To learn, or not to learn, that is the question.

Some friends and I attended the Texas Writers Conference event on Monday night at Schreiner University.  The keynote speaker was Bret Anthony Johnston, who is from Corpus Christi but is currently the director of creative writing at Harvard University.  Bret read for us and took questions.  He was funny and charming and complimentary of the questioners.  I figured he had to be pretty damned smart to be teaching at Harvard.  I wasn't disappointed.

Bret's writing is character-centric, which now seems different to me than storyline-centric.  The action in his stories is inside the characters.  I think this might be the way to write the Great American Novel; I am still trying to write a story as good as Last of the Mohicans.

My question for you is, can creative writing be taught?  There are a lot of classes which offer this.   My friend Tom learns well by reading and in classroom settings.  I learn best by doing.  What about you?  Your comments are invited.

  Bret Anthony Johnston

The Tractor

I talked with my friend Robert Schwarz last night on the telephone.  He lives about as far out in the middle of nowhere as one can get these days and still be in the hill country.  He has written most of his two memoirs in a spiral notebook with a pencil on the hood of his old ranch truck in a pasture in that middle of nowhere.  He told me of a time he spent struggling with a paragraph, and when suddenly, there it was, clear as day, while he was baling hay, he stopped the tractor and wrote it down  with a pencil from the toolbox on a feed sack he was using as a seat cushion.  Here is an excerpt from "R L and Other Stories"

Tall at slightly over six feet; slender maybe 160 pounds, muscular with the long, thin untiring muscles of the fields and cedar brakes; sharp features; large intense brown eyes, short scissor cut brownish hair; smooth faced without even a hint of a beard; short upper body with long legs; floppy battered grey felt hat with a high crown and wide brim turned downward all around; work worn scarred calloused hands with long fingers liberally coated with the blackish tar like cedar resin; leathery skin - Ben was the archetypical cedarchopper.

Robert has been to a couple of Conference meetings, and one of these meetings we'll get in a discussion about writing.  For me, the Conference is about just that - talking about writing with other writers.

Talk up our short story contest, tell your friends about the Conference, and if you have a really good paragraph you would like to share, send it to me.  As always, your comments on this blog are invited.

Me?  I'm still trying to write a paragraph as good as Robert's.