The assignment had been to focus in on an important conversation that took place at some point along the students’ personal timelines. I like the assignment—though I really should move it earlier in my teaching plan—because it’s general enough that it allows writers to write about nearly anything they choose (everyone’s had a conversation at some point, is my theory), but it also challenges them to employ dialogue in their writing, and also to zero in upon the small slice of time in which the conversation took place. For writers unused to writing with such focus, it’s valuable to encourage them to gaze narrow and think deep.
My student’s written sentiment wasn’t uncommon. A lot of us have similar thoughts. In the conversation she recorded having with a boyfriend, she voiced the phrase: I think it’s truly better to collect rich experiences than material things.
After she finished reading her essay, I went back to that paragraph and read the sentence aloud. “This is something you really believe?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she replied, nodding.
“Something that’s really, really important to you?” She nodded again. “Is it something that’s in your writer’s credo?”
“Oh,” she replied. I knew her answer was going to be No. But at the same time, I could see the gears turning in her mind as she thought it over and realized, It could be. It should be.
Credo. I believe. The writer’s credo is an assignment I give at the beginning of whatever writing classes I’m teaching. The idea of a credo isn’t mine; it’s not unique to my writing, certainly, or even to the field of writing in general. National Public Radio ran, a few years back, a four-year series with the title “This I Believe” in which writers and other types of celebrities discussed the core beliefs that have defined their lives and careers. The first time I heard the idea of the writer’s credo articulated was in college, when I was taking playwriting classes from Louis E. Catron.
Lou’s class revolved around the concept of the writer’s credo. He’d written an influential textbook that used the credo as its cornerstone—Playwriting: Writing, Producing, and Selling Your Play. Catron thought of the writer’s credo as a recorded statement of personal conviction:
A credo is the writer’s beliefs concerning topics he or she feels are highly important. It is focused most especially upon those portions of life that concern the writer most. It addresses topics about which the author has a deep emotional attitude—a burning anger, a scorn, an affection. It is, then, “This I believe. . . .”
It is uniquely your own.
Lou’s philosophy was that once a writer put into written words those convictions that mattered most, and once he or she had expanded upon and written, personally and privately, about each and every point of importance, it would provide a fertile ground from which art could grow and flourish. He believed the credo inspired students to write with passion and conviction—two qualities that differentiated good, rigorous work from tepid wheel-spinning.
To Lou, a writer’s credo was more than a mere list made into short essays. It was the burning spear of the valiant champion, the holy writ from which began a playwright’s righteous crusade. Taking time to write a credo taught his students to value the self as a source of material; it forced them to evaluate, often for the first time, their own moral compasses. The act of writing down thoughts and beliefs they may never have before examined would lead to stimulating deeper thought. And most of all, the credo was intended to teach students that their convictions had artistic and intellectual worth.
The assignment itself, as he set it forth in the first class of every semester in playwriting, was generous and simple. We were to write down those things we truly believed, the elements of our writer’s credo, and throughout the semester, in our own time, we were to expand on them little by little. He’d never ask to see our credo. It wasn’t graded. He didn’t specify a minimum number of pages. He simply sold the concept to us during that first week of classes and strongly suggested it would make a big difference. Then he left us to our own devices.
Of course, when you give students an assignment that the professor is never going to read or evaluate or ask about again, nine out of ten of them will never do the damned thing. I didn’t, my first semester in the class. I thought it was the kind of bullshit busywork that I could easily get away with not ever doing. In theory, I was right. I wrote and revised three plays that semester without ever having to think about what I really believed. They were okay student plays. Maybe even pretty good student plays.
Over the holiday break that year, though, I had some kind of minor crisis of faith. Maybe I had too much time on my hands, or maybe I was lonely and bored away from campus and my friends. Whatever the reason, I found myself writing in my journals quite a bit as I tried to find solace and inspiration. One night, I happened back upon Lou Catron’s grand and glorious credo. Suddenly I found the idea compelling. I ended up poring through past entries of my journal—in what, a diary that was about three years old by that point?—and compiling them into preliminary statements of belief. Item by item, over the next couple of weeks I went through and expanded each into a short essay that was more personal and heartfelt.
The next semester, my plays were a lot better. I mean, none of them were produced on Broadway with me highlighted as some kind of hitherto-unknown Southern wunderkind. But even at their most bonkers (I seem to recall writing a play that semester in which a clairvoyant housewife directed an amateur Shakespearean repertory company using as actors the ghosts from the local graveyard), I knew from where in my belief system each of those plays was coming. I could sense how much more confident my writing had become. Best of all, I always knew what I wanted to write about next.
Lou made me a convert. Over the years I’ve kept a credo in some form or another. It’s changed over the years, as Lou predicted it would. The concerns of a young man are not those of one in the um, middle-to-mid-late-summer-but-really-still-oodles-of-warm-weather-to-go-of-his-life old geezer like me. I keep it, and I keep revising it, because having a credo has made a difference in my writing. I keep a credo because it matters.
I want my students to have something that matters. So I assign the credo in the first class. I tell them how it will challenge them to confront and examine parts of themselves they might not have contemplated before. I tell them it will give their writing passion, depth, and that it will convince them that their intellectual property is valuable and worthy of attention. I inform them that throughout the semester we’ll continue talking about the development of their credos, and the challenges they encounter in doing so—but that I won’t ask to see it. It won’t be graded or evaluated.
Of course, predictably, nine out of ten students never do a thing about the assignment.
