It is no accident that it started expanding at precisely the moment when traditional financial props of the writers' trade such as the Net Book Agreement were abolished when traditional supports of writers' incomes such as book reviews started being eroded by budget cuts when publishers, under their own pressures, started savagely cutting away at their standard advances for authors of all levels. I don't think I really had a solid novelistic technique until I wrote my third or fourth novel, and in today's publishing world, that would be a serious disadvantage in a career.Ĭreative writing, as a discipline, may not be entirely selfless, despite any beneficial results. When I look at my first novels, they seem to me to have no idea about some technical features of the novel. But since 2005, I've started teaching creative writing in universities, and now teach at Bath Spa. I still think, for a writer who is also an insatiable reader, there is a lot to be said for the self-taught route. When I began, it didn't occur to me to go on a creative writing course – there were few in the late 1980s, and it seemed more pressing to do an academic PhD. I've seen the experience of becoming a writer from both sides. Half the class stay silent the student leaves with ego intact and work unimproved. After a long silence, one of the student's best friends, primed, says: "I really like the way you … " The student says: 'Thank you." Another one says: "I didn't quite understand about the bit where …" The student explains. A student has submitted some work with the words: "I don't think it's very good." The class has (mostly) read it. A furniture-making course might school you in some unsuspected skills, and save you some time.Ī bad creative writing class will look like this.
AND STILL I WRISE WRITER HOW TO
You could teach yourself how to make a chair by taking a lot apart, and experimenting with joists. A good creative writing course will explore underlying principles of good writing – not to impose invented "rules" on writing, but to introduce ways of thinking about writing that are strong and purposeful. But writers can perfectly well have native ability, a feel for language, an inventiveness and a keen eye towards the world and still not quite understand how they can do something well, not once, but repeatedly. Commentators sometimes say that writing can't be taught that beginning writers either have "it", in which case they don't need to be taught, or they don't have "it", in which case money and time is being wasted by the exercise. What lies, or ought to lie, beneath the growth of creative writing as a subject is the conviction that a good deal of the best writing derives from conscious craft, if not all of it.
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