So you want to be a writer

Last week Hanif Kureishi dismissed creative writing courses as 'a waste of time', yet
they have never been more popular. Other leading author-teachers reveal their
advice to students

The Guardian
Friday 14 March 201417.52 GMT
Philip Hensher
Good writing is a mixture of the calculated and the instinctual. No one writes
through pure dazed inspiration; questions of craft and calculation enter in quite
quickly. Last week, speaking at the Bath festival, Hanif Kureishi cast some doubt on
the existence of transferable, teachable craft in writing by witheringly classifying
99.9% of his students as "untalented" and saying that writing a story is "a difficult
thing to do and it's a great skill to have. Can you teach that? I don't think you can."
(Kureishi teaches creative writing at Kingston University, apparently ineffectually).
What lies, or ought to lie, beneath the growth of creative writing as a subject is the
conviction that a good deal of the best writing derives from conscious craft, if not all
of it. Commentators sometimes say that writing can't be taught; that beginning
writers either have "it", in which case they don't need to be taught, or they don't
have "it", in which case money and time is being wasted by the exercise. But writers
can perfectly well have native ability, a feel for language, an inventiveness and a
keen eye towards the world and still not quite understand how they can do
something well, not once, but repeatedly. A good creative writing course will explore
underlying principles of good writing not to impose invented "rules" on writing, but
to introduce ways of thinking about writing that are strong and purposeful. You
could teach yourself how to make a chair by taking a lot apart, and experimenting
with joists. A furniture-making course might school you in some unsuspected skills,
and save you some time.

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A bad creative writing class will look like this. A student has submitted some work
with the words: "I don't think it's very good." The class has (mostly) read it. After a
long silence, one of the student's best friends, primed, says: "I really like the way
you " The student says: 'Thank you." Another one says: "I didn't quite understand

about the bit where " The student explains. Half the class stay silent; the student
leaves with ego intact and work unimproved.
I've seen the experience of becoming a writer from both sides. When I began, it
didn't occur to me to go on a creative writing course there were few in the late
1980s, and it seemed more pressing to do an academic PhD. I taught myself to
write. I still think, for a writer who is also an insatiable reader, there is a lot to be
said for the self-taught route. But since 2005, I've started teaching creative writing
in universities, and now teach at Bath Spa. When I look at my first novels, they
seem to me to have no idea about some technical features of the novel. I don't
think I really had a solid novelistic technique until I wrote my third or fourth novel,
and in today's publishing world, that would be a serious disadvantage in a career.

Illustration by Adam Gale

Creative writing, as a discipline, may not be entirely selfless, despite any beneficial
results. It is no accident that it started expanding at precisely the moment when
traditional financial props of the writers' trade such as the Net Book
Agreement were abolished; when traditional supports of writers' incomes such as
book reviews started being eroded by budget cuts; when publishers, under their
own pressures, started savagely cutting away at their standard advances for
authors of all levels. The days when VS Pritchett could run a house in a Regent's
Park terrace on the proceeds from short stories and book reviews are long gone. In
2014, a professorial salary may be anything, financially, from a useful support to
an absolute necessity.
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Forced into the academy, a writer might run a good seminar something like this. We
would probably talk about an exercise of street observation undertaken in the
previous days how people groom themselves, or attract the attention of strangers.
We might discuss an aspect of technique with reference to a passage from a
published piece of fiction last week we talked about character from the outside,
looking at a page of Elizabeth Bowen. We might look at a classic book, or
an absolutely new novel it's an obligation on a creative writing course to keep up
with new work, and we're investing not just in new work, but in new digital
techniques for writing.
Other ways of thinking about humanity might prove relevant. There are writers'
statements or thoughts about what they do as writers Arnold Bennett's glorious
book on the subject, or Virginia Woolf's counter-statement about the exterior and
interior world of the mind, or any number of interviews with present-day authors. Or
we could have a look at sociologists' analysis, like that of Erving Goffman, or
psychologists', or anything else that seems interesting and relevant. When student
work is discussed, it has to be a safe but rigorous process. Constructive comments
are insisted on; not ego-massaging niceness, but specific comments on where
something has gone wrong and how it might be improved. The focus is on technique

