Teaching Creative Writing. Fact or Fallacy?

 

Dear Michael de V, I agree with you that far too many people (students?) are flooding the writers’ marketplace with their “thinly disguised biographies to the detriment of literature.” I have commented on this myself. In fact I wrote an article about it back in 2001. Except for a page excerpt that was published as a letter in Island 87, no one else wanted to give it an airing. Was it because it was a poor argument? Or is it because there is too much money involved in continuing this myth that anyone can learn to write creative fiction? Below is the article the letter was taken from and I challenge anyone who disagrees to come forward…

 

Teaching Creative writing:

What are these strange convolutions taking place in the literary world? Publishing houses, for example, reneging on their traditional role as the literary nurturers of emerging talent? How convenient for them to be able to drop all that tedious time-consuming work, sack a few editors and get on with the simple task of making money.

  How propitious it is for the institutes of higher learning that our present day literary policy - presumably promoted by the Literature Board in conjunction with the Federal Ministers for the arts - have managed to sell to the gullible youth of this nation, the foolish (and I consider destructive) notion that anyone, if given the right tuition, can write literary fiction. And are we to assume from this outlandish supposition that it also means that anyone can learn to become a concert pianist, compose a credible orchestral symphony or become a first class portrait painter, if given the required tuition?

  Rather than querying this very shaky assumption as one would expect, educational institutions have cashed in on it by offering painless, do-it-yourself, soft-option degrees for the multitudes of aspiring young (would-be) writers for a mere $15000. It seems to me that the most popular and ever growing literary activity in this country from the late nineteen eighties on, revolves around its learning rather than its doing.

  Ah, but some might say, it pays the writers a decent wage for teaching creative writing. Well yes, but that’s not the point is it? Do we continue on with a fallacy just so writers can earn money? Wouldn’t it be better to simply pay promising writers some kind of remuneration to continue to write and stop the fudging of the facts?

  I had the privilege in Adelaide once of sharing a coffee break with two women writers I admire, the late Thea Astley and Elizabeth Jolly. I remember clearly Elizabeth lamenting that her time to actually write was beginning to take second place to her teaching writing and talking about it at various festivals around the country.

  These days, she said, much of her writing was done on an aeroplane heading across country for the next engagement. And, although it was probably a throw away comment, there is an underlying truth that such a process could have a deleterious effect on both the quantity and possibly the quality of literature.

  It is a fact that most people involved in any branch of the arts should also have a day job to fall back on. However, I would suggest that hiding oneself behind the castles walls of academe is hardly the kind of social interaction that a creative person needs to stimulate his or her imagination. I painted other people’s houses for my day job where at least I was engaged in the hum of ordinary life.

  But I repeat the central point; can creative writing be taught? I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that he could tell a class of students how to write all afternoon and he would just as likely to be wrong as he would be right. I agree entirely. In those few times I have attempted to explain how I write stories I found it impossible to come up with any kind of concise formula that could be followed. All I could say was that when the idea came I found the right voice(s) and began. How the story evolved was as much a mystery to me as it was to anyone else.

  I agree that it is beneficial to show someone how to improve his or her sentence and story structure, but can a teacher tell someone else how to construct a personal contrivance that not only engages readers but also offers them up an individual’s unique view of the world? One might be able to teach the craft of writing but to my mind the creative process that brings a fine story into being, is indefinable.

  And if anyone continues to believe that creative writing classes have any real literary value, look around at the results from nearly thirty years of its practice. Where is that multitude of storywriters that the system promised? Where is the wealth of writing from the thousands of students who have been taught to write? Where are the up-and-coming honest to God storytellers like Carey and Winton? Where are the replacements for the world-class women writers like Olga Masters, Amy Witting, and Beverley Farmer? And if I need to go further, where are the hundred or so storywriters that were represented in the Penguin Century of Australian Stories and the Harper Collin’s Personal Best volumes published in the late 1990s?

  And, I ask, how did these writers learn to write? The same way, I would suggest, that all writers in the past learnt – by the simple method of reading and writing and reading and writing and by trial and error and making minimal use of advice from those writers they trust and all the time believing implicitly in their ability that they have something worthwhile to say. 

  Certainly there are writers emerging today like they always have, but I would suggest that those few with the necessary talent to grow into first class writers might be hard to find in the piles of the untalented, misguided wannabees cluttering up the editorial desks around this nation.

  What a waste of the valuable time of the young and the bright who should have been concentrating on some other more profitable life’s endeavour that they might be naturally good at.