John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction” begins by stating there are no rules for writing fiction. There is no formula for success, no educational path that can propel you to the Pulitzer. The only relevant metric is mastery. Anything goes, as long as it helps foster your sense of aesthetic intuition. “It is feeling, not some rule, that tells the abstract painter to put his yellow here and there, not there,” Gardner writes. Out of that inexplicable process emerges a piece of work that tugs the audience into its orbit — something we might call “good art.”

Of course, I wasn’t reading “The Art of Fiction” to be told that art was a matter of intuition. I knew that much. A lifetime of reading had granted me a discerning taste in literature. I could tell when a story was working and when it wasn’t. And here’s what my intuition was telling me: my stories weren’t working. A gap existed between what I could put on the page and what I read in the magazines. The rest of Gardner’s book offered help in the form of high-level technique and writing philosophies, but I needed something else to bridge the gap. Something to force me to do what I set out to do, even if I failed in the process.

Enter: the creative writing class.

When I came to Stanford, creative writing classes seemed like an intuitive entry point into the art of fiction. If you wanted to learn something, why not take a class on it? What else was college for? I had never taken a creative writing course before; maybe that’s where I had gone wrong all these years.

In frosh spring, I enrolled in ENGLISH 90. We read stories. We talked about stories. We wrote stories — rather, each of us wrote a story, singular. We said what we liked about each other’s pieces, and then what we didn’t like, and then what we liked again so that we ended on a good note. I emerged with what might loosely be called a complete work of fiction. I was not pleased with it. The gap between my skill and my goals only seemed more insurmountable.

So naturally, I took another class.

An arts education is a finicky thing. How do you teach something with no rules? So much of the advice surrounding art school or MFAs is that they waste time and money. Everything these programs offer, you can learn on your own by finding your peers, committing to your own practice and consuming more of the type of art you’d like to make. As Chad Harbach points out in his essay “MFA vs NYC,” the fiction writing classroom exists to employ writers as teachers, not necessarily to build literary giants. It isn’t the path towards greatness. It might not even make you good.

That truth is a point of detriment for people like me, who take classes in order to feel committed to the craft while avoiding the vulnerability that comes with the actual production of art. I knew when I first stepped into that first writing workshop that it wouldn’t be that simple. Still, I wanted to believe that doing assignments would be enough.

Little over a year ago, I had something akin to a breakthrough. Suddenly, my writing was operating on a new level. Before, I had been in the dark, groping at some semblance of good prose through amateur-ish imitation of my favorite authors. Yet, that winter of my sophomore year, something shifted. My sentences felt sharper, more assured. The voice in my head was making its way onto the page, with perfect fidelity.

In the months since, I’ve tried to pinpoint what exactly changed. I was taking a class on narrative theory with writers like Proust and Faulkner on the syllabus. I was reading weird and experimental fiction on various internet litmags. All of this expanded my view of what writing could do, turning the rule of no rules into something tangible. But I think the real difference was that I was writing more. Instead of trying to commit to longer pieces, I stuck to writing off-kilter paragraphs every day. I ended up loving those one-off freewrites more than any of the other pieces I attempted. All of a sudden, I had it: proof that improvement was possible.

I’d like to think that from then on, the curve has carried upward. Truthfully, I’m finding myself in a bout of insecurity once more. I’m still taking fiction classes. They have great merit in forcing you to see others look at your work. But to get past that insecurity, to bridge the gap between intuition and execution, I know I must push myself to write outside of the classroom context. Over and over again.

Ira Glass has a famous quote about the gap, which I first encountered on the internet in sixth grade. I had no idea who Ira Glass was, but upon seeing it, I felt like I had read nothing more truthful in the world. “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste,” Glass says. “But there is this gap.” Your work will try to reach your taste, and fall flat. It will stay like that for years and years. The only solution is to keep at it.

For many, this is not some huge epiphany. Even I had this bit of wisdom in mind since middle school. Still, there’s a difference between seeing and believing. Between thinking and doing. Between reading “The Art of Fiction” and actually writing some fiction. I am one of the worst people I know at making that jump.

Still, I try. The process comes with ancillary benefits, including cool writer friends, an expansive bookshelf and a heightened sense of self-understanding. The more I learn, the more I realize that all artists are in the same boat, desperately flinging half-articulated parts of themselves out into the world, as if saying, “does this mean anything to you? Does this mean anything? Am I reaching you from where I am?”

Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes but poorly. I enjoy the attempt anyway.