hul241-schedulemarksrulesetc

8/2/2019 HUL241-ScheduleMarksRulesetc

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CW HOUSE RULES (5 excellent reasons to drop HUL241)

1. You cannot miss classes on this course, because it depends on activeparticipation. 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 andbrief Delhi spring

Going nowhere3. 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 thisdoes 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 yourcreative efforts. Scrappy pieces of handwriting torn out of grubby note-books areunacceptable, no matter how inspired! Copies of this folder must be available ondemand without fail

Terribly hardwork

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 butsomebody else. Our task as writers is to figure out who that figure in the mirror is and what thescenarios behind him or her really represent."RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR, 2012


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COURSE OUTLINE AS IN THE UG(H!) BOOKLET(NOTBY 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 BYWRITERS WILL WORK FOR US? WOULD IT BE A GOOD IDEA TO'BRAINSTORM' AROUND THE ISSUE OF WRITING WITH SOME WRITERS INDELHI, AS WELL AS AMONG YOURSELVES? HOW DO WE MANAGE THELOGISTICS OF SUCH DISCUSSIONS?

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


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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 illustrationsThursday 12 J More on the 'problems' of writing and creativity

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

Monday 23 J FictionMonday 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/PlaywritingMonday 13 F Drama

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

Thursday 23 F PoetryMonday 27 F Poetry

Thursday 1 March Poetry GUEST LECTURE 2

MID-SEMESTER BREAK 2-11 MARCH

Monday 12 M Poetry

Thursday 15 M PoetryMonday 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 EssayThursday 29 Ml Essay

Monday 2 April Essay

Monday 9 A EssayThursday 12 A Essay GUEST LECTURE 3

Monday 16 A Minor Literary Miracles: Jokes/Aphorisms/Emails etcThursday 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.


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What We Teach When We Teach Creative Writing byPeter 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 greatestfootball team ever, not Manchester United is the greatest soccerteam

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 meon 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.
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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 'Canyou 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.


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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

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