CW HOUSE RULES (5 excellent reasons to drop HUL241)

1. You cannot miss classes on this course, because it depends on active

participation. Even if your excuses are brilliantly ingenious, your being absent for
more than three classes during the semester will send your grade plummeting!
No easy rides
Accident prone+

2. You may have to give up some your weekends between January and April. Sad
because you'll have to be in class instead of romancing during the magical and
brief Delhi spring
_ Going nowhere


3. You must choose whether you like it or not to belong to one of four focus
groups in either poetry, prose fiction, drama or essay-writing. Of course this
does not mean that you will be excluded from learning about the other genres,
but it does mean you have to make some hard choices early on

Which road to take

4. You have to maintain a file folder, containing type-written versions of your
creative efforts. Scrappy pieces of handwriting torn out of grubby note-books are
unacceptable, no matter how inspired! Copies of this folder must be available on
demand without fail
Terribly hard
work

You will have to submit your immortal writings to brutal scrutiny. In addition,
marks on this course are likely to be dismal

+ Why bother to make the trip?
x x x x x Action cancelled!?

"Writing is looking in the mirror and realizing that the person you see there is not yourself but
somebody else. Our task as writers is to figure out who that figure in the mirror is and what the
scenarios behind him or her really represent." RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR, 2012

COURSE OUTLINE AS IN THE UG(H!) BOOKLET (NOT
BY ME, ALAS, BUT I SHALL STRIVE TO DELIVER ON THE PROMISE)


Introduces the concept of creative writing through an analysis of the
techniques of writing and stylistics along with explorations in the problem of
literary creativity. It also introduces contemporary writing that is relevant to
the areas being discussed in the workshop. Students are invited to write in a
genre of their choice. Selected readings in the theory and practice of creative
writing will be used to brainstorm on what is involved in acquiring a style of
writing.

Introduces the concept of creative writing through an analysis of the
techniques of writing and stylistics along with explorations in the problem of
literary creativity. Q I. - WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

It also introduces contemporary writing that is relevant to the areas being
discussed in the workshop.
Q 2. - WHAT IN THE WORLD IS A 'RELEVANT CONTEMPORARY TEXT'?

Students are invited to write in a genre of their choice.
Q 3. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE ABOUT AND HOW?
THE 'HANDS ON' APPROACH? OR THE 'HANDS OFF' APPROACH'?

Selected readings in the theory and practice of creative writing will be used to
brainstorm on what is involved in acquiring a style of writing.
Q4. WHAT CRITICAL READING IN STYLISTICS OR COGITATIONS BY
WRITERS WILL WORK FOR US? WOULD IT BE A GOOD IDEA TO
'BRAINSTORM' AROUND THE ISSUE OF WRITING WITH SOME WRITERS IN
DELHI, AS WELL AS AMONG YOURSELVES? HOW DO WE MANAGE THE
LOGISTICS OF SUCH DISCUSSIONS?

ON THIS COURSE, ALL OF US (INCLUDING ME) WILL WRITE AND
CRITICALLY EVALUATE EACH OTHERS WORKS PREFERABLY IN SMALL
GROUPS (FOR EXAMPLE, TUTORIALS)
MANTRA OF THE COURSE: READ, READ, READ!
THOSE WHO CAN, READ; THOSE WHO CAN'T, WRITE


HUL241 WORKSHOP IN CREATIVE WRITING Tentative Schedule rbn/5january2012.


Lectures: Mondays and Thursdays Tutorials: As scheduled

Thursday 5 January Introduction to course

Monday 9 J Creativity: some illustrations
Thursday 12 J More on the 'problems' of writing and creativity

Monday 16 J Fiction Novel/Short Story/SMS Novels/Fact-ion
Thursday 19 J Fiction

Monday 23 J Fiction
Monday 30 J Fiction

Thursday 2 February Fiction GUEST LECTURE 1

Saturday 5 - Wed 9 F MINOR I First substantial piece of writing to be submitted.

Thursday 9 F Drama/Playwriting
Monday 13 F Drama

Thursday 16 F Drama/Film-scripts etc.
Tuesday 21 F (Mon-TT) Drama

Thursday 23 F Poetry
Monday 27 F Poetry

Thursday 1 March Poetry GUEST LECTURE 2

MID-SEMESTER BREAK 2-11 MARCH

Monday 12 M Poetry

Thursday 15 M Poetry
Monday 19 M Essay/Blogs/Auto-bios/Diaries/Meditations/Rants/Journalism etc.

Thursday- Sunday 22-25 March MINOR II - Second substantial piece of writing required.

Monday 26 M Essay
Thursday 29 Ml Essay

Monday 2 April Essay

Monday 9 A Essay
Thursday 12 A Essay GUEST LECTURE 3

Monday 16 A Minor Literary Miracles: Jokes/Aphorisms/Emails etc
Thursday 19 A Video Games and Story Boards

Monday 23 A General Discussion on Contemporary Literary Forms PANEL: 4?
Thursday 26 A Wind up Discussion on Life, Literature, Taboos and Creativity



MAJORS: 2 - 8 May; Regular two-hour test, non-negotiable, no concessions.

MARKS: Workshop/Class Participation:30; MI 20; MII 20; MAJORS 30.

