Learning to teach writing to SF novelists

Isn't that a miraculously apropos subject to find? This article was pretty eye-opening. I don't know how anyone can generalize about teaching writing--this author doesn't, by the way--because it's all so very specific. What one person needs is completely different from what another person needs. And even if they need exactly the same thing, you might have to use completely different techniques to get there. I remember a student who wanted to write novels, who already had a contract to write for some kind of cookie-cutter series of fantasy novels. He was doing great, right? But he had not the slightest idea how to do anything more. Fortunately he knew that and came to me for answers, so we had a semester-long running battle over it because he was so utterly frustrated. It sounds absurd now, but he couldn't see what made one book better than another and wanted to know how to tell the difference. It was like teaching color to the color-blind. And then to try to do that in his own writing at the same time. Brave young man. I give him all the credit in the world because that is insanely difficult, and he was just beside himself the whole time, but he kept coming back. We had days where I'd say, "Okay, well, one of the traits English professors like me tend to like is vivid imagery." Him: "What's that?" Go ahead, try to explain imagery. I think I got out my Margaret Drabble book, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and found him a clear definition, because all my hand-waving wasn't going to cut it. I still feel like I kind of failed that student in the end. (Not in the sense of failing the class, obviously.) He got everything, but it was like trying to explain the buffalo joke to the Japanese exchange students in my History of the English language course. It was so much work for so little payoff. Jacob loves the buffalo joke. I got it from a mathematician friend. Here's the sentence: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. [These large bovines][who are flummoxed by][those large bovines] [then flummox] [other large bovines][who are flummoxed by][yet more large bovines.] Except the order is off in the translation. Also I'm not entirely sure buffalo are bovines. ANYWAY. Teaching is hard. The larger point being, I don't know what I need to learn as far as writing, I don't know what techniques they're going to need to get it through my thick skull, I hope I can be as patient and persistent as my student was and come back for more every week like a boxer who doesn't know when to stay down, and I hope I can GET BETTER, because that's what I want. Eyes on the prize.