Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 20, No. 3 (2023)

“There is No Rubric for This”: Creative Writers’ Bids for Writing Center Support

Lizzie Hutton
Miami University
huttoneb@miamioh.edu

Abstract

This study explores the distinctive questions, challenges and types of feedback requests that creative writing students bring to writing center consultations. Through an examination of appointment form data, this analysis shows significant differences between these and other students’ bids for support, in both their conceptions of task, audience and genre, and in their expectations about the role that writing consultants might play. This study has implications for both consultant training and writing center presumptions about students’ varied writing and revising processes.

Introduction

I recently had lunch with two of the undergraduate writing consultants who work at our university’s writing center, and whom I taught in our center’s credit-bearing training course. Both are high-achieving, thoughtful, and full of can-do energy. Yet when they asked about my current research, a key difference between them emerged. I’d told them that I was investigating writing center consultations that centered on creative writing projects, and one of them—I’ll call her Andrea—immediately blanched. “I’m terrified of working with creative writers,” she blurted out, eyes wide. “I know nothing about that kind of writing! I’d have no idea what to say!” The other—I’ll call her Jess—laughed in surprise, looking from me to her colleague. “I love working with creative writers,” she told us, taken aback at the strength of her friend’s sudden show of absolute uncertainty.

For the sake of context, I should add that both these consultants are triple majors, and that in this capacity each is amassing a wide range of disciplinary knowledge that spans the humanities and the social sciences. Both, moreover, profess a particular affection for cultural and literary studies; moments before, we’d been discussing the varied pieces of literature, historical and contemporary, they’d each been reading for their courses. Both, finally, are experienced and confident writing consultants. They seem to genuinely enjoy the work, and in our professional development seminars, they appear equally at ease supporting fellow consultants as they are taking on new consulting challenges. The difference between them that had just emerged did not therefore spring from vastly divergent learning dispositions, cultural interests, or even levels of writing center experience. The difference was rather that Jess was a creative writing major, and thus familiar with the fundamental values of the field. Andrea, in contrast—despite her enthusiasm for foreign films and literature, and her two-year stint as an eight hour-a-week consultant—saw the idea of supporting a creative writing student with something like pure panic.

Jess, however, should not have been so surprised. A 2020 study of writing center practitioners’ attitudes about creative writing consultations found that more than half of those surveyed felt they needed specialized training to support creative writers, especially writers working on poetry (Ozer). Nor is this a new realization for the field. The writing center studies literature—in both its training guides and its scholarship—has long attested to, and worked to preempt, the challenge that creative writing consultations can present. Ben Rafoth’s classic Tutor’s Guide (2000, 2005) includes a chapter on tutoring creative writers by the seminal creative writing theorist Wendy Bishop. More recently, Melissa Ianetta and Lauren Fitzgerald’s 2015 Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors acknowledges that creative writing constitutes a “highly specialized” type of writing “that can stump tutors unfamiliar” with its conventions, and provides a brief heuristic for supporting such potentially challenging forms of writing (154-5). In the field’s leading journals, writing center scholars have also periodically taken up the topic, offering an array of best practices aimed, like these tutoring guides, at assuaging the specific anxiety that working with creative writing can inspire in many consultants (e.g., Devet, Pobo, LeBlanc).

Yet even as this scholarship recognizes that working with creative writers merits a kind of special consideration, it also tends to gloss over the fundamental complexity of the challenge. Many recent recommendations advocate a generalizable approach of genre and/or rhetorical awareness (e.g., Ianetta and Fitzgerald; Ozer), essentially implying that the demands made by creative writing are in fact little different from the demands made by any other field-specific genre, whether academic and disciplinary (a literature review, a lab report) or professional (a cover letter, a business memo). For consultants trained as “expert outsiders,” in Rebecca Nowacek and Bradley Hughes’ phrasing (181), consultations about creative writing are thus understood to offer a challenge best met through collaborative discussions about genre, audience, purpose and authorial intention. There nonetheless remains something unsatisfying about such a tidy formulation, resting as it does on an ethos of soothing reassurance, and the claim that consultants are actually better prepared than they think to provide the support that creative writers will need. This despite the fact that the creative writing studies scholarship of recent decades (e.g., Bizarro; Vanderslice and Manery; Peary and Hunley; Hesse) has worked to articulate the distinctive values and habits that undergird its reading, writing and revising practices. And this also despite the fact that little to none of the creative writing-writing center literature (with the crucial exception of Ozer) emerges from systematic study of the specific learners, tasks, or feedback requests that actually comprise creative writing-focused writing center consultations.

In response to such a gap, I set out in this study (IRB 03454e) to empirically explore what creative writers actually ask of their writing center consultants and consultations. Through an examination of writers’ creative writing-focused bids for support, as expressed in the appointment forms these writers fill out for their writing center consultations, this article seeks to name the precise questions, challenges, and kinds of feedback that these writers in reality request—and which consultants, ready or not, are obliged to navigate.

Attending to writers’ bids for support

In attending to creative writer’s real writing center requests, this study also responds to recent calls among writing center scholars for more empirical research into the varied forms of writing support that real students bring to college and their coursework. Roberta Kjesrud’s 2015 meta-analysis of the field’s methodological habits critiques a longstanding tendency to put writing center “practitioners at the center of our gaze,” often to the neglect of the writers whom our practices and policies are purportedly designed to assist (44). Kjesrud’s claim is confirmed by Yanar Hashlamon’s 2018 overview of writing center research focused on the writer’s role in consultations; overall, Hashlamon finds that evidence of such “tutee-central” research is relatively scant, and that writing center literature generally proves to “rarely address [writers’] perspectives as active participants in testing our pedagogical assumptions” (np). Indeed, Harry Denny, John Nordlof and Lori Salem’s study of working-class college students’ perspectives on writing center support, published the same year as Hashlamon’s review essay, stands as an explicit rejoinder to these observations. As these scholars note, “We pride ourselves on meeting students where they are, without preconceived notions of where they ‘should’ be” (69); yet, as their study also confirms, many writing center policies and practices do not always align with the reality of student need, much less with the writing center support requests students actually make.

