On Five Great Creative Writing Videos

for Teaching and Learning

As the new academic year is starting, I thought I’d share a few of my teaching materials. My touchstone stuff. My gold dust.

Here are five clips that I often use to open up discussions with Creative Writing students, and a little explanation for each of what and why.

1.

There’s too much to say about this wonder by the Eames Studio. It’s my most frequently used visual aid, especially in non-fiction classes. I will have to do a few diary entries explaining what I say, but essentially it’s this: just as I’ve suggested the genre of fiction is related to maximum velocity attained within it, so non-fiction’s sub-genres are related to the scale of the thing that’s being written about, and also the POV’s distance from it in space (although being inside the subject is one of the main things non-fiction can do). This is easy to see with popular science writing about, say, the birth of the universe, but it’s also true about a memoir like The Outrun by Amy Liptrot or Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test. As you watch it, think about which scales you’ve written about, and which you’ve never gone near.

2.

For classes on storytelling, I use this video of the South Park guys. (Contains swears, unsurprisingly.) It’s a good, memorable reinforcement of what George Saunders says in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (although you’ll note he uses the word and rather than but or therefore). George has something to learn from Matt and Trey —

I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.

First, a willingness to revise.

Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.

Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire out of his car” are all easy enough to type) but in making one thing seem to cause the next.

This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

“The queen died and then the king died.” (E.M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a super-power that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

3.

Yiyun Li’s sensitive, detailed advice is useful for helping students push off from the shore of fact and out onto the lake, or sea, of what the hell is happening in my story? I’m making stuff up!

What Li says fits alongside, and perhaps partly comes from, Vivian Gornick’s book The Situation and The Story (which is about non-fiction).

4.

When a student is getting downhearted about their writing, I often suggest they listen to what Ira Glass — host and producer of This American Life on NPR — has to say about judging your own work. It’s wise and kind.

(Glass was Editorial Adviser on the podcast S-town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder. If you haven’t listened to it, you should. Just don’t read anything about it beforehand.)

5.

And if a student really wants to get into thinking about themselves as a learner, as an artist, I point them in the direction of this amazing interview with the sometimes controversial philosopher Agnes Callard. She asks (I’ll do my best to distill) how is it possible we humans can aspire to acquiring a skill or a set of values that we don’t yet know well enough to understand. We don’t yet value the values of, say, the literary modernism of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But we want to start working toward that because, for some reason, we feel it will be worthwhile for us. This may seem a little niche, but it’s crucial for a student’s sense of themselves as a learner, and for any artist’s as an explorer. It explains why there are things you’re not going to get immediately, or for a while, or for years, but that they are vital. A half hour very well spent. Perhaps life-changing.

So, if you’re studying or teaching or administrating this year, at university, school, college or outside academic, good luck for the next few weeks.

The long slide toward Christmas begins.