Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

I’ve been going to Cross Fit classes for five years now, and even though I’m deep into my fifties, I have become stronger and have learned a number of skills, outcomes that have surprised me. It’s a remarkably effective system of education and training.

My vocation is writing and not (yet) fitness influencing, however, so my progress in Cross Fit has sometimes led me to daydream about whether a system like it could teach and train writers. This is not a question I have found an answer to! What follows will be exploratory rather than decisive.

In America today, instruction in creative writing usually takes the form of a workshop, which isn’t completely unlike Cross Fit. Both a Cross Fit class and a writing workshop leverage the power of the in-person group. When people come together with the aim of getting better at a particular endeavor, their will power as individuals is strengthened by two social forces: solidarity and rivalry. Being in the presence of people who share your ambition gives that ambition a social reality, by showing you others who are also making a commitment to it, and the encouragement of these peers, in the form of admiration and expressions of confidence in you, can provide positive reinforcement. Humans in company inevitably compare themselves with one another, which risks sparking unpleasant feelings but if properly regulated can be a further motivation for learning and effort. I probably wouldn’t do my allotted burpees quite as fast if I weren’t hoping not to be the last person in class to finish them (as I often am, still). Similarly, in the setting of a writing workshop, I’m probably spurred by a wish to impress, or at least not disappoint, my colleagues. Getting the balance right between solidarity and rivalry is tricky. Much depends on the charisma and emotional intelligence of the group’s leader, whether coach or teacher, and perhaps as much on the social rules, implicit and explicit, that order the interactions between participants.

In a group setting, most instruction comes from the coach or teacher but not all of it. Participants also sometimes instruct one another. This can happen indirectly, as when you watch a peer respond to a teacher’s advice on how to overcome a flaw in technique, or directly, as when a peer gives you a suggestion about how to improve. There’s a risk that the peer might not know what he’s talking about, but this risk is reduced if the coach or teacher eavesdrops and intervenes when necessary. And the act of offering advice is itself instructive, because it is an opportunity for the person giving the advice to consolidate his understanding of technique.

So much for commonalities. Now for some distinctions. I should say up front that I have far less experience with workshops than most writers. I took part in a few as an undergraduate, and over the past half-dozen years, I’ve taken part in one with a few friends, all of whom are professional writers. But I’ve never attended or taught at an MFA program. Take what I say with a grain of salt, therefore.

One limitation of a writing workshop is that its focus is almost exclusively what you might call “demand-side.” I’m using the term metaphorically. In economics, a “demand-side” solution to a problem focuses on consumers, perhaps by proposing to boost their spending power, whereas a “supply-side” solution focuses on producers, perhaps by suggesting that burdens on them like regulation or taxation be lowered. When I say that a workshop has a “demand-side” focus, what I mean is that the attention of a workshop is mostly focused on the way writing is received. This focus is largely built in to the rule that structures most workshops: one participant listens silently while peers who have read a piece of her work describe their reactions.

Writing is not words on a page. It is a series of impressions and thoughts conveyed by words on a page—in part by their texture and rhythm, and in part by their semantic content. A workshop is excellent as a test of whether impressions and thoughts are arriving in a reader’s mind as intended. Do your readers suspect that the butler did it in the first half of your story, or can they tell from the get-go that it was the heiress and resent you for taking so long to say so? Does your description of a rural landscape stir up uneasy feelings of insecurity in childhood, or are you the only person who feels that way about distant slopes of yellow and green? If people in your workshop are skilled at describing their responses to a text, and feel comfortable being honest about their responses, the feedback can be invaluable.

It’s not clear to me, however, that a workshop can provide much more than this. A reader who can tell you that something is wrong is not necessarily a reader who can tell you how to fix it. The premise of a workshop is that its participants arrive already equipped with enough strength and skill. But can you ever have enough of those? It’s easy to see how access to attentive readers could help a writer fine-tune a piece of writing. But it isn’t clear that feedback from readers will build up a writer’s skills. On the contrary, if a writer doesn’t have a resilient enough ego, feedback might impair his fluency, one of the skills a writer needs, by making him self-conscious about exposure.