The field is not short on largely speculative recommendations about how writing center practitioners might best support creative writers; we are short, however, on systematic analyses of this population and the type of support they appear to need and want from their writing center visits—as Ozer also notes. Instead, therefore, of proposing yet one more preemptive solution to a consultant like Andrea’s panic, this article seeks to better understand such panic’s source—the exact nature of the challenge that many of our consultants face. The questions I focus on, then, are questions of problem clarification: not the prescriptive “what should writing center consultants do to better tutor creative writers?” but the more descriptive “what do creative writers come to the writing center wanting and needing to learn and explore?” and “how do these creative writers’ bids for support differ from those made by other writing center writers?”

To begin to answer these questions, at least within the context of one writing center, one institution of higher education, and the specific culture of creative writing that this institution cultivates, I drew data from our writing center’s appointment forms (sometimes called “intake forms”), comparing the support bids made by creative writers to those made by a random sample of other writers. As my below analysis reveals, the bids for support made in these creative writers’ appointment forms did prove distinctive in some crucial ways, related both to the kinds of feedback requested, and to the specific conceptions of task, genre and audience these writers brought to their writing and revising. Limited to one site as these findings are, they are not, of course, entirely generalizable to all writing centers or to all institutionally mediated creative writing cultures. But these findings do offer a suggestive picture of some of the values, habits, freedoms, and constraints that shape one set of creative writers’ approach to writing and revising. These findings thus also lay important groundwork for further research into the writing center practices and policies that may be most appropriate for this population.

After all, this is a field and a type of writing-focused student that writing center consultants should feel reasonably well prepared to support. The numbers of students committed to creative writing continues to grow at many institutions, whether as undergraduate majors or minors, or through increasingly popular MFA and PhD programs. At many institutions, moreover, introductory creative writing courses can count towards undergraduate students’ general education or advanced writing requirements, on the presumption that such classes can introduce students to practices, dispositions and techniques also applicable to a number of other academic endeavors and genres (see Tassoni 2020 for a potent defense of this position).

Indeed, and despite this study’s interest in more precisely articulating the distinctive kinds of questions creative writers tend to bring to the writing center, I do not want to promote the common misconception that creative and academic writing tasks represent entirely irreconcilable activities and fields of study. I myself am a creative writer, a writing studies scholar, and a writing center administrator all at once, and I do not feel these affiliations to conflict in my day-to-day. As noted in my introduction, moreover, many of the peer consultants I train and employ also identify both as creative and academic writers. Here I concur with Elizabeth Boquet and Michele Eodice (2008) that writing center work is essentially creative, in ways too often unrecognized by academia’s more typical frameworks of assessment; and that, as a number of other scholars have also argued, writing center practitioners are already adept at the highly collaborative, responsive, improvisatory, peer-feedback models that also structure many workshop-based creative writing courses (e.g. Adams and Adams; Conner; Kostelnik; Neff; Sherwood).

Nonetheless, it is also important to note that such affinities will remain difficult for non-creative writing consultants to leverage so long as the actual needs and values brought by such writers remain understudied. Consultants such as Andrea do not need only to be reassured, or provided a patchwork of tips and tricks; they also need, and deserve, concrete and detailed explications of the varied and distinctive demands these writers see themselves responding to, and the expectations they tend to bring to writing center support. Only by exploring the reality of these distinctions can we prepare consultants to work with the flexibility, receptivity, and informed sense of confidence that productive writing center support requires.

I should also note that, in the analysis that follows, I use the terms fiction writer, poet and creative nonfiction writer (as well as “academic and professional writer”) only as shorthand for writers working in these genres at the time they made their writing center visit, not to imply an essentialized view of these writers’ identities. It is only for the purposes of brevity that I identify writers this way.

Research Site and Methods

First, the institutional context from which this data was drawn: this study took place at a mid-size public midwestern university with a strong emphasis on the liberal arts. Here, the English department has long housed a popular creative writing major and minor for undergraduate students (comprising about 180 undergraduate students), as well as, more recently, a two-year MFA program (20-25 graduate students). As to the writing center: we advertise ourselves as open to all writers at the university, working on any kind of writing project, including creative writing. A portion of undergraduate and graduate student consultants also bring to their writing enter work a specific interest in creative writing. One of the writing center’s student-run special interest groups runs two creative writing contests each year, open to the entire university; and creative writers looking at consultant bios on our scheduling system or website will moreover see that a number of these consultants are creative writing majors, minors, or MFAs (around 4-8 each year). Judging from our programming, marketing and the disciplinary backgrounds brought by many of our consultants, we are a center visibly interested in supporting creative writers working at a variety of levels.

Methodologically, I collected, coded and analyzed appointment form data that spanned three years (August 2019- August 2022), drawn from our writing center’s WCOnline platform. I included appointment forms written for the three modalities of consulting that we offer: in-person, live online (synchronous) and written online (asynchronous). To build a collection of creative-writing specific appointment forms, I included only forms in which the writer either referenced one of our university’s creative writing courses, or used the terms “creative writing,” “poem,” “poetry,” “fiction,” “novel,” “short story,” or “creative nonfiction” somewhere in our appointment form’s open text boxes, in which we ask writers to describe their task and audience, and to explain the main kinds of support they would like. (See appendix B for these two open text box questions.) I excluded from this collection appointment forms whose writers had declined permission for their forms to be used for research; and appointment forms that, upon closer inspection, did not request feedback on a piece of creative writing per se, but instead on a reflection, analysis, or peer review about creative writing. I finally excluded appointment forms whose writers were especially spare, using five words or fewer to describe their task and concerns. In the end, this process provided me with 45 creative writing appointment forms, which I anonymized and dissociated from all demographic information except the class for which the writing was being produced (if applicable).

