The post-war expansion of creative writing instruction and the contemporaneous institutionalization of literary theory have each exercised a significant impact upon recent American fiction. Suggestive of divergent values, theory and writing instruction are often portrayed as opposed. This essay complicates that division, by providing the first detailed account of the influential creative writing classes run by the writer, teacher and editor Gordon Lish during the 1980s and 1990s. Lish’s teaching appropriated a range of theoretical concepts, revising them into principles of literary composition. The essay reconstructs Lish’s various conceptual revisions, examining their practical and rhetorical functions in his classroom, before tracing their impact upon the prose styles of two of his most successful students, Ben Marcus and Sam Lipsyte. In so doing, it illuminates an institutional process of influence, through which theory has indirectly structured the syntax of numerous contemporary writers. The essay concludes by suggesting that this process reflects a charismatic logic which informs the dissemination of theory and creative writing alike.