Let's go back to the original thread, then, Ashlinn.

I have never attended a formal writing course, for one main reason. When I'm surrounded by people who are single-minded about what they are doing, and who radiate enthusiasm in all directions, I tend to find it extremely intimidating. In the past, this has often resulted in me losing almost all of my enthusiasm for a subject, because I'm one of those people with a very broad spectrum of interests, and I begin to find my own lack of single-mindedness erodes my self-confidence.

I did once start a correspondence course in writing. I got a few lessons into it, but when it started on fiction writing, as opposed to non-fiction, I hit a stumbling block. They made a thing called a "plot plan" a central theme to building a fiction piece, and I just found I couldn't get on with that way of approaching a story. The format of the plot plan tended to disrupt my own ideas about the story, and I found I couldn't actually think in those terms (desired emotion, theme, key character's emotional drive, key character's purpose, plot units... I just don't approach a story like that!). Luckily, the course had a key promise: it guaranteed that you would make at least as much from writing as the course cost. So, when I had a flash of inspiration for a non-fiction article, I wrote it, sent it off to a magazine, had it accepted, received about £50 more for it than the course had cost, and was able to abandon the course without feeling I had lost out. (And sold two more non-fiction pieces to other magazines, as well, in the couple of years that followed. So I probably got back about 3 or 4 times the cost of the course in the end.)

So, for me, writing courses either don't work or I don't dare to try them. I don't belong to a creative writing group, either, for exactly the same reason as I've never attended a formal course. I find that close personal contact with highly-motivated and highly-talented people intimidates me.

Um... that's not to say no one here is highly talented or highly motivated. It's just not as intimidating as when I'm face-to-face with it in the flesh. (And I find a roomful of people intimidating in any case. Up to 5, I can handle; more than that, and I tend to clam up. Oddly enough, though, I can get up and speak to a roomful of people.)


Alex

Kat, Jessica Mitford did pretty well with The American Way of Death. It's quite a serious book in some ways, but it's also extremely funny. So, go for it! (but maybe only once you've retired)

Emma

I've heard that joke before, Kat, but it's one of the "Laurel and Hardy" kinds of gag - you know what's coming, but it's still funny.


Alex

Alex,

I could (i)never(/i) talk to a group of people. I would panic, go all hot and clammy, shake, eww! Just thinking about doing it is bad enough. Yet my husband, who was in a band in his younger days, has got up in front of 20,000 people at Glastonbury. I would love to have that much confidence.

I turned down a job once that I was more than qualified to do (in terms of experience), because they said I would have to give presentations. It was working for a womans refuge, and the salary was pretty good. I am a trained counsellor, and have worked with homeless people in the past. I know I shouldn't let myself be limited through my lack of condfidence, and sometimes I wish I could be more outgoing and not so afraid of people, but I can't. It's me and I'm stuck with it.

Talking about writing courses, I've just embarked on one, and am really enjoying it at the moment. This might change however, I'll keep you posted.

Kat

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Oh heck, I'll never get the hang of this thing, How do you put something in italics?

Oh heck, I'll never get the hang of this thing, How do you put something in italics?

Use square brackets, not round ones (i.e. italics, not (i)italics(/i)).


Alex

I didn't do a writing course for the first ten years of writing, and I've never belonged to a writers' group. They're not everybody's way of approaching it, and the prescriptive ones - as you discovered, Alex - can be positively dangerous. You had the confidence to realise that it didn't suit you, but there must be many who give up, thinking 'I can't do this, I must be useless'.

Kat, I hope yours is good, and if not, you'll remember that it's because the course isn't right for you, not the other way round!

Emma

I have never attended a formal writing course, for one main reason. When I'm surrounded by people who are single-minded about what they are doing, and who radiate enthusiasm in all directions, I tend to find it extremely intimidating.

Interesting, Alex. A couple of times on short writing courses I've had the experience of being in a room of (mainly women, mainly beginner) students and have been astonished by the amount of positive energy generated - a sort of group joy experience. However, personally I've tended to distrust this - it being so far removed from the lonely, anxious, doubtful business of simply getting on with writing - I mean by oneself, not in a group setting.

