Creative Digest #4: workshop tales; against vaping; disrupting the status quo
The fourth edition of our departmental Substack looks at good and bad approaches to leading a workshop, how vapes fail writers, and a useful short story-writing tip
Welcome to the fourth edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. In this edition you’ll find:
Deepa Anappara, on tales and takes from the creative writing workshop
Jonathan Gibbs, on vaping vs cigarettes
Joe Thomas, on a short story-writing tip with wider application
We hope your enjoy it!
‘Don’t write that novel’ and other takes from the creative writing workshop
By Deepa Anappara
As a student of creative writing, first on a master’s programme and then a PhD, I became convinced that teaching creative writing wasn’t for me (famous last words etc). Literature modules appealed, but writing? Absolutely never, I said to anyone who suggested a career as an academic.
My impression was that only a certain kind of person could, with one hundred percent authority, tell students that their first-person narrator was a mistake, or that they should replace the past tense with the present. And these were some of the gentler comments I heard on my writing programme. At least one professor didn’t hesitate to tell students to scrap their ideas altogether. A published writer confessed that he had dreamt of sliding a glowing review of his novel under the office door of this very professor who had assured him his book would never get published.
Around that time, I met a writer who had started teaching writing. When I asked her how she found the new job, she said it was a terrible responsibility. ‘Who am I to suggest changes in someone’s manuscript?’ she said. ‘What if I’m wrong?’
Now that I, err… teach creative writing, I know that certain changes are in fact easy to suggest. These typically tend to be around aspects of technique: heightening unreliability in narration, sharpening characterisation, or avoiding unintended shifts in point of view. Where it gets murky is where personal taste intersects with elements of craft.
As readers we don’t have to justify our subjectivities. We may prefer dense, lyrical prose over spare writing, an action-packed scene over a passage of exposition, or like Philip Pullman, publicly declare our animosity towards the present-tense narrative. We may set aside books that lack plot, or are plotted so rigorously the writer’s machinations are visible. But a creative writing teacher can’t approach student writing on those terms. To expect students to write in a style that aligns with the teacher’s taste or preoccupations about writing is both disingenuous and a disservice.
I am reminded of a few of my friends who found it difficult to write after studying for a master’s because the ‘suggestions’ offered by teachers effectively silenced the voice they had been attempting to discover in the first place. This is not an isolated experience. Reading Miranda France’s The Writing School, I came across a quote from AL Kennedy: ‘The workshop leader’s power can be huge, given that writing is so intimate. Although the scale is tiny, the possibilities for wrongness and corruption can be appallingly extensive: ideas can be mocked, weaklings can be bullied, while tired or apprehensive participants can actively encourage the tutor to blather on about his or her self at revolting length and offer all the most toxic sorts of admiration.’
I’m not in any imminent danger of receiving admiration—toxic or otherwise—from my students, I don’t think, but I try not to be prescriptive in the workshop, particularly if the writing being discussed is elegant and polished. I often prefix my feedback with ‘perhaps’ so that a comment appears tentative, perhaps giving the impression that I don’t know my own mind. Mentioning this tendency to a writer friend with whom I had done the MA, I said I was envious of writing teachers (and reviewers) who state opinions as if they are facts: fiction should/shouldn’t be political/entertaining/representative or that idea just doesn’t work for a novel. Where does such authority come from, I wondered.
If you have led a certain kind of life, my friend said, where you’re part of the majority, where your view is accepted as the right kind of view and is often unchallenged, then it might be easier to believe whatever you’re saying is right.
Having never been in such a position, I can see why I am tempted to pepper my feedback with caveats. But it seems like good practice anyway. This term I have been teaching Atul Gawande’s ‘The Case of the Red Leg’ (from Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science) to an undergraduate class, where Gawande writes candidly about uncertainty in medicine, the ‘gray zones’ and ‘distortions’ in physician judgement. If medicine can withstand such an analysis, so can creative writing, but to my mind, there’s insufficient discussion around why we consider certain kinds of writing to be good and others bad, and the influence culture and the ‘canon’ have on our tastes. (It seems every other year there’s a Booker judge stating they dislike historical fiction or books that don’t ‘zip along’, as if these are universally accepted criteria for deciding the quality of a novel.)
As a student I had found the assessment rubric to be a mystical document, but as a teacher, it’s helpful to see the criteria for grades spelt out clearly. Irrespective of genre or style it helps me evaluate the writing on its own terms. Is there strong development of character? Is the dialogue convincing, and engaging? Does the structure serve the story the writer wants to tell? It’s possible to argue that personal preference can determine whether I find the form of a piece successful or not, but this is less likely because I have to delineate my reasons in my feedback; I have to point out that the structure facilitates or impedes narrative momentum or characterisation or the writing itself. None of this means I will get everything right—we are all fallible—but perhaps that’s why an acknowledgement of one’s personal taste in reading and writing while giving feedback may not be such a bad thing.
Against vaping
By Jonathan Gibbs
The UK government’s consultation on how to regulate e-cigarettes ends on 6 December. Cigarette manufacturers, as you might expect, are hoping the government will come down hard on them, even as they hope Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will follow New Zealand in backing down on plans for a ‘rolling’ smoking ban that would mean today’s 14-year-olds never get to legally buy cigarettes.
For health campaigners, this might be a question of weighing up which is the greater of two evils. For writers, however, the choice is obvious: vapes are a disaster. They don’t come close to cigarettes for usefulness – for characterisation, for plotting, and for narrative pacing.
In terms of imagery, for starters, they are admirably direct and overt. The glowing tip stands for the smoker’s sense of self, the spirit or life force that, paradoxically, they’re damaging with every drag. The cigarette itself is paradigmatically phallic, whether sucked on, flaunted in the hand, or bobbing between your lips as you talk. Vapers by contrast seem positively ashamed of their ‘device’, shielding it from the gaze of those around them as they take surreptitious puffs.
