The question of whether writing is something that can even be taught has been kicking around writing/reading circles for ages. I suspect the same happens in music and art circles, though I wouldn’t know it, because well…
It’s like my writing Science Fiction/Fantasy, Mystery and Romance. I might like all the genres equally but sf/f is where I “live” – i.e. where most of my friends are, and where I attend all the conferences. I do have friends who are primarily mystery and romance, and to the extent they fetch-and-carry I might know some of their scandals and arguments, but not the minor stuff because my friends are at best midlisters, which means I only get the really big stuff that propagates from the middle down.
In the same way I do art – though I found out recently that I need to go back to classes/practice, because I’m losing my hand, which is very frustrating. It’s part of my objective to get back to art in the next year, because that’s how I rest – but I don’t live there. I’m at best and when in practice “talented beginner” not “Person making living from this” and the professionals don’t admit me to their circles.
But I suspect the questions are the same: is art/writing something you’re born with, or something you can teach?
As both a writer and a teacher of writing, and (still) a student of writing, all I can tell you is that I’ve come to doubt talent and inspiration as motor forces of excellence, or, indeed, of creation.
As for the question of whether you can teach writing? No, but you can learn it.
Over the weekend we found ourselves talking to a friend who is also a young writer. She was complaining of how slow she writes, and how she doesn’t have confidence in her voice. We told her I was the same way before I took the Oregon Coast Professional Writers Workshop. And I came back able to write a short story in an afternoon.
She told me to distill it and give to her now – which is cute, and half joking, I’m sure.
Of course, I can’t do that.
Part of it is that learning is art is very individual. I can’t know what’s stopping you producing professional work. You might not know it yourself. You might be reading your stuff and not seeing the flaw. And I, through my different experience might read your piece and see flaws that aren’t there.
You see, what makes reading fun is that each writer has a unique and idiosyncratic approach to story elements from beats to construction of plot, to character development.
No? Imagine Pride and Prejudice as written by Heinlein or Ray Bradbury or, if you’re so inclined, Jorge Luis Borges. You see what I mean?
But the problem is that when a writer is looking at a piece of writing as “can this be improved” he brings his own experience to the fore. Imagine Jane Austen attending a writers’ workshop where she gets critique from Heinlein, Bradbury and Jorge Luis Borges. Now, imagine she takes it seriously – you see the mess?
This is why editing is such a difficult job, because you have to preserve the writers’ voice while improving the story.
Can it be done? Oh, sure. But I wouldn’t entrust it to a beginning writer. You need to be fairly confident of your own abilities and have seen enough of what is out there and have found a “voice” of your own to step back and go “this isn’t right but no, it won’t be solved my way.”
For this, often, non-writers are better than writers – if they’re voracious readers – if for no other reason than that they don’t impose their own angle on story on you.
The same works when it comes to teaching a writer. At this point I’ve done it enough that I can look at your story and tell you what is wrong MOST of the time. At least some of the classical mistakes like “you edited this to death” are obvious.
Others… particularly if they’re close to mistakes I myself make, but not quite, I might misdiagnose.
The point here is that I can’t simply tell you “this is wrong, fix it”. What I can do is make you practice enough, point out the minor and obvious flaws, and make you practice some more.
So, two weeks of pressure-cooker writing where you live/breathe/eat writing will improve your work, no matter where you are. The teacher might not be teaching, but you will be learning.
And what about the weekend workshops like what I’m teaching Fri-Sat- Sun?
Well, it’s part information “this is how you build a story” and part info on the field/business, so it’s not going to give you that amount of practice you need to bring barriers down. But it will help. I can (and hope I do) give the students the foundation on which to build.
After that they’ll need to do that which the rest of you at home can – and should—do. 1- set deadlines and respect them 2- force yourself to write fast (this makes you not have time to seize up) 3- don’t rewrite. If you’re not competent enough to write, trust me rewriting is harder. Instead, just do typo and obvious mistakes, and let the rest fall where it may.
Most importantly, write, write, write. The year I spent writing a short story a week was the one in which I made the most progress.
Writing can’t be taught, really, but you can teach it to yourself.
Mad Genius Club 
42 responses to “Can you teach writing?”
[…] UPDATE: completely different post up at Mad Genius Club […]
Side note. As an observer, if someone who is a noted author takes many exceptions to your book and tells you to change this that and the other thing to make it good, do so, if you want to do a pastiche of him. Otherwise, look at the changes and see if they fit your version, and are they better or just different choices. In other words, get advice from Sarah but write what you feel. Otherwise you will just be parroting her works and never do anything that is you. This is true even if Robert Anson Heinlein speaks to you from the grave. Of course in that case you should first see a mental health professional
On the rewriting point, what is the difference between re-writing and editing?