To provide a point of comparison to this data, I also randomly selected and anonymized 100 other appointment forms from the same three-year span, whose writers had also granted permission for their appointment form data to be used in writing center research. These included appointment forms related to coursework from a range of academic courses, theses and dissertations, as well as job materials and applications. I anonymized this data and dissociated it from all demographic information. Using open coding (Cresswell), I then analyzed these two sets of writers’ answers to our forms’ two open textbox answers, attending specifically to patterns in their descriptions of task, expressed challenges, questions, and bids for feedback.

In adopting this method, I drew on scholarship that has examined writing center appointment forms for the insight they can offer into the questions, challenges, and needs that writers bring to their writing center consultations (e.g., Severino, Swenson and Zhu). Appointment forms, of course, have some limitations as an entirely reliable window into writers’ concerns. Not all writers fill out their appointment forms with the same level of detail. Writers coming to an in-person or live online (synchronous) consultation usually know that they will also have the opportunity, through discussion with their consultant, to further develop the consultants’ understanding of their task and concerns, so the attention they give to their appointment forms can be somewhat cursory. Some writers may also have little ready language to describe their tasks, challenges, and concerns; this may be particularly true for newcomers to a field, or to higher education more generally. Moreover, appointment forms themselves should be understood in context—as writers’ answers to the specific questions the appointment form poses about the nature of their work, their audience, and their main writing and revising concerns.

Nonetheless, and especially considered in the aggregate, appointment form data can offer a telling overview of the concerns most significant to a large range of writers at the very moment when they are making their writing center appointments. While retrospective writer interviews and surveys provide room for extended reflection and the scaffolded development of writers’ ideas, such data is also limited for its focus only on participants who self-select into a study, and who are willing and able to make the extra outlays of time and attention these data collection methods require. Appointment forms, by comparison, are completed by everyone who visits the writing center; and while not everyone grants permission for their data to be used, far more do than not (77% of the forms pulled for this study granted consent). While less nuanced and context-sensitive than other types of writing center data, appointment forms can provide a relatively more comprehensive cross-section of writers’ support requests than surveys or interviews viably could.

Indeed, even the uncoded collection of this data offered some insight into the numbers and kinds of creative writers who use our writing center. First—and despite the facts that our university has robust undergraduate and graduate creative writing programming, and that 10-15% of our consultants identify in their bios as creative writers—this data showed the numbers of creative writers coming to our center to be notably low (about 5% of all visits over this three-year span). Second, and as table 1 (Appendix A) shows, utilization numbers varied among different types of creative writers. Fiction writers were by far the most frequent visitors (21 of 45); and the writers most likely to bring in “advanced” work (11 of 21): produced for an upper-level course, their MFA program, or not created for a course at all. By comparison, about three-quarters of poets and creative nonfiction writers (73% and 77%, respectively) brought work for an introductory course. This data suggests that fiction writers are more apt than poets or creative nonfiction writers to see the writing center not only as a space suitable for creative writing feedback, but also more for feedback on advanced-level or self-sponsored projects. While I do not have space here to speculate about the reasoning behind these tendencies, I can note that our writing center does not appear to be either marketing or tailoring our support as well as it might, whether to creative writers more generally, or to poets, creative nonfiction writers, or advanced creative writers more specifically. More to the point of this article, this data also suggests that our field’s current practice of treating creative writing consultations as little different from all other kinds of consulting may not be as welcoming to creative writers as might be imagined.

Open coding helped me refine my study’s aims. I began with two broadly linked research questions: about the kinds of support creative writers request, and how (and whether) these bids for support might differ from those requested by non-creative writers. Through continued analysis of my data, however, I developed a more granular understanding of what these bids for support might reveal about the specific challenges and questions different writers bring to the writing center. This understanding was gleaned both through codes related to the types of feedback requested (whether “general” and unspecified, or focused on correctness, or attached to the use of specific techniques) and to these writers’ attendant representations of task, genre, audience, purpose, intention, and the role they ask the consultant to play in providing such feedback. In comparison to academic and professional writers, I thus found these creative writers’ bids for support to prove distinctive not only for the explicit content of their support requests (e.g., “how should I strengthen character development?”) but also for the way they framed their writing and revising tasks, and the way they conceptualized the writing center consultant as support for these tasks. My first research question thus evolved into three more specific sub-questions, all of which were sharpened by a comparison to non-creative writers.

• What kinds of feedback do creative writers explicitly request, in comparison to non-creative writers?

• What kinds of writing and revising demands and challenges do creative writers appear to be facing, as indicated by their representations of task, audience, and purpose, in comparison to non-creative writers?

• What distinctive kinds of responses are consultants thus being asked to provide to creative writers?

My findings fell into five broad categories, around which the following five subsections will be organized. While creative writers shared with academic and professional writers either a tendency to leave appointment form feedback requests somewhat undefined (“I just want a pair of fresh eyes”) or tied to the specific deployment of technique or rhetorical moves (use of evidence, use of dialogue), creative writers nonetheless distinguished themselves from non-creative writers in the following fundamental ways: (1) an overriding interest in holistic feedback unconcerned with correctness; (2) an open-ended conception of task and audience; (3) malleable and still emergent aims; (4) uncertainty about genre boundaries; (5) requests for highly individualized reader response. Not all creative writers’ appointment forms exhibited all five of these tendencies, but all these tendencies did stand in clear contrast to those evinced by academic and professional writers; and, as I will discuss in my conclusion, these findings not only substantiate but help to explain why writing consultants’ usual approaches may not suffice in providing the specific kinds of feedback these particular writers want and need.

