Can Writing be Taught?

Of course writing can be taught. This is not to say that you can teach anyone to be Faulkner. But you can't teach anyone to be Thelonius Monk, and no one questions the value of piano lessons. You can't teach anyone to be Andre Aggasi, yet no one questions (at least from a tennis-playing perspective) the sending of five-year-olds to tennis boot camps in Florida to learn how to hit tennis balls for seventeen hours a day. I wrote about this subject at greater length in an essay in Poets and Writers last November called "In Defense of MFA Programs." In that essay, I made an argument in support of the teaching of writing in general and in support of MFA programs in particular (though not, of course, without qualifications. There are bad writing classes, obviously, and bad writing professors and even good writing professors who don't match up well with a particular student, and not every writer is temperamentally suited to take a writing class. The devil, as always, is in the details.)

What I want to touch on briefly here is the reason for the widespread suspicion of creative writing classes. If the most frequent comment a writer receives when being introduced to somone is, "I'd love to be a writer--if only I could find the time"; if the second most frequent comment is, "Here, can you look at my manuscript"; then the third most frequent comment, uttered when the person learns that you not only write but that you teach writing, is: "Do you think writing can really be taught?"

It's hard to know how to respoond to this question. It's a little like being asked, "When did you stop beating your wife?" Obviously, I think writing can be taught; if I didn't, I'd be engaging day-in and day-out in an act of fraud.

Why are people so suspicious of the teaching of writing when they're not suspicious of the teaching of piano, ceramics, tennis, or ballet? The brief answer, it seems to me, is that, there's nothing in our day-to-day lives that imitates, much less approximates, any of those activities. If someone wants to be a ceramicist, no one thinks it's something you should automatically be able to do. So you go take a class. But writing is another matter. Every literate person writes all the time. We compose letters and email messages and diary entries and grocery lists. And we all know how to tell stories. We sit at the dinner table, the bar, the school cafeteria and do so every day. It seems we should just be able to do it--that is, we should just be able to write a short story or a novel. But when we sit down and try, we find it's not nearly as easy as we thought. So we throw up our hands and declare it a gift. And it is a gift, at least in part. But there are different kinds of gifts, and different writers are gifted in different ways. And one thing some writers are gifted at is revising and sweating and learning how to take criticism and slowly, over time, getting better. Yes, there are gifted writers, just as there are gifted actors and singers and fencers and mimes. But to say that is not to say that there's no craft to be learned, that there's nothing to be taught, that the right teacher matched with the right student can't allow a developing writer to make huge progress. This seems so obvious it shouldn't need saying. But it does need saying, over and over again. So I'm saying it.

Comments

[Jack Pendarvis]

I question the value of piano lessons!

[Glad Doggett]

I agree that the mechanics of writing can be taught, though I am not sure whether that "spark" that gives a story wings can be taught.

Oh how I wish it could!