Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

In 2004, I began teaching a class called “Uncreative Writing” at the University of Pennsylvania. I sensed that the textual changes that I was noticing in the digital landscape as a result of intensive online engagement was going to be echoed by a younger generation who had never known anything but this environment. This is the course description:

It’s clear that long-cherished notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. How does writing respond to this new environment? This workshop will rise to that challenge by employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering, as compositional methods. Along the way, we’ll trace the rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations spanning the arts, with a particular emphasis on how they employ language. We’ll see how the modernist notions of chance, procedure, repetition, and the aesthetics of boredom dovetail with popular culture to usurp conventional notions of time, place, and identity, all as expressed linguistically.

My hunch proved to be correct. Not only did the students take to the curriculum, but they ended up teaching me much more than I knew. Every week, they’d come into class and show me the latest language meme raging across the networks or some new remix engine that was more capable of mangling texts than I had ever dreamed of. The classroom took on the characteristics of an online community, more of a dynamic place for sharing and exchanging ideas than a traditional professor-lectures-students college course.

But, as time went on, I realized that although they could show me cool new things, they didn’t know how to contextualize these artifacts, historically, culturally, or artistically. If, for example, they showed me “The Hitler Meme,” where the infamous scene from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Downfall was resubtitled so that Hitler was screaming about everything from Windows Vista problems to the collapse of the real estate bubble, I had to inform them that, in the 1970s, situationist filmmaker René Viénet used the resubtitling technique to détourn genre films like porn or kung fu into scathing artworks of social and political critique. It also dawned on me that they were much more oriented to consuming online culture than seeing it as something to create new works from. Although we were engaging in a meaningful two-way conversation, I felt there was a real pedagogical need to be filled, one that centered around issues of contextualization. And there were big gaps of knowledge. It was as if all the pieces were there, but they needed someone to help put them together in the right place and in the right order, a situation that called for a conceptual reorientation of what already came naturally to them. In this chapter I want to share five basic exercises I give my students to acclimate them to the ideas of uncreative writing and make them aware of the language and its riches, which are, and have always been, around them.

The first thing I want to do is to get them to think about the act of writing itself, so I give them a simple assignment: retype five pages with no further explanation. To my surprise, the next week they arrive in the class, each with a unique piece of writing. Their responses are varied and full of revelations. Although some predictably find the task unbearable and can’t wait to get it over with, others discover that it is relaxing and Zen-like, saying it’s the first time they’ve been able to focus on the act of typing, as opposed to struggling to find “inspiration.” As a result, they find themselves happily ensconced in an amnesialike state, with words and their meanings drifting in and out of their consciousness. Many become aware of the role their bodies play in writing—from their postures to the cramps in their hands to the movement of their fingers—they became aware of the performative nature of writing. One woman says that she finds the exercise closer to dancing than to writing, entranced by her rhythmic tapping on the keys. Another says it’s most intense reading experience she’s ever had; when retyping her favorite high school short story, she discovers to her amazement just how poorly written it is. For many students, they began to view texts not only as transparent carriers of meaning but also as opaque objects to be moved around the white space of the page.

In the act of retyping, another thing that differentiates one student from another is the choice of what to retype. For example, one student retypes a story about a man’s repeated inability to complete a sexual act. When I asked him why he chose this text to retype, he replies that he finds it the perfect metaphor for this assignment, frustrated as he is by not being permitted to be “creative.” One woman, who has a day job as a waitress, decides to mnemonically retype her restaurant’s menu in order to learn it better for work. The odd thing is that it fails: she detests the assignment and is enraged that it didn’t help her on the job at all. It’s a nice reminder that, often, the value of art is that it has no practical value.

