‘Hello – how are you? – thank you for coming. Could I ask your name? And you’re interested in Creative Writing, are you? Good. Great. Well, what would you like to know?’
This is me, being open. We are sitting across from one another in one of the — for me anyway — cosily Stalinist halls of the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury. Between us is a table covered with prospectuses and brochures. On the covers of the prospectuses and brochures are contented-looking students, asking questions, writing answers. Occasionally, an announcement comes over the crunchy tannoy, and we have to wait for it to finish blasting before we can hear one another.
It’s a Birkbeck College Open Evening, getting towards the end, about a quarter past seven. But that’s good, because you haven’t had to wait in a queue to speak to me. (Quite a few people are interested in Creative Writing these days, even if they’re not entirely sure what it is.)
You’ve just walked in, straight up to the table, and sat down — slightly out of breath after rushing from wherever — and now I’m asking you a question. Of course you expected this, but you’re not entirely settled, so you say, ‘Well, yes, I’m interested — very interested — ’ (You remember to sound enthusiastic.) ‘ — but I’m not sure it’s right for me.’
This is just what I hoped to hear. So, I begin finding out about you by asking, ‘Have you done anything like a creative writing course before?’
You tell me about the group at your local library, or the Arvon course you attended (but you really can’t remember either of the tutors’ names), or the BA you’ve already completed.
Or you say that you haven’t really done anything — except write, that is.
You’re a little more relaxed now; I seem friendly enough — smiling and saying yes. A little tired, but then both of us are.
So you ask, ‘How would I know if the course would be right for me?’
You settle back. It seems like I’m going to talk for a little while now, and you’re right. As there’s no-one waiting behind you, I decide to give you the full answer. The ideal, forget time, forget embarrassment, answer.
‘In a way, it’s easier to say who Creative Writing courses are wrong for. For example, me. When I was twenty or twenty-one, I thought that there wasn’t anyone around good enough for me to learn from. I thought that writing was about genius and that the learning-your-craft part was for non-geniuses. (I was a genius, obviously.) I thought that letting anyone else in to my work, my ideas, my mind would damage my originality. I thought that Creative Writing courses were, as I used to put it, “a load of swine sitting around waiting for a pearl to be tossed by the master”.
‘That changed when I met a writer called Jacqui Lofthouse, at a party. By this point, I was a little older than twenty-one and had written four and a half unpublished novels. We sat on someone’s carpet, drank wine, chatted, and Jacqui changed my life. I think I mentioned the pearls and the swine, and she laughed and said, no, the course she was on — with Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia — wasn’t like that at all. In fact, most of the time Malcolm — (It was exciting to hear her speak about a published writer by their first name, but I stayed cool) — Malcolm didn’t speak much at all. Just a little, at the end, to sum up. It was a workshop, and that meant that Jacqui did most of her learning from the other writers in the group. They were the ones who spoke or significantly didn’t speak, who passionately disagreed, who gave feedback she could either take or leave. This had worked for Jacqui. Her novel, The Temple of Hymen, was going to be published.
‘In the years since sitting on the carpet with Jacqui, I’ve realised that she said just the right thing.
‘If you’re thinking of any kind of writing class, you need to ask yourself a very simple question: “Am I prepared to do anything — to learn from anyone — in order to become a better writer?”
‘Creative writing courses are less like sitting at the feet of the pearly-teethed master and are far more like Alcoholics Anonymous.
“Hello, my name is X and I am trying to write a historical novel set in Y.”
“Thank you, X.”
‘When I was lucky enough to get onto the UEA course and be in one of Malcolm Bradbury’s workshops, I saw that the learning-from-anyone part was the foundation. Because I learned at least as much from other students’ negative examples as from their occasional positive comments about my work.
‘I learned that what usually makes a writer bad is clinging on to something about their writing, something they feel is essential, but which is causing it to collapse inwards in some way or other.
‘Self-love, in other words. Conceit.
‘Most people never get to read unpublished writing, or even first drafts by published writers, so they have no idea of the kind of swampy sinkhole-filled morass that’s out there. They get used to strolling along the paths of the landscaped garden, after the completion of the massive drainage project, after the dumping of new imported soil, after the carefully planned planting that looks so wonderfully natural.
‘So, to answer your question more directly: Creative Writing is right for you if you come to it with a basic humility. “Okay, something’s not working in what I’m doing. Probably a lot of things. I know that. And I’m prepared to do anything – and learn from anyone – in order to get better. I’m prepared to give up my self-love, and my idea of myself as a self-sufficient genius. I’m prepared to listen.”’
This answer, even on an Open evening, is a little more open than you expected. In fact, it’s verging on the confessional.
You didn’t need to hear about the wine and the carpet — although it made the whole thing quite vivid. But you think you’ve got the basic concept: Creative Writing courses are hard on the ego.
