Can creative writing be taught? I’ve always hated the question, in part because of its passive construction, which omits both students and teachers. It has always seemed to me to imply some abstract learning scenario wherein a generic would-be writer is acted upon by unnamed forces and thereby caused to understand the obscure codes and formulas of creative writing. There’s actually a name for this approach: Transmission Model Learning, wherein the teacher transmits information to a passive student, who memorizes and regurgitates the material until it is learned. While it used to be the dominant approach to teaching, no one really believes in Transmission Model Learning anymore, certainly not in the arts and humanities. So the question has always seemed to me to promise its own answer: Of course not. Besides, creative writing has no quantifiable body of information, its outcomes are difficult to objectively measure, it involves too much chatter and sitting around in bars and coffee houses, and anyway, real artists are born artists—people whose genius shouldn’t be corrupted by instruction. Right?

Even before I started down the road of becoming a full-time teacher of creative writing in an MFA program, before I’d entered a graduate fiction writing workshop and heard the late Frank Conroy’s staple first-day lecture on Occam’s razor, abject naturalism, the meaning-sense-and-clarity pyramid, and a long rant that included chalkboard diagrams with stick figures, coal bins, and something reminiscent of broken rainbows, during which he adamantly debunked not Transmission Model Learning but rather Transmission Model Reading (“It’s a dance! The reader is not a passive blank slate, reading-and-writing is always a collaborative endeavor!”), I knew writing was something I wanted to do—and that I could be taught how to do it better. I didn’t know how I’d learn it, much less how I’d one day teach it; I only knew that I wanted to be in the classroom, and that something about the whole endeavor was electrifying. 

I’d spent most of my adult life to that point playing and teaching violin for a living. I had some faith that, if I could learn to do that, then I could learn about writing and I could learn to teach it. Musicians and music teachers don’t spend a lot of time questioning whether or not their instruments can be taught. We take it for granted and share what worked for us as learners. We invent or research new techniques and approaches as students come to us with problems we don’t recognize, and we adjust the pace according to the student’s abilities and drive. Some of us are better or worse at this than others. Frankly, I don’t think I ever got to be very good at it. But when I was teaching music close to full-time, the question was never, Can this be done? The question was always, Why are some students so much better and faster at learning? Why do some of them have willpower and discipline and others don’t? All my students, if they applied themselves, could absolutely improve, but the ones with discipline and talent, the ones who practiced, could go faster and further.  

After fifteen years of teaching creative writing full-time, I’m pretty sure the question for writing teachers is, or should be, basically the same. It’s not, Can it be taught? Of course it can be taught. Anyone who’s sat in an effective workshop can tell you that. The question is, Why does it work when it works? When it works especially well, what’s happening? 

In order to answer, we have to make the original question active by returning to its true subject and object—student and teacher.

Every year my colleague Sam Ligon and I admit eight to ten new MFA graduate students to the fiction-writing track at Eastern Washington University. We review application files from across the country all winter and try to understand, based on a twenty-five-page writing sample, academic records, and a one- to two-page personal statement, which students show the most promise. Which ones are hungry, and demonstrate a mature relationship to or understanding of their work in its current state? Which ones can write gorgeous sentences already? Which ones are passionate and articulate about what they’re reading, and already have a story that pulls you all the way through? Which ones seem to have an earnest desire to learn, or some life experiences that might make for really good material, even if they don’t have the writing chops to pull it off at present? We puzzle over mysteries like the application file that contains an utterly bland personal statement paired with an arresting writing sample, or the brilliantly clever and intelligent personal statement matched with straight-across perfect GRE scores and a garbled, boring writing sample that never gets off the ground. In all this we’re looking for one thing, and it’s unknowable and we know that it’s unknowable: Who here is teachable, and why? Every year we guess about this and get it somewhat right and somewhat wrong. But because of limited financial aid and competition with other writing programs, we do have to guess; we have to decide, in advance, who looks to us like the learner most likely to succeed, and who causes us concern. Generally, we expect that all students we admit, if they apply themselves to the work earnestly and don’t resist learning, will improve. We expect that, and we also expect surprises—students who don’t develop according to the promise we saw in their application and those who exceed all expectations. 

The most interesting and informative surprises, year after year, come from those students who we let in based more on a hunch than a strong conviction (and sometimes with real worries), and who, by becoming astonishingly good, full-fledged writers by the end of their two years, show us not just that creative writing is learnable, but also exactly what the learning looks like when it happens, and why it’s worthwhile. 

In 2001 we admitted Shann Ray on such a hunch. He was not a front-runner, or even in the middle of the pack; he was the last student we admitted. Aside from the fact that he was local and therefore willing to enroll on short notice, what stood out to me in his application was the fact that he’d been a star basketball player for Montana State and for Pepperdine University and had even played pro ball in Germany, but he’d more or less walked away from a career in the sport (though he did continue playing for a faith-based organization for some years). Also notable to me was that he had a PhD in psychology, and had worked for years as a clinical psychologist before taking a full-time teaching job at Gonzaga University in something called Leadership Studies, and later Forgiveness Studies. I don’t watch basketball, much less play it, and I am about as unreligious as anyone you’ll ever meet. So the particulars of Ray’s achievements didn’t mean a lot to me, but they suggested a record of discipline and hard work. My colleague at the time, John Keeble, himself a minister’s son, and I talked about this at some length and agreed that though Ray’s writing sample was troublingly weak, he at least seemed likely to be agreeable and hardworking. We took a chance and let him in.