as well as emotion and experience. Is the presiding consciousness the right one?
Does he need to filter everything through his awareness? Is this the right tense?
What is this thing called free indirect style? Does enough happen? Do students say:
"I really like the part where you "? You bet your sweet bippy they don't.
Classes, at Bath Spa and elsewhere, differ greatly. With a faculty that includes very
varied authors, there is never going to be a uniform approach. But we often find
ourselves addressing recurrent issues. How can I create characters that are
memorable and engaging? (Top tip introduce them in small groups, and out of
their customary context.) There doesn't seem to be enough happening my
characters just keep telling each other how they feel about each other, and then
they have an affair or kill each other or have a baby. But then what? (Top tip;
incident has to keep coming from outside, and the unexpected illuminates
character. Try experimentally dropping a giant block of frozen piss through the
ceiling of their room and see what they do.)

Illustration by Adam Gale

There are also possibilities that writers just haven't perceived. You don't have to
present action as a one-off series of events; actions can be beautifully recurrent in a
sentence running: "Whenever Amir visited Brenda, he always took the secondcheapest box of milk chocolates from the newsagents for her. She would always
thank him effusively." You don't induce emotions by talking about those emotions;
you are much more likely to do so by describing facts of the world, quite objectively.
Go out into the street and watch human beings attentively; you will probably realise
with a shock that your vocabulary of gestures which now runs, in its entirety "he
shrugged, she grinned, he frowned, she shook her head, he rolled his eyes, she
sighed" is totally inadequate. (And how rude and rare is shrugging, anyway?)
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Personally, I like to irritate as well as inspire a class, sometimes by saying sagely: "A
short story consists of an introduction, five OR seven episodes, and a coda in which
the weather changes." (Worked for Chekhov, anyway.) Or: "If you're going to have
an animal in a story, have a dog and not a cat." (Dogs are easier structural
principles, running up to strangers in parks, and so on.)
Your students are not, thank heaven, going to be much like you as writers. They are
going to react against you with their own thoughts and creative principles. Yes,
there are courses where people who write present-tense historical novels,
apparently about 21st-century women in a crinoline, produce students who
do exactly the same thing. But a good creative writing course will produce
independent-thinking, craftsmanlike innovators with critical, widely curious and
energetic minds. I don't know why this goal isn't more common in universities,
anyway.
Philip Hensher is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson. Photograph: IBL/REX

1) I don't give a shit what's in your head. By which I mean if it isn't on the page it
doesn't exist. The connection between your mind and the reader's mind is
language. Reading is not telepathy.
2) I don't care whether you like the texts we study or you don't. Like or dislike is a
personal thing and tells me something about you, but nothing about the text. If you
don't think something is well written, convince me. If you do think so, convince me.
Learn from everything you read and understand how to learn from everything you
read. And above all read! My classes use texts I am pretty sure they won't know
because I want them to see how wide is the world of books and thought and
imagination. I am trying to reposition them in relation to, in response to, language.
3) Writing is a love affair not a solitary pleasure. You can write about anything you
like but there must be a connection between you and the material.
4) Do not take any "advice" on how to write from anyone who has not written and
published a significant piece of work. (Ezra Pound was right.)
Jeanette Winterson is a professor of creative writing at Manchester University.
Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Many creative writing students start with the belief that writing is entirely the
operation of point of view; in other words, that the world only exists in so far as it is
perceived by a human personality. Most of what I teach involves encouraging
students to exteriorise their subjective world by fixing it to objects, instead of
routing everything through the persona of Jane or John. For the reader, being
trapped in the head of Jane or John, and dependent on them for every scrap of
information, is the precise opposite of their own experience of existence. A story
that starts with "Jane looked out of the kitchen window and thought about her life"
despite the fact that it may be perfectly true will always be struggling to free itself
from a basic unreality.
Many students find this idea counterintuitive, but the easier and more effortless
something looks, the more thoroughly it is underpinned by technique. The desire to
write comes easily; writing itself is technical and hard. I give my students exercises
in which a certain object has to feature. I choose the object myself: the more alien it
is to their subjective processes the better. The object represents the impingement of
reality, and it nearly always has the effect of turning their writing inside out. Over
time I've learned which objects work the best: some of the things I've used a

violin, a pair of scissors have been too easily conscripted into the student's
subjective world. Others a lawnmower, a new pair of shoes unfailingly make the
writing more objective. The narrative has to find a way around it, like water has to
flow around an obstacle, and the result is that the whole enterprise is given form.
Rachel Cusk is professor of creative writing at Kingston University.
Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