More important than the visual, though, is the social aspect. Cigarettes – and perhaps this is key to their phenomenal success over the past 150 years – are tokens, eminently exchangeable. They offer themselves as a form of currency that can be used to forge and cement connections. A character asks another character for a light – a strangely intimate interaction, leaning into the struck match or sparked lighter, a hand placed on the cupped hand to steady it. Or a character asks to bum a cigarette off another character: immediately questions of hierarchy and obligation come into play. None of this applies to the vape. No one asks anyone else to have a hit on their vape. They are selfish, solipsistic objects, of no use to a writer hoping to kickstart a scene or develop a relationship.
And cigarettes are durational, too. They give your character something to do while they’re doing the important thing, the thing you want them to be doing. It’s a commonplace that any scene has to contain two narrative elements to truly work. The thing you character is doing, and the thing they’re doing while they’re doing the thing they’re doing. Smoking a cigarette, like making and drinking a cup of tea, adds structure to the most ordinary parts of the day. They help writers ‘get through’ scenes, as much as they help people get through the day.
Even here, though, the cigarette beats the humble cup of tea. A cup of tea can be eked out, and even drunk cold, but a lit cigarette commits you to a specific duration. It’s a fuse that burns inexorably down to what will be the rest of your (shortened) life. And when it’s finished, you have the valedictory performance of stubbing it out: folded into an ashtray, ground underfoot or flicked into a canal.
Vapes are not durational in the same way. With a vape, you take a hit when you want a hit (furtively, guilty, with none of the bravado of the fag smoker) and then back it goes into your pocket. A character who lights a cigarette gives their author a sort of low-level localised rhythm to the next page or two. A character who vapes offers their author an identical uninteresting act once every five pages. Thanks a lot.
Characters need objects to measure themselves against the world. A cigarette measures five minutes, a cup of tea a little longer. A pint or a glass of wine rather more, or less, depending on the character and the situation. A vape measures nothing.
Or that’s how it seems to me. I’m sure novelists and writers will find ways of using vapes – find a way of taking their measure, of finding the aspect of human life that they can be used to measure – just as they found ways to integrate the telephone, mobile phones, texting and social media into narrative forms that at first struggled to accommodate them. It will happen, but the moment it’s hard to give up on the disastrous glamour of the coffin nail.
On disrupting the status quo in short stories and beyond
By Joe Thomas
In a recent second year undergraduate class, we welcomed award-winning short story writer Gurnaik Johal, who spoke to the group about his writing and his work in publishing, too. The class assignment is to write a short story of 2500 words, and I asked Gurnaik for his top tips for a story of that length. It took him a moment, but he came up with this: disrupt the status quo. Don’t try and do too much – it’s not many words to play with – but do disrupt the status quo.
He went on to explain that this is exactly how he conceived of the arc of ‘Arrival’, his story that won the Galley Beggar prize, which is about a suburban couple living west of London who suddenly have the use of a car. The trick, he told us, was not to show us the life of the couple before the car, but rather show how the car changed their life with the ‘before’ element implied in the before/after narrative. He pointed out that the premise – suburban couple has life changed by arrival of car – doesn’t sound especially exciting, but recording the moment when a couple gains a new lease of life is exciting. The prosaic nature of the event is not really relevant: the energy and power of the story is in this new life, in this revelatory state they find themselves. Disrupt the status quo – it feels as good a description of what a short story can do as I’ve ever heard.
On our MA, students submit, typically, 3000 words for workshop classes, and I’ve been wondering if adopting this approach might make for a focused and coherent submission. We have writers working in all genres, forms, and styles, and a regular question is how do I choose what to submit when I have a word limit? Maybe show us a section or a scene where the status quo is disrupted? Novels and memoirs are full of them!
And this question leads to another fundamental question when writing within an MA programme – what’s the priority: the work, or the assignments? I usually say that the two things are so closely linked in the end that it doesn’t really matter. The best answer is that what you prioritise is up to you, and what our MA offers is a range of modules that allows for experimentation in your writing alongside a long-form project. Perhaps the best priority over the year or two is, simply, to develop your practice… and disrupt your own status quo.
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Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here – including a postgraduate virtual taster session on Thursday 7 December at 5pm in which Joe Thomas will be talking to leading literary agent Lucy Luck. Details here:
Contributing writers:
Deepa Anappara is the author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line and co-editor of the essay collection Letters to a Writer of Colour. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and will be teaching The Novel and the Creative Writing Workshop in the spring term.
Jonathan Gibbs is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal. He is Programme Director for the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City and this term is teaching The Contemporary Essay and the Creative Writing Workshop.
Joe Thomas is the author of White Riot, Brazilian Pyscho, Bent and other novels. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, and is excited to teach the Creative Writing Workshop module, and Working as a Writer, an industry guide for writers.
Department news:
Joe Thomas’s next novel, Red Menace, will be published in February 2024 by Quercus. It follows White Riot as the second in a trilogy of novels set in East London, and will be followed by True Blue.
Deepa Anappara's second novel, titled The Last of Earth and set in mid-nineteenth century Tibet, will be published by Oneworld in the UK in March 2025, and by Random House in the US. More details can be found here.
Recent MA Creative Writing graduate Alim Kheraj will be taking part in Navigating the creative industries and media sector as an LGBTQ+ person: an evening of discussion and networking on Monday 11 December at City. Details here.
Recent MA Creative Writing graduate Priscilla Yeung celebrated the publication of Battersea Anthology: Grow and Flourish, an anthology she edited championing new and diverse voices of local writers in Battersea and Nine Elms. Find out more and buy a copy here.