Teaching Creative Writing . . . and Plymouth

“Can you teach creative writing?”

It’s one of those lame questions, as though writers just close off their conscious minds and let some disembodied genius flow through. It ignores all those elements of craft most writers learn through slog, though trial-and-error, through entering a writer’s work and seeing how it was wrought from the inside. It ignores the skill involved in registering some emotion as it is stirred in what you are reading, and troubling to work your way back to learn how it was achieved. It never even considers all the stuff that writers have to unlearn, all the habits and ways of thinking and manners of perception that need to be shaken down.

Can you help writers step back enough from their work so they can view it objectively? Can you train them to appreciate, challenge and support each other? Can you give them the confidence to dare and shock themselves? Can you lead them into seeing how rhythm works in their writing, how to write to achieve silence, how less can mean more, how just switching tense can give a piece a tremendous boost? Of course you can, and so much more besides.

Some worry that teaching creative writing stultifies your own creativity. Maybe it can. Everything can become a rut. But the teaching itself can be creative, and as you help other writers become more attentive to the minutiae and sweep of their own work, your own focus is improved. You learn too from drawing lessons out of passages from the great writers. And stay alive through entering the process as other writers, often much younger than you, discover their own unique voices. It’s hard for your own work to stay stuck when everyone around you is moving.

So I’m looking forward to my new role come July . . . teaching English and Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth, on the south west coast of England. There are ten in the department at the moment, so I’ll make number eleven, based in one of the villas you see in the bottom picture. Top picture is the new 36 million pound Levinsky Building that is opening in the Autumn – striking in itself, but still more striking is that a university is prepared to invest so much in the Arts. The university is a large one for the UK, housed in a compact city-centre campus, the English department recently moving into it from its previous country retreat. Creative Writing is active at the undergraduate level, with a thriving MA and a fledgling PhD programme. My new appointment is fresh investment in this strand of the department, and it’s encouraging to see how everybody is behind it. I’m excited at the prospect.