Today is my first day back at my desk, and even though it feels as if summer only began last week autumn is certainly in the air. This is my favourite time of year. There’s something about the slant of morning light in September that makes me think about fresh notebooks and starting back to school. Maybe I’m just a perennial student at heart. Last September I felt a particular pang of envy, and, as I was taking a short break from reading manuscripts anyway, on a whim one Friday night as the new series of Graham Norton was coming on (no, not more Hollywood hard-sell), I signed up for a creative writing course ‘that approaches writing with the rigour of academia and also as a contemplative practice’. I needed a refresher, and wanted some inspiration, and this felt like a perfect fit.
That course was called Story Is A State Of Mind, which is run by Canadian writer Sarah Selecky, author of the story collection The Cake Is For The Party. The course is online and self-paced, which suited me just fine (I’m also something of a hermit at heart). I started the next day, the Saturday, and organised it into a mini retreat of three weeks, three days for each of the seven units.
Those units have the following titles:
* Freewriting * What Starts A Story? * Character * Dialogue * Plot and Drift * Consciousness * Influence
Each unit includes a lecture, readings and reading debriefs, shorter exercises of writing practice, and a longer writing assignment. These materials come in the form of thoughtful audio podcasts (usually between ten and twenty minutes long), alongside print notes in PDF format transcribing the audio. There are also four video lectures, as well as links to other recordings and videos of writers talking about writing; I found the one with Ira Glass particularly incisive. The podcasts occasionally use breezy transition music that succeeds in being ever so energising in setting the tone for the work you have to do. Jaunty jingles clearly rouse me.
Sarah Selecky is in herself the great inspiration within this course. A lot of thought has clearly gone into making everything work in print as well as in podcasts and video, and Sarah brings a warm and inviting presence that is also grounded in a practical grasp of what it takes to write purposefully and effectively. She offers various tips, which range from obvious reminders, such as carrying a notebook with you at all times, to more personal observations on freeing the imagination. The idea of writing as ‘the kind of knowledge that feels like it is coming out of your body’ really makes sense to me, and I love the idea of letting your writing orbit around you in the same way you hold respect for a person you love:
A dear friend or love is always something of a mystery. The beauty of a deep relationship is that you can orbit around each other for years, always learning new things about each other, always trying to understand each other.
My advice: treat your writing with the same kind of respect.
There are many excellent writing prompts too. One of my favourites is a really good twist on the popular ‘I Remember’ exercise.
I gained many fresh insights. I particularly liked the idea of drift as it relates to plot within your drafting:
The art happens when you go off track.
I also brought away a sense of how I need to pay more attention to dialogue in my own writing. Nothing beats good dialogue for bringing life to a story, does it?
Aspects of craft are introduced artfully and easily, and the course gets the balance just right in explaining important concepts and techniques without constraining your creativity. One of the first exercises gets us to understand (and practise) the difference between showing and telling in a straightforward, intuitive way. There are plenty of fun activities for creating characters, and the first-rate lesson on dialogue contains many thoughtful recommendations on, e.g., the importance of subtext. Point of view is explained with clarity. Many introductory courses get schoolma’amy, or bogged down in jargon that belongs in an English literature classroom. Or they are simply boring. This course, however, feels more like a studio in an art school. It possesses a lightness, and energy, and the emphasis is certainly on fostering ways to write spontaneously and easily.
Everything is extremely well organised, and well designed. The choice of readings as explanations and departure points is particularly strong, and includes work by writers such as Karen Joy Fowler, George Saunders, and Tobias Wolff, as well as a number of writers who were new to me. A number of them are Canadian; Canada seems to produce so many noteworthy writers whose work I enjoy, and this added a further freshness of perspective for me. In addition, an interactive style diagnosis quiz in the section on influence presents recommendations for inspirations in further reading based on your own preferences. Apparently I am a Fearless Creative who might enjoy Lorrie Moore or Mary Gaitskill; this is true!
The focus is, on the whole, on the craft of fiction that is most relevant to writing short stories, but would-be novelists should not be deterred – characterisation and dialogue and attention to detail are things any writer needs to practise and grow, and we have to walk across a room before we can run and go the distance of a marathon. And, too, short stories are a joy in themselves. I’ve had a summer reading many good books, and I dare to say that the ones I enjoyed most were books of short stories. No second best.
Best of all, this course gets you to do lots of writing (LOTS), and to finish a short story. I almost filled a notebook with writing – about 140 handwritten pages in three weeks (which, even though it also includes some notes, is significant creative output for me).
Since I took this course in 2015 it has been renamed the Story Course, and Story Is A State Of Mind is now used as the name of the larger online school it belongs to. Other classes include the Story Intensive (a teacher-guided and interactive version of the Story Course, with classmates and fixed deadlines) and the Story Intensive (a critique course with organised feedback for a story from each member of the class). The Story Course currently costs US$250, and you can enrol and start at any time, and take however long you need to complete it.
I can’t recommend Sarah Selecky’s Story Course highly enough. I’m already a believer in and practitioner of contemplative approaches in writing and learning, and I truly enjoyed everything it gave me. If you want an inspiring entry point into creative writing that also offers a grounding in fundamental techniques, this class ranks among the best. An inspiring Friday-night whim!
