Status Updates From On the Teaching of Creative...

"The best possible justification for a writing class is that it should make students competent to deal with the word in all its manifestations."

"If you are a grower and a writer as well, your writing should get better and larger and wiser. But how you teach that, the Lord knows."

“Talent can’t be taught, but it can be awakened—by reading, by contact with other talents, by exposure to an environment where the expression of talent is valued and encouraged.”

“You don’t go out and and ‘commit experience’ for the sake of writing about it later; and if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.”

“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.”

No offense to some of my creative writing professors, but... they could've taken some of Stegner's advice, and this should've been required reading (or if there's a recording, listening/watching) in a 100-level course.