The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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Creative writing
in yielding the unpredicted in writing. As we shall seethe qualities of fluency,
unpredictability and syntax are not far along the spectrum of writing from originality. It is a matter not of what you say, but how you say it. As Goethe wrote, The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.’
Writing as teaching
You cannot play a musical instrument you do not know how to play. What we can all probably agree on is that talent, like taste or character, can be cultivated, creativity nurtured or protected, and the purpose of creative writing as a discipline is to develop the talent and technique of new writers. Most teachers of writing recognise this, which is why, when people sign up fora creative writing course, they are often required to submit a folio of work, and they are selected, and sometimes self-selected, on its strengths. Teachers of writing,
who are usually practitioners, then build on this potential. They teach them how not to write and students learn how they might write. Whether a writer can teach creative writing is another matter, and it is worth your knowing why your teachers might be there, rather than at home, or on the road, scribbling and living the literary life.
‘Those who cant, teach, the adage goes (it goes on divisively. It is a much more complex matter, and those famous writers who can may also prove to be ideal teachers. What motivates writers to teach Responsibility – as accomplished film directors feel responsibility for the refreshing of their medium by taking on apprentice directors and training them, so writers often wish to give something back to the medium by which they live. For writers such as poets,
certain literary novelists and critics, whose work by its nature – if not by its quality – cannot support living costs, teaching their art form provides a crucial income.
The same goes for music or painting. Mozart taught it subsidised composition. Leonardo da Vinci and Auguste Rodin taught, by taking apprentices and,
in the case of painters and sculptors, students not only provided an extra pair of hands, but were trained to do some of the work by which their masters were known. Art does not pay enough, and never has, but most of the work that people do is like that. Teaching supplements life as a working artist. Artists may even want to use teaching to pass on their own artistic practices and philosophies. They want their aesthetic or ideology to survive, so they adopt proteges as ambassadors, as carriers of their message – a process vulnerable to backlash once the artist dies.

Creative writing in the world
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For some writers, teaching is part of the process of creating an audience and catching them young – in this case, unlike public readings, an already captive audience. A fusion of idealism and a sense for the communitarian draws some also into the teaching room. Some writers are natural educators by dint of their work or their character. For them, teaching is performance their performance is their writing they are performing themselves. In Fires, Raymond Carver writes of his experience of being taught the practice of fiction by the novelist
John Gardner:
One of the dangers . . . lies . . . in the overencouragement of young writers. But I learned from Gardner to take that risk rather than err on the other side. He gave and kept giving, even when the vital signs fluctuated wildly, as they do when someone is young and learning In The Point Where Teaching and Writing Intersect (Shapiro and Padgett,
1983
),
a number of writers present the view, based on experience, that teaching writing feeds into the making of writing, and certainly that is my experience. However,
for some writers, teaching is an interruption, although sometimes that interlude is welcome owing to the solitude of their work. It offers them a scaled-down sense of community with other writers, and their apprentices, even though they might write out of a dislocation with community.
A marriage of heaven and hell
The worst thing that can happen to a writer is that their teaching begins to impact on their own artistic practice their work begins to sound like a teacher writing – intended, crafted, lifeless, and too clever by half (Freed. Writers may even view the classroom as intrinsically anti-creative. They may have had an alienating experience of taught literature, or they may favour study at the
University of Life.
The world, of course, exists outside books. Engaging with the world is likely to yield material that is more genuine, funny, more exacting in integrity and experience teaches lessons as necessary to a writer’s development, as any primary texts, let alone criticism or literary theory. Some writers feel it is best to avoid any second job that involves either the study or making of literature.
Better to be a gravedigger, a long-distance truck driver or wait at table, they feel, than to be a teacher of literature or writing.
Some writers perceive such work as having more innate moral integrity than teaching, because it connects with the real world, and is work for the hand not the mind. They see physical work as nobler than mental work, and holding more

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Creative writing
potential for material and writing. Such writers sometimes mimic physical activity through travel and the taking of part-time jobs as a form of research.
Like lottery winners, many of these same writers, on becoming successful, flee the physical workplace. However, successful writers do not flee the classroom as a rule. It is possible that teaching is less vicarious of experience, and more rewarding, than some writers make it out to be not heaven exactly, but certainly not hell either. As a writer who has held dozens of menial jobs, without knowing at the time that they were considered menial, I think you need to beware of hubris masquerading as experience. A well-paid executive or surgeon could consider teaching and writing relatively menial.
Experience of the world is vital, but our classrooms are part of that world.
Our lives can be as closeted and narrow, as a university or library can be open and remarkable. Wherever we write, however we write, we must let in the world, let in people. It is why I argue later for universities to act as bridges to their communities. This is as important for the creative health of the writers brought into teach the subject as it is for the students. It is less a problem
outside higher education. Creative writing has always had a wide constituency of practice, thriving in schools, hospitals, adult education and wherever else writers seek to make their temporary homes or residencies. Downtown, purgatory is always more bustling. In these situations, the isolation of the writer becomes impossible, and their work as a writer becomes a functional part of those local real worlds.
Many of these incentives and reasons combine and recombine as a writer’s career progresses, or regresses. There is a balance between teaching and writing;
it teeters one way or the other, but generally the writing gains a slight or more numinous (often unspoken) preference. This is an intuitive procedure while also being pragmatic, since original research informs the best teaching, and writing is the writer’s living version of research. Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual – Arthur Koestler. The energy of live creativity rubs off on students, a little like standing close to somebody lucky. It electrifies, it enlightens the way they approach teaching those who can, teach, and they do not need to be in a seminar room to do so.

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