The only thing worse than the term creative writing is a creative writing program.

While the expression is merely an outrage to common sense, the schools are a real threat to what remains of literary art in this country.

The term “creative writing” suggests that fiction in its many forms — novels, plays, screenplays — is somehow creative, while non-fiction is not. Yet has there ever even been a law brief in a hotly contested divorce case that did not involve creativity on the part of its author? Are bad novelists in some way more heroic than good non-fiction writers? Are we to value Howard Fast more than H. L. Mencken, or to rank Tom Clancy above Spinoza?

It’s time to retire the term. I propose “imaginative writing” as an alternative, since “fiction-writing” is too closely associated with novel-writing.

Creative writing schools, however, are not merely misleading and presumptuous but actually destructive of talent. The record speaks for itself. Raymond Carver did go to the Iowa Writers Conference. But Carver was a successful and fully formed writer and individual in his late thirties when he arrived.  No one has ever entered a creative writing MFA program in their early twenties and then developed into a figure of greatness.

Quite the contrary: the important English-language playwrights and novelists who have emerged since the creative writing programs first appeared — V.S. Naipaul, Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer, Tom Sharpe, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn, Kenneth Lonergan, Richard Yates, Woody Allen, Charlie Kauffman — did not attend writing schools or programs. A striking number of them never finished or even attended college.  

Perhaps this makes sense. After all, significant writers have their own style, personality, voice and pointedly unique sets of experiences — the very things that writing programs are apt to diminish. Encouraging students to endlessly re-write their thesis projects hardly teaches them how to be prolific and productive. The “writerly” styles of the teachers and the emphasis on “writerly” authors as examples (James, say, rather than Maugham) worsens this problem.

A creative solution to the problem: end both the term and the places of instruction.

Jonathan.leaf@aya.yale.edu