Unpredictability is one of humankind’s most treasured traits. We believe unpredictability to be the lifeblood of hope, the core of belief, the substance of our psyches, the unfulfilled potential that exists in each one of us. We therefore celebrate unpredictability as predictably as we seek it out. We want unpredictability to be a personal and communal trait that always measures us favourably against machines and against nature. Elements of the predictable (the cyclical, the quantifiable, the repetitive and the habitual) simply make machines and wild nature inhuman. To be human, alternatively, is to be unpredictable. It is in unpredictability that human love is thought to dwell, and in unpredictability where it thrives. The extraordinary strength of a love, the resilience of a love, the emerging love, born where it could not be expected to be found, the love between polar opposites, the love not unsettled by onerous circumstance, the love that overcomes distance or challenges time, the love that is uniquely, individually, idiosyncratically expressed. Our attraction to each of these is evidence of our belief in the importance and power of human unpredictability.
Nevertheless, while we clearly find unpredictability of enduring value we have spent a great deal of time endeavouring to negate it. In fact, we have codified our endeavours to remove unpredictability from our lives in centuries of laws and regulations that seek to limit unpredictability’s legitimacy. We have grown increasingly to expect that our journeys from one place to another will take well-established routes, and that we will arrive at scheduled times. In education, we’ve come to believe that certain disciplines are necessary for a well-rounded understanding of the world and, indeed, all that lies in it and beyond it. In this there is a much vaunted prediction that each individual will be equipped with knowledge that allows them to become productive members of a society, and provide for their own success and well-being. In that way they will also contribute to the success and well-being of the communities in which they dwell. We have sought to make the weather predictable, through the application of empirical science; to increase the predictability of medical interventions to the point where many are all but guaranteed; and to create discernible patterns in markets for goods and services that allow industry to look ahead and markets, whether local, national or global, to speculate in order to maintain an economic dynamism, but only within a generally agreed tolerance, so that economic forces act in measured ways and results come in systemically understood patterns.
All this and more we have done in the name of promoting predictability and negating unpredictability. Yet still we dearly want unpredictability to exist. It is in this vein that we appreciate and encourage human creativity. It is why we speak enthusiastically and often about our imaginations. It is to unpredictability we are referring when we hope to find in ourselves and in others inspired ideas, originality and ingenuity.
When teaching creative writing the nurturing of inspiration, originality and ingenuity refers directly to the encouragement of unpredictability. If not yet explored formally to any productive extent, colloquial and anecdotal references to unpredictability are nevertheless common in creative writing teaching – times when a teacher relates a story of an unexpected moment of discovery in drafting, or suggests a student do something to ‘stimulate your imagination’. Yet, despite a considerable enthusiasm for unpredictability, over a great deal of time and across cultures, and a casual and causal recognition of unpredictability within creative writing practices, we have yet to ensure that our belief in unpredictability, our long and indeed persistent reference to it, and our continued desire to embrace it as a fundamental part of our humanity is formally acknowledged in creative writing teaching and learning.
Is it that we are simply incapable of approaching a condition with which we have so much affinity? Is it that we would rather dismiss actions we find difficult to approach than attempt to understand them? Or is it that we are so disempowered within the institutions where we teach that we cannot formally embrace a trait we have so long valued and so enthusiastically treated as part of what it is to be human?
Recently, during a video conference in what has now been some years of such global discussions via the International Center for Creative Writing Research (ICCWR; www.iccwr.org), a question arose about the role of oral examinations in creative writing programmes. I pondered with colleagues, Dr. Robin Michel from Oakland University and Dr. Stephanie Vanderslice of the University of Central Arkansas, how oral examinations have played a part in graduate creative writer assessment. It was at that point, with thanks to those colleagues, that I began to wonder if we in creative writing academe have somehow let something come adrift. Worse, have we been complicit in pushing something aside, claiming that by doing so we were legitimising our teaching and research practices in a way that made us stronger, comparatively at least, in a higher education environment in which meaning is sometimes reduced to exposition without much regard for the value in narration, description and argumentation? That important something we have marooned in the name of disciplinary credibility is unpredictability.
At first unpredictability seems much like randomness, a kind of dangerous presence, an arrival unruly enough to unsettle the ease by which we make our way along a path through a forest, or the confidence with which we flick a light switch and expect light to flood in. At that point, unpredictability acts not as a thing of love but as a thing of fear. We desire the certain in those cases and, not finding it, blame unpredictability. We point to it to explain our inadequacies. We are lost because of unpredictability. We cannot see our way because of unpredictability. Unpredictability stands between us and our goals, our progress is impeded, we are identified as being less capable, liable to succumb to this mysterious maleficent fluidity. Because of impending unpredictability we narrow our vision, let go our sense of possibility and focus firmly on the immediately graspable. If at the point we are the same creature as the one who yearns for the extraordinary, the challenging, the unique we nevertheless subdue this in the interests of accessible clarity and, in doing so, we are rewarded by again seeing the path before us. We relax in witnessing the dark room become lit. But what have we lost in doing this?