Finding 1: “Anything and Everything”: Holistic feedback unconstrained by concerns with error

Creative writers’ bids for support were often notably broad—"anything and everything” was how one writer put it. When specified, however, these bids for support almost always centered on holistic elements of revising, concerned with the meaning of a text in its entirety (see table 2, Appendix A). First, a good number (31%) sought guidance in a general kind of whole-text improvement, as when a fiction writer wrote, “I would like another person to review this story and make edits and comments all over it to help improve it,” and a poet requested “fresh eyes” and “any tips, suggestions or critiques of the work I have completed.” Second, and even more frequent (40%), were requests for help with specific issues of technique, albeit as pertained to the writers’ overall production of a general effect.  In these requests, writers asked for support on issues that ranged from “dialogue,” “character development,” “imagery,” “tension,” or “pacing.” Some (seven total) also referenced a concern with “word choice,” “style” and “tone,” with one poet requesting feedback even more specifically about “register,” explaining that “I have a tendency to inflate my word choices” and expressing a worry of sounding “pretentious.” The other most frequent topic of feedback centered on the writer’s “development” or “expansion” of the text and its story, characters, images, or main ideas (38%): one fiction writer, for example, asked if they “should add more detail to the ending”; a poet asked whether “there are specific sections that could be expanded on”; and a creative nonfiction writer wrote that “I would like to know if the overarching theme of the piece…is fully developed.”

The vast majority of these bids therefore asked for support with a whole-text form of meaning production and development. This tendency is underscored by the fact that strikingly few (2 total) requested help with issues of correctness, or the fulfillment of sentence-level rules (e.g., proofreading, grammar, mechanics, or formatting). Those who did ask for support in error correction, moreover, did so only in passing: both of these requests were embedded in and made implicitly subordinate to the kinds of “whole-text” questions described above, concerning the development of meaning (as when the same writer not only requests help “formatting my dialogue correctly” but also requests “feedback on my ideas”).

In this, creative writers stood in contrast to academic and professional writers, 23% of whom not only requested help with corrective issues, but frequently positioned such support as the sole kind of support they wanted or needed. Often to the exclusion of more holistic matters involving the content or structure of their texts, these writers requested help only with formatting headers, with citation styles, with grammar, spelling, or “checking for mistakes.” This random sample also showed very few academic and professional writers seeking help with exploratory development of themes or ideas (only 8%). Creative writers’ bids for support, by contrast, were almost entirely unconcerned with error, concerning themselves instead with the development of meaning and deployment of technique. At one level, of course, this suggests that writing consultants might benefit from at least a passing familiarity with some of elements of creative writing craft (dialogue, pacing, imagery, et cetera). At another level, however, this finding also suggests something more fundamental about the values these writers brought to their peer-supported composing processes: an interest in discussing the themes and associations that a text in its entirety accrues as it is revised, rather than discussing that text’s adherence to some predetermined set of rules.

Finding 2: “This is just supposed to be a poem”: Open-ended tasks and sense of audience

Coding of this data showed that creative writers further differed from academic and professional writers in the ways they represented, and thus implicitly conceptualized, both their tasks and their audience. Indeed, and in striking contrast to non-creative writers, my data shows this population to be both writing and revising with few pre-determined constraints or reader expectations, at least that they felt they could or should describe in their appointment form.

First, and whether requesting help with broad improvement, uses of technique, or development of content, these creative writers showed an overarching tendency to describe their genre or assignment in strikingly open-ended terms (see table 3, Appendix A). Indeed, the majority (80%) described their task or assignment only as “creative nonfiction,” “short fiction,” or “a poem”: the three loose categories of writing—what we might consider the meta-genres of creative writing—around which their university's creative writing program is organized. One’s poet’s somewhat dismissive explanation of their assigned genre is typical: “this is just supposed to be a poem for my English portfolio final exam.” Such representations of task suggest that these writers were working with few predetermined conventions or aims, whether formal, structural, or rhetorical, to which their texts are expected to cohere.

To be sure, there were some exceptions: One fiction writer, who asked for help on how to handle the “the general climax” of a central scene, described their larger project as an “historical” novel for “young adults.” Another fiction writer—one who asked about “pacing”—framed this as a question pertinent to genre-specific conventions and goals, explaining that “I want to know how I handled the mystery elements of my piece.” A third fiction writer described their flash fiction piece as an attempt at a “fractured fairy tale”; a poet, as a final example, described their draft as a “visual forms poem.” Notably, however, this constituted only a small portion of creative writers; of all creative writers’ bids for support, in fact, only one fifth (20%) represented their writing task with this level of genre-specificity. The vast majority, in response to the appointment form’s request that they describe their task, assignment, or purpose for writing “in detail,” used the broadest terms possible: the academic equivalent of describing a course assignment as only a paper or essay.

What’s more, almost a quarter of these creative writers (24%) took the time in their appointment form to explicitly state that they were approaching their revisions lacking both an assignment and any sense of the criteria by which their finished work would be assessed (again, see table 3, Appendix A). One writer highlighted this by writing in all caps (in an appointment form that was otherwise not all caps): “THERE IS NO RUBRIC,” echoing in another part of their form, “there is no rubric for this.” Another explained, “there are no specific guidelines except for the genre being creative nonfiction.” A third wrote, “there was no prompt of any other requirements, including length” and a fourth explained, “very broad instructions and all we really had to do is write a poem.”

This lack of genre-specificity contrasts sharply with the professional and academic writers from my random sample, almost all of whom (95%) provided within even the most general bid for support a specific description of their task, and using terms that offered a fairly precise picture of the genre norms that typically constrain that task. Academic and professional writers asked for support revising genres that ranged from a “rhetorical analysis,” to a “case study,” from an “annotated bibliography” or a “business report” to a “personal statement” for a “graduate school application”: task descriptions that each carry specific connotations about the point of view, argumentative mode, kinds of evidence and even formatting conventions that writers will be typically expected to deploy.

If creative writers’ representations of task were broad, their representations of audience tended to be even broader (see table 4, Appendix A). Very few creative writers’ bids for support distinguished a specific audience for whom they wrote. Some—presumably in direct response to the question about audience asked on our appointment form—outright stated that they brought no sense of audience to their work of writing and revising: as one put it, in a classically expressivist vein, “I didn’t have a main audience in mind, it’s more of a piece for me.” Those that did name their audience, moreover, most often defined this audience merely as their classroom instructor and peers, and without explicating any functional expectations these readers might bring to the text (about what that text should do, or how). Indeed, only four writers (9%) described their audience as constituting a population who would read their text through the lens of somewhat specified identities, as when one wrote that a text was intended for “young adults” and another for “other mothers.” Yet even when these writers did define their audience, they gave no indication of the particular genre expectations or kinds of knowledge this audience would bring to such a text.

