I'm interested in what credentials you look for in a tutor/teacher taking a writing course. I've just been looking at a writer's website, for example, where he's offering online courses in short and flash fiction. He says you will be working with a 'master' if you take his course (which is not cheap, by the way), yet he appears to have placed only a small handful of pieces with short fiction magazines/journals, all of them non-paying markets. This doesn't of course mean he can't write . . . but I think it does at least indicate that either he submitted his stories to better markets but they were rejected, or he stuck with easier venues. And I'm not sure that either is a great credential.

There are many very good coaches who didn't play football, for example, to a high level. But to coach football you have to get the approved training and pass the relevant exams. The writer above doesn't appear to have taken any teaching training either.

I've sold stories to the toughest markets and taken all kinds of training and coaching courses over the years. Again, I don't think this necessarily means I can write better than someone who hasn't done the same. But I am certain that many useful experiences, insights, instincts and understandings would not have turned up without me taking this route.

So I'm interested in your views and with an ulterior motive, i.e. I'm putting together some courses for a large organisation and it would be useful to be able to address writers' needs when looking for a course.

Terry

I've had some bad experiences with people who were perfectly good writers, but were unable to distance themselves sufficiently from their own writing when dealing with someone else's. It meant they were not able to take on board what I was trying to do and kept returning to what they they would do. from talking to other people, I'm beginning to think this is a fairly common failing amongst the creative writing community.

However, I have also had a very positive experience and the key difference was that she didn't just know how to write, but also knew how to read analytically. This meant she was able to explain the effects my writing had on her (obviously, this was very subjective, but at the end of the day, what we write is always about the relationship between the individual and the page). We were then able to discuss the gaps between what I had intended and what I was achieving, and how I could alter what I was doing (playing with the volume and the bass and the treble settings, if you like).

This particular person has a degree in English, which probably helped her analytical skills. I wouldn't say this was a necessary qualification by any means, but it would help me to feel more positive about someone I was considering working with. How else to identify that elusive thing that would make me feel that someone had the necessary skills? It's an interesting question, because it's difficult to pin-point, but I would want to talk to them about what they have read and how they responded to it, to try to get a feel for their analytical reading skills.

Probably not helpful. Sorry, Terry.

Thanks. That is helpful, actually. It's similar to my experiences and seems to confirm that where creative writing's concerned, it's often down to pot luck. I agree, too, that a degree is at least a sign of someone having been through training in looking analytically at writing.

It's difficult to think of any other art, where someone can have limited experience yet set themselves up as a tutor, or even be given a tutoring job by a creative writing teaching establishment. Yet it happens in writing quite a lot. And when that's the case, I think your point - that they are not able to take on board what you were trying to do; can only tell you what they would do - is inevitable.

Recently, an SF writers' group I'm in decided it wanted to extend it's yearly critiquing workshop (at a convention), into various teaching/tutoring roles. However, I was concerned that the group hadn't really worked out why it would want to do this. We had a meeting at which it became clear that not only was the group unclear on this topic, it was also unclear about what it was fundamentally a group for in the first place! Which I don't believe is a strong foundation from which to offer tutoring/teaching to others. But as you say, this is a fairly common, and unaddressed, failing amongst the creative writing community.

I'd take it another way and ask why in hell would anybody want to pay for a flash fiction writing course? A writing course, perhaps, perhaps one that uses flash-fiction to work on other skills, but a course that is _specifically_ and _only_ focussed on flash fiction seems a bit... well... limited and limiting.

That's not to knock those of us (like me ) who send out flashes from time to time - it's nice to be read once in a while. Flash is fun, some of it is really good, but you'd have to write an awful lot of stories to ever stand a hope of earning back a course fee... And endless reworking of flashes like you might do in a course feels just a bit like it might be missing the point in any case.

Mind you, I'm equally baffled by the "write a novel" courses. I'd say it's way more useful to have an "edit this bloody-greate lump of manuscript you've already written into some kind of readable format" course... that way all the guidance is based around things you might actually need to know.

G

This is a very interesting point, G. Most writers these days appear to start with novels, or rather bloody great lumps of manuscript, as you put it. And I understand your point about how writing flash fiction is never going to make you a ton of money. But I do worry that lot of new writers seem to want to skip over the skills-building stuff, and just get straight to the big novel. The problem there being two-fold: 1) they lack the skills to produce what's needed both at micro and macro level, and 2) their lack of skills means their vision is limited. Actually, it's three-fold: 3) in spending so much time on what is probably going to be a faulted project, they can build-in bad habits and lack of versatility.

