re a professor, so one would hope.

Chris: I just want to break down some… We get used to accepting what is normal to us, and this Iowa Writers’ Workshop is so standard in so many places that people don’t really question it, but I think it’s worth comparing it to other fields and other industries and realize that most other classes you would take in other subject matters, the students just aren’t teaching the other students. The professor teaches the principles and then you do assignments and then the professor gives feedback on assignments and grades the assignment based on how well they actually implement the specific lessons the professor taught. As opposed to, write a story. I’m not going to tell you how to write a story, just write a story. Okay, now that you’ve written a story, this other student who knows as much as you do is the one who’s going to give you feedback on your story and then somehow we’ll just give feedback to each other, which is the model used for creative writing in many cases.

Oren: The Writers’ Workshop where you’re just giving each other feedback is, in my experience, a not great time. They don’t know what feedback to give, they often aren’t given any real instruction, and they are often giving recommendations on how to fix the story or they are simply getting too theoretical and trying to explain what is wrong with the story in ways that they do not have the expertise to explain. It’s just not a fun time. And that’s why when we talk about beta reading, we have this whole thing about how you need to be aware of what kind of feedback you’re trying to get and guide your readers into giving you that specific data and not just being like, okay, how should I make the story better? Because they don’t know, but they don’t know any better than you do, probably worse.

Bunny: If the writer is supposed to remain silent, they can’t really ask clarifying questions or, “I’d specifically like feedback on this or that aspect.” Let’s just talk about the story as a whole.

Oren: I remember there was a while ago, and it’s probably still going on, there was this big pushback about the “remaining silent” aspect. I see where you’re coming from, but I think you’re identifying the wrong thing as the problem here.

Chris: I’m assuming that the base reason for that is because writers get defensive and they start arguing with the people giving them feedback. And that’s not helpful. That’s not going to add anything good to that conversation. At the same time, I just think the entire model is the problem. And it’s based on the idea that we just don’t know anything about storytelling and so we can’t teach it. So we’ve got students teaching students.

Bunny: That just means that you don’t get a lot of helpful feedback. I went through my notes and dug up some of the feedback I’ve gotten. One of them, I quote, “I think the biggest thing to work on is to try not to spend all your time on things actually happening and spend more time developing the characters and revealing to the audience who they are.”

Oren: Oh no.

Chris: Sounds like somebody’s preference there.

Bunny: Another one. “My question is why this relationship story is set in a sci-fi universe. What does the setting add to the central story? I would argue as written, it actually detracts from the central story.” This is a story about turning off a sci-fi device.

Oren: See, that’s the other issue with attending a random writer’s workshop. You get a bunch of random people and it’s like, hey, I have my story about cool World War Two action ships and they’re fighting and then someone’s like, “I don’t like boats. I think you should take the boats out.” That’s not helpful. 

Chris: Honestly, I think getting good feedback from beta readers requires accepting that they are not knowledgeable and that what you want is for them to convey their experience so that you can look and see, okay, this is the place where they got bored. And then you realize that you need to do something to fix that. But of course that leaves the writer not necessarily knowing what to do. But that’s the point, is that they can’t tell you anyway.

Bunny: In a lot of cases, I found that teachers try to discourage you from presenting criticism as criticism. They want you to pose it as questions. I get it. But at the same time, I do have criticism for your piece. I just think that doesn’t help things either.

Chris: I think that comes from a very Romantic mindset where there are no storytelling rules or principles. Oh, maybe if I just provoke more thought, then somehow it will become better. We don’t really give feedback.

Oren: Plus, even the most politely constructed criticism is often hard to hear. I would never in my life choose to get real time beta reader feedback on my novel. My God, I have a hard enough time getting that when it’s written down and I can stop when I get upset. Trying to do that in real time with the person there telling me all the things they think I did wrong, God, I would lose it. It’d be really hard for me to take anything away from that other than being upset.

