Stumbled upon another piece of ‘witty observation’ by Stephen King in his book ‘On writing‘:
“..it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
I’m afraid this idea is rejected by lots of critics and plenty of writing teachers, as well. Many of these are liberal in their politics but crustaceans in their chosen fields. Men and women who would take to the streets to protest the exclusion of African-Americans or Native-Americans (I can imagine what Mr. Strunk would have made of these politically correct but clunky terms) from the local country club are often the same men and women who tell their classes that writing ability is fixed and immutable; once a hack, always a hack. Even if a writer rises in the estimation of an influential critic or two, he/she always carries his/her early reputation along, like a respectable married woman who was a wild child as a teenager. Some people never forget, that’s all, and a good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it.
If generalized as a ‘test’, it might suite in highlighting areas in those ‘deep waters’ where ourselves, as social ‘psyches’, find grounds for biases toward the unconventional..
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