Teaching Writing

Some writers were discussing teaching writing. We agreed that writing teachers should be published authors, whether or not they also have teaching credentials. "Of course, writing can't be taught. It's just something you're born with," someone said. Hmm. I'm not so sure. Certainly one can learn to write news, stretch that into magazine articles, extend it to a nonfiction book. Tools and guidelines abound. On the other hand, writing good poetry and fiction does seem to require some certain intangibles. I'm starting to suspect these mysterious qualities relate to memory and verbal skills (as measured by I.Q. tests) and a sensitivity to stimuli that sometimes accompanies other less desirable conditions like alcoholism, agoraphobia, and anxiety disorders. The illusive "creativity" may be more a matter of innate traits that can be coaxed and nurtured and guided. It's less an either/or situation than a more or less one. It seems to me that to exercise and try to develop a minimal creative writing talent would result in a mechanistic style, rather like formula writing: plug in a character from list A with an adjective from the B list, a verb from list C, and a D list adverb. Repeat until the story's done.

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