Imaginative leap
EducationGuardian
Published on Tuesday June 24, 2003
Arts and Books | Education | Features
Creative writing courses used to be shunned by many universities as being too weird and way-out, but no longer, reports Chris Alden
They said it couldn’t be taught. Creative writing, academics agreed, was too intuitive a subject for rigorous study: fine for the poetry society, but not rigorous enough for the lecture halls. Fine for Americans and children, but they don’t know when to close their own mouths. Fine for those chaps in East Anglia; but not here, not in this university. We have standards. Our papers have to be marked.
That was then. In 1995, when Andrew Motion became professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, it was one of only a few institutions to run a creative writing MA – other notable names were Sheffield Hallam and Lancaster. This year, when he leaves to set up an MA at Royal Holloway, University of London, there will be 45.
“The spread of these things through higher education institutions,” says Motion, “is dramatic enough for us to feel that the battle that used to have to be fought about the teachability of this subject has really been won; the neurosis that the British seem to suffer from about the teachability of these things has been cured.”
But a look at the universities offering the MAs shows that most are former polytechnics, whose specialism was after all the “vocational” course. Universities with the traditional “academic” reputations – particularly Cambridge and Oxford – are absent.
Which is why Synergies, a new book published by tutors and students at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, is so timely. The book is not just an anthology, though it is that. More vitally, it is an attempt to ask how far creative writing can help students develop analytical skills – “to try”, as tutor Lucy Newlyn puts it, “to integrate their creative with their critical faculties”.
With the help of Jenny Lewis, a poet who teaches at the Oxford continuing education department’s diploma of creative writing, participants – including Newlyn – each wrote a sonnet, then analysed the work and edited one another’s sonnets to create poems of their own.
Newlyn was astonished by the result. “The most pronounced thing was that the students became very much more articulate about form, and able therefore to integrate this into their essays. The momentum of the improvement was huge.”
As part of a campaign to get creative writing recognised at Oxford as a legitimate, academic pursuit, she hopes to introduce it as an optional paper in the final exams of Oxford’s English BA.
Final-year student Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, whose work appears in the anthology, says. “It’s a wonderful course, and it’s great the way it spans every century of English literature, but I think by cutting out the creative element you do take something away from the criticism.”
Nevertheless, Newlyn expects some opposition. “People in the analytical world are probably resistant to the idea of having to integrate the creative into what they’re doing. Partly because it’s difficult to mark – this is what is said – and I’ve heard from the inside, from people teaching creative writing courses in Britain, that they don’t know quite how to assess the work, because it’s so subjective.
“But I would challenge anybody to look at the contents of our book and to say that you could not assess that work.”
Novelist Russell Celyn-Jones, who taught with Malcolm Bradbury and then with Motion at UEA and launches an MA this year at Birkbeck, University of London, says creative writing can inform traditional academic study.
“Creative writing is not quite another academic course; there is a certain freedom and free-spiritedness among creative writers, and some academics might look at that and say they’re not serious.
“But it’s quite the opposite: there’s a feeling that an element of fun has to be introduced to creative writing, because writers are very serious about the text.
“Writers live inside the novel, if you like, whereas academics tend to have an exterior view. But both are complementary.”
The core of the Synergies process, as with most creative writing courses, is the workshop – and the involvement of the tutor in the creative process. The result, suggests Oxford academic Paul Ashwin in an essay at the end of Synergies, is a redefinition of the roles of “teaching” and “learning”.
“It’s a bridge,” says one student. “You immediately start from a completely different level to where you did when you were in your first year and you walked into your tutor’s room and sat down, and there was a spectre of your tutor on her big-bear chair and you were on your little-bear chair.”
If teaching is more than the simple imparting of knowledge from tutor to student, it is easier to argue that creative writing can be taught.
“It’s absolutely absurd to say you can’t teach writing,” says Motion, who has been poet laureate since 1999. “What I think you can’t do, is to say that you can make something from nothing.
“I’ve never thought of myself as someone who can go round the oyster-bed prising the shells and stuffing in pearls, but as someone who can go round the oyster-bed finding little pearls in the oysters and help them to grow; in all kinds of ways from doing nuts-and-bolts tinkering with their work to much larger-scale interventions about form and structure.”
Another difference, points out Scott McCracken, course leader at Sheffield Hallam – the first institution to launch a creative writing BA – is the commercial aspect of writing.
“English academics are used to working in a rarefied discipline, but in creative writing there is a practical application and a product.
“Literary publishers and agents increasingly see MAs as a recruiting ground for fresh British talent.”
Take Jonny Geller, an agent at Curtis Brown with a reputation for taking on first novelists. In his first year as an agent he took on Tracey Chevalier, Martyn Bedford and Phil Whitaker from UEA.
“In terms of publishing it’s limited, but important,” he says. “It would be madness for an agent not to take seriously people who have committed themselves to writing.
“It’s more about the commitment, especially as a postgraduate, that puts you firmly on the road to being a writer. Good writers learn more things and benefit from that.”
Panos Karnezis, whose book of short stories, Little Infamies, was published last year by Vintage, worked for four years as an engineer before going to UEA and changing his career.
“I was writing as a hobby, and I hadn’t shown my work to anyone or been to any writers’ groups, so for me it was a good thing.
“It’s not a direct route to publication: there are very loose contacts with publishers, and to be fair, they do say that when you go. In retrospect I see that publishers pay attention to the course; it’s a foot in the door.”
Of course writing is not all about having your name in lights. Motion’s plans are to persuade the government to modify the curriculum to allow more creative writing in schools.
“I hope there will be a sink-down effect. I’m absolutely convinced that the future of English studies must make more room for imaginative work than it allows at the moment.”
But does the explosion in the number of creative writing MAs inspire Newlyn to campaign for one at Oxford?
“An MA,” she says, “would be lovely.”
· For a copy of Synergies, email joan.arthur@english.ox.ac.uk – or send a cheque for £5 including postage to the English faculty, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, made payable to Chough Publications.
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