I teach a class on the craft of fiction-writing at Yale, which is a hybrid of a literature
course and a writing workshop. If a more traditional literature course has to do with
why we're interested in writers like Henry James and James Joyce, my class focuses
on how they did what they did, using only ink, paper, and the same vocabulary
available to everyone.
If a more traditional workshop is largely based on trial and error write a story and
we'll tell you what's wrong with it my course is based at least partly on why writers
write as they do; on the basis for their decisions.
I do remind my students, periodically, that fiction contains an element of ineluctable
mystery along with its elements of craft, and that a great story or novel is great in
certain ways we can elucidate, and certain ways in which we cannot. We don't
dissect great literature in the belief that once all its organs are spread out on the
table before us, we've got it figured out.
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We read extensively and, each week, do our best to determine how certain effects
were achieved by a different writer. How did James build his characters in The
Aspern Papers? How did Joyce structure "The Dead"?
The students perform writing exercises as we go along. During the week we spend
on character, for instance, I ask them to write a single paragraph that conveys the
appearance and essential nature of a character. During the week on structure, I give
them an impossible welter of information seven different people, with twice that
many interconnected dramas and conflicts and ask them to sketch out a story,
with the understanding that they can omit as much, or include as much, as they
like.
During the final third of the semester I simply tell my students to take what they've
learned, and write a story. Any story they like. Which can be anywhere from one to
25 pages long (though I encourage them to lean more toward single-digit page
counts) I stress economy and precision throughout the semester. The stories they
come up with are often surprisingly good.
Michael Cunningham is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Yale University.

Tessa Hadley

Illustration by Adam Gale

Last week we spent half an hour or more looking in minute detail at two versions of
a paragraph from Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. She seems to achieve the
compression and electric intensity of her final version through minimising the
connective engineering of the syntax in her sentences, taking out explanations,
excising the mediating voice from around the things seen. The students went home
to work on a paragraph of their own, cutting and intensifying in that way, taking out
what's flabby and banal.
In the short-story class, we spent lots of time thinking about endings. Why do the
endings of short stories carry so much more weight, in proportion to the whole, than
the endings of novels? We wrangle over the endings of particular stories we've been
reading together Dubliners, Eudora Welty, Agnes Owens and others. What
satisfies, what doesn't? How can the writer tell when it's enough? Why has taste
turned against endings that clinch too tightly, or have too much twist in the tail?
The students are working on their own stories: with that reading and discussion
behind them they can think with more scope and more audacity about where to go,
how to sign off. Rehearsing these things collectively loosens the tight fit of fear and
inhibition, imagination relaxes.
The writing course offers an audience. Everyone lifts their game in response to the
exacting readers they'll face next Tuesday. Student writers are under pressure to
learn to hear themselves, to hear how they sound, to make essential judgments
about tone and pace and transition. Of course, all writers have always had to learn
this; a good writing course just crystallises the opportunity. In the past apprentice
writers practised with a coterie of friends, or with their family, or with a mentor.
Writing courses aren't free; but I'm sure they do help to widen the circle of
opportunity, beyond the metropolitan and university cliques.
Tessa Hadley is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Gary Shteyngart
It helps to be clean and presentable when teaching. Students react to sharp odours.
It can't be like the University of Iowa during John Cheever's time when you could
just wander in drunk and fall asleep for two hours. Today's MFA students expect you
to be awake. I also try to get students to bring in snacks because I have low-blood
sugar. But the snacks are really for everyone.
Gary Shteyngart is associate professor of creative writing at Columbia University.
Naomi Alderman
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1) The most useful thing you can do is read someone's work and give them specific
advice regarding what is and isn't working in their particular book. That is what goes
on. It's the non-universal stuff that is the most useful. Are you using description to
cover the fact that you don't really know your characters? Have you given your
particular character a motivation that makes sense? It's not general, it's specific.
2) Another key thing you can help with is finding the writing routine that works best
for each student. For me, when I'm working on a book, it's around 800 words a
day every single day. Five hundred words a day is too few. A thousand is too many. I
can't take the weekend off; if I do the book has dissolved to mush when I get back.
So a teacher can talk to you about your process. Suggest different ways of working,
different times, places, different rituals to get you in the right mental place for it.
Again, this is very particular to the individual.
3) If you're a responsible teacher, you talk to your students about money. You say:
most novelists earn around 5,000 a year from their writing. You watch them
blench. You say: so if you're going to do this, you have to think about how you're
going to support yourself. I tell my students about journalism, about other kinds of
writing, about crowdfunding, about grants, about balancing the day job with the
novels, and the pitfalls of all of these. Most people can't make a living only from
selling their art, but almost anyone can put together a life in and around the artform
they love if that's what they really want. You help them work out how to do that.
Naomi Alderman is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Don Paterson
At St Andrews, we tend to teach that most problems writers encounter have already
been solved by other writers: students learn to be good readers first. Often the most
useful exercise is just to compare some bad writing with some good, and then learn
how to articulate the difference between the two. This is most bracing when the bad
writing is your own. Here's Robert Frost; here's you. What's the difference? Ouch. I
teach in three ways: seminars on poetic composition (I take a fairly technical and
linguistic approach, but not everyone does); workshops, where students can hone
their editorial and critical skills; and one-to-one sessions, which address the very
personal business of "art practice". There are many useful textbooks that can help
with the first two, though very few of those are about "creative writing" (a term I try
to avoid anyway). Almost no books I've read address "practice" very satisfactorily,
though many students have benefited from reading (ex-marine!) Steven
Pressfield's The War of Art, which is basically the Allen Carr method for writers: just
do it already.
Don Paterson is a professor of poetry at the University of St Andrews.
Chang-Rae Lee