I guess on a longer course everything would tend to settle down a bit.

Frances

"but no writer worth reading hasn't undergone an apprenticeship of some sort"

What sort of apprenticeship do you mean, Emma?

I didn't go to university or anything like that. Does that mean that mean that I'm not worth my salt?

Nik.

I didn't go to university or anything like that. Does that mean that mean that I'm not worth my salt?

Nik, in view of your recent success, and having read some of your stuff, I don't see how anyone could possibly say that!

Did Dickens go to university? DH Lawrence? Virginia Woolf? Shakespeare?

Reading is the best kind of apprenticeship, in my view. A university English course has this advantage - it gives you a good excuse to spend a lot of time reading!

Frances

Isaac Asimov used to say that he didn't know "how to write", he just did it. I guess I've fallen into the same approach - I try it until it seems to work, but I don't have a set of rules (other than grammar and spelling) that I follow.

That's not to say I'm arrogant enough to believe I could learn nothing from a writing course. I could probably benefit from knowing a few of the really important standard pieces of advice, but I might end up having to sit through hours of stuff that I didn't get on with, while being told that I would never make it because I wasn't doing it like I was being taught. Creative writing, more than any other discipline, has to fit in with the writer's way of organising their thoughts, else the techniques themselves become the barrier.

These days, I don't work from any kind of plot outline other than the picture I have in my head of how the story should go. I spent years trying to make the other approaches work, but only began getting anywhere when I ditched them and tried it my own way. I make big use of all of the features of Word (including comments and hidden text), and I rely on being able to go back and rewrite scenes to make the story fit together properly. That seems to work for me.


Alex

Nik, no, no, I didn't mean that at all. You can have a perfectly good apprenticeship in your public library, if you're self-motivated enough, and in the days before universal secondary education that was how vast numbers of people did it. Or in a mixed bag of general education, informal groups, helpful journalist brothers-in-law, devoted mothers, inspiring English teachers, whatever. An apprenticeship to me is a (usually long) process of extremely practical, hands-on learning, directed at gaining and improving the skills and knowledge of a craft. The image of medieval apprentice, watching his master work and listening to him talk, doing the easy jobs, then the harder ones, and meanwhile whittling away at his own masterpiece in his bedroom at night is actually quite accurate. There are no writers who sit down, never having written anything creatively, and write a novel which is publishable straight off. It may be publishable after five years' re-writing, in which case that novel is the apprenticeship. My own apprenticeship was pretty much like that: my degree was very late in the day.

Emma

Albert Einstein was a patent clerk.

(Which has nothing to do with creative writing, but I thought I'd chuck it in anyway.)


Alex

Fair enough, Emma. I didn't think (certainly hoped!) you meant it like that.

I don't think it matters where your "apprenticeship" is. At the end of the day, as long as you've got the natural ability/talent to write, as long as you're prepared to put in a lot of hard work, time and effort, you can learn the craft. You get out what you put in.

Nik.

PS Oh, and I think a little bit of luck helps as well!

My writing course is an online one with a personal tutor, I couldn't go to an actual class with lots of strange people - I don't mean that they would be strange as in weird, but as in strangers! Although they might be weird as well!

So for me, it works better this way. It's the Writers Bureau course. I've heard lots of praise for it, and some not so good reports, but I thought the only way to find out for myself was to do it.

I did think of joining a writing group once, for all of 2 seconds, 'til the woman that ran it said you had to stand up in front of the others and read out what you had written - no thanks!

Alex, I tend to just write, with no formal training or anything too, hey, whatever works for you, is ok.

Guys, I feel so much better now, thank you for your encouraging word earlier.

Kat

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Oh,and a bit of useless information I read earlier, did you know that Sir Isaac Newton invented...

The catflap, yes really!

I'm just trying a word in italics [word/i]

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Oh blast, it still didn't work... word

word



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hooray! I did it ha ha.