Can you teach writing? Americans think you can, broadly speaking. They are happy to attempt a definition of good writing. In the UK, we are a bit more sceptical. At a pinch, we'll concede that there's good and bad usage (for instance, all serious newspapers have a style book), but we wouldn't go much beyond the horror of the split infinitive or the dangling participle. We have Henry Fowler, who is not really quotable – very conservative and rather old maidish. They have Strunk and White, whose "omit needless words" and "prefer the standard to the offbeat" have reverberated through American prose for half a century.
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style was published in 1918, has gone through countless editions and has never been seriously challenged (or should that be "seriously been challenged"?). Last month in the US, the influential critic Stanley Fish published a contemporary variation on an old theme with How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.
All his career, Fish has grappled with one question: how do forms of writing produce forms of thought? His new book is really a long, and very interesting, footnote to that endeavour. I hope it gets published in the UK. It certainly deserves a UK audience – but I'm not going to attempt a review of it here, now. Today, I'm more interested in the idea of instructing people how to write.
I'm agnostic on the teaching-of-writing question. I have no doubt that there are some great creative-writing professors, just as there are also plenty of charlatans and timewasters. I certainly do believe that you can show would-be writers examples of good prose, as an inspiration. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that one way to limber up for one's own writing is to read, at random, from other books. Not so you fall under an influence, but just enough to be reminded about the magic potential of original prose.
If I was teaching a writing class, which mercifully I don't have to do, here are some passages I'd refer to by way of illustrating some technical lessons.
1. The introduction of a fictional landscape
How to bring up the curtain on a narrative setting. Two classic passages:
- The first chapter of Hardy's The Return of the Native
- The opening of EM Forster's A Passage To India
2. Narrative economy
How to get a story going and introduce your protagonists with maximum speed and efficiency, while developing the plot and establishing character and motivation:
- The opening chapter of Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon
- The opening pages of DH Lawrence's Women in Love
- The first two pages of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
3. The joy of dialogue
How to convey character and situation in fictional speech:
- Almost any passage from Beckett's Waiting for Godot
- Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
4. The magic of tone
How to make your voice heard on the page, to mesmerise the reader:
- Lorrie Moore's story "Vissi D'arte" (actually, almost anything by Lorrie Moore illustrates this)
- JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
- Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
5. Pace
How to get started, at top speed:
- Act I of Macbeth
- Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island
6. Impact
How to grab the reader's attention and hold it by the scruff of the neck:
- Graham Greene's "The Destructors"
- Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song
- Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses
7. The only rule is that there are no rules
How to defy gravity in prose and still come out a winner:
- Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy
- Melville's Moby Dick
- Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.
