Living with Books

...At the New School for Social Research there are two seminars in novel writing, one of which I have been teaching for the past two years...

...And then there is the attentive reader...

...But I suspect that the proportion of good teachers is uncommonly high if only because in these days, when so few writers can live by their writing and when universities look with favor on writers even if they haven't advanced degrees, many teachers of writing are writers...

...Despite all the depressing sales figures...

...Nor, if they have ability, do I want them to be...

...So far as my own experience goes, I have come to believe that I cannot teach students how to write novels but that, with luck, I may be able to help some of them to learn the craft...

...He is someone who is interested enough in a piece of writing to ask questions about it...

...For another, the promising young writers may not have time and money for conferences...

...It is from the way the audience responds— whether they are restless, whether they laugh when they are supposed to laugh, whether their eyes brighten when he is reading his big dramatic scene—that a writer comes to measure success and failure...

...Taking part in a writers' conference is an experience that is likely to raise in anyone's mind the old, old question: Can writing be taught...

...All education, of course, is a matter of learning rather than teaching, but when one comes to what is called creative writing, there is almost no teaching at all...

...But whatever he has been, he has read carefully the work in hand and thought about it...

...they earn their livings in a variety of ways, mostly quite unconnected with literature...

...But serious and talented writers, as I have frequently pointed out in these pages, are having a bad time, and one cannot cheerfully contemplate the writing of more and more novels of merit that will go virtually unread...

...to raise the quality of our writing, I cannot lie against them...

...Three or four decades ago, there were famous teachers of writing here and there, such as Charles Townsend Copeland at Harvard, but even their courses, the undergraduate was made to feel, were luxuries...

...I do not believe that we can have too many good novels...

...It is also true that he can do nothing much for the people in the second group, but at least he doesn't have to feel sorry for them, for they are getting what they want...

...When I used to teach freshman English, I was able to find the right answers, he is learning how to write, about what constituted clear communication, but in my seminar in the novel I find myself mostly asking questions...

...I would say, "No...

...Today the teachers of writing —who often are writers of some reputation—are respected on every campus, and to such teachers come annually thousands of students, many of them already dedicated to a writing career...

...And yet I am appalled when I think of all the thousands of people who will be taking writing courses this fall...

...If a young person came to me and asked, "Do I have to take writing courses to become a writer...

...It was a good staff, I think, and since the enrollment was rather small the students received a good deal of individual attention...

...You can probably learn to write by yourself, but the chances are that you will learn faster with so-and-so...

...At the same time, courses in writing, on both the undergraduate and the graduate level, have multiplied in colleges and universities all over the country...

...The teacher of a writing course is this kind of attentive reader or he is nothing...

...And the New School is only one of many institutions for adult education in New York City, each of them offering a variety of writing courses...

...sometimes he has been an editor or an agent...

...Sometimes the attentive reader has been just a friend or a wife or a husband...

...A student might come out of such a session with a sad realization that his story had not been worth reading, but at least he knew it had been read...

...A good writer, to be sure, is not necessarily a good teacher, but he is likely to be since he cares about writing and almost certainly has learned how to read...

...As the course is organized, each member reads aloud from his work in progress, listens to the comments of the other members, and if he sees fit defends himself...

...Then there are the people who aren't seriously interested in writing at all but want a vacation-with-culture...

...He says: "I may be crazy, but I think the last three pages of the love scene are pure corn...

...there are several general courses in writing...

...This, I have discovered, is a fallacy...

...Scores of writers' conferences were held this summer, more than ever before, and perhaps some of them were luckier than Antioch in the caliber of their students, but my guess is that everywhere the proportion of non-talent to talent was high...

...Even today there are able young writers who never took a writing course in their lives...

...The unpromising people who make up the majority at most writers' conferences can be divided into two classes...

...they may also, quite understandably, have no interest in attending them...

...That by all practical standards these people ought not to want to be writers is irrelevant...

