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AGK's avatar

I love this. It's a very difficult topic, and my take here may offend, but I'll follow your advice and write without the endless safe words and hedging caveats.

I don't believe creativity can be taught. It can be nurtured when the seeds are already planted, but if the building blocks aren't there, you cannot systematize their development. Technique is what is taught, and it's taught by people who also learned through technique.

The saying "those who can't do, teach" is often misused, but I think that's the deep message. As far as I can tell, people who we consider to be talented all have stories of being able to do things before they could even describe what they were doing, and many are never able to describe it, precisely because it wasn't learned through curricular frameworks. Hence, teachers are people who did the curriculum and learned a process, which was used to fill the innate talent gap.

Most talented people were doing, long before they knew WHAT they were doing. Often this starts young, and by themselves, where the self-consciousness and obsession with technical data hadn't yet impinged on their creative minds. They learned through this relentless practice, which was relentless not because of goal orientation, but because of natural inclination. They were drawn, called, and in turn put in the work that wasn't really work at all, but expression.

By the time they get to that high school art class, or writing workshop, they're stifled and frustrated by rules that either don't apply, or are already understood intuitively. But the classes are not for them; they're for the people who did not find their calling at age 7, staying up past their bedtime endlessly doodling and unknowingly refining.

Once you're in the curricular framework, what matters is the performance of knowledge. You pass the course by demonstrating what you've learned, and if you do this well enough for long enough, you get a PhD. So "creation" becomes an endless display of what you know and what you can do, and it comes across as soul-killing admin, as you put it. See nearly all academic writing for proof of this concept.

No amount of technical mastery can compete with the endless "doodling" of a creative mind following their inclinations. And people push back hard against this because 1) it's not sellable in courses and 2) it commits the ultimate sin in this culture by daring to suggest that we're not all the same blank slates that can be perfectly molded by just the right environmental conditions.

Thank you as always, Tamara. For not playing it safe and for sharing your obvious talents, unapologetically.

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Céline Artaud's avatar

Tamara, I don’t know how you do it, but every essay you write manages to reach into my ribcage and rattle something loose. Your words breathe and live. Reading this was like being seen in a way I didn’t expect but desperately needed. I’ve admired your writing for a long time, and what continually stuns me is not just your command of language, but your courage to say what so many of us are too scared to admit: that we’ve been writing like we’re being supervised.

One line in particular knocked the air out of me: “You become the literary equivalent of a lover who always hits the right spots, but never once looks you in the eye.” That is exactly the shame I’ve felt when re-reading my own polished but emotionally anesthetized drafts—ones that check every box but somehow fail to pulse. And that’s why I don’t publish.

What I love most about your writing is how you always bring me back to why I wanted to write in the first place—not for approval, not for publication, but for that raw magic of turning feeling into form. You remind me that the most dangerous thing a writer can do isn’t being messy, but being forgettable.

One idea your essay sparked for me: maybe we need “unworkshops.” Not just spaces where rules are suspended, but where risk is required. A kind of writing circle where the only criterion is: Did you say something you weren’t supposed to? Did your sentence bleed?

Thank you for writing this. I learned from every paragraph—and more than that, I felt every one. Your work isn’t just technically masterful—it’s alive. Please don’t ever stop.

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