Creative writing – from teaching to hacking it

That hoary question ‘can you teach creative writing?’ has always seemed daft to me. I’m a teacher and I write so of course I can put the two together.Writers redraft their work. We do that because we have acquired a sense of how to make it better. Teaching is tansmitting that, illuminating texts so that students have a chance to turn on their own editorial eye. They see what they’ve done well and what has not quite hit the same heights, and learn techniques to strengthen what is weaker. Hopefully they also take on the confidence to dare the imagination and surpass themselves.

 I’ve had a sense what it’s like to be one of my creative writing students these last days. A novel I had worked on for a decade and deemed masterful and complete went out into the world in manuscript just over a year ago – and it came back. Readers I respected simply didn’t get it. It was clearly neither masterful nor complete. I took it back on board.

I’ve often said time is the best editor. Set writing to one side for six months and you gain the perspective to see it more clearly. I’ve also hammered away at this book, remodelled characters, written wholly new opening chapters, researched more and dramatized and stripped away. These last days, with teaching put to bed for the semester, I’ve been able to return to the task.

And I learn once again how teaching supports writing. I spend scores of hours a month analyzing writing, isolating elements so I can show students what works, what doesn’t, and why. Now I come to look at my novel – and boy, those failings I’ve seen in others’ work are obvious in my own. Did I really believe that the trajectory of my main storyline had enough momentum to carry readers through all these digressions? Here I am, in perhaps my novel’s climactic scene, and I’m reporting it rather than dramatizing it, letting the reader enter the scene as it unfolds!

I see it, and I can mend it. It means lots of stripping away. Sometimes substituting a simple scene for a complex one does the job. It was tough work, like cutting a path through brambles, but I managed it.

And for a while at least, it makes me more appreciative of others. I see how hard some students work with their writing – and how tough it can be to actually make that breakthrough to hoist writing up a level. I might also be more tolerant of writers who push good but flawed novels out to the public – they needed editors to push them the extra mile and editors are hard-pressed.

We’ll see if all the work makes the difference with this novel, Music.  I’ll let this new draft rest a wee while more before reading it. We drank a champagne toast to it last night even so – I’ve learnt as a writer to take moments of celebration where you can.