Black Gate

I commanded my first students to revise, as I had been commanded by my own mentors. Had I ever revised–not just proofread and fiddled, but actually revised–anything in my life before I started teaching? No. When I was a student, my first drafts were clean enough and clever enough, I could get away with handing them in for all my classes. Some of my teachers called me on it, but nobody insisted I do anything differently. When I took the helm of a writing class for the first time, at the absurd age of 24, I could tell my students all the steps of a beginner’s revision process. I knew the platitudes, and for me, that’s all they were. I could not have followed those steps to save my life. My first drafts, while in progress, were plenty messy, but once I finished them, the prose style was smooth as glass. I feared what might happen if I broke it.

To my astonishment, my first crop of freshman composition students followed my directions. Why on earth did they do that? I had no idea what I was doing at the helm of that classroom in 1994. I’ll be grateful to them always, because they did one thing none of my teachers had theretofore accomplished: they made revision look desirable, enviable, even occasionally joyful. They didn’t just shame me into learning how to revise, though I will say that my horror at my hypocrisy was one force that drove me to change my ways. My students were, at semester’s end, happy with freshman composition papers, of all things, because they had accomplished major transformations on their projects. Yes, their sentences got smoother, but more to the point, their ideas grew.

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When I learned my first child would be a boy, one of my first stops was the library, where I checked out a huge stack of books about boys: how they think, how they learn, how they’re socialized, with all the attendant parental and teacherly how-tos and cautionary tales. I was wary of essentialism, but willing to consider the possibility that the big recent developments in neuroscience might have something new to tell me. Since my son would not be born yet for some months, I tried out the most promising of the books’ insights on my students. Childhood in a masculine mode–any version of a masculine mode–is a foreign country to me. I wanted what I always want when I’m about to fly off to terra incognita. I wanted a map, a phrasebook, and a Rick Steves guide to the notable sights. That and a good highlighter pen will get me through as much touristing as I’ve ever been able to afford.

Only it turned out I wasn’t a tourist, or even a long-term expatriate. I was a character in a portal fantasy, the kind this essay on io9 praises, in which people cross through the portal from each world into the other, and nobody’s normality is stable. As it turned out, I had lived my entire life as a character in that portal fantasy without knowing it. None of my maps or phrasebooks could be relied upon.

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About half of the students brought their awesomeness with them into the creative writing class. This is not to say they were all necessarily awesome at writing, just that they allowed whatever was delightful in them to show at a time when I happened to be there to see.

The other half of the students had registered in the mistaken belief that creative writing must be an easy A because there’s no right or wrong in creativity, and they tended to get angry when they discovered their error. Of those, only the plagiarist who handed in the lyrics to I’m My Own Grandpa for a poetry assignment stands out in memory.

Years later, it’s the awesome kids I still think about. I wonder what happened to the girl with the stutter who spoke clearly only in verse, who could recite long stretches of Shakespeare from memory. She wrote the most astonishing sonnets. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the boy whose work I keep watching for, who was too nervous for eye contact when he asked whether he could connect all his pieces for the course to a comic book project he was working on outside of class.

No one assignment he did was stellar. In part this was a result of the weird framework of the course that had been handed down by the mighty powers of the department — we had four weeks for fiction, four weeks for poetry, four weeks for drama — and I was not at liberty to turn this student loose to write in his own genre. In part, it was because he was thinking of himself as a writer, and thinking like a writer, for the first time, so he got to make his beginner mistakes on my watch. Fine with me, fine with him.

Here’s why I think he’s still out there writing comics somewhere: he was completely content to write about his superheroes in verse, in script format, in prose, because stretching himself that way allowed him to see new things about his characters. When I gave him feedback about his drafts, I took his work seriously enough to tell him what wasn’t working.

Unlike the students who were after easy A’s, this guy never complained about comments or grades. He took my suggestions and assessments under advisement, and got back to work. He had the personality and habits of a lifelong creator, and he had articulated to himself and others that he intended to be in it for the long haul.

The Internet hasn’t turned him up for me. His name is common, but I would think there can’t be so many African-American comic book artists creating African-American superheroes that he’d stay hard to find. Now that I’m writing occasional posts here about books I assigned in that old creative writing class, I wish I could ask him if anything from that semester was of long-term use to his work in comics–regardless of whether that work ever appeared in print.

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Sarah Avery’s short story “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” appeared in the last print issue of Black Gate. A related novella, “The Imlen Bastard,” is slated to appear in BG‘s new online incarnation. Her contemporary fantasy novella collection, Tales from Rugosa Coven, follows the adventures of some very modern Pagans in a supernatural version of New Jersey even weirder than the one you think you know. You can keep up with her at her website, sarahavery.com, and follow her on Twitter.

Here’s a classic set piece: a young writer of genre fiction arrives at college and finagles his way into a creative writing seminar, only to get stonewalled by the professor and most of his classmates because they’re allergic to genre fiction.

Any of several things can happen next. The student may find three likeminded young writers and a folding card table to meet at, and start her own seminar. The student may drop out of college, get a series of fascinating dead end jobs, and write his way to a workshop like Clarion or Odyssey. Maybe she gives up writing altogether. Maybe he stops showing his writing to others. Maybe she goes pro eventually despite it all, and has a chip on her shoulder about that confounded creative writing class for the rest of her days.

I was…what is the genre equivalent of ambidextrous? Ambigenrous will have to do for now. I snuck back into the creative writing seminars as a poet, and most people forgot I had wanted to write fantasy. For a while, I forgot it myself.

A fantasist can find useful tools in a creative writing classroom, even an inhospitable one. But since nobody wants to do time in an inhospitable classroom, and really nobody should have to, I’m going to write a few posts over the next few weeks about books on writing that I’ve found helpful in re-reinventing myself as a fantasy writer.

Back in 2005, when I was just starting my personal blog, Ask Dr. Pretentious, and had maybe six readers in the whole world, I wrote an essay on The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner that has held up so well, I’m giving it another chance at life here. Gardner was surprisingly hostile to fantastic fiction, considering that he was the guy who wrote that first-person retelling of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster. Why would I urge writers of genre fiction to devote many hours to learning from Gardner when he regards genre fiction as trash? Read on.

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