‘What every writer must learn’

 John Ciardi, a fine writer and a teacher of writers, doubted that writing could be taught. 

A good teacher, whether in a college classroom, a Parisian café, or a Greek marketplace — can marvelously assist the learning. But in all writing, as in all creativity, it is the gift that must learn itself.

 

I smiled when I read that. I’m working on some new pieces that are different than things I’ve written in the past. I’m having to learn as I go along. It’s a humbling thing — and a good thing — to do when you’re past 70.

Ciardi’s essay “What every writer must learn” has a lot of good advice. I like his insistence that a piece of writing has to be about something. He claims that Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” has all the details of building a stone wall you’d expect to find in a bulletin from the Department of Agriculture. That might be a stretch, but I see his point.

Old newspaper editors used to tell cub reporters: Always do some reporting before you sit down and face a blank page. Ciardi said it better:

 

I know of no writer of any consequence whatsoever who did not treasure the world enough to gather to himself a strange and wonderful headful and soulful of facts about its coming and going.

 

• John Ciardi’s essay “What every writer must learn” originally appeared in The Saturday Review, Dec. 15, 1956.I found it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 227-35. The quotations are on pp. 227-8 and 230.