So, I've been having this conversation with my face to face writer's group about how "learning to write is like learning a language"

For examples, one goes to classes and learns "grammar" most often, but what is really helpful is when you just go out and try to communicate (write stories) and see what you come up with. You can learn all the grammar (rules of writing) in the world, but to really become fluent, you have to go out and do it.

And then I read jay lake and paul jessup's journals this morning and they were talking about learning to write at workshops.

These two parts were salient for me:

Paul:

"The only thing in any workshop that I have learned was to trust my own instincts on my work. If I feel a section is dragging, than it is and I should fix it. Etc, etc. I don’t need a peer review to tell me what I already know (and that’s what the best crit’s do- tell you what you already know). And I don’t need a pat on the head and someone to tell me I’m a genius (or just the opposite, that I am a loser and my talent it crap and I need to work on this and this and this)...I want to be helped in my writing, improve my writing. But in the end, I realize that I need to be the one doing the improvements. I can tell when I need to work on something now, where things need to go."

and then Jay:

". He pointed out that the way most people learn a facet of craft is by intellectualizing it first, for example, through structured critique. Then there is a time period of months for that intellectualization to sink in. Then, eventually, the subject of study becomes part of the writer's unconscious competence.

So for me, I listen to what people tell me, I listen to my own intuition about my writing (which, for the record, I still find highly unreliable, six and half years into my publishing career), and I pay a lot of attention to what other people tell each other. Because for me, the real purpose of a workshop was never the critiques I got or didn't get -- I was too invested in those to listen as well as I should. The real purpose of a workshop was the critiques between others, where I could listen with both objectivity and focus."


So it seems to me that both Paul and Jay would agree that trusting your own instincts on a story is important. And I would agree. Continuing the linguistics metaphor here, if you've learned the rules for conjugating verbs and you go out into the world and see that most people aren't conjugating it in that way, then you probably shouldn't, either if you want to sound natural.

And as a seven year plus ESL teacher, I would hate to think that all those lessons focusing on grammar were a waste, as supaluv tends to think.

So maybe I believe, as Jay says above, that one can practice something until it becomes unconscious, but the other part of me is whispering "wouldn't it be easier just to immerse oneself in the language and not worry about grammar classes?"

Because really, that's my own writing experience. I started writing seriously around 1999. I was in Japan, I had no writing group, I was naive and sent terrible stories out, wrote, got rejected, and kept writing because I didn't know I was bad. There was no one telling me how I wrote stories was wrong except for my own instincts.

Since moving to Portland in 2005 is the first time I've seriously (beyond a few stints in critters and OWW) tried to be thoughtful and academic about my writing, as opposed to just blithely doing it.

I'm not sure how it's affecting me.