I’ve achieved some amazing results in ten years of teaching creative writing to kids, ages 9-16. Everything can be taught to kids, from the Martial Arts to xenophobia (taught by parents), to physics, to French, to creative writing. Not all young students of physics, however, can wind up as Einsteins. And not all young students of creative writing can wind up as Hemingways.

When did Hemingway become Hemingway, a writer of “quality” prose? In the marketplace of ideas we can judge “quality” in a writer as measured by critical acclaim (not only by sales volume). For example Pynchon and Gaddis are both “quality” writers even though we don’t hear much about them, as are Faulkner and Fitzgerald who are famous. It is the initial whisperings of that very “quality” that I’m listening for when I judge a student’s acceptability for my workshop.

It’s easy to say, then, that creative writing can be taught. But, in my experience, those students who come to me with an established apperceptive base can best be taught what I have to teach them (with any real shot at success). What is that “success”? I define success for myself as having my students capable of “quality” writing by the time they leave my workshop. My task is to help those students toward becoming publishable and published writers.

A word on “apperceptive base,” a term of jargon in the teaching biz. Simply stated: “able to get it.” Mozart’s father was a star, and moved among the greats of his time, artists, musicians, royalty, feeling free to take his little boy along. It wasn’t strange at all that young Mozart could play instruments and even compose, only a short time after he stopped toddling. He had been “exposed” intensively to art, to languages, to high society, to an adult world, to music. He had developed, unsurprisingly, an “apperceptive base.” How could he have written The Marriage Of Figaro at so young an age without having been exposed to all he’d been exposed to? He was able to get it! He got it.

Are there great ones like Mozart Senior who don’t produce progeny capable of artistic quality? Of course. And are there the poorest of slobs on the block who do produce masters!? Of course. If I were choosing, however, who I’d put my money on to become a “quality” artist, I’d bet on the great artist’s daughter rather than the daughter of the bricklayer. This is especially true in the writing biz, where ideas are at stake, where the writer has already learned to respect, cultivate, admire words and ideas, a profession in which a high reading level is demanded of the writer and maintained.

Since I can’t be everywhere at once, and have limited time to devote to teaching, I believe I’ll have better results teaching students who already have an apperceptive base when they come to my workshop. I have this option open to me only because I’m teaching an extra-curricular class. I wouldn’t have this choice if I were teaching in the school system. What I’m saying here is hardly revolutionary, and yet it is rarely stated as openly as this in our society, which practices social Darwinism but daren’t admit to it.

Someone whose studies have led her to embrace socialism as a hypothetically fine way of governing ourselves needn’t give up her personal in-the-bank-today fortune to establish her bona fides, or for her right to espouse socialism. The notion of socialism is an idea. Only that. Just as capitalism is just an idea. A debatable idea. In the marketplace of ideas all ideas must be examined and debated on their own merits, as ways in which we may change and better the human condition. If enough people agree with this idea versus that one they may be able to carry it forward, so that it may have a chance of becoming policy, either tacit or official.

During the '60s, for example, where the whole bourgeois world had always eschewed drinking from bottles in public and had frowned upon going out in public in your underwear (T-shirts), it became OK practice because enough people tacitly accepted it. I opposed it (still do), but events swept my idea away. I oppose social Darwinism politically; but, for this specific goal (to help students become publishable and published writers), the students and I will be better served by the elitist approach I propose. Therefore I’m not afraid to announce that idea even if those methods of choosing students smack of social Darwinism. My primary question in this endeavor is: Where can I find the best, those who will write quality prose when they have matured? What I’m presenting here is my own thought-through solution, already in practice. Is it a good solution? Perhaps. If you have a better solution, on that can achieve the same results, it would be terrific if you offered it, perhaps to a nearby school.

Where then can my students best find the building blocks for an apperceptive base of their own that I’m talking of? Without my having done academic research on the subject, the answer seems clear enough to me: in a home with loads of books on the shelves; from parents who themselves love words and reading and have an openness to and appreciation of ideas. That’s another way of saying that in theory all things are teachable, but in practice not everyone is set up with the ability to learn (or to teach for that matter). Does that sound elitist? It is. Not everyone can write quality prose, just as not everyone can run the four-minute mile. But everyone can burn for it, yearn for it. Few do. It’s hard.

