College Topic: Creative Writing and Reading

10-second review: Says that students in creative writing programs are reading superficially—to get to the end of the book. They should be reading as critics, as literary scholars and writers.

Title: “A House Divided: On the Future of Creative Writing.” K. Andrews. College English (January 2009), pp. 242-255. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Summary/Quote: “When I identify myself as a creative writer with a strong desire to become an active literary critic, my creative colleagues (writers for writing’s sake) regard me with a mixture of encouragement and sympathy. But they seem also to be asking me, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ (To which I sometimes want to snap, ‘Because I can’t read.’)”

Summary/Quote: “I have had fabulous writers as teachers: writers who taught me the mechanics of a sonnet, uncovered for me the inner workings of Anglo-Saxon verse, and showed me fourteen different types of elegy. And I know, now, that each one of those writers was also, in part, a scholar.”

Comment: I have found that people who read learn to write without instruction in writing.

Reading literature carefully, as a writer, will teach creative writing students to write.

The purpose for creative writing for most students in school is to learn to write the genres of literature in order to understand the literature. RayS.