If the current growth in creative writing courses continues for another 70 years, more people will be learning to write than taking driving lessons.
This unlikely and invented statistic underlines a genuine problem. I am bombarded with invitations to paid creative writing workshops and courses. While some of these are probably excellent, the barrage of announcements makes me want to weep. (If you’re attending or, please god, holding a course in social media ‘platforms’ for writers, you need to stop and think about your life)
Despite the number of courses, there is a definite shortage of readers. Without an EU scheme to redistribute consumers from best-sellers to literary fiction, few creative writers will find much audience for their work. Yet courses continue to talk about publication as a goal, rather than looking at the social and recreational aspects of writing.
My friend Ellen and I had the obvious response to all these courses: we started our own. This September, we launched the Brighton Creative Writing Sessions. We want people to explore, to adventure and to experience a new way of seeing, and then write from there. We want them to get as much enjoyment from the session as going to the movies or a theme park. We can leave the classroom-environment and the plumbing workshops to other people.
Our sessions have featured life models, fortune-telling fish, easels and lots of writing. Ellen and I describe ourselves as tour-guides, not teachers, wanting to lead people to interesting places, but not to tell them what to do. Before we launched we weren’t sure what people would make of us – maybe they liked the workshops that were already out there? But, over the weeks, attendance built up and our sessions have begun selling out.
We’ve also run a series of free sessions, under the name Not for the Faint-Hearted, based at the Skiff, a local co-working space. The idea is simple: a picture is projected and everyone has a brief time to write something inspired by it. We find that 3-5 minutes works best. When the time is up, everyone takes turns to read their story.
We only have a few rules:
- Everyone must read something of their work, even if it’s just a couple of sentences.
- No formal feedback is given. You read your work, then the next person follows.
- No-one is allowed to apologise for their work
We weren’t sure how writers would respond to this, but it’s been incredible. We’ve met some fantastic people. Both beginners and experts have come along, even a friend’s eight-year old daughter. Nobody is turning out masterpieces, but the session is fun, and the work is certainly stronger than many prose open mics I’ve been to – possibly because people are not over-thinking their work. Above all it’s fun.
Chuck Palahniuk once advised writers to “Use writing as your excuse to throw a party each week – even if you call that party a ‘workshop.’” The world has all the talented writers that it needs – other people can take care of teaching people how to write. What concerns Ellen and I is that there aren’t enough writers having fun.
James Burt is a writer, and lives in Brighton. Visit his site at www.orbific.com/weblog 
Interesting article. Put me in mind of this paragraph from the Scottish Review of Books:
“Stanley Roger Green, in his charming (if forgivably rose-tinted) memoir of literary Edinburgh, A Clamjamfray of Poets, offers a mournful appraisal of our republic of letters’ contemporary denizens: “I am soon made aware of their sobriety and watchfulness… They don’t seem to go to parties for fun, but to ‘network’. No one ever makes a remark that isn’t calculated, and there’s never a Dionysian or Apollonian in sight. It is hard to resist the notion that one is in a market place, that writers are subject to deals and negotiations, that literature is the stuff of commerce.””
The workshops sound fun – good luck.
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This really makes me miss Brighton, James. Sounds excellent.
I’m actually finding a lot of guidance in my approach to writing from meditation and yoga. You’ve probably heard of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh — he’s famous for the teaching: ‘wash the dishes not for clean dishes, but just to wash the dishes’ (The Miracle of Mindfulness).
And from that, I’ve tried as much as I can to write not to produce a great piece of writing, but for the feeling of writing. I won’t go too ‘be the tree’ on you (although as you’re in Brighton it’s probably something you’re quite used to) but I think doing something for the love of it, and to do it as well as one can with no requirement for an outcome, really does make something special.
Keep going with the workshops. Would love to hear more about them in the future.
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