Its simply not possible to teach someone how to write creatively. One can teach techniques but not the music of the words. The music of the words, the words within the words, the being and becoming that exists beyond all clever stories with clever twists, that is something else, something other that comes from the writer themselves. In the same way as one cant teach music to someone but can teach skilful techniques for making notes in clever sequences. Writing creatively is something that is more than the sum of its parts of putting words down on paper or on a screen. It comes from the individual soul and cannot be imparted from one to another. All the techniques in the world will not make a good script or book or poem or play. Neither will all the criticism nor all the praise improve a writers gifts. Its the most individual of arts and its down to the writer putting thousands of hours of effort, sweat and lifeblood into their work until they have that moment when their art begins to transcend everything they thought they knew and they begin to have what is known as a moment of flow, where they feel that they are taking dictation from another dimension, when in fact that is what they are actually doing. Writing, like all art, is a form of transcendental meditation, a form of channelling, a seeing beyond what is merely present in our very unreal very everyday existence. Life is largely an illusion. We were not born to go to school to get a job to get married to fight for more wages to vote to get older to get divorced to die and somewhere along the way to repeat the whole tired ritual with our kids and our children’s children. Modern life is largely illusory as is a lot of our so called beliefs. Art transcends what we call reality. Let me give a subjective example, from my own experience.
I recall doing an advanced fiction course some years back. I was recovering from a very bad time in my life and wanted the camaradería of other writers. I was deeply lonely, had had a bad time in Poland. I had been isolated politically and personally finishing a very difficult novel while coping with family fragmentations. I also had no money so my ex very kindly paid for the very expensive course. It involved going up to the capital every so often and sharing drafts of what turned out to be the present novel I am in the process of finishing. To say that the very expensive course did nothing for either my writing or my loneliness and isolation would be a world class understatement. The tutors technique was far from gentle. The technique was to harshly coldly wittily critique the students, set them against each other by making them critique each other’s work, and then make endlessly abrasive remarks about most if not all of what was clearly only drafts of future books. It seemed to me to be a pointless power hungry and entirely destructive pedagogical method. At first I thought this was me. I thought, as I was in a terrible place emotionally, it must be the fact I am just going through a lot, and I am taking well intentioned objective criticism personally. After all my relationship with my partner had ended. My Mother was very sick. My sister was very ill. It was me, not them, I decided. I needed to own my own feelings and not project.
Then I went to a magazine launch one weekend, again for the company, and perchance I got chatting to the editor of the magazine who had very distracting hair and I mentioned in passing I was doing this high powered course. Oh she smiled grimly, I did that too. Really I said. How did you find it? Traumatic, the editor said. Don’t know if it helped. Looks good on a CV. Oh it looks great on a CV, I agreed. She went on, uninvited by me: Are you going through the usual period of trauma bonding with your fellow writers as you live in fear and anxiety for the next session? Er, I began, not wanting to be quoted. She went on even further: Are you being torn to shreds like we all were and rebuilt in the tutors image? I was surprised to hear this. I didn’t know what to say. I nodded and smiled and didn’t really answer. Shit, I thought. Maybe its not just me.
I was living in anxiety. I recognised that. I really feared the next class. I hated critiquing the other writers works, especially if they weren’t good, and some of it was really not good. A lot of them hadn’t written a single book, and, to be honest I wondered how they had gotten onto this course in the first place. Then I thought: Imagine saying that out loud. It was unthinkable and very unproductive. Freedom of speech is not saying what you like. I also didn’t think I was helping anyone and I didn’t feel I was being helped. I was planning a huge project, day after day week after week, and the Tutor was going on about questioning my predilection for worldbuilding. Maybe, I wondered, I was there for the wrong reason. I also loathed the atmosphere the tutor had created, deeply hated it. I disagreed with it fundamentally. I had taught too many classes myself to buy into this methodology. Playing hardball with writers is something of a pointless exercise. Brutal honesty just hurts. It creates resentment and invites revenge and does not bring out the best in people. In a sense writers are all in the same boat, however different our backgrounds and levels of experience and skill. We are only human and human beings are fragile. The atmosphere created seemed to build less a culture of personal development and individual creativity and more one of ultimate conformity to the aesthetics of the tutor, the one who was cracking the acerbic verbal whip and encouraging this rather dark anxiety ridden atmosphere without warmth, without encouragement, without the positivity needed to get people to flourish. I didn’t get what the ultimate goal here was, except to create clones of the tutor.
After a while I had enough. For me the end came when I mentioned the movie THE MATRIX which seemed to evoke an explosive reaction from a fellow writer. Now this movie is an acknowledged master (mistress?) piece and a seminal moment in movie making with a huge cultural, literary and philosophical freight attached to it. This writer blew it away as nonsense. She had never seen it. But that didn’t matter. Fuck that. I closed my eyes and said to myself that my ex had wasted her money. I looked at the tutor. He was smiling at his student who had dismissed the movie. Why was he doing this? Was there a value in being rude and ignorant? Was this a verbal and critical free fire zone? Where was the respect? Why were we engaging in literary trench warfare with each other? How is this helping? How was breaking each other down going to build a better model of ourselves creatively? Were we here to score points on each other or get better at our art?
So I quit and felt a whole lot better when I did. It was one of the few writing courses I ever did in my life, the second I think. The first was a screenwriting course in Trinity. After that second one I have no plans to ever do another. I got a very nice email from the tutor saying how sorry s/he was I was going, that I added a lot to the class, and so on. It was too little too late, really. I thought about giving a piece of my mind but I was dealing with too much at the time and decided to pick my battles. To be honest I actually felt a little sorry I was going. Its funny how we can have two contradictory feelings at once. I never saw those other writers again. I don’t think I want to. it would bring it all back again when it was best forgotten. But it underlined to me that teaching writing is a highly profitable but highly questionable job.
A Normal Man Writing 
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