I think that there are a lot of facets to writing, some of which can be learned, some of which I would say require something pre-existing in the writer's character or way of thinking - though, technically, that could be learned as well, albeit not in a classroom setting.

Anyone can learn correct grammar and story structure, but whether or not they'd have the type of mind to feed them stories is a different matter. A writer should know how to take snippits of detail the world gives him, and combine them and flesh them out to make stories that appeal. I believe a writer has a certain way of looking at people and situations that others may not necessarily have.

You can find aspiring writers who have too much technique and not enough imagination, and vice-versa, and there's hope for them learning a little more about the aspect they're lacking.

Ultimately, unless you're completely devoid of imagination or the ability to force yourself to acquire one through a little different thinking, I think you can learn writing.

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"I wasted ten years of prime writing life because of the Big Lie.

In My twenties, I gave up the dream of becoming a writer because I had been told that writing could not be taught. Writers are born, people said. You either have what it takes or you don't, and if you don't you'll never get it.

My first writings didn't have it. I thought I was doomed."

(Skip ahead a little)

"At age thirty-four, I read an interview with a lawyer who'd had a novel published. And what he said hit me in my lengthy briefs. He said he'd had an accident and was almost killed. In the hospital, given a second chance at life, he decided the one thing he wanted was to be a writer. And he would write and write, even if he never got published because that's what he wanted.

Well, I wanted it too.

But the Big Lie was still there, hovering around my brain, mocking me.

Especially when I began to study the craft of writing."

(skip a bit more)

"While in the throes of the Big Lie,the most frustrating thing to me was Plot. Because what I wrote didn't have it.

I would read short stories and novels and wonder how the writers did it. How did they get all this great story material? The Big Lie said that they had it all in their heads, naturally, and it just flowed out on the page as they went along.

I tried it. I tried to let plot flow. But what came out on the page was dreadful. No plot! No story! Zip!

But when I began to learn about the craft, I saw that plotting had elements I could learn. And I found out about structure: when plot elements were put in a certain order, a stronger story resulted.

I can still remember the day it came together for me. It was an epiphany. All of a sudden, something clicked in my head. The pieces started to fit. The Jell-O hardened.

About a year later, I had a screenplay optioned. Then another.

Then I wrote a novel. It was published.

Then I got a five-book fiction contract. Somehow, someway, I had learned to write after all.

The Big Lie was exposed."

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I have also come to realize there's a lot of mechanics/techniques/tricks that will help translate that talent/passion/drive into something marketable.

But I think there's a real risk in over-relying on the techniques (or the "advice of the month/year") and ignoring your gut. Your gut doesn't lie. If it says this piece is drivel, you can't put frosting on it and make a cake. You might need to jettison it, keep mechanics and technique in mind, but then let your passion drive you for a while. At least this is what I'm learning is the balance point for me as a writer. Somewhere between craft and passion.

The only prerequisite is you have to like to read stories, and you have to want to write them.

That can't be taught.

But everything else can.

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Maybe one day, when I land on the NY Times Bestseller's List.

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Oh, but then you'll have a couple of other "lies" to deal with:

Imposter Syndrome--"I really don't belong here, and anyone who reads my book is going to see immediately that I'm really just an imposter, and they'll come with pitchforks and torches to drive me out, or at least embarrass me terribly."

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I can still remember the day it came together for me. It was an epiphany. All of a sudden, something clicked in my head. The pieces started to fit. The Jell-O hardened

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However, I don't think every individual reaches the 'Aha!' moment. I'm in health care, and it took a few months of study until I hit that moment. That's when everything clicked and the individual components we had been learning became cohesive. There were a couple of people in class who never reached that 'Aha!' moment, and they ended up being expelled from the class.

Not many people have the luxury (or discipline) to study the craft of writing and storytelling on a full time basis. So it may take months or years for everything to click. And, even when a person reaches that point, I believe there's always more to learn.

[Edited to change a choice in words.]

The discipline can be taught. The typing can be taught. The language skills; sentance structure, syntax, spelling, grammar, all can be taught.

The interest in doing it cannot be taught be has to come from inside. The idea, the story, cannot be taught and that also has to come from inside.

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Yes, but HOW do you go about "improving" your writing?

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First, by writing. Writing books are helpful for teaching you how to think about writing...and by far the most important thing we can forget to do...keep reading. Books show us how other people do write, and be it good or bad, there is something to be learned from it.

Talent is something that I think any creative process needs. Some people have a lot of it, some don't. The real difference is the amount of work that has to be done to make it good. Still, no matter how much talent someone has, there is always work involved to go from not bad, to good, and even more to get to the point it is worth someone else's money.

If you throw in some great writing--some Hemingway, or Chesterton, or London, or Tolkien, or any of the other titans of the craft--you can immediately see and learn from the differences. From my examples above, the lessons jump right off the page. Read Hemingway and you see the incredible power of brevity and the unwritten word--how to say something with more depth and meaning in seven words than another author can in seven sentences. Read Chesterton and you see how to have a meaningful, vibrant authorial voice that makes the story as distinctly your own. Read London and you see how to develop a character--a remorselessly vicious dog, in most of his books--so well that the reader loves him out of mere depth of understanding. Read Tolkien and learn the art of purposeful, meaningful description.

That's how you learn. You read, pay attention to what they write and how they write it, emulate, experiment with your own writing. At the end of the day you necessarily are left with your own style, but if that style is nurtured on a diet of great writing, it stands a much better chance of being clear, powerful, and useful to telling your stories than if you fed it on a junk-food diet from the sci-fi/fantasy shelves. Picking books indiscriminately is as unhealthy for your writing as picking food indiscriminately is for your body, and "best-selling" is a far cry from "great."

