Authors Electric

A whole heap of radio plays ...I'm lurking in there somewhere! Before I begin: if you’re somebody who gets pleasure from writing stories or poems purely for enjoyment or fulfilment or as a way of exploring human nature but doesn’t have any great need to communicate or disseminate the work or only to a select group of friends, then this is probably not the post (or rant) for you. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for fun. Lots of people do it, just as lots of people paint and draw or play sports for love and without any thought of turning professional, even though many of them are arguably more talented than some full time professionals. I remember back in my teens writing only because I loved what I was doing, although even then, there was lurking at the back of my mind the desire to make a career out of it. Along with that was the hope that somebody, somewhere, might pay me to write. And in fact quite soon, the BBC  did pay me to write a whole heap of radio plays, so ...

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...