It is a fate peculiar to English teachers that our college training does not prepare us for our most important roles as teachers of
writing. I venture to say this despite the increasing number of college courses in
methods, theory, and curriculum for composition. Such courses are a welcome development in the last ten years since they
are gradually making the profession aware that writing is a process and must be taught as such.
But the product orientation--the tendency to understand "writing" as a noun--is still strong--and it is
reinforced in complex ways by our other role as teachers of literature.
Most of us became English teachers, after all, not out of any special love of correcting sentence fragments, but because of an attraction to fine writing: an attraction, a facility, an ability to discriminate--an ear for wit, perhaps, an eye for a well-wrought sentence. In short, we enjoyed an engagement with writing in its most polished condition. Also, we ought to remember, we became English teachers because we were rewarded for following the rules of reading, chief among which is the rule that great literature is to be treated with deference, even reverence, as the finest expression of our highest faculty. The style of reading that accompanies this general view of literature is one which assumes the perfection of literature; in high school and in college most of us were encouraged to ignore or forget the processes through which literature was written and concentrate instead on the text alone.
Consequently, once we are out of college and in front of a class, we all go through a period of retraining. The style of reading we used on the great authors does not help the student writer; we develop a bag of tricks, interesting assignments, pocket explanations, and a style of margin commentary more appropriate to the teaching of composition. If we are skillful and dedicated, we can even leave the product orientation behind, to a degree, and learn to respond to student writing with an eye to the process that generated it. Yet we run the risk of sabotaging this devoted work if we do not at the same time revise our treatment of literature. For awhile we may regard our teaching roles as distinct, in practice we often teach literature and composition in the same class. And if we are not careful, our style of reading literature may convey to our students erroneous and unrealistic conceptions of the writing process.
The problem is perpetuated by the literature textbooks most of us find ourselves using. In the first place, the very organization of the literature anthology suggests that what is important to understand about great writers is their finished works. The typical anthology presents one great work after another, inviting the student to consider each in its perfection and completion. The questions at the end of each selection assume that each detail in the work is there for a discoverable, intended purpose, and therefore that the writer was in control of the entire context at each moment. We know, of course, that complexity of this kind is achieved not all at once, but through gradual revision. No one who thought for a moment would maintain that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet straight out off the top of his head. But the question is how often do we stop to think about it? How often do we, or our textbook editors, make clear to students that authors rewrite, revise, reconceive, often over a whole lifetime?
Only a handful of texts of the hundreds available show how a poet works through stages and drafts. The three or four that do attempt this show very neatly arranged, typeset "drafts"--occasionally with neat lines drawn through words, indicating a genteel dissatisfaction with this or that phrase. None show handwritten drafts, with all their blots and curses, and none demonstrate any struggle with language. I have never seen any mention of failed poems or stories, projects begun and dropped. We get only the best and the brightest in our literature anthologies, and we get it in all its apparent spontaneity.
We don't usually think of our textbook editors as actively changing an author's work--much less contributing to its perfection--but in fact they do routinely make substantial editorial decisions, often preferring an earlier edition of a poem to a later on pedagogical grounds, and always correcting the writing. Normally an author's work has passed before several editors before it reaches our students. It is a rare anthology that reproduces Emily Dickinson's original punctuation (which consisted almost entirely of dashes); Byron was an indifferent and inconsistent speller; and Shakespeare, of course, spelled and punctuated as the spirit moved him. To judge from our textbooks, though, writers since the Renaissance have kept to a modern style manual.
This nearly exclusive emphasis in literary studies on the perfected text leads finally to a general--and widely held--misconception of the nature of composings. It is that complexity of technique and richness of detail in literary works is the product of the rich, complex, and powerful state of mind of the author while composing; that great poetry, for instance, is necessarily the result of great poetic ideas; and that fine literature is hard to interpret because of the relative complexity of the mental processes involved in his composition. By extension, then, simple or confused writing would appear to be the result of simple or confused ideas. But it ought to be clear from our own experience as writers that a clearly held idea by no means ensures clarity of exposition; at the same time, complicated notions can end up most distressly simplified when they are written. What is required is technique and experience. If we do not make clear to our students that complexity is the result of craft, not of the "spontaneous overflow" of brilliant ideas, then we are telling them in effect that they cannot write well unless they can sustain a pitch of intelligence from moment to moment.
It's a tribute to the tenacity of the students that, in the face of such Olympian models, they try to write at all. Of course, many would not if we did not force them. There are many obstructions we cannot touch but this one we can though it is not easy to do. It is not as if knowing the problem will make it disappear. One practical way to run most literature courses is to use an anthology, and I have yet to find an anthology that does not massively and systematically convey a sense of "literature" as the sum of all the great, complex, finished works. I am not even sure there could be such a thing as a "process-oriented anthology". At any rate, I see no trend in that direction.
What is required now is that teachers constantly supplement the study of literary works with informed discussion of how professional writers go about their work: their regular habits, their eccentricities, their successes and especially their failures. This does not require a period of retraining. There are hundreds of books, thousands of articles, on the creative process, many with specific accounts of writing. For example, the Paris Review interviews, published as Writers at Work, are interesting sources of information, not only on modern literary artists, but on the practices of professional writers in general (each interview reproduces a page of rewritten copy in the author's hand). But in truth the teacher who is committed to infusing literary study with a conception of the process of writing need not go outside the classroom for support. A practical problem-solving session--one simply asks how a writer might go about achieving this or that effect in writing--would go far toward countering the product message of the textbooks. And the most profitable source of information for students is their own experience in composing. It takes a certain amount of skill and planning on the part of the teacher; but if students can be brought to achieve an effect in writing--a metaphor, an image pattern, a syllogism--and then be made conscious of their craft in the work, there is no surer way to evoke an interest in the technique of the great artists.