★★★☆☆ Does what it says on the tin

The College Handbook of Creative Writing

Robert DeMaria

This winter I will be taking a course called "Essentials of Writing Fiction" at my local community college, and Cengage Advantage Books: The College Handbook of Creative Writing by Robert DeMaria is the textbook. So, I got my Hermione on and read the whole thing in advance.

In his preface, Robert DeMaria claims, and I have no reason to doubt it, that the first edition was the first textbook of creative writing to be published and used as a college creative writing textbook. Before that publishers were wary, thinking that the subject was too "idiosyncratic" for a text. (Apparently they all used exactly the same words to express their skepticism, from which DeMaria deduces that they were all talking to each other about it.) DeMaria managed to convince a publisher to give him a try, and he wrote a text that he used to teach creative writing courses. That was 1991. Over time the book has evolved, until we get this 2012 fourth edition.

The book contains, I would say, three types of content. Mostly it defines and explains those things you'll have learned about in literature courses: theme, setting, characters, and plot. Those are the first four chapters. They are followed by others on less fundamental concerns such as point of view, tone and style, and description. I didn't really read anything I hadn't read before in these parts. It is, however, useful in setting the terms and vocabulary of discourse.

The second type of content is advice for writers. DeMaria is in fact a published novelist, which gives him the presumption of a right to make such pronouncements. However, I found I didn't really believe much of his advice. Some of it is patently absurd. For instance, on p 49 he states, "A good writer must pay attention to everything he or she encounters---everything!" It is literally impossible to pay attention to "everything" one encounters.

The third type of content is examples: reprints of poems and stories to exemplify the concepts of the chapter. A small number of these are DeMaria's own work, but the large majority are works of other writers, including some who are very well known. By and large, these are only OK -- there is very little in the examples that I would call truly great writing. There is a reason for this:

DeMaria is a snob. He makes (over and over) a distinction between entertainment and art. The distinction, I believe, exists and is significant, but it is much less significant than DeMaria appears to believe. Entertainment, to DeMaria, is "mere entertainment." He appears, if anything to regard it more as a bad thing to be entertaining than unentertaining. This is silly.

I'm going to give you a little list: Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Alexandre Dumas, Isabel Allende... All of these men and women are or were, I submit, great artists who wrote some very entertaining works. (Also, in most cases, some that were less entertaining.) You undoubtedly have a few names to add to the list. They were not entertaining despite being great artists -- entertainment was part of their art.

It is NOT a bad thing for an artist to be entertaining. It IS a bad thing to regard Entertainment as Antithetical to art.

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