A chair with two legs.

Last week, in confessional mode, I claimed that when it comes to writing I mostly don’t know what I’m doing. This isn’t the whole story; I do have experience, and I do have techniques and strategies to fall back on. But sometimes those strategies only made sense for a previous piece of work, not this new and unformed thing in front of me now. It’s helpful, I think, to acknowledge this: I might have known what I was doing back then, but I don’t know what I’m doing now.

As I said, this kind of cheerful wide-eyed uncertainty doesn’t always sit well in the classroom. Even the most open-minded and curious of students like to know what the teacher’s version of The Right Answer might be, and most of my time in class is spent turning that around. I don’t know. What do you think?

Here’s one example of how we might play with inexpertise in the classroom. I’ll mention a few others in the weeks to come.

She was blue, I am blue, they would be blue, we once were going to think about being blue…

I can talk until I’m blue in the face about narrative perspective, point of view, first and second and third person, or temporal positioning. I can explain that, while the astute handling of perspective is the very thing that distinguishes prose fiction from the screen or stage, there is no intrinsically ‘better’ choice to make. And still students will bring me their stories and ask, “Should I change this to third person? Will it be better in the present tense? Do I need a flashback here?”

I don’t know. What do you think?

One thing I do know is that it’s usually easier for people to think more clearly about technique and form when they’re handling someone else’s text. There’s something about handling your own text that bends you towards the defensive, or the squeamish. So if we’re thinking about perspective, I might point to a story we’ve been studying and ask for it to be rewritten from a different point of view, or in a different tense, or from a different narratorial moment. The beauty of this exercise is that not only does it reinforce exactly how those techniques work, but it often illustrates or reveals what the choice of technique can achieve in a story.

Try it. This Robert Coover story, Going for a Beer, uses a particularly intriguing tense, which you might call ‘future-present,’ in which the protagonist finds himself completing an action even as he begins contemplating it. Read it through a couple of times, and then try rewriting the first paragraph* using a different tense, point of view, or perspective. Make sure you can clearly articulate which technique you’re using. See what happens to the story by the time you’re done.

When I’ve run this exercise in classes before, I’ve anticipated students simplifying the tense and the narrative, turning it into something easier and clearer to read. But in fact they’ve usually gone much further: the story gets told from the perspective of the bartender, or the young woman the protagonist meets, or another customer, or the protagonist’s son. The students discuss misogyny, feminism, alcoholism, trauma, and the differences between past-perfect and past-historical tenses; the story gets bigger and more complicated, and their understanding of what can be revealed by simple technical decisions in sentence-making gets bigger and more complicated.

And all I have to do is sit back and watch, inexpertly, and take notes.

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Homework:

A reminder that although these Class Notes have their origins in the teaching I do at the University of Nottingham, the lecture room is enormous and there’s plenty of room for you all. And that also goes for the exercises I sometimes suggest here; if you find yourself having a go, and you want to send me the results, go ahead. I’ll keep what you send me in confidence, and if I have a moment to send you some feedback I will. And/or if you have any questions you’d like me to address in future Class Notes, send them along.

Class dismissed.

p.s. think you could do my job?

The excellent people who run my department have given me research leave in the forthcoming Spring semester, which means they’re looking for someone to cover my teaching. Nottingham can be glorious in the Spring, and the students are a cracking bunch. Details here; closing date is Mon 4th Dec.

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