Joined Up Writing
I realise it’s that time of year but I did wonder why a certain organisation has sent me enrollment information for their Creative Writing courses. Are they trying to tell me something?
I’m not sure when Creative Writing became a taught subject. It’s a relatively recent development. For sure Mark Twain never took a class. Can a writer be cured of cloth ears, or chronic adverborrhoea (she pondered tentatively)? I’m not convinced . I don’t know what happens on these courses that could not just as usefully take place in solitude with a chewed pencil, but I concede that many of my writer friends disagree. Some of them teach these courses. Some of them also attend workshops and submit their own efforts for criticism by their peers. Maybe it makes better writers of them. Having eavesdropped on one such session, I doubt it. More likely, I think, they emerge feeling annoyed or battered. Again I say, Mark Twain never did it.
One friend asked me if I have the same opinion of painting classes, and I had to say No, but also Yes. Painting is a manual skill and an exercise in observation, both of which can develop with guidance. If I were to enrol for a class my painting might improve, but never to the point where it brought joy to people’s hearts or made them reach for their cheque book. Nothing wrong with being a weekend painter. You can hang your canvases all over the house and your friends will see them. But writing? What are you going to say?
‘Bill, Linda, come over for drinks and I’ll read you the first 50,000 words of my novel.’
It’s a tricky one. I have some sympathy. Not bucketsful, but some. Writing is a seductive, addictive thing but it’s a funny old business. By the time we’re out of kindergarten we all have the basics. Some people make good money doing it. You may create a masterpiece, you may create dreck. Most of us could stop, right now, without any great loss to the world. We could do something useful. Like the ironing.
That’s my week. Irony, Monday to Friday. Saturday, ironing.
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However, I welcome the fact that higher education has embraced and now values writing--whether creative or professional or journalistic or academic--as a discipline worth studying and learning. Thank heavens we've finally stopped asking if writing can be taught (a rather silly question considering that creative writers are always teaching themselves to write, as you point out) and are now exploring and thinking about how we write, about how audience and purpose and genre and culture and language impact on our writing. At the very least, creative writing courses offer writers a choice about how they develop and hone their craft. They show students how to read like a writer and introduce them to compositional techniques and conventions many would never discover on their own. Equally important, I think, is that creative writing courses provide many novice writers with some of the best editors they will encounter.
Bottom line for me is that we don't "have all the basics" by the time we leave kindergarten. We have acquired an appetite for story by then, but we don't necessarily know how to tell stories in engaging and delightful ways. We must learn to do this. And while I agree with you that most mediocre writers will never become rich or famous from their writing (though I must admit to rethinking this a wee bit after the recent phemenon that is Fifty Shade of Grey), I do firmly believe that there would indeed be a great loss to the world if they all stopped writing.
As a writer and a writing teacher (yah, I'm one of THOSE), I know that while I can never teach bad writers to become a David Foster Wallace or a Virginia Woolf, I can help them become more competent writers, just as I can teach the competent ones to become good writers.
Now, back to writing (but only because I'm philosophically opposed to ironing).