'Q' (Rip Torn) in Wonder Boys
In
Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film Wonder Boys,
based on a novel by Michael Chabon, the successful author Quentin Morewood (known
as ‘Q’, and played by Rip Torn), opens his keynote speech to a literary
festival by announcing, portentously, “ I am… a Writer.” There is a brief
pause, followed by thunderous applause from the assembled members of the
university Creative Writing faculty hosting the event. As the ovation dies
down, it is replaced by isolated shrieks of laughter emanating from James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a
gifted student, misfit and fantasist, who plainly has no time for the solemnity
and self-regard of the occasion – and has also been smoking marijuana. It’s a great comic moment, puncturing Q’s pomposity
and calling into question the solemn presence of everybody there. We’re never
quite sure if James is impressed by, or even aware of, his own talent – which has
already been comprehensively rubbished by his studious peers – or whether it is
all part of the continuum of deceit and self-concealment by which he keeps everyone
around him at bay. But there can be no doubt that he holds the institution of
which he is a member in little regard, and this only serves to emphasise the uncertainties
simultaneously assailing his tutor, Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), who
was appointed to his post on the strength of a single well-received novel and
now cannot finish his second. James
obviously can write, but won’t – or can’t – play the game. Prof Tripp plays the
game – he is both coach and referee into the bargain – but seems to have
forgotten how to write spontaneously.
And here we have, in one brilliant little vignette, the whole paradox of
Creative Writing education.
I‘m
thinking of this because for some reason a number of my Facebook friends have,
in the last couple of days, posted various press and blog articles giving
advice to writers and other artists on how to ‘up’ their performance, concentrate on the job in hand, augment their
creativity, and otherwise improve themselves and their production. Coupled with this has been publicity
surrounding the recent 40th anniversary of the first UK Creative
Writing degree course at the University of East Anglia (alumni: Ian McEwan,
Kazuo Ishiguro, et al.) The question this
raises with me is one I’ve often heard articulated
before: does any of it work ? Indeed, given the huge disparity in personality
between practitioners of the literary arts, the impenetrability of the
commercial market for their output, and the unpredictability of artistic
trends, can it work ?
"Bleeding obvious !"
I
suppose a lot depends on what it is you’re trying to achieve. Much of the
standard advice concerns the development of writing habits – treating what you
do as though it were a day job, writing even when you don’t feel like it, accepting
that writing practice complies with the old formula ‘1% inspiration, 99%
perspiration’, and so on. But this strikes me as what Basil Fawlty might have
described as the ‘school of the bleeding obvious’ – useful only to those with a
vague idea that they might want to become a writer, as though this were some
kind of supplementary accomplishment like learning to swim or cultivating
gardenias. I’d guess that most of those who take any notice at all of this kind
of article, or who might consider enrolling on a Creative Writing course, have
already been doing these things for years and have either worked out all the
basics on their own or learnt them through independent research. For the rest, a very great deal of the other
hints and tips regularly dispensed are contradictory and/or mutually exclusive –
the most obvious example, familiar to all practising writers, being the
incompatibility between screenwriter Robert McKee’s brilliantly-constructed comprehensive
theory of storytelling and his confrère
William Goldman’s pithy dictum: “No-one
knows anything.” The journalist Robert
McCrum was widely ridiculed just before Christmas when he filled his Observer column with “Fifty things I've learned about the literary
life”, apparently because he was simply reproducing a set of self-cancelling clichés
about writing. But as far as I could tell,
this was precisely the point he was
trying to make.
Robert McCrum's Life in Books
OK,
declaration of interest time. I am a writer (note lower-case ‘w’, and no
pregnant pause) – or at least, I was. Not a serial success like Q, nor a talented
maverick like James Leer, nor even a one-hit wonder with a great future behind
him (as they say) like Grady Tripp. I was a hoverer round the fringes of the UK
poetry scene, recipient of fairly regular little-magazine publication, a
couple of minor residencies, commissions for reviews and essays on poetry, and
author of a single short collection bought out by a small press. My three continuously-rewritten
and -submitted novel manuscripts remain unpublished. I have also purported to be a Creative Writing
tutor, this last earning me far more
money, and probably a bigger audience, in one year than all the rest had
managed in the previous ten. As I commented when the first series of Chris
Douglas and Andrew Nickolds’s Radio 4 series went out, Ed Reardon – c’est moi !
