In defence of creative writing schools

Creative writing is one of the few growth areas in the humanities. Thirty years ago, such courses were rare, with the famous exception of Malcolm Bradbury’s University of East Anglia programme that helped Kazuo Ishiguro, among others. Now more than 100 universities offer them as well as publishers (Faber), literary agencies (Curtis Brown), newspapers (The Guardian) and independent organisations (Arvon) to mention only some. Even as sales of serious fiction have stalled the demand to join the writers’ guild has grown. (In a similar irony the growth in journalism courses has come about while newspaper circulation is plummeting.)

Getting a regular creative writing gig can be a blessing for published authors in a time of pinched advances. Speak to writers privately, though, and a good number resent having to take on teaching roles. More than one has described the situation to me as a con in which aspiring writers with little chance of publication financially support established ones. Others are contemptuous of their students’ lack of talent. These courses are the frequent butt of satire—Todd Solondz’s film Storytelling, for example, or the latest series of Lena Dunham’s Girls, in which the main character attends the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In Muriel Spark’s final novel, The Finishing School, a teacher tries to destroy a more talented pupil.

One writer has recently crossed the line and gone public with his criticisms. At the end of February, Ryan Boudinot wrote a piece for The Stranger entitled Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One. Alongside some sensible advice—good writers are serious readers; give pleasure to your audience—Boudinot dropped in some stinging rebukes: “No one cares about your problems if you’re a shitty writer,” he wrote. Most of his students who chose to write memoirs, he added, “are narcissists using the genre as therapy.” Speaking about one child abuse account he had to evaluate, he said: “having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more.” Many ex-students (unsurprisingly) objected to his aggressive tone and he was challenged by thousands of tweets and comments. Someone has even created a “Watchdog website for Ryan Boudinot.”

It’s never pretty to see the internet in outrage mode, but I can’t help feeling some sympathy for Boudinot’s students. All teachers complain about their pupils but good manners dictate that their comments stay in the staff room. Much of what Boudinot claims about lazy or arrogant students could equally be applied to those studying any academic course.

But still an attitude persists that creative writing is a more unique skill than painting or playing a musical instrument, realms in which professional training is normal. In an article for The Daily Telegraph published last year, the novelist Hanif Kureishi, a professor of creative writing at Kingston, complained about the banality of his job: “The teacher and the student are enacting their roles perfectly, keeping everything nicely mundane, only talking about things that can be taught, or maybe learnt.” He cited the Romantic poets, whose “imagination was as dangerous as dynamite”—implying such danger was lacking in the regulated world of the seminar room.

Yet there’s something refreshing about treating writing as a craft to master rather than a spontaneous overflow of innate genius. Any young writer—no mater how talented—needs to pay attention to sentence structure, plot development and point-of-view, even if it is to learn how to creatively break the rules. You can learn this on your own, for sure, but it might be quicker if an experienced writer or editor pinpoints where you’re going wrong. No great writer will be spoiled by a creative writing course, and many others will learn much they didn’t know before. True, most graduates will never make it as a novelist or poet but not everyone who studies history becomes a historian or biology a biologist. That doesn’t mean they've wasted their time. In a recent lecture on the problems in higher education, Marina Warner states eloquently the case for the defence: “Creative writing teaches attentiveness to the qualities of a text, to its structure and latent meanings. Such developed linguistic capacity can help us to counter the codes and systems and protocols that increasingly regiment our world.”

The  myth of the solitary writer appearing fully formed to the world is exactly that—a myth. Writing has always depended on conversations with other writers—alive and dead—and the creative writing class is arguably a more democratic place for that than the socially exclusive literary salons of the past.