In my previous blog entry, I argued that the mood of literary studies today produces students who have a sharp critical eye, yet unintentionally can produce students who have an unhealthy cynicism. Literature teachers must train their students to be critical readers. Living in America in the 21st century means we are immersed in a consumer society where we are likely to be preyed upon by advertisers, fake news and sensationalist content. Right now, there is a heavy emphasis for literature professors to train students to think carefully about the context and motives of the author. But is it possible to go overkill with the goal of critical thinking? Could some students be scared away from being a literature major because of this trend?

The answer to both of these questions is “Yes.” There is a point in literary studies when students can embrace what literature professor Rita Felski calls “freewheeling dissidence” or “disembodied skepticism.” We’ve thoroughly achieved the goal of training our students in the skill of critical thinking in literary departments. But critical thinking cannot be a stand-alone value. It must be paired and connected with other values to reach its full potential. The question becomes, what values should be paired with critical thinking so students don’t become hypercritical? In my opinion, those values are self-awareness, affirmation and creativity. Literature departments need to develop practices that help students grow into well-rounded thinkers.

What’s at stake here if things do not change? Well, in some ways it is a matter of whether Gen Z students will want to become undergraduate lit majors. A University of Delaware student named Caleb Owens recently wrote that he finds English faculty often more concerned with their own publications than their student development and maturation: “convinced that their academic work, inaccessible and unread, has greater value than their undergraduate teaching, which they do only begrudgingly.” Yes, Owens is the editor for a college newspaper. Should we listen to him? Considering the title of his article is “The Self-Inflicted Death of the English Department,” I would say yes, we should listen to this member of Gen Z. His article carefully explains why he decided not to become an English major. If English professors failing to think carefully about the needs of Generation Z, then we will disappoint students like Caleb and ultimately the university could be forced to cut faculty positions.

This is bad news for everyone involved.

Here is the good news: many English departments already have the solution. Most people who are “English majors” take a majority of classes in literature, creative writing, technical writing and journalism. Both of the undergrad and graduate level universities that I attended had created a program to get a bachelor’s in fine arts in creative writing. Yet they often operated like 2 different majors. My solution is that literature departments should require their majors to take at least one creative writing class.

Creative writing classes form the skills of self-awareness, affirmation and creativity in their students in ways that literature classes often fail to do. The end goal of the creative writing workshop is to help students become writers of nonfiction, poetry and fiction. Since the end goal of creative writing classes is to push students towards becoming writers, it uses different classroom practices.

What is a creative writing workshop?

A creative writing workshop is centered around the work of each of the students. Typically, a creative writing workshop has 15-20 students in the classroom. The classroom is led by a professor that requires students to create their own poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Their stories are passed out and then there is a “critique” session or a workshop where someone’s story is shared. If there are 16 weeks in a college semester, that means a class typically meets 32 times. Therefore at least ½ of the class meetings will be focused on student created work.

Advantage #1 of the Workshop: Building Self-Awareness and Humility By Sharing Your Writing Publicly

The first advantage of the creative writing workshop is that it creates humility and self-awareness in students. In my previous blog entry I argued that mode of discussion in literature departments today tends to put a heavy emphasis on looking for flaws in a text. This is typically an emphasis on finding ideological flaws such as whether a text is intentionally or unintentionally affirming sexist, racist or capitalist ideas. This is important in terms of helping students read carefully. Yet this overemphasis on critique becomes problematic when you have 21 year old students who dismiss classic works of literature who have identified ideologies that exist but have absolutely no experience with crafting a creative narrative themselves. Ideology identification often trumps the creation of craft in literature classes.

The creative writing workshop method forces students to present a poem or short story to the class they’ve written. Let’s say there is a 21 year old junior student named James at the university. James is a literature major and has taken multiple American, world and British literature classes. He excelled in Shakespeare in high school. Now James is taking an Intro to Fiction Creative Writing class which will go towards his English major.

