A series of posts on what creative writing pedagogy has to offer vocational teaching in any discipline.
At a recent workshop on vocation at my university, I heard a colleague use a beautiful metaphor to describe the vocational journey: “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I love this metaphor, and it’s one I know well as a creative writing instructor because the original quote refers not to vocation but rather to writing. This metaphor’s source is a Paris Review interview with American novelist E.L. Doctorow, in which he describes the writing process.
It’s not surprising to find wisdom about writing popping up in conversations about vocation. After all, when we ask students to reflect on their vocational journeys, we’re usually asking them to tell a story about themselves, and creative writing is the discipline of storytelling. That’s why—in this post and those that follow—I offer several frameworks, tools, and activities from the field of creative writing that instructors in any discipline can use as they integrate vocation into their teaching and advising.
I’m not the first to draw connections between vocation and storytelling. In their collection Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies, editors Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham make the case that literary studies plays an important role in vocational teaching and offers significant potential in helping students explore their callings. Literary studies, they argue, offers students skills in meaning-making, analysis, and evaluation essential for interrogating their own lives. VanLaningham argues that “the critical interpretive approaches offered by the field of literary studies … provide important ways to conceive of vocation as a narrative act.” As useful as Johnson and VanLaningham’s focus on the interpretive side of English studies is, I wish to share with readers what the field of creative writing has to offer to vocation.
The process by which we pursue a good life, it turns out, has a lot in common with the process by which we make beautiful art. Why? Because, as John Keats writes in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Creating beauty requires pursuing the truth, and so does living a good life. At their core, both vocational discernment and art-making involve courage, wisdom, self-knowledge, and determination. Both require intention, inspiration, practice, hard work, and maybe a bit of luck. When we teach creative writing, we’re essentially teaching how to live a bold and purposeful life. And that’s because most of the biggest challenges for student writers are not related to talent or even the knowledge of craft knowledge. The most common obstacles student writers face are psychological or spiritual: imposter syndrome, procrastination, perfectionism, self-doubt, and jealousy. Accordingly, some of the most famous books about writing, like Stephen King’s On Writing or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, are not about technique but rather about process—about how to overcome one’s demons in order to tell the truth in your art.
In our vocational teaching and advising, we try to help our students discover, speak, and live their own truths. And to do that, we must teach them to follow the conventional creative writing wisdom to “write [or speak, or do] what scares you”—to live courageously.
So how do creative writing instructors do this? What exactly do we do in our classrooms all semester? Since the emergence of creative writing as a field of university study in the 1970s, the most common pedagogical tool employed has been the workshop model. In most creative writing courses, half of the term’s meeting days are spent “workshopping” student writing. Typically, the class and instructor all read a student author’s piece and write them a letter of feedback, including praise, analysis, questions, and suggestions. Then during class, the student author reads their piece—or an excerpt from it—out loud to their peers. For the next 10-15 minutes, the student author’s peers share and discuss their commentary aloud together while the student author takes notes and asks follow-up questions. In this way, students learn not just how to improve their own work, but also how to offer constructive criticism to their colleagues. And in offering such criticism, they learn how to strengthen their own writing.
Essentially, creative writing pedagogy is grounded in community dialogue and support—in the belief that our work only improves with the help of our communities. And by returning the favor and helping them, we further improve our own abilities. The message students receive from the workshop model is that we cannot be writers in isolation. Our vocational work as artists is dependent on our vocational work as responsive, generous community members, friends, and neighbors. As Erin VanLaningham emphasizes in Called Beyond Our Selves: Vocation and the Common Good, vocation is not an individual project but rather integrated in questions of the common good. As solitary as writing might seem at first glance, it is, like all human endeavors, a collective enterprise. We are all interdependent. We all belong to each other.
What a profound model to offer any discipline! I see no reason why lab notes, research papers, critical analyses, or experiment designs couldn’t be critiqued in similar ways. Especially in introductory or capstone classes, this community model of peer review lends itself beautifully to conversations about what it means to be a scientist, musician, social scientist, or an accountant. In what ways can we learn to lean on each other in these diverse fields, and make a meaningful life in community?
The second key framework I want to offer in this post is the mantra of creative writing instructors everywhere: “show, don’t tell.” This simple, powerful idea is one of the first lessons students hear in any creative writing class. But what does it mean? Be specific. Describe everything in such precise detail that the story can only be uniquely yours. Don’t just write, “I love him so much.” That’s telling. Instead, show exactly what your love looks and feels like: how you awe over how calm he stays in emergencies, or how you spent your first anniversary together lost in a jungle with monkeys.
When students tell the stories of their own vocational journeys—in advising meetings, personal narrative assignments, or in-class reflection activities—we should ask that they show instead of tell. When a student says, “I knew I wanted to be a teacher after taking Introduction to Education with Dr. Jameson,” we should push for more specificity. What was it about that class that was so inspiring? Which unit? Which textbook? Which lesson? When a student says, “My internship at the food bank solidified my desire to pursue a career in non-profit work,” we should ask the student to show us what is meant. Was it a conversation with a client at the food bank? An epiphany while shelving canned goods? A slow burn of joy or frustration building up every day during the bus ride to the internship site?
Practically speaking, the ability to tell stories like these about one’s vocational journey comes in handy for job hunting, whether it’s sharing an anecdote in a job interview or sketching a vivid example in a cover letter. In You Majored in What?, a guide to job applications for undergraduates, Katharine Brooks emphasizes the importance of story-telling in the job search process, pointing out the ways that anecdotes capture the attention of hirers and give them something to remember you by. Stories can also help job candidates form connections with interviewers and show, rather than tell, why the candidate is qualified.
So remember: stories are grounded in specifics. In moments. In scenes. When students learn to narrow in on these details, they learn to see their own uniqueness—to see their lives in HD. And this can be deeply empowering and liberating—I see it every day in my writing classes.
Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University. She is the author of six poetry collections, two video game history books, and four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, POETRY Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. Her lyrics have been performed at Carnegie Hall and her poetry is permanently installed on a wall of the New York City Public Library’s East Harlem branch. She is a teacher of students aged 8 to 80, and received her MFA from George Mason University. For more posts by Alyse, click here.