Agreed: It can’t be taught. It can be guided and improved. Which is what MFA programs are designed to do. It’s apprenticeship.

The problem starts with the first word of the phrase, “creative.” How do you teach “creative”? You can teach writing to some extent, but if the person has no flair or passion, the baseline of competence should be a goal. For those with the mojo, a teacher can be problematic.

I remember taking a college creative writing course — only one. It was a joke. Even at that age, I had the feeling I could write circles around the instructor. Maybe it was the arrogance of youth, but I don’t think so. At the same time, Francine Prose, a writer with a true gift, was teaching another course I was taking, and I was in awe. That lady can write!

There’s an illusion that anything can be taught. Sorry, but nature beats nurture at almost every junction of the two. Nurture can reveal talent but it can’t generate talent. And since creative writing courses are not about revealing talent but teaching someone else’s idiosyncratic technique, they don’t work.

Good catch! The New Yorker article was BS.

So much for my degree in Creative Writing, Skidmore College, a long time ago; in fact I made the term up afterward. It was one of the early do-it-yourself college programs, called University Without Walls. Didn’t want a perfectly good scholarship to go to waste. Like most of you, I am fully qualified to be appreciated as posthumously as anybody. Let us bow our heads and swear to be content.

I have a treasured old friend. She’s now 103 and still going. James Thurber put the very first copy of the New Yorker in her dainty hands for her 21st birthday. She was a dancer from a highly musical family, who palled around with Thurber and the Algonquin Table people. “I still don’t know if I liked Dorothy Parker,” she said once. She seemed introverted and kind of sneaky. This lady, I am proud to say, was very fond of my writing — until I wrote about her.

I think that good writin’ can be taught, and this is no small thing. Yet “teaching creativity” resembles an oxymoron; after all, learning the rules is a rote matter. Creativity is a matter of wresting out one’s mythology from the jungles of his psyche. It is an endless living thing. If it is not, why write? If it is, a good background in literacy will do.

I studied with writers who were considered among the literary giants of their day. Vance Bourjaily, Jack Leggett, and Robert Anderson were my thesis committee. Anderson taught me to write screenplays. If these names are unfamiliar, that just shows that literary glory is very transient. My other instructors included William Price Fox and, yes, Raymond Carver, who I endured for a semester of drunken antics and no teaching whatsoever. I’m not sure what he was doing there since he’d never completed his own degree, but he had a big rep and that sufficed.

There were genre writers in the program. Joe Haldeman was a classmate of mine. James Crumbly had been there a few years before. The program is supposed to give you a couple of years to work on your stuff and talk to other writers about writing. It’s a peer-review feedback class where people talk about story, character and style,; things which most PhDs comprehend dimly if at all.

As for the pretensions of MFA students, that too is part of the program. You already know you’re very talented because you are there. Part of the process is to build your confidence and help you discover your voice. That’s not done by being kind or gentle, but by being pretty tough. Those classes could make “Survivor” look like a tea party. But getting your work out to an audience requires a kind of mental toughness. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will believe in you? By your very presence you’ve already proven you can write; now you have to prove you can write better than anyone else. This is not a task for the shy and retiring. It requires a cast-iron ego and nerves of titanium.

These programs do not guarantee publication or great success or critical acclaim. They give you the tools, but you must do the work.

Another very interesting thing that I noticed about the MFA program was that none of the fiction writers in the program were interested in becoming “genre” writers. From what I could tell, there weren’t any budding mystery writers or romance writers or YA writers. No, instead, they were all determined to write and publish only “literary” fiction. They were all convinced that they were going to be the next James Joyce or Jane Austen — which of course also led them to develop very high opinions of themselves. It was kind of funny, really. I also noticed that almost all of the MFA students also had written at least one movie screenplay. One fellow, after getting into a fistfight with a freshman student during his office hours, even dropped out of the program and moved to Hollywood to “make it big.” I never heard from him again.

I would submit that you cannot teach creative writing effectively without demanding the student conform to what your idea of “good” is (and probably very narrow at that) and that anything other than that is therefore “bad,” thus, a mentoring relationship may be simply an experiment in cloning. But bouncing from professor to professor may not get you any better instruction when one loves what you write and the next hates it.

The sticky wicket is the word “creative.” You can teach Comp 101 and some people are never going to get it, but likely those people don’t have a story in ‘em. If they do, fine. Teach them craft and see if they get it. If not, oh well. After being in critique groups for years and stopped when one of those types of people never got it, I decided I wasn’t going to waste my time.

But what if you come across a fairly competent writer who writes fiction but has no real story? I ran into a bunch of those in my degree course…