On Writing

India Uncut, one of the blogs I follow, recently had a short but interesting post titled 'Education'. A Quinton Tarantino quote was used to make a larger point about whether or not writing, like films, can be taught in a classroom. The original post can be read here, and the response I sent to Amit Varma, the author of India Uncut, is below. If any of you have thoughts on the topic, do write in.

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’
-- Quentin Tarantino

As someone who put down a small fortune on a (relatively) expensive writing degree here in the UK, I have come up against this line of argument on more than one occasion- before, during and after the course. My answer has always been the same: Writing, like any other art form, is both an art as well as a craft. The art is a largely metaphysical thing and can never be captured in a textbook (some say you are born with it, but I'm not convinced you are born with anything. That's another debate, though). The craft, on the other hand, can and should be learnt. The classroom is not a bad place to start.

While Mr Tarantino's quote makes good copy, I would begin by questioning the truth of it. The most obvious reason is because films, more than most other art forms, have a technical element that cannot be learnt from merely watching them. This might be reading too much into his quote, but I am certain that at some point he was just an unknown clever guy who wanted to make films but didn't have the foggiest idea how. He would then have hung around people who knew what they were doing and sucked up everything like a sponge. This process would most likely have involved sleeping on a few couches, recreational drugs, and some beautiful free-spirited ladies. Mr too-cool-for-school Tarantino might never call this an 'education', but for those of us who lead far less exciting lives, that's exactly what it is.

It's a similar argument that one sometimes comes across in sports as well. Mr Tarantino's quote, when used in a sporting context, would be akin to a gifted cricketer saying all he needed to do to become a world-class batsman was watch Sachin Tendulkar bat. This is meaningless because all he would be watching is the end-product of years of hard graft, the distillation of months of toil to perfect a certain shot or correct a flaw in technique. He is watching the final edited version, with no awareness of what has gone on behind the scenes.

Yes, writing is, at its core, a solitary activity. But there is a collaborative element, however subliminal, to all good writing. This is what I leant from the few months spent in workshops with other writers discussing each other’s work, all of us believing all the while that our individual pieces were nudging perfection but realising in the end that we merely did different things well.

You would no doubt have felt this too, over the course of your promotional tour for your first book. Those who came to the various venues to listen to you read and discuss your writing will inevitably try to incorporate certain things they liked into their own work, and some of their questions, reactions and comments would have set off sparks, however tiny, in your mind as well.

It is this constant process of moulding and shaping, modulating your own inner voice in relation to others, that creative writing classes seek to capture. Has all this made me a better writer? I'm not sure. What it has given me is a better understanding of what I do, and the ways and means of doing it better.

Still, I am by no means suggesting this is the only way to go about turning into a 'writer', whatever that creature is. At the end of the day, as they say, there are no answers. Only choices.

All the best.