Now for all the reading

Whenever I tell people I'm teaching a novel writing class, the first question that inevitably comes up is, "Does this mean you have to read all your students' novels?"  Well, truth is, different teachers have different approaches to such a class, and so they each will have their own stories to tell--which is why I'm hoping that an AWP panel on this subject, one that has been proposed for the 2014 Seattle conference by fearless novel writing instructor Cathy Day, gets accepted--but the long and short of it is: Yes, that's exactly what it means.  For me, at least, this is what it means.  I don't think it's fair to ask a student to commit to such an ambitious project like finishing the complete a draft of a novel without also offering to read it and give her feedback.  After all, the students are making one heck of an investment of time and personal energy for your class; it's the least you can do for them.  Even if that means extending the spring semester into your summer.

Our spring semester has been over for three weeks, so lately I've been delving into the tall stack of my students's novels.  (Btw, I offered to let them post their novels to our class web site instead of actually giving me a paper copy, but nearly every single one of them preferred to just give me the paper copy.  One student, after she printed out her novel, felt strongly that the next time I teach the class I must insist on them printing out paper copies.  She said doing so was a powerful experience for her.  She hadn't quite understood her accomplishment until she saw how thick was her printed novel.)  As I've noted in the past, it was a mixed group of graduate students and undergrads in the class.  So far, I've read three of the graduate students' novels and four of the undergrads.  (Although two of those undergrad novels I had read mostly while the semester was on, because they were in a peer review group with me.)  As much as I love to read and do read it's a sad fact that I'm not a very fast reader.  This is a great quality to have when one reads poetry--you want to fully and slowly ingest a poem's images and its rhythms--but a bad quality for someone who needs to get through, and comment on, over a dozen books.  And hopefully before the summer is done!  To complicate matters even more, I have to get ready to teach a summer semester course--it begins one week from today--and I need to prepare a study abroad proposal for the summer of 2014.  The good news is that I'm finding, as I found the last time I taught the course, that reading my students' novels seems to go faster than reading other novels.  Of course, they are relatively short novels; but more importantly, I think it matters that I know all the authors and even the conditions under which the novels were written.  That ups the intrinsic interest and allows me to move faster.

So far, just like the last time I taught the course, the results are a fascinating mix.  First, the ranges of styles and subjects is perfectly intriguing.  So far I've encountered a near-future sci-fi story; a fantasy story; a highly literary murder/suspense story set in Little Rock; a coming of age novel about a group of college-aged guys in small town Pennsylvania; a YA novel that details a culture clash between a transgendered protagonist and the bible belt town he lives in; a story about a senior in high school who tries to find her bearings as she negotiates the infamous warfare of friendships and boyfriends; and a historical novel, set in 1930s Arkansas,  about the tragically bad choice one woman makes in husbands.  This kind of variety makes the reading burden much lighter,  and I know that the remaining novels I have yet to read are just as various.  The other thing I'm noting about the novels so far is their overall quality.  You'd think that having to write a draft of a novel in one semester would lead to some mighty bad prose as well as some ridiculous, untenable premises.  While I can't say my students' writing has been error free--this is to be expected in a first draft, after all--I've also encountered some passages of evocative description and many stretches of effective dialogue.  More to the point, except for maybe one of them, none of the books has collapsed under the impossibility of its hurriedly thrown together story.  All three of the novels from my graduate students are quite good and quite well-structured.  Amazingly well-structured, actually, given the furnace of activity in which they were composed, and given how busy the lives of those students are.  But my undergraduates' novels have also evidenced some inventive descriptions as well as very deft plotting.  Even in the one undergraduate novel that evidenced crippling structural issues I saw the author aptly play with situations so that the dramatic tension was usefully ramped up in key scenes, so that the protagonist found herself in hotter and hotter water.  That was very smart fiction writing--and, again, that's in the novel that I thought was the least successful of all I've read so far.