Far more typical was an appointment form in which a creative writer explained that they were composing for a wide and deliberately undefined spectrum of readers. As one writer put it, “I want to make sure that it’s engaging to a broader audience”; as another explained, “My main readers consist of anyone who likes to read in general, especially poetry.” Indeed, a main challenge these writers seemed to face was not to write to a specific audience but to produce a text that some undefined range of readers should presumably be able to access and enjoy, without any previous familiarity with the topic: as one creative nonfiction writer explained of their piece, “I hope anyone would enjoy reading it,” even “a reader who doesn’t share the experience.”

Academic and professional writers’ descriptions of audience again provided a telling contrast, arguably because of the more constrained genres and tasks with which they were working. A few (9%) non-creative writers asked consultants to help them make sure their work was “readable,” “clear” or “professional” for a “general” or unspecified reader or audience. A somewhat larger number of non-creative writers (22%), however, explicitly specified not only a particular type of audience, but—unlike all creative writers studied here—with a degree of particularity that also indicated some of the values and knowledge-sets by which this audience would read their texts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the writers working on career or application documents showed an especially high level of audience-awareness: “The audience is the graduate committee,” wrote one; and another explained, “I am asking for feedback on… meeting the expectations of the person receiving my personal statement …I am currently applying to graduate school (Arts Administration).” Other academic writers described an intended audience baked into their assignment, as when the writer of a business memo explained that the “main readers would be Apple” and, more specifically, its “communications team.” To be sure, and like many creative writers, academic writers did sometimes name their instructor as their primary audience; unlike creative writers, however, these academic writers also suggested that their instructors would be bringing very specific expectations as they read student work, expectations that many students appeared to know ahead of time: as one writer explained, they were revising in order to “meet the criteria my professor put forth.”

These creative writers’ bids for support, then, were not only aimed at holistic improvement and meaning development, but were undergirded by few predetermined constraints, such as might be provided by more specific sense of the genre conventions and audience expectations to which their work should adhere. This is not, of course, to suggest that these writers are operating without genre or audience constraints. It does suggest, however, that these writers’ sense of genre and audience remains notably open-ended for much of their writing and revising process. Compared to academic writers, very few creative writers appeared to bring to their writing center appointments an already defined sense of what sort of writing their final product could or should constitute.

Finding 3: “I’m more than willing to change up as needed”: Malleable and still emergent aims

These creative writers further tended to ask for support revising texts whose aims they represented as extremely malleable and often still emergent. Just as few described their work as shaped by a precise task or genre, very few also made statements about their intentions. Indeed, only about one eighth of creative writers’ requests for feedback referred to intended meaning (see table 5, Appendix A). The exceptions to this trend—the 13% who did attribute a specific, already articulable intention or meaning to their text—shared with academic and professional writers an abiding interest in making sure their aims were clear: as one poet wrote, “I am hoping that the emotion of the past of the [poem’s main character] comes through as well as the message that he has been left behind.” But the great majority of creative writers (87%) asked for feedback without specifying any specific meaning or effect they hoped to achieve, instead explaining that they merely wanted help revising work in order to make it broadly “good,” “compelling,” or “readable.”

The open-endedness of their given tasks, in fact, seemed to make it particularly difficult for some creative writers to define their “purpose”—as requested by our writing center’s appointment form—in anything except circular terms: one creative nonfiction writer explained that “the purpose of this piece was to explore non-fiction,” and another wrote that “the purpose of this writing is creative writing.” Indeed, creative writers most often elided the issue of purpose altogether. Many simply asked for feedback that would help them achieve some generalized sense of improvement or to deploy specific creative writing techniques that were yet dissociated from any sense of meant effect. When one creative writer wrote “I’m looking for feedback on anything that doesn't flow,” or another asked, “should I go more extreme in terms of creative elements, like adding more specific characterization?” neither attached these bids to any representation of the specific aims that might guide these revisions. A few creative writers even asked for explicit help achieving a more precise sense of purpose. As one fiction writer explained, they understood the components of their draft as “actually very flexible and I’m willing to change up as needed.” This writer’s bid for support was essentially a request for help determining their own aspirations, support that would then help them structure their text more deliberately: “I feel a bit like [the characters] are just sprinting from setting to setting…but there’s nothing particularly intentional or motivated to why.”

This tendency is also reflected in the number of creative writers who openly represented their intentions as still unformed: as noted above (see table 2, Appendix A), more than a third (38%) asked for help with “developing,” “expanding” or “enhancing” texts whose potential meanings the writer was apparently still undecided about. Especially in comparison to the pragmatic, particularized and highly directive terms that academic and professional writers used in their bids for support (e.g., “I would like help with making all the evidence I have flow paragraph to paragraph”), the language in these creative writers’ requests for feedback is significantly indefinite and open to a range of responses. As one creative nonfiction writer explained, “I would like to know if it feels like there’s anything missing or something should be added…are there themes or ideas you feel should be highlighted more?” Another creative nonfiction writer asked, “Are there any sections or narrative threads that you want more of?” A fiction writer inquired about “what I can do to expand on some of the ideas in the plot of the story.” A poet requested “general feedback about…what you recommend I change” and “if I should continue to add on to the piece.” Like creative writers’ representations of task, these requests cast a remarkably wide net. Without the rhetorical or formal guidance provided by more constrained genres of academic and professional writers, these creative writers appeared to understand their texts as revisable in an infinite number of as yet unexplored directions.

