Ian McEwan: “My writing life has been one long uphill struggle to persuade the world that I didn’t do a creative writing course”
“I had a plain kitchen table,” says Ian McEwan. “A sort of small, pine, deal kitchen table. I laid out some pencils and pens, and a block of blank sheets. It was about seven o’clock in the evening, and I promised myself I would not leave this room, and I would not go to sleep, until I had written a short story.” At five the following morning, “a rather grisly tale” called “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” lay finished in front of him. In ten hours, spread evenly across the junction of his second and third days at the University of East Anglia, McEwan had written the first story ever to emerge from a British creative writing course. That was the autumn of 1970. Today, McEwan is Britain’s most successful literary author, UEA’s creative writing masters is unrivalled as the country’s most prestigious, and the legend of how one came immediately from the other has itself become a famous story. In its unlikely neatness, it almost looks like fiction. And it almost is. Not because the best-known facts of McEwan’s time at UEA are inaccurate—he did indeed study on Malcolm Bradbury’s new MA in 1970—but because they are almost entirely misleading. McEwan was not merely the first student of creative writing on that inaugural course; he was its only student. What he signed up to, as he remembers it, was a conventional English literature MA with one small creative writing option. “I don’t think the words ‘creative writing course’ were used,” he recalls of the prospectus, “but it said that you could submit, for one part of the MA, some fiction in place of an essay.” Nobody else but McEwan did. Neither, while he was there, did McEwan experience anything that you could call a writing class. “I probably saw [Bradbury] fewer than three or four times over a year,” he says. “Once or twice in a pub, briefly, for half a pint of bitter. Once or twice in the university corridors. But at no point did he ever tell me how to write, or make any suggestions about my fiction… My writing life has been one long uphill struggle to persuade the world that I didn’t do a creative writing course. But I’ve utterly failed.” Why does he mind? “I don’t mind particularly… I was not being coached in the art of fiction by Malcolm Bradbury, that’s all.” These days, one does not have to strain so hard to find someone you can call a creative writing student. The website whatuni.com lists 94 universities and nine colleges in Britain that currently offer at least one postgraduate qualification in it. Besides the sturdy MA, there are several MLitts, MPhils, MFAs and an increasing number of PhDs. Undergraduate degrees in creative writing have become almost as widespread, now being offered in 77 universities and ten colleges in Britain. By comparison, that is more than offer maths, chemistry, geography, media studies, French, Spanish, physics or “English literature.” Needless to say, this huge growth in the number of people who learn creative writing has not been matched by a comparable growth in the number who buy it. ***** Yet this appears to be putting no one off. When I arrive on a Tuesday evening in central London to observe a group of first-years on City University’s novel-writing MA, the mood is light and cheerful. Four men and ten women are gathered in a youthful horseshoe around their teacher, the novelist and dramatist Jonathan Myerson. Seven say that they already have jobs connected with writing or media—in journalism, publishing, theatre, advertising. They are a confident and eloquent group. Tonight they are discussing the exercise that has occupied them for the past fortnight. Myerson gave each student an agony aunt’s column from a newspaper and told them all to submit two 1,500-word stories inspired by it—one taking place over a short space of time, the other spanning months. To prepare for the workshop, Myerson has had to read and annotate more than 50,000 words in less than two days. In the agreed opinion of the room, the first student selected has written stories of such quality that there is very little to say about them. Praise is offered, then everyone moves on. The second student has also done well, but not so well. There is talk of “tense issues” and “too much telling,” and dominating the discussion are questions of the characters’ behaviour—specifically, how credible or likely it seems to be. In discussions of the third and fourth, these themes continue. “I thought maybe” and “I wasn’t sure about” are frequent gambits, though never said unpleasantly. Mostly, Myerson just lets everybody speak, before adding his opinions when they reach a lull. After three hours, the group has covered power dynamics, the unimportance of accuracy, the pluperfect (a new term to many), and recommended a dozen books. Finally, several people slink off to continue in a pub. In two years’ time, all these students are expected to have finished novels—a distinctive requirement at City. In the course’s four-year history, 48 graduates have managed this so far, two of whom have agreed publishing deals, and one more self-published. Nine of last year’s 14 students are already represented by agents, however, which Myerson considers a better measure of success. Since 1936—when the idea that universities could teach people how to write novels, and not just how to read them, was first put into practice by the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa—classes like this one have hardly changed. Nor has the explosion of their popularity in the past two decades been a parochial oddity of Britain. According to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, by 1975—when Iowa’s degree was almost as old as UEA’s is now—there were 79 university courses in creative writing in the US. By 1994, this had risen to 535. Now there are 852. Having outgrown the boundaries of hobbyism, creative writing has become a major academic discipline. And you would be brave to bet that it has reached its peak. When practitioners are not teaching or writing, they publish journals, hold conferences, peer review. Their students have bursaries and their professors have chairs. In Britain, at the University of Glasgow, an MFA course in applied creative writing has even been designed to teach people how to teach creative writing.
