Is it helpful to read critical essays about writing?

Is it helpful to read essays about creative writing? It’s an interesting question that I’ve given a lot of thought to recently. As a creative writing student at a university you seem to be steered towards the view that it is helpful. You’re encouraged to read essays so you can write critical commentaries on your own writing. You’re loaded with five different essays at the end of each seminar to read for next week. And it’s true that you can learn some interesting lessons from reading essays about creative writing.

However, the more I think about it, the more I believe that reading critical essays on writing is, in fact, unhelpful. It fuels the biggest enemy of good writing: over-thinking.

‘Fail Better’, an essay written by Zadie Smith, teaches that ‘writers have only one duty… the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world.’ This is really interesting and, in my opinion, correct. But did we need to know it? Isn’t it obvious that that’s what writing should be? And now I’ve read that essay I’m over-thinking. I’m wondering whether I should abandon the screenplay I’m writing about a dystopian reality TV show were twelve people have communal dreams which are watched by the public and whether I should be writing something that I myself have experienced.

But I shouldn’t be worried about this. Because, even if you write a story about something you’ve never experienced, you automatically, instinctively, as a writer,

draw on your own experiences. So reading this critical essay has made me worry about a silly thing that I never would have thought about before.

The rest of Zadie Smith’s essay tells us that nearly all writing is failure and always ends up feeling dishonest. I think if I started to over-think that, I’d go crazy.

In my experience, reading critical essays on what makes writing good turns writing into a cold, clinical, academic discipline rather than an art. Obviously technique is important. But if you start trying to conform your writing to what a critic thinks it should be like, your writing is going to lose its authenticity, its emotion and everything that makes it a part of you.

When you start to overthink a piece of writing, especially the technical side of it, it saps your inspiration – in my experience, at least – and makes you lose sight of the vision you had before you started writing. So what’s the point in reading something that will inevitably make us overthink something that should come naturally to us?

Thanks for reading.