The thing about the CW gig, which
I walked into almost entirely on my own say-so, was that I had absolutely no
idea how to proceed in a way that would make any sense to my students. Leaving
aside the fact that my track-record was in poetry and they were principally
prose-fiction writers, their main concern was how to make their work
publishable and attract the requisite attention of agents and
publishing-houses, something I was in absolutely no position to tell them other
than by repeating what others had, ineffectually, told me. I was quite honest about this, as my own
occasional tutors and quasi-mentors had been with me. I might be able to help
you write better, I said, but beyond that nothing is guaranteed. Nothing can
be guaranteed. Unsurprisingly, this was not what most of them wanted to hear :
one class dwindled from 35 participants at the beginning of term to 3 at the
end. Yet even in areas where I believed I had some expertise – conciseness of
style, handling of imagery, effective use of dialogue – I had read too many too-diverse
books to expect any more than the most provisional impact. Presented with a
latterday Henry James, for example, I would have savaged his prolixity. John Le
Carré
would have been commended for plot, advised to tone down some of his
characters, and generally recommended to make his style less leaden. God alone
knows what I would have made of JK Rowling.
I ought to stress that I have
never had anything to do with university-level CW courses. These are probably
quite different from the kind of weekly evening-class sessions that I oversaw, and
certainly attract higher-calibre authors as teaching staff. Also, I’m sure they will have changed from
the early days at UEA, where, as Ian McEwan recalled in a recent radio
interview, students benefited chiefly from being encouraged to read a great
deal (another example, I would suggest, of the blindingly ‘bleeding obvious’)
and tutorials with the late Malcolm Bradbury sometimes consisted simply in being
told one was on the right track and should carry on along it. I mean absolutely
no disrespect to anybody who either teaches or has studied on any CW course at
any level – and I number several friends
among both groups – but I do wonder if they aren’t setting themselves an
impossible task, given the ever-mutating nature of art and literature, and the
fact that nobody, but nobody, claims to be able to predict what ‘the Market’
will pick up, now or in the future.
Of course, as McEwan also pointed
out in the same interview, the great advantage of his time at university was
the opportunity to spend a substantial period legitimately concentrating on writing,
reading, discussing work with other writers, and developing ideas, free from the
necessities of paid labour and the multifarious other calls on one’s time which
necessarily circumscribe the lives of most people, the great majority of
practising writers among them. Ultimately, however, he will have had to reach the
same accommodation as the rest of us with the practicalities of everyday
existence. Whatever he or anybody else may have chanced to learn through the
teaching or experience of others, such knowledge or ability remains under
constant review, and is only any good so long as the individual is able to keep
acquiring insights for him- or herself, maintaining self-confidence, and
convincing those on whom publication depends that the work is worth the
investment. Perhaps the grounding of a CW course can help in this, although it
seems to me that there are so many variables involved that any success in this
connection is likely to be more by luck – combined with native talent and blind
tenacity – than by any judgment on the part of the course designers.
Of all the arts, I’d argue,
writing is the most thankless. Even an indifferent painter or sculptor will end
up with a picture or object that can be displayed, albeit in their own
living-room. A composer will have a piece of music that can be played, by its
author if by no-one else. A choreographer doesn’t even exist as such without
someone willing to dance his or her steps. A writer, on the other hand, can
spend years creating, refining, editing, and rewriting a book, but have only a
heap of manuscript paper in a drawer to show for all that solitary effort if
no-one is willing to publish it. With all the encouragement in the world, this
is something no CW course, or handy list of writing hints and tips, or do’s and
don’ts from people supposedly in the know, is ever likely to be able to remedy. Nobody has a right to publication, and many
literary agents are admirably clear in their submission guidelines as to what
they will consider accepting – even though
they will themselves sometimes break their own rules if they come across
something genuinely surprising. The
whole process is inherently unpredictable, and this isn’t helped by the lack of
feedback accompanying most rejected submissions. The best anyone can hope to
derive from the kind of advice generally available, be it in the form of
structured academic courses or ad hoc lists,
is a kind of temporary bulwark against the next disappointment, or the
superstitious gambler’s hope that next time, next time it will be
different.
(That looks suspiciously like my study floor... PS)