“I had a plain kitchen table,” says Ian McEwan. “A sort of small, pine, deal kitchen table. I laid out some pencils and pens, and a block of blank sheets. It was about seven o’clock in the evening, and I promised myself I would not leave this room, and I would not go to sleep, until I had written a short story.” At five the following morning, “a rather grisly tale” called “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” lay finished in front of him. In ten hours, spread evenly across the junction of his second and third days at the University of East Anglia, McEwan had written the first story ever to emerge from a British creative writing course. That was the autumn of 1970. Today, McEwan is Britain’s most successful literary author, UEA’s creative writing masters is unrivalled as the country’s most prestigious, and the legend of how one came immediately from the other has itself become a famous story. In its unlikely neatness, it almost looks like fiction. And it almost is. Not because the best-known facts of McEwan’s time at UEA are inaccurate—he did indeed study on Malcolm Bradbury’s new MA in 1970—but because they are almost entirely misleading. McEwan was not merely the first student of creative writing on that inaugural course; he was its only student. What he signed up to, as he remembers it, was a conventional English literature MA with one small creative writing option. “I don’t think the words ‘creative writing course’ were used,” he recalls of the prospectus, “but it said that you could submit, for one part of the MA, some fiction in place of an essay.” Nobody else but McEwan did. Neither, while he was there, did McEwan experience anything that you could call a writing class. “I probably saw [Bradbury] fewer than three or four times over a year,” he says. “Once or twice in a pub, briefly, for half a pint of bitter. Once or twice in the university corridors. But at no point did he ever tell me how to write, or make any suggestions about my fiction… My writing life has been one long uphill struggle to persuade the world that I didn’t do a creative writing course. But I’ve utterly failed.” Why does he mind? “I don’t mind particularly… I was not being coached in the art of fiction by Malcolm Bradbury, that’s all.” These days, one does not have to strain so hard to find someone you can call a creative writing student. The website whatuni.com lists 94 universities and nine colleges in Britain that currently offer at least one postgraduate qualification in it. Besides the sturdy MA, there are several MLitts, MPhils, MFAs and an increasing number of PhDs. Undergraduate degrees in creative writing have become almost as widespread, now being offered in 77 universities and ten colleges in Britain. By comparison, that is more than offer maths, chemistry, geography, media studies, French, Spanish, physics or “English literature.” Needless to say, this huge growth in the number of people who learn creative writing has not been matched by a comparable growth in the number who buy it. ***** Yet this appears to be putting no one off. When I arrive on a Tuesday evening in central London to observe a group of first-years on City University’s novel-writing MA, the mood is light and cheerful. Four men and ten women are gathered in a youthful horseshoe around their teacher, the novelist and dramatist Jonathan Myerson. Seven say that they already have jobs connected with writing or media—in journalism, publishing, theatre, advertising. They are a confident and eloquent group. Tonight they are discussing the exercise that has occupied them for the past fortnight. Myerson gave each student an agony aunt’s column from a newspaper and told them all to submit two 1,500-word stories inspired by it—one taking place over a short space of time, the other spanning months. To prepare for the workshop, Myerson has had to read and annotate more than 50,000 words in less than two days. In the agreed opinion of the room, the first student selected has written stories of such quality that there is very little to say about them. Praise is offered, then everyone moves on. The second student has also done well, but not so well. There is talk of “tense issues” and “too much telling,” and dominating the discussion are questions of the characters’ behaviour—specifically, how credible or likely it seems to be. In discussions of the third and fourth, these themes continue. “I thought maybe” and “I wasn’t sure about” are frequent gambits, though never said unpleasantly. Mostly, Myerson just lets everybody speak, before adding his opinions when they reach a lull. After three hours, the group has covered power dynamics, the unimportance of accuracy, the pluperfect (a new term to many), and recommended a dozen books. Finally, several people slink off to continue in a pub. In two years’ time, all these students are expected to have finished novels—a distinctive requirement at City. In the course’s four-year history, 48 graduates have managed this so far, two of whom have agreed publishing deals, and one more self-published. Nine of last year’s 14 students are already represented by agents, however, which Myerson considers a better measure of success. Since 1936—when the idea that universities could teach people how to write novels, and not just how to read them, was first put into practice by the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa—classes like this one have hardly changed. Nor has the explosion of their popularity in the past two decades been a parochial oddity of Britain. According to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, by 1975—when Iowa’s degree was almost as old as UEA’s is now—there were 79 university courses in creative writing in the US. By 1994, this had risen to 535. Now there are 852. Having outgrown the boundaries of hobbyism, creative writing has become a major academic discipline. And you would be brave to bet that it has reached its peak. When practitioners are not teaching or writing, they publish journals, hold conferences, peer review. Their students have bursaries and their professors have chairs. In Britain, at the University of Glasgow, an MFA course in applied creative writing has even been designed to teach people how to teach creative writing.