However, when James takes the intro to creative writing class, he realizes that he can’t replicate the detailed scene descriptions of Herman Melville and the character descriptions of Flannery O’Connor. He wants to write a short story based on an experience he had at Myrtle Beach as a teenager. He got the idea after reading John Updike’s short story “A&P.” He has a decent template for what his story might look like, but he is absolutely stunned at how weak his description skills are. As James is drafting out his first draft of his fictional story at a coffee shop on a Tuesday night, he is terrified at what his peers might think of his mediocre short story. Will they judge him? Will they think of him as less creative and intelligent?

The answer is yes. His fellow classmates will judge him. They will realize that James is likely not the next John Updike, but they will see bits and pieces of James’s own style and life in his short story. His classmates will see James as he is-----a storyteller who needs development and encouragement. But more importantly, as James is critiqued by his classmates, he will likely learn to point out the incredible skill that it takes to write a cohesive, enthralling fictional short story. Until you attempt to write your own fictional short story, the writing excellence of Melville and O’Connor will likely not seem as impressive. In turn, this allows the 21 year old James to become self-aware of his own need to become a better writer.

Pushing students to do the creative writing workshop method prevents students from only standing back and making detached observations about a text. If we only train students to become analysts of literature we are doing them a disservice. Requiring literature majors to attempt to complete a creative writing projects will give students like James an accurate view of his own writing skills. If we constantly are asking literature students to critique other authors we must put literature students in the role of being publicly critiqued. If we ask students to critique other classic works of literature, why would we not ask them to practice the habit of creating their own short story or poem? This is a practice of formation of humility in all literature students.

Advantage #2 of the Workshop: The Unrealistic Expectations of “Good Taste”

Another way the creative writing workshop helps is to balance out the unrealistic expectations of “good taste.” Kurt Vonnegut was very blunt about what happens to our self-esteem when we only consume great literature. He said “English departments have never produced a good writer.” He blamed this on how literature majors learn “good taste” at a stage “when they themselves aren’t capable of doing very good work. So what they learn makes them hate what they write. And they stop before they ever get started.” Being a literature major will help you develop good taste, but it might make you so critical of your own attempts at poetry and fiction that you won’t let yourself just write something mediocre. Or as Vonnegut said, students end up hating their own voice.

We must consistently remind students that it took Henry David Thoreau 7 years to draft, revise and edit Walden. We must remind students that Thoreau went through some self-loathing and frustration with his own writing before he published it. It is possible to worship the finished works of literature which leaves us paralyzed when we attempt to write a memoir of our own experience like Thoreau. We must remember to be inspired by Thoreau’s expertise rather than despair at our mediocre writing skills.

Yet unless a student intentionally participates in a creative writing workshop, he or she may tend to worship the great works of literature rather than being inspired. Thankfully the creative writing workshop can lend itself to students developing a healthy understanding of finding their own voice. This is the opposite of my previous point about students being full of pride. This situation is where students’ confidence is crushed so that they do not find their own voice.

How, then, do they find their own voice?

Advantage #3 of the Workshop: It Allows Students an Opportunity to Imitate Their Peers

The third way the workshop method helps students develop is that it gives them realistic role models to imitate in their classmates.

When I took an intro creative nonfiction at UNCW as a sophomore in college, it was one of the best classes I ever took. Up until that point, I had little self-awareness as to how much growth as a writer I needed.

One student in the class was named Kristen. She was a senior. She dressed like a hipster, she was articulate in discussion and she was the most experimental writer in our class. Part of the creative writing workshop is for everyone to share what they believe their peer can improve on. During workshops everyone listened to what Kristen had to say carefully. If she did not like something, you were disappointed. If she did like something, you were charged with confidence. And for me, Kristen was somewhere in between my own aspirations to be a great writer and Melville. She wasn’t as developed as Melville, but she stood in the gap so I could see that perhaps by the time I became a senior I could develop the same kind of skill as Kristen.

We often talk about comparison being a negative thing. Yet in creative writing classes, I’ve always found it to be a source of solidarity and inspiration. To compare myself to my classmates helps me to realize that all of these other college students are not creative geniuses and I am not alone in my undeveloped writing skills. Rather, I could see that they were there alongside me in developing their own writing style when I read their imperfect and undeveloped nonfiction essays.

