Can you actually teach someone to write?

Some people on Substack beg to differ....

I had a lovely thing happen a couple of days ago; I was walking my dogs near my house and stopped as a young woman was unloading a retriever from the boot of her car (I have a retriever-type and they always want to say hello). We had a brief chat, asking our respective pets’ names, the usual polite conversation between dog owners, and then she said: I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you Jojo Moyes?

This is the kind of thing that usually makes me panicky. I’m not sure why. Book fame is a very specific kind of fame that really only involves people being familiar with your name on a spine. But I said yes, and she said: “I’m just doing your BBC Maestro writing course. I’m really enjoying it.” We talked for a little longer and I told her she had made my day (she had) and she got extra points for gracefully avoiding walking to the heath with me by announcing she was going to get a coffee first (unless I looked deranged and she was actually genuinely just trying to get away). I thought of this exchange later that day when I read a piece on Substack by the esteemed writer Susan Hill saying that one cannot teach writing.

“The number of people on here trying to teach other people to write. Essentially, you can’t. If you have the given talent, you hone it, train it, improve it, every day of your life, partly by actually doing it but mainly by reading.”

I’ve been thinking about this for the last day or so. Can you teach creative writing? A whole industry has sprung up over the last decade or two suggesting that yes, you can. Arvon courses, my own agents, Curtis Brown, a number of writers on Maestro aside from me, including Lee Child, Ken Follett and Julia Donaldson. Numerous college courses. Are we all just conning people, even if it’s unintentionally? Leading would-be writers to believe in an impossible future?

Firstly, I have some sympathy with Susan Hill’s view. I think if you genuinely have no talent whatsoever – and I have read stories by people who clearly have none – then no amount of teaching or tips and tricks are going to polish those particular piles of doo doo. There has to be a germ of something in there, some combination of talent and imagination and - perhaps most importantly - the ability to analyse your own work.