As the previous section showed, academic and professional writers grounded their bids for support in far more consistently precise representations of task and genre; relatedly, these writers also provided a far more definite sense of the intentions and rhetorical aims that would help determine the direction of their revisions. In one academic writer’s explanation, for example, that they were “hoping” to produce “a fact sheet that is satisfactory for business research presentations,” there is nothing to suggest that the writer is at all undecided or unclear about the rhetorical purpose driving their task. More generally, academic and professional writers also far less frequently requested help developing ideas (8%) than creative writers; and further framed such bids for help with far more precise statements about the predetermined aims that guided their writing and revising. The challenge these writers brought to the writing center, then, appeared less to involve the pure development of meaning, ideas, or arguments, than they involved improving their clear and comprehensive communication of meaning, ideas, or arguments that the writer had already formulated. As one academic writer explained, “I…need help developing ideas so that my argument is clear,” suggesting that their argumentative intentions were already well in hand. Another similarly requested help making sure that their “organization” as well as use of “evidence and source material complements the development of the paper’s main ideas.” In none of these cases did writers present themselves as still vague about what they hoped their text would present, or the purpose that such a text should serve. Creative writers, however, approached their intended meanings very much as a work still in process—a process they seemed to want a consultant to engage in genuinely exploratory ways.

Finding 4: “I’m honestly not even sure if this counts”: Uncertainty about genre boundaries

Some creative writers’ bids for support implied a degree of familiarity, if not outright comfort, with the open-ended nature of creative writing tasks and aims. Others, however, appeared more unsure about this quality, and looked to their writing center consultations as an opportunity to clarify what exactly constitutes the field and its main text-types. My next finding illustrates this concern vividly, wherein a portion of these writers expressed a deep uncertainty about how to define and realize for themselves the kinds of creative writing they had been assigned to produce. As table 6 (Appendix A) shows, in fact, 20% of creative writers requested support in better understanding the boundaries of these creative writing genres and their constituent features.

These bids for support are especially poignant for the window they offer into novice creative writers’ sometimes deep apprehension about what actually comprises these different creative writing genres, as well as the formal features that would justify such discernments. One poet explained, “I would like feedback about if this fits what a poem is expected to be and if it makes sense to fall under that category.” A creative nonfiction writer asked if their piece “works” as an example of its type, and moreover if it was sufficiently distinctive from other text-types, such as a “news story, for example.” Yet another creative nonfiction writer, who explained that “I have been struggling with writing creative nonfiction,” explicitly requested “suggestions for what I can do to meet the criteria of creative nonfiction.” This writer's struggle lay in their incomplete understanding of how this genre could be differentiated from other historical reports; as they explained, “This story is an account of my past, but I don’t know if I portrayed it ‘correctly’.” Their scare quotes arguably stand as an acknowledgement that such a “corrective” framework might not be appropriate for describing the norms that shape such unconstrained genres. But this bid for support also suggests that the writer still lacked alternative frameworks for discussing the “criteria” by which this genre might be defined.

Poets were particularly uncertain about how specific aspects of poetic form and structure function, and how these features could help identifiably define their work as indeed belonging to this loosely defined genre. One poet wrote, “I have no idea [how] line breaks work and when I should do them as well as how I should format the lines following a break….I also feel like my division of stanzas is weird and idk if each one is equally relevant.” Another poet’s questions center on poetic form: “is my poem set up properly? I do not know anything about setting them up…” A third poet explains, “I am not a poet and I feel like I don’t really understand poetry…I am hoping to discuss what determines flow specifically in a poem.”

Again, a comparison to academic and professional writers’ support bids brings creative writer’s boundary uncertainty into even sharper focus. Compared to the 20% of creative writers discussed above, only five (5%) of academic and professional writers requested help approaching and understanding the exact requirements involved in their task. Even more crucially, every one of the academic and professional writers who requested help with genre expectations introduced these bids with a detailed description of the assignment they were working towards, which is to say that not a single one (0%) described genre in the broadly unconstrained terms (“poem” or “short story”) used by creative writers. Questions about how best to approach writing in their genre, then, had more to do with procedural execution than conceptual uncertainty about either the boundaries of their given genre or the function of its varied features. An academic writer who requested help with “how to get started on the essay and what kind of information to put in and not put in” also provided a detailed description of their assignment (“a reflection”) and its constituent expected elements (accounts of the writer’s “demographics,” “community,” and “experiences”). Another, who asked for support in “better understanding the essay and what I am supposed to be doing,” described their essay topic and purpose with similar precision: as focused on “why students should be attending in-school classes for their own mental health.”

Overall, then, these academic and professional writers’ bids for support with understanding their task were bids for help in how best to meet some set of pre-given genre and task expectations. Creative writers’ bids for support with understanding their task, by contrast, requested help understanding a task whose boundaries and constituent elements many of them were still unsure how to define. For this portion of creative writers, these support bids most essentially involved questions about the “criteria” that make creative writing genres what they are, especially as such “criteria” compare—and more crucially, contrast—with the more familiar, and often rigid, norms, aims, and reader expectations by which academic and professional genres are often understood. As the previous findings show, moreover, these support requests cannot be met by the writing consultant’s usual questions about the writer’s rhetorical purpose, or through an consultants’ explication of the expected rhetorical moves that structure more predictably constrained genres. Indeed, these are questions about creative writing that could also stump writing consultants, like Andrea, who themselves remain unfamiliar with this field’s distinctive values and practices. Yet, as I will explore more in my conclusion, such uncertainty about genre boundaries also shows these students intuitively beginning the grasp one of creative writing’s most essential qualities, and which distinguishes it from so many other disciplines and attendant forms of expression: its commitment to constantly playing with, prodding, and even deconstructing its own genre boundaries, norms, and reader expectations. As I will argue, consultants would benefit from recognizing this as a fundamental value of the field, to alleviate both their own and fellow students’ frustration in trying to ask and answer closed-ended questions of such a determinedly open-ended field.