The critique proceeds through a rigorous examination of paratextual devices, those normally considered outside the scope of writing, but that, in fact, have everything to do with writing. Questions arise: What kind of paper did you use? Why was it on generic white computer paper when the original edition was on thick, yellowed, pulpy stock? (It was surprising to me that students had never considered this question, always defaulting to the generic computer stock at hand.) What did your choice of paper stock say about you: your aesthetic, economic, social, political, and environmental circumstances? (Students confessed that, in a world where they supposedly have more choices and freedom than ever, they tended toward the habitual. On economic and social levels, a discussion ensued about cost and availability, revealing heretofore invisible but very present class differences: some of the wealthier students were surprised to learn that other students were unable to afford a better quality of paper. Environmentally, while most claimed to be concerned about waste, none entertained the notion of electronic distribution to their classmates, defaulting instead to printing and handing out paper copies to all.) Did you reproduce exactly the original text’s layout page by page or did you simply flow the words from one page to another, the way your word processing program does? Will your text be read differently if it is in Times Roman or Verdana? (Again, most students used the word processing defaults to represent the works in digital format, using a ragged right margin—the default in Microsoft Word—even when their source text was justified. Few had thought to enter a hard page break into the word processing program correspondent to the pages they were copying from. And the same with fonts: most had never considered using anything other than Times Roman. None had considered the historical and corporate implications of font choice, how, say, Times Roman alluded to but is very different than the font that the New York Times is printed in—not to mention the waning power of the once-almighty media giant—or how Verdana, created specifically for screen readability, is a proprietary property of the Microsoft corporation. In short, every font carries a complex social, economic, and political history with it that might—if we’re attuned to it—affect the way we read a document.) In the end, we learned that writing up to that point had been a transparent experience for them, that they had never considered anything but the construction and resultant meaning of the words they were creating on the page.

Even the way the students discuss their work is closely examined. One student, for example, without thinking, prefaces a presentation of her work to the class by claiming her piece “isn’t going to change the world,” which is normally shorthand for “this piece isn’t all that great.” But, in this environment, her pronouncement leads to a heated half-hour-long discussion about writing’s ability or inability to affect change in the world, its political ramifications, and its social consequences, all on account of an innocently—but sloppily—spoken platitude.

I give the class the instructions to transcribe a piece of audio. I try to pick something with little excitement or interest so as to keep the focus on the language, a straightforward news report or something seemingly dry and dull so as not to “inspire” any student. If I give ten people the same audio file to transcribe, we end up with ten completely unique transcriptions. How we hear—and how, in turn, we process that hearing into written language—is riddled with subjectivity. What you hear as a brief pause and transcribe as a comma, I hear as the end of a sentence and transcribe as a period. The act of transcription, then, is a complex one involving translation and displacement. No matter how hard we try, we can’t objectify this seemingly simple and mechanical process.

And, yet, perhaps mere transcription is not enough. We end up with text, but, upon reading it over, we’re still missing one key element: the physical qualities of the voice—the lulls, stresses, accents, and pauses. Once we allowed those vagaries in, we open Pandora’s box: How to transcribe the messiness of speech, say, when two people are talking atop one another? Or what to do when words are mumbled or indecipherable? Or how do we connote someone laughing or coughing while speaking? What to do about foreign accents or multilanguage texts? For such a seemingly simple task, the questions kept piling up.

On an Internet search, one student comes up with a standard set of transcription conventions, one used in courtrooms and in witness statements, that we immediately adopt as our guide. In them we discover a world of orthographic symbols designed to bring the voice out of the text. We set to work, peppering our dry texts with extralingual symbols. We listen over and over again, each time parsing with more minute focused intensity—was that pause (.10) seconds or was it (1.75) seconds? No, it was somewhere in between, noted as (.), a micro pause, usually less than a quarter of a second. By the time we are through, the voices jump off the page, shouting and singing as if a recording of them were playing in the room. The results look more like computer code than “writing,” and it produces a dozen unique works, in spite of the uniform standards we impose upon them, so that, for example, a transcription of a snippet of dialogue would carry over as this:

He comes for conversation. I comfort him sometimes. Comfort and consultation. He knows that’s what he’ll find.

