Writing, Ethics, and the Liberal Arts
Robert Schultz
"The aim of right education is to lead a man out into more varied, more intimate contact, with his fellows." Ezra Pound's formulation expresses at least one aspect, if not the very essence, of liberal education. Each of the disciplines taught at Roanoke College helps to meet the aim Pound upholds, but my special subject here is the teaching of creative writing.
When student attempts to write a story, to create a character negotiating a conflict in which something important is at stake, that student must get to know his or her character uncommonly well. In the words of author Janet Burroway,when you write you must know what your character "eats for lunch and how much it matters, what he or she buys and how the bills get paid, how he or she spends what we call working hours. Know how your character would prefer to spend evenings and weekends and why such plans get thwarted. Know what memories the character has of pets and parents, cities, snow, or school." Though little or none of this information may be directly included in your story, what you do include will be "the iceberg tip that implies the underwater bulk of heredity, environment, experience, and human nature." The goal is to get inside your character's skin, to write of her gestures and decisions so that she is convincingly individual and at the same time universal in her humanity.
In this labor to create characters real enough for us to care about, in a world that we recognize as our own, the writer will realize that she is at a distinct advantage if she is well-educated. In writing, as in life, anything we know about the physical sciences, psychology, history, economics, philosophy, and the rest will come to our aid. Indeed, all of one's knowledge, all of one's intelligence is brought to focus and activity in making the microcosm which is a story. Further, the student writer who works to make a fictional character act and think and feel like a real person is exercising the sort of imagination which, in other contexts, allows her to imagine the reality of those around her, and this is the root of moral responsibility. All ethical behavior, if it is not merely coerced by law, is founded on our ability to imagine the reality of other lives.
Most of what I have said about writing stories is true of poems, as well. And, in both kinds of writing, students are introduced to principles of artistic craft and discipline which apply throughout and beyond the arts. In writing, as in most other endeavors, sheer will and the sort of enthusiasm that often passes for inspiration are both necessary and pleasant, but not sufficient. One must also know one's medium, must become proficient in the techniques of the art, and learn the conventions of the genre at hand, whether to conform to them or break from them. One never knows enough. As Chaucer lamented: "Life so short, and craft so long to learn."
The difficulties of trying to write well are wonderful for teaching humility and for teaching one to stick to one's business, but the satisfactions can be great, as well. Speaking of a remarkable experience, we often say to each other, "Words can't express what it was like." The writer is the one who knows they can. John Leggett, former director of the famous creative writing program at the University of Iowa, once said: "Our medium is the English language, an instrument of such marvelous complexities that it can portray, like some great cathedral organ, every nuance of human thought and feeling. It is no less than the great mirror of intelligence itself." Exploring the nuances of thought and feeling by trying to express them in language is to know one's ideas and emotions more fully. The word "articulation" carries in its origins the sense of branches and joints. When we articulate experience in a story or poem (or essay) we are forced to investigate its branches and joints, its numerous related parts and the precise ways in which they fit together. This is why writing is not merely an act of recording, but a process of discovery.
I am trying to say three things about the study of creative writing in the context of the liberal arts. First, that it carries the imagination into the deep water of other lives, and so it exercises the faculty which makes life in community possible. Second, it involves and enlivens all of a student's learning throughout the traditional liberal disciplines, because good imaginative writing simply demands all the knowledge and intelligence the writer can muster. Third, working to master the resources of our language and to grow in technical accomplishment demands the sort of discipline and attention which all good craftsmanship requires, whether in artistic performance or any other kind of work.
Not all students of creative writing will continue to make stories and poems after their college years; perhaps very few of them will. The business of teaching this subject is to support and train those who will continue to write, and at the same time, to give something of permanent value to those who won't. I believe that even a brief, introductory experience with creative writing can enliven the powers of empathy, can stimulate a synthesis of the student's learning in other fields, and can train the powers of discipline and concentration which are required for success in any sort of work. Most of all, I hope that the study of creative writing, as with the study of any art, can enliven imaginations and so help nudge students out of the jail of their sole selves into more varied, more intimate contact with others.