My daydream about a Cross Fit for writing is that it might be possible to design a kind of instruction that is “supply-side”—that focuses on improving the skills that go into good writing.

A couple of objections immediately present themselves. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that there are established, agreed-upon conventions for success in Cross Fit, and there are none in writing. There is little to no ambiguity about what is good form in, say, a power snatch. But tastes differ in the arts, and even if you argue that a community of informed, well-read taste-makers will tend to converge in their opinion of which writers are the best, you will have a great deal of trouble articulating the aesthetic rules behind their judgments, and you will never be able to derive rules as practical and concrete as those that allow coaches to correct athletes on the spot.

Second, can writers train and practice, in the sense that athletes can? The understanding in Cross Fit is that athletic performance depends on a number of different skills. Some of these, such as stamina and strength, improve with training, that is, by choosing goals that are more and more challenging (in Cross Fit, this usually means heavier and heavier weights), which cause the body to adapt by becoming stronger than before. Other skills, such as agility and balance, improve by practice; during structured repetitions, the brain and nerves learn, becoming better able to perform particular tasks and improving their general coordination of the different parts of the body. Two of the skills behind athletic performance, power and speed, improve only with both training and practice.

What are the components of skill in writing, and can they be improved by training (more challenging goals) and/or practice (structured repetitions) in a group setting? Some candidate skills: memory, insight, observation, tact, theory of mind, openness, stubbornness, precision, surprise, fluency, control of tone, grammatical resourcefulness, ear (including rhythm and sonority), diction (including vocabulary), figuration. This list needs work! I’m so used to focusing on the attributes of good writing that I find it hard to name the skills that good writing relies on. Even if we can come up with a list of these skills, however, we might discover that they are best cultivated by some other kind of effort altogether, neither training nor practice—such as, for example, plain old reading, which, when done right, expands a writer’s vocabulary and broadens her understanding of literature’s possibilities. It also might turn out that it is impossible to come up with a well-formed list. It might be the case that writing is such a whole-psyche endeavor that the list would be tantamount to a description of what it means to be human, which presumably can’t be nailed down, trained for, or practiced (or can it?). Or maybe my list needs to be winnowed, and the more-general traits, like organization and insight, set aside in favor of the traits that have a closer relationship to writing, like ear, grammatical resourcefulness, and diction.

A third, perhaps related objection: What if writing is intrinsically unlike athletic performance? An athlete, after all, competes in public in real time, whereas a writer usually works in solitude, and presents her achievement to others long after she has finished “performing” it. Athletes don’t get to revise their performance; writers don’t have to show their first drafts. Athletes are constrained by rules—their competition is given meaning by rules, and is felt to be undermined when they are not enforced—whereas there is virtually no rule of writing that some great writer has not broken.

Still, originating sentences, even in private, does require something like athletic skill. You can’t convincingly use a word or a sentence structure that you haven’t made yours, that hasn’t become a part of your voice. No amount of fiddling after the fact can take the place of a missing insight. As I’ve grown older, I’ve grown more and more aware of how physical writing is—how much depends on being in good health, well rested and well fed. The secret weapon of most successful writers is probably hidden long hours, but there is an element of fitness, too. It may take you a thousand tries to write a sentence perfectly, but you do have to write it perfectly that one time. If it turns out that agility in writing can’t be taught, I don’t think it will be because that agility can only exist when the writer is alone. Improving a skill seems likely to help a writer, even if some paragons of the art, following its mysterious vicissitudes, decide to make the experiment of dispensing with the skill in question. I admit, though, that writing created during an exercise in a group setting probably won’t be of enduring value; it will be what in Cross Fit goes by the name of “assistance work.” Privacy and silence probably are necessary, in the end, for magic to happen.