In my work as a book doctor and writing teacher, I sometimes remember a friend who’s a publisher saying to me that she thinks that creative writing programmes ‘give false hope’.
Hmm. I think this is a valid concern.
However, I am a teacher, as well as an editor, so I do believe in the idea of improvement, and especially in the idea that people can learn.
An MA in creative writing is one possibility, and it can provide structure and community, as well as direction. Someone was singing the praises of such courses in the Guardian only this morning: ‘Will a master’s in creative writing get you a book deal?’ – a variation on a familiar theme of discussing whether writing can be taught.
But an MA can also be expensive, and very often you’ll probably only produce the 15,000 words required for an academic thesis to satisfy the academeaucrats. Which is fine if you want or need an academic qualification. If you also want to complete a novel, you might need to seek out one of the few MA’s that actually require you to finish a novel (and even then, know it’ll still almost certainly need revising). So: research such courses well. Look at their content, look at the teachers, speak (directly) to recent graduates, and go in with your eyes open. And remember that the guy who wrote the article above got his book deal because an editor liked his book enough to want to publish it, and not necessarily because he has an MA.
And don’t start me on the idea of marking academic work. A % attached to a piece of creative writing is an absurdity, but one that the academeaucracy requires. In my view, if writing has to be marked (and it is a big If), it should be Pass/Fail, with maybe (maybe) very rarely, like, every five years, a Distinction for that brilliant thing that is ready to go. After that success should be measured by the author: completing the novel, getting it published, winning a prize, making a living, finally getting the approbation of the disapproving father. A % (often based on pretty subjective criteria) just disappoints, and boxes you in, and that is useless for most any creative enterprise. So please: a Distinction might stroke your ego, but take it with a pinch of mixed metaphors if what you really want is to publish your book. (Not least, you have to finish it first. See: 15,000 words, above.)
One further thought: in the UK, I suggest part-time MA’s spanning a couple of years are often better than one-year courses, because writing and creativity take time to gestate. In the US, an MFA (such as the one I did at Naropa University) usually takes two years full-time, and maybe longer part-time, and I think that shows in the depth and quality of the experience. Plus, it usually takes at least a term/semester to warm up and readjust. One year simply feels too rushed! Spin out the experience, spin out the pleasure.
And if you are thinking of going to university for any reason at all, you really must read this.
Rants over. Let’s put the positive back into the world. Let’s make it new. Let’s not forget that most of the great writers we read had no MAs, but very different qualifications: life experience, yearning, a typewriter, a well-read library. Their writing courses were self-assembled.
With a bit of discipline and imagination, you too can build a course of careful study and reading for yourself:
DIY CREATIVE WRITING: SOME NOTES TOWARDS A SYLLABUS
1. Read. One of the more gratifying things that someone said to me at the festival this last weekend was that she was very grateful to me for making her go away and do a lot of reading after last year’s book doctor session. (And she might know a thing or two, as she did win this year’s prize for the best opening chapter. Though I’m not taking the credit! Her book idea is very good, and she really can write too.) I always always always dish out a load of reading recommendations, and sometimes I worry I am being a bit too schoolma’am. So this was validating.
They might include (roughly in the order I’d recommend):
* Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction (the classic textbook, which came out in an affordable edition in 2019) * Ursula Le Guin, Steering The Craft * Constance Hale, Sin And Syntax (for help with prose style) * Stephen King, On Writing * Susan Bell, The Artful Edit * Francine Prose, Reading Like A Writer * good books on story structure, such as various written on screenwriting, e.g., Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey (though remember that fiction is not film, especially with regards to narration – fiction writers do not have to rely entirely/mostly on foreground action) * Sandra Newman & Howard Mittelmark, How Not To Write A Novel (much mirth here too) * Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones (fabulous for inspiring people, especially at the beginning) * John Gardner, The Art Of Fiction * Scarlett Thomas, Monkeys With Typewriters * Alice LaPlante, The Making Of A Story (another textbook, including short stories that are discussed along the way)
Note: these are books and resources about writing. You might have to research other stuff too (what it was like to live in the 1970s, the workings of an astrolabe), but here I am talking about the focused study of writing. If you’ve not done this, you might gain from it.
2. Also reread your favourite books – but this time as a writer. See what makes them work (Francine Prose’s book listed above is great for helping with that). I often recommend listening to old faves as audiobooks for a different experience of them.
3. Get circulating in that world of writing. Take yourself to conferences, writing festivals, or conventions. Attend readings, talks, and literary salons such as those run by Words Away, the Riff-Raff, or TLC, and also check out what’s on at your local bookshops. Join Twitter and use social media, and participate in online communities. Blog, review. In fact, in some genres this is almost a requirement. Plus, it’s fun, and at the very least you’ll make friends. You’ll also grow your writer’s instinct.
4. [Updated January 2018.] Think about taking a course. Creative writing is now an industry, and some course are better or more suitable than others, for sure. I strongly recommend you get a direct personal recommendation from someone who’s actually taken a specific course with a specific teacher (and paid money to do so). Maybe try to talk (not email) with some of the teachers, and also consider who the other students might be (your peers can make a hell of a difference to your experience).
