Jian Response 1: We Can Make the Shoes Fit--If We Want to!

Until reading If the Shoes Fits, I have never thought about theory behind teaching creative writing. Two questions that Haake asks strike me. One of them (93) is: “What is interesting to you?” It reminds me of a creative writing class I took at a community college some years ago. The teacher in that class encouraged her students to write as much as they could, giving them assignment to write a story, but never told them what the purpose of writing was. At the time I did not know that, even though I was into writing and loved to play around with sentence structure, which was one of favorite parts of writing my stories—because all I cared was what grade I would get from the assignment, just like most competitive students.

I was not sure why I wanted to write a story I wanted to write; but I was hunger for words—partly because I was an ESL student who had the desire to master the English language; partly because it was something I could produce with enough practice and was interesting in how sentence structure functioned and let people read it and got a positive feedback; partly because it felt good to write a story so that someone could praise your writing style that was not foreign and strange, or saying that you are good at writing or your sentence structure as good as a seasonal writer. It felt good to hear that, as Haake refers to students who see themselves either “good” or “bad” writers (88).

But I realize now that my teacher lacked the structure of teaching creative writing. All she said was that let your voice be heard and I had a story to tell. I knew the concept of writing a story to some extent, as Haake emphasizes: “[Students] understand the concept of rising action, climax, denouement” (92). Basically we were obedient students who seemed not to have asked themselves What is the purpose of writing anyway?

This question leads me to “What still sustain your interest over the years?” I could not answer it until I took my senior seminar on Joyce and junior seminar on Faulkner, two of whom are good models for my in-progress project because they deal with psychological realism, which emphasizes the in-depth of interior characterization. I particularly like Faulkner, who produced twenty novels, fourteen of which I have read, and two of which that made me realize how powerful the English language is: Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. My answer to the second question is: sentence structure, which I understand how it worked while I tried to imitate his style of writing in my own writing: because of his confusing, complex, compound, long continuous sentence structures with many insertions not only of adjective and adverbial phrases but also of shifting past-present-future tenses in between create the realistic imagery of the human working mind.

Reading Faulkner, while I was an undergrad, opened me up to have my own “design” of how to structure my stories in a way that has the power to make the reader appreciate the English language. My problem was solved, as Csikyszentmihalyi quotes from Dyson: “You have to a design in view, in which you design a chapter. . . Then you have to put it together out of words…, but if you don’t have a clear architecture in mind then the thing won’t end up being any good” (119).

In other words, if we, as writers-student-teacher-thinker (though not a theorist, as Haake states ) have access to the abstract language of theory behind teaching creative writing, we can transforms it and teach our participants to “largely extent to” be more aware of and control their work because if you know the language, then, as Haake quotes from Sanders, “[language], he argues to the contrary, is not a prison house,…[but] the means of our freedom…we can’t change race, class, or gender, we should concentrate on ‘artistic criteria’—the one thing over which we have any control” (83).

Therefore, our participants would be free from the puppet “strings . . .jerked by some higher power . .” (83). Realizing that theory “helps us recognize the puppet strings” (86), I wonder if I can test it out. I agree with what Haake says: creative teachers tell their students “write three stories, without asking what is a story? But I ask myself: Do I need to explain what a story is to a five-week introductory creative writing class I will be teaching to Cantonese speakers at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center in Oakland Chinatown in mid-march to mid-April? Last Friday, when I met with the OACC director and the coordinator, I found out that the students are ESL learners whose writing skills are beginner to advanced levels. Is it useful to them what a story is?

I will teach them what I have learned: transforming the abstract language into in simple daily language so that they can understand, since they are ESL learners, whether they will be receptive or not, [they] “are on their own” (89).