Some people say you can’t teach writing.  That’s like saying you can’t teach language.  Everything we do is taught.  We’re taught to walk, to talk, to eat, to cook so what makes these people think you can’t teach writing?

Now more than ever, we need to know how to write.  Every day, we write emails, text messages and it’s steadily contributing to the disintegration of the English language.  It’s a bone of contention with many writers.  Some might argue that we’re merely hyper-aware of the younger generations’ grammatical handicap because of our text-based technology, but more than likely, it’s a result of educational neglect.

Writing is a craft.  It’s a muscle.  It’s something you have to work on.  I imagine that only those naturally gifted story tellers believe that writing can’t be taught.  There aren’t many of them.

There are a lot of crappy books out there proving that writing needs to be taught.  What’s more offensive is that someone published them.  I’ve seen books with spelling mistakes and typos.  There are books making millions written by authors who can’t put a proper sentence together.  Books used to represent the authority on writing.  Even newspapers get it wrong.

Writing is about more than just grammar and spelling.  It’s about structure, theme, voice, style, poetry, voice, description, accuracy, visuals, story telling…the list goes on and on.  I honestly think it’s pretty arrogant to say that you can’t teach writing.  If that’s the case, why do we study English literarure in school?  Why do we learn sentence structure, paragraph structure or how to write essays?  Why learn how to write poetry?

That being said, I don’t think you can be taught voice.  When you start out as a writer, the first thing you’re told to do is ‘find your voice’.  It’s a little like being asked to define who you are in absolute terms, which is impossible to do.  As a screenwriter, we have to know how to adopt other writers’ voices so what’s the point, right?  There has to be something unique about your writing and you need to know what that is.  This can take years to develop, but no one can show you how to find it.  The only thing you can do is keep writing and it will appear.