Guest post by MFA candidate Ryan Edel, whose Creative Writing Blog is a journal of his experience at Johns Hopkins.
Emotionally, I think this debate has little to do with teaching and everything to do with learning. The question isn’t whether one person can teach writing, but whether anyone can learn writing. And there’s a difference. We know, for example, that Stephen King became a creative writer before taking any creative writing course – his mother encouraged him to write stories, but provided little advice on how. When I was fifteen or so, my mother used this as evidence that I should give up writing. “You don’t have the talent,” she explained to me, as if The Talent was some inscrutable force bestowed at birth.
Disagreement with my mother’s attitude has sent many people scurrying to the “Teach Me to Write!” side of the debate. If writing is teachable, then it must be learnable. And I don’t disagree with this – I credit writing workshops with much of my progress. I still remember one fiction professor telling me “you need to write with this thing we call conflict…” There the journalism professor who took my eight-hundred word assignment, cut four hundred words, and then told me that the remnants needed work.M
I spent years mastering their advice. But does that mean I was taught? Not necessarily. As the University of Iowa pointed out, they teach the techniques for becoming good writers. They differentiate between writing a decent story and becoming a decent writer. And this distinction is important: the first is a question of one moment’s talent, the second a question of years of habit. Workshops have revealed the flaws in my work, yes, and they provided the encouragement to keep me writing. “You need a million words of crap before something good comes out,” said the one professor. “You cut the unnecessary words, and then keep cutting,” said the other.
And I did. I wrote 190,000 words of a junk novel. And when I was done, I realized it was junk – it needed more conflict, and more words needed to be cut. This, to me, is proof that my teachers did indeed teach me the art of writing. I applied their lessons to my work and continued to learn. It’s like any other subject in school: instructors teach the techniques, they give assignments, and then they give feedback. It’s unreasonable to expect students to turn in perfect assignments – if they already knew as much as the instructor, there’d be no reason for a classroom.
When critics claim that creative writing cannot be taught, they point to those students who failed to learn creative writing despite taking classes and workshops. By treating creative writing as a “unique art,” they ignore the fundamental property of all learning – we learn from others, but mastery comes through independent study. It comes in the hours spent alone at the keyboard, applying the techniques taught in class, living the habits that make us writers. But this is no different from any other field. Consider major league pitching, quantum mechanics, and the violin – intense coaching is required before mastery can even begin. Shifting the arm to prevent rotator cuff injuries, solving the differential equation describing the orbit of an electron, sliding the bow to stretch each note to its natural length – these are skills that must be taught. They represent the word order and character development of worlds outside writing.
So I urge you to see instruction for what it is – a critical component of your development as a writer. How you apply this lessons from your teachers will, however, remain your responsibility.
Read the post that stirred this eternal debate to life on Write a Better Novel, Iowa Thinks Writing Can’t Be Taught. –Bill
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Hi Ryan, I agree with your sentiment, that there are techniques of writing that can be taught, but the application of those techniques is subject to so many personal and external forces that influence the final outcomes.
In the most rudimentary way, a comparison would be to a wood craftsman or sculptor. The techniques of these crafts can be taught – the way the wood is selected and smoothed, turned and cut – but to create something original takes personal drive, imagination, life experience and so on. I can make a spice rack following instructions in the same way any writer can re-write another persons story and merely change the characters names.
For me it gets back to people forgetting that there is art and craft in storytelling, and often people are so blinded by subjective notions of ‘art’ that they miss how much craft is put into the back end. Sure some people are natural, just like Beethoven could see a piano and understand it immediately and completely, but everyone develops in different ways – technique is one way of encouraging that development in writers. Teaching technique is teaching habits, the habits that many great writers rely on subconsciously.
I for one have developed immensely through workshops and creative writing classes, though perhaps in entirely different ways to the person sitting next to me. What I learnt was to look deeper and analyse my work more. If technique were a waste of time, so would the process of drafting, as presumably every great writer would write perfectly the first time or give up entirely.