I think it's also important to note that "learning how to write" (fiction) right now is very, very constrained and basically colonialist. At least in an academic setting. The things that get taught from high school through college and MFA programs all occupy a very sort of specific, entrenched idea of literary fiction and what it entails (Christian theology, subtext, foreshadowing, avoidance of genre standbys).
That depends to some extent on who is teaching. In my high school, we learned that with a couple of the teachers, we would get higher marks if we blathered on about religious symbolism and imagery in whatever novels or poems or plays our essays were about. That got to be such a habit that by the time Grade 12 came around, a small discussion group I was part of just couldn't shake it off. We were assigned to read and discuss a poem -
"The Horses" by Edwin Muir.
The other people in my group insisted the horses were a metaphor for soldiers returning after war, or they were really Jesus coming back. I kept telling them that in this case the horses were horses, and the poem was about World War III.
My classmates looked at me blankly. "But World War III hasn't happened yet" (note that the Cold War was still going on at that time and all of us were old enough to remember "duck and cover" drills in elementary school).
It was a bit of a surprise when the teacher happened by and heard the conversation. She told them to listen to me, because I was right.
I suppose my classmates' confusion can be explained by their non-interest in science fiction plus the fact that in most other assignments, the teacher would have been happy if the students had insisted the poem was really about Jesus.
This was in a public high school, btw, in the late 1970s. This teacher pushed a religious agenda of her own in other assignments that year, so I suppose it was an understandable mistake this time.
That said, those are generally what get published. I did some research recently out of curiosity, since I frequently read a ton of short stories that are in lit magazines, collections, contest winners, etc. I basically just took 50 short stories over the last 13 months that had done well and won something, or been published in a respected outlet, etc., and that I had come across, and of the 50 authors, all 50 of them had at least a 4 year degree, and 15 of them had an MFA. So, yeah.
I'd have to do some digging to find out which of my favorite authors took degrees involving writing. Taking a literature degree means writing a lot of essays about other people's writing, but it doesn't teach someone how to write fiction unless you not only read, but write.
There's a saying that "to write science fiction, you have to read science fiction." If you want to write space opera, that's true. There are a lot of things that the general public assumes are true about modern SF that really aren't. This is why Margaret Atwood sticks her nose in the air and insists The Handmaid's Tale isn't science fiction - because it doesn't include space ships, ray guns, monsters, or talking octopuses.
Well, I'd disagree with her that it doesn't contain monsters. The people running the Republic of Gilead are certainly evil.