Re-writing, changing sentences and paragraphs to mean something completely different, or even redoing whole scenes from scratch. Changing characters, tension, plot points.
Editing, fixing existing structure to clarify it’s meaning, strengthening theme and adding foreshadowing and other such things you might have brushed over in the first pass.
Copy-editing, fixing spelling and grammar errors and changing the physical structure of paragraphs to make them easier on the readers eye.
(Or that would be how I understand the differences.)
Laura, my take… I spent a week going over the scenes in my climactic chapter, tightening sentences, adding dialog tags, eliminating the white room syndrome — editing. I spent a different week ripping out whole scenes in a different chapter, adding new scenes, re-attributing dialog, adding new scenes… Rewriting.
M
Re-attributing dialogue. I’m about to do that. Sometimes I learn who the characters are as I write them, and then I have to go back and fix earlier stuff that doesn’t fit when I was still kind of muddling away at the beginning. But, then, I’m a great one for writing introductions to memos last. How do I know what I’m introducing it until I’ve written it?
Editing is adding a scene, taking another off. Rewriting is changing the entirely first half. Recasting is writing it completely from beginning. For a newb, recasting is the only safe option
So… Where exactly IS the line between editing and rewriting? In my example, I re-made Chapters 2 and 3 out of 25, totally changing the pace of the first third or so of the book.
M
Oh, good. ‘Cause I’ve certainly killed off whole scenes that others may live.
Instead of asking if writing can be taught ask if storytelling can be taught. Putting it on paper or into bits is just knowing how to use grammar and spelling.
If you can’t tell a story putting it in print won’t make it suddenly interesting.
I once submitted a story to a large publishing house and the editor asked me to change the first chapter. I did and she wrote back and told me I had done exactly what she asked and it ruined it. So yeah – find your own voice.
I completely agree with you here. I can write competently, and worked as a technical writer for a decade or so, but I just am not compelled to tell fictional stories. Nothing inside begging to be released.
[…] First off, Sarah Hoyt asks the very good question, can you teach writing? […]
And keep writing. Last spring I went back to revise a non-fiction monograph I’d written in 2009. Since finishing it and putting it aside, I’d written another 85k word monograph, several short articles, fifteen or twenty short stories, and a novel. I read through that first book and wondered how in the h-ll the committee allowed it to pass, it was so bad. Chunks repeated, transitions were (to be charitable) clunky, “to be” verbs lurked around every corner . . . What just went back for a third outside review is 100% better, because I’ve written so much in between.
Of course you can teach writing! Every grade school teacher does that. Now _good_ _publishable_ fiction is another story. And as Mackey says, storytelling.
I get your meaning though. Writing beyond the basic requirements for school becomes so individual that the learning process must turn upside down. Not the teacher teaching, but the student taking in everything, then tossing the parts that just don’t work for him. Having to work out how his own creative process works, through writing rather than listening to lessons.
Yeah, but what if you can “tell” a story but can’t write worth a damn? *chuckle*
I love storytelling. Everybody does it. Heck, gossip is storytelling, catching up with friends can be very similar, probably half of all the socializing I do is telling stories. We’re human, most of us just love to tell tales and we love hearing (and reading) them, too. Maybe it’s just me being odd, but putting these stories into print is a mite harder.
Sure, I could just *tell* The Story Of The Squirrel That Shot Back, but there’s stuff that gets lost that way (in print from in person, I mean). One word and a look that’s instantly recognizable when you see it might take a paragraph to explain, or half a page if your particularly verbose- like me sometimes. I’ve been looking back at how writers get these effects (blame Dave Freer, he got me started on it), but it’s still about clear as mud to me. Perhaps this is part of what you folks are talking about when you say “find your own voice?” Heinlein, I am definitely not. *grin*
I did get quite a belly laugh from Borges writing Pride and Prejudice. *grin* There would’ve been more knife fights, philosophizing, and obscure references to quite possibly made up things that maybe should have been.
Yeah, but what if you can “tell” a story but can’t write worth a damn?
Collaborate.
“Force yourself to write fast,” coupled with, “don’t rewrite”? Heh. You’re funny. I can see if I did that. No amount of editing would fix it.
You need to get the whole story down, first. Then, when you’ve got the whole thing, you can see where the major fails are. Like Mark said, change the pace by rewriting a couple of the chapters. You won’t see that need, until you’ve written a long way past that spot, and then you need to just keep going, because the last bit you haven’t written yet may change what needs to be done again.
That need to see the whole thing is also the reason that advice to writers often includes “Now put it away for a month or six, so you can look at it with a fresh perspective.”
And “write fast” doesn’t really mean words per minute, it means words per day or week. I can type as fast as I can create story, and while working on my touch typing and speed might help, it’s the butt-in-chair, fingers-on-keyboard time that really matters.