...That may be sentimentality, but it is true that literature managed to get along for many centuries without benefit of writing courses...

...There is consolation, however, in the reflection that the courses in writing aren't bringing the would-be writers into existence but are being brought into existence by them...

...At Antiocli selected stories, which had been mimeographed and distributed anonymously to students and staff members, were discussed each afternoon...

...My students come from all parts of the city and the suburbs...

...If I ask the right questions, and if the student is able to find the right answers, he is learning how to write, and I presumably am helping him...

...The teacher is sorry for the people in the first group, but of course there is nothing he can do for them except to say, as gently as he can, that he is not the magician they are looking for...

...But if he said, "Would it be a good idea for me to take a writing course with so-and-so...

...it would be the purest luck if any of them, in the normal course of his life, were to meet another person interested in writing novels...

...He says: "This is fine, but I wish you'd have another look at Chapter X; I think you must have written that when you were tired...

...You will still have to make your own mistakes, but he'll help you to see them for what thev are...

...Of the teachers of writing I know, the majority are attentive readers...

...In the first place, it gives each of these novelists and would-be novelists a chance to meet other people who have the same interests and the same problems as he has...

...In most university courses, I imagine, there is more formal instruction—more talk about esthetic theory, more analysis of masterpieces— but beyond a certain point whatever can be accomplished must be accomplished in terms of what the writer is writing...

...There are some who lament the passing of the good old days when a young man who wanted to be a writer holed up in a Greenwich Village or Paris garret and wrote...

...For one thing, there just isn't enough talent to go round...

...There are, first, the men and women who know they aren't writers but who believe they can become writers if they can find someone who will pronounce the right magic formula...

...sometimes he has been a mature craftsman who has generously given his time to the work of a promising beginner...

...And if writing courses tend, as I believe they do...

...there are courses in the writing of short stories, essays, literary criticism, plays and poetry...

...Putting conferences aside for the moment, what about the hundreds of writing courses that are being given every year...

...Beyond that, the course does two things for its members: It gives them an audience, and it gives them an attentive reader...

...I am sure there are many bad teachers of writing, teachers who are too lazy to read attentively or have never learned how, teachers who demand that their students conform to their tastes and be governed by their limitations, teachers who feel they have done their duty if they corrected a student's grammar...

...My experience has been rather specialized, for I have been dealing with selected adults, but that kind of writing course, I have been surprised to learn, is valuable in several ways...

...The spoken criticism is usually helpful, but I have come to feel that the unspoken criticism is more valuable...

...and if so-and-so was one of several dozen teachers I can think of, I would say, "Yes...

...He says: "If you want me to believe that Joe would have stabbed his uncle with a butcher knife, you have got to make him a different kind of character...

...Not all of them, fortunately, will become writers, but some will, and not a few, it is safe to predict, will turn out to be serious and talented...

...Once I would have said that, whatever might be true in smaller places, in New York no writer need be lonely...

...Four or five of them showed promise, and I am sure they profited from the attention they got, but the majority, it seemed to me, were not and never would be writers...

...Every year I tell my students at the New School that they are crazy to want to write novels, but they are not discouraged, and I do not expect them to be...

...A writing course is at least a place where other writers can be found...

...It used to be that writing courses were few and were viewed with suspicion if not contempt by most academicians...

...This summer I was on the teaching staff of the Antioch Writers' Conference, along with James McConkey, Nolan Miller, Hollis Summers, Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell...

...And though there are equally able young writers who have taken such courses, nobody knows whether they are able because of or in spite of the instruction they have received...

...Many novelists who never took writing courses have been heavily indebted to attentive readers...

...The good teacher is the kind of reader who misses nothing, who grasps the writer's intention and is able to show where and perhaps why what has been written falls short of it...

...And when the story under consideration was a promising one, its author could feel that it had been read with great sympathy and with the kind of insight he was bound to respect...