On Having Finished a Creative Writing Course

and Not Been Published. Yet.

Apologies if what follows is a bit stick figure.

I am thinking it through for the first time, on the screen, having written yesterday about the benefits of Creative Writing Courses — particularly workshop-based MAs.

If you are lucky, you have ended up with a group of fellow students who, over time, run their own workshops outside the university, and become a group of friends. A mini-generation.

I know this happens.

A few days ago, I was at the launch for Avi Ben-Zeev’s beautiful, funny and endearing memoir, Calling My Deadname Home: Trans Bear Diaries (Muswell Press, 2024).

Avi was a student on the MFA I ran at Birkbeck, and over half of his workshop group were there to support him. They have continued to meet up, and to read and support one another. And they are building their successes together.

Getting on the shortlist for a memoir or short story prize. Taking part in the London Library Emerging Writers Programme.

However, there can be an inevitable disappointment on finishing a Creative Writing MA that it hasn’t brought you what you wanted.

In many cases, this is straight publication.

Given that lots of MAs are taken full-time, and run from September to September, and involve at least two modules in which you’re working on something that isn’t your main project, it’s very rare for a student to emerge with a completed novel or short story collection.

Most will be twenty- or fourty- or sixty-thousand good shape words into their book.

That means they are on their own, or with their supportive cohort, as they work on toward a finished draft.

After the warm collegiality of student life, and the white hot dread of assessment deadlines, this time can feel very chilly.

The discipline — which, along with needing to learn technical stuff, is what most applicants to mention as their reason for taking an MA — discipline (which some call structure) is gone.

No more writing prompts, weekly readings, submission deadlines, tutorials, editorial meetings.

Some groups can maintain something like this, but life-demands tend to reduce the numbers of committed members fairly quickly.

There’s a loss of momentum, a loss of push. And this lapse is necessary, because the job of most writers is to complete their work in their heads and on their pages by themselves.

When I first told my parents I wanted to be a writer, my Dad said, ‘It’s a lonely business.’

He wasn’t wrong.

But I liked much of the isolation — I still love travelling to the dark side of the moon with something I’m writing. Being out of radio contact with the rest of earth is a relief. It’s a privilege not to be micromanaged in a big mad project of your own.

There comes a point, though, that a student who has attended a Creative Writing course, and perhaps completed a novel, queried, met rejection, started a novel — there comes a point where they’re going to wonder whether the MA was worth it.

Might they not have been a purer or better version of themselves without all the new voices they introduced into their head?

This doubt I can, I hope, dismiss straight away.

I have never known anyone who has come out of an MA as a worse writer than they entered.

They may, it’s true, be very dispirited at what they now realise is the amount of work that a novel takes.

But they are — I’ve seen it hundreds of times — far better equipped, technically and psychically, to write a novel, or a collection of stories, or a memoir.

If nothing else, they know how much labour and stress it takes other writers just to get a chapter done — because they’ve seen it, week by week, in their workshop.

Most unpublished novels are underwritten. They just haven’t had enough time put into them on every level, from sentence to structure.

Putting time in isn’t something abstract. It’s not just sitting at the desk rewriting sentences. The ways in which early drafts of novels need to be examined, tightened, tested, partially junked and flowingly redone — these are approaches that an MA can teach.

However, let’s ask what a writer can do who has completed an MA — perhaps a few years ago — and has completed that novel, and done their best to get it out into the world, but hasn’t succeeded.

What should they do?

This is where I feel I have two answers.

Very often when students are working on a story or novel, and present me with a binary choice they have to make (I could either do this first person or third person) I advise them to start writing both versions.

Create separate files. Give them titles so you know what you’re doing differently in each.

Styled up version/ Raymond Carver version.

For my Mum as my ideal reader draft/ for that-agent-who-encouraged-me-to-submit-my-next-novel draft. (Mum Draft and Agent Draft might be more practical.)

What I hope happens is that they find themselves working more on one rather than the other, or they find one easier — even if they don’t like it more. And from that being drawn back or drawn on, they learn something about what kind of writer they’re likely to be.

My advice to a post-MA student is to dedicate a couple of months is this — go through your MA again.

By which I mean, first of all, spend some time thinking about what you believe you learned. Make a list.

Then think about what you didn’t learn, and have only learned subsequently — if there is anything.

What were the pieces of feedback or criticism that hurt the most? Did you take them or reject them or set them aside for later?

Look, most especially, at the marker’s comments for your dissertation. These should have given you some direct advice about how to improve your work.

Re-read all your notes. Look at what you wrote during workshops both when people were discussing your pieces, and when they and you were discussing the work of others.

Go through the other students’ stories and excerpts, and think about the feedback you gave them. What would you say differently now?

After you’ve done this for a while, chronologically, perhaps even redoing the in-class or homework exercises, and thinking about why the tutors chose to approach things in that order — after all of this, form two plans.

For the first plan, imagine a version of your next piece of writing where you take all the advice you were given that you didn’t take at the time.

If some of this advice is fundamentally contradictory, you may need to make another split and do an A. version and a B. version of the story or novel start.

Even if you resent some of what you’re having to do, do it. If the tutor said you need to plot more, plot more. If they said have more characters in each scene, and write more dialogue, do that.

Be the best, most obliging student you can be.

For the second plan, do the opposite. Try to forget everything you heard. Put those voices completely out of your head, and write what you think is your best writing in the way you want to write it.

If you don’t want to reject absolutely all the feedback you received, then pick the single piece of criticism that has stuck with you longest and that, probably, hurt you the most with its truth.

Be the most focused, single-minded, difficult student you can be.

There may be some overlap between the two (or three) draft you end up writing. Don’t worry about that.

After you’ve done this for a while, a couple of months, with as much dedication as you can, take a hard look at your two separate drafts.

Which, honestly, is better? The Them draft or the You draft?

If you can, go back to those people you’re still in touch with from your workshop group and ask for their feedback. And offer, in return, to read an equal amount of work from them.

The most important thing is to begin to use what you maybe didn’t learn during your time on the MA, but that you can learn now.

It is likely that what you most need to hear is in there somewhere, waiting.

Photo by Afonso Vieira on Unsplash