I'll give a sporting example (which always annoys me when others do it but still . . . ). I used to play table football (Subbuteo-ish) to a high level. Yesterday, a friend sent me a YouTube link to a recent World Championship game involving the current champion, a Spanish guy. Wow. This guy did amazing things - moves that his opponent simply didn't see coming. A few of the goals he scored looked magical - complex moves made at high speed; moves that I wouldn't have attempted. More importantly, I wouldn't have seen. And that's my point: this guy's close-in skills were so good he could forget the basics and use his vision to go for the extraordinary.

I don't really think it's any different in writing. If you haven't built the skills; if you don't have an instinctive, automatic grasp on structure, rhythm, character-into-plot-into-character, and so on, you won't a) have the vision and b) the means to realise it anyway. Flash fiction, I believe, can be a very good way of building those skills; as can short fiction in general.

I'm always recommending writing shorts to the authors I work with but they're usually reluctant. I could accuse myself of being hypocritical, too, in that my first serious submission was a novel. However, in my defence, I spent years writing hundreds of poems before trying a novel, and while that didn't help with big picture stuff like plot, it was invaluable, I think, for learning to be precise with words. Also - and this may be a key point - my first book was taken on at a time when editors would put a lot of work into a new book. Which they don't today. Now, new authors have to get the skills themselves somehow. Which brings us back to my original question.

And I wouldn't disagree that it can be very useful to pay someone to edit your manuscript. I do this for people all the time. But I also think it would be beneficial, alongside that, to practice the short form. Although I don't think I'd recommend a course with the 'master' mentioned above.

I've done a few different modules/courses with different tutors and they have varied a lot. I think more important than a qualification in writing is the fact that they are successfully (and recently) published in the area that they are tutoring in.

BUT, having said that, one of the best tutors I ever had in Writing Fiction for Children had only had one picture book published at the time. She was fantastic though, and did go on to get two YA novels published.

What I don't like is online tutors who get the other students to give all the feedback and only offer a line or two themselves.


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Mind you, I'm equally baffled by the "write a novel" courses.

that was the worst one I did (but offered by a v respectable university known for its creative writing courses, though they've now stopped the continuing education bit). I think it was the fact that the course was billed as how to write your novel from scratch, and yet when I signed up and paid for it, the first thing you had to do, within the first week, was come up with a detailed synopsis for your novel. There was no indication in the course info that you had to have already thought of and planned your novel. So of course mine was complete rubbish because I had to make something up on the spot, with no knowledge of novel writing. This was a few years ago, and the response I got was so negative and vague that I nearly gave up writing altogether. Fortunately I took the things I did learn from it (the hard way) and put them into practice so that I figured out how to write a novel by reading and trying things out for myself.

I've done a few different modules/courses with different tutors and they have varied a lot. I think more important than a qualification in writing is the fact that they are successfully (and recently) published in the area that they are tutoring in.

I agree. But it shouldn't really be the case that creative writing tutoring varies so much. I think one of the reasons is because tutors aren't often taught how to teach. At best, they have degrees in Creative Writing but I suspect this is mostly based on analysing literature - useful enough but not the same as learning how to teach. And, really, most teaching/tutoring organisations - including Avon and the manuscript agencies - do not offer their tutors much if any training. So, you get a lot of people teaching who may have had a couple of books published but don't necessarily have a clue how to help other writers.

I'm something of a preacher about this, I admit, because I've learnt a lot of excellent coaching practices and techniques from coaching professionals over the years. And I do believe if you're tutoring creative writing, you must be able to get outside your particular personal approach, to provide the methods that will work best for a particular student. Coaching helps with that but in my experience, there is not much appetite for it in writing institutions.

BUT, having said that, one of the best tutors I ever had in Writing Fiction for Children had only had one picture book published at the time. She was fantastic though, and did go on to get two YA novels published.

I've had similar experiences. But, again, it's pot luck that you find someone like this (or word of mouth), and maybe it shouldn't be.

yet when I signed up and paid for it, the first thing you had to do, within the first week, was come up with a detailed synopsis for your novel. There was no indication in the course info that you had to have already thought of and planned your novel. So of course mine was complete rubbish because I had to make something up on the spot, with no knowledge of novel writing.

This is an example of what I'm getting at re coaching vs fixed approaches. Leaving aside the question of whether very many experienced novelists ever start with a detailed synopsis, this presupposes that this is the only way to plan. Which leaves Philip Pullman in limbo, for a start, since he starts a novel with no idea of where it's going to go. In other words, there are lots of different ways to plan a novel, some depending on the writer's level of experience; and the last thing a good coach would want to do is stifle creativity by insisting it has to be done this way only.

