Paul Engle NOT teaching, at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, late-1950s.
Saturday I’m going to retire the “Can Fiction Writing Be Taught” poll. Right now, it’s running 100% yes, 0% no. To which I say… what else would you expect?
[Note: Final results of the poll were: 95% yes, writing can be taught. 5% no.]
Yet folks who should know better continue to run away from the obvious. Here’s my own former writing program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, splitting hairs on their website:
“If one can ‘learn’ to play the violin or to paint, one can ‘learn’ to write, though no processes of externally induced training can ensure that one will do it well.”
Can somebody at Iowa tell me what “processes of externally induced training” means exactly? And why the need for such a bone-rattling euphemism anyway?
What’s so wrong with teaching a little writing? Juilliard certainly doesn’t try to duck the notion that they teach talented violinists to become better violinists–in fact, we never hear the questions “can violin, or painting, or dance be taught?” Yet the absurd assumption that writing can’t persists. Why?
My wife Carol, who works with nonfiction writers, thinks it’s because we approach artistic writing challenges preloaded with the necessary basic medium, language. Anyone can feel pre-qualified to create art from language–to write a novel, say–simply because they already read and write.
The unforeseen problem is that writing fiction is not like writing anything else. Under its surface, multiple covert agendas make excruciating technical demands on the fiction writer. Some novelists have likened fiction writing to playing 3-dimensional chess. Given this, good teaching can be the crucial difference between a mediocre novelist and a very good novelist.
Yet Iowa persists in the fantasy that such a complex body of craft and technique can’t be taught – particularly that talented, advanced, young writers can’t be taught to become even better.
I wonder where the idea started. One of the programs I taught in was big on a modified version: “writing can’t be taught, but it can be learned.” Whenever I heard that, I would think to myself, “then what the hell are we for?”
Iowa is clearly horrified that that anyone might presume they offer young writers more than just a place to stay. And should they rise to prominence in the future, it’s “more the result of what [the writers themselves] brought here than of what they gained from us.”
Here’s another stunner, quoted by Louis Menand in a recent New Yorker piece: “…we continue to look for the most promising talent in the country in our conviction that writing cannot be taught [ital. mine] but that writers can be encouraged.”
So the Iowa Writers’ Workshop doesn’t teach anything; rather it’s a kind of rolling talent search, cum junior MacDowell Colony, with a bit of 800 support line thrown in. Am I getting this right? What I’m hearing, in effect, is, “please don’t expect to encounter teaching here, we bear no responsibility for that…but hey, here’s some encouragement–you’re lookin’ good, doing great, keep it up, keep it up.”
Over the years, I’ve come to understand a few things, but I’ve yet to fathom what’s powering the can’t-be-taught myth. Maybe it’s some kind of literary-academic Calvinism: you are born either elect or damned, and nothing you can do (or be taught) will ever change that. Or maybe it’s just club snobbery of the “we’re writers and you’re not” variety. What do you think? I’m at a loss.
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