“Let me be honest. I didn’t always believe in the value of a writing community.
When I was 18 and backpacking through the wilds of Alaska, I thought I was Jack London (or Martin Eden) and that a writer was meant to be a lone wolf. In Prague, I thought I might be Kafka (I even had his image tattooed on my calf there), solitarily plugging away at my work while the world slept and sharing my writing with no one. Although my years in college provided me with the skills to explicate literature and use what I gleaned for my own writing (to paraphrase Eliot: Real writers don’t borrow; they steal. College improved my skills in creative shoplifting), I found the writing community at River Falls to be lacking. Except for my collaborative work in the university’s theatre department and my summer stints in a touring punk band, I kept to myself artistically.
It took my co-developing and participating in a writer’s group in Sofia, Bulgaria, and my recent scholarship into Zoetrope’s Advanced Fiction Workshop for me to understand the necessity of a writer’s community to further my artistic aims…” Etc, etc.
That’s the first 191 words of the personal essay I wrote for application into a master’s of fine arts programme six years ago. I slavishly revised it dozens of times — trying to balance the tight rope between confident and self-effacing, funny and serious minded, qualified but still green enough to merit entry. I boiler-plated it, making slight modifications for a dozen schools (“I crave a more thorough immersion in an environment where literature and writing would be my daily bread. I’m certain that University is just such a place.”), then consigned the essays and applications to the hands of the US Postal Service, kissing each envelope before I dumped it into the hands of strangers and destiny.
Six schools accepted me and, after an agonising decision-making process, I finally decided to attend Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The scholarship and stipend were generous plus the programme offered maximum writing time — at Brown I didn’t have to sing for my supper until the second year, and singing meant teaching creative writing rather than the freshman composition most grad schools required.
The first year passed, a blur of writing workshops, scotch, words, words, words, poker games and endless struggles with the page.
September of my second year, there I stood: My back to the whiteboard and 15 expectant faces turned to me, awaiting the golden keys to creative transcendence. I cleared my throat and began.
And here I am again, six semesters running, teaching creative writing at the American University in Blagoevgrad. The class grew from a modest course proposal, which barely filled — students here are always apprehensive about new teachers, to a fixture of my teaching load, with a lengthy waiting list each and every time.
Do I write this merely to toot my own horn? Maybe, but there’s a deeper question that nags at me every time I face my creative writing class. It’s not an original question and, like most worthy questions, it’s probably a query for which no adequate answer exists: Can writing be taught?
I wasn’t sure this subject suited the diary column until I started to dwell on the point of a diary. Isn’t a diary, aside from being the place where one might record the drab quotidian and the infrequent epiphany, a place to think aloud? To release the cerebral pressure of a burning question, we record it. If the mind possesses an excretory process it’s writing, especially diary writing, which accounts for the scatological nature of so much “dear diary” scribbling. I suppose this might sound like a sort of disclaimer along the lines of “I’m thinking out loud so don’t expect this to amount to anything profound or even significant. In fact, don’t expect this, by its very nature, to read like anything more than what it is, a big, steaming mind-dump”.
It’s infantile, I suppose, to think anyone should be interested in my excretions, my questions. Yet here I go, again: Can writing be taught?
If the definitive answer was “no”, I’d be out of a job. Yet the answer I give my students at the beginning of every creative writing class is just that: “No”, it can’t be taught. It can only be learnt. If this sounds like new age, paradoxical mumbo-jumbo, allow me to clarify.
I provide the students with the tricks of the trade. Through theory and praxis we examine structure, character, setting, point of view, dialogue writing and all the other ingredients that go into a well-done story. But I warn them up front that writing is nothing like cooking. Writing fiction is not a matter of simply following a recipe, stirring together a smidgen of well-rounded character with a dash of symbolic setting, and topping off with a few well-chosen words for an end that echoes beyond the page. Writing is the art of making these inky smudges come to life in the head of a reader. I tell them they have to play God or, at least, Dr Frankenstein, and make the inanimate animate. This ineffable trick of fiction cannot be taught, it must be learnt, and it can only be learnt by reading everything and writing, writing, writing.
If I ever succeed as a fiction writer maybe I’ll try my hand at writing a book on how to write. Generally there’s more money in how-to-write books than in novels. Chapter one of my book will be entitled “Assitude”. This is the way you learn to write — your ass in the chair and the pen in your hand — and it’s the only way.
So my book will rely on the perpetuation of the myth that writing can be taught, just as my class hinges on it every semester. Every semester the students gaze up, their eyes dewy with hope, their respective stories burning in their chests, awaiting release. I will clear my throat again and again and attempt to teach them the unteachable, even as I continue the struggle to teach myself.
Did I answer the question? Of course not. Another thing I tell my students, though, when we finally move to the tricky area of theme (“Now you’ve imitated or rejected reality but what the hell does your work mean?”), art should be a question rather than an answer. And perhaps a diary can and should be nothing more than that, too, a book of questions.
This week's diary is written by Michael Harris Cohen, an assistant professor in the department of arts, languages and literature of the American University in Bulgaria, in Blagoevgrad. He was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and then became a nomad.
