Question: Why are literary professors often portrayed as being adulterous? Answer: Because they are.

Posing this Q&A to Will Miller (27) who used to teach creative writing at New York University I half expected him to get agitated with me, like he did when I asked him about sex with students which he deemed inappropriate, the question not the act. But this time he didn’t mistake my blunt question for an allegation and was prepared to enlighten me about the lives of literary professors in the United States. He only really was a teacher for two years but we’ll get to that.

Curtis Hanson’s ‘Wonder Boys’ shows us a literature teacher and his students breaking the rules by using drugs and having inappropriate affairs, the university seemingly condoning this behavior in the name of academic freedom to stimulate their creative impulse. Eventually, by showing us that those breaking the rules turn out to be to most successful writers, Hanson seems to illustrate that the goal of becoming a great writer cannot be achieved by playing by the rules in the enclosed environment of the university, or within the security of a stable family-life. This begs the question why, if it is not what happens inside university but what happens outside that matters, there are such courses as creative writing at all? And as I wondered whether this film is an example of fine fiction writing or that maybe there is some truth to the situation, Will became my ‘one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite’.

Having both studied and taught creative writing Will believes the course exists not to make bad writers good, but to make good writers great. Something that can also be seen in the character of Jamer Leer, one of Hanson’s ‘Wonder Boys’, who is that one student out of the hundred who doesn’t actually need his professor to teach him about writing, but more to teach him about life. There is no equivalent of creative writing at Dutch universities but apparently we might not even need one. All the best artists never get into Art School either, right?

So, if it’s not education that makes for better writers than what is? Writers write about what they know in life and I agree with Hanson’s vision that rules need to be broken for life to be at its fullest, most exciting, most interesting. What I like about Will, besides his neatly groomed beard, is how he himself has found an authentic way of doing this. He, not being the adulterous type, left his job as a teacher to become the manager of his best friend’s unexpectedly successful electro-noise band, and this, in my opinion, has made him a better writer.

This brings me back to my first question: Why are literary professors often portrayed as being adulterous? And the answer still is: Because they are. Or if they are not they’re probably perverts, or shooting up, or posing as private detectives, breaking the rules in one way or another. So while studying creative writing might not make you a better writer, being an adulterous literary professor probably will.

I would like to thank Will Miller who’s name is not really Will Miller, without whom I could not have written this.

Bron: Curtis Hanson, Wonder Boys (2000)