Can creative writing be taught? Virtually nobody thinks it can, but there are 822 creative writing programs in the U.S. ostensibly doing just that.
Louis Menand has a (typically) great piece in the current New Yorker that considers the rise of these programs. Here is Menand’s opening. (MFA’s, you are advised to avert your eyes.)
Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers.
Read the whole thing. In fact, read everything Louis Menand writes.
Personally, I have never taken a creative writing course and can’t imagine ever doing so. To me, the question is not whether writing can be taught; it’s whether creativity can. These programs seem designed to produce a certain kind of writing: conservative, restrained, discreet, sophisticated — dull.
Imagine you are a young writer thrown into a workshop. You are anxious, surrounded by a dozen equally inexperienced but ambitious student-writers all eager to critique your work. Are you likely to go out on a limb by trying something wildly original? Of course not. In that environment, you don’t take chances. You conform to the expectations of others. Why throw meat to the sharks? It is no wonder that the beau ideal of these programs is Raymond Carver, whose stories are so concise and involuted that they are workshop-proof. (I should point out, I love Raymond Carver.) The simple fact of submitting your pages to others for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down compromises the writer’s independence — and at just the time in a young writer’s development when he is still searching for his own unique style.
Of course there is no way to measure how the increasing professionalization of our writers has affected our literature, but here is an anecdotal test: when was the last time you picked up a book by a young American writer with a truly wild, out-of-left-field new voice, unlike anything you’d ever heard before? To my mind, there is a ton of very good books out there but there is a sameness to the prose, a cautious, sober tone that we take for “good writing,” even “literature.” It is as if we have come to a consensus about what good writing is supposed to sound like. It is a tyranny of good taste. For some time now, the most daring new writing has come from other countries, particularly Latin America. How sad that even our creativity has to be outsourced.
Yes, yes, it is too much to lay all that on the rise of creative writing programs. Plenty of dull writers have nothing to do with these programs, and plenty of iconoclastic writers have come through MFA programs with their creativity intact.
On the other hand, it is hard to imagine these programs not tending to homogenize our young writers. There has to be a standard curriculum, after all — they have to teach something. We have created a national professional academy for training young writers just as we train young doctors and lawyers. That may be good for writers, not so good for literature.
Creativity and academia have long made strange bedfellows (bedfellows, what a strange word … I picture two monacled Edwardian gents lying head to toe, wearing knickers and striped hose). Unlike contortionists, who merely crave an audience, it seems the fate of the American writer, painter, poet, musician — and I mean those who don’t live with their mothers, unless they’re John Kennedy Toole — to spend a good chunk of their most creative years worrying about critical approval. Writing programs, like music schools, by design “train” pupils to conform to an ideal. In return for sapping a writer’s confidence, a well-established program will provide you with the creds you need to get you into … other, more prestigious writing programs. What does a resume have to do with creativity, indeed? In the golden age of publishing it might get you laid, but now it invariably leads to a masturbatory interview in Poets & Writers, sandwiched between ads for … writing programs.
So, less workshopping, more screwing, better (non-safe) writing.
I think you’re absolutely correct; creativity can’t be taught. Workshops can work for some people, but not necessarily for all. The idea of something wildly new is a hard-find in America. We are taught to conform even when work is being critiqued in writing groups and it’s true, a writer doesn’t want to throw out the wildest, most innovative idea. There is also another thing to consider: The big publishing companies have fallen short in the area of wildly new work. The risk is too great for publishing houses, which is why the indie market is opening for such writers.
I hope you and I are right, Christine, and there’s a place for us self-taught writers. Cheers.