Five Possible Reasons Why We Believe Writing Can’t Be Taught
22 Jun
Beliefs about teaching as information/skills transfer
I am the teacher. You are my student. I have life knowledge in my head computer. Your head computer does not. As my student, you expect to download my life knowledge from my head computer directly into your head computer.
Failure of the direct download at the personal level is attributed to either the teacher or the student.
Failure of the direct download at the system level is attributed to the impossibility of teaching the subject.
Results take so long you lose track of cause and effect
Gregory Blake Smith was one of my teachers and mentors. Over twenty years ago, he likened point of view to a kite on a string. The more string you paid out, the higher the kite flew and the broader (and more distant) the point of view became.
When I heard first him say this I thought, “What do you know, old man?” During my apprenticeship I wrestled with that metaphor. Today it’s part of my daily practice.
Did Gregory Blake Smith teach me about point of view that day? No. Did he teach me about point of view eventually? Yes.
Genius obliterates reason
Geniuses are like airplane crashes. Statistically you’re more likely to die a car crash or a home accident than in an airline disaster, but when a plane goes down it’s a lot more dramatic than someone slipping in the tub. Those rare talents scramble our brains in the same way. A “silver gleaming death machine” comes along and we say, “You see! Writers are born, not made.”
Pride and ego makes us take credit for what others have given us
If you’ve ever worked in an office, then you understand the phenomenon of the boss who takes your idea and passes it off as his own. Writers are the same way, if not worse. One of the reasons we don’t believe writing can be taught is because writers are too close-lipped (or self-blind) to talk about how they were taught.
Beneficial “secondary benefits”
Whenever human beings are around you always want to look out for the secondary benefits to a belief. If writing can’t be taught, then teachers are off the hook for not teaching, and students are off the hook for not learning. We don’t have to think critically about our writing programs. We don’t have to risk having uncomfortable conversations about what’s working and what isn’t working (or, more pointedly, who isn’t working). In other words, we all have “plausible deniability” and nothing has to change.
That’s a great post, Dennis. I particularly agree with the last one. The more mystery there is, the less accountability. It’s sad, considering that I’ve spent many years outside school learning what I should have been taught had the program been more robust and the concept of teaching writing believed in.
I don’t know but I’m thinking writing can’t be taught at least in the conventional way that you might teach me how to fix a fuel injection system. The curiosity, the expressive germ has to be present already doesn’t it? Then, like your experience with professor Smith, the bounds of that expression can be expanded, neural connectors already present get tickled, fired up.
It’s said that Orson Welles spent hundreds of hours watching the films of John Ford before shooting “Citizen Kane”. Now, no one would confuse the “grammar” of Citizen Kane with anything John Ford might have directed, but through that study Welles grasped the fundamentals of a narrative cinematic form, and then ran with it. Visually and structurally the film is derivative of many elements but the resulting synthesis pure Welles.
Greg Smith helped me out quite a bit, too. I highly recommend his novel “The Divine Comedy of John Venner.”
Writing is a skill. Like any other skill, it can be taught. Anyone can learn the fundamentals. Anyone can improve. (The workshop may not be the ideal learning model, but that’s a separate issue.)
That doesn’t mean everyone can become a great writer, just like everyone can’t become a great brain surgeon or zookeeper or silversmith.
I think the term “great writer” can be misleading.
What makes a great writer isn’t how s/he strings words. That can be taught–how to communicate what you want to say. If I’ve learned it, others can learn it.
I think what really makes a great writer is what s/he has to say. I think certain people naturally make connections between ideas and happenings and mold them into stories and essays. Others don’t. I don’t know that such thinking can be taught, but it can be learned.
@bets: I believe that if it can be learned it can be taught.
Maybe the reason why we don’t believe we can teach the whole “having something to say” part is because we’ve never tried.
Okay another cliff- hanger from Professor Cass. Intriguing, but how can you teach “having something to say?”
I would much rather try to teach someone how to say something meaningful than how to put words together as well as Woolf, or Faulkner, or McCarthy, or [insert your favorite author here]. The former is do-able. Not so sure about the latter.
Love this discussion. Never been in a writing class (likely obvious) but other than tearing apart good writing–is this “deconstucting”?–to explore how the meaning, emotion, effect was arrived at and conveyed how can saying “something meaningful” be taught? Doesn’t it presuppose that the writer have something to say in the first place? Then maybe he/she can be helped along to communicate it thoughtfully and powerfully. Come to think of it maybe I’m confusing teaching to say “something meaningful” with teaching to say something “meaningfully.”
I learn about what to say best by reading and talking to my peers, being on and attending industry panels, and more reading and thinking. But you’re right, no one teaches that. It’s just something you’re expected to have. Several bestsellers have proven that it trumps great writing. So how do we teach it, hmm?
“There are six billion of us hurtling through an infinite and otherwise empty universe on a giant rock, and all of us are going to die. Help me make sense of this. Go.”