\He comes for/ *cONverAstion—* I cOMfort him sometimes (2.0) COMfort and >cONsultAtion< (.) He knows (.) that’s what >HE’ll find—< (2.0) He knows that’s <whAT—> >he’ll fi—nd< (6.0)

Underlining of the syllable nucleus denotes that the word is stressed with a syntactically focused accent

UPPERCASE indicates words which are spoken in a louder volume and/or with emphatic stress

(2.0) marks a timed pause of about 2 seconds

(.) denotes a micro-pause, usually less than a quarter of a second

–(single dash sign) in the middle of a word denotes that the speaker interrupts himself

—(double dash signs) at the end of an utterance indicates that the speaker leaves his utterance incomplete, often with an intonation which invites the addressee to complete the utterance

\ / inward slashes denotes speech in a low volume (sotto voce)

> < (arrows) denotes speech (between the arrows which is spoken at a faster rate than the surrounding talk

< > denotes speech (between the arrows) which is spoken at a slower rate than the surrounding talk

* * (asterisks) indicate laughter in the speaker’s voice while pronouncing the words enclosed

Is this writing or is it mere transcription? It depends on whom you ask. To a stenographer, it’s a job; to a fiction writer, focused on telling a compelling narrative, it’s a clogged storyline; to a screenwriter, it’s the actor’s job; to a linguist, it’s analytical data; yet to an uncreative writer—one who finds unexpected linguistic, narrative, and emotional richness by subtly shifting frames of reference in words they themselves didn’t write—it’s art, revealing as much about the transcriber/writers’ biases, thought, and decision-making processes as traditional types of writing do. Who would have thought that parsing and coding could reveal so much about the coder?

As the semester progresses, the class begins to take on a life of its own and the students begin to act as a group. The class virtually assembles to watch, say, the season’s finale of Project Runway at 10:00P.M. on a Tuesday evening. We’ll each be at our separate homes, scattered up and down the East Coast, yet all connected by a chat room. Once the show starts, no conversation is allowed, except for us to all type what we’re hearing on the television as we’re hearing it. Subjective commentary, gloss, and opinion—original thoughts and words—are prohibited. From the moment the show’s opening credits roll, a blizzard of repeated words are looped onto the screen by all fifteen participants. We don’t stop for ads, rather texts are spawned continuously until 11 P.M., at which time over seventy-five pages worth of raw text is generated, which looks like this:

ChouOnTHISSS (10:19:37 PM): really really happy

beansdear (10:19:37 PM): all the models are dress

ChouOnTHISSS (10:19:37 PM): show the world what I can do

WretskyMustDie (10:19:38 PM): Michael’s parents

ChouOnTHISSS (10:19:38 PM): Michael’s parents

customary black (10:19:38 PM): ready to show the world

Kerbear1122 (10:19:38 PM): weally weally happy

sunglassaholic (10:19:38 PM): ready to show the world

ChouOnTHISSS (10:19:38 PM): I really like it.

ChouOnTHISSS (10:19:38 PM): do or die

tweek90901 (10:19:40 PM): I really like it

EP1813 (10:19:40 PM): coming to life I like it

shoegal1229 (10:19:40 PM): I do or die

WretskyMustDie (10:19:40 PM): do or die now or never

beansdear (10:19:40 PM): i really lke it

tweek90901 (10:19:40 PM): one shot

shoegal1229 (10:19:40 PM): now or never

sunglassaholic (10:19:40 PM): one shot

beansdear (10:19:40 PM): do or die

shoegal1229 (10:19:40 PM): one shot

WretskyMustDie (10:19:40 PM): Jeffrey’s girlfriend and son

beansdear (10:19:40 PM): I’m giving it

tweek90901 (10:19:40 PM): all of the looks

tweek90901 (10:19:40 PM): on all of the girls

sunglassaholic (10:19:40 PM): all of the looks

customary black (10:19:40 PM): all the looks all the girls

The class then constructs an editing process. They decide to remove language they feel interrupts the rhythmic flow (“Michael’s parents” and “Jeffrey’s girlfriend and son” were extricated). After much argument, the user ids and timestamps are removed (some felt that their documentary function was essential to understanding the piece), all punctuation is excised, typos are fixed, and all lower case is are changed to upper, leaving the final text looking like this:

