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Beyond the Writers' Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction
400Beyond the Writers' Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction
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Overview
An innovative new approach to teaching and writing creative nonfiction from veteran teacher and critically acclaimed author Carol Bly.
Teachers and writers everywhere are facing the limits imposed by the prevailing models of teaching: community or MFA “workshops” or, at the high-school level, “peer review.” In Beyond the Writers' Workshop Carol Bly presents an alternative. She believes that workshopping’s tendency to engage in wry scorn and pay exaggerated attention to technical details, causes apprentice writers, consciously or unconsciously, to modify their most passionate work.
Inspired by a philosophy of individuality and moral rigor, Bly combines ideas and techniques from social work, psychotherapy, and neuroscience with the traditional teaching of fresh metaphor, salient dialogue, lively pace, and analysis of other literary work in her pioneering new approach. She also includes exercises and examples in an extensive practical appendix.
Teachers and writers everywhere are facing the limits imposed by the prevailing models of teaching: community or MFA “workshops” or, at the high-school level, “peer review.” In Beyond the Writers' Workshop Carol Bly presents an alternative. She believes that workshopping’s tendency to engage in wry scorn and pay exaggerated attention to technical details, causes apprentice writers, consciously or unconsciously, to modify their most passionate work.
Inspired by a philosophy of individuality and moral rigor, Bly combines ideas and techniques from social work, psychotherapy, and neuroscience with the traditional teaching of fresh metaphor, salient dialogue, lively pace, and analysis of other literary work in her pioneering new approach. She also includes exercises and examples in an extensive practical appendix.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780385499194 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 04/17/2001 |
Edition description: | 1 ANCHOR |
Pages: | 400 |
Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Carol Bly was a critically acclaimed short story writer and essayist. She was the author of many books, including The Passionate, Accurate Story, a writing guide; My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories; and an essay collection, Letters from the Country. She was a frequent and respected lecturer at conferences of the National Council of Teachers of English, Associated Writing Programs, and the National Association of Social Workers. She lived in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Table of Contents
Introduction | xvii | |
Chapter 1 | Taking on Three Demanding Situations First | 3 |
Cultural Deprivation | 4 | |
The New, Nontraditional Mission of Present-Day Writers | 9 | |
Eight Elements of Bad or Scanty Teaching of Creative Writing | 15 | |
Chapter 2 | A Fundamental Mistake in How We Learn to Write: Skipping the Long Middle Stage of Writing | 33 |
The Three Stages of Writing a Manuscript | 37 | |
Chapter 3 | Using Empathic Questioning to Deepen Your First Draft | 46 |
Empathic Inquiry | 48 | |
Some Final Thoughts | 58 | |
Chapter 4 | How Stage-Development Philosophy Serves Writers | 59 |
A Basic Overview of Stage-Development Theory | 59 | |
Assumptions of Stage-Development Theory | 65 | |
How Two Authors Offer Us Stage Philosophies That Are Especially Pertinent to Writers | 70 | |
Chapter 5 | We Have Pushed Off from the Animal Kingdom for Good: Good News for Writers from Neuroscientists | 76 |
Reentry and Literary Endeavor | 82 | |
Becoming a Generalist | 92 | |
The Love of Thinking | 94 | |
Chapter 6 | Literary Fixes | 100 |
Driving the Exposition Inward | 101 | |
Raising the Tone | 109 | |
Changing Statement to Theater (Showing, not Telling) | 111 | |
Combating Lying and Cowardice | 113 | |
Removing Self-References | 116 | |
Pushing Off from Mindless Male Realism and Mindless Female Realism | 119 | |
Checking for the Skinflint Syndrome and Enhancing Your Manuscript as a Gift to the Reader | 121 | |
Asking, for a Last Time, What Is Still Missing from This Manuscript? | 122 | |
Small Language Fixes That Help Remove Humbug | 122 | |
Starting Sentences with Dependent Clauses | 126 | |
Getting Rid of We, Everybody, and All | 127 | |
Chapter 7 | Seven General Issues in Teaching Creative Writing | 129 |
Writing Literature Can Be Taught | 129 | |
Protecting Student Writers from the U.S.A. Junk Culture | 133 | |
