An article by Louis Menand in The New Yorker:
Menand just published a well-written, and intriguing
article in the The New Yorker entitled "Show or Tell, Should Creative Writing be Taught?"
He recounts the history of informal writing workshops to the creation of university level degree programs in creative writing, which he posits are a fairly recent development in the history of the creation of creative writers. Using many references such as John Barth's 1985 article in the
Times Book Review entitled
Writing: Can It Be Taught?, as well as Mark McGurl's book,
The Program Era, he examines whether or not writing workshops, either informal or institutionalized, are worthwhile endeavors for both authors and readers. He poses the question: "Is the rise of the creative-writing workshop, as McGurl claims, “the most important event in postwar American literary history”?" He later writes the profound statement that "Writers are products of educational systems, but stories are products of magazine editorial practices and novels are products of publishing houses."
The article is a worthwhile read, and at the end, he injects his own experience of participating in writing workshops and how they've affected him in the long-term:
"I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make."
As someone who is somewhat adverse to institutional learning environments, but who has participated in, and run, many writing workshops that concentrate on the creation of new work, I have witnessed the joy that writers get from creating something they never expected they would invent, and how the act of creation itself keeps them coming back week after week. If a writing workshop makes you feel productively creative, then it has served it's purpose.
Brenda Ueland wrote in
If You Want to Write,
"...at least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it. If they did not - fine. They did not need to listen. That was all right too."
What she is saying here, and what I agree with, is the motivating factor to write should not be
to gain, but rather because
you love. If you gain from it, so much the better. If a writing workshop or a university degree feeds your love, feeds your passion, then participate. If writing alone feeds your love and your passion, then don't participate. Either way, write because you love.
