In 2014, in The Guardian newspaper, the novelist Will Self wrote about the death of the novel. His piece was a version of the Richard Hillary memorial lecture. You might think the sardonic Will Self an odd choice to commemorate the author of The Last Enemy, but you needn’t worry on that score, the essay didn’t even mention him.
Aware his theme was a trifle hackneyed (after all, this particular patient has been on its deathbed for decades) he wanders off into a rather unconvincing account of the baleful influence of digital media on the reading public. I’m afraid Marshall McLuhan gets roped in, at which point you might well decide to give the whole thing a miss. But you would be wrong! Right at the end, Self gets onto the subject of teaching creative writing in universities. He is passionate about it and what he says resonates.
“… another way of looking at them is that they're a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme purpose built to accommodate writers who can no longer make a living from their work. In these care homes, erstwhile novelists induct still more and younger writers into their own reflexive career paths, so that in time they too can become novelists who cannot make a living from their work and so become teachers of creative writing.“
Famed for his light touch, you obviously have to tease out Self’s subtle innuendo here, but you get the point: he doesn’t think much of creative writing as a university subject. But he hasn’t finished yet:
“If you'll forgive a metaphoric ouroboros: it shouldn't surprise us that this is the convulsive form taken by the literary novel during its senescence; some of the same factors implicated in its extinction are also responsible for the rise of the creative writing programme; specifically a wider culture whose political economy prizes exchange value over use value, and which valorises group consciousness at the expense of the individual mind.”
The article did not pass without comment. For example, Nicholas Royle (who teaches Creative Writing) wrote:
“I would agree that if someone has no talent at all, no gift for writing, you can’t pluck one off the shelf and give it to them. If they don’t have it, you can’t provide them with it. But if they do have something, you can help them grow it, develop it, refine it. And even if they haven’t got it, you can still teach basics and offer techniques.”
Royle gives an example of what he means by “technique,” by the way: punctuation.
“I have an MA student at the moment who has a brilliant idea for a novel, a superb voice and a good ear for dialogue, but she struggles with punctuation. It’s as if someone bought her a bag full of colons and she feels she has to use them all up, no matter that in most cases she should be using the humble comma. She reads plenty, but she’s not picking up the rules or nuances of punctuation from her reading, so this is an area in which she can benefit from being on the course.”
Well, I said I’d say where I stood on this vexed topic. So where do I?
These essays are about self-publishing and I have already given you the golden rule. If it’s going to cost you money rather than your reader, don’t do it. So I’m afraid that argues against.
You may well declare you are uninterested in self-publishing (curl your lip if you like). You intend to take the other route. Before you do, listen to Will Self on the subject:
“When I finished my first work of fiction in 1990 and went looking for a publisher, I was offered an advance of £1,700 for a paperback original edition. I was affronted, not so much by the money (although pro rata it meant I was being paid considerably less than I would have working in McDonald's), but by not receiving the sanctification of hard covers. The agent I consulted told me to accept without demur: it was, he said, nigh-on impossible for new writers to get published – let alone paid.”
It is arguable that self-publishing is now the only viable route to traditional publication. I shall be writing about this later. Meanwhile take comfort in this - if your work succeeds, it will be noticed.
I am particularly uneasy about undergraduate courses in writing. Whatever else it is (and it is many things) writing fiction is a craft and, generally speaking, a university is not a good place to learn a craft (and it is certainly not an appropriate place to teach one). Even if that point can be met (although god knows how) the business of evaluating work is highly subjective. To my mind, that raises virtually insoluble ethical problems for the teacher.
Self’s essay points to a more intractable problem: a course “valorises group consciousness at the expense of the individual mind.” A course offering exclusively “one-on-one” teaching would escape this stricture, but would be prohibitively expensive. In my view, writing is necessarily a solitary occupation. Nothing is gained (indeed, much can be lost) by treating it as a form of group therapy.
It used not to be so, but the modern university is currently in a highly conventional state, cloaked in a deathly kind of Eurothink. Indeed, this is so pervasive that transgression itself must take conventional forms. I never imagined I would write this sentence, but there are now opinions in universities that cannot be held, ideas that cannot be expressed. Do I need to tell you, the writer’s job is to be transgressive, to get up the reader’s nose now and then, to offend? Perhaps it is my blind spot, but I can’t see how that chimes with the apparatus of graduation - assessment, marking, and so on, What if the response to the question, “What did you write?” is bugger all? You can’t see it ending well, can you? Can you really see a Michel Houellebecq emerging from a course in creative writing?
Punctuation? Well, yes – we all have our weak spot. My publisher friend, god bless him, infuriated by my own eccentricity in that regard gave me a copy of Notes on Punctuation by Eric Partridge (you can probably still get it on Abebooks for a quid or two). It’s only twenty pages long. Honest, you really don’t need a course for that.
To be continued …