Why Writing Can't Be Taught

"I st-st-stuttered when you asked me what I'm thinkin' bout." -Miley Cyrus, See You Again

So. Why writing can't be taught. There are a couple steps to this one. The first is understanding that there is inherently a gulf between teaching and learning. What someone teaches you may not have anything to do with what you learn. For instance, someone may teach you that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. Hopefully what you'll learn is that they know very little about astronomy.

That's an extreme example, but it applies to everything you learn. There will always be a subtle difference between what someone attempts to teach you and what you actually learn from them, whether it's the mechanism by which hydrogen and oxygen bond to form water or what the madwoman in the attic really means in Jane Eyre.

So, there is a difference between teaching and learning. Everyone still with me? Good.

In some disciplines, the goal is to bridge this difference. Since 2+2 will always equal 4, the goal is to make sure that when someone teaches that 2+2=4, everyone learns that 2+2=4 (and that hopefully they learn why as well).

With writing, this doesn't work. There are no facts to be memorized, no simple truths, nothing that can be taught. You must learn how to write, and in order to do that what you really need to do is be able to look at your own writing and see its shortcomings, then be able to keep your eyes open enough to find solutions to them in the world around you.

Unfortunately, a class focused on that wouldn't sell textbooks. It might not even sell books of poetry and literary fiction. And what do professors of creative writing write? Textbooks, books of poetry, and literary fiction. And we all know that professors need to sell books in order to keep their positions (not to mention pay their bills).

What's the solution? I don't know. There are economic realities involved here that I'm not really equipped to deal with, but I do know that most creative writing courses I've taken have been a big steaming pile of bad (aside from workshops, anyway, so long as the workshop isn't really an hour-long critique from the professor with a few comments from other students scattered in for good measure) and I certainly wouldn't count on them to improve your writing until the way they're taught is changed.