There are thousands of good writers (despite my view that we have been witnessing for many years a declining cultural heft). That's the very point. There are thousands, not millions. Excellently crafted creative writing is difficult to master. Can one be born in a slum with no cultural background at home (or in the street) and still wind up as one of those thousands? Of course. But that’s rarer than hen’s teeth, as they say. Does this sound as if I’m setting the bar impossibly high? Does it sound like social Darwinism? Of course.

Very few of the students who apply to get into my class will go on to write quality published prose. And only the best of those will survive, and be able to make a career as a writer of quality prose. Those few are the ones I can teach most effectively, since I intend my program to be successful. Let’s remember the goal I set for myself -- not to prep kids to write better reports, or develop in them an “interest” in reading or remedy for them what’s gone wrong with their home environment, or their ability to learn in the school system as it exists. My goal (as I see it at least) is to help students become publishable and published writers. And I’ve had several who have already appeared in nationally distributed media.

There are some key ingredients in this successful recipe. We keep our workshops relatively small (a dozen, max). These weren’t and aren’t ordinary kids in the workshops I’ve run, they are exceedingly bright. And I don’t teach them in an ordinary way. Because they are so bright I can go beyond teaching them the nuts and bolts of the craft. I teach them words and a love for those words, I teach them the broad spectrum of secular thought. I teach them to connect themselves with the world. I expand them and try to inculcate a passion for words and an appetite for ideas. I teach them life’s reality along with its magic.

For some theorists, pot-boilers have equal weight with quality prose, both creative writing after all. On the other hand when I sit down to write poetry or prose I aspire to write the works of the quality I have alluded to. That’s what I teach. Can pot-boilers be considered creative writing? Of course. I don’t teach pot-boiler writing. Perhaps no one can. Some writers have a knack and a drive to write pop stuff. I don’t. In my graduating classes I can point to at least half a dozen kids who have the potential to be not just good but great.

Who are these kids? Considering my goal, I’ve always started with kids who have a burning desire to read and write, who have the capacity to do it even before they come to me, who have high IQs. I’m not a sociologist and can’t speak with authority in mooting this, but anecdotal evidence supports the notion that there is a correlation between those attributes and coming from a home where intellect is highly respected. I believe that such a home is not at all guaranteed to produce such a child, but in my limited experience has the best chance of doing so. A home where intellect is not held in high esteem may produce such a child, but rarely. What I’m looking for, obviously, is the cream of the cream. What would be the advantage (in this passionately egalitarian state, but equally passionate in advancing roughshod over everyone) of pussyfooting around and making believe that the cream of the cream is really just plain milk? Wouldn’t that simply be a mode of making the rest of us poor slobs feel good? Cream is not plain milk. Cream is cream. Why not call it that? How do you get there is the only great question we should be asking. In other words, let’s not deny that cream is cream because that doesn’t sound egalitarian enough, but, if cream is our desire, make that our goal, with the clear understanding we run the risk of falling short.

At this juncture it’s important to speak of the politics of what I’m saying. And politics there are. Am I in favor of social Darwinism? No. Am I in favor of how federal and state governments have trashed the teaching of our kids by underfunding schools while squandering a trillion and a half dollars, and are still going down that road? I’m not. Do I have any belief that “vouchers” or the breaking down of the wall between religion and the state will be good for us or good for our kids? I do not. Do I believe that anyone in government truly respects intellectuality or wants to educate kids in my sense of the word? I do not. Liberals and progressives have tried a sloppy form of all-inclusiveness and got “dumb” as a result. Now the “education President” (perhaps a cut above Dan Quayle’s intellectual achievements) has made education his football in his “faith-based” schemes. Do I believe those initiatives would be good for us or our kids? I do not.

