Q. Is this just another course in ‘Creative Writing’? I’ve taken enough of those. Brilliant lyric poets starve and some of the writers I most admire (Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust come to mind) would have a hard time today getting a Random House contract. Sad commentary, not on their art, but on the financial strictures of contemporary publishing.  Academic courses in creative writing proceed as if the market place does not exist. That’s not their job. Ever find someone in an empty room, playing a piano for her own pleasure? If you want to sit down and listen, OK. Walk out, and that’s OK too a she’ll still keeps playing. Writing for yourself offers similar rewards of the spirit.  So, if you want to write for your own memory book, beautiful pages meant to be read solely by friends and/or family, I can commend your pursuit. My course is more narrowly focussed and may not be for you. I teach the kind of pragmatic approach I wish I’d found at the beginning of my own writing career. To be published today, writers must ride a two-headed horse, art and popularity yoked. Joe Heller, Alice Walker, Martin Cruz Smith and Kurt Vonnegut show it can be done, and Milan Kundera not only gets favorable literary reviews, but Hollywood buys his books. In their own different ways, Agatha Christie and Theodore Dreiser did not write by the rules I teach. Their prose was wooden, but their masterful feeling for plot enthralled readers.  I name these wildly-varying authors to show there are more ways than one to make your mark as a writer. If you are an artist of their enormous intuitive talents, you have nothing to learn from me. For the rest of us, the precepts I teach may not guarantee you will be published. They do maximize your chances for that to happen.

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