Hamlet in a classroom
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Lee Kofman
Download the complete article PDF
Go to the FORUM and start a discussion thread about this article
Lee Kofman's biography and other articles by this writer
In my teens I revered writers. I hung onto their words the way my classmates hung onto marijuana. I believed writers had the gift of clairvoyance, that they knew things about this world non-writers didn't. I thought people wrote and read books to decipher the secrets of human nature, to find meaning in their lives.
I was definitely looking for meaning. Everywhere I carried my notebook printed with red roses. On school-bus rides I read and wrote in quotes: I don't believe in God, it's an infirmity, but not to believe in God is a belief – Margaret Duras.
I grew up hoping one day to call myself a writer. I wrote in my notebook: to become a writer or disappear into a black hole.
I wrote and wrote and wrote.
I still do.
Because I simply don't know how to live otherwise.
But does it make me a writer, my endless writing?
I STILL RETAIN THAT TEENAGE IDEAL of what a true writer should be – an eternal student, a wise philosopher with an idiosyncratic vision able to observe people from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Someone like Dostoyevsky.
And I still revere writers, even though the older I become, the more they multiply around me. I see one regularly at my local Starbucks: Harry Potter glasses, an island of hair underneath his lower lip and frantic fingers knocking hell out of his miniature silver notebook.
I'm becoming more and more skilled at spotting them: at the coin laundries, internet cafes, even the gym. Some are in their twenties, with the symbolic jewellery of peace and eternity, some are IT specialists or retired teachers.
Should we attribute this excess of writers to an increasing intellectualisation of our era? Ironically, we tend to read less (unless we count internet easy-reads), whereas technology makes our writing process easier, faster, ubiquitous. Our trained fingers perform a frenzied hip-hop as we email and SMS tirelessly. Writing becomes our second nature; we no longer revere words.
To edit ourselves, all we need do is insert a letter, or press a key to delete redundancies. We check facts effortlessly on the internet while writing – just as I'm doing right now, browsing through the Fiction Writer's journey website, where a certain best-selling author offers "writing coaching" on the phone, or to take you along to a writing-coaching retreat in the Costa Rican rainforest.
Central to this increasing democratisation of writing is the notion that "everyone can find his or her unique voice and write a book ... " This idea sustains an entire industry directed at aspiring writers. One of its manifestations is the abundance of best-selling books on writing. The Weekend Novelist (A & C Black, 2005) offers a 52-week program for producing a novel; another book suggests writing using Buddhist principles. John Marsden in Everything I know about writing (Pan Macmillan, 1998) includes, like many other authors, "the great feature: 600 extraordinary topics, guaranteed to have you or your students writing".
Topic 368: Describe a time when an animal you've known has shown courage, loyalty, affection.
But why should anyone be encouraged to write if they have nothing of their own to say?
Not every writer has to be Dostoyevsky, yet I cannot picture a writer without an urgent matter he or she wants to explore. Kundera was passionate about deconstructing big words that we use too casually – like mortality. Lessing wrote to understand why people get caught within big ideologies.
So should we perhaps discourage writers who have nothing urgent to write about?
THE MANY WRITING COURSES WHERE TUTORS PROMISE self-expression, painting with words, writing with five senses, understanding what the literary competitions' judges want, or information on how to compose a best-selling crime novel, are another facet of this democratisation. An article in The Guardian, by John Crace on February 18, 2003, linked the increasing number of writing courses in different institutions to increasing mediocrity in the literary scene: " ... there is a lurking feeling that many creative-writing courses are driven by market forces rather than any altruistic desire to release untapped genius".
This argument about whether creative writing can or should be taught has been going around ever since the 1930s when the University of Iowa offered the first creative-writing course. The opponents claim that writing courses or books foster uniform political correctness and produce standardised, technically smooth, but soulless fiction.
In my early twenties, I tried a writing course. My classmates were mainly middle-aged, middle-class mid-achievers – teachers, secretaries, even doctors – thirsty for a meaningful hobby. Occasionally, younger students joined, poorly read but ambitious to write the next take-it-all fantasy novel.
The ones I tolerated most were those I called "short-story-writers". Earnest, bespectacled and melancholic, they usually were experts on American contemporary fiction. Their charm expired pretty quickly. Their stories turned out to be similar: endless lyrical descriptions of remote villages, dark birds and wintry skies, despite the authors' clearly urban origins. Most annoyingly, their characters never had sex.
I cruised along, but with a vague feeling of discomfort. Finally I got it. Our tutor, and my peers, thought writing a craft rather than a vocation. We discussed thoroughly the use of metaphors, but never the reasons for needing them. We were encouraged to become aesthetes of words, but there was no debate on the meaning of writing, what it is we were trying to say and why we should bother. I could not imagine a new Rushdie emerging from our classes of "conflict checklists".
The rules were tight: never end a sentence with a preposition; don't start a new sentence with "and".
And I dropped out.
Georges Simenon said of his career: "Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness."
Yes, Monsieur Simenon, I know what you mean. I dropped out, and into the confinement of my torture chamber, my writing desk ...