That year, in my fall workshop I tried very hard not to regret the decision. The stories Ray presented for workshop exhibited two glaring problems that I assumed he’d hang on to with all his might. Probably in imitation of some of his favorite poets and Bible passages, he seemed to be in love with gigantic, lyrically looping and garbled metaphors to describe a landscape, which all but devoured his characters and which I guessed would fog his vision and prevent him from finding his own voice and essential subject matter for a long, long time. He also incorporated a lot of heavy-handed, message-driven, didactic Christian themes that deadened the work at every level, and alienated me as a reader (and the rest of the class as well). In my experience, these were red-flag writing problems that I expected would be really hard to work around, and that I knew would seriously challenge my own reflexes as a reader-critic. We had so little common ground, and I didn’t have a lot of hope that I’d be able to show him the way. The stories were exhausting, and Ray’s persistent questioning of our feedback, mine and the class’s, sounded then more like resistance or refusal to hear than genuine curiosity or requests for clarification. 

With his rigorous background in psychology, theology, philosophy, and ethics, Ray always asked us, “How can you write anything without moral purpose? Why would you want to write without a moral purpose, and who are the great moral fiction writers of today?” I was surprised that though he was a voracious reader of academic texts and premodern poetry, he’d read very little fiction at all, and possibly no contemporary fiction whatsoever. For starters I assigned lots of Andre Dubus, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson. 

I remember during one class going off on a too-long diatribe about the power of metaphor to transform a reader’s experience of the world: how a writer needs to learn to use that power with discretion and purpose because nothing else we have at our disposal, at the line level, will quite so vividly illuminate the world for the reader as a really great metaphor, which simultaneously functions to reveal the author’s unique vision—the writer’s imagination’s “fingerprint,” if you will. This wasn’t something I’d ever articulated for myself until Ray pushed me for the explanation. I also remember talking a lot about message and meaning—the whole class talked to Ray about this, often—trying to describe for him how readers who feel corralled into a predetermined point or moral at the close of a story will feel manipulated and disrespected, their imaginations beaten down, as if they are being asked to believe in a one-dimensional reality. 

What Ray took from any of these craft lessons I don’t know. I do know that delivering them crystallized some things for me.

Ray’s next class was with Keeble. At the end of that quarter, Ray told me, he remembered going to talk to Keeble about the low grade he received and asking if it was due to a lack of effort. “No,” Keeble answered. “It was the writing.” The next quarter I heard from another of my colleagues, who asked somewhat angrily if Keeble and I hadn’t made a mistake letting Ray into the program. “What were we thinking?” she demanded. I gave her my reasons and told her we just needed to be patient. And then I tried to forget about it. At that point I suspected he’d never finish the program.

Aside from having taught at Memphis State, Eastern Washington University, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, I’ve also participated in creative writing workshops at the University of Arizona, the University of New Hampshire, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I was married to a poet while she was enrolled in workshops at Brown University and the University of California in Davis. I’ve seen, heard, and absorbed a lot of information through the workshop culture and can safely say that for one thing, no two writing workshop classes are the same. No teacher runs a workshop in quite the same way as another, and no program or workshop has ever managed to codify an approach to creative writing that would achieve aesthetic uniformity, or any kind of uniform outcome, period—nor does any program I know of seem to have that as a goal. In fact, the only generalization I ever felt I could comfortably make, as a student of creative writing, was that my teachers disagreed about everything and that trying to find any kind of consensus in their feedback on my work would have made me crazy. I had to learn to follow my gut and go with the advice that made sense.

This is what I share with my students at the start of every workshop class. I caution them that no story has ever been written by committee or by consensus. A workshop’s goal is not to write your story, or tell you how to write your story; its aim is to give you feedback on what you’ve already written—to point out where it succeeds and soars, what it seems to want to be about, where it might be improved, where it’s too slow or too rushed, and to give line-edits and suggestions for revision. A workshop can only respond closely and candidly to what’s on the page. I tell students that if at the end of the day 5 percent of that feedback is actually applicable to the story up for discussion, then that was a good workshop. The other 95 percent? It goes into your hard wiring to inform future stories, maybe—it gives you walls to reach out and touch later as you make your way through the dark. I advise participants against being prescriptive in their feedback, and ask that all participants lay aside their own aesthetic preferences as much as possible when reading one another’s work. I want their revision suggestions to work with a story’s best interests rather than against them. My role as a teacher, as far as all this goes, is also to widen my critical lens in order to understand each story on its own terms, regardless of how foreign the story feels—and to use examples from each story, as appropriate, for general craft tips and pointers.

