Writing Courses: Myths Exposed

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Writing Courses: Myths Exposed

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/the-independe...

Im not sure that London's Kingston Univerity's Vice Chancellor will be delighted by Kureishi's candour...

smiley

 

I'd agree with him.  Which is why it's unfair that literary agents focus so much on them - especially the prestigious ones like UEA.  I get tired of reading stuff by writers who aren't as good as some of the writers on ABC, but they've got nice publishing deals - and when you read their bios, it's very often 'MA in Creative Writing' from somewhere or other.  I was recently checking the past winners on a BBC writing competition, and they nearly all had some form of creative writing 'qualification'.  But just as a teaching qualification doesn't necessarily make a good teacher, or a pile of NVQs doesn't make a good carer...

I got a place on a CW MA a few years back.  I didn't take it up in the end for lack of money.  When I told the convenor that I was going to have to go it alone instead, he said quite openly 'That's a shame - because we have good connections with some leading agencies, and you'll be guaranteed of getting to the top of their pile.'

Maybe.  I don't know.  Maybe it's just a silly prejudice of mine.

My hero, Carver, did CW courses - but he was really lucky to have, as Kureishi says, that special mentor in John Gardner.

Totally agree Stan.

 

Kureishi is one of my heroes, he is from the same wacky London Borough as myself and I love The Buddha of Suburbia. Even if I had the cash and the committment to do a Creative Writing course it would probably do my head in.I am sure it would be a small group of self-pressured and course-pressured students all being nice to one another, hopefully in an authentic way and yet all desperately wanting to hang on to their personal self-belief of 'I am by far the most talented.' Nightmare in Hell, no way would I consider it.       Elsie
 

LOL elsie!

 

I did the Open University Creative Writing courses and they were very good and useful. I also did an MA Creative Writing at Glasgow (unpaid for as yet) and it was useful too. What it gives you is people that are serious about writing. They're not employed to flatter you. All of them are skilled writers. They cannot sprinkle magic dust and make you better, but they can help you save time. Hanif Kureshi got a free ride in theatre and then film. His books are best sellers. He's a profesor of literature and he's made it. What he says has weight. 'Fuck prose nobody's going to read your book.' That's true, but we shouldn't be too proud to take all the help we can along the way. 

 

Well, CM you are full of surprises and your  writing's pretty good. I think Glasgow Uni would be the best place for aspiring poets. Tom Leonard only retired from employment there as professor of poetry a couple of years ago and his opinion pieces are good too, and Edwin Morgan spent his entire working life there and Liz Lochead teaches there, or used to - you probably got to meet them. It's good to hear it worked well for you     Elsie

It's really valuable hearing experienced writer's views on the MA. Ummed and aahed over applying for it last year, but didn't due to cash. 

 

I think you have an important point, celticman.  Yes... help.  Maybe there's a kind of bull-headedness in my aversion to the idea (and maybe it is just stupid prejudice), because I'm always thinking to myself 'I need help with this.'  I suppose I'm also wary about the kind of help I might get, though.

I know someone who also did an OU CW course (don't think it was an MA), and she got in touch one night a little bit flustered because of something her tutor had said about one of her stories.  She sent me the story - I can't remember it now - and the critique.  And I just thought 'Does this guy know what he's talking about?'  I agreed with her - not because she was a friend, but because I thought she'd done the right thing in this story.  I couldn't really see what he was on about.

But maybe I, too, was wrong.  Maybe he had the answer after all, and we'd both missed it.  He was, after all, a published writer.

But maybe it also points to that other thing of subjectivity.  We all read stuff we think is crap, but which other - perhaps more discerning people - think is brilliant.  On the other hand, I hold in high esteem one particular pair of film writers (the Coen brothers) who a friend - a film studies academic at UKC - regularly pulls to pieces for me to prove how wrong I am.  What do I know?  Not much, it seems!  But I know what I like!

I remember reading how Carver was once taken to task by Richard Ford about a story he'd written (The Calm, I think)  Ford thought he'd got the point of view wrong.  Carver took his point - but disagreed.  I could see what Ford was driving at - but I still prefer the way Carver wrote it.  So I guess even the best of them aren't always right.  Or maybe they're just right in a different way, if you see what I mean.

A lot of my favourite writers are the product of writing courses. On the other hand, go back a generation, and most of my favourite writers from that era are a product of the war - it doesn't mean if I start shooting at you you'll suddenly become a better writer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You could try it though, Terrence!  Anything that inspires... even the prospect of a bullet up the backside!