What We Teach When We Teach Creative Writing by Peter Ho Davies

I'm a British writer living in the US. It says so in the bio at the back of my books. I was
born in Britain. Many of my stories are set in Britain. I fight with my long-suffering US
manuscript editor about preserving British spelling and usage in my work (Manchester
United are the greatest football team ever, not Manchester United is the greatest soccer team
ever). It would not, in short, be unreasonable to say that Britain is my inspiration. And yet,
whenever I return home, I'm reminded that in a very specific sense I'm an American writer: a
writer, that is, made in America. I moved here almost a decade ago to join a graduate creative
writing program and have stayed ever since, supported by grants and fellowships, advances
and awards, but mostly through teaching in the same kind of programs I first came to study
in.

And here's the thing. In the US at present there are over 300 creative writing programs. In
Britain there are ten. IN INDIA? MAYBE 2 OR 3? RBN

What this means for me today is that it's unlikely I'll be returning to live and work in my
home country anytime soon. What it meant to me seven years ago was that I felt I had to
leave if I wanted to become a writer at all. The British attitude was neatly summed up for me
on a recent visit home when an old friendnow a high school science teacherasked me
with devastating politeness: 'But can you teach creative writing?'

Now, I've heard this one before. It's a question I myself asked (implicitly and with a slightly
defensive hostility) of my own teachers when I first came to graduate school in the US. I was
confident that a program could offer me time and financial support, less sure that anyone
could teach me something as individual as writing. It took a few months, but slowly I began
to feel my work improving and because I was learning something (issues of craft as much as
art) I assumed I had been taught. In the years since, caught up in the busy academic round of
classes and committee meetings, I hadn't given the question much more thought until my
friend's very British question.

What I told her at the time is that if music and art can be taught in colleges, why not creative
writing? This is a ready answer, a neat analogy, but a slightly spurious one.

One reason colleges of music and art have an academic currency is that they frequently,
alongside the teaching of technique and craft, offer classes in the history, criticism and
appreciation of their subjects. Those things feel scholarly, feel teachable. Yet in creative
writing, although my own teaching and that of most of my colleagues includes reference to,
and often classes in, literature, its harder to see this as the remit of Creative Writing Programs
since separate and independent of them we have institutions which teach the history,
appreciation and understanding of literature; they're called English departments (or HSS
Depts. -RBN)

I might have tried a cleverer answer to an implicit charge in the original question. Not so
much 'Can you teach creative writing?' as 'Can you teach creative writing?' The hubris
question, if you like. And in fact that's an easy one to answer. Do I teach creative writing?
Not quite. I think of myself as frequently in the general vicinity of the teaching of creative
writing. The traditional workshop method with its peer discussion of student work means
that, at least at the graduate level, good students often teach each other as directly as I teach
them. But this answer while honest, feels also slightly cowardly, a ducking of the issue.

At heart I suppose the problem for my friend is that she can't imagine what I teach when I
teach creative writing. She's no more knowledgeable than me about music or art, but she
respects the terminology of perspective and colour theory, point and counterpoint. The
technique that I teach in creative writing classeshow to construct a scene, how to strike a
balance between narration and dialoguelargely lacks such specialist terminology. Art and
music have both been able to appeal to the sciences (the physics and biology of perception)
and to maths in particular (the geometry of perspective, the precision of harmony) for a kind
of borrowed technical authority. They feelto the layman at leastlike theories. By
comparison what writers have seems more like a kind of folk knowledge, a set of old wives
tales that might or might not adequately help us through the narrative woods. Write what you
know, show don't tell, are catchy slogans, but if they're rules at all, they're at best rules of
thumb. Each story or poem, because of its very individuality, presents along with familiar
issues the potential for new problems, new challenges for which the answers won't have been
worked out previously.


I do teach technique, practical quotidian stuff (how to use a speech tag, like 'he said' not just
to indicate who's speaking but within a line of dialogue to suggest pauses, breathing, for
instance), but it's also that very lack of theory and learning to live with it that I find myself
teaching more and more.

This is a kind of problem-solving where the answers are uncharted and where a good deal of
time and thought has to go first into problem-analyzing, problem-defining, problem-
elucidating.

And here I must confess somethinga dirty little secret. Before I was a writer, before I
studied literature or took a writing course, I was a scientist, like my old friend. My first
degree is in physics. The dirty part of the secret, what's embarrassing, is that I don't remember
a single formula, a single theorem from three years of college physics (this is actually more
not less shameful because I graduated summa cum laude). But what I do recall, I hope, is
certain ways of thinking, of approaching the world. Physics taught me those and they have
remained with me long after the equations faded. What I'm trying to teach my students then
are ways of thinking, which for want of a better word I might call a sensibility.
And that's what I wish I'd told my old friend.

But there is one final thing that I hope my students are learning, even if I'm not sure I'm
teaching it (suspect, in fact, that they're teaching me it week after week). Exposing cherished
work and risking having it criticizedan inevitably painful processis something we all do
reluctantly and a graduate student in a creative writing program does it every three or four
weeks. Some fail the testthey turn in work they care less about, they reduce the stakesbut
a remarkably high number persevere, keep taking risks. It's an act of ego certainly,
foolhardiness probably, but also, in a modest but too easily overlooked way, of bravery.

2001 Peter Ho Davies