really really happy

all the models are dressed

show the world what I can do

ready to show the world

weally weally happy

ready to show the world

I really like it

do or die

I really like it

coming to life I like it

I do or die

do or die now or never

I really like it

one shot

now or never

one shot

do or die

one shot

I’m giving it

all of the looks

on all of the girls

all of the looks

all the looks all the girls

It’s streamlined and rhythmic, none of which was generated by doing anything other than repeating what was heard. But it’s a powerful echo chamber, feeling like a minimalistic cross between E. E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein, all generated by a group listening closely to the spew of a popular television show. If the text wasn’t convincing enough, the students give a group reading of the piece, each speaking the lines they “wrote,” reanimating this media-saturated text with a bodily presence in a physical space. If we listen closely to the everyday language spoken around us, we’ll be sure to find poetry in it. When Project Runway is aired, you’d be hard-pressed to find a group of viewers paying attention to the way words are spoken instead of how they carry the narrative. Yet all media using language is multifaceted, at once transparent and opaque; by reframing, recontexutalizing, and repurposing the found language around us, we’ll find that all the inspiration we need is right under our noses. As John Cage said, “Music is all around us. If only we had ears. There would be no need for concert halls.”¹

I like to get students out of the classroom, off the page and the screen and, taking a page out of the situationists’ book, have them practice uncreative writing on the street. I tell them that they are to choose arcane texts or out-of-date slogans—“Impeach Nixon,” for example—and to graffti their words onto a public space in a nonpermanent way. Some choose to work almost invisibly, inscribing a section of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in micrography using a ballpoint pen on the skin of a banana and placing it back in the bowl with the rest of the bunch. Others are brazen, violently scrawling 1940s advertising slogans in red lipstick across washroom mirrors. Some make their most secret data very public, hoisting enormous flags up campus flagpoles in the middle of the night emblazoned with their bankcard PIN numbers. One student scrawls an erotic slogan from ad 79 in Pompeii, MURTIS BENE FELAS (“Myrtis, you suck it so well”) in freshly fallen snow across the campus quad in red dye; someone else tacks a futurist slogan “SPEED IS THE NEW BEAUTY” across the front of Wharton, subtly critiquing the leading business school in the country; yet another obsessively chalks the first one hundred numbers of Pi on every flat surface he can find across campus, resulting in a Philadelphia paper sending a team of investigative reporters to try to ascertain the identity and motives of this mysterious graffti writer.

The next week they take their slogans and, using card stock and computers, created greeting cards out of them, replete with envelopes, made to look as slick and authentic as possible. I then have them source out and adhere authentic bar codes on them and we march en masse to the local CVS’s card section and droplift (the opposite of shoplift) them, snuggled amidst the sea of real “get well” and “first communion cards.” We document the droplift event and stick around to see if anyone stumbled across and bought one. I have them buy a few to make sure the bar codes worked. Over the next few weeks, the students keep checking on the cards: they’re always there. Rarely will someone buy a card with the feminist slogan “WOULD YOU MARRY YOUR HUSBAND AGAIN?” paired with a soft focus illustration of a sad-eyed puppy.

