From "Creative Writing Classes: What Are They Good For?" By Matt Rader

Two attitudes towards training in literary arts arise repeatedly and regularly in introductory creative writing classes. These attitudes often persist, in various forms, through each level of university arts training and are shared by instructors and students alike. And this is why creative writing classes make people want to smash their heads against a wall. Preferably, a hard wall.

Without dismissing the "real politic" of working in a human institution such as a university (as the joke goes, there are two kinds of people who hate professors: those who didn't go to university and those who did), and while acknowledging the pragmatic decisions instructors, students, and administrators alike need to make on a daily basis, I assert that both these attitudes arise from a failure to turn reflective and critical thought towards training in literary arts, particularly in universities. As with any discipline, the goal of such training is only ostensibly mastery of craft because mastery of craft, whether in medicine, engineering, music, mathematics, or creative writing, will always be of extremely limited use if it is not accompanied by a well trained mind, one that has, through training, a better chance of turning one’s eyes “in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky” and thereby contextualizing craft and deploying it in innovative, imaginative, and useful ways. One can become very skilled at hammering nails into a porch but unless your goal is to use up a lot of nails, whittle away some time, or to cause pain to the barefooted, the usefulness of this skill resides in the mind's ability imagine it in other contexts and for other purposes. Likewise, the usefulness of training in literary crafts such as plotting, meter, and dialogue resides not only in the way these crafts are deployed in literature but in how they assist in exercising the imagination.

There are, as John Gardner says, no rules for literary composition. None that any good student or instructor would submit herself to without “proof” in the sense that Dewey uses the word. What Scarry is saying in her comment about the comet is the same thing that Gardner is saying when he dismisses rules, and what Dewey is saying when he demands “proof:” that education, in literary arts or otherwise, is not about answering all the questions that have and can be raised, but rather about conditioning the reflexes of the mind (I’ll leave the question of mind and noetics for the moment, but, to be clear, I would include the way the body “knows” as part of the “mind”) to be in increasingly better positions to recognize those questions when they come before us....

The vision of education as primarily dissemination of discipline specific knowledge from educators to learners is an illusion that distracts instructors and students alike from the much more pragmatic insight that, as Dewey says, “one can teach others to think only in the sense of appealing to and fostering powers already active in them.” The best instructors assist students to both discover the scope of the "powers already active in them" and the limitations of those powers. An individual transforms from student to learner when she begins to recognize how those limitations might actually be leveraged to her advantage--think Dumbo or that episode of the Brady Bunch when Greg and size-sensitive Bobby get locked in a meat-locker and Bobby discovers he's small enough to wriggle through the window and open the locker door from the other side....

It is here, at the site of self-reflection, that learning occurs and where literary training must be aimed. The ability to scope and strike this site despite the distractions of disciplinary hubbub and institutional clatter distinguishes the most effective creative writing educators and learners.

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