It's simple, if you buy a piano, it doesn't make you a muscian. There's been an explosion of writing courses. It's big business and easy money. Any one of those that post regularly on here, if they could afford it, would get an MA in Creative Writing. It's a worthless bit of paper, as useful as an O'Grade woodwork. But, as you pointed out Stan, agents and publishers get tens of thousands of unsolicited material. They look for security, where there is none, because nobody really knows outside the usual suspects, what the public is going to fall for next. Shiny bits of paper with some University on it is a starting point, but never a finishing point. I remember reading someone's work on here and they were having a debate with another 'author' on here and both were saying the same thing. Don't worry about spelling and grammar, the editors will sort that out for you. Yeh, well, let's just say there is a baseline minimal of good grammar, but there is no ceiling as to how good it should be, or indeed what good actually means. Robert Pirsig's idea of quality? Who knows? I don't. I was reading one of Harpie's old posts the other day and she wrote about how she  to get home because she needed to be writing. Her priorities were her family and her writing. I can understand that. I too spend long hours bashing away. It's quite easy to follow my process, or indeed progress. More, or less, all I've written is on this site. None of it publishable. What I object to with Kureshi is he comes out with this kind of self-centred pish and nobody mentions what about when you first started in theatre, who helped you there in your rent-controlled flat in Central London? Who helped you develop the script of My Beautiful Laundrette? Who edits your books?    The self-made man. Hardly.
 

 

What makes you think none of your work is publishable, celticman? 

Yeah... I understand that thing, too, about priorities.  I've basically set aside and sacrificed so much in my life... because I've had this bug in my head from the age of 10.  I've only taken jobs with regular hours, never taken the overtime options, so I could get home to write.  I've spent holidays at home, writing.  It largely cost me a marriage.  When we sold our house afterwards, instead of spending my bit of money doing something like traveling the world or setting up a business - I used it up on the rent to sit at home and write unpublishable stuff.  40 years of living with that bug, and at least the last 15 of trying to make it pay its way.  There are so many other things I could have done.  But it's always come either first or a close second.  A lot of effort and sweat and tears for little in terms of financial return.  A friend in a local writing group won the Readers' Digest 100-Word Story competition recently.  £1,000 - or a tenner a word.  That easily tops all I've ever made out of writing.  But it's not about that, is it.  The bug's always there, for better or worse.  Sometimes I wonder about that MA course - but no.  I don't think I'd do it now, even if I could afford it.

Some of my family think I'm mad.  They've all made money.  My brother - whatever he turns his hand to, he makes money.  They look at me, I'm sure, and think 'Isn't it about time he gave it up.'  It's like mental health.  They don't understand, and never will.  I don't think I even understand it myself.

Stan,I was interested to read your opinion and some of your life here. As you know, I read In the Day simply because Tony Cook had placed it on a table at the York meet. I had not not read any of it on Abc and had no notions of what lay inside the cover.

it seems to me now that you have been writing with two aims in mind.

To write as best you can.

To gain fame and fortune from your work.

 

The second aim may never happen. Get over it! Don't let the pain eat you alive, You are worth more than that both as a writer and, though I only know you through your writings, I am sure as a human too.

As for the first - the book's brilliant and you know that, or should. Plenty of us here on Abc have been telling you that for over a month now.

'nil illegitmii carborundum terra firma' - don't let the b*stards grind you down into the ground.

All the best        Elsie

 

Thanks very much for your kind words, Elsie. smiley

I've got to disagree a bit with you, though.  I may have started out when I was a kid with some vague notion of fame and wealth - but I came to accept long ago that not only was that a far-fetched idea, but also it's the wrong reason to write in the first place.  Yes, my aim has been to write as best I can.  But I also do it because it's simply something I have to do.  Like I said, it's that brain bug.  I can't not write.  I had a 5-year block when I immersed myself in work and tried to forget it.... but it was a miserable time.  It felt like I'd lost my life purpose.

It would just be nice, though, to make some kind of a living from it.  I'll stick my neck out and say all writers who are serious about what they do - those that do it other than seeing it as a route to making a lottery fortune - want at least that kind of validation: to be paid something for their labours.  I live cheaply - always have - again, because writing has always come first.  I can manage on £10k a year.  This last year, I've managed on less.  If I could make even a third of that amount out of writing, I'd be happy - because it would buy me more time to write.  But even that amount would be a stretch.  Here's David Morrell, author of First Blood:

"You could tell the bad writers from the good writers because the bad writers were motivated by money and ego, whereas the good writers practiced their craft for the insistent reason that they had to be writers, that they had no choice, that something inside them  was gnawing at their imaginations and the festering pressure had to be released."

no elsie, I didn't meet anybody. I did it through the internet. That suited me better. Actually, you don't need to meet anyone, all you need is their writing. Universities in ten years will all be online.

 

The benefits of writing courses are simple: you might buy yourself a breathing space, might even be located around a nice man-made lake with brutal ziggurats (they are as any Aztec will tell you very bad for your health) but the unknown factor is the critics in your class. My experience was of one bored tutor who spent the entire two hour seminar texting his boyfriend about their dinner arrangements but there was one great fellow writer who offered incisive nuts and bolts criticism, not the sort of unhelpful guff like 'try surrendering to polyphony and see where the whispers take you...'  You might meet that fellow critic on line or in a library but that sort of friend in the early days is vital. 