Finding 5: “Do you like it?”: Requests for highly individuated consultant response

As illustrated above, most creative writers requested support developing new forms of meaning that were unconstrained by any expectations that a specific audience might bring to their texts. These writers represented their tasks, their potential readers, and their aims in strikingly open-ended terms. Some articulated this open-endedness as a core challenge to their revising and asked for support in defining the genres they were being asked to produce. As my fifth finding shows, however, most creative writers’ bids for support also suggested a strong, field-specific understanding of the kinds of support most beneficial for such open-ended tasks and processes, as illustrated by a consistent interest in their real readers’ more specific and personal impressions of their texts. Indeed, my data showed that the most frequently requested form of feedback (62%) constituted an account of the reader’s response to a piece of writing: an account, more precisely, of whatever significance and value the reader found in what a writer had produced (see table 7, Appendix A). For many creative writers, in fact, the only feedback they requested were these purely descriptive accounts of engagement—their consultants’ sense-making experience as a singular, often highly subjective reader. Indeed, this aligns with the highly individuated peer response model that structures so many creative writing classes, even as it contrasts with the kind of more rhetorically sensitive, less personally inflected responses many writing consultants are accustomed to providing.

Some writers asked for an account of their reader’s affective engagement with the text: whether, as one poet put it, the “emotion…comes through,” or, in another case, if a text is successfully “scary”; another poet wondered if they had successfully fulfilled their “purpose…to convey and express various feelings.” Other writers wanted an account of the reader’s production of coherent and logical meaning: whether a given draft “makes sense” or was “believable.” A poet working on a poem laid out in a non-linear form asked to know about the sequence in which the reader’s experience unfolded: “I am curious to know where you began to read the poem.”  For many of these writers, therefore, the question at stake was about the specific experience their text might have inspired, perhaps independent of the writer’s own intentions: whether their work, as one poet asked, actually “accumulates meaning,” and what that meaning might be.

These bids for a reader’s responsive feedback sometimes also contained a request for more explicitly evaluative reactions: the “interest,” “pleasure” or positive assessment that a text might have inspired in the reader. More than one fifth of creative writers (22%) asked in their appointment forms some variation on the questions “was it enjoyable?” was it “interesting enough?” and/or “is it any good?” “I want to make sure that it’s engaging,” explained one writer. Another asked if their writing was “compelling.” Yet another explicitly positioned the reader’s pleasure as fundamental to the disciplinary field, writing that “Since this is creative writing, I want to know this: do you like it?” Many also suggested that the reader’s mere “liking” of a piece of writing provided sufficient grounds for whether and how it should be revised, as when one creative nonfiction writer asked, “I would like to know if there’s anything that jumps out at you that you either like or that should be changed.” By contrast (see table 2, Appendix A) no single academic or professional writers from my sample requested this form of subjectively evaluative feedback.

Particularly striking about these bids for response, then, is the highly personalized kind of feedback they request, and the attendant implication that for these creative writers such personalized response constitutes the main kind of consultant response that counts. Indeed, these bids for responsive feedback show a notably frequent use of second person (36%), as well as an often-intimate tone: one wrote, “I would just like to see what your thoughts are,” and another, “I am curious to know what you like.” Like so many the other request types already explored, this tendency sharply diverges from the conceptions of audience and reader implicit to academic and professional writers’ bids for support. As noted above, academic and professional writers’ appointment forms often appeared at pains to explain the specific expectations an audience would bring to their texts—expectations that the consultant was presumably being asked to adopt as they read. Only one writer from this academic-professional sample (1%) made a direct second person request for the consultants’ personal experience as a reader. By comparison, creative writers regularly requested a form of feedback that was constituted only by their consultant’s raw and unvarnished perspective, as when one fiction writer requested “some brutally honest feedback on my ideas, … basically whether or not this story is any good.”

Conclusion

As this data shows, creative writers distinguish themselves from academic and professional writers for bringing to the writing center strikingly open-ended tasks and a notably malleable sense of intention. These writers tend to request help generating ideas and developing meaning, through the deployment of varied creative writing techniques; yet they also bring to these projects few of the predetermined rhetorical constraints that, in the case of more traditionally academic and professional kinds of writing, can help consultants tailor their guidance to a writer’s given purpose and situation. Indeed, these tendencies sit somewhat uneasily with the more rhetorically minded questions that our appointment form requires students to answer. Finally, and instead of asking for help navigating specific audience expectations or already established criteria for assessment—as most academic and professional writers did—creative writers largely asked for individuated, often quite personal responses to their texts, to aid them in their exploration of new avenues for development, and in the homing in on as yet unrealized forms of meaning.

These findings should not suggest that the work of creative writing is somehow free of genre conventions, purpose, or sensitivity to audience. But this data does show creative writing students taking a distinctive processual approach to how such rhetorical exigence is determined. As their support bids show, these students approached writing and revising with a radically unrestricted, even emergent sense of what might constitute their eventual aims and constraints—implying that writers knew that their aims and constraints might develop and change quite dramatically as these they continued to write and revise.

Such bids for support can arguably pose a significant challenge for writing consultants more accustomed to conceptualizing both the activity of writing and their role as consultants through the framework of most other school-based writing tasks. After all, consultants who are habituated—both as writers and writing center practitioners—to more constrained academic and professional writing assignments often use details about task, genre, audience, intention, and situation (whether concerning macro issues of structure and argument or micro issues of what counts as “error”) as the foundation for their subsequent feedback and revising suggestions. Indeed, most writing center guides recommend that discussion of these issues form a central feature of the “agenda setting” that is then used to guide the session’s main work. But when a writer’s rhetorical aims are as malleable as many creative writers’ appear to be, these consultants’ usual operations will be significantly destabilized.

