As I write this, I sit in the Bronte room of Hawthornden, a medieval castle on a secluded crag overlooking the valley of the river North Esk. Here I shall be for the coming days, preparing this book for print, and here the great Ben Jonson was also once the guest of William Drummond, who owned the castle. Thus, it seems appropriate -- even if Jonson and Drummond parted on less than friendly terms at the time -- to begin this work with a quote from Dr. Jonson: “A good poet is made as well as born.”

I do not believe there has ever been a successful writer who has not studied writing to learn the craft. Here perhaps we must define terms, to wit “successful” and “studied.” I shall eschew any attempt to define the former lest I find myself vulnerable to charges of having excluded features from the profile of success simply because they are not my own (e.g., an appearance on Oprah Winfrey, publication by a major New York house, front-face displays in airports and Barnes & Noble, rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review, and so forth). Granted, these and other attributes might accompany the highest literary excellence, but these are not the measures of success to which I refer, which I can most simply identify as writing that is in some manner a profound expression of our existential predicament; in the words of another local Scot, from just eight miles down the road in Edinburgh, Robert Louis Stevenson:

The poet . . . is to find some way of speaking about
life that shall satisfy, if only for the moment,
(wo) man’s enduring astonishment at his (her) own
position. And besides having an answer ready, it
is he who shall provoke the question. He must
shake people out of their indifference, and force
them to make some election in this world, instead
of sliding dully forward in a dream . . . He is the
declared enemy of all
living by reflex action, of all the
pleasureless pleasuring and imaginary duties in
which we coin away our hearts and fritter
invaluable years.”

I believe that any writer whose work can be thus described would have had to study writing. Reading and contemplating the work of the masters is the classic manner of doing so. A writer may do this on his or her own, in isolation, and/or by building and judiciously using a network of intelligent colleagues, and/or by pursuing a course of formal study of literature and/or the art of writing.

In brief, one can do it alone, on one’s own or one can do it in community with others. I have tried it both ways and find the latter method far superior to the former.

Some writers -- even some who make their living teaching college writing courses -- pride themselves on saying, “I never took a course in writing. I never had to.” Others -- for example, the extremely gifted fiction writer W.D. Wetherell -- never took a writing course or even met another writer until some time into their careers, but do not make a point of honor of this.

Wetherell worked in isolation for some years before joining the faculty of Vermont College’s MFA Program. He likened the moment of being welcomed by fellow faculty member Gordon Weaver his first day there to the historic meeting in the wilderness between H.M. Stanley and David Livingstone (another Scot whose statue stands alongside the enormous monument to Sir Walter Raleigh on Princes Street in Edinburgh):

“Professor Weaver, I presume.”

Writing in isolation, Wetherell had published two books and many stories (and has gone on to publish many more), but had never met another writer before that moment. However, that he had never taken a writing course is not the same as saying he had never studied writing; clearly, he had -- he had studied and learned from the masters he most admired; Hawthorne, Melville, Proust, Chekov . . .

I am not certain that all potential writers are capable, given the limited years allotted us, of learning the craft they need on their own just as most people would be hard pressed to build a house without first being taught a few things about brick and timber, shingle and cement, without at least studying how a few sturdy houses have been put together, without examining the way a door is hung, a lintel set in place, windows cast, how to pitch and raise a roof, angle the walls, lay flooring, not to mention seeing to the electricity, plumbing, heat ducts . . .

Never having studied such matters a person might succeed, on superficial observation and surmisal, in constructing some semblance of a house, but not likely one that stands straight and flush, with doors that shut tightly, free of drafts and secure against the weather. A novel written in similar ignorance is more than likely to be subject to similar flaws -- a lopsided, insecure structure that offers little shelter and is liable to collapse on your head at any moment.

When I was starting out, I took what undergraduate courses were available to me. My first help was the advice of my freshman college composition professor at C.C.N.Y. to keep a journal in order to loosen up my style and to try to write something in it every day, even if only a single sentence. “And then,” he said, “in a year or two, who knows? You might even have a book.” Good bait for me. I was seventeen, and four years of keeping a journal -- sometimes just a sentence or two, sometimes many pages, sometimes with gaps of weeks or even months -- did indeed get me in the habit of writing and writing freely. To learn to write freely is important.

Next I took a course with Edward Hoagland which included individual writing conferences, maybe four or five twenty-minute sessions. These brief meetings resulted in major progress. That was after a few years wandering alone in the wilderness, so to speak, hitch hiking around the United States in the mid-sixties as I thought Jack Kerouac would have wanted me to do, scribbling in my journals (which I carried around in an attaché case ultimately stolen from me in San Francisco -- I cannot help but pity the poor junky when he discovered the contents of the alluring stolen case, pages of ringbound scribble.)

What Hoagland did in conference was essentially a commented line-editing. I had learned from my journals to write freely; I was helped by him to rein it in, slice away the excess. I sat beside him and watched him run his pen over my lines, crossing out words, phrases, sentences, saying things like, “You are including every fucking detail!” That single statement broke ice for me because I was ready for it. “This is purple prose,” he said another time about a piece I had thought lucious as Dylan Thomas’s fiction. “Horribly overwritten.” Uncomfortable as they sometimes were, those few small lessons were worth gold to me and moved me sufficiently forward to win a three-year writing grant shortly after finishing his course.

Then I dropped out of college for the second time and took a few independent workshops, but I never stayed for long -- my experience of them was a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing running off at the mouth under the weak leadership of slightly accomplished writers. Rightly or wrongly, I felt they were offering bad advice that would only confuse my search. Still, I didn’t believe in myself and I didn’t know what to do; the only thing I knew was that I had to write -- in any event I kept coming back to it.

I wish that someone at that time had told me to read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a book I urge all of my students to read now. In it, he says things like:

“There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them . . . I learn daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!”