The Pursuit of Perfection by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

Writers and Business

The last two weeks have been quite a revelation for me. My post on perfection led to the following week’s post about writing workshops/writing culture, and even then, it wasn’t until the comment sections of both blogs that I realized just how prevalent the whole writing problem thing is.

What I consider to be “the whole writing problem thing” is this: writers have never learned how to become professionals. They have learned how to become critics and academics.

Farther into this post, I will talk about the problems caused by what we learn and how we learn it. Before I do, however, I want to remind you of something:

I write these blog posts for professional writers and those who want to become professional writers. By professional, I mean someone who makes a living at their writing. Not at teaching writing, not at lecturing, not at criticism. But at their actual writing, their published works.

So when I’m talking about problems in what writers learn, I’m talking about what writers who want to become professionals learn. I have nothing against English teachers; there are several in my family and more among my friends.

I am talking about the problems in the teaching of creative writing only. Other degree programs help their students become professionals in their fields—in other words, those professionals know that when they graduate, their field offers work, paying work. It might take a while to get there, but the students know they can if they follow a particular path.

(Please note that some creative writing degree programs are trying to change this attitude. Folks have mentioned such programs in the comments section of my blog. I have not vetted these programs and, in some cases, was unaware of them. So check them out on your own. The tide might be turning—slowly.)

Writers do not get a training in their profession (an existing profession, in which thousands of writers work and thrive), and not just because of the reasons I had assumed. These blog posts and your comments have sent me on a journey of discovery into just how old, deep, and pervasive this misunderstanding of our profession truly is.

I spent some time looking for the very first writer’s workshop. I vaguely remembered an article I read about famous prose writers and poets on the East Coast setting up their own degree program (Robert Lowell’s name comes to mind), but before I searched for that, I decided to go the easy, Google route. I wanted to find the first degree program in the United States on Creative Writing.

It was, as you probably guessed, The University of Iowa, which still has a famous writing workshop, a prestigious one. According to its website, the university offered its first creative writing class in 1897 (which was the first creative writing class in Iowa. Dunno about the rest of the country).

I dug deeper. I have a (badly produced) book from Hyperion on the Iowa Writers Workshop called, unsurprisingly, The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers Workshop. The book is a wealth of rather shocking information.

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