The Creative Writing Coursebook was something we started putting together almost twenty years ago. Both of us were writers and teachers of writing. We were up to our necks in daily practice and workshopping, and we were surrounded by students and other writers at the University of East Anglia. When we taught and when we talked about writing we used materials from all kinds of sources and we realized that what we could really do with was a bespoke book we could use on our courses. One that was compendious and generous and friendly. Not a stuffy, textbookish, prescriptive kind of book. Instead, one that was encouraging, challenging, entertaining and inspiring. We realized that it was a book we would have to create for ourselves: a book of many voices that would hopefully have a usefulness beyond courses and universities. It was the kind of thing that anyone who ever wanted to write would like to have.
We wanted to take the best elements of the kinds of university courses we had taught – both under- and postgraduate writing courses – and pour them into a single volume. It was important to us to counteract the myth that creative writing couldn’t be taught. We were steeped in the idea of craft and practice, and knew that writing is just the same as painting or piano-playing. To learn, you need guidance, exercises, time, space, energy and encouragement. We both had a lot to say about the business of creative writing and so did lots of our friends and fellow writers and teachers, and so the two of us found ourselves dreaming up a voluminous book that would somehow contain all these varying viewpoints.
It wasn’t to be a book that would tell you to follow the right way to do things. There never was any single correct way to do things in writing – no matter what anyone tells you. It wasn’t a case of instructing anyone on how they could become materially successful. It was all about providing the reader with the tools that we thought they might need in order to create a piece of imaginative writing they could be proud of, in whichever form or genre they chose.
We started collecting exercises and essays that would make the reader and potential writer think about gathering together the elements of a piece of new writing; how best to shape it into the form they wanted; how to experiment and play, and then offered suggestions about where to take it next. A lot of the lessons that writers must learn are hard won and a long time coming, and our idea was to pool the experience of a whole host of writers we loved and respected and maybe to offer a few hints and shortcuts to those setting off on their own journey.
Not everyone would turn out to be a literary star. No book and no course would ever promise that. But it’s not only the success stories that validate our belief that creative writing can be taught. Crafting and creating a piece of written work that is uniquely yours and the product of your own sensibility and personality is immensely rewarding. Through the development of such work you can add so much to your repertoire of life skills. Writing is something that will always bring pleasure to you, throughout your life, once you feel confident on the page and at ease with expressing yourself. You will always feel at home in your own thoughts and the quiet of your own endless struggle with style. Being able to say exactly what you mean without fear, self-censorship, woolly thinking or jargon seemed extremely important when we first curated this book, and it seems even more important now.
In the years since the first publication of The Creative Writing Coursebook, much has changed in the world of publishing, most obviously the rapid expansion of the digital. When we first put the book together back in the early 2000s, we were sending emails, able to work with our editor who was on secondment in New York, but digital books and the explosion of social media was still to come. There was no Facebook or Instagram, no Twitter nor even the behemoth of Google that we know now. This sudden and consuming interconnectivity has of course changed the landscape for writers, creating new opportunities while challenging some of the more traditional methods of publishing your work.
What this book celebrates – now updated to include some essays on these changes and offering even more advice and exercises – is the fact that while some of publishing may have shrunk in the face of the digital, the world of text has expanded exponentially. We are actually writing and reading more than we ever were, communicating through the written (or typed) word – texts, blog posts and tweets. Most people are now writing down their thoughts and sending them to others in a way that was never possible before. We are very much still writing, even if the medium has changed beyond recognition.
But the means of learning about writing have remained pretty much the same – to be good at expression a writer needs to learn the arts of what might be called rhetoric. How to use language accurately, skilfully, persuasively. How to use words to create convincing characters, develop an exciting plot or to work out a rhythm for a poem. It also demands stepping back and editing and reading yourself with some honesty. Writing, like any craft, requires application and practice. Talent might be useful, but the main prerequisite is the hours – the time that you spend in your imagination allowing yourself space to write.
Time, and our relationship to it, is the other aspect of life which the digital has radically altered. In our always-on culture it’s easy to disappear into a rabbit hole of web searches and social media and realize you’ve lost hours of precious writing time. #amwriting is a poor excuse for actually getting on with it. This book, then, is also a way of making more time to write. It’s analogue, and it invites the reader to try out exercises either in a programmatic way – by following the structure of a course – or by dipping in and out, by choosing a few exercises to follow to help energize or inspire new work. It’s an invitation to step away from the digital for a moment. To look around you without the distractions of the internet. A pen and paper is really all you need, and some uninterrupted time, only an hour or two – you never know what you might be capable of.
This is how the book is organized. It’s split into three sections: Gathering, Shaping and Finishing. There are exercises and activities to try throughout, and to help you navigate the book you will see that they are marked with a symbol in the margins. In Gathering we start off with encouragement and simple exercises to get you started; the essays move through issues of detail and abstraction to the uses of autobiography. Following that, Shaping is the section where plotting and narrative construction are explained, and the uses and effects of point of view. We go into the nature of characterization, and the employment of landscape in writing. Finishing, the final section, offers pragmatic advice on how to edit and refine your work. It contains essays by editors and publishers on how to prepare manuscripts for submission, how to publish your own work and how to find editorial guidance. Here you’ll find a new section, created for this brand-new edition of the Coursebook, entitled New Forms, where we explore some of the genres and platforms that have flourished in the years since our book first appeared.
This book can’t give you the raw material or the talent or the ideas, but it has, over the years, taught many people how to write better. The essays here are a gift, written by some writers at the beginning of their journeys, by others who are no longer with us, and by some who have had brilliant subsequent careers. They are all passing on advice and exercises that have worked for them. The Coursebook has become a kind of standard on university courses, partly because of the breadth of knowledge it contains, but also because it was amongst the first of its kind. When we put it together we did it because there were no other works which offered the structure of a university course in a book. Now there are many, but this was the first, and, we believe – with the new material – the most comprehensive across all forms of prose and poetry writing. This book is a place to begin, but where it may take you, on the adventure of creation, is entirely up to you.
Power to your pen. Rock on.
Julia Bell and Paul Magrs, December 2018