Mary's review of On Teaching and Writing Fiction (original) (raw)

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Mary's Reviews > On Teaching and Writing Fiction

On Teaching and Writing Fiction by Wallace Stegner

On Teaching and Writing Fiction
by

1337800

Not only comes down on the "yes" side of "can writing be taught?" but explains how and why it matters.

Stegner, Wallace. On the teaching of creative writing: Responses to a series of questions. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. Hanover, NH: UP New England, 1988. Print.

Quotes:
"Nobody can tech the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging" (10). The teacher's "job is to manage the environment" (11).

Students need "to be taken seriously. they need to be assured that their urge to write is legitimate. And, eve when they must be discouraged from wasting their lives in a hopeless effort, they must not be dismissed flippantly" (25)

"It is fatal (though by no means unheard of) for a teacher to impress his own craft, as well as his own conceptions, upon his students" (34).

"I do subscribe to the notion that in order to write a great poem one should be, in some sense or other, a great poet. That suggests that any writer had better be concerned with the development of his personality and his character" (37).

"everybody will benefit from a good, deep, well-worn and familiar rut" (41).

Once committed to the parental role a teacher can be swamped... [students] collective need can swallow his whole life" (43).

"English department have, with some grumbling, made room for writers, feeling (sometimes with justification) that these people can sling words but are lacking in both learning and culture. The writers, on the other hand, often take the view that English teachers are disappointed writers, that they teach because they can't do , and that envy and jealousy are behind their resistance to the full academic acceptance of writers" (52).

Composition is "absolutely essential ... and it is never done well enough. It has its basis in grammar and (67) syntax, which are simply the logic of the language" (68).

Emphasizes the Socratic by name a couple of times and "the end is not the production of clones of any approved style or writer" and "writing is a social act, an act of communication both intellectual and emotional" (71).

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Reading Progress

November 26, 2011 – Shelved

November 26, 2011 –Finished Reading

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