Oh, I understood what it meant. It’s just that it also means, “plow ahead and ignore that feeling that you just wrote something incomprehensible”. That’s the part I would have a problem with.
We all feel that way about things we write. But you _have_ to ignore those feelings, or you wind up in the bottomless swamp of editing the first third and never finishing anything.
All right, then, I guess the question I’m looking for the answer for is, “What if I come back later and have no idea what I was trying to say?”
That has happened to me. I can remember that I felt very mysterious and subtle when I wrote it, but not what it meant. And, you can’t count on remembering. I have learned to just delete whatever the mess is and replace it with something sensible, even if less intriguing.
That’s how you learn. Last time I moved my office I found the most hideous stories . . . but some of them had good ideas, so they might be written (again, from scratch), eventually. I’m not sure I ever finished anything until I discovered Baen’s bar and got a proper education. Which included things like “Everyone writes a million words of trash before they produce anything that ought to be seen by others.”
“Everyone writes a million words of trash before they produce anything that ought to be seen by others.”
Which brings me, at least, to a paradox. I have several story ideas in my head that I want to write well, so they need to not be the first things I write. But I don’t have any throw-away ideas — that is, there are no story ideas in my head that I’m willing to write poorly.
So how do you deal with the paradox? To write well, you must first write poorly — but I don’t have any story ideas that I’m willing to sacrifice to the writing-poorly stage, and how can you write without a story idea?
Wait, wait! I know this one!
Write them anyway, put them away, then come back and rewrite the early ones after you get better.
I like this answer, mostly, because the more you write, the more story ideas you get, and, weirdly, you may like some of the later ones even more.
I can’t claim to have the answer but I can tell you what I’m trying: write the stories around the stories. With more clarity, write the stories that are one or two steps removed from your main story idea. How did the guy who runs the grocery in your MC’s neighborhood get to where he is today? Like that.
For me, it’s letting me flesh out the world building and get a grip on the universe without hitting on my main story idea directly. I’m also writing back stories for secondary or peripheral characters. These may never see the outside of my computer, and certainly the detail involved in those stories will never make it into the main work. But I get to play without sacrificing my ‘big ideas.’ And I get a clearer idea of those characters so they can speak to me better, as needed.
Just thoughts, I could be on entirely the wrong track. But it’s still kinda fun.
Ooh, I like that idea. I’ve written plenty of backstories for characters in role-playing games; I could take those backstories (which are usually only fleshed out to the depth of “When he was eight, he ran away and joined the circus, which is where he learned his acrobatics skill. Then at sixteen he ended up press-ganged into service with the Navy, which is why he was a crewman on the ship where you met him.”) and expand them. What was his life like in the circus? When did he acquire his lifelong fear of elephants? And why does he twitch when anyone says the word “umbrella”?
See, now I want the story that explains his umbrella twitchiness. There’s gotta be a good story in that one. 🙂
Use a pen name?
You will. Truly.
*sigh*
So what does it say about me that I can write the dialogue with the semi-intelligent computer at least 3 times as fast as with the humans?
Hey, for a long time my older son could only write snarky homicidal cats. It says nothing about you. It’s the way it is. Unless you’re going to say “Gee, Sarah, what does it say about you that you have so many gay male characters?” And then we can’t be friends anymore. So, you write what you write — it says nothing about you.
This is timely. I’ve been participating in an informal online writing class. Structure was 13 weeks, video lectures from a published author’s university class, and the participation part was exchanging our weekly writing segments for review by our ‘classmates.’
The lectures were good, but I think I gained more from what ended up functioning as an online writers group, reviewing each others submissions.
The question I keep coming back to is, when do you know your work is good enough? I realize this may be an impossible question to answer. Everybody has doubts, I have a lot of them, but was there a specific point when you felt confident enough to submit your work, or pulled the trigger on the self-publishing route (believing it met some threshold of quality)?
I am not a writer but, I have been associating with them for long enough to field this one. Short answer is you never reach the level where you know you are good enough. I have beta-ed for several authors now including at least two who are above the mid-list rankings. They still have doubts on every story. You simply get to the point where you grit your teeth and takes you castor oil. One thing that does help is to have non friends critique your work.
Scott, I hate to say this, but you never are good enough. Eventually you either launch your babies to live and die on their own, or you become the world’s most prolific non-published writer.
You get so sick of editing the story that you just say “To H*** with it,” and push the publish button.
There is no specific point of confidence. There is a specific point of just doing it. And, not to worry. The first time you prepare something for Kindle, it takes a nice chunk of your time. This leaves you lots of time to change your mind, so don’t feel like you’ve committed yourself to publishing just because you’ve set foot on the path.
I was asking your question last year, and put my first book up this spring.