Language works such that each side of it goes together. If you want to be a better speaker practicing helps but knowing what makes a good speaker is as if not more important. A fundamental element of good speaking is delivery. When you listen to speakers like Kennedy, MLK, Churchill and cadences and patterns begin to emerge.

Writing is the same way. One needs to know how good writing is delivered to the audience. Reading is to listening as writing is to speaking. Reading good work will teach you things than writing cannot, not will not or does not but cannot.

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Yes, but HOW do you go about "improving" your writing?

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I also think anyone can learn music.

But I also think there's an element that is most ignored and most needed, and learnable--the kind of element that elevates just writing, or just playing the piano to an art form.

I heard of a quote recently from a piano competition judge. He said that that year's entrants had been disappointing. Not because they weren't proficient. They were HIGHLY proficient. But that they lacked heart. Their music was technically perfect, but soulless.

Technical learning isn't enough.

There are a lot of people that can come up with great ideas, and they have an engaging story in their head. But when it comes down to it, they don't write well. Things like punctuation, story structure, order of events, etc; they just plain suck at. And they won't learn how to do these thing correctly because they think that what they are writing is good and beyond criticism.

It comes down to arrogance. They think that because they have a natural talent for gathering stories, they don't need help putting them on paper. Hogwash. And if you disagree with me, go to the Fragments and Feedback. Sure, there are a lot of great story beginnings, but there are also some that just start poorly. And I'm not talking about them having a lack of hook or main character, I mean they are completely incoherent.

So, long story short, writing as a technique can and should be learned. It should be improved upon. A writer should always be trying to improve his/her craft. There are many books and resources dedicated to such topics.

After some further thought, I'm leaning towards the importance of technical skill---learning how to craft a story is, maybe, more important.

Talent, is really an ability for something to come easy to you. the more talent you have, the easier it is.

We have a tendancy of concentrating our abilities to things that come easy, while avoiding things that are difficult to pick up. That "come easy" is talent. People with a lot of talent will become great at it because doing it is so easy for them.

This does not take into account that one must work at it to rech the limits of one's ability or talent.

We can work at and get good at something we have no talent for, but if we applied the same amount of work toward something we have talent for, we would reach a higher level of skill.

In terms of physical ability, yes, talent and ease go hand in hand. This is true for both sports and playing a musical instrument, though more so with sports.

But when it comes to creativity, I don't know if I agree. In almost every interview on the subject of writing, almost every writer says it gets HARDER as you get better, not EASIER.

That's true in my experience. I'm no Shakespeare, of course, but putting stories together is far more difficult for me today than it was when I was 18. First, as a 33-yr-old, I have a higher level of aesthetic standards than I did when I was 18. Second, I've studied the craft of storytelling and know, for the most part, what I need to do to put together a well-told story. (Of course, whether or not the story is worth telling is another thing.)

If there is a talent for writing -- it's a talent for knowing which stories are meaningful, i.e., worth telling, and which stories are banal and trivial. But even then I'm not sure if this is a talent or not. Spend a year reading and thinking about Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostovesky, and you'll have built a rather solid critical apparatus for separating the good from the bad.

Going back to talent -- and this may have already been said, I didn't take the time to read every post -- I'd say that when it comes to the act of creating anything -- stories, music, art -- the only thing that really needed is a love for the form and a desire to do it.

With stories, that's all the talent you need.

And I'd even say that is true with art. We don't look at a Cezanne or a Gauguin because of their ability to paint; we look at them and admire them because of the vision they give us.

But with music, that's different. You need good musicians to bring life to your songs. But I'm not sure you need musical ability to write good songs. In fact, I'm sure of it.

But this is a huge tangent . . .

I don't agree with this. No less a writer than James Joyce struggled to get the words on paper. There is the story about a friend who asked him how his writing had gone that day. James said "I got five words written down today." His friend said "Well for you that's very good." James replied "Yes, but I'm not sure of the order they go in."

Talent has also been described, not as knowing how to create, but what to create.

In my belief and in my experience, the skill of writing can be learned. The techniques of the art can be taught. Knowing what to write, that's the hard part.

I don't believe talent is something you either have or don't have. I believe talent is a measure of aptitude. Some people have more talent to begin with. But it's like a muscle. The more it's worked, the more it can work. The more you use your talent, the more talented you become.

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Yes, but everything here seems to be talking about composing stories, not the actual efforts/study of putting words in order and dividing up paragraphs and figuring where to put in a hard scenebreak and where not to.

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Sentences, paragraphs, and how you build them are part of grammar. How you build a story is part of learning to write stories, as is where you start and stop a scene. How do you learn? Read writing books, I'm sure there are several threads on which ones people found useful. Practice, and practice some more, then practice some more...and one day people won't rip your stories to shreds...but they still won't be good enough, and you will practice some more. The point, if you want to learn to write, it is going to take work. It won't happen overnight. If working for it is too much, well, I can't help you.

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What part of writing can't be learned?

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To me Style can be a genre or other set of rules about story structure or format. An author's voice is almost as unique as a singer's. Some authors like Heinlein are very clever at masking their voice to fit the story while others have to suit the story to their voice. As an example I've never read an OSC novel that I couldn't believe was also written by the same guy who also wrote ______ OSC novel. Whereas try reading Have Spacesuit will Travel, Starship troopers, and Time Enough For Love in sequence. I've tried and its almost impossible because RAH's voice shifts range and timbre significantly

(Though to be fair OSC is not dead and may come out with a novel that I can't see the same man behind the curtain, and the three RAH novels I picked represent early, prime and twilight of a masterful career)