A sequence of online courses that I recommend highly is run by the University of British Columbia on the edX platform – read my review of How To Write A Novel here. The teaching materials on that course are probably among the best I’ve seen in creative writing.
I have also seen very good results from the self-editing course run by Debi Alper and Emma Darwin for Jericho Writers. It’s short (six weeks), and focused, and it’s taught by two very good and very experienced teachers who really know what they’re talking about. It might be an idea to consider a class such as this once you have a first draft of a manuscript and it’s ready for more work.
There are plenty of other courses too – online, residential, and regular classroom: Curtis Brown Creative, Faber Academy, The Literary Consultancy, Masterclass, Arvon Foundation, Write Here, Word Factory, London Lit Lab, Writers’ HQ, or the Guardian, as well as classes run by museums and libraries and regional writing bodies. Some are one-offs lasting a day or an afternoon, some are run over a weekend or a block of several days, or once a week for several weeks. Some offer more interaction with tutors and other writers than others; some are self-paced, while others have more fixed durations. You can find all sorts of different topics too, e.g., inspirations in getting started, characterisation, structure and story, drafting, publishing. I myself run workshops and masterclasses on creativity as well as craft topics such as plotting, character, voice, and revising and editing. Contact me if you’d like to be added to a mailing list, or if you are interested in my mentoring services.
And how about going to Boulder and immersing yourself in a week or two of the love and crazy wisdom of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program at my alma mater Naropa University? Such residential programmes and writing retreats can be found all over the world, e.g., Write It Down, Skyros, various locations across the UK. If that sounds a bit Let Them Eat Cake (or Millet Bars, in the case of Boulder) it’s cheaper than an MA, and possibly more transforming. Combining writing and learning and travel can be extremely liberating for your creative self.
It is in fact good to attend a variety of courses and events: practical, commercial, artsy, academic. By exposing yourself to different styles of teaching or different views of writing, you can work out your own process and needs. Also take on board the fact that, though there are times when feedback is essential, there are other times simply for finding inspiration. Taking classes in other fields can also inform your work in some way.
And again: seek out direct recommendations. Twitter can be a good place to find out more.
Also, it can make sense to use fresh projects or new ideas for exercises you try out in your studies. The task of learning can be complicated by your attachment to an existing or intended pet project, so it can be good to get out of your own way. Your labour of love can make you too outcome-oriented (is this good enough to publish?), when at this stage what you might really need is to focus on the more immediate goals of learning the craft (is my characterisation strong enough? should I try out another point of view just to see what happens?). It’s usually easier to free yourself for experimentation in technique and style when you’re working on something fresh. Short stories are great places to practise writing – and are also great outcomes in and of themselves, requiring less time, commitment and resources than a novel.
5. Use time wisely. It’s also a good idea sometimes to put a limit on various activities such as courses, as you can become a writing groupie, and mostly we probably want you to be a writer. (Nothing against groupies, but that is more about community and socialising and friendships – do that on the side too, for sure.) Create long-term goals, with deadlines. And not just deadlines of daily word counts, and for The End. Among your deadlines, you might actually take a break from writing your masterpiece for a bit, and decide to spend six months reading some of these books on writing, and maybe taking a short course or two.
6. Oh yes, and among all this set aside time actually to write. Maybe even do something like NaNoWriMo, which tasks you on clattering out a novel of 50,000 words in the month of November. I have conflicted feelings about NaNoWriMo, but a bit of bingeing doesn’t hurt for one month a year.
7. Find readers. Writing groups, reading groups, workshops. In person and online: I recommend working both ways, so that real time and eye contact can be balanced with reading that takes place at slightly more of a distance. Consider other potential beta readers among booklovers you’ve gathered down the years (and if you’ve not been gathering them already, maybe now’s the time to start).
You can also get professional reads from writers or editors, or work with a mentor; the cost of these services can vary, and it’s worth getting a personal recommendation. As I work independently, I tend to quote on an individual basis so that I can tailor what I offer according to need, but literary consultancies usually tell you their fees on their websites.
Integrate the different and sometimes contradictory things you hear, until your instinct knows what you need to do to make the writing the best it can be, or what you want it to be.
8. And reading and giving editorial feedback on other people’s work-in-progress will turn you into an editor, and you’ll gain perspective on your own writing too. Who knows, maybe you’ll even develop another career as editor or teacher yourself.
9. Think about a budget. Courses and editorial services or mentoring will have a cost attached, as will books. But look out for various offerings, e.g., via writing organisations – TLC provides info on regional writing bodies (as well as many other useful web links); sign up for emails from your local body with regular updates on events and opportunities in writing as well as publishing.
9. Most of all: listen. Listen to other people, but most of all slow down and listen to yourself, and listen to your own writing.
[I added a few minor updates here in January/February 2018 and September 2019, mostly to points 1 and 4 above. As the landscape of creative writing is always changing, I shall be overhauling these resources to reflect the widening range of available offerings. There are lots of workshops and courses and publishing events popping up all over – it’s great to see so many opportunities giving writers alternatives to the MA model.]
