Teaching through the written word
After discussing his recent Order of Canada award, and experiences as a writer and activist last week, Lawrence Hill sits down with The Ontarion to give advice to hopeful writers.
Fiona Cashell: How have you found teaching at Guelph?
Lawrence Hill: I’ve loved it. I’m teaching a fourth-year creative writing course. The students are wonderful and engaged with their work. I have a personal attitude that you can stand up and speak until you’re blue in the face about what makes good writing and it wouldn’t really improve a student’s writing at all. You can listen to a great lecture, but that night when you go home you won’t be a better writer because of it. I believe the best way to help people of any age to become better writers is to engage with them on the page. Don’t speak in abstractions about good writing, but read what they’ve written, offer detailed comments, and drive them back to rewrite. Help them through the learning curve of taking a work, assessing it, and then rewriting it. In my course, I comment on [students’ works] deeply, sometimes my comments are as long as the work itself.
“Sometimes people ask what is the magic ingredient, the potion you have to drink to become a published writer, and my playful answer is…”
FC: What kind of advice do you give your students?
LH: Sometimes people ask what is the magic ingredient, the potion you have to drink to become a published writer, and my playful answer is G.Y.A.I.C.—or get your ass in chair. If you really want to write, you do need to turn off the cell phone and the external distractions and be comfortable living inside your own imagination. There is no guarantee that this eccentric pursuit of exploring your own creative heart will lead anywhere, so you have to be ready to get your ass in the chair, to do it repeatedly, and to feel comfortable going at it regardless of the promises of tomorrow.
Another thing, which is a bit more concrete, is that it’s amazing how much you can improve your writing by taking a thick editing pencil to it and just hacking out any extraneous bits. One of the fastest ways to improve your writing is to be merciless at looking at your work. It’s actually fairly easy to hack things out rather than rewrite the whole thing. A sentence that is 20 words can easily become six with well-chosen words.
“We all have beautiful things lodged inside our hearts, and the job of the writer is to send the pipe down into that heart and let things start bubbling up.”
FC: When you find it hard to write, how do you motivate yourself?
LH: It’s kind of like a marathon—of which I’ve run many. You can’t really stop if you want to get through. You can stumble a little, or limp for a kilometre, but you’ve got to keep going or you’ll never hit the finish line. It’s important to start with something you can actually finish. If you can’t get any velocity in writing in one piece of a story you’re working on, jump somewhere else and go where you can to get a flow going. Try to silence the inner critic and write as freely as you can. If you can get some sort of speed on the page and get your thoughts to start tumbling out, somewhere a gate will open in your imagination and you can work around that. We all have beautiful things lodged inside our hearts, and the job of the writer is to send the pipe down into that heart and let things start bubbling up.
Photo by Karen Tran.