I eventually got tired of “practicing” and decided to do it “for real”. There’s only so long you can drive around in the school parking lot. Eventually you’re going to have to drive around in neighborhoods and then city streets, highways…
If you’re still worried, start with a pen name. No one will ever have to know if your experiments don’t do as well as you hope. They’ll probably do better than you think.
But if you’re wondering about specifically why I decided to start publishing…
I used to be fairly popular as a fanfic writer (in the small community I wrote for – not like one of the big names of fanfiction or anything, just for awhile, I was one of the more known names in a community with a couple dozen writers). I got and get compliments all the time on my roleplaying abilities. And I got several, “Wow!” comments on just the application process. And I used to write (and still sometimes do write) stories about the characters in the roleplaying group (now it’s just me and my bff). I had compliments. I had, “AURGH – I can’t believe you left off there!” I had, “When’s the next one?/When will you write the next part?” And in college, I had a writing workshop class and had people comment fairly regularly that mine was their “favorite” of that round.
So I’d known for a few years that I was pretty close to ready. The problem was making that plunge. I think I’d decided on it being my 2012 New Year’s Resolution to start submitting to short story venues and I just happened to come across an announcement for a steampunk/wuxia anthology a few months ahead of their deadline in… September 2011, I think. So I decided to go for that, even if it was earlier than the New Year. By the time I submitted that story (which thankfully got rejected as I hated stripping it down to 5k words, which was the max. wordcount they’d accept), I didn’t even want to do the “submit to magazines/anthologies” thing because I found out about self-publishing being a viable option.
I decided I still wanted the cushion of practicing, so that’s why I’ve been publishing under a pen name. And they’re selling pretty predictably well. (Not enough to live on at the pace I’m publishing them, though.) Next year, I’ll be publishing under this name. There are stories that want to be told. They’ve been in my head or in early drafts for years and need to get out. Because it’s time.
And, no, I’m not saying, “If you’re ready, you’ll know.” I don’t feel “ready”. I just think it’s time.
I’m going back and editing a story I wrote 15-20 years ago, tightening it up and working to complete it. When I stopped, 15 years ago, I considered it crap. Then a couple of weeks ago I saw an ad for a SF&F book offered on Amazon. I checked the first few pages out, and realized it was total crap. My junk was better than that. So I’m housekeeping (dusting it off and polishing it up).
As for teaching writing: When I first moved to Kerrplunk I looked around for other writers – zilch. So I started a writers association. A couple of years afterwards I pushed the idea of doing writing contests for school kids, 5th thru 8th grades, two categories (5th/6th and 7th/8th). The kids loved it, and winners were treated to a ‘real’ critiquing of their stories before publication in the local paper. The first year we had 30-40 applicants – the second three times as many. Kids LOVED learning how to write, and several members went into to classrooms to give talks.
You can’t teach someone to write – but you can sure motivate them to try.
I find much of this reassuring, as it tells me I’m not solely locked up in navel gazing. I’m spending time writing character bios as shorts, and exploring side issues and non-story events and such all for the purpose of working on craft. I’m banging them out and reading them as narrative, but the real intent is to hone craft. So, it’s a comfort to know that this essentially non-commercial work is reasonable and I’m not just fiddling with my own brain.
Remember, this is from the standpoint of an author (read got paid for something I wrote), but the best two pieces of advice I had, were: A) write as if you’re talking across a table to someone; B) Write as much as you can.
I’ve been “active” in email lists, newsgroups, and “Social” media since about 1994 (yes, about _19_ years), and so have written (conservatively) millions of words. So, I think I have actually learned to express myself, but still can’t type/spell/create all at the same time. 🙂
In a sense “writing can be taught.” Anyone can learn to “write.” Telling a story is something else. I can “sort of,” tell a story. Actually, I just write down what they tell me. In order for them to “tell me their stories,” I have to have free, _quiet_ time, and then time to actually put it on paper. Charlie told me her story (The Man Who Became A Santa Claus), which is sort of Joe’s story as well, over a period of several weeks, just before I went to sleep. My “Rant” about being handicapped/disabled over a couple of weeks, or 30+ years (take your choice).
My point is that you can teach the work, but not creativity. I can make a bookcase, but not a “Chippendale” bookcase. I just don’t have the right “spark.” That “spark,” or X factor is what separates the Journeyman from the real Master. If you have it, IMO, you can be “taught” to write. Assuming that you can get the support of family, friends, others willing to read crap and call it that, and (most of all) not spend most of your time fighting those who want to drag you back.
Before I became “really disabled,” as in using a wheelchair to get around, I was around enough people to get the critiques I could use. Today, I struggle with getting any at all. (I am willing to allot some of my precious working hours {I can *function intelligently* for about 4-5 hours per day} to doing it for others.) I did “edit”/write/publish a fanzine for a couple of years in the 70’s, so I can be very detailed. Ask Kate Chaplin about my comments on a script for a potential film. .
Does that answer the question?