But oh, when they do, I can tell. Last semester I had a student in my memoir writing class—let’s call her Francine—who had a voice so distinct that, had you mixed an unread essay of hers with those of a hundred other students, I could without hesitation have picked it out. I knew what Francine believed. When she read one of her essays, I knew that Francine placed family above all else. I knew that Francine insisted upon the concepts of personal and familial loyalty, and that she had nothing but scorn for people who didn’t hold those as their highest moral absolutes. Francine wasn’t the most experienced writer, but every paragraph she wrote might as well have had I AM FRANCINE DAMMIT! stamped as the background watermark.
“You wrote your credo, didn’t you?” I asked her, one evening. “I mean, you really worked on it.”
Francine blinked at me in surprise. “Well yes,” she said. “You can tell?”
Yes. You can tell.
I think my young student from this semester was surprised when I asked picked that sentence from her essay and asked about the credo. She’s a very strong beginning writer; she has a good sense of purpose and a neat, insightful choice of detail. She writes with courage, and writes from the heart—two qualities that developing a credo encourages. But she hadn’t actually written anything as her writer’s credo, I suspect. She hadn’t yet made the connection that a credo isn’t woven from big, bombastic concepts, but from the little truths and self-realizations that make up our everyday lives. Truths like, I think it’s truly better to collect rich experiences than material things.
I hadn’t communicated myself well. I was teaching the credo all wrong. And I had a new class starting in just a few days.
When my Writing Calisthenics class had its first meeting later that week, I once again devoted a portion of the first class to the idea of the writer’s credo. Normally I would’ve launched into my usual talk about what a credo was, how I’d first encountered it, and why I thought it was important. In other words, what I’d always done that students yawned through while they wait for the first real assignment.
This time, though, I simply handed around a sheet of paper printed with statements. They included:
1. A stranger is a friend I just haven't yet met.
2. Everyone has only one true love in his or her life.
3. Arguing about matters of faith is a waste of time, as the only life we’ll have is the here and now.
4. Life is most honorable when lived without depending upon anyone for help.
5. My stories deserve to be heard.
6. The past is the past and shouldn't be revisited or dwelled upon.
7. Everything in the world is impermanent; we should not attach ourselves to things or to people.
8. Money does more good than harm.
9. I would and should sacrifice everything for my family.
10. Every adversity can be seen as a gift in disguise. The greater the adversity, the greater the gift.
11. I am responsible for my own happiness.
12. Anyone who doesn’t have a five-year personal/career plan is asking for trouble.
13. No one is truly complete until they have raised children.
14. In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
15. I believe that when fate or the universe offers us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it's our obligation to pursue it.
Without any other preface, I told them that what they held in their hands were statements of belief. They might not all be your beliefs. But you probably know someone who subscribes to each and every one of them. Two of them were my strong beliefs, I said, but for the moment it didn’t matter which. I gave them a moment to read them over, then suggested that they start at the top of the list and read them again.
This time, I told them, put a checkmark by those with which you strongly agree—on a scale where 1 represents extreme disagreement and 10 is strong agreement, check those that would get an 8 or above. Put large X marks by those that might get a mere 1 or 2—the items you find utterly distasteful and just plain wrong. It was okay, I told them, if in the end they didn’t mark any of them. In that case, at least pick out one or two that inspired a mild amount of agreement or disagreement.
I could see all the students found something to mark. After a moment, I told them that I wanted them to take five minutes and tweak two of the statements until they really represented what the student believed. If you’d put an X by one, I said, you should rewrite the affirmation until it reflected something that really and truly reflected what you think. Money does more good than harm might make them twitch, but perhaps Money is the root of all evil might suit you better. Maybe As a society, we must defeat economic inequity—soon is how you really feel. If that’s the case, fix it.
If there’s something you believe strongly, but you could express it better with a little adjustment . . . do it. Maybe you don’t want to condemn the innocent with No one is truly complete until they have raised children, but you really believe in My children are the center of my life. Great. Do it.
Pick two. Fix them up a little. Rewrite them from scratch. Renovate them in whatever way it takes to make them feel lived in—to make them feel like they’re yours.
Then I left the room.
When I came back a few minutes later, we sat down and discussed the changes they’d made. I was a little surprised that nearly everybody in the classroom had X’ed out and rewritten the third statement, the one about faith. (Maybe it was the contentious phrasing. I’ll have to remember that, next time around.) A couple of them rewrote the affirmation into a more traditional credence about needing religion in their lives, but one of them transformed it into something with a more agnostic bent that emphasized a need for communication. Some people rewrote the statements about career plans; others picked out the beliefs concerning family and amended those. Everyone had at least two statements they’d tinkered with until they were uniquely their own, though. A couple of the more ambitious had scrawled short paragraphs at the bottoms of their pages.
These two statements, these two beliefs that you’ve renovated and rehabilitated for yourself, I told them—they’re the start of your writer’s credo. Then I launched into my lecture about how stating This I believe followed by single strong conviction can be and should be the foundation for any number of stories and poems and plays and memoirs. They each had two. Think how much art they could weave from them both, alone or combination. They’d come up with two beliefs in less than ten minutes.
What if they had eight statements? They could do that in less than an hour on their own. Eight statements of belief were a solid cornerstone for a writer’s credo and they were already a quarter of the way there.
Did the exercise work as I hoped? Did it make writing the credo into a less daunting task? I don’t know. Maybe to most of them it seemed like the bullshit kind of assignment that they’d never have to turn in, that would never have evaluated, and that they would never contemplate or create.
For a couple of people in the class, though, I expect the assignment will resonate. They’ll think about their convictions and consider from what and where they arose. They’ll think about why their beliefs matter. Those students will have a certainty of what moral issues excite and inspire them. The art they create will be all the more heartfelt.
Then I’ll know who worked on their credo. I’ll be able to see that passion. Everyone will.
1 comment:
Hi Vance,
This was a very interesting post. I think the principles you espouse for a writer's credo could well apply to one's life in general. It provided much food for thought!
Paul, NYC
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