Can creative writing be taught?

It's the million dollar question. OK, maybe not the million dollar question, but certainly one that brings in millions of pounds worth of student fees to UK universities. Creative writing - especially in the north east - is a healthy, happy, swarming marketplace. It's written somewhere (of course) that everyone has at least one book in them. Question is: can writing be taught? If so, how?

My position is that, yes, creative writing can be taught. It's a skill that can be refined and improved through a range of techniques and methods of instruction. As both an educator and practitioner, I get kicks out of the creativity of devising new ways of teaching creative writing. Having taught a range of methods - characterization, scene writing, writing the ending before the beginning, rewriting a popular narrative - I've a bag of new tricks up my sleeve for my students this September. With so many new developments in creative technologies, there's a world of stuff to learn about interactive fiction, blogging (memo to self), online narratives etc etc. And I've a new module on Public Textual Art coming up, which gets the students thinking off the page and into public spaces, considering how poetry and prose interact with their environments, and to get them thinking even more creatively about writing and space.

But how does the prospective writer choose a writing course? More exactly, does a writer need to be taught in order to 'qualify' as a writer? Would a one-day workshop suffice, or does it take a BA, MA, or - more recently - a PhD to become a writer?

I believe that is the (multi)million dollar question.

A tradition of literary giants would argue with the dogs on the street that writing cannot, in fact, be taught, and that all this accredited courses nonsense is a symptom of late capitalism.

On the other hand, my own experience proved otherwise. I was always forced to write. Not, alas, by some dramatically overbearing parent, but by an inner compulsion to put pen to paper. I remember spending half-term, aged 10, hammering at the keys of my grandparents ye olde typewriter, producing a (rubbish) novella in just under a week. I also remember writing letters to publishers in pencil, on lined school notepaper, around the same age, begging for my latest Care Bears novel to be published. I kid you not. A degree in English allowed me to take a module in poetry, lead by Carol Rumens. At last, I got real, face-to-face, professional feedback. They didn't have full-scale creative writing degree programmes back then, just the occasional semester-long module. But it was enough to get me writing the beginnings of my first poetry collection.

The 12 week course with Carol Rumens did not involve anyone dissecting the guts out of Shakespeare. We were never pointed in the direction of a 'winning writing formula', how to write a bestseller, or any one of the 'how to' titles that line the shelves at Waterstones. What the course involved was an introduction to a range of poetic forms, including examples, and a consideration of what form actually did, how it liberates the writer. Had I opted for a module on 18th century literature instead of poetry, I probably never would have encountered a triolet, a sestina, or a villanelle. In other words, the stuff I was writing at the time probably would have chugged on for another couple of years into the vacuous pits of cliché, at which point I probably would have packed in writing for good.

Can creative writing be taught? The question for me is, why should it be taught? And how? My initial response to this is - based on my own experience - that it should be taught in order to broaden the writer's horizons, as it were, in terms of form, structure, and - believe it or not - to enforce the importance of reading as well as writing. As far as the type of writing course goes, degree programme or week-long Arvon course - it's entirely up to you.

How should it be taught? Hmmm. That's a question with a million answers.

What are your views?

Image credit: Linda Cronin