“Let the writing be of words”: from writing stories to writing materials Jen Webb, University of Canberra Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. (from William Carlos Williams, “A sort of a song”) Let me start with a quote from Brian Eno: The arts routinely produce some of the loosest thinking and worst writing known to history. … The lack of a clear connection between all that creative activity and the intellectual life of the society leaves the whole project poorly understood, poorly supported and poorly exploited (Eno, 1996, pp. 258‐59). This came as part of the speech he gave on the occasion of the 1995 Turner Prize award ceremony (the prize won that year by Damien Hirst), so it was directed at writers in the visual rather than literary arts. Nonetheless, I want to build on Eno’s complaint, and discuss what I see as something of a problem in how we teach creative writers their craft. My paper will be unabashedly polemic; however, it is offered not in the spirit of argument, but as a point of discussion about how we, as teachers of writing, might offer our students (and ourselves) ways to further “the intellectual life of the society”. This is an important issue, because of the remarkable proliferation of writing courses and hence of writing graduates over the past three decades. A very high proportion of tertiary education institutions now train students at undergraduate, graduate (coursework) and postgraduate (research) levels. While few of these institutions enjoy the huge enrolments found in, say, the business or communication faculties, there is a steady and growing number of people who believe they have a story to tell, and who want to be trained in the techniques and in the field of literary production. While this is pleasing – because people really believe there is value in narrative, and that they themselves can participate in this practice – I want to assert that writing is more than story, and that the teaching of writing should have a somewhat different focus. For thousands of years humans have managed to tell good stories despite the lack of tertiary courses designed to train storytellers.