Curing Writers of the Bad Habit of Perseverating | 139 | |
Convincing Writers that Surprise Is the Inevitable, Eternal Principle of Literature | 140 | |
Practicing Professional Reticence | 142 | |
Being Aware of Bullying | 143 | |
Making the Classroom One of the Great Places on Earth | 145 | |
Chapter 8 | Teaching Elementary School Children to Write | 148 |
Ways to Use the Appendix When Working with Children | 148 | |
No Children's Writing Should Ever Be Subjected to Peer Review | 155 | |
Validating the Serious as Well as the Fun-Loving Spirits of Children | 157 | |
Offering Some Comment for Every Piece of Creative Writing a Child Does | 160 | |
Giving a Child Two Opportunities to Answer a Question | 161 | |
Teaching Children as Well as Ourselves the Psychological Skills that Protect a Person's Personality from Group Bullying or from Unfair Pressure by People in Authority | 162 | |
Asking Children to Memorize One Hundred Stories by the Age of Eighteen | 163 | |
Chapter 9 | Helping People in Middle and High School Learn to Write | 171 |
Adolescents and Monoculture | 171 | |
Using the Appendix of This Book with Adolescent People | 173 | |
No Peer Reviewing of Manuscripts | 178 | |
No Teaching of Literary Techniques | 179 | |
No Asking for Rough Drafts of Creative Writing | 182 | |
Never Failing to Comment on the Core Content of Students' Papers | 183 | |
Teaching Adolescent Writers to Continue Memorizing Stories, if They Started in Elementary School, and to Add Poems | 184 | |
An Ethics Code for Teachers of Adolescents | 184 | |
Chapter 10 | Helping College Students and M.F.A. Candidates to Write | 185 |
Leaving Behind the Natural but Useless Attitudes Common to Any Enclave of Creative Writers | 185 | |
Ways to Help College- and Graduate-Level Writers Experience a Literary Change of Heart | 206 | |
Chapter 11 | Teaching at Writers' Conferences, Community Retreats, and Summer Short Courses | 217 |
What These Courses Are, and the Burgeoning Population Who Use Them | 217 | |
Three Kinds of Populations We Don't Serve Well Enough So Far | 222 | |
Chapter 12 | Some Issues of Aesthetics and Ethics of Writing Literature | 235 |
Some Psychological Dynamics of Aesthetics and Ethics | 235 | |
Distinguishing Hack Work from Literary Artifice | 246 | |
Normalized Indifference Is Our Comfortable Stance on Any Subject until Something Jars Us | 247 | |
How the Old, Familiar Dynamic Called Pain Avoidance Affects Creative Nonfiction | 254 | |
Falsifying What Could Otherwise Be Interesting Psychological Evidence about Homo Sapiens in One or Another Setting | 261 | |
Hatred of Literature by Those Left Out of It and Sometimes by Those of Us Who Participate in It | 267 | |
A Psychological Tool for Ethically Minded Writers | 272 | |
Writing Creative Nonfiction for the 400,000 | 274 | |
Appendices | ||
Appendix I. | Fifteen Writing Exercises | 279 |
Four Exercises about Background or Place | ||
1. | Writing without Cliches about a Beautiful Place | 281 |
2. | Ugly Place, Good Event: Ugly Event, Good Place | 283 |
3. | Pathetically Shallow Use of Places Once Full of Serious Enterprise | 284 |
4. | Paying Respectful Attention to Background Settings | 286 |
Easy Exercises | ||
5. | Good and Terrible Qualities in Human Nature--An Exercise for People over the Age of Fourteen | 288 |
6. | Ignatow Poem Exercise | 289 |
7. | A Catty Vignette | 292 |
8. | An Essay Pot--A Group Talking Exercise | 295 |
9. | Writing about Work | 297 |
Elegant Exercises | ||
10. | Attending to Other--Specifically Attending to Relatives, Nonhuman Creatures, or Plants | 301 |
11. | Increasing One's Affection for Utterly Ordinary People | 303 |
12. | A Writing Exercise for Extroverts | 306 |
13. | An Irritating Person Exercise | 309 |
14. | A Nearly Impossible Writing Exercise | 311 |
15. | The Andover Format: Writing Your Life at Two Levels--One the Usual Sort of Memoir, and the Other Secret and Profound | 315 |
Appendix II. | Usage Sheets | 322 |
Appendix III. | Abbreviations and Notes for Referencing Margin Comment on Students' Papers | 328 |
Appendix IV. | Formats and Strategies | 330 |
A Format for Writing an Essay | 329 | |
The Vertical-Line Way of Taking Notes | 331 | |
Analyzing a Literary Work of Art | 332 | |
Appendix V. | A List of Useful Sentences for Writers in a Tight Spot | 335 |
Appendix VI. | Two Examples of Class Agendas for M.F.A. Students | 340 |
Appendix VII. | The Robertson-Bly Ethics Code for Teaching Writing to Middle and High School Students | 349 |
Endnotes | 355 | |
A Reading List | 361 | |
Index | 363 | |
Permissions Acknowledgments | 373 |
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