The Australian printed an article by Jenny Sinclair, who dislikes writing classes despite being currently enrolled in one right now:

EVERYWHERE I turn, it seems, I see advertisements for writing courses, writing workshops, writing weekends, writing holidays. All of them promise to help participants polish their prose and carve out their characters.

It should be stopped. The only people writing should be those who must write, I scrawl in a notebook as I sit on the side of the running bath while my young son makes duck noises at me.

There is no shortage of people who can, with a little encouragement, write. There are lots of skilled craftspeople. Even more say they want to write, and many of those find their way into university courses, adult education or privately run seminars on the novel, genre, short story and importance of plot. . . . [The programs] provide toolboxes, and with those toolboxes the vaguely talented often turn out the equivalent of high school carpentry projects: a procession of by-the-numbers breakfast trays and carved wooden animals.

For Jenny, a Writer-with-a-capital-W are those who “must” write. It is a lesson she learned when she had cancer. Suddenly, she let her dishes pile up, ignored her son and husband, and became a write-a-holic:

I completed scenes as I waited for chemotherapy, scribbled plot outlines in the radiotherapist’s waiting room, wrote dialogue on the tram, jotted down two-word ideas in a notebook while my car idled at the traffic lights.

All that work paid off! She had an “epiphany”:

It didn’t matter to me if I was any good as long as I wrote. The realisation was like a starburst in the dark of a hot, sleepless night in Thailand, and it hasn’t left me since.

This isn’t writing. This is hypergraphia. And it’s a disease. A serious, serious disease from which one may never return. “Hypergraphia is understood to be triggered by changes in brainwave activity in the temporal lobe.” Hmmm…

It’s true, a writer writes, but that’s not nearly as interesting a question as what would make someone publish a self-righteous rant implying that writing classes are filled with hacks who are not “real” writers?

I have a feeling that most of the mumble-jumble about the value of writing programs has to do with the fact that they boost competition among writers. Writing programs increase the number of people who think they are writers, who in turn flood literary journals and publishers with submissions, making your individual chance of being noticed much slimmer. But, if there were more financial support for journals and independent publishers, there would be more writing opportunities, more writers would get paid, and I think most of the complaint about writing programs would fade away.

So, maybe the solution here is to write rants about how people should buy literary journals, or rants about how programs should encourage writers to support the literary scene, not question what makes someone a “real” writer. Because in the end, that question is kind of useless. Cream rises to the surface in any industry. While it’s true that writers write–they also publish.

Link via Bookninja.

~ Joy