Guest-blog: RHYS HUGHES

My guest blogger today is Rhys Hughes, who is one of the most successful Welsh authors. His first short story was published in 1992 and since then he has embarked on a project that involves writing exactly one thousand linked ‘items’ of fiction, including novels, to form a gigantic story cycle that will eventually be called PANDORA’S BLUFF. His latest book, Twisthorn Bellow, is also part of the cycle and concerns the adventures of a self-exploding golem.

Some time ago, Simon Kurt Unsworth wrote about how positively membership of a creative writing group benefitted his work and that he recommended aspiring writers to do the same – Rhys, on the other hand, begs to differ about their worth. Here, he explains his reasons.

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Creative Writing Classes – a Bad Idea

I’ve been saying the same thing ever since I started getting published back in 1992. Don’t go to creative writing classes! I have never joined one, so how do I know they aren’t a good idea? Well, I could (unfairly) point out that I have taught a few, but I was against them long before I reached that stage. They always seemed wrong.

Nothing I have seen or learned since has changed my mind about that. In fact I keep meeting successful writers who share my opinion on this issue and they substantially outnumber the writers who praise creative writing classes. By itself, this proves nothing, but the assumption that writing can be taught needs to be challenged.

I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who once said something like, “If you want to find a decent writer in a university, look in the Physics Department, not among the Creative Writing students.” I don’t go that far, but I do accept he was making a valid point about imagination.

There’s a plethora of imagination in physics and in the other sciences. The students of such subjects are forced to make massive imaginative leaps all the time, far bigger leaps on a routine basis than the students of a creative writing class. And imagination is vital.

If you already possess true imagination, you already have everything you need to be a real writer; and if you don’t have any, no amount of creative writing classes will ever give it to you.

Without imagination you can’t be a writer, it’s impossible; and there is no way of teaching imagination. You can develop your imagination, yes, but that’s something you must do yourself, alone. And certainly the best way of doing it is just to think about things. It’s as simple as that. If you drink too much alcohol you will get roaring drunk, right? Well, if you think too deeply you’ll get roaring thunk.

And that’s actually a very good thing…

The problem with creative writing classes is that they gradually smother the imagination and the process of thinking. They do this in several ways, primarily by exposing the students to influences that lower the standard they should be aiming for; and the manner in which the classes operate also undermines the principle of self-discipline that’s essential for success in the writing world. Self-discipline by its very nature is something that has to develop outside a social context.

This is going to sound bombastic, but it’s not bombastic really, it’s just a fact; unfortunately it’s an unpalatable fact for many new writers. The truth is that all writers are always strongly influenced by the material they read and if they read substandard stuff it does have a negative effect on their own work, and the majority of work paraded at creative writing classes isn’t very good at all. If you are a member of a creative writing class you are regularly exposing your style to near-lethal doses of amateurishness without any protection. Yes you are.

I’m not saying that the instant you read a piece of fiction that is poor, your own style will be irredeemably infected; that if you read hackwork you’ll abruptly transform into a hack. It takes more than a few drops of poison to bring you down. But quality does rub off, slowly, relentlessly, and that applies to low quality too. Over a period of time, mixing with amateurs and absorbing an amateur aesthetic will have a detrimental effect on the level of your prose, and far more damagingly on the depth, flexibility and uniqueness of your imagination.

Nor am I saying that there have never been any good writers who went to creative writing classes. Thomas Pynchon is the living refutation of that idea; he felt that classes helped him significantly with the technical side of writing, but not with developing his imagination. Sure, creative writing classes can help you learn the rules of grammar, or even just the ordinary conventions of orthodox writing: crisp prose, clear expression, etc; but that’s nothing you can’t pick up from reading. And in fact, reading is the only essential step a writer ever needs to take. Reading will help develop your technique; and your imagination too, by giving you plenty to think about. Read, read and read some more; but read great writers at least as much as mediocre ones.

That doesn’t mean you should exclusively read Tolstoy, Balzac, Kafka, Proust, Nabokov, Marquez, Beckett, etc; and even if you do that, you almost certainly won’t end up writing texts as fine or significant as they did; but the point is that you must always aim higher instead of lower. There’s an analogy here with crossing a fast-moving river in a boat: an experienced sailor will point his vessel to a part of the riverbank further upstream on the other side than he knows he will arrive at. Aim very high in order to maximise your chances of arriving high enough. Tolstoy used this analogy himself when viewing one of the early paintings of Nicholas Roerich, a picture that plainly demonstrated the truism in colourful terms. Shun amateurs as much as you can…

That sounds harsh but it’s practical advice. Creative writing classes will expose you to an overwhelming amount of amateurishness. But they can expose you to something even more insidious: the overbearing individual. When it comes to something as subjective as literature, there’s always the danger of an extroverted, controlling or narcissistic personality intruding on what is supposed to be a healthy learning process.

