Creativity and theory

Creativity and analysis/theory come from different places. There are very fine creative writers who couldn't tell you the first thing about dramatic theory. There are brilliant theoretical minds who can't write interesting creative work. Unfortunately, academia often favors theory over creativity, and a brilliant theoretical mind who in fact cannot write can be deluded into thinking s/he's "talented," while a brilliant storyteller who can't recite one principle of theory may feel like a failure.

I'll take the natural storyteller over the theoretical mind any day! Back before the MFA glut, writers learned their craft not in schools but in the "school of hard knocks," writing for paying pulp magazines that no longer exist today. I cherish my apprenticeship as a freelance journalist when I was a young writer because it forced me to meet deadlines, forced me to think about my audience, and forced me into good work habits. Later, as now, an old man, I can write more "privately," for an audience of myself, period, because I've already sold hundreds of things and don't need to wonder if I can do that. Been there, done that. But learning to write in the real world has great advantages, it seems to me, to learning to write in an MFA program. I did the school of hard knocks first, then the MFA, which I pursued in order to have a union card to teach (as an insurance policy when I got it -- I actually didn't start teaching regularly until much later).

The trouble with MFA programs (from my limited observation of them) is that they exist in academia, where the bias is toward theory over creativity. A perfect example is the controversy that always surrounds an MFA program in playwriting. Does it belong in an English Dept or a Theater Dept? When I got my MFA at the University of Oregon, this very controversy had been recently settled in favor of the English Dept. Too bad! I was lucky, my mentor also believing this was a mistake and so teaching me as if we were in a theater department. English departments are wedded to literary theory and analysis. Theater departments are wedded to the practical reality of putting a play on stage. Theater folks think English folks are impractical theorists with their heads in the sand. English folks think theater folks are illiterate touchy-feely oddballs who emote too much.

Guess what? All the best Playwriting MFA programs in the land, such as Yale's, exist in theater/drama departments, not in English departments. I'd like to see Creative Writing branch off from English and create its own department more wedded to the practical world of writing than to literary theory. I think perhaps Iowa does this.

Of course, theory has its place. But I'm not sure its place is in the mind of a young, struggling writer, who above all else must learn beginning-middle-end storytelling so it's like blood and breath, who must identify with the magician (doing a trick without giving away how it's done), and who must connect the work to the life, the individual life, which is what "being new" is really about. Being new is being intensely personal. The larger meanings are not contrived but are organic, they drop out of the work like fruit because the tree, the work, is alive and vibrant.

I say, Long live the natural storyteller.