How Much Writing Success Should Your Writing Tutor Have Had?

This was raised on another blog, and I thought it was an interesting question.  I don't have any answers, but these are my thoughts, in no particular order.

1.  I'm a better teacher now than when I started teaching, but it's not my personal writing success that's made me so, it's my experience as a creative writing teacher plus lots and lots and lots of thinking and reading about creative writing.

2.  When I started going to writing classes, I wanted someone who'd had some success with their writing.  I didn't have confidence in someone who hadn't achieved publication in some form.  I still feel that way, and cringe when I hear of someone teaching who hasn't actually been published (unless they've got other professional publishing experience, such as having been an editor).

3.  When I was on my MA some of the feedback the other students gave was excellent, some was not.  There was no correlation between the quality of the feedback and the student's previous success or experience.  However, those people who gave good feedback went on to have publishing success while those who didn't, didn't.

4.  There is publishing success and publishing success.  Self publishing a book, however you dress it up, means you have sidestepped the quality question.  I'm not saying all self published books are bad, just they haven't been through an external quality assessment process and backed by someone else's money.  I've seen people announce that they are published, when actually they mean self published, or published by a vanity press.  

5.  I am successfully published by most people's standards, but I could no more give useful advice on poetry than I could run a marathon.  If poetry was your thing, you'd do better with an unpublished but knowledgeable tutor than you would with published but ignorant me.

6.  I have high standards and want my students to set themselves high standards too.  Even if I'm teaching a leisure course I want them to work hard.  That's not for everyone.  Some people are happy for their writing to be way down their list of priorities, and that's fine - but I may not be the best person for them.

7.  Similarly, I'm not a great person for touchy-feely navel gazing, although I hope I'm sensitive to people's vulnerabilities and encouraging to the tentative.  Some tutors are touchy-feely and like navel gazing, and if that's what you want, why not? In other words, the personality of the tutor may be more important than their publishing history.

8.  If you were writing to go through a lot of personal stuff then you'd be better working with someone who has experience of this.  There are courses around of writing for therapeutic purposes, and there are people trained in this area.  Their experience would count far more than their publishing history.

9.  Some tutors are very sniffy about some forms of writing - I've heard of students on MA courses in particular having their work dismissed as not worthy, simply because of the genre they wanted to write in.  It would be more important to have someone as a tutor who was open to what you wanted to write but was perhaps not a super successful writer themselves, than someone who was a starry literary name, but dismissed your work and undermined your confidence.  

10.  Related to the above, you may be sniffy about what the tutor writes, in which case you won't have confidence in what they say.  You may be right, you may be wrong, but if you don't have confidence in them, they are the wrong tutor for you.

OK, so that's my thinking.  What do you reckon?

What I've Learned From Teaching

And after my grumpiness earlier in the week about a new term starting, I'm off this morning to teach the first session this term of my Friday class, the longest teaching job I've had - over ten years, who'd have thought it? Ever Friday morning (and afternoon, because the waiting list for the morning led a duplicate class in the afternoon) in term time for over ten years I've come up with a new class idea for thirty odd students to react to.

That's a lot of classes. A lot of ideas because I rarely duplicate a class unless asked to (or once because I came across a scribbled class note to myself and thought "that's a good idea, I'll use that in class", completely forgetting that I already had) and a lot of people putting their heads down and reacting to my commands to write something impossible.

And they do. I set these impossible tasks, they pull faces and then write something in response. They're so obedient! I hardly ever get a refusal, their creativity hitting a blank. There may be moans and groans, but they do it.

Usually when I call time they're less obedient. The pens scribble on. I call time again, and reluctantly people leave the world of their writing and come back to the class.

So, what do we learn?

Firstly, it doesn't take long to get sucked into writing. You just have to get started and it pulls you in.

Secondly, if you HAVE to - a new class looming means a new idea must be found, a teacher demands you write something - you will write.

We've been proving that every Friday for over ten years. We'll prove it again today. It's true for you too. Sit down, start writing, and in a few minutes it will come.

How I Got Into Teaching Creative Writing

Jessica asked me this and I thought - whee! there's something I haven't blogged about before, which is brilliant when you're a daily blogger and always terrified the ideas are going to dry up.

I had written six books about careers in the media aimed at school leavers before deciding what I really wanted was to write fiction. So I started with short stories and applied for an MA in Creative Writing. I didn't have a job to go to after the MA and I was broke, all my hopes were pinned on getting a fabulous publishing deal but even I realised that that might not happen. Teaching creative writing had a lot of appeal but I thought no one would ever want me. Then I discovered that a woman in my MA workshop group who I thought was a) the worst writer and b) an even worse critiquer was teaching creative writing.

That gave me confidence: however dreadful I might be at teaching, I had to be better than her. But I didn't do anything about it until I went to a talk on getting published. The speaker arrived late and, while she was sorting herself out, instructed the audience to talk to the person next to them to start networking. So I asked the bloke on my right what he did, and he said - and I am not making this up - "I teach creative writing in Devizes but I want to give my class up when I find someone to take it over." "Me!" I squeaked. "Me!" He gave me the contact details of who ran the courses and said he'd recommend me.

So I applied, and was offered the class, and jumped through the admin hoops, got CRB checked, went on a special day about disability access, and another about health and safety, and then not enough people enrolled so the class never happened. But I'd been fired up enough to write to six other colleges and universities within a hour's drive of me, saying I was looking for work as a creative writing tutor. It was February, a good time to write as that's when the schedules for the coming year are planned. Three never replied but three did....

I was offered an evening class at Norton Radstock college for that autumn. I got my publishing deal the same week as I taught my first class which gave me a bit more confidence, but I was still terrified. Because of their system they couldn't repeat a class so I did Beginners in the autumn and Advanced in Spring and that was it for Norton Radstock.

Bath University offered me a day course and after that went well, I began teaching a novel writing course. I did that for about two years, and might be teaching it today except I got fed up with the administration and walked out, the only time I've ever done that. (Note to self: Do not start ranting. Stop it now.)

Bristol University ran two creative writing classes in Bath, one that I'd been on before the MA and another which was always on the verge of failing. About six months after my initial letter they got in touch and said they'd take the chance on offering me the class for a term to see if I could turn it around. And eight years on I'm still there, Friday mornings with a duplicate class in the afternoons and there's still a waiting list.

I went on to teach on the BA Creative Studies at Bath Spa, the Creative Writing Diplomas at Bristol and Oxford Universities, and various undergraduate BA modules at ASE, which is a branch campus of Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, USA. At one point I was teaching sixteen hours a week, which was too much and my writing suffered, so it's now a maximum of six.

Starting in October I'm the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Bristol and I'm not sure how that's going to work out with the writing time. I've decided not to teach at Oxford next year, although I loved the students, and I'm doing just one course for ASE. But the Friday class will carry on until I run out of ideas or students. And at an Oxford tutorial on Tuesday a student asked why a successful novelist like me taught, so I might do that tomorrow.

Next event - CHESTERFIELD! 10th June, at the library at 7.30 as part of the Derbyshire Lit Fest. (Details on p 49 of the brochure). And then it's Birmingham on the 23rd.