Quotes from this article:
I felt it when I opened a textbook that purported to teach me how to teach the subject, or perused a sample syllabus lent to me by a colleague. There seemed to be a disconnect – between my experience of learning how to write fiction and what lay within these pages.
This is precisely what I felt when I started looking through the old syllabus that was left for me. It felt... off, wrong... It didn't feel like creativity, and it felt culturally cold.
For Cecilia Tan in “Let Me Tell You”, this rule, as with others touted by the literary establishment (mostly of the white, male, privileged kind), worked under the assumption that their experience was “universal.” The power to show, not tell, she explained, stemmed from writing for an audience that shared so many assumptions with them that readers would feel that those settings and stories were “universal” and familiar to all.
For Namrata Poddar in “Is ‘Show Don’t Tell’ a Universal Truth or a Colonial Relic?” the rule stemmed from a remnant of colonial infrastructure dismissive of non-western modes of storytelling. She wondered if 21st-century America was overvaluing a singularly sight-based approach to storytelling. Could this be, she asked, another case of cultural particularity masquerading itself as universal taste? In short, yes.
As Poddar noted, it’s often posited that oral, communal practices of storytelling organically evolved into modern modes of storytelling, consumed by a reader in “privacy” – but this is in fact the understanding of a Western history of storytelling as a universal one. For most non-Western countries this was not the case.
Not only was this not the case for non-Western countries, but this was also not inherently the case for many people of the lower classes (non-white and white alike) in Western countries. Oral stories have always held an importance, but the wealthier and white Western demographics enforced these views on everyone. (I'd dare say that schooling and academia was a huge aspect of this, too.)
In many formerly or currently colonised regions like South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the American South and Native America, there has always existed a rich, vibrant tradition of oral storytelling, one that was marginalised, often violently, through an imposition of an allegedly modern, white Western language and culture.
The creative-writing programme, I’d known, was an American invention, and recently had become an American export – not just to the UK, where the first master’s degree in creative writing was offered in 1970, but further to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, the Philippines, and yes, India.
I hadn’t yet asked though what it meant for us to inherit a creative writing pedagogy from elsewhere. It meant, I began to see, that we inherited a set of craft conventions that tended to dismiss anything outside their ambit as “bad” writing or (worse?) something “experimental”.
This was why when Morley spoke of the “double helix” of reading and writing fiction, I’d found myself asking, but what about listening? Worse, there I was, teaching creative writing in a classroom in the Indian subcontinent, a region where oral storytelling traditions, the epic, the folk, the mundane, have thrived for centuries. Were we going to toss them all away, unacknowledged, on our quest to become Writers? To me it seemed ridiculous, and a tragic waste.
This doesn’t just entail, as I’ve seen some “how to decolonise creative writing” guidelines suggest, including a diversity of texts in the reading list – it means to go beyond that, and critique how creative writing is taught. To interrogate the “rules of good writing” and ask of them first where they come from and whom they benefit.
This is also a huge reason why I don't think that diversity is a good goal. We need to be considering, alongside a range of voices, what those "rules" are that we're still focused on. This doesn't only mean writing, either; it really should be every rule and guideline. We shouldn't accept them without interrogating them.
Craft, Salesses made me see, is cultural. And in many textbooks, and workshops, the dominance of one tradition of craft, serving one particular audience, is essentially literary imperialism that poses – it isn’t hard to imagine – a threat to minority and marginalised voices. Instead we need to acknowledge the existence of many different craft conventions – with each being as valid as the other.
Slowly, I’ve mustered up the courage to include sessions on “listening” in my creative writing courses – we now open the semester with students gathered around a virtual bonfire (in these days of online teaching), telling stories to each other. We speak of silences, hesitations, circulatory, repetition, breath.
I love this.
But most importantly, no more quiet acceptance of craft conventions as handed down to us – rather, a quest to know where they come from and whom they serve, in order to know what and why and how to mean. The debate on whether writing can be taught still rages on, but while these courses exist, I would hope for them to discuss craft critically, with deeper cultural understanding and sensitivity. In this act itself lies the fiercest deconstruction, and dismantling, of colonial ways of telling and teaching.