"There are no words."

Last year, one of my writers' workshop students had led off her nonfiction travel piece with that sentence, which I thought might be improved. She wanted to describe her feelings upon first landing in Antarctica. The piece as a whole was awfully good, I thought, combining, as it did, a problematic relationship with her father, who was along on the trip, and the desire to see a massive ice ridge named after her grandfather, who had been in Admiral Byrd's party. It was a real quest, filled with real emotion, and the woman had the talent to make it work.

But the lead? "There are no words."

"This," I suggested to the students at the writer's workshop, "does not fill the reader with confidence in the writer's ability to describe the interior or exterior landscape of her journey." I stifled an impulse to put my objection more bluntly. I would be risking another tearful exit if I said: "There are no words, and here they aren't."

I carefully polled the other seven students in the class. "There are no words"—good lead, or bad? And the fact is, most of them liked it.

A few nights later, my friend and colleague David Quammen came to my house for dinner. David has won awards for his essays, literary criticism, and science writing; I think he's won awards he doesn't even remember anymore, or doesn't care to talk about because he's pathologically modest. David's news was that he was building a new house—probably, I thought (with that total lack of envy that writers are noted for), to hold all his damn awards.

He asked me how my current writing class was going. I said it was exhausting. I couldn't get certain manuscripts out of my mind, not because they were so bad, but because they were so nearly good.

David shook his head. He believes that no one can teach writing, that it is a solitary endeavor you do over and over again until you start getting it right.

"Tim," he said, "I think that if you just went to church and prayed real, real hard, you'd have the same effect on your students."

The essayist and memoir writer Gretel Ehrlich is of much the same opinion. Once she and I were featured speakers at a writers' conference in Montana. Gretel, it must be said, is a writer whose books I greatly admire, especially her lyrical evocation of the West in The Solace of Open Spaces. She gave the keynote address to a crowd of eager would-be writers, and was not at all encouraging. Gretel spoke well, and with passion. Writing, she said, cannot be taught. Some teachers, she said, will tell you that there are matters of craft you can learn. This, she averred, is not so.

"Any questions or comments?" she asked at the conclusion of her remarks.

The students, who'd all paid a substantial amount of money to learn to write, sat in a kind of poleaxed silence. Now, my own opinion is that elements of technique—matters of structure and organization, lead-ins and walk-offs—can indeed be taught but are the only substantive principles professionals can impart to beginning writers.

So, in the silence following Gretel's request for comments, I raised my hand and said, "I thought the piece you read was well crafted."

And now Gretel Ehrlich, in company with a certain Indiana Catholic high school lay teacher, thinks I'm a dickhead.