In the university near where I live, there’s a creative writing class that is taught by a local writer who believes himself to be an important literary personality. He is indeed well known in one obscure corner of the Welsh cultural scene. If I tell you his name, it’s probable you’ll have never heard of him, let alone have read any of his books. His method of teaching the secret of good writing is to show his students a film of himself in the bath and then to get them to read his books and try to write short stories in his own style, which he can then judge.

There is really no place for such dominating, attention-seeking behaviour in any authentic class. Almost twenty years ago I was briefly involved with a postal writers’ group; the idea was that each member would send a story to the next member, who would comment on it, before sending their own story to the next name on the list, and so on, until the package came back to you. It was supposed to be an endless cyclic process. Despite the inherently democratic nature of this scheme, one of the writers decided he wanted to be the ‘leader’ of the group and proceeded to attempt to assert his personality over the other members. The truth is that he had almost no talent; yet he succeeded in intimidating a few others who did have talent but who were too unconfident or shy to react against his schemes. I have never seen any of the writers in that postal group go on to achieve success in the writing world, although at least two of them had the skills to do so. I still wonder if his domineering personality managed to discourage them out of the running? A shame if true.

The writing market is small and growing smaller all the time. It’s a world where supply hugely exceeds demand. To succeed, a writer needs many qualities; and one of the most important is unflinching self-belief. If you don’t already have this quality, then attending a creative writing class may put you at the mercy of those who do, or who think they do, and who will attempt to control and dominate you. Personality clashes are common and bullying, usually subtle, is not unknown.

Another problem with creative writing classes is that they almost always teach only the most orthodox approach to writing. I wonder how many talented writers with an unusual approach have been discouraged from following their own path by attending a creative writing class? Earlier I mentioned the fact that I have myself taught creative writing classes. Does it seem that I must be a hypocrite by now condemning such classes? Well, I only ever teach one type of creative writing class: the techniques of a ‘workshop’ known as OuLiPo, which is actually a system for helping to generate unique ideas by using certain logical constraints. OuLiPo isn’t well known in Britain and I see my mission as spreading the message that there are alternatives to the orthodox approach.

The work produced by following OuLiPo techniques is often playful, odd and very original; and yet creating it is partly an objective logical process and doesn’t conform to the standards of the typical creative writing class. In OuLiPo there’s no emphasis on psychological interaction or character motivation; the process starts with pure form. One of the best OuLiPo novels is A Void by Georges Perec. It’s a lipogram, in other words a text written without using a specified letter, in this case ‘e’. Phenomenally difficult to construct, the novel is not just an exercise in formal style and technical ingenuity but also poignantly reflects real world situations and concerns to no less a degree than the best orthodox fiction; and it does this partly because our society itself is a sort of lipogram. This can be demonstrated simply enough by substituting the conceit of writing a story without using the letter ‘e’ with the equally random conceit of living a life without (for example) money or love. OuLiPo works take as their genesis an arbitrary constraint, just as real life does, hence the fact that Perec and other OuLiPo writers produce vibrant work that is emotionally engaged rather than exclusively intellectual.

But you can’t get to learn anything at all about OuLiPo in creative writing classes in Britain (apart from in mine, of course, which is why I decided to teach it in the first place!)… So we can see that another disadvantage of such classes is the narrowness of their range. It’s a sad fact that many teachers of creative writing classes are ignorant of the wider possibilities of fiction writing. In a literary magazine many years ago, I recall reading a series of articles designed to teach the skills of writing to hopeful new authors. These articles declared a set of inviolable commandments. One of the first was to always focus on characterisation, for without proper characterisation it was impossible to create worthwhile prose! Another was to develop only believable plots and never take inspiration from the implausible! A third was to concentrate just on personal issues, to write what you know, etc! Instantly I thought of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the finest writers in any language in any age, whose brilliant stories have no characterisation, no plots and are always utterly impersonal. Needless to say, those magazine articles were worthless.

I have expressed my contempt for creative writing classes in one of my most recent novels. Mister Gum is a satire that follows the misadventures of a creative writing tutor who is partly based on the aforementioned tutor at my local university; he is manipulative, opportunistic and egotistical in the extreme. He also lacks any vestige of talent. In the first section of my novel, he sequentially declares the orthodox rules of writing (for instance “show, don’t tell” or “write only what you know”) and then proceeds to tell a story proving the truth of that rule; but the form of this story always directly contradicts the rule. This novel is emblematic of my distrust of creative writing classes. I’m pleased with it for the way it puts content and form into opposition for satirical purposes. Plus it’s filthy.

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Many thanks to Rhys for writing this!

I want to generate some debate here, so please comment on what you think about creative writing classes. Have you ever attended one, and if so, was it a positive experience? Or did you come away feeling it had all been a waste of time? Feel free to add your thoughts…. =)