Writing Business by Catherine Czerkawska
I’ve just spent half an hour browsing through university and further education college creative writing courses across the UK. They made interesting reading, mainly because – with all the benefit of 20/20 hindsight – I can see one glaring omission in the middle of all the exciting promises that students will explore and develop their literary intentions, examine their creative practice, experiment with form and - just occasionally - ‘become employable.’ You can spend up to £9000 a year in fees and that’s without all the other expenses involved for three or four years in order to ‘improve your critical awareness' of how you can get your work published or produced. I can dimly remember a time when – as a young arts graduate, struggling to make a career as a playwright, and then as a novelist – I might have welcomed the opportunity to study creative writing at postgraduate level. I can still see the attraction. No such courses wer...