Hanif Kureishi thinks creative writing courses are a waste
of time, which is a dangerous thing to say given that he makes his
living (not all of it, but probably more of it than he does from his novels) as
a professor of creative writing at Kingston University. Telling a story well took a rare skill, he
told an audience at the Bath literary festival last weekend.
He estimated that perhaps 0.1% of his students had it. Could it be taught?
Kureishi didn’t think so. Would he pay money to take an MA in creative
writing himself? “No … that would be madness.”
We should feel sorry for all
concerned: for a university that may consequently face a sharp drop in fee
income; for Kureishi’s students, who have paid £5,800 each (£12,700 for non-EU
citizens) for their professor’s useless course; and not least for Kureishi
himself, biting the hand that fed him out of a rage (I speculate)
that he has to make money in this despicable way.
….But how do you explain the apparently unstoppable growth of a
vocational course for a vocation that is being remorselessly de-monetised? When
Kureishi started out, the University of
East Anglia had Britain’s only department of creative writing, which may
also have been the only one outside North America. Today no broad-based
university would dream of living without one, despite the fact that writing
(“literary” and otherwise) earns increasingly little money, if any at
all, and we are returning to the time when it was confined as an occupation to
those who had private incomes or the patronage of philanthropists and
academies.
What tempts students towards such an
unfeasible career? A clue lies on
Kingston University’s website: “A Kingston University creative writing
MA graduate has been snapped up in a six-figure deal by one of the world’s
biggest publishers after her self-published books topped the Kindle download
rankings, selling tens of thousands of copies.” In other words, like winning the national lottery, it could happen
to you.
Workshopping is probably the most
hateful feature of writing courses, easily mistaken for an American idea
because, like Alcoholics Anonymous, it believes in the benefits of group
frankness. In fact, according to a
professor of creative writing I once met in Chicago, the practice originated in
the early years of Soviet Russia, when Leninists wanted bourgeois activities
such as writing to assume the more muscular, proletarian habits of workers’
committees. According to my American professor, Lenin found the results
hard-going when they were shown to him, and announced a preference for an old
favourite, Pushkin. In this, Hanif Kureishi and the Chairman of the Council of
People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union would have been at one.
regards