LEARNING ABOUT THE WRITE STUFF

Whether writing can be taught is a matter of lively debate.

There are enough summer and winter writing conferences, college classes, extension programs and correspondence courses to prove that somebody --the givers or the takers, but presumably both--think that writing can indeed be taught.

My own view is that anybody who begins with at least trace elements of an inborn gift for words can be taught to write better. But I also think that there are those who are born word-deaf as others are born tone-deaf.

The word-deaf never quite get the hang of putting one right word after another. The logic of beginnings, middles and ends, in approximately that order, escapes them, and so does the simplicity that carries grace and clarity along with it. To the genuinely word-deaf, a sentence never sounds sharp or flat, or perfectly pitched.

I get their letters every day, the passive voice running amok (“It is hoped that . . . “), metaphorical drops of blood on every strained word.

But the natural writers declare themselves instantly, on a scrawled post card or at book length, their words flowing with the interest, charm and ease of good conversation.

The iron laws of compensation in the Emersonian sense apply, I feel sure. The transcendental powers that be give, and the transcendental powers that be withhold. I was absent the day muscle memory was handed out, for example.

It is probably called the Gerald Ford Syndrome, the inability to walk and chew gum at the same time, the joke famously associated with him. I can do that , at least, but I’ve never been able to remember from one hour to the next how to swing a tennis racket or a golf club correctly, or how to control a knuckle ball or judge a fly. I have a life’s worth of embarrassments, and some discarded sports utensils, to show for it.

But you work with what you’ve got, and if at an early age you sense that you and words were made for each other, nothing else is likely to distract you for very long.

Barnaby Conrad’s Santa Barbara Writers Conference, dedicated to the proposition that people can be helped in their writing, has just concluded its 14th running at the Miramar Hotel with something like 250 writers on hand and a small platoon of editors and agents on the prowl for new voices.

Even now, I’m not sure how a writers conference functions best. The afternoon and evening talks (Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Winters, Charles Schulz, Julia Child and several others) are inspirational if only in that they demonstrate that writers do make it, and make it big. The talks are also consoling: It’s never easy and it’s never not lonely is the message, but the passion is all.

The daily workshops address the specifics of everything from poetry to how-to books and screenplays, and the constructive criticism continues at other sessions that last into the wee hours of the morning.

You can’t minimize the practical values of this and other workshops and classes: useful hints on how to structure clues in a mystery, for instance, and the contacts with agents who may well, they say, be eager to see manuscripts or works in progress that they’ve heard good things about.

But it was clear to me, as it has been at other conferences in other places in other years, that the real importance always is in giving writers a sense of their own community, reminding them they’re not alone in their solitude or in their struggles to find a little quiet time to get some work done.

Getting published--making communication--is the ultimate goal, of course. But one of the rewards of writing is that the act of writing itself provides releases and satisfactions that are rare and restorative.

There was evidence throughout the week that for many of the participants the writing was an ongoing journey of self-discovery -- therapy is too glib and clinical a word--and a way of seeing and dealing with life experiences that ranged from the Thurberian bizarre to the tragic.

One of the week’s more interesting readings was from the manuscript by a newly divorced, middle-aged woman seeking a new life in Southern California and exploring all the nostrums from est to nudism available beside the Pacific. The writer put an amusing face on a fairly universal and painful process of readjustment.

The week’s fiction prize went to Grace Callahan, a woman in her late 70s doing a novel drawing upon her family’s pioneering experiences in the Southwest in the late 1800s, and very moving, too.

The conference might (usefully) help a handful of would-be but word-deaf writers see that their strengths lie elsewhere. But the majority of the attending writers will, I have no doubt, be reaffirmed and re-energized in their conviction that they’re doing what they have to be doing--rejections and all--for their own happiness.