These exercises use language in ways that echo the use of poetic slogans during the Paris of May 1968 (most famously Sous le paves, la plage [Under the paving stones, the beach]) that were spray painted across the walls of the city. The nonspecific and literary nature of these slogans serve to disrupt normative logical, business, and political uses of discursive language, preferring instead ambiguity and dreaminess to awaken the slumbering, subconscious parts of one’s imagination. Finding their footing in surrealist notions of Comte de Lautréamont’s famous line, “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” such uncharacteristic uses of public language were meant, as Herbert Marcuse said, to motivate the populace to move from “realism to surrealism.”² Of course on a college campus in 2010, it’s unrealistic to have such political expectations, but in fact these interventions, within their context, carry a certain disorientation and provoke some strong reactions. These gestures, echoing street art and graffti, remind the students of the potential that language has to still surprise us in ways and places where we’d least expect to encounter it. It lets them know that language is both physical and material, and that it can be inserted into the environment and engaged with in an active, public way, making them aware that words need not always be imprisoned on a page.

Take a film or video that has no screenplay and make one for it, so precisely notated that it could be recreated after the fact by actors or nonactors. The format of the screenplay should have nothing left to chance or whim about it: the students must use a Courier font as well as adhere to the preordained formatting constraints that are the screenwriting industry standards. In short, the final work should be unmistakable for a Hollywood screenplay.

One student decides to take a short porn film, Dirty Little Schoolgirl Stories #2, starring Jamie Reamz, and render it into a screenplay. The piece begins:

FADE IN.

EXT. HOUSE—DAY

For a split second, we see the image of a man, immaculately suited, pulling on the lavish handle of a tall wooden door. On either side of the door sit two lamps, and beyond this are stone columns. The overall effect, although the shot is brief, is one of wealth and prestige.

INT. BEDROOM—DAY

The shot cuts to the inside of a bedroom. The camera sits at a diagonal to the large, mahogany sleigh bed, so that we can see only half of the room. Also in our field of view are a nightstand, in detailed cast iron, and a tall armoir. The bedspread is done in a red-and-gold paisley print and perfectly matches the four or so pillows and small items on the nightstand. In the foreground is a young-looking blonde, JAMIE, who was once wearing a typical schoolgirl’s uniform—button-down shirt, tie, dark blue cardigan, headband. She is now only wearing white underwear, and we see her pulling up her blue-and-yellow plaid skirt. Her wavy hair swings from side to side as she does so. As she gets the skirt up to her waist, the camera zooms in close to the skirt. She reaches around to the back of the skirt to zip it.

The camera, so invisible in film, is given a prominent role in the screenplay, as are the furnishings, something that normally disappears in a porn film. In fact, just about everything extraneous to bodies and sex is rendered transparent in pornography. When the dialogue is transcribed, the result, naturally, is stilted and awkward; these were words that were neither meant for the page nor to be scrutinized for their literary qualities:

JAMIE (naughtily): Well … since I am staying home today …

TONY (raising his eyebrows): Right …

JAMIE (laughs devilishly).

Jamie puts one hand over her crotch, then spreads her legs, all while looking at Tony seductively. He returns her gaze.

TONY: Well … (mumbles).

JAMIE (laughs). How do you mean?

(Tony clears his throat twice.)

JAMIE: What do you think I mean? (Her voice is becoming increasingly syrupy and suggestive.)

The selection of adjectives (naughtily, devilishly, syrupy) and use of punctuation (ellipses, parenthesis) are written according to the whim of the student; someone else writing a screenplay for the same film might have chosen other words to use or have selected other actions to describe. Conventional valuations of writing enter: like most literature, it’s one’s choice of words and how they’re arranged that determines the success or failure of the work.

Once the “action” starts, the student employs the most clinical terms to describe it:

JAMIE moans in response and the camera zooms out again, so that we can see the whole of JAMIE’s vagina. TONY has one hand on JAMIE’s thigh and one right above her vagina. He is looking at it intensely, as if surveying the territory. The camera zooms out again as TONY strokes her vagina twice, his hand moving downward. He gently touches a finger to her inner thigh.

