The art and craft of writing


Is writing an art or a craft? Does it come from natural talent or hard graft? Are you born a writer or can you learn to be one?


Recent debate about the value of creative writing courses – stirred up by Hanif Kureshi who disputed whether such courses could ever deliver good writing (despite teaching one himself) – has pondered the perennial question of whether writing is something that can be taught. Or is it the case that you’ve either got it or you haven’t?

But this debate’s based on a false premise. That writing is a single process – have an idea ... write it down. When actually it’s (at least) two. Writing and editing. Two separate activities. Demanding different skills. And when you look at it that way, it’s clear that writing is both an art and a craft.

You need to have a story to tell, an interesting perspective on the world, a head full of engaging characters. No one else can put those ideas in your head. Of course this is not to say that ideas are formed in a vacuum. All ideas are sparked by external stimuli – the people you meet, the experiences you have, the things you see. But how these stimuli percolate through you and coalesce into an idea for a story is all down to you and no one else.

But then you have to get that idea onto the page. You have to write it down.

I saw Michael Morpurgo on TV recently talking about this aspect of writing:

“The best thing to do is to talk a story – from your head … down your arm through your fingers onto the page and you let it flow which means mistakes and all. You don’t worry about the spelling, the punctuation - I’m sorry but you don’t, not the first time. You just get the stupid thing down there. I think it’s rather like an artist sketching. When an artist is sketching it’s letting the line flow, capturing somehow the image of it. And that’s what I do - I tell it onto the page and craft it afterwards.”

I think many new writers, including me, focus on the first part of this process - the capturing of the story. There is a tendency, perhaps, to think that once it’s down on the page the job is done. But, as Morpurgo says, this is just a sketch, an outline of the true story that's waiting to be revealed.

And just as an artist uses a palette of colours and materials to build on that sketch, give it form and shape, light and dark, texture and depth, so the writer has a palette of words. An almost infinite palette.

It’s at this point then when the work (and fun?) really begins. The work of editing, of crafting the text into shape. There’s real skill to this, it takes patience and practice. It’s about choosing the right word for the job, word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page.

In her (thoroughly recommended) book ‘Reading like a Writer,’ Francine Prose demonstrates how it is this deliberate and often painstaking word selection process that is the real skill:

“For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded and, especially, cut, is essential.”

She uses extracts from a range of literary examples to illustrate (and encourage) the calculated crafting that makes great writing great. And which makes writing a joy.


Perhaps the key role of the creative writing course then - alongside the vital element of encouragement and support - is to help develop the skill of editing rather more than the talent of writing. To help inexperienced writers turn their very individual ideas and stories into finished, polished works, ready for a more public readership.


What do you think? Are you an artist or a craftsperson? Do you think someone can learn to be a writer?