In this, these findings challenge the efficacy of some of the scholarship’s recommendations about creative writing, writing center consultations. Ianetta and Fitzgerald draw on the work of Hans Ostrom to argue that tutors can and should take to the same approach to creative writing that they take to any academic task: “by asking if there is an assignment and what the writer’s goals are,” including the “kind of writing” the writer “is aiming for,” and the “conventions” or “audience expectations that are typically associated with this genre” (155). Yet the cases described in this study suggest that a consultant’s further inquiries into a creative writer’s intended genre, audience or intentions may prove ineffectual. Especially compared to academic and professional writers, few creative writers brought to their consultations a clearly bounded, already decided upon sense of either their purpose or the generic constraints that would best help them meet such purpose. Some writers, in fact, were outright confused about how to define the boundaries and constituent features of the open-ended tasks they had been asked to complete. Yet all seemed in agreement—whether implicitly or explicitly—that the field itself operates by a kind of resistance to predetermined rules: that creative writing privileges experimentation, idea development, and the unpredictable “accumulation of meaning,” as one writer put it, over the achieved adherence to formal norms and pregiven aims and expectations.

The work of Doug Hesse is particularly useful on this point, especially regarding the different processes and values by which these distinctive kinds of writing are produced and revised. As he argues, creative writing, on the one hand, and, on the other, composition—that field that has shaped so much of current writing center pedagogy, and so many of our contemporary conceptions of academic writing support—possess “dissimilar orientations and aspirations,” dissimilarities which require “respect” (50). For Hesse, these differences comprise “move[s] in a Burkean parlor constituted differently.” As he goes on to explain, “in familiar if reductive terms”: “the former [composition, or writing studies] is a Bartholomaen parlor where rhetors are heard by developing given topics along approved trajectories; the latter [creative writing] is an Elbovian parlor where writers gain the floor by creating interest, through the arts of discourse” (40-41).

This study substantiates Hesse’s claims, showing that creative writers come to the writing center looking for support in how to “gain the floor by creating interest” rather than “developing… along approved trajectories.” Indeed, this study’s final finding particularly underscores this feature of creative writers’ writing and revising process: that what creative writers want most is an account of such “interest,” as an individual reader feels it, rather than as an imagined audience would expect it.

To be sure, a good deal of the writing center scholarship has recognized the value of reader response feedback for creative writing consultations. Yet writing center administrators and scholars should also acknowledge—or “respect,” to use Hesse’s terms—the extent to which these kind of reader response feedback requests will also represent for many writing consultants a significant departure from their usual conceptions of writing and the roles they should play as consultants. Indeed, and as my findings show, strikingly few academic and professional writers ask consultants to base their feedback on the kind of intimately individuated, affective, or evaluative responses to a text that creative writers consistently request. Many consultants, in fact, working in the “Bartholomean” framework that Hesse describes above, may, in their more typical consulting practice, feel obliged to actively suppress such personal responses, and to instead privilege the guidance offered by a given rhetorical situation and set of readers to which the consultant-reader often has no personal relationship of their own: imagining themselves, as it were, into the writer’s Burkean parlor. Yet creative writers present no such Burkean parlor. Their requests that consultants instead respond only personally, individually, and often evaluatively, will understandably make many consultants feel disarmed and unmoored.

The question that remains, of course, is how consultants can be better prepared to navigate the facts of such field differences. One solution commonly offered in the scholarship is to recommend that administrators provide more training in genre awareness (Ozer; Pobo) and in creative writing’s specific craft elements (LeBlanc; Devet). But I would argue (as this data confirms) that administrators—or well-intentioned tip sheets—cannot reasonably provide consultants with a crash course in creative genres or meta-genres and its technical conventions (e.g., the poem, the logic of line breaks) the same way they might with most other academic or professional genres, whose conventions, aims, and sense of audience are far more stable and constrained (e.g., the literature review, an academic introduction’s rhetorical moves). I would recommend, instead, that consultants be introduced to some of the foundational characteristics that structure creative writing as a field: the deliberate open-endedness of its tasks or prompts; the capacious nature of its forms; and the emphasis on exploratory processes, in which a sense of authorial meaning and purpose develops over time and through feedback from creative readers. Armed with this information, consultants can first and foremost commiserate with writers about what makes creative writing so challenging for those new to the field, and commiserate with each other about how creative writing requires such a distinctive a kind of consulting. More specifically, consultants can also be prepared to more deliberately provide writers with the kind of experiential descriptions of meaning-making that reader response feedback requires. They can practice articulating for writers the themes, associations and emotions that a text calls up for them; and they can practice helping writers to develop ideas in multiple directions at once. Consultants should moreover be persuaded that creative writers are a population of college writers whom writing centers are not only obliged to support, but whom writing center consultants and writing center research will benefit from supporting more mindfully and more often. After all, and as this study shows, these writers’ requests for feedback can challenge some of our field’s most persistent presumptions that a rhetorical, “Bartholomean” line of questioning will be best for supporting all writing, revising, and consulting challenges.

Yet also crucial for writing center and writing studies training and research will be the continued exploration of why reader response remains, for these open-ended tasks, the feedback request of choice; and how such responses can be provided ethically and productively, and without making either writer or consultant feel unduly vulnerable. It is my hope that future scholarship can take these questions up: what constitutes useful “reader response” feedback during creative writing consultations, and the extent to which such feedback indeed meets the needs of creative writers of all sorts, and working at all levels.

Works cited

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Appendix A: tables

Table 1: Number of CW-focused consultations and affiliated course (if applicable), broken down by genre, August 2019-August 2022 (N=45)

Table 2: CWs’ Main Feedback Types (NB: writers often asked for more than one type per session)

Table 3: Writers’ Descriptions of and Comments about Task and Rubric

Table 4: Discussion of Audience/Reader

Table 5: Bids attached or unattached to specified intentions

*unlike creative writers, the bulk of feedback requests unattached to specified aims for the text concerned bids for help with correction: grammar, citations, and formatting.

Table 6: Expressed Challenges with Genre Boundaries

Table 7: Bids for Account of Reader’s Engagement

Appendix B: From our writing center’s WCOnline appointment form

Open textbox question about task and readers:
In your own words, describe your writing task or assignment in detail. (Do not paste an assignment someone else wrote.) Explain the purpose of this piece of writing and identify your main readers.

Open textbook question about writing concerns:
Explain in detail your specific writing concerns and goals for this consultation.