Like any screenplay, the actions are clearly and factually described, yet these erotic actions, we’re led to believe—through the talents of Jamie and Tony’s acting—were spontaneous and “real” they must be as “real” and spontaneous the next time they are performed. Yet, on another level, the student really isn’t describing Jamie and Tony’s actions as much as she is the camera’s movements and the editor’s decisions. Hence, by creating her screenplay, she adds another dimension to an already complex chain of authorship, one that interweaves the literary, the directorial, and scopophilic:

the remade film’s viewers → the actors & director of the film from the student’s script → the reader (of the student’s work as literature) → the transcriber (student) → the film’s original intended audience → the film’s director → the camera operator → the actors → the set

The chain omits the intended result of any porn film: the erotic. In this exercise the student’s language muddies and objectifies the goal of pornography, upending conventions that are almost always unquestioned, transparent, and deeply unaware of their own workings. In writing such a screenplay the student sets up a hall of mirrors, purposely confusing notions of reality, authenticity, viewership, readership, and authorship.

Another student takes a home video, makes a screenplay of it, has copies of it bound, and gives them as gifts to her parents for the Jewish holidays. The video is of her family’s emotional return to the ancestral village in Poland where the better part of them had been exterminated during World War II.

(Begin to enter cemetery. Jay and Tourguide are in the shot. Inside the cemetery. Mostly dirt, grass, trees.)

JAY: This is where the residents of the walled city of the Jewish ghetto were buried.

NANCY: So this is an amazing experience. To see where a quarter of a million Jews are buried. Or three and a half million Jews before the war, ten thousand today. To think that people still deny the existence of the Holocaust, having visited the ghetto. We see that millions of Jews were transported out of Poland to the camps. Pardon my jerking, it’s really hard, I’m holding my umbrella. And these are our tour guides in Baligrad, currently they’re … How many people live in Baligrad now?

(Voices muffled in the background, as the camera pans the rundown cemetery and over-grown greenery.)

It just so happened that the student’s mother, Nancy, is in class during the presentation of the screenplay and is requested by her daughter to stand up in class and “act” out a few lines from the “play.” She specifically indicates that she should read the paragraph just reproduced. Nancy, being a good sport, stood up and begins reading her “lines.” She is immediately cut off by her daughter, who says, “Mom, that’s not the way you said it in the film!” and makes her repeat the lines with “more feeling.” The mother begins again and is just as quickly cut off, her daughter begging her to intone her words in a very specific way, to act more “naturally.” What we are seeing in the classroom is a recreation of a scripted event, which is a recreation of a home video with mother as “actor” and daughter as “screenwriter/“director.” Furthermore, this is not taking into account the degree of “acting” that both of them are doing publicly in front of a class, which is presumably different from the way they would act in the privacy of their home.

It was a very emotional episode. Yet emotional is not the first word that comes to mind with transcription or screenplays of preexisting footage. One would think these methods would produce sterile and dry results, but the reality is the opposite. The transcription or interpretation of extant materials provides students with a sense of ownership of these words and ideas, to the point that they become the students’ own as much as would a piece of “original” writing.

The uncreative classroom is transformed into a wired laboratory in which students hypertext off the ideas of the instructor and their classmates in a digital frenzy. This was proven during a recent visit by a writer to my classroom. The writer began his lecture with a Power-Point presentation about his work. While he was speaking, he noticed that the class—all of whom had their laptops open and connected to the Internet—were furiously typing away. He flattered himself that, in the traditional manner, the students were taking copious notes on his lecture, devouring every word he spoke. But what he was not aware of was that the students were engaged in a simultaneous electronic conversation about what the writer was saying, played out over the class listserv, to which they had instant access. During the course of the writer’s lecture, dozens of e-mails, links, and photos were blazing back and forth; each e-mail eliciting yet more commentary and gloss on previous e-mails, to the point where what the artist was saying was merely a jumping off point to an investigation of depth and complexity such that a visiting writer, let alone a professor’s lecture, would never have achieved. It was an unsurpassed form of active and participatory engagement, but it went far astray from what the speaker had in mind. The top-down model had collapsed, leveled with a broad, horizontal student-driven initiative, one where the professor and visiting lecturer were reduced to bystanders on the sidelines.

