Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught?

Still, the creative-writing program, unsystematic or even anti-system as it might believe itself to be, is a system. People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing (like the Scarecrow) a piece of paper with a Latin inscription, but also bearing (unlike the Scarecrow) the impress of an institutional experience. The nature of that experience mutates as the folk wisdom of the workshop mutates--from "Show, don't tell," which was the mantra in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to the effectively opposite mantra "Find your voice," which took over in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions--about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing--and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced. "The rise of the creative-writing program," he says, "stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history." -- Louis Menand, The New Yorker