There's a traditional view that good writers train themselves in the forms of tradition, only to expand into experiment later.
So it's striking when writers train their gaze on us, looking closely at what happens here, at how pretensions to inclusiveness can still leave people feeling invisible and estranged.
"The Boat" is transparently a product of the increasingly formalized milieu in which American writers train — a well-wrought collection that, in its acute self-consciousness, trails a telltale whiff of "the industry" that is its initial concern, of the "heap of fellowship and job applications" the fictional Le needs "to draft and submit" when he's interrupted by his father.
Writer trained for fifteen months to play in the World Championship.
The writer trained in high-speed driving one morning with Deputy Edmundo Hummel of the Sheriff's Department.
Mr. Gendel, a television writer trained in the Stephen J. Cannell school of action-drama, eschews "the C-word" -- camp.
Not long ago, the Times' Amanda Hesser, a serious food writer trained at La Varenne, in France, wrote a column about cooking a Julia Child dinner in which she presented it as a once-in-a-lifetime novelty.
Battier went to Duke, where he played for Coach Mike Krzyzewski, a rite of passage that ensures one will forever be seen as "playing the right way," sort of like a writer trained by Strunk & White: they might not be the most creatively explosive, but just as commas will be correctly placed, so offensive screens will be correctly set.
Writers train for one length or another, and Breslin's is essentially a series of eight-hundred-word columns strung together, all told in that good Breslin style, where this guy said that to this other guy — quick glimpses of Prohibition, the Hearst press, stealing coats in the Depression — so that the total effect is like watching the world's longest subway train go by at night.
Now, with Arab writers being trained in a professional environment, I can use them to tell my stories.