I'm just past the halfway mark with my students' novels, and so I can't yet offer any conclusive take.  But I can tell you that I'm honestly enjoying the experience of reading through them.  It doesn't feel like a burden as much as a chance to get know even better all these interesting people who filled up my classroom this spring.  To get to know them, that is, from the inside.  To get to know their imaginations.  I can also tell you that reading these books gives me hope for the future of novel writing.  One student who eventually soured on the course told me that he thought it was a terrible idea to insist on a draft in one semester; he said that any monkey could type out 55,000 words if  you let it type long enough.  (Yes, that's actually the metaphor he used.)  He was certain that my students' drafts would amount to nothing much better than monkey typing: long enough but artistically wtihout merit.  So far, that has definitively not been the case.  So far I can fairly say that I had some talented novelists in class this semester, people who understood how to form an affecting story over 55-60,000 words.  They are showing that to me every day I read, every page I turn.

Results are in!

At the beginning of this semester, fifteen students--ten undergraduates and five graduate students--gathered in Thompson Hall on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas with one goal in mind: to finish a complete draft of a novel in less than four months and even while taking other courses.  To say nothing of all the other life matters they needed to tend to.  Indeed, several of the undergraduates were on the staff of our student-run campus literary magazine, which features both print and online editions, and necessitated not only the reading of submissions but regular late night, sometimes contentious, meetings.  Many of the students had other on-campus responsibilities and off-campus hobbies.  Some of them had spouses.  Three of the graduate students worked full-time jobs on top of taking a full graduate student load.  One had a child.  In spite of all that they knew was in front of them, and some that they couldn't anticipate, every student gathered that cold January night for Novel Writing Workshop professed to be ready to take on the challenge: 55,000 words of original fiction writing in one semester.  And not just any old fiction writing, but writing that developed a plot and characters over a single book-length work and that eventually found its way to a denoument.  55,000 words.  For those who don't understand what a challenge that is, I'll say that while on the short side for a novel, 55,000 words is roughly 10 times the amount of original writing typically asked for in a creative writing course.  10 times.

Well, last Wednesday we held our final class meeting of the semester (not counting our "exam" period), and so I figure it's time to release a semester report.  How did they do?  First, I'm happy to report that of the original fifteen students thirteen stuck with the class until the finish.  And of the two students who dropped, one was dropped by me; not because she was not able to keep up with her novel and not because she did not want to continue with the course, but because she almost never came to class, a violation that gets you dropped in my book.  Only one student--a single one--dropped herself because she found the assignment of composing a draft of a novel in one semester too imposing.  And it's a fact of life that no matter what the college class, students drop. There's nary a course offered at any college any semester in which someone, or several ones, don't choose to drop.  (For example, in one of my other creative writing courses this semster, three students dropped.)  In other words, the droppage rate for Novel Writing Workshop was at worst typical, and maybe even less than typical, for a university class.  Astounding.  As I told the group week after week, when I was an undergraduate I would never have dreamed of trying to write a novel in one semester--or even before I graduated!  None of the other creative writing students I knew would have dreamed of it either.   And yet this group--not without some occasional, and not very surprising, bouts of despair--took up the challenge and soldiered on, as if it were the most normal enterprise in the world.

Okay, okay, I hear  you saying, give us the results--numerical results!  Here they are:

The winner among the graduate students is Lynne Landis, a first year MFA student who, while working a full time job as a nurse and taking two other classes, wrote 79,841 words.  79,000!  Said another way, that's almost 300 pages of original work.  In one semester!  

The winner among the undergraduates is Chelsea Callantine, who wrote 57, 830 words.

Every other student in class, every single one, met the 55,000 word count requirement.  Most went over by several dozen or several hundred words.  These students are:


Darby Riales
Michelle Cates
Karen Cockrum
Colleen Hathaway
Taylor Hicks
Taylor Neal
Sarah Wilson
Jasmine Jobe
Stacey Margaret Jones
Louie Land

and

John Mitchel 

John Mitchel, I must note,  earned the unique distinction of hitting 55,000 words exactly.  This isn't so surprising, though, because John had a habit of writing exactly up to the word count requirement most weeks: not a single word more.  That's fine, John.  You got it done, after all.