You decide to reciprocate by making yourself a little vulnerable. You say, ‘I have all these ideas, and I make lots of starts – I’ve got dozens of those – but I can’t seem to get them finished. What I’m really looking for is some discipline.’
And I say, ‘A lot of people thinking about doing a writing course say that. And discipline — or, at least, structure — is one of the things a workshop can offer. You’ll have to put in a piece of work three or four times a term. (They call them semesters, now.) So, you’ll have deadlines that aren’t artificial or self-imposed. One of the most important things a creative writing class provides is an audience. It’s a peer group as well. But firstly it’s a set of readers who don’t have a personal investment in you or your ego. (Not to start with, anyway.)
‘If you give the first twenty pages of your novel to your partner, or your best friend, or even to that writer you know through a friend of a friend, they are socially and emotionally involved with you. They are aware that they’ll have to deal with the social and emotional aftermath of telling you the truth. Most writers, myself included, just want to hear, “This is the greatest thing ever written. I laughed. I wept. I even pondered. You are a sublime genius. Don’t change a comma.” Most writers don’t want to hear, “The main character is the most self-important tosser I’ve ever come across and, if they opened their mouth and spoke like this, could clear the 8.14 from Basingstoke” or “You write like you’re some kind of demented cross between the Pope, the Queen and the Oxford English Dictionary” or “I was so bored I ate my index finger”.
‘Now, this is not the sort of feedback you’re going to get in a Creative Writing class — because your readers there will themselves be writers, they will know about dwelling in the swampy morass of the first draft, and they will be starting from the basis of thinking, “Here’s a story, what’s happening in it? What’s not happening? How can it be improved?” They quite possibly will talk about the story as if the person who wrote it wasn’t in the room. That may feel odd but also oddly liberating. The writing is from you and of you but it isn’t you yourself personally for ever. It can be changed, improved, transformed. The main character can become loveable, the prose style can become delightful, the story can become unputdownable. This may be because you find your own particular truth in the usual workshop advice of “Write what you know”, “Keep it simple, stupid” or “Show don’t tell”. This may be because you learn some technical stuff to do with point of view, narrative tone, time-management, or because someone in the class, talking about something else entirely, not your work at all, said just the right thing. This will almost certainly be because you, in writing terms, get over yourself. All writers need constantly to get over themselves, but they also need selves to get over. That’s the paradox you’ll be dealing with for the rest of your writing life.’
Even for an Open Evening, this was beyond open. It’s all getting a bit self-helpy, the other side of the table. But you feel it’s fairly close to answering your question. You said you needed discipline.
I’m saying that discipline isn’t just about putting in the hours and decades at the laptop, it’s about self-discipline.
And it seems, from what I’m saying, that you can learn a lot about self-discipline from other people — more particularly, from a group of ten or twelve passionately attentive strangers, gently moderated by someone they all respect, collectively trying to improve as writers.
You’re feeling good. You decide to commit fully and ask the big question. You say, ‘Will going on the course help get me published?’
And it was all going so well! But now I can’t keep the look of disappointment from my face. Publication? That’s what they really want to know about, isn’t it? Choosing covers and doing interviews and rave reviews and saying you’re a writer rather than a whatever, and having people say, ‘Oh, how interesting!’ But it’s Open Evening, so I have to be open.
I have to say, ‘If you write just for publication, you’re doing the wrong thing. Leave now and don’t come back. Publication is a tiny part of a writer’s life. Most of a writer’s life is — and I know you’re ahead of me here — writing. Which means, being alone with your failures. They may only be verbal failures, but they often don’t feel like it. They feel like my-entire-life-failures. I know people who’ve become astonishingly successful at writing — you’ll have heard of them — films have been made of their work — but they discover they hate their job as much as anyone can. So, they move away from the being-alone bit by becoming screenwriters or writing journalism or finding something that lets another person through the door, that gives another person responsibility.’
Oh dear. I’ve said too much. Been too open.
But it’s late. I’m tired.
And now they’ve just announced, through the crunchy tannoy, that the Open Evening is finishing.
You look crestfallen. You say, ‘I only meant – ’ I wait. ‘I only meant would it help?’
‘Yes,’ I say, with a smile, ‘I think it will. If you have the right approach, it will help you become a better writer faster than you could on your own. And it’s the better writers who get published — the ones who have repeatedly transformed their swamps into gardens.’
And we shake hands, and you head off back to your swamp, and I head off back to mine.
If you’re at all interested in taking a Creative Writing MA with me, at the University of Southampton, in the very green and pleasant Avenue Campus, please get in touch.
A version of this article was originally published in The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.
Very useful and Fab photo.
I had a meeting with a ‘60’s Situationist in the bar of that hotel the late 2000’s.
A friend of a friend arranged the meeting so that he, the Situationist, could talk to us about his experiences since ‘68. He didn’t say much.
I think the carpet might have been the same then….