Chris: The class that for me is notorious, did not really do that. It did a little bit with poetry and the experience was not particularly great. But that was not really its issue. This was a course that was so bad I dubbed it my uncreative writing course. It was supposed to be an intro to creative writing 101 and it was so terrible, I decided never to take another creative writing course in college ever again, even though I switched colleges twice. I never gave any other professor another chance. I’m going to say it’s at the University of Minnesota. I even met with somebody who was, I think, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota in the English department about five years ago and he said it had not changed.

Bunny: Name and shame, name and shame.

Chris: I’m not afraid of pointing fingers.

Bunny: They’re going to come for you, Chris. I think I hear, [knocks] oh man, I think those are the agents of Minnesota.

Chris: Actually, it was one of those intro courses that has a couple hundred students in it, but there wasn’t a professor. There was only a coordinator who invited authors to come and talk about their books. Because another thing that typically happens in this Iowa workshop is the idea that just by being around a successful author, somehow they have good cooties that rub off on you. They would invite an author in and then we would be required to read their work, which I never did because it was just stuff I wasn’t interested in. Then we would be given an assignment where we were told to just copy something they did by rote with no other instruction.

For instance, we had this poem that we were given that used “where I’m from” to start every single line. I can see how it might be valuable, for instance, to teach how repeating phrases can be used for effect in poetry, how they can create rhythm. But we weren’t even given an assignment where we were supposed to choose something to repeat. We were just told that we had to create a poem where every line started with “where I’m from,” those exact words. Just copied, which is why I dubbed it my uncreative writing course. It banned genre works, although I managed to convince my TA to let me write what I was calling magical realism because it had the word realism in it. I didn’t really know what magical realism was. As I understand it, it’s associated with a lot of Mexican writers. I don’t know if my TA knew what magical realism was, but I used that as an excuse to sneak in speculative fiction. But we were not just discouraged from writing quote unquote genre, but also from fiction. In my experience in college, all of the writing you’ve done, they have wanted you to write about your life.

Bunny: Ugh, I’ve had that experience.

Chris: One of our assignments was like, write a story about a character who has your name and write about a piece of furniture. I just made up a horror story about this creepy witch who was on a bench. No, I’m not actually familiar with that bench. But that’s how it went and we were given no instruction whatsoever. The only thing we were told once is, trim down our story in half. That was like a universal thing we were all supposed to do. No one looked at our writing and was like, hey, your wording is a little cluttery or you’re a little verbose. My natural writing style was actually quite sparse. That’s how it went and my TA was just frustrating because he was really incompetent and that probably wasn’t his fault. He probably just didn’t get any support as far as I knew from the coordinator or the class. At the same time, it was still very frustrating because he was grading my assignments. I’d fill up an entire podcast with stories from this class because that’s how wildly bad it was. I didn’t take as much classes elsewhere, but the assignments I did get, like I had a story writing assignment in my just regular English class and it was much the same. Right, where we were told to write something specific from our life, given no instruction about how to write a story, and then marked down when it didn’t have the qualities the teacher wanted to have that the teacher hadn’t actually taught to us.

Bunny: Yeah, I guess I should amend my earlier statement and say that outside of creative writing classes, I have been forced to write a crap ton of personal narratives to the point that I wrote a personal narrative about how much I hate writing personal narratives.

Chris: Half of my assignments for this class were dissing the assignment. In their class.

Bunny: As they should.

Oren: I’ve been trying to think of what ways in which schools could do better and admittedly, I’m having some trouble suggesting anything that isn’t obviously self-serving. You should teach Mythcreants, problem solved.

Bunny: I can get behind that.

Oren: Because there are a lot of places that purport to give writing instruction that are not schools and so you might assume that the answer is that schools should take a stronger look at those and get books on how to do writing, but those books are all bad.

Chris: I still think that would be a start. I think that it has to start with the professor taking responsibility for teaching the craft to their students as opposed to just the students giving each other feedback. And even if the knowledge is wrong, at least trying to develop a knowledge base about the craft and teach it is something. From there you can then refine what’s actually being taught but without taking that responsibility, without thinking of it as a craft that can be learned. A lot of professors in these situations that are teaching this workshop format have this idea that this is a talent you were born with. Can you imagine teaching people and being like you have to be born with it? You’re not really teaching at that point, are you?