And what I find most admirable is that these folks didn't merely pump out words, although I know it felt like that to them at times, but they wrote complete drafts.  Not one of them simply stopped at the word count goal.  They stopped when they had finished their stories.  Congratulations to all.  You have earned yourselves a week off.    

Once more to the novel class

I know I already bragged up my novel writing students in my last post, but after looking over their Final Folders I just have to go one more time to this subject. Their Final Folders contained a few different items, one of which was a reflective paper about the whole semester and the act of composing a novel in such a short period of time. In reading the folders, I'm amazed by, and proud of, them all over again, especially at the extent to which they get it. What the semester was about, what I was hoping to accomplish, and how by necessity that accomplishment happened. No kidding, I was almost moved to tears a couple of times. (Or maybe that was just relief that I hadn't caused them to lose their minds.)

Perhaps my favorite reflective statement came from a student who is not even a Writing major, but who understood the class and its utility as well as any one. This is a student who on top of taking classes in his major and on top of taking my novel writing class, spent the semester working on an iPhone application called "Video Game Trivia," for which he had to compose 1000 questions, an endeavor that forced him to write another 78,000 words on top of the 55,000 he wrote for his novel (and however many he wrote for his other classes). He didn't tell me this until our very last meeting, after all the novels had been turned in. My jaw literally dropped. Talk about a semester to remember. I quote from his reflective paper: "Going into this class, I had certainly never written anything of this magnitude or scale before. Designing and crafting a story that would span 55,000+ words just didn't seem like something I was cabable of. Maybe in ten years but certainly not as a junior in college. It's removing that roadblock that I believe was the most important accomplishment forward in writing and for my life in general. I know I'm capable of creating another novel if I need or choose to. If my boss tells me he needs a fifty page report on howGoogle uses their public relations (my major), then I'll nod and begin thinking how it pales in comparison to the task that I accomplished when I was 20 years old."

That really choked me up. This student was in my peer review group (I broke the class into groups of twos and threes for semi-regular peer review sessions; that way, they knew at least someone was going to read and keep tabs on their progress), and I know how hard he worked on his book. I think I was even more relieved and grateful by what he said next: "I believe I may have learned more from this class than in nearly any other class in my college tenure. In a weird way, I think it may be partially because we, being the students, kind of act as the teachers in this class." Yes. They certainly were. I took a huge step back this semester and essentially turned the class over to them. Either they were going to leap into the challenge, take it up, and assist each other in the taking up, or they were going to flounder, divide, and turn sour. Remarkably, almost no one reacted in the latter fashion. Unable to workshop in the traditional sense, the learning had to come essentially from the doing and from regular meetings with their peer groups. They had to be almost completely responsible for their own education. All I did was check word counts each week and collect response papers to the chapters we read in our textbook, No Plot No Problem by Chris Baty. (And of course compose a novel of my own right along with them.)

The success of the whole enterprise really did depend on them. Not only did this group rise to the occasion, but I think they found the process of doing so--of just pushing and pushing and pushing ahead on their books--incredibly liberating. As my student wrote: "We create the material we will be discussing by writing our novels, and we don't have to worry about memorizing every ligament in the kneecaps. All we have to worry about is when our cabin is going to be overtaken by zombies and who is going to survive. The work can still be a burden, don't get me wrong, but never once did I feel like it was a waste of time." I guess that what happens when you're engaged in a project you feel passionate about. And so many of them were. How many times can I say it? They were amazing.

Novel Class Survives!