Chang-Rae Lee. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian

My classes are undergraduates only. Our primary activity in the workshop is to read
very closely both the workshop material and a published story, which is assigned
weekly. It's as simple as that. No use of "exercises" or discussion of "technique".
While what the pieces might "mean" to us will no doubt arise, we first and foremost
pay zealous attention to the words, going sentence by sentence, considering what's
being instituted by each clause in every way possible (language, idea, structure,
trope, tonality, perspective etc), appraising how the prose is developing its world
and characters as well as shaping our apprehension of them.
Chang-Rae Lee is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
Kathryn Hughes
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1) Lots of people can write beautiful prose, it's structure that's tricky. Novelists can
afford to just start writing and see where it takes them, writers of non-fiction need
to have a plan. Draw up a list of "landing places", points in your narrative where
your reader can have a bit of a sit down and admire the view so far. Your job as
narrator is to lead them from one landing place to the next, neither chivvying them
along nor allowing them to lag behind. Make sure, though, that you don't come over
like a drill sergeant. The trick of good narrative non-fiction is to allow the reader to
feel that they have worked it all out for themselves.
2) Just because you are trying to learn how to write, it doesn't mean that you need
to employ an entirely new vocabulary. Be ruthless about cutting out any word that
you wouldn't use naturally in everyday speech. In real life no one calls a book "a
tome" or says "she descended the stairs" or refers to "my companion". A book is a
book, people walk down the stairs and a companion is actually a friend, or a lover,
or a colleague or someone you were standing next to at the bus stop. Be specific
and be real.
3) It is entirely normal in fact, it is entirely right to feel despair during the writing
process. At some point in the relationship between a creative writing tutor and a
student, there will be a conversation that runs exactly like the closing lines of
Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel, The Unnamable:
You must go on.
I can't go on.
I'll go on.
When you hear these words coming out of your mouth, the best thing to do is shut
up shop for the day and go and read someone who is writing the kind of stuff that
you would like to. You'll start work the next day with a better pair of ears. And good
ears, actually, are what good writing is all about.
Kathryn Hughes is director of UEA's MA programme in biography and creative nonfiction.
Toby Litt

