Learning to Write Stories—Analysis or Practice?

What’s the best way to learn how to write stories? Should you just start writing a lot and work to improve? Or should you study the works of the best writers and understand their techniques before setting fingers to keyboard yourself? Or a combination of the two?

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A writer friend enrolled in a literary master’s degree program and took a short story workshop class. The instructor told the students to dissect a literary work and analyze it. My friend discovered the entire w...