Three decades ago only eight universities in the UK offered postgraduate degree courses in creative writing. Today that number has increased to 200, with a further 200 offering courses at undergraduate level. That’s on top of all the undergraduate degree courses and modules - and the eleven thousand short-term courses and evening classes on the subject up and down the country. These days you can get an MA in poetry or writing for children; a BA inwriting about yourself. Hell, you can even submit your first novel for a PhD. So what if it’s never published? At least you’ll get to call yourself ‘doctor’.
But there are worms in this rosy apple of academia. Like the Ugly Sisters at the Royal Ball, not everyone in the academy welcomes the late arrival of this glittering young Cinderella in their midst. ‘We are the thorn in the flesh of the academy,’ says Sue Gee of Middlesex University. ‘They don’t like us, but they like our fees. So many students, wanting to write...’
Creative writing is not a proper academic discipline, complain some tenured mortarboards. It’s not a proper vocational course, carp others. It’s a soft option for lazy students. It can’t be assessed. It should be taught by professional lecturers, not practising writers. (‘What next?’ exclaimed one Harvard academic on hearing that Vladimir Nabokov had been appointed professor at Harvard. ‘Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?’)
Which is why we thought it was time to dispel a couple of myths about the teaching of creative writing.
MYTH 1: Creative writing can’t be taught
If you’ve ever signed up for a creative writing course, you will probably have had a dinner-party or pub encounter with the man who says, ‘How can you be taught how to write? Surely it’s an ability you’re born with?’ (He’s the same man, incidentally, who, on hearing that you’re writing a novel, will quip, ‘Ooh, I’ d better be careful what I say, or you’ll put me in your book’.)
The ‘writing gene’ theory was challenged well over 200 years ago by Walter Besant – doughty founder of the Society of Authors – who argued that would-be authors should realise ‘that Fiction is an Art, and, like all other Arts, that it is governed by certain laws, methods and rules, which it is their first business to learn’. What’s more, ‘the laws of Fiction may be laid down and taught with as much precision as the laws of harmony, perspective and proportion’.
Besant’s assertions were supported by poet T S Eliot in his essay expounding the 99-per-cent perspiration theory of creativity. ‘The larger part of the labour of an author is critical labour,’ he wrote, ‘the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing.’ What Eliot referred to as ‘this frightful toil’ was, he believed, eminently teachable. ‘lt’s astonishing that people still claim that writing can’t be taught’, says Linda Anderson, who ran the premier MA at Lancaster for years. ‘No one questions the role of teaching in the other arts. Everyone accepts you have to be taught to paint, or play an instrument.’
Anderson says you only have to read the early work of some top writers to see that the ‘larger part’ of good writing is by no means innate. ‘lf you compare the first paragraph of Herman Melville’s first novel with the opening of Moby Dick the difference in quality is striking. And William Faulkner’s first books were unreadable.’
This suggests there may be more potentially great writers around than most people realise. ‘If I’ve learnt any thing in over 20 years of teaching,’ says poet Gillian Allnutt, ‘it’s never to assume someone can’t write. I’ve seen people write superficial banal stuff for months, until the right exercise or subject matter suddenly lifts them to a higher level.’
So much for the ‘larger part’ of creative writing ability. What about the remainder? l have to admit here that every creative writing tutor I spoke to did believe that a proportion of the writing gift was innate. But I’d like to question where that so-called ‘natural ability’ comes from. Does an A S Byatt or a Martin Amis write well because they inherited the writing gene from their bookish forebears? Or is it, as I believe, because they were steeped in sophisticated language and letters from infancy and grew up assuming ‘writer’ was an attainable ambition?
So which elements can be taught? ‘Technical matters,’ says veteran novelist and writing tutor David Lodge. ‘Point of view, narrative voice, frame-breaking, time-shifting etc. – and to entertain a wider range of possibilities in these respects than the writer might have discovered independently.’ ‘Openness,’ says prize-winning short story writer Ali Smith, who has taught at UEA and elsewhere. ‘Getting people to focus on their senses. And editing. When I teach writing I always end up teaching people how to edit their work.’
‘Craft,’ says Lancaster alumna and debut novelist Monique Roffey. ‘If I hadn’t done the MA I’d never have finished my novel. I didn’t know about plot structure. I didn’t know how to critique my own work. I had no idea what I was doing.’
MYTH 2 People with ability will succeed without help
‘I’ve seen people with enormous raw talent who are completely unable to control it,’ says Margaret Wilkinson, who’s been teaching at postgraduate level for well over two decades. ‘They produce breathtaking fragments in workshops but have no idea how to develop them into finished pieces of work.’ Wilkinson propounds what she calls the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ theory of writing. ‘You need four things to be a writer,’ she says. ‘Natural ability, craft, commitment – and the intelligence to profit from good feedback.
‘Lots and lots of people have three of the four, just as Sleeping Beauty had three gifts from the three good fairies. But if the fourth one is missing, and you’re cursed by the bad fairy, you’ll stay asleep as a writer forever.’
A good tutor can save people years of flailing around in the wilderness. How long would Pat Barker have continued with her ‘polite ladies’ novels without Angela Carter’s electrifying advice on an early Arvon course, to write about the Northern working-class background she came from? ‘I’d rewritten my first novel five times,’ recalls Livi Michael, now an established literary and children’s author. ‘Then I took it to an Arvon course led by Jane Rogers and she told me to change the structure. She was absolutely right. I don’t think I’d have thought of that without her.’
Both Margaret and Jane are core tutors on Mslexia's online Novel School – just saying...
MYTH 3 Creative writing courses create clones
‘Who killed poetry?’ wailed Joseph Epstein at the peak of the US creative writing explosion in the 1980s, lambasting courses for drowning the ‘divine art’ in a flood of two-a-penny ‘workshop poems’. Fiction teaching also came in for a drubbing, with John Aldridge claiming that it produced homogenised mechanical writing he dubbed ‘assembly-line fiction’.
In the UK, two decades later, self-taught author Will Self joined the chorus of nay-sayers. ‘Creative writing [teaching] encourages blandness and uniformity,’ he declared. ‘Even writers such as McEwan and lshiguro [who studied at UEA], whom I admire a lot, l wouldn’t call great stylists.’ But David Fenza, Director of the Associated Writing Programmes in the US, begged to differ. On the contrary, he says, the increase in degree-level creative writing has ‘propelled US letters to new levels of accomplishment’.
Ask the editor of any British literary mag and they’ll admit that the standard of US submissions is streets ahead of most UK work they see. A creative writing course may not be able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but it can make a pretty neat leather wallet.
And talking of clones, it’s worth remembering the clones that result from the lack of good guidance. Agents and editors alike told me that untutored writers – particularly those who don’t read – tend to produce the same cliched images, characters and plot lines over and over again. The expansion of writing courses in the UK has had another result too, in addition to raising standards. ‘The melting pot of writers is growing and includes more and more of the people who have been excluded in the past,’ says Gillian Allnutt. ‘So we’re seeing more women coming through, more black people, disabled people, old people from all sorts of backgrounds.’ So much for the clone myth.
None of this is to say that writing courses are perfect. Far from it. Even at postgraduate level there are tutors with inappropriate experience; students with unrealistic expectations; frustration and disappointment as well as insight and exhilaration. And no creative writing course can ever (ever) guarantee publication. Despite these caveats, it’s worth pointing out that there are precious few short cuts in the life of an author. A good creative writing course is one of them.
This is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared in Issue 21 of Mslexia.
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