Bunny: I’m sorry, you have to be born a carpenter in order to be a carpenter. 

Oren: You have to be born with it, but also it needs to be developed. So if you do learn how to be a writer, you were born with it. But if you weren’t, then it’s not that my class didn’t do a good job, it’s that you weren’t born with it. That’s how it works, right? But that’s also why you still need to take my class because it still needs to be developed.

Chris: So Oren, you’ve got to share your story.

Oren: My story is pretty boring compared to your guys’. The main thing that I noticed is that when I was at Evergreen, basically every large English program, because at Evergreen when I was there, they want you to take these big programs that are the majority of your credits instead of taking a series of small classes. Each and every one of them that involved English in some way would put creative writing on the list of things that would be covered and then we would find out that it did not mean what we thought it meant.

Bunny: Did it mean personal narrative?

Oren: It didn’t mean really anything. Professors would just put that on there and then we would never do any kind of fiction writing. It was standard essay stuff.

Chris: Sounds like a surprisingly common practice from what I’ve heard where professors will put in misleading descriptions of their course to lure students to sign up.

Oren: I did a total of one short story despite taking a bunch of classes which claimed to be creative writing related and the feedback I got back on it from my professor was that it was not good. I’m sure he was right, it was probably not good, but I feel like maybe he could have tried a little harder.

Bunny: I feel like that’s not feedback, I feel like that’s just being an ass. 

Oren: It was not good, it was a bad story, absolutely, but I think maybe I could learn something more. In my experience, another thing that I think would just really help would be teaching students to think critically about stories because Evergreen was great at that for nonfiction. Evergreen gave me incredibly valuable lessons on thinking critically about nonfiction writing, thinking about who the author is, what are their biases, what would make them say this, what narrative are they reinforcing, all of those things. Really important stuff. But when it came to fiction, we were suddenly just supposed to basically assume that the writer was doing everything correctly and that they meant whatever the professor thought it meant. They never do that for nonfiction. They know that’s not okay, but for fiction, suddenly the critical thinking went out the window. I get it, it sucks to hear your favorite story critiqued, you don’t like that, so maybe don’t assign your favorite story as reading.

Chris: That is the issue with literature classes, right? The professor is completely in love with the stories they’re teaching and doesn’t want to hear students say anything bad about it.

Oren: The best experience I had was when we did Charterhouse of Parma, which no one liked. A few people tried to praise it, but in ways that the professor who assigned it didn’t agree with. And you could tell that he was just really upset watching them give the incorrect interpretation of this book, which he had apparently read dozens of times. The other professor eventually had to talk to him to get him to calm down.

Bunny: Oh gosh.

Oren: Yeah, it was weird. It was a very weird experience. You can imagine how much he liked my spiel on it, which is that it was a boring story with no point to it. That didn’t go great.

Chris: I do think that’s part of the big problem when it comes to the lack of a knowledge base for teaching storytelling. The culture of you don’t criticize things. Because if you can’t find problems, you can’t find opportunities for improvement. It has to start there, or else what do you have to work on?

Bunny: One thing, as long as we’re talking about how can we improve these classes, certainly one thing that they could do is not just giving us stories that they think are exemplary of this or that, but stories that need work. And then having students go into it and practice giving feedback that way before they actually are confronted with their peers’ stories. Because that’ll give you both a way to critically read fiction and background in how to give feedback rather than just, here’s a cathedral again, it did a good job, now write your own.

Oren: All right, we are about out of time. So I think that’s a good note to end this podcast on. Now we’re going to take an hour to each give each other feedback on how well we did in this podcast.

Chris: But we can only raise questions, right? We can’t actually critique anything. We’ll just… “have you thought about this, or maybe you could be a little bit more deep on this subject.”

Oren: And the person who is getting critiqued is not allowed to speak. If they speak, then all is lost.

Bunny: Man, I have questions about that boing boing joke at the beginning. Was that a smart idea?

Chris: All right, that’s it for this episode. Again, if you would still like to get our feedback on a thousand words, you can do that. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: All right, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.