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You can’t teach Writers how to be Great…

Joseph Roth.

Salman Rushdie on Leonard Lopate, and I paraphrase:

There is more well written fiction — creative writingese, bloodless, humourless competence –  today than there has ever been at any time in history, and less really great literature. This thanks to an epidemic of writing classes.

Craft is the one thing you can teach.

But  you can’t teach eye — what to see/select. You can’t teach ear. Or a vision of the world that is interesting. Or how to develop a profound relationship with language.

In other words, you can’t teach people how to create great literature

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 1:17 AM and is filed under Authors and Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “You can’t teach Writers how to be Great…”

  1. Lee Says:
    January 11th, 2009 at 5:17 AM

    Absolutely … or even a great blog (but yours comes close).

  2. brian palmu Says:
    January 12th, 2009 at 3:09 AM

    All excellent points from Rushdie, especially referencing the paucity of vision and imagination in the thousandfold manifestations of “creative” writing graduates. Who cares about the technical exactness of some earnest, well-meaning poet transcribing the robin’s pecking for life in the hardscrabble of winter when the same lads and lassies are doing a minor variation of same in the same journals, the same books, with the same voice.

    Humourless, competent, and also redundant.

    Pertinent to this piece, it must be also be said — how many creative writing classes did Whitman or Shakespeare take? How many leagues of poets did Dickinson or Blake belong to?

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