Writing A Bestselling Series

Chapter 15: On Molding New Writers

When you're a writer, there are a lot of jobs in the field that are somewhat related. I've worked on videogames and movies, edited computer manuals, helped write proposals, written a little nonfiction, and so on. Certainly one of the most common careers is teaching.

Now, when I was in college I put a lot of my emphasis on editing, and worked as an undergraduate helping professors raise their writing skills to publishable levels—editing books, magazine articles, scholarly journals, self-help books, funding proposals, and so on.

But I also took a classes on children's literature and on teaching, and found that I really enjoyed both, and began to wonder if I would like to teach at all.

But every time that I considered it, I shied away from the idea. There is a quote that many of you have probably heard: "Those who know how to write, write. Those who don't, teach."

If you think about this quote and extend it to all fields, you an easily see why civilization is crumbling. Those who know how to doctor, doctor. Those who don't teach—so our doctors get worse with each generation. Those who know how to design skyscrapers, design. Those who don't, teach. Those who know how to live moral lives, live. Those who don't, teach.

Obviously, the saying isn't true, and I've only ever heard it applied to writers. Still, there is something about a writer who is looking at teaching that sort of makes him squeamish. That sort of says, "Don't do that. It's an admission of failure."

My old writing professor, Leslie Norris, told me once that this saying came about in the 1950s, when colleges first began getting a strong demand for writing classes. They tried to fill the classes wholesale with professors who had merely been reading and dissecting literature, not creating literature. Well, you can dissect a frog a lot easier than you can create a frog.

I was more interested in making frogs—in creating living, breathing stories.

So at first, I resisted the impulse to teach. The first time that I was invited to teach a writing class was pretty early in my career, back in about 1992. I attended a little science fiction convention, and afterward a group of a dozen people approached me and a spokesman asked, "Will you teach us a writing class?" Well, I was a fairly new writer, but at the same time I was winning awards and working with the Writers of the Future, so I thought about it and said, "No, I don't do that."

But one of them replied, "We'll pay you money," and so I quickly reconsidered.

Over the next few years I continued working with the Writers of the Future to discover new writers. I would give critiques on stories, tell writers how to fix them and where to send them, and by 1995 I had over five hundred writers that I had helped get their start. As I took over the contest, that process accelerated, and I gradually eased into the role of becoming the lead instructor with Writers of the Future. In about 1997 I was asked to develop the writer's track for Dragon Con, which at that time was one of the two largest science fiction conventions in the US.

I discovered in fact that many, if not most, writers teach in some ways. We often speak on panels at conventions or give presentations. Many fine writers teach at various workshops, and I learned that some of my favorite working writers, like Roger Zelazny, Gene Wolfe, and Connie Willis, all taught at the university level. So that lessened the stigma.

Then in 1999, one of my old writing teachers at BYU developed cancer and knew that it was terminal. He asked if I would be willing to teach a class or two at BYU, specifically the science fiction and fantasy writing course, though we also talked about teaching courses on Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and others. I went to the interview and was offered a full-time job, a nice one, though I couldn't justify taking a job that paid me roughly 1/3 of what I was making as a writer, so I said, "I'd love to teach just the one class."