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Can Writing Be Taught?
- University of Iowa Press
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28 Can Writing Be Taught? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This debate is as old as the hills . . . but a hell of a lot less inter- esting. A colleague recently said to me, “But, really, how many of your students are going to be great fiction writers?” He’s a literature professor who clearly has problems with creative writing as a scholarly pursuit. I replied, “How many of your students have gone on to be great scholars?” He had to concede not many. By his litmus test, what I did wasn’t worthwhile if I wasn’t producing great writers. His question was meant to disarm me. I was supposed to raise my arms and surrender. But when I applied the same standard to him, he couldn’t offer up proof that he was producing any more great scholars than I was producing great fiction writers. Another colleague asked, “What the hell do you do in a fiction- writing class, anyway?” What do you think we do? I wanted to ask. Play the bongos? Sit in a circle, hold hands, and hum until inspiration strikes? I wish I could say that these sorts of presumptions are rare, but they’re not. I’ve heard these questions or questions like them ever since I stepped into my first creative writing class in 1984. Curiously, no one ever asks, “Can physics be taught?” And why don’t they? Because no one’s benchmark for teaching physics is for a professor to produce a classroom full of the next generation’s Einsteins.Yet people often assume that if a creative writing professor isn’t producing the next Austen or Melville, then the whole enterprise of teaching creative writing is an academic con game. The charge that creative writing can’t be taught isn’t lobbed by literature professors alone. Some creative writing professors dispute the ability to teach creative writing. In her book The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick writes, “This book grew out of fifteen years of teaching in MFA programs, where I have learned that you cannot teach people how to write—the gift of dramatic expressiveness, of a natural sense of structure, of making language sink down beneath the surface of description, all that is inborn, cannot be taught—but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgment about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others.” I couldn’t disagree more. Gornick perpetuates the myth of the Education and the Writer 29 “born writer.” Sure, people are possessed with varying degrees of talent , and, yes, some talent is innate. Yes, some people probably don’t have what it takes to be a writer. But there is a wide swath of gray between the born writer and the person who doesn’t have a chance. As will become clear by the end of this book, I believe strongly in the notion that all these things—the gift of dramatic expressiveness, a natural sense of structure, making language sink down beneath the surface of description—are the result of internalizing what you’ve read over a period of years as well as internalizing the craft you’ve practiced, combined with the act of writing itself. If I didn’t think that writing could be taught, I wouldn’t be teaching it. I’m not a snake oil salesman. I know these things can be taught because I certainly didn’t enter my first creative writing classes with an innate gift for dramatic expressiveness, a natural sense of structure , or the ability to make language sink beneath the surface of description . These things, when I accomplish them, are the result of years of hard work on my part, and I failed more often than I succeeded during my first ten years of writing. But whenever I’ve experienced a breakthrough, where dramatic expressiveness, structure, and language all fell triumphantly into sync, I knew it was happening , and whenever I sent those stories to magazines, those were the ones that got snapped right up and won awards. But was I born with these gifts? No. I was born with a sensibility that creeps into my work; I had certain passions for narrative early on; I had an aptitude to learn. Look: I can’t turn a young writer into the next Flannery O’Connor or John Updike any more than a math professor can produce the next Pythagoras or Descartes. In every profession, there are always going to be those...