Who creates the creators?

Provocative piece in the New Yorker: Should creative writing be taught?

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers …. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.

…

What is usually said is that you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft. What counted as craft for James, though, was very different from what counted as craft for Hemingway. What counts as craft for Ann Beattie (who teaches at the University of Virginia) must be different from what counts as craft for Jonathan Safran Foer (who teaches at N.Y.U.). There is no “craft of fiction” as such.

I’ve snipped just two bits from the lengthy article, which I found interesting, but also lacking. It spends almost no time dealing with the number-one benefit that a creative writing class offers to the aspiring writer: it gets you writing. Once you’ve paid to enter the program, writing becomes homework — it becomes something you must do, something that can no longer be put off, something more than a hobby. A lot of people, I imagine, find that it takes a pleasurable pursuit and turns it tedious. In creative writing classes I’ve taken, I’ve really enjoyed the fact that writing becomes necessary — something I can tell other people that I have to go do. And I’ve benefited from an explosion of creativity when I’m forced to sit down and write and write and write.