The fact is, we appreciate human unpredictability as ardently as we appreciate human love. Like unpredictability, love too is something very few of us can completely define. We can suggest elements of it, and offer up evidence of its results. Pushed to put more substance in a definition we might describe love as a condition with a temporal shape, recalling its beginnings perhaps, its growth and sometimes its diminishing. Love in such a description consists of a recollection of sensations and ways of responding. But we struggle to find certainty in this and therefore to ground our definition. We baulk at something that is transcendent yet commonplace, sacrosanct yet imperfect, so individual yet often shared. Finally, unable to reach a definitive sense of what we’re considering we decide to acknowledge love by referring to its opposite: hate, perhaps indifference, enmity, animosity, apathy. The contrary more easily defines the proposition. The source of a definition of love, its sense, is now merely and frighteningly deemed to be its opposite. The path is clear. The light is lit. But what have we set adrift by doing this? What is it of ourselves that is now marooned?
Consider therefore a creative writing pedagogy in which unpredictability cannot be acknowledged, not least because it cannot be understood or defined. It does not exist because while we will anecdotally accept it, even celebrate it, revealing as it does the creativity of the type of writing with which we’re engaged, and thus suggesting the human worth of our work, we will not formalise unpredictability for fear that because we cannot define it then ipso facto we cannot defend it. In our classes we ask instead for critical explorations of the textually evident. We suggest that in this enterprise there will be revealed a kind of model of behaviour that, even if not simply manifest in the text, has been organised in the mind and the emotion that produced that text. We simply define unpredictability, and all that it brings, according to its opposite. In this way we have, in a phrase, sighted the path, and merely need to share our vision of it to connect all around us to it. That is the switch we can flick. The light comes on. Unpredictability cannot exist in such a pedagogy because it cannot be explained; even if it can be shown in the personal narrative, the description, the argumentation, it is an antithetical mystery that we have no way of adequately formalising or even approaching.
At which point, in my thoughts, arrives a creative writing student’s oral examination. Here we frequently find a creative writer exploring for her or his examiners how a piece of writing came about. Not in the vein of the explanation that has been manifest as written critical text, suggesting a modelling of behaviour that itself represents what some other disciplines in higher education call methodology. Rather, in the more open forum of conversation, also exploring elements of the imaginative, the creative, the fortuitous, the emotional, the personally contextual. In any written critical work that is present in the room these events could of course be hinted at. But in the fixity of the page, the discourse of the paper, the requirements of the exegesis, the comparative needs of a discipline holding its head up among other academic disciplines, these events are reduced to mere simulacra, a version of the predictable. However, what emerges in conversation, in the oral moment, is something else. It is both an exploration of unpredictability and it is unpredictability itself.
Not all creative writing assessment involves oral examinations. Globally we see variation across levels – so, oral examination sometimes at graduate level but not very often at undergraduate. Different types of examination occur also, some involving multiple conversational participants, Chairs of Committees, External Examiners, Internal Examiners, Mentors, Supervisors, some by regulation required to be silent (other than their potential subversive use of facial expressions, we could call these ‘absent presences’), some part of a discussant ‘team’. Here and there a student of creative writing might face an audience of their peers and in that oral experience wonder on the aural impact. That is: who is hearing what, and in what ways are they hearing it? Does the work on the page sound as it reads?
The ephemeral nature of the spoken, combined with various elements of the unscripted, makes the oral examination an active exploratory event. The student largely cannot determine what might be asked and the examiners, in whatever guise, cannot guarantee what might be offered in reply. The conversation is certainly posed but it is not predictable. This might not be a straightforward empowerment of inherent unpredictability, but it at least points toward our acknowledgement of its importance in creative writing. Ask how and when the unpredictable occurred and we get closer to the truth of what occurred in its entirety, off the page and on it. In this way oral examinations reveal much about creative writing that we will not otherwise capture, and thus not otherwise acknowledge, represent or examine in our work or the work of others.
Should we therefore not re-examine the use of oral examinations in creative writing programmes? Perhaps we should do this as a matter of urgency, if we truly seek to accurately understand what a creative writing student has achieved, what they have learnt. From there it might be this further consideration of oral examinations encourages us to consider other under-used pedagogical tools. Are there are other methods of accomplishing greater veracity in our work? In that vein, we might wonder why more use is not made of the metaphoric in the critical exploration of creative writing. By this I mean if we struggle to articulate that much vaunted existence of unpredictability, we might more successfully do so by shifting the plain of reference. In doing that we always open up the opportunity for bridging the intellectual and the imaginative, the critical and the creative. In metaphor explanation gains narrative depth, argumentation becomes multi-sided, description is imbued with the qualities of both the literal and the figurative. Metaphoric exploration potentially unearths cognitive processes that were, and are, at play but would not otherwise be unearthed.
And surely, too, this is not the end of the list of potential exploratory, investigative, communicative tools we have to use in our creative writing programmes – to inform our assessments of individual student successes, the extent of student learning. If unpredictability is so much at the heart of the human condition, there are almost certainly other actions we can take to better understand and share what is happening when we are writing creatively.
While we currently might celebrate unpredictability, while we might treat it as precious to us, while we have acknowledged that it is part of creative writing, we have not yet been brave enough to really defend it. For a discipline in which the emotional is so important how strange it is that on something as fundamental as this we cannot better express our feelings.