3 - Writers as Readers, Readers Aswriters: ‘Focal- Plane’ Activities in Creativewriting Practice

Summary

The take-off of creative writing courses within university English departments happened so quickly in the UK that a lengthy phase of ‘pedagogical deficit’ was perhaps inevitable. The situation is in some ways a repeat of what happened with literary theory in the 1980s, when a major new area of content was added to the syllabus very rapidly, before any serious thinking had been done about how to teach it. This may partly explain why the influence of theory has proved to be more ephemeral than we would have imagined twenty years ago. The same may yet prove to be the case with creative writing, though a major difference between theory then and creative writing now is the existence of an active and energetic body devoted to the teaching of this new(ish) component of English Studies. Creative writing in universities has a long history, especially in the United States, where it was first established at Harvard as part of the English Composition course in 1873. In the UK, it was first taught as an MA at East Anglia University from 1970, and then at the same level at Sheffield Hallam, Manchester Metropolitan and Lancaster Universities from the early 1980s. So it began in the UK as a postgraduate discipline, and later developed as an undergraduate degree, almost exclusively at post-1992 universities, in the 1990s. This very different pattern of emergence is one of the reasons why practice and experience in the USA do not seem to be easily transferable to UK students and conditions. But in creative writing worldwide, the ‘workshop’ approach is the basis and backbone of pedagogy at both BA and MA levels, and (perhaps consequently) the workshop is a major area of current pedagogical debate and uncertainty within the discipline.

It is indisputable that the workshop experience has to be central to a creative writing course, but a constant round of workshop sessions, stretching over three years, term after term, in which student work-in-progress is peer-reviewed, is likely to produce staleness, and eventual disillusionment. Even if there were nothing at all wrong with the workshop as a teaching format, courses must have variety, and we have to be able to do something different from time to time.