My other abiding memory is in the interview all three writers and myself had matching moleksin notebooks and there was a confusing moment when the interview ended and we all picked up the wrong one.

There also has (I think rightly) been a backlash against creative writing courses and the UEA... it encourages a smooth house style with similar ingredients, it can look accomplished, showy and formulaic-- a paragraph seen from fifteen viewpoints including the protagonist, his galoshes and a goldfish.  But what does that initial accomplished impression lead to?  just that -- a showy and unconvincing smoothness-- that makes me groan after a couple of paragraphs.

I was writing following my own instincts for unusual first person stories but the stories were coming out in big undigested chunks, with weird plots. I didn't know where it would lead. The course initially boosts your  confidence but then made me feel insecure so I tried to smooth it all down and became more formal and third person. I ended up boring myself and now I'm trying to remember what it might be like to write for fun without the pressure of a finished and saleable product.

A more serious threat to emerging writers is that publishers are obsessed by America, they want American things, American guilt about war, Americans in their Eyes...

 

 

Nothing guarantees publication sucess if publication's what you're after. I occasionally have notions that a course may help me develop and hone and sweat it out and moan and immerse myself in my work in a way that's never happened. It's a fantasy. Could probably do that with one teacher rather than a course. Probably won't happen. The reality may be that at the bottom of the slushpile, trying to write as something else, insecurities get even worse, whilst the tutor is texting her boyfirend and people fall far down into the abyss of writer's loathing, leaving just a pen on the cliff edge and a spidery incoherent message on a rock. 

 

Vera Clark, don't you dare sign up for a writing course. You are one of the most talented ‘wordsmiths’ I know. A writing course, run by a bunch of pretentious know-it-all tossers would be equivalent of combing and schooling all the talent out of you and finally getting your mum to lick a hanky and clean the art out off your face.

 

Actually it wouldn’t. You’re too good for that, but you would end up walking out half way through the first session.

 

I can’t imagine anything worse than sitting in a room surrounded by an agglomeration of writers. Well, tight shoes perhaps.

 

Celticman – you might want to rephrase yesterday’s insight into you spending hours bashing away. Just a thought :-)

 

Having done a few CW evening classes, I've got to agree with you, Karl. 

Memories of...

'What's the situation?'

'What's it about?'

'What theme are you trying to explore here?'

I wrote a short play once - kind of a 'Waiting for Godot' thing, with 2 blokes on an abandoned tube station waiting for a train that wasn't coming.  Bit of a piss-take, really.  But people liked it.  Then the theatre director, who was tutoring the course, said to me...

'So... what's the overall meaning of it?'

Same answer, I guess, Beckett probably gave.

Fuck knows.

Why does there always have to be 'meaning', anyway.  And what's 'meaning' for me won't necessarily be 'meaning' for you.

 

A lot of people were writing things that they thought the tutor would like, which didn't seem to be quite the way to do it.

Back in 1984 I had the idea for a long rambling existential-type poem about life, war and peace and journeys. Mainly serious and with a comical element. It was to be called The Watershed and was to be set in the toilets of Stranraer boat terminal. I had the notion when trying to get some kip there, the station staff were OK and I was a roving peace camper at the time travelling between Scotland and Ireland, a journey I made more than once. I never got round to writing it down. This is a truthful memory, All the best                 Elsie

surprise  Point taken, Karl. Move away from the anky

 

This is fascinating and makes me realise how ignorant and naiive I am about writing.  But, as Stan points out so admirably, some (all?) of us would just write anyway.  I've said again and again what a godsend this site is and I stick by it.  My 400+ scribbles would otherwise be in half a dozen shoe-boxes (...what's that?).  I suppose it all comes down to what you want out of it.  It would be nice to write something good that in some way contributed something and hung around for a while after I've gone.  I've got no wish to take a course in writing, but wouldn't begrudge anyone else doing it.  For me, writing for a living would only result in dramatic and terminal weight-loss.  Good luck to anyone who can hack it.

Parson Thru

I remember Wayne Dyer telling a story about someting that happened when he was in school. They were asked to study a particular poem and write down what they think the meaning was. He got it all wrong and got a 'C' but he still thought he'd got it right, so as the poet was still alive he wrote to him and explained what he felt the poem was all about. The poet replied, "You nailed it! That's exactly what I meant when I wrote that poem."

 

So he took the letter to school and asked if he could have his grade changed.

 

The teacher patiently explained that poets are a strange breed and you'll quite often find that sometimes even they don't really know what they're trying to convey in their own poems.

 

Dyer's grade remained a 'C' and he laughs telling the story that somewhere in the archives of that school sits a 'C' grade for something he got exactly correct.  

 

F***ing brilliant, Karl. Just goes to show that once you show something to somebody else it's not really yours anymore.

Parson Thru

'Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.'

Flannery O'Connor