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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Salon Magazine for April 1, 1997: Novelists 'R' Us by Laura Miller
Apr 1, 1997 | between the moment when an individual decides to become a fiction writer and the day he or she sells that first book lie some terrible years -- a wasteland of self-doubt, false starts, flagging discipline and humiliating obscurity. Sometime in the 1960s, university creative writing programs stepped in to fill those years with structure, support and training. At least, that's their stated intention. The literary world has been arguing for years over whether or not they succeed.
University fiction workshops, in which a group of students, led by a teacher, offer each other detailed critiques of their manuscripts, are usually, but not always, part of a two-year master of fine art degree-granting program. A number of highly regarded writers, including David Foster Wallace, Ethan Canin and Lorrie Moore, have graduated from such programs, and many ambitious young writers regard them as a necessary career steppingstone. But the programs have also been criticized for more than a decade. Critic John Aldridge best distilled the complaints in his 1994 book "Talents and Technicians: The New Assembly-Line Fiction." One of Aldridge's charges is that fiction workshops lead to a "cookie cutter" effect, prose "so bland, so competently but unexcitingly written, so interchangeable in style and substance that it very seldom stimulates a distinct response."
In a recent issue of the Paris Review, several leading editors, including Grove-Atlantic's Morgan Entrekin and TriQuarterly's Reginald Gibbons, blasted workshops for producing work marked by what Gibbons called "the conventionality of its artistic choices." Karl Wenclas, editor of the New Philistine, denounces workshop writing as "constipated, homogenized products ... a putrid disease."
