A Goodreads user asked Mary L. Tabor:

How might you go about aiding an emerging writer who finds "not knowing" frightening? Say, for example, this writer feels it safer to remain loyal to preformed ideas and her writing process is to transcribe those ideas. Yet at the same time she finds her writing is not quite making it into that higher register, and so she becomes cross-footed and frustrated. Is this a situation you have come across in your teaching?

Mary L. Tabor In teaching workshops at the university and graduate levels, I consider this the “elephant” in the room. There sits that big lug and nobody’s talking about him. So what to do to help? First, I tell my students, those I’m working with now and all those from all my years of teaching, “If there is no risk, there is no writing,” wise words from the French philosopher Edmond Jabès. With a good teacher, the student will find the safety to take a chance. To risk, means a willingness to fail—in the best sense of that word.

The worst outcome of the creative writing workshop is the “competent short story”—the one that follows all those so-called rules, but doesn’t cut to the jugular, no heart bleeds on the page. The writer has to find his voice by selling his heart and no analytical work will achieve this.

Analytical work is the work of studying accomplished fiction, the study of craft—and all good writers do this work. They read. They read everything they can get their hands on.

But invention comes only when the writer is willing to risk. When you find that on the page, you know it. You see it. You can’t help but want to say so if you are already reading and studying literature.

And if you’re really lucky, you’ll find a mentor/teacher who will tell you when you “hit” it but who won’t throw the invention out with the bath water. When I see that glimmer of invention in work, I want more than anything to encourage, to say so—to say, I see it, go for it!

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