Iowa Writers’ Workshop staff, 1960s: classes like this one have hardly changed since 1936
What is more, once novelists are considered to be academics, their own new novels can be counted as research papers. This makes the departments that employ them look more active, contributing to a higher score in the government’s research assessment exercise, and thus an improved claim for subsidy. So a prolific novelist can be a useful fundraiser for their entire faculty. Yet despite its triumphs, the creative writing movement—which seems a reasonable phrase for it—still struggles to be accepted. Certainly, there is no scarcity of graduates and teachers voicing doubts. Hanif Kureishi, who teaches at Kingston University, has described creative writing classes as “the new mental hospitals.” “The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers,” he told an audience at the Hay festival in 2008, “and no one will disabuse them of that.” Lionel Shriver has said that she feels “queasy” about having majored in creative writing at Columbia. Neel Mukherjee even called his time at UEA “one of the worst years of my life.” Then there is that old persistent question: is it even possible to teach creative writing? Clearly, in some technical respects, it is. One can explain how to escape from the pluperfect, or why clichés are dead air. But these principles will not make interesting novels on their own. They might even stifle a few. So why risk it, when almost all the greatest writers taught themselves? And we haven’t even talked about the money yet. A typical creative writing MA at a British university is priced at around £4,500 a year, and UEA estimates living costs in Norwich at £600-650 per month. This prices a one-year degree at roughly £12,000. Yet the courses’ overall success rate, in terms of producing graduates who become paid novelists, is not high. To my knowledge, the final proportion has never been counted properly, but it is almost certainly below one in ten. In total, just 27 per cent of even UEA’s graduates have published or self-published a book. ***** When considered in a certain mood, the situation looks ridiculous. I hesitate to say this because—I’ll confess it now—I too have written a novel, which is going to be published. I did not study on a creative writing course, but I have lived the fears of unpublication, so I really do not mean to be patronising or triumphalist. Yet there are some simple questions here that must be asked. Why are 18-year-olds being officially encouraged to begin their writing lives when they have scarcely broached their reading ones? How can anybody take the idea of a doctorate in novel-writing seriously when it is being given to people who have never published a novel? What does any writer good enough for publication actually get from a course in creative writing besides a bill for £12,000 and the incentive to pay it off by teaching others? What is the difference, in other words, between the creative writing movement and an unusually tenacious pyramid scheme? Well, for one thing, if creative writing students think that a course improves their chances of publication they are not deluding themselves. Indeed they are highly favoured in comparison with aspiring novelists generally, who have virtually no chance at all. A good literary agent often receives more than 5,000 unsolicited novels every year, and will agree to represent perhaps just one or two, which most publishers then reject. Doing a good creative writing MA, on the other hand, will usually guarantee a writer the opportunity to meet a few visiting agents and publishers, and will also make their letter more impressive when the novel finally arrives on someone’s desk. “It will probably go to the top of my pile,” says Karolina Sutton, an agent at Curtis Brown. “It won’t guarantee publication or representation, but it means that maybe your work will be taken a bit more seriously at the beginning.” The same logic applies to publishers. “It shows a commitment to the writing life,” says Francis Bickmore, senior editor at Canongate. “A creative writing course also bestows that sense of filtering, to some degree… And it’s the prizes at these courses, that’s what you’re looking out for.” Nor is there any reason to suppose, as some do, that creative writing graduates must be less interesting writers. Well-received new authors such as Adam Foulds, Eleanor Catton, Kiran Desai, Evie Wyld, Ross Raisin, James Scudamore, Samantha Harvey, Naomi Alderman and Mohammed Hanif all studied on creative writing courses. And we can add Kazuo Ishiguro, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Andrea Levy, Sarah Hall and Anne Enright to the list of more established ones. Indeed, if you’re prepared to do a bit of counting, it is clear that former writing students occupy an ever-growing section of the British literary elite (and almost fill it in America). As a way of sampling the best new authors to emerge in the past two decades, I totted up all the novels that have been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award or Booker, or won a Somerset Maugham award, Costa First Novel award or John Llewellyn Rhys prize. Between 1991 and 2000, 10 per cent of these people had studied on creative writing courses. Between 2001 and 2010, 35 per cent had. If this trend continues, the final respectability of creative writing will soon be clinched by the simple fact that hardly any major British authors did not study it. Even so, the large majority of graduates never get close to publication, let alone the winner’s podium. Are they all tragic casualties? We cannot tell, of course. But what evidence there is does not suggest so. Novel-writing is a long process, after all: emotionally precarious, but with no conclusive