Can We Learn How to Write?

The elephant in the room for any budding writer

Hello! So what do you think? Can we learn how to write? There are many, many writers out there (and some of them teachers, too) who think that writing can’t be taught. Not creative writing anyway. It’s creative, duh. There’s no formula. So where does that leave those of us who’d like to write more creatively?

The Elephant in the Room

I’ve been thinking more about Monica Miller’s question (thank you, Monica!) about what I’ve learned about writing since leaving academia to write full time, and I’ve realized that the elephant in the room is really this question of whether or not writing is something we can learn in the first place. Before I could commit myself to learning how to write creatively, I had to first believe that I could learn how. That was no small thing. (I’ll share more of what I’ve learned in future letters.)

I always wanted to be a writer but had no idea how to go about becoming one. In college, I took two fiction writing workshops. After the second one, I gave up on my dream. I suspect I’m not alone in this—giving up on writing before barely starting. But why do we give up so easily?

The limpets on the beach outside my apartment in Scotland cling to the rocks, waiting for the tide to rise again. You can’t budge them. There is a kind of tenacity there that any writer needs.

The simple answer is that the message I received from those workshops was that writing is not taught or learned. It’s something you can already do well or not. In the latter case, a classroom full of your peers will tear apart your sad little attempt at writing and leave you wanting to crawl under a rock. Those workshops offered no instruction, just merciless pointing out of everything you did wrong. This was not something my fragile little writing ego could handle. So I went to grad school to study writers and their work instead, specifically women writers with big ambitions. I wanted to know, how had they gotten the courage? (If you’re interested in the answers, you can check out my first book, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America.)

I recently read an interview in which a well-established writer and teacher (whose name I can’t for the life of me remember) had real concerns about the workshop approach to teaching creative writing, which is the dominant method in the U.S. He said the problem is that it often teaches students their goal as a writer is to please a jury of twelve other relatively novice writers, that the more people who “like” a story, the better it is. Instead of focusing on evaluation, he asks his students to observe and analyze. The best thing you can do is help a writer see what they are doing on the page, he says.

The problem, in other words, is with evaluation. Because no one wants to just be a writer. We all want to be good writers. But what does that mean?

What is good writing?

I was so interested in that question after my workshop failures that I wrote my senior thesis about how feminist and multicultural studies were upending the standards by which art and literature were traditionally evaluated. It was an exciting time as scholars and critics excavated the white male values behind what passed for seemingly objective criticism. That was in 1991.

Since then, what we value in literature has weaved and bobbed all over the place to the point where MFA students don’t know who to listen to. That’s what I heard from a lot of the MFA students I had in my literature courses.

But the goal of becoming a better, if not exactly a “good,” writer is still very much worth having. It’s certainly what I’m focusing on these days.

So how can we become better writers?

First of all, I no longer believe that you can’t learn how to write. Since I taught myself how to write researched nonfiction books for a general audience and get them published—something that seemed out of reach but ultimately wasn’t—I suppose I’ve gained some perspective on what is possible. And how to achieve it.

When I was young, I didn’t have a lot of faith in myself, and I thought everything from volleyball to writing to playing the piano was something you were good at or weren’t. I didn’t know that if you stuck with something long enough, you could learn to do it pretty well. I don’t think I’ll return to volleyball or any of the other sports I failed at miserably when I was young, but writing creatively and making music are still very possible.

The sun doesn’t rise too far these days in Scotland, so long shadows are the norm. My daughter and I made these when she was visiting me last week. Thankfully, she has learned, by playing the violin, to persevere and that “practice makes perfect.”

Today, the internet proliferates with guides, workshops, courses, retreats, etc. for all kinds of writing. There are a gazillion people out there who want to teach you how to write. Many of them are writers supplementing their meagre incomes (because writing rarely pays all of the bills). Some are full-time teachers/coaches/editors who love helping writers succeed.

So there are a lot of options out there. You can take short courses on specific aspects of writing or longer courses to help you work on a book project. You can hire a coach or developmental editor to help you at any stage of your writing. You can find a community of writers to workshop your writing with. I have done all of these. And all have been valuable to one degree or another.

Whether or not an MFA is worth getting is up for grabs. (See the endless online commentary on the topic.) But the most important thing to know, which many students don’t seem to realize, is that it won’t teach you how to write a novel or a memoir. MFA programs teach short fiction, essays, and poetry.

And lastly, there is the old-fashioned, pre-internet, pre-MFA approach: reading and simply putting pen to paper. Jane Austen didn’t take a course or get feedback from other writers. She read. And then she wrote.

Teaching Yourself to Write

Francine Prose (what a name for a writer!) has written about her confusion over the question (in all caps): “CAN CREATIVE WRITING BE TAUGHT?” She doesn’t think “the love of language” and “a gift for storytelling” can be taught (although she is also a teacher of writing). Ultimately there is only one way to learn, she says, and it involves a LOT of self-study:

“What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.”

The trial-and-error and success-and-failure parts of the learning process are particularly difficult to bear. But that is a topic for another letter!

The book this quote comes from, by the way, is called Reading Like a Writer.

The UK cover of Prose’s book

In it, Prose goes through the process of close-reading to analyze what a writer is doing, which is how she teaches her students—and also how she has grown as a writer.

Some examples Prose gives are learning from Joyce how to write a party scene so that her protagonists’ voices could stand out against the chorus, or learning from Isaac Babel how to write about violence by first including a lyrical moment against which to silhouette the eruption of violence.

This approach reminds me of the other writer (whose name I still can’t remember) who wants his workshop students to notice and analyze what their fellow writers are doing on the page. This is how the sausage is made, it seems. And it may be the best way to learn how to write.

I am certainly going to be reading more closely—not to analyze for meaning, as I did for 23 years as an English professor, but to learn how writers do what they do.

Your Thoughts

I’d love to know what approaches you have taken to learning how to write better. Do you think it can be taught? And if so, how do you think writing is best taught? Have you had positive workshop or course experiences? Have you sought support from fellow writers or a coach?

I’ll also be sending out a Thread for your input on how I can best support those of you on a quest to become better writers. So look for that as well!

Until next time,

Anne Boyd Rioux

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