Post by Rhianna Saunders

On the 11th of November, the immensely talented Gwendoline Riley came to the University of Westminster for a Q&A and workshop. It was, for me, a truly inspiring afternoon, filled with discussion and affirmations. Gwendoline talked about how growing up she always had her head in a book, which I think resonated with most people in the room. We got to hear the story of how she was published after her tutor read something she’d written, and offered to put her in touch with an editor. I personally felt relieved after hearing her story about being published, as most people will tell you that it’s near on impossible to do it on your own. Gwendoline told us that as writers, we should read as much as we can, especially when it comes to the classics. I think, as students, it’s easy to get caught up in life and forget to read. But in order to hone our skills as writers, we need to read a whole range of literature, from the classics to the modern and all that comes in between.

In the second half of the session we focused on setting and place, where we picked apart extracts that Gwendoline had compiled, discussing what we liked and what we would possibly adapt for our own writing. She told us how she had ‘borrowed’ a paragraph from another book once, and worked on it until it was hers, and nothing of the borrowed paragraph remained. She told us that this helped her get through her writers block, and that it’s a technique she occasionally uses when she feels that she’s really stuck. I found this extremely useful, as writers block is something that I’m sure all writers have suffered with, at least once. I’ve tried a range of techniques to break down my writers block, but this was new to me.

As she really caught my attention with it, I decided to give Gwendoline’s technique a try. I picked up one of my favourite books, took the first paragraph, and started moulding it. It took a while, but after 20 minutes of solidly working on it, my block had faded and the paragraph was my own.

It was a pleasure to take part in such an in interesting and useful workshop, and I’m very much looking forward to reading her next novel, First Love, when it comes out.

Rhianna Saunders, 22 November 2016

Post by Cameron Sherwell

When it comes to creativity, it is tempting to seek affirmation. As a writer, seldom is there anything better than hearing your work praised. Fear of embarrassment, disapproval, or being told that, after so much effort, you’re not as good as you think you are, is common amongst creative writing students, and a constant source of anxiety. At best it strengthens our resolve, at worst it makes us transfer to economics.

For these reasons, it is tempting to search for dictums – commandments to worship at the altar of creativity – that let us know we’re doing something right. ‘Show don’t tell’, ‘less is more’, ‘write what you know’: these are “rules” all of us have looked to for guidance— rules that we often forget aren’t eternal truths. But Toby Litt won’t let us forget. In fact, in his guest lecture last week, he was adamant that we should break these rules. For Litt, greatness in writing means embodying the spirit of free-form jazz; it is all well and good to be competent, to have the formal elements down and play a melody, but competency isn’t enough. There has to be more. There has to be risk.

Awareness of the self is also crucial, and Litt suggests that studying your own reading habits is vital to understanding and improving yourself as a writer. At the end of the lecture, he proposed four tasks writers should undergo to become better acquainted with themselves: writing, reading, re-writing, and re-reading.

More than anything, Litt’s creative philosophy is individualistic. He doesn’t want you to write to better the world, he wants you to “write for yourself”. What I took away from his lecture was: only adhere when it suits you. If the pressure of being yourself is too much, be someone else. Write with a pseudonym. Write what you love. Write what is LIVE, and be open to the process of growth and transformation, because thinking that there’s nothing left to learn is the biggest pitfall of all. Competency is boring.

Cameron Sherwell,  7 November 2016

Post by Hannah Buff

Miranda France (@MirandaFrance1) delivered an interesting, inspiring and eye-opening talk to Creative Writing students at the University of Westminster last Friday. One of the main things that stood out to me as an aspiring writer was how open and honest she was about her work and all that it entailed: from how she stumbled upon writing; to how her publisher told her to go back and rewrite the entire second book as it just wasn’t her. Her editors gave her the most important advice a writer can receive: that sometimes writing is like solving a Rubik’s cube that just doesn’t want to be completed. She was honest about all the highs and the lows suffered while writing, though, as she put it, you suffer many more lows as a writer than you do highs. She mentioned how everything she has been through shaped her to become the writer and person she is today, which spoke to me as everything that has happened so far in life has made me the person I am.

She spoke about the essay she wrote that launched her writing career and landed her the book deal, and how without that offer she may not have ever written what she has. While her first book, ‘Bad Times in Buenos Aires’ – an extended version of the essay – is not the kind of  genre I usually read, it seems like it would be an interesting and rewarding experience. Her second book, ‘The Day Before the Fire’, sounded more my cup of tea and I definitely want to look into it more. Not only did the journey surrounding the character Ros resonate with me, but the story behind the title also prompted me, and my reflective writing class, into a lengthy reflection about history. It explores how we, as a society, love to preserve the memory of the past, no matter how cruel and ashamed we should be about it, for it shaped the world today. We can assume (based on our own history) that centuries into the future, places we know and the parts we are ashamed of will be preserved for new generations to learn about.

From the talk the one piece of advice I will take with me as I progress as a writer, and I am sure many others will also, is:

“Do not be afraid to feel like a fish out of water.”

Because as a writer you need to throw yourself into new and possibly uncomfortable situations to come up with a great story. Thank you Miranda for a great perspective on writing and showing us that following the road to writing is not impossible.

Hannah Buff,  24 October 2016

Post by Nick Johnstone

A popular myth about writing is that everyone who writes, writes everyday. It stems from the mythology of a blinding passion being the fuel of writing. And who powered by a blinding passion can go a day without writing?

The reality is very different. Writing, as I see it, is episodic, seasonal. I rarely write everyday. And in fact, recently, I took an epic nine month break from writing altogether, to refresh my palette, charge up my fingertips and gather some new rolling down the hillside of life experience.

People skeptically said to me of this sabbatical, Oh but Nick you can only afford to do this because you’ve written fifteen books. But the reality is this: I’ve taken breaks from writing before, in fact quite regularly.

Studying the fever graph of my writing career, I see episodic seasons of high temperature productivity (for example, in one season, the writing of three 70,000 word books in 15 months); in-between quiet seasons of bitty, fleeting, quick-turnaround activity (journalism, essays, contributions to anthologies, album liner notes, blogging) and hushed periods of no-writing where there was quite happily nothing that I wanted to say through writing.

On the MA Writing Business course, we had a guest speaker recently – a former graduate of our BA Creative Writing programme – and she said that at one point on her road to success, she didn’t write a single word for eighteen months.

The best part of this revelation is that her writing career took off as soon as that sabbatical ended and she’s now doing very well for herself. That eighteen month silence, though painful at the time, with hindsight now, turns out to be the best career move she could have made because she stayed silent when it was the right move to stay silent. When she started feeling her writing again, she followed that call and doors opened for her all over London.

If you look at writing careers generally, of course you’ll find plenty of examples of writers who can go about the work with a factory-esque 9 to 5 vigour, books firing off into bookshops with precise regularity. That’s just one way of writing. Just as my episodic, seasonal variety is one more. The point here? Don’t worry if you don’t write anything for a few days, weeks or even months. You haven’t lost the passion. You’re no less of a writer. You’re just busy being you. Trust that the silence is more fertile than a screen full of empty words. That writing is a journey. And that when you have something to say again, the words will of course come running by the thousand.

Nick Johnstone,  13 October 2016