Good teachers convey to students the thoughts of Ernest Hemingway, who said, ‘What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn’t been written or beat dead men at what they have done.’ They tell you it takes fifteen years for a fiction writer to become ‘established’ after he or she first publishes. They tell you that you must master all the exercises at the end of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, as I made David Guterson and Gary Hawkes do. They tell you that you must be interdisciplinary, be able to solve any writing problem three different ways, and find the perfect painting, sculpture, and piece of music or work of philosophy that compliments your fiction.
Charles Johnson, “Creative Adventures: The Fiction Writer’s Apprenticeship”