ABSTRACT
In the discipline of creative writing (CW), much of the pedagogy focuses on the development of craft, typically via targeted readings and variations on the workshop intended to mimic authentic reader response via peer feedback. What is less clear in the pedagogy is how students are taught to gauge success. Therein lies a fundamental conundrum of CW. In the practice of writing, as in other areas of the arts, culturally constructed markers of success tend to be external, lying largely outside of the writer’s control: achieving publication, obtaining literary representation, enjoying robust sales and positive reviews. Similar dynamics exist in the classroom: when the instructor is an established creative practitioner, the feedback process can resemble the relationship between a master and an apprentice. Pedagogical attempts to help students develop mechanisms to assess when their work is successful sometimes lapses into a vernacular that suggests that reader response can be controlled and other outcomes achieved. In this chapter, I aim to clarify what success within an academic CW context might look like by means of a pedagogical taxonomy of sorts. Specifically, I use the 1996 study by Greg Light, ‘How Students Understand and Learn Creative Writing in Higher Education’, as the basis for this construct because it was based an empirical study that sought to identify CW learning outcomes that could be named and measured. One of Light’s key findings was that student writers progress through several stages of orientation toward the reader. More specifically, Light identified a growing awareness of what information must be provided, and in what order, so that a story will be comprehensible and accessible. The underlying message is that successful writing originates from a certain mindfulness of the extrinsic and perhaps an aim of completeness in advance of relinquishment. What I propose is not a radical reframing, more a way of refocusing attention and discussing what can be taught and what must be looked at as outcomes, a distinction that I argue has not always been clear within academic CW.
