The Intimacy of Teaching Creative Writing

Enjoy this conversation between Lynn Steger Strong and Laura Spence-Ash and read novel excerpts from her 12-Month Generator students in this graduation showcase.

In celebration of our 12-Month Novel Generator students’ graduation, we’re thrilled to share a conversation with Lynn Steger Strong and Laura Spence-Ash, a graduate from Lynn’s first 12-Month Novel Generator cohort. Read their conversation and find excerpts from some student novels below:

• Kelly Bonner, excerpt from Stuck in Eden

• Haley Jakobson, excerpt from Old Enough

• Katelyn Kiley, excerpt from Cravings

• Claudia Hinz, excerpt from Privately

• Winshen Liu, excerpt from American Cheese

• Katie Virnig, excerpt from Must Be Nice

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Questions from Laura Spence-Ash to Lynn Steger Strong

You teach in many different settings, but most of your teaching involves working with students for a semester. How does the year-long nature of the Catapult class affect your relationship to both the students and their work?

All writing teaching, to me, is incredibly intimate: You’re reading and discussing work that often feels—irrelevant of whether the story is about dragons or characters that might look or sound like the student—like some of their most vulnerable, mushiest, most piercingly honest parts. The class fails if the group doesn’t come together and find ways to trust one another, if they don’t show up for one another every week. All of this is further amplified with the year long class: It’s a long time to be together and to stay invested in one another; it’s a long time to be engaged this rigorously with a single project. We all come to know one another’s work in ways you simply don’t have the opportunity for in a single semester. We get to know one another’s processes, our strengths and weaknesses, and when and how within these processes some of us lock up and some of us thrive.

To me, so much of novel writing specifically is understanding how many different registers you have to be in as a writer to finish a novel; how different generative work is from editing is from radically revising, and I love that we have the time to hit all of those registers as a team. A student that was floundering in month two can add incredible wisdom and insight in month nine. In our final workshop, each student runs their own class. One of my goals over the year is to render myself obsolete, and I find there’s space in the year to really show students how much every project is ultimately theirs. My goal is to help them become confident enough in that idea to finish not just the novels we work on together but all those they’ll write after we part.

I was a member of the first cohort of this class, and the fourth cohort is about to begin. How has the class changed over time? What lessons did you learn from the earlier cohorts that you were able to put into action?

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is how much I want to feel irrelevant by the end. Every student I’ve ever had has taught me something new about writing and thinking—and about novels specifically—and the longer I teach the class, the more I want to work to find opportunities to be less present in the conversation, to let students reclaim ownership of their work throughout the class. So much of writing is making choices, and I love thinking through all the various choices at our disposal. I love to think about the different impacts of structure or form or character, but I also know that the best part of every novel I’ve ever loved is that it felt like only that writer could have written it. The more time I spend teaching this class, I think, the better I get at finding opportunities to remind the students of this fact in ways that, I hope, also makes them feel confident enough to make those decisions themselves.

You teach for multiple universities and schools, you write novels and essays and reviews, you read seemingly everything, you run long distances, and you have two small children. What is your secret to doing everything you do?

Haha. Laura, you know I don’t sleep.

How has teaching this class affected your own writing? What do you learn from your students?

I learn new things from students constantly. (I learned so very much from you.) I come into a class all fired up about two or three specific things and then halfway through class I realize I’m all wrong, that there are all these other ways of seeing and re-seeing every text I’ve ever read. While I’m not sure I could ever itemize all the small things I’ve learned (though if I were a more organized or responsible person I would have started a list), I think it’s this fluidity and openness that has been the most instructive overall. The longer I teach the more often I find myself trying to pose questions instead of espouse diagnoses or opinions, and I would say the same is true of my work. I do not think it’s my job, either as a teacher or a writer, to assert things or to offer answers. I don’t think I’m capable of that! I think it’s my job to listen and to read as carefully and as thoughtfully as I can, and then to pose as specific and as exacting questions as I can—such that the piece or the idea that I’m exploring in my work be cracked open in some new or different way.

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Questions from Lynn Steger Strong to Laura Spence-Ash

You are a Catapult success story! Your first (brilliant) novel will be published in 2023! But like most success stories, yours is in large part one of extraordinary commitment and hard work (as well as incredible skill). Talk us through the life of your novel. What work had you put in before the novel generator, what sort of spur did the class provide, and how did you maintain momentum once class had ended?

I had started thinking about this book as early as 2008; I workshopped the first chapter I wrote in the fall of 2009. Then I didn’t look at it for quite a few years. During my MFA, from 2014-2016, I focused on short stories. I started the novel again a few times in the following years, getting to about eighty pages before abandoning it. I kept trying different POVs, different ways of telling the story. When we began the novel generator, I had about thirty pages of the way it is currently structured, with eight different POVs in short sections. The class gave me the structure I needed to move forward; I created a spreadsheet that kept track of how much I needed to write every day to get to the pages needed for submission, and I followed that religiously. I needed that accountability. Knowing that you and the other writers were waiting for pages was extremely important. I spent the fall after the class ended doing some revisions, and then started querying agents that winter.

One of the many things I admire about you is your incredible commitment to your colleagues and to a larger community of writers. How has community served your work over the years? What about the novel generator community more specifically?

I came to the writing community after years working in corporate, nonprofit, and academia. The support I found in this community has been tremendous, and I feel so lucky to be a part of it. I did a full-time MFA, and I was by far the oldest in my cohort, but for me, that was one of the joys. I’m so thrilled to see these amazing writers getting their work into the world, and I know so many of them will be publishing wonderful books for years to come. With the novel generator, it’s a very bonding experience to write novels together.

Your feedback toward your colleagues and in craft conversations throughout our time together continually bowled me over. It is often the case that I learn so much about reading and writing from students, and I will always be grateful for everything I learned from you. How does thinking and talking about your colleagues’ work help you in your own? How is reading linked to your process of writing?

I often feel as though workshopping other people’s work is more beneficial for my own writing than when my work is being workshopped! I find I think more deeply about the craft in someone’s else work than I think about it in my own work, but I can then take the lessons learned and apply them to my fiction. I love writing critical essays about craft for exactly that reason: rarely do we get the opportunity to read slowly and really consider the craft choices that have been made. When I write about a story or a book, I have to slow down and think about how and why it’s successful. I also find that reading often opens up new possibilities for my own work. I just read a book that used the omniscient voice in a really interesting way, and now I’m wondering about whether that would work for my new project. I love how reading opens up so many new possibilities.