by Shawn Andrew Mitchell
Despite the last fifty years of literary theory, and despite the overpopulation of MFA-accredited writers and the limited range of styles possible, the dominant mode of thought within creative writing workshops and programs is still that of the author as an auteur who needs to “find his or her voice.” There is little attention paid to ideas of deconstruction or heteroglossia, the ideas that an author is a construct or a compilation of other voices, that what goes in is what comes out.
Likewise, workshop participants in advanced workshops are by and large expected to have found their writing technique, and thus workshops focus primarily on critiquing the work, not generating it. But how does one reach that state of flow where the subconscious opens up onto the page? In From Where You Dream, Robert Olen Butler suggests the answer is functional fixedness: write every day at the same time in the same place with the same notebook and pen and your stories will flow out. But what if they don't? And what if you have no ideas to work with?
In an age of computers and the internet, there are new frontiers for generating writing. My talk will present various methods that might be taken, from imitative writing to computer-generated language to Oulipian formal constraints. I will read from a few of my short stories and discuss the methods used to generate them. Overall, I will argue for moving beyond old concepts of “voice” and “originality” and into the humble and productive state of trusting in the unknown of the machine.
Biography:
Shawn Andrew Mitchell is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale where he teaches composition and creative writing. He is a contributor to the Fiction Writers Review, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Torpedo, NANO Fiction, The Montreal Review, Prime Mincer, and Crafty Magazine. His short story “It’s Not the Heat So Much As the Jelly” was anthologized in Torpedo Greatest Hits, available from Hunter Publishers in Australia.