Because I want students to write their own stories according to their own most strongly held convictions, I also tell them that the only hard-and-fast rule in writing that I know of is this: The student who figures out what is most loved, what is absolutely essential for that student to write about before the time runs out, and who figures out how to get started on that, is the one who will have a breakthrough and write something with lasting power. This is not something I can tell students how to do or find access to in themselves; the process is too individualized. I can only describe it by responding to the words on the page when I see it happening.

I also tell students that, aside from the many craft tips and pointers they will pick up from me in class, from one another, from assigned reading, from visiting writers, from other faculty, or from other classmates over drinks after class, the single most valuable thing they can hope to walk away from the MFA workshop experience with is a handful of lifelong faithful readers: two or three people with a shared vocabulary for stories, who will always be willing to trade drafts of new work no matter what else is going on in their lives and who will know how to get inside that work to give prompt, constructive criticism that makes sense, long after the MFA work is done.

The culture of the MFA program is itself one of the strongest components of the learning experience—the dialogue that carries on in class, after class, at parties, in coffee shops—and if students can find two or three readers to keep that culture alive in their post-MFA life, they will have gotten more than their money’s worth. 

By the time Ray showed up to work with me one-on-one on his thesis project, he’d already made significant strides as a writer. The work was no longer as clouded with overwrought descriptive language. The descriptions were still very dense, sometimes too dense, but he’d learned to couple that density with real physical urgency in the story action to always keep things moving and purposeful, no matter how heavy the language became. He did still tend to ram his black-and-white, good-versus-evil themes and messages through a little too hard, but I could see that by peeling back the language he had found the subject matter that was most essential to him and about which he felt a genuine urgency to write: basketball, life on and off the res and along the Montana Highline, hard living, true love, violent family life, and alcoholism, and through all of this an insistent pursuit of, or longing for, some kind of spiritual lightness, purity, and transcendence. I no longer felt that the stories were intended to persuade me to share his moral perspective; instead the stories felt inspired and illuminated by a moral vision that was essential to him and thus to his characters, and which consequently I couldn’t help but admire and feel moved by. When I asked him what had happened, he said simply, “I paid attention. A lot of it was talking to other students after class at the bar, going over stuff from class. I listened. And I realized I had to work a whole, whole lot harder.” 

During our time together we discussed many or most of the stories that later comprised his hugely successful, prizewinning debut collection, American Masculine, which was published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. Not many first books of stories have done as well in recent years. That Ray managed to write most of that book during his MFA years with us is probably the most astonishing thing I’ve ever witnessed in my years of teaching and stands as a model for successful and effective teaching and learning. Could he have done as well alone? I have real doubts, but of course it’s possible. I am certain that progress of any kind would have required that someone read and respond critically to his work. I’m also sure that without something analogous to the structure and intensity of attention he received from our program, the process would have taken him many years longer.

I learned to expect Ray to show up for our thesis meetings with a legal pad full of questions about whatever story of his we were discussing, and I learned to expect that he would ask every single one of those questions, all the while methodically and patiently taking notes, flipping back and forth between his notes and questions. The first round of questions would be followed up with a second, as he dug ever more persistently into the most sensitive and uncomfortable problems his stories faced. Rather than resisting or defending the material if I suggested something radical—or defined for him how certain story elements failed or alienated me as a reader—Ray asked more questions to understand better why I’d had these responses. He had a dispassionate, clinical curiosity about this. “Tell me just a little more about that, if you would—what you mean when you say…” was a familiar refrain. I also learned to expect full-blown revisions of each story addressing everything we’d gone over, within weeks of talking to him. 

Despite our notable cultural and aesthetic differences, it became apparent that my responses to Ray’s work were valuable for him precisely because of those differences; my responses could show him how to reenvision, reshape, and recalibrate his prose and his more message-heavy leanings so as not to exclude a reader like me. As it turned out, just by tuning in to the work and being honest and thorough in my own responses to it, modeling all the advice I always give in workshop, I in fact became an “ideal reader” for Ray. I also learned to expect our sessions to end with a lot of tough questions about my own writing—what was I working on, what problems was I facing, how was I integrating the writing work with family and everything else going on in my life. This seemed to matter a lot to him, which was unusual. He’d share, in kind, some of his own struggles to carve out writing time and to keep it balanced with a full-time teaching job and a busy family life. In one conversation it came out that he was rarely sleeping more than a few hours a night.

Ray’s stories got better and better. He had some solid bites from good literary quarterlies, and soon a few acceptances. When he brought in a draft of the story “When We Rise,” I knew he’d really broken through to a new level and come into his own as a writer, and that my role as teacher was just about done. I remember feeling something as I read the story’s first sentence, a kind of pleasure and awe as the sentences continued to build and build without a misstep. As a teacher, there is really no more pleasurable moment than this. I knew the best thing I could do for him would be to get out of the way. Not long after, he brought me another excellent story, “Mrs. Secrest.” It was all there, but had no ending, or had the wrong ending. He later reminded me that my advice was to pay attention to the characters to find the ending. Something like, “It’s perfect right up to here. Now you need an ending. So just write the ending and don’t fuck it up, because that’s about all you could do to wreck the story at this point.” I don’t remember saying that, but I don’t doubt that I did.