But what of the sustained classroom discussion or the art of carefully listening to another person’s point of view? From time to time I make the students close their laptops and switch off their cell phones and we reconnect face to face in meatspace. My students seem to be equally comfortable with both modes, moving in and out of them with as much ease as they do in their day-to-day lives, texting their friends during the day and going out dancing with them that evening.

But I do wish to raise a red flag: I work at a privileged university, perhaps one of the most privileged in the world. The classrooms are crammed with the latest technology and top-speed wireless flows like water from the tap. The students, as a whole, come from economically empowered backgrounds; those who aren’t are well subsidized by the university. They arrive in class with the latest laptops and smartphones and seem to have every imaginable piece of the latest software on their machines. They are adept at file sharing and gaming, instant messaging and blogging; they tweet nonstop while updating their Facebook status. In short, it’s an ideal environment in which to practice the sort of techno-utopianism I preach with enabled students ready, willing, and able to jump right in.

Needless to say, the situation at an Ivy League institution is not in any way normal. While many institutions in the West have ramped up their technological infrastructures in similar—if not quite as elaborate—ways, at most universities students struggle to get by with older laptops, earlier versions of software, and slower connections; smartphones, for now, are the exception, not the rule, and vast numbers of students must balance the demands of school with equally demanding jobs. In many parts of the West and throughout the third world the situation is much worse, to the point of technology being nonexistent. The data cloud is a fiction, with open and accessible wireless connections few and far between. If you’ve ever tried to find an unlocked or open wireless network anywhere in the USA, you’ll know what I mean. This won’t be changing any time soon.

My students know how to express themselves in conventional ways; they’ve been honing those skills since grade school. They know how to write convincing narratives and tell compelling stories. Yet, as a result, their understanding of language is often one-dimensional. To them, language is a transparent tool used to express logical, coherent, and conclusive thoughts according to a strict set of rules that, by the time they’ve entered college, they’ve pretty much mastered. As an educator, I can refine it, but I prefer to challenge it in order to demonstrate the flexibility, potential, and riches of language’s multidimensionality. As I’ve discussed throughout this book, there are many ways to use language: why limit to one? A well-rounded education consists of introducing a variety of approaches. A law student can’t only study a case from the side of the prosecution; what the defense does is equally important. The Socratic method of legal education emphasizes the importance of knowing both sides of an argument in order to win it. Like a chess match, a skilled Socratic lawyer must anticipate her opponent’s next move by embodying the contrary stance. A legal education also stresses objectivity and dispassion so as to represent a client’s interests. I think writers can learn a lot from these methods.

Why shouldn’t a literary education adopt a similar approach? If we can manage language/information, we can manage ideas and thus the world. Most tasks in the world are oriented around these processes, be it the gathering of legal facts for an appellate brief, the collating of statistics for a business report, fact-finding and drawing conclusions in the science lab, and so forth. Taking it one step further, by employing similar strategies, we can create great and lasting works of literature.

At the start of each semester, I ask my students to simply suspend their disbelief for the duration of the class and to fully buy into uncreative writing. I tell them one good thing that can come out of the class is that they completely reject this way of working. At least their own conservative positions become fortified and accountable. Another fine result is that the uncreative writing exercises become yet another tool in their writing toolbox, one they will be able to draw upon for the rest of their careers. But the big surprise, even for my most skeptical students, is that being exposed to this “uncreative” way of thinking forever alters the way they see the world. They can no longer take for granted the definition of writing as they were taught it. The change is philosophical as much as it is practical. The students leave the class more sophisticated and complex thinkers. I, in fact, train them to be “unoriginal geniuses.”