Many writers, including some who teach in graduate writing programs, claim that creative writing cannot be taught. Whether this is true or not is probably unknowable, but the attitude certainly is a paradox, like a preacher who does not believe in God and yet continues to preach. If they're right, why do they keep teaching? Given the obvious hypocrisy, why should anyone pay any attention to them? They assume, I think, that some people have talent and some do not and that instruction either way is a waste of time. Whether or not that's the case, surely it is undeniable that some aspects of writing can be taught and, in any event, creative writing programs provide other benefits to aspiring writers, talented or otherwise.

For those with talent, such programs offer a path to the realization of their gift. For those without, they offer either a means of faking it (which is no disqualification from commercial success) or, just as importantly, the discovery that there is no sense in pretending. Writers born with talent, if there is such a thing, could find their predestined voice by reading widely and recognizing in the work of their predecessors those techniques that they might artfully employ in their own writing, as writers always have done and will do. While this is a lifelong quest, an MFA program can provide a shortcut. Or, to put it less pejoratively, an MFA program may show a talented writer a more efficient route to the same goal. Experienced writers can help new talent find and avoid the pitfalls that almost always plague beginners. Is this guidance not teaching? The process of discovery itself benefits many writers and may contribute to the formation of a permanent writing community, often a secondary, but important, by-product of an MFA program.

And what of those writers without talent? What's wrong with helping them fake it? If a writer learns to assemble the elements of fiction more effectively, to use figurative language more creatively, to manipulate words, sounds and rhythms more engagingly, has she not learned to write? Before I began my MFA program I had completed a draft of a novel with a few decades of reading for training. During the course of my MFA studies, I learned how to use dialogue to best illustrate character and move plot, and to make the dialogue seem real without actually representing the imperfections of genuine speech. I learned that adverbs are often a cloud, obscuring in the writer's eye the right verb that is needed to show the reader precisely what is happening. I'd like to think I brought my manuscript into sharper focus by applying these and other lessons. But I don't believe that these are techniques that require particular talent.

Others without talent, and some with talent, may discover in the course of an MFA program that they aren't going to succeed, if success is measured by publication, or that they aren't willing to risk failure. Flannery O'Connor (who earned her MFA at the University of Iowa), famously said, "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." Perhaps not enough, but it is undeniable that many are stifled by the writing program experience. While numbers are hard to come by, there is anecdotal evidence that a significant percentage of MFA graduates never publish and may give up writing altogether.

Regardless of whether writing can be taught, other critics of the MFA programs argue that the programs destroy creativity, that they actually do more harm than good. In a review of Good Poems, an anthology edited by Garrison Keillor, August Kleinzahler writes: "What little of real originality is out there is drowning in the waste products spewing from graduate writing programs like the hog farm waste that recently overflowed its holding tanks in the wake of Hurricane Isabel, fouling the Carolina countryside and poisoning everything in its path." Apart from being bad logic (just because there is bad poetry in the world and also an abundance of MFA programs we cannot conclude that one is the cause of the other), the notion that quality gets lost in the crowd is shallow thinking. If the mere quantity of art is enough to dim the light of good writing, then surely that art isn't all that great to begin with. The truth is that Kleinzahler doesn't believe that art is for the masses; it should be the preserve, apparently, of those who can most appreciate it. Some critics claim that American literature is already too pretentious. For Kleinzahler, it seems, it isn't pretentious enough.

The writing workshop experience itself may be to blame both for the stifling of writers and for the impression that writing programs homogenize literature. Rick Moody writes in the Atlantic Monthly, "The creative-writing workshop that is shorn of all ornament, that pre-emptively restrains the eruption of personality, that simply goes about its business—photocopying stories, handing them out, collecting responses, handing back the responses—is . . . creative writing by committee. And because it is creative writing by committee, it hews to the statistical mean, which is to say the mediocre." (Writers and Mentors, August, 2005.) It's a doubtful proposition.

MFA programs may be similarly structured, as I've described, but writing instruction surely depends on the instructor. How could it not? A student who works with Michael Martone at the University of Alabama is going to get far different feedback on her work than the student who studies with Lan Samantha Chang at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. As writers, Martone and Chang are far too different for this not to be the case. Moody himself admits that he had hoped to go to Johns Hopkins to work with John Barth (with whom Martone profitably studied), and had he not been forced to settle for a spot in Columbia's MFA program would he still hold this view? Is this not sour grapes?

Furthermore, if there is a similarity in approach to teaching writing, surely that is because creative writing, like any craft, is first about technique. A writer masters fundamental skills—constructing sentences, paragraphs, stories—and then learns to shape them into the elements of, say, fiction—plot, character, voice, setting, dialogue. The advanced learner then studies more subtle techniques of dialogue, description, narration, and point of view that can alter the effect of the fiction on a reader. A graduate school program is not the place to learn grammar, of course. And beginning MFA students can reasonably be expected to know the basics. It's also not unreasonable to expect aspiring writers to have read widely, so that some sense of the tools of the writer might be absorbed in this way. But given this basic knowledge, the MFA graduate should then know how to apply the techniques of craft and perhaps bend the rules creatively in order to generate distinctive art.

It must be admitted that the process of the critique workshop, which is central to many MFA programs, may suppress creativity, at least in the short term. The writing workshop itself is designed to identify and eliminate imperfections in student work, like the trial forgings executed by apprentice silversmiths. Workshop participants hammer away at their pieces until every scratch, every distinctive mark is pounded smooth: every comma in the right place, every sentence grammatical, every adverb erased (because, as all MFA students learn, adverbs are the enemy). Telling is converted to showing; summary becomes scene; scenes are dramatized; dialogue is naturalized; characters are psychoanalyzed. This is the homogenization that critics worry about. This is where all work produced in the sterile atmosphere of the MFA programs begins to look and sound alike: Moody's "writing by committee."

In fact, though, this is where talent emerges. A writing student who sees past all that hammering and still allows his or her instincts to control the work, to apply a singular mark—of language, cadence, imagery, playfulness, or whatever—is the one who will stand out from all the rest and will succeed. There may be many similar voices in the very large MFA chorus, competent at the craft thanks to the program experience, and there may be more such voices than the literature world can really absorb. But there seems no harm in that. The competition, in fact, surely stimulates artists to be more creative, rather than less. It also seems to me that MFA programs can foster the special voices among the multitude, nurturing them until they are ready to flourish.

Contributor's Note
Clifford Garstang received an M.F.A. from Queens University of Charlotte. His work has appeared in Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Baltimore Review, Potomac Review and elsewhere. He won the 2007 GSU Review Fiction Award and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.