Writing education

It’s been really interesting to read recently about writing and formal education. Laura at Miss Read started the topic and Lucy at Write Here, Write Now continued it. I’m in my third (and final) year of a part-time MA course in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and so thought I’d chip in too.

Why I started
I’d written two and half novels already and got some really encouraging feedback from the publishers and agents that I sent my stuff to. I got maybe half a dozen requests for my manuscripts but they were finally all rejected.

It seemed like I was able to string a sentence together but had a lot to learn when it came to telling a story – at least a novel length story.

The course
I followed the part of the course specifically for novel writing – there’s an option for poets.

It was part-time and online which was handy for me, and the main reason why I chose this particular course, since I was living in Angola when I started it, and turning up at the campus, even part-time, would’ve been tricky.

There’s more details on the website about the course content but here’s my thoughts:

It’s basically split into 5 bits with two kinda vague project things that I won’t go in to. They were helpful in their own way but the real meat of it came from the writing workshops and the literature module.

For the literature module we all (about 11 or 12 of us) would log on at the same time every week to chat – virtually – about a novel we had been given to read.

We’d discuss things like 1st person point of view as oppose to third, the development of particular characters – why is s/he like that? why not? – the language used, did those flashback scenes work, etc.

We also had to write our own (500 word) piece based loosely on the novel that week -  write from the point of view of an unlikable character, do a short satirical story, or, and I quote, ‘ Analyse a comic scene in The Accidental Tourist from a technical perspective, explaining how humour is achieved’. That kind of thing.

Half the time of the online class (45 mins) would be spent discussing the book, the other half (45 mins) discussing each others’ short stories.

The writing workshop was an extended version of this where we could submit fairly lengthy pieces – about 3000 words or so – and get pretty detailed feedback. Most people would add comments in the text – so very specific – and post them back to the author. Then the one and a half hour online discussion, usually split to discuss two or three authors.

The feedback was pretty much always positive and friendly and I think everybody at one point said; Look, just tell me the truth, I can take it. But the truth was that everybody’s stuff was pretty good. Maybe not to your taste, but the course is very popular and so the uni can be very selective about who they take in. Everybody there had already proven they could write.

Teaching
The tutor – all published authors – basically just asked the right questions to get us thinking about our own writing and also how to be critical of what we were reading, including each other’s stuff.

There was no real formal teaching in the sense that the tutor told us how to write or told us things like ‘the thematic patterning in this epistolary novel regularly referenced the predestination paradox through the internal discourse of the protagonist.’

I think it might have been useful to learn that kind of thing and be able to understand a sentence like that (if that’s possible) but then again I could just look up wikipedia (and I just did).

What I really needed was feedback on my own writing but also, and I see now that this is very important, how to learn by reading other writers’ writing.

Portfolio
The third (main) aspect of the course is the portfolio. There are no classes in the third year. You have that time to put together the story you’ve probably been developing throughout that last two years and by the end you have to submit a novel of at least 60,000 words.

Throughout the year you have a tutor that you can send chapters to and get one-on-one feedback from. If you like, you can even have a virtual chat with that person to discuss your progress.

You can’t ask for much more.

Verdict
There were moments on the course when I thought it was useless and I was learning nothing. But then I’d write the essays at the end of each term or so and then, when I had to gather all my thoughts in one place, I’d realise just how much I’d learned.

I could suggest a few ways that course could improve or change and I’m sure the other dozen students in my year would say the same. But I’m also sure that we’d all have quite different suggestions. Writing is a very persoanl thing, and every writer has to work on their own specific weaknesses – as Miss Read’s recent survey also shows.

But has it been good for me?

My aim was to get further than I had before and that means getting a manuscript accepted and finally getting published. I’ve got until September to finish my novel and I won’t send it out until after that, until it’s really finished. So I can’t expect too much before the end of this year (and I’m just realising this as I type it and it seems very far away) but if there is any news on that front I’ll let you know. I’ll be letting everybody know.