Good post. I'm not involved with the BWA thing - turned down the offer to judge the comp last year - although I know large numbers of people who are, for good and ill.

In the end you can only be the writer you're wired to be. But I think writing can be taught to the extent that painting or choreography or writing music can be taught; of course it's possible to do it all on your own with a big library and a pile of paper, but help from outside - paid or free - can make the learning quicker and stronger. For some reason the default assumption seems to be that painters and composers and choreographers need training - lots of it - but writers don't. In fact we do, it's just that the ways we get it have, historically and for complicated reasons, been more ad hoc and informal. But writers have sought out mentors, examples, heroes and fellows since the beginning of time, and to some extent the creative writing industry is only formalising that into a shape more like that which the other arts have had for centuries. The fact that Southey ought to roast in Hell for having told Charlotte Bronte that her writing would serve nicely to fill in her time until she could reach her proper job of wife and mother, doesn't negate that: there has always been bad advice/help on offer, as well as good, and the problem of telling one from the other has always been with us too.

Anyone can learn a bit more craft, and a teacher can help with that. And a good teacher can also help with the other end of the business, which is process: how to find and develop the material which you write with. It's undoubtedly true that the vast majority of people who try to write a novel - and maybe pay for help with that in some form or another - won't get it published. Most of them won't get anything published (although the novel is so much the dominant form for creative writing these days that often it's more that they don't realise it's not the form for them...). But human creativity is a good thing, of itself, regardless of the outcome, and I'm not going to tell someone that they shouldn't be writing, and refuse to help them with their writing, because I think they'll never get anywhere. I will happily - frequently do - tell them that in my opinion they've got a very great deal of work yet to do before reaching the kind of goal they're hoping for.

So I'm not sure it goes without saying that any money such a writer spends is wasted, AS LONG AS they weren't lured into spending it by promises which can't be fulfilled (of publication by a "top publisher" for example...). The difficulty I would say, as someone who teaches and mentors writers, (and thanks a Masters for getting her own debut novel into contract-gaining shape), is to offer what they're usually asking for - help to become a good enough writer to get published - without promising that they will get published. I can only do my best with the loudest, most honest caveats I can manage, and all the other teachers/mentors/editorial-report-writers and so on that I know do the same. Some people just don't hear those caveats, though: the "you can do anything you want to if you try hard enough" industry has a lot to answer for, because in the book trade, at least, it just ain't as simple as that.