Everything I wish I'd learned on my creative writing course

However, there's a lot that can be left unsaid on these courses, in my experience. Things which, once I had that fabled publisher's acceptance letter in my hand (metaphorically speaking, as it was an email), I could have done with knowing.

The biggest lesson I never learned at university was the workflow from acceptance to publication. I said several times as I went through my first publishing experience that I'd been prepared more for failure than for success. The courses I'd been on had focused a lot on "trying to get published" but not on "being published" or the hinterlands between the two states. I'd thought, naively, that once my book was accepted it would be polished and perfected by a whole team of people - and that was true! But between every single step of that process, that book also comes back to me, for revisions and changes.