It’s the zombie rhetorical question that won’t die. What do you think? Check a box in the sidebar to your right.
[Note: Poll is closed. The final results were: 95% yes (writing can be taught), 5% no.]
Novelist Harry Crewes, a no-nonesense guy, was approached by a neurosurgeon at a party and asked the question every novelist-teacher gets: can fiction writing be taught. Crewes said, “Well, I don’t know, can brain surgery be taught?”
This is: the answer to your question should be as obvious as the answer to my question.
To me it’s a given that fiction writing can be taught. To say it can’t is to play a wicked semantic trick on many would-be writers. Here’s James Scott Bell, author of Plot and Structure, on how it affected him:
“I wasted ten years of prime writing life because of the Big Lie. In my twenties, I gave up the dream of becoming a writer because I had been told that writing could not be taught. Writers are born, people said. You either have what it takes or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’ll never get it.”
I’ve worked with hundreds of new writers who didn’t get it when we started, but a year or two later were writing well-wrought stories that moved a reader through the stages of narrative with confidence.
“Ah, but Faulkner, Kafka, Hemingway….”
This is meant to be the trumps-all response–as if invoking the gods nullifies the gains of mere mortals. In fact, some of my students have been extremely talented; others, not so much. Did I teach any of them to write like Faulker and Kafka? No. Did they all learn how to write a story that works (something many had no notion of, going in)? Yes.
I don’t often chat with brain surgeons, but I’ve played tennis all my life, and I learned the strokes, court sense, basic strategy, and gamesmanship from club pros who taught me the moves most likely to produce success.
“Ah, but Federer…”
No, I’m not Federer. I can put together a decent set or two against an opponent at my skill level, but I’m not Federer, not in a million years. But does that prove that tennis can’t be taught?
|
|
|
|
|
 |
