I came to literary theory and creative writing
courses late. I had written as a teenager—the usual angst-filled
poetry, maudlin short stories—but my adult life was mostly about working and paying
bills, with very little time for writing. Then I had children, became a
stay-at-home-mum, and suddenly I had some free time again. I went to writing
courses, which gave me both confidence and inspiration, and after that I bumbled
along independently—but with no success. I was producing work, but I didn’t
know where to send it, and when I did it was always rejected. Something is missing,
I thought. Could it be a creative writing degree? Is this something I should be
considering?
At the end of my first undergraduate
year, I won my first short story competition. Two years later, I won the university’s
undergraduate writing prize. Since then I’ve been short-listed in comps, and published
in a number of literary journals. I won’t go on. Whether I can attribute all
this to one creative writing course is debatable, but what I can say with
conviction is that university taught me many things, including to be disciplined.
When friends phoned to ask me for morning coffee, I declined. I said I was
working, and quickly learned not to take offence when they said, “Working? What are you doing?” “Writing,”
I said. “Oh, that,” they said, as if I had told them I was doing needlepoint. I
watched how other writers worked. I listened in class, I learned, and I read,
and I read. I read stuff that I would never
ever have read on my own, including things I didn’t even like, and I am a
better writer for it.
I’ll be the first to agree
that literary theory can be as dull and tedious as a writer stuck indoors on a
rainy day without a computer … but it needn’t be. With the right teacher,
literary theory can speak to you. It did to me. From the walls. The piece of
writing was “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I read it twice
before the lecture, and didn’t get it. So
what, I thought, a woman and some
wallpaper. The lecturer went into it in depth. She started with Freud and
psychoanalysis. Then she moved on to how the narrator discerns a ghostly woman in
the sub-pattern of the wallpaper, how the narrator’s quietly going mad, trapped
by her domestic life and her marriage, and so forth and so on. I was
awe-struck. Oh, I remember thinking, Oh. Hooley-Dooley. Look what you can do with
words! It wasn’t the proverbial
penny dropping. It was a radiant light shining where before there’d been gloom
and murk. It had never occurred to me that you could say one thing, but mean
another. That you could hide secret messages within your writing. That, in quoting
another literary work within your own, you could reveal the ending. Ian McEwan
does several spectacular things in Atonement,
and this is one of them. He mentions W. H. Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts—about life going on in the face of suffering, and
Icarus, the boy who fell from the sky—signalling to the reader that there will
be no happy ending to this narrative. Literary devices such as intertextuality;
stream of consciousness; the unreliable narrator; and theory such as
psychoanalysis; postcolonialism; eco-criticism; all these should be learned to appreciate
how good writing works.
As an aside, I’ll concede it’s
possible that Barthes, Foucault, Woolf et al aren’t relevant to all writers. Commercial
writers, for instance. I know at least two who have achieved publishing deals
without any background in creative writing courses and, Whoo Hoo, I say, because they are my friends. But I will still
argue that commercial writers are better writers for knowing the nuts and bolts
of writing.
My
point is, why assume you don’t need a degree to be a writer? Why should being a
writer be any different from any other career? In today’s writing world, where
publication is on knife-edge, book sales are wildly unpredictable, and even publishers
can be surprised by what readers want—witness the explosive popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, picked up by
mainstream publishers only after its unexpected self-published success—you need
every iota of help you can get. I think it also comes down to this: how badly
do you want—not to write—but to be a writer? And not just any writer, but a good writer? If you really want to be that writer, surely you will make it your business
to find out everything there is to know about your craft?