Illustration by Adam Gale Photograph: Adam Gale

Although we give classes on the technical aspects of writing, one of the most
important things we give is more basic. It's permission. Permission, for example, for
a student on the MA to say, "I'm sorry, I really can't come out on Friday night I
have coursework." Because however supportive of a partner's or friend's or
relative's ambition to become a writer people are, they often aren't very good at
granting them the necessary time. And, for most of us, it's easier to say, "I have
coursework" than "I'm writing a novel it'll take me about five years, and might not
get published."
We also give students permission to experiment, and encouragement to try things
that they think might fail. Even quite late on in the course, when I'm advising
students about what to write for their final dissertation, they will ask me, "Can I try
this?" They know it's what they should do, they just need permission to do it. If they
didn't have someone they respected (because that person is a tutor, because
they've been published) to say this, they might never dare and much of their best
work wouldn't happen.
Finally, we the teaching staff give students permission to believe they might
become "real" writers. Because, by being in the room with them, week after week,
we help demystify what "real" writers are. Too many people write badly because
they write up to their idea of what "real" writing should be or what a "real" writer
should write. They put on literary airs. If someone holds writers in too much esteem,
they'll never become one.
Toby Litt is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck University of London.
Joyce Carol Oates
Students in graduate writing programmes are already seriously committed writers
by the time they enrol for a workshop; prospective students must apply, and only a
small number are selected. Certainly in the US, many, or most, have already
published short fiction. No one "teaches" young people how to write in fiction
workshops; the classes might be described as intensely focused editing sessions in
which manuscripts of substance are examined with the close scrutiny with which
they would be examined by editors at such magazines as the New Yorker and
Harpers, or in such literary publishing houses as Ecco/HarperCollins and Farrar,
Strauss & Giroux.
Joyce Carol Oates is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld. Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Guardian

Establish a writing schedule ahead of time for the coming week or month. This is
more important the less time you have. If you work full-time, you might plan to
write for an hour at 6am on Tuesday and Thursday, or at 4pm on Wednesday and
Saturday. Write this commitment down in your diary or calendar, don't schedule
anything that conflicts with it, and sit alone somewhere you can focus when the
time comes. It's OK if you don't produce sentences during that time, but don't do
anything else don't check email, don't text, don't go online (and for heaven's sake,
if you're using a computer, shut all files and windows except for the one you're
working on). If some nagging errand you need to do occurs to you, write it down,
but don't start doing it.
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Create an outline. This will give you a roadmap to follow and make you less likely to
write yourself into a corner. It's fine to deviate from the outline, but it's very useful
to think about the overall structure of what you're trying to produce. Similarly, don't
go back and revise until you've completed a first draft. Solutions to problems tend
to reveal themselves much more clearly when the whole work is finished than they
do along the way.
If you don't enjoy the process of writing in some way, you probably shouldn't do it.
While there are people who make lots of money from books, most don't, and many
writers I know have found the experience of having a first (or subsequent) book
published disappointing and anticlimactic. I agree with some of what I understand to
be Hanif Kureishi's viewpoint, but I don't think anyone knows who does or doesn't
have talent without that person giving writing a try.
Curtis Sittenfeld has taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Victoria
University in New Zealand, and St Albans School in Washington.
Blake Morrison
On the MA at Goldsmiths, I work individually with students in a range of forms
(novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction) but also run a specialist seminar in life
writing. One key strand of the seminar is memoir, and among the exercises we've
done this term are:
1) Restricted point of view. Recounting an episode from the perspective of someone
whose eyes are sharp but whose capacity for understanding is limited. There's a
wonderful example of this in Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, where a small
boy recounts a traumatic episode (his dying sister being taken from the house by
ambulance-men) while hiding under a table all is revealed by what he observes in
the movement and appearance of adult feet.
2) Bearing witness. Working in pairs, student A speaks of an episode he or she
witnessed, and student B writes it up, selecting, exaggerating or even inventing key
details an exercise in how to create authenticity and demonstrate "I was there".
Orwell's essay "A Hanging" offers a brilliant precedent, as does the first chapter of
Tim Lott's The Scent of Dried Roses, which reconstructs the day of his mother's
suicide.

3) Narrative pace. Forget what creative-writing handbooks say: narratives can't be

all showing and no telling. A 10-minute scene that runs to 50 pages might be
followed by a paragraph encapsulating two years. Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, Tobias
Wolff's This Boy's Life and Martin Amis's Experience are bold and inventive in the
way they vary pace, and I encourage students to do the same.
All such workshop exercises have the same end in sight to help aspirant writers
find the right form for the story they want to tell. The luckiest go on to publish and
win acclaim two of our former students (Ross Raisin and Evie Wyld) made Granta's
recent list of the 20 best young British novelists. But even those who don't win
prizes or publishing contracts usually benefit from the course, by articulating their
ideas and experiences, and by putting writing at the centre of their lives.
Blake Morrison is a professor of creative and life writing at Goldsmiths, University of
London.