Whatever Happened to Creative Writing?

 

Edinburgh days.

The writing career I embarked on many years ago seems unrecognisable to me now. I studied English Language and Literature at Edinburgh University where there was a thriving community of young people who wrote in their spare time or who just loved literature, poetry, theatre, for itself and not as a means to an end, not as a way to promote 'wellbeing' or primarily as a way to tackle various 'issues' - although we did write about issues that seemed important to us. But the practice itself, the 'doing' was the thing. We seemed to enjoy books, plays, poems with less angst, less fear of censure, more freedom to just be ourselves. Sensitivity readers were unknown. Beta readers were unknown. We wrote because we needed to write, loved to write. We learned by writing a lot, and by working with a trusted editor or - in the case of drama - with a trusted director. And if that seems like nostalgia, maybe it is.

A friend of mine organised poetry festivals and they were sold out. Young people came along in droves to listen to poets. The vast majority of my fellow students were, like me, from comprehensive schools. Years later, when I was working at another Scottish university, they organised a poetry event, with a few well known poets. Even with the benefit of social media, hardly anyone came. An experienced and successful playwright, working in the department for a while, generously offered one to one advice sessions to students on film and theatre courses. Again, nobody came. He couldn't understand it and neither could I.

It sometimes seems as though the focus on the formality of the actual courses, the pressing need to get the degree at the end of it, means that the joy in actual creative practice has disappeared.

The original Writers in Residence schemes meant that a writer with a certain level of experience would be given a residency at a university, and would be expected to do some hours of teaching. This would normally be a mixture of workshops, tutorials, one to one advice sessions and the very occasional lecture which would often be open to the public. Writers were autonomous and organised their own timetables. It would be no more than, for example, 15 or 20 hours per week, including preparation time, but the salary would be for 30 or 40 hours, so it was assumed that the writer would have a room of their own and about 20 hours of paid time to write. When I was at Edinburgh, Norman MacCaig was writer in residence, with Robert Garioch before him. They were there to encourage creative writing within the student body, and they usually did. 

As the years went by, there was a sort of 'mission creep'. You started to hear that universities were taking advantage, paying for 15 hours, expecting 30. The paid 'time to write' practically disappeared. On new campuses, individual rooms were hard to come by. At some new campuses, lecturers' rooms were often shared and (appallingly, even though I love my Kindle!) without bookshelves. 

Partly to address this problem, partly, I think, to raise its profile, Creative Writing became an academic subject. I remember that the change was just beginning as I was finishing my Masters in the 70s. Now there are degrees in Creative Writing all over the place, but these courses are - in my opinion - seldom practical enough. The Uni Guide admits that 'unemployment rates are currently looking quite high overall, with salaries on the lower side.' Typical graduate job areas, the site goes on to admit, are as 'sale assistants and retail cashiers.'  

Many graduates emerge into ever more shark infested publishing waters, thinking they are going to get an agent and a deal, but few do. And nobody ever seems to tell them that getting an agent won't even guarantee getting a publisher.

I saw an ad for a so called Writer in Residence for Edinburgh University a few years ago and realised that Norman MacCaig, arguably one of Scotland's finest poets, wouldn't have been qualified to apply, because the position required a degree in Creative Writing. That seemed to me to encapsulate what writing at university level has become. This is nothing to do with quality or talent, because many of these lecturers will be very talented indeed. Writing pays so little nowadays that most of us have to do something else to make ends meet. (Sometimes as sales assistants and retail cashiers!) But once you subject your creativity, your words and ideas, to the kind of rigorous academic analysis demanded by these courses, it can disappear like snow off a dyke. It's not the teaching that's the problem. I taught EFL for several years and wrote plenty while I was doing it. It's the intensive and persistent involvement in other people's creativity that can damage your own.

Every year a handful of graduates will get publishing deals, but many more won't, and even those who do will seldom make any money. Which wouldn't matter too much, as long as they loved what they did and used it elsewhere. I was astonished some years ago when speaking to a class of young people doing a Creative Writing course, to find that only two or three of them ever did any writing of their own, (nor even much reading) beyond the amount prescribed by the course. They had none of the passion for the work that dedicated writers, young and old, still have. The desperate compulsion to write.  Which made me think that they might have been better doing a good general arts course and reading widely - as we did back when we still queued for cheap theatre tickets, went to poetry festivals and - if we were so inclined - wrote whatever we liked, obsessively, whenever we could.