What do you look for in a writing teacher?

Publication record of some respectable sort - at least in mags with fierce editorial standards that I can google and inspect. I wouldn't myself do a course involving novels taught by someone who's only published shorts. Having said that, some of the best insights into my own novels have come from tutors who were primarily poets... they may be as shrewd readers of novels as you could possibly want.

But I agree that the starriest writers don't necessarily make the best teachers, because the skills of teaching, and of writing, are related but not the same. I'd look quite as much at their teaching track-record, as their publication record.

I also agree that it is a bit of a lottery - but then, frankly, so is any course in anything. I've been in courses where some students thought it was brilliant, some thought it was terrible, and some of us thought it was good-but-limited, and whether it was right for the latter depended on whether, within those limitations, it gave them what they wanted. So it doesn't go without saying that it's either good or bad - it can be at least as much about understanding what you're looking for in a course - no course can give you anything - and asking questions till you can get a bit more of an idea whether this course and this teacher will dish it up.

Not necessarily a creative writing degree - not least because they're such a relatively new thing - but the ownership of a CW degree should, at the very least, guarantee some capacity to get outside their own work, because that's part of the course: critical commentaries are all about trying to understand what you're doing and how, and articulating it, and linking it to wider questions of how writing works in current writing and literature at large.

You'd hope that possessing a CW degree has also inculcated some sense of how other writers write - tho' that's always going to vary. If the course is pitched at the perspiration end of things, then what a good creative writing teacher SHOULD be doing, to my mind, is offering a range of insights into how writing works, and a range of tools for the writer to try, so each student can begin to get a sense of how that writer works best.

The other thing a writing teacher can offer is the inspiration end: ways of finding material, dreaming and expanding it, letting go of outcomes, confidence to explore the weirder corners of your mind and imagination, and have what those are heard in a safe environment. I was lucky enough to get a place in a workshop taught by Ali Smith, and it was just wonderful. Not as a masterclass technique, though hers is astonishing, but just in helping me to re-find a bit of creative mojo after a long stint of writing-to-order and failing to fend off industry gloom.

Of course what no writing teacher can offer is the join between perspiration and inspiration, where you actually learn to work your more exciting material, more supple-y, into a better piece, than if you hadn't done the course.

As part of my own reflective practice as a teacher, I looked the other day at the first and the last assignments of my most recent batch of Open University students: everyone had improved in range or technique or both, and the commentaries showed how this was related to their improvement in insight into their own and others' writing. Some had improved hugely, which is always such a thrill.

But everyone was still clearly themselves, if you see what I mean. The (course hadn't fundamentally changed their writerly nature, if you see what I mean. In one sense, a good teacher can and should only be trying to bring out what's there already. I could talk about singing-teaching, but I won't...

Thanks, Emma. Great answer. I particularly like this:

The other thing a writing teacher can offer is the inspiration end: ways of finding material, dreaming and expanding it, letting go of outcomes, confidence to explore the weirder corners of your mind and imagination, and have what those are heard in a safe environment.

Feels very allowing and expansive, rather than prescriptive and censorial.

Terry

Feels very allowing and expansive, rather than prescriptive and censorial.

It can be wonderful, given the right teacher. Or it can be an abnegation by the teacher of having to do any actual teaching: they offer a splurge of prompts which you could just have well got off a well-chosen Twitter feed, and put their feet up.

But it's never either-or, is it - everything is intertwined with everything else. Teaching highly technical technique, if you see what I mean, can be immensely valuable and in a funny way liberating, if it's taught in the right way. Not as in, "You must do it this way, or you'll be WRONG and get a Bad Mark," but as tools. Showing and Telling would be one example: understanding the difference, how they're both essential, and then being given exercises to flex and stretch your own prose-muscles so that they'll respond better and with more suppleness to whatever it is you're trying to say.

I have also taught workshops on explicitly very technical things - psychic distance, say, or the writer's voices - and then had a student come up and say that some small, closely-designed exercise I'd got them doing to explore that particular tool has sparked off a whole new story that they'd never have thought of if they'd sat down planning to "write a story". Technical constraints can be so liberating, as any sonnet-writer knows.

But you do need a teacher who really understands how those techniques work. Too many just parrot the crude "rules", and look for whether they're kept or broken, rather than looking for how this piece works and doesn't, and why... which is the proper reason for thinking about technique.