A few months ago, I blogged about one of the classes I'm teaching this semester: Novel Writing Workshop. As I explained at the time, I had taught the class twice before, somewhat successfully, but decided to do it differently this semester. Rather than have my students simply plan and begin novels, workshopping the chapters as they went, I decided that this time they would all start and finish their novels. In one semester. They would be producing a draft of a novel, of course, not one immediately ready for publication, and the word count I asked for--55,000--would put their novels on the short side. But, even so, let's not kid ourselves. 55,000 words is an awful lot to ask of students in one semester. A friend of mine taught a Novella class last year. His minimum word count was 15K and apparently a few of his students struggled to produce that much. So I didn't quite know what to expect when I presented my semester plan to them. But I know what I feared: A goggled eyed response, a few choice epithets relating to my sanity, and an empty classroom the next week when the whole group sensibly dropped my course. That first week of the semester, whispers, recollections floated through my head: a presentation I'd heard years ago about a Novel Workshop taught in England for graduate students--a two semester affair in which, the presenter explained, we of course don't expect the students to actually have finished their novels at course end; a teacher of mine in graduate school gossiping about a class taught by John Gardner, a graduate level class in which he demanded that the students finish novels in one semester and at the end of which most had dropped out and more than one suffered a nervous breakdown or divorce or both; an AWP session I attended two years ago about teaching novel writing workshops and at which the general notion of the panelists seemed to be "Of course, you could never do this kind of course with undergraduates."

Did I really know what I was doing? No, but I did know that I really didn't like hearing that students in my previous novel workshops had barely taken any steps toward completing their novels once the semester was over. Most had done no further writing past chapter 4. So how much--I thought and thought and thought--did they actually learn about writing novels?

I'm happy to report, now that we've reached exam week at UCA, that of the original 15 students, 11 endured to the end of the semester. And of that 11, 10 have already given me their completed 55,000 word novels, with the 11th to be delivered to me at any moment. 11 of the 15 finished their projects. That's a hell of a good percentage. (I wrote one too, meeting the same word counts they did. I actually like my little book a lot, but that's material for some other post.) What's more, several of them went over the 55,000 goal. One enterprising guy--who never came close to having a nervous breakdown--actually produced over 75,000 words. Another student quietly reached the 55,000 goal a week before she had to and then refrained from saying so because she was afraid the class would resent her for it. (She didn't need to worry; it wasn't that kind of class.) Another student not only finished a 55,000 word novel for me but at the same time composed an Honors College research thesis about an entirely different subject altogether. (I have no idea how she survived.) I am just so proud of this group. Not a one of them blinked when I explained the set up of the class; many of them were actually excited. And they are even more excited now at having finished their books and their word count. One student announced last week with a huge smile, "I can take that Novella course and it will seem like nothing!"

Most important is they learned from doing about the process of composing a book length fiction. They struggled with juggling characters, plots, story arcs, rising action and climaxes. What to leave in, what to leave out. All the messy, and even onerous, decisions of book writing. (A couple students realized they were actually composing the first of what must be a series. One of these students asked if I was teaching the course next semester, so she could write Book 2!) Most of all they now know what a commitment it takes to stick with and finish a novel. And they've each discovered what writing habits/schedules work for them. One student, a talented but extremely intuitive writer, struggled much of the semester to keep up with the words counts but in the last few weeks hit on a schedule that worked for him: 1000 words a day. That was not too much to overburden him and it was plenty enough to keep him connected to his book. He found it not so very trying after all and told me that he wished he had been writing that way since the beginning. He hadn't, but the important point is that the class allowed him to discover that way of writing.

Yes, I am now faced with a pile of novels to read. But here's the most satisfying part: They're good novels! Some of them are actually really good. Now I haven't gotten all the way through them yet, and I won't for a while, and maybe I'll be singing a different tune come January, but let me just say that I don't think I've ever been more impressed with and proud of my students as I read these semester-long labors of love. There's no way, as an undergraduate, I would have felt ready to take on a novel--not in one semester. 11 of my undergraduate students just did. And they didn't just survive; they thrived. Kudos to you all. It was a great four months.