Yet one can’t do everything at once. I’m trying to do this, teach this class -- with wonderful results thus far. There are any number of courses, remedial, “good book” programs, etc. Should there be many, many more such programs? Of course, double, quintuple what there are. Should there be more programs like mine, geared to students who can’t write quality prose? Of course. A class like mine (but one or more cuts down) would surely make kids better writers than they are, make them take a greater interest in words and communication, modes of stating ideas more clearly, etc. Are kids enriched by exposure to a gang of their peers in a serious workshop, where all are trying to catch that elusive brass ring “good writing”? Without question. They would be led to a deeper interest in words and self-expression as they grow, even if they didn’t wind up as “fine writers”. Does this sound dismissive? It shouldn’t. It’s part of the reality I teach.

As can be expected, then, the kids I teach live in one of the most affluent counties in the United States,Westchester. Under the pressures of poverty, poor education, and poor and “bad” neighborhoods, parents and their kids live a nightmare existence (I did, growing up in a slum -- and was saved for a life of the intellect by my mother, who treasured intellect above all), an existence where time to read and time to be exposed to intellect are hard to come by. The “haves,” without question, can afford not only better education for their kids, but the time in which to appreciate the world of the intellect which is thus more accessible to them.

My political views, however, don’t prevent me from trying to see the world whole and clearly. This essay is about (inter alia), "Where are we most likely to find those students with an apperceptive base who have the best chance of becoming publishable and published writers so that we can run a successful program? How is such a base established? How can we spot it? How shall we prepare the necessary sweetness of the soil in which such talents flourish that will be needed in the learning process, as will make a young student ready (just as we prep loam before we plant) to learn creative writing?”

It has been my good fortune to teach under the watchful eye of Sara Bracey White, who “discovered” me, or rather discovered that I had an ability to teach which I had never thought I had. She runs the KSSC project in Greenburgh, NY. The template designed by her for these workshops (I teach the most advanced, the one the kids graduate from) is marvelously wrought. The bare bones of it are these: The Town of Greenburgh itself provides the basic funding, plus provides a central meeting place in which to teach (Library, Town Hall). The parents pay -- an excellent notion, since that itself requires a certain mind-set on the part of the parents, an ordering of priorities. Since the classes/workshops are on Saturday mornings they are in competition with soccer, hanging out in malls, watching TV, etc. Attendance therefore requires a certain mind-set on the part of the students, who have to want to be there, what with so many choices open to them as to how to spend their time. So -- the town wants it, the parents want it, and the kids want it. This guarantees the very basis for the continuance of the program. The talent, of course, comes from the kids, who are screened by Sarah and me for admission, with the presentation of two pieces at least. Key to our success is that not everyone gets in. Is that an elitist approach? Of course. We’re looking for the cream.

Some words on me and my credentials (none in teaching prior to this experience). Elsewhere on this site you will see that I have very definite political views. I began serious writing and writing seriously when I was 31, just out of the Air Force (World War II). Imagine my chagrin to find these two kids, barely twenty-one if they were that, Capote and Mailer, with such gigantic talents, when mine was so minuscule. Fortunately for me, on contemplating Mailer and Capote, writing contemporaneously with me, I said “Hey -- that’s life.” And so it is. I’m still at it (at 87) and still haven’t caught up to their genius (may never do so). Of what value would it be to blame my parents, school, my genes, the System? None at all. I’m who I am. As Mark Harris says in Bang the Drum Slowly, “not so bad as most, better than some.” Jimmy Carter said “Life is unfair.” Well, of course. Even those like me, who desire social change, will never be able to change some of the inherent unfairnesses of life, or those we’re born with. We have to learn to live with the luck of the draw.

My need to support my family directly after the war led me to become a publisher for over 40 years. About ten years ago I began once more to write full-time, and have been widely published, with two stories nominated for Pushcarts XXIII and XXVII. My book of poetry, A Stubborn Pine in a Stiff Wind (Mellen Poetry Press) was published in 2001.

I had expected (erroneously) that this essay would be much shorter. And yet I find I’ve just started! I’d run the risk of boring you, and the subject’s too interesting and too important to risk that. So I’m going to close here, like the old silent serials, with a To Be Continued In My Next.

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