Should creative writing be taught?

"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. "

There's an attribute of people that the best term I can come up for is the "give-a-shit gene." It's the tendency to care too much about the intrinsic quality of the work you produce, rather than its reception or where it fits in. Like implementing great code for an employer you hate on a project that's going to fail, or putting in all the effort on a group project in school while others slack off just because you want to have produced something good.

This is usually more of a weakness than a strength in most situations. But to be a good writer, you have to genuinely give a shit about it. I've found a lot of the people I go to school with don't really give a shit about anything, so long as they get the grades or points or whatever they're being judged on.

I think zimbabwe has a point that "the classroom rarely adds more than what students could get in a focused extracurricular group," but finding that group would be nearly impossible. Writing is a very solitary activity, and sharing unfinished work is (for the vast majority) a horrifying experience. You're not going to easily get those people together to recreate a regular (and good) workshop.

The workshop itself was pretty widely reviled by professors and students, and contact we had with writing departments elsewhere showed we weren't alone in that feeling. But I agree with the final thesis of the article that "workshops work". I'm pretty sure my stories and novel got better throughout, from criticism I received and from the sheer amount of practice I got. I ended up not writing after getting the degree (programming was more fun), but a few people I graduated with have started making names for themselves, and I feel pretty good about that. It suggests that maybe I could have if I stuck with it.

I sometimes think that a writing workshop could be nicely transferred to programming. It's been my experience that programmers are much more willing to share and accept advice on unfinished projects, and the little writing games that seem so lame to writers might translate better too.

I personally don't think creative writing is something that college teaching is suited for. A few courses, maybe, but a full major in creative writing is not only a risk, it is largely a waste of class time for the student. Since most of a creative writing major is just plain writing, followed by critique, the classroom rarely adds more than what students could get in a focused extracurricular group.