I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.
Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.
One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.
Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.
Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.
Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.
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