way of failing, and plenty of examples of persistence paying off. If graduates do not publish anything immediately, they may still feel that what they learned was worth it, and use those lessons to produce a second, better book. As Russell Celyn Jones, director of the Birkbeck programme, put it in a letter to the Guardian in May 2009, “I have yet to hear of anyone demanding their money back.” Then there is the argument that publication, anyway, is not the only thing worth striving for. Many people find a great therapeutic value in writing creatively, and in learning to write better. Some teachers, such as Graeme Harper of Bangor University, who edits the journal New Writing, also propose that creative writing offers a fresh way to understand how literature works. “What I find interesting, personally,” he says, “is why do we choose to do this thing? It’s not purely informational. It’s not purely entertainment-orientated. It’s not purely artform-orientated… If [publication] was the only criterion, frankly it would be the same thing for the vast majority of arts and humanities, probably the same thing for social sciences, and probably the same thing, to be honest, for a lot of the sciences: we’d be saying, ‘Well actually why are we doing this?’ Because it’s not having any direct impact on commerce.” For those who want to have an impact, meanwhile, the creative writing movement does now appear to be developing a pragmatic second phase, made up of teachers suspicious of the workshop who favour a more direct approach to getting published. In 2008, the Faber Academy, run by the famous publisher, began offering a variety of courses, including a selective six month novel-writing programme. “There’s an emphasis on the practical, on writing,” says Becky Fincham, head of the academy. “And we do say, ‘This is how you can get published,’ definitely.” (Although not, of course, “This is how you can definitely get published.”) A year later, Edinburgh Napier University announced a new MA, under the direction of Sam Kelly, a former literary agent, in which one-to-one tutorials replace workshops entirely. In April, the National Academy of Writing will also start offering courses of its own. “It helps to be honest about the motivation of writers going on MA courses,” says its director Richard Beard. “And I think it’s true to say in the huge majority of cases that it’s not to get an MA. You go on those courses because you want to be a better writer, and the logical extension of that is that you want to be a published writer. Being honest about that helps in the whole process.” The NAW uses the conservatoire model, in which students are given one-to-one critiques on a single piece of work while the rest of the group watches silently. For several years, these classes have been available as part of the MA at Birmingham City University, and when I go to visit one, they are certainly impressive. Beard’s insights are precise, intelligent, and unarguable when you hear them. “It is a close textual reading,” he explains, “so it’s not a discussion which can become vague, or shoot off into other areas.” Watching him, there is little doubt that skilled authors can indeed teach novice ones a great deal. But is the teaching, in the end, what matters? Consider Ian McEwan. Though no one taught him how to write at UEA, he loved his time there. “The year I had in Norwich was extraordinary for me,” he says. “I wrote a lot of short stories. I was aware that my stories were going to be read by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, both writers I respected… It was a great spur to be writing, knowing that someone was going to read you… The reading lists were good. The other students doing the MA were incredibly bright… If you’ve bracketed that time, and expectations are laid on you, then that has to be useful.” After graduation, Wilson helped Mc-Ewan to win a £1,000 grant from the Arts Council, which was very important at an impoverished time. His first publication came when Bradbury sent off one of his stories to the Transatlantic Review, which paid him £5. Bradbury was “probably” instrumental in McEwan’s breakthrough, too, bringing him to the attention of the New American Review. Even now, “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” is still in print, and frequently adapted and performed. In short, what the tutors at UEA did was recognise and promote McEwan’s talent; while being there, and being expected to write, helped him to get serious about fiction. Today, these are still the most important functions of the creative writing course. Even if the teaching is almost irrelevant in some cases, they select the best new writers, create a space for them to focus on writing, and bring them to publishers’ attention. Always valuable, this work became vital once internet retailing opened up a path between every book and every reader. All novels now have a shot at prominence, so more are published, less expensively. It is thus getting noticed, not getting a contract, that is the modern author’s cynosure. In the eyes of publishers, this makes debuts perversely more attractive, because it is easier to generate hype around no reputation—the precocious talent, the hot new thing—than around a reputation for not selling very many books. In other words, the books world has developed a paradoxical appetite for novices: literary virgins, on whose fresh hopes of a hit the trade must pin its own. And the creative writing movement supplies these virgins, aptly trained. Which makes the whole thing sound more exploitative than it is. These are eager virgins, let us not forget. For a short while longer I am one of them. And like all writers in the search for readers, we will always willingly exploit ourselves.
