Do creative writing workshops actually deter students from writing novels?
The bottom line is you don’t learn how to write in a classroom. You learn how to think, how to critique, how to appreciate there. Maybe you gain some self-confidence. But self-confidence is useless without publication.
Perhaps there you also will make a few friends who later will be able to help edit your work—though this is doubtful, as they’ll either give up on their own writing and not want to see yours or not want to waste the precious few free hours they have to write by reading yours.
Instead, you learn how to write by sitting by yourself in a room and writing, hour after hour, day after day, for years.
That’s how you learn to write.
It is a solitary and almost entirely unrewarding experience. The only relevant difference between becoming a writer and going insane is that eventually, if you’re lucky, you’ll be rewarded with publication. And even then the reward in all likelihood will be minimal, as very few writers manage to make a living at it.
This is why a person writes because he/she has to. Because otherwise a person wouldn’t do it.
True, you don’t learn to write in a classroom. That first paragraph you wrote is spot on. But I don’t know about the rest.
Unrewarding? The years I spent learning to write were indeed solitary, but also wonderful. Watching myself progress, learning how to express myself and get the ideas in my head onto the page in a way that conveyed emotion to people…that was extremely rewarding. Teaching myself something difficult was extremely rewarding.
Publication isn’t the reward. Publication is the way that you share, and if you are fortunate, find a means by which you can survive off of your art. You could call that a reward, I suppose, but it’s not the primary one. You yourself mentioned that a person writes because they have to; publication is secondary.
Writing can be painful, frustrating, and maddening. But if it’s not rewarding at the same time, something is wrong.
Also, the “only relevant difference between becoming a writer and going insane” is publication? I think that might be a tad on the side of hyperbole. You’re right that few writers manage to make a living at it, but I think that you’d be surprised at how easy it is to improve your odds. The people who spend the years and years of practice that you speak of have a better shot than most realize, though genre, skill, and luck all play a part.
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