But then, you read something incredible and awe-inspiring. Anything you read in an undergraduate or graduate level creative writing workshop is a work in progress. In graduate school, my friend Jonathan wrote a creative nonfiction story about cliff jumping with his friends in the Appalachian Mountains. At the end of his story he did a 2 page stream of consciousness glimpse into his brain of anxiety when he thought one of his friends had drowned after jumping off a waterfall. When I read Jonathan’s story about cliff jumping, I responded with excitement because my friend had accomplished the difficult feat of writing a moving piece. Again, I knew Jonathan’s writing journey was moving in the right direction and I then wanted to try this stream of consciousness technique that he used to get the point across in his story.

If students are working alongside their peers as creators rather than critics, it will help push back against the “ubiquitous criticality” that Rita Felski has identified. If students are in an environment where they can see the writing strengths of their peers, this will fuel the fire that they themselves are not trapped in the role of “being a critic” but can become creators themselves.

Advantage #4 of the Workshop: It Pushes Back Against the Idea of an Isolated Writer

Lastly, the workshop method develops a mood of collaboration and openness amongst students. One experience I wish I had more of in college was that of group work. Group work is a staple in the real world. Presenting an idea, hearing feedback from fellow classmates is often a common experience for students who are business majors. How many group projects did I have as a literature major? I don’t remember a single one. One of the biggest parts of my career now is taking ideas to meetings and attempting to get people on board with particular ideas.

Yet the creative writing workshop does have some of the elements of group work. It has the elements of doing a proposal in the workplace and gathering feedback. In 2015 UCLA allowed all students to be able to take an intro to creative writing course. Many students showed interest in taking a CRW course, without becoming English majors. UCLA professor Fred D’Aguiar explains what skills students learn in the creative writing classroom:

“There’s also a precious humility factor inherent in a creative writing course, he pointed out. Students learn not only how to flex their more creative-thinking muscles, but how to be critiqued, edited, even humbled, he said. They learn how to recognize what is good — and what maybe isn’t, and how to let go. This is extremely useful in workplaces from Google to Disney, where innovation and creativity rule and are often driven by brainstorming, D’Aguiar said. “In a creative writing course, students learn how to present an idea, when to promote it, when to let go and when to compromise,” he said.”

As D’Aguiar said, the workshop method promotes compromise and collaboration. In a workshop a peer might say to you “I think the first paragraph on the last page of the story does not relate. I recommend that you cut it out.” This forces students to publicly hear what other students honestly think about their work. All students who take a creative writing course will be put into situations where they must learn to be flexible on hearing critical feedback on their writing.

I regularly experienced collaboration in my creative writing classes. This did not come easy for me. In contrast, while writing essays in my literature classes, I developed more of a lone ranger cranking out words alone in my own do-it-yourself, individualistic mindset. But this often needs to be challenged, considering anyone who publishes a book must communicate well with editors. Writers need to not see themselves as hermits to edit all of their work alone, unwilling to let anyone see their errors or flaws then magically publishing a masterpiece. Collaboration is something that is built-in to the workshop method that is lacking amongst students in literary studies.

My argument hinges on the idea that the workshop method seen in creative writing classes is less common than the lecture and discussion-based literature classes. Literature professors, myself included, must consider how we might encourage students to see themselves as creators. The best way for literature departments to thrive is for two creative writing courses to be required for students to graduate with a literature degree. This is an easy solution since a majority of English departments at American universities already have creative writing courses offered every semester.

As literature professors we must intentionally consider if we are training students to be multi-faceted individuals who are storytellers and creators along with being critics and thinkers. We should certainly continue to train our students to learn to interpret, explain, observe and critique difficult texts. However, we must train students to be creative storytellers rather than stand at a distance to observe and discuss beauty. We may be mistakenly training students to be life-long observers and “commenters” instead of life-long creators and participants.

Thankfully we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The solution is right in front of us.