The
Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia is justly famous.
Less well-known is the undergraduate version of the course, also part of
the wider Creative Writing programme created thirty years ago at UEA by
Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. Their aim in creating the programme
was not to ensure fame and fortune for its participants (though this is
always a welcome bonus) but to give students a chance to really
concentrate on their work in a supportive atmosphere. As Andrew Motion,
the Poet Laureate, explains in his foreword, the courses are meant to ‘help
students to develop their skills, to search more deeply into their
selves and their imaginations, to experiment and to diversify.’ All
of which sounds utterly marvellous if you’re sitting in the seminar
room with Ms Well-known Author and a handful of other students, all of
them focusing on your manuscript, but how can you achieve that effect if
you’re somewhere else, perhaps working in less than ideal conditions?
The
Creative Writing Coursebook
is an attempt to recreate at least part of the undergraduate course
experience in book form. It won’t supply the wide-eyed, dry-mouthed
panic as Sir Famous Poet sets to work on your magnum opus, but it
certainly does make a determined effort to put as much of the rest of
the experience on the page as it possibly can. Indeed, one of the most
remarkable achievements of this book is that it really does feel as
though you’re participating in a series of class discussions: the
authors are there, offering advice, suggestions, thoughts on the nature
of writing; they pick up ideas from one another, expand on them, explore
them. The effect is quite uncanny.
The
Coursebook follows the structure of the undergraduate writing
programme, but the undergraduate writing programme doesn’t follow the
usual conventions of ‘how-to-write’ books. Instead, its structure is
rather more subtle, flowing from the development of ideas to the
creation of a piece in a way that is much more organic and more
realistic. There are no neatly packaged gobbets of information on ‘finding
ideas’, ‘characterisation, ‘dialogue’ or ‘plot’. Instead,
the book is broken down into three main sections, ‘Gathering’, ‘Shaping’
and ‘Finishing’, reflecting the three main activities of any writer.
You will find the ‘where do you get your ideas’ section in
‘Gathering’ and a long discussion of ‘characterisation’ in ‘Shaping’,
but presented in such a way as to reflect the process of writing,
rather than as individual ingredients in a recipe to produce the
perfect, best-selling novel.
Creative
Writing classes at UEA are taught by writers, in the belief that they
are probably those best qualified to talk about the matter, and this
philosophy is reflected in the Coursebook. Writers talk about
their own approaches to particular aspects of the craft, and suggest
exercises with which to explore their topics. The emphasis of the
contributors is on sharing their own experiences in the hope that this
may help students, rather than laying down hard-and-fast rules for
guaranteed success. At the same time, it is gently pointed out, more
than once, that slavish imitation of these suggestions is probably not
the best way forward. But all the writers stress that it’s up to
the student to put in the work; the tutors can’t do it for you.
This is almost certainly the most profound lesson offered in the Coursebook.
It
really is such an immense pleasure to read a book like this; even though
I write non-fiction whereas the Coursebook focuses on fiction and
poetry, I felt I learned a lot from it about the business of writing,
and about how to look at other people’s work. It’s also a pleasure
because this is such a writerly book, written by people who know
what’s really important to a writer. They write about craft and
technique, but they talk about the philosophy of writing too, and about
their own motivations in writing. It’s this I find so inspiring, being
able to see inside writers’ heads, however briefly, and fathom the
mysteries of what they do, and realising that I’ve got the potential
to do it too.
In
the book’s introduction, Julia Bell talks about the importance of
being not a best-seller, but of being able to ‘generate and shape a
successful piece of creative work’, something that will go on to give
us pleasure throughout our lives. That is the strength of the writing
course, and I think it’s the strength of this book too. It is so
thoroughly imbued with a love of and respect for writing it is hard to
believe that anyone could come away from the Coursebook not
determined to produce something wonderful. It
is probably the best book on the business of writing that I’ve ever
read.
