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.