A very personal defence of creative writing courses

Lisa Pryor writes in the Age today that creative writing courses at universities are effectively sideways schemes to insure incomes for writers and have no earthly benefit to the students, and indeed impoverish writing as an art and so are generally a Very Bad Thing and what's more ripping off the young and variously gullible who would like to be writers themselves.

Apart from the fact that my university degree in creative writing clearly didn't teach me to use short sentences, it was actually quite useful. While there were one or two writers involved in the process who I would have preferred my HECS debt not to have supported, I would say that it was a fruitful process all together. Here are some things I learned:

1. You have to write stuff to be a writer.
2. You cannot be precious about deadlines or editing.
3. Lots of people who write are much better than me.
4. Lots of people who write are much worse than me.
5. Lots of people who write improve through writing and talking about writing and reading (including about writing).
6. Some people don't (see points 1 and 2 above).
7. There is more than one way to write a story.
8. Being isolated in a garret is a great way for me personally to go a little bit crazy and depressed and working with other people is a great way for me to be motivated to write more.
9. Don't talk about your story too early and don't leave your story too late.
10. Your editor doesn't hate you or your work when they make changes.

I expect these are all things I would eventually have learned by myself. I expect it would have taken a much longer time than it would have if I had had to do it all on my own without other writers (both students and teachers) to crash into.

The thing that I would never have learned was how to have confidence to submit my work, to let it go out into the world. Lisa Pryor seems to imply that timid people (and people without the level of income to support taking a year off to devote to writing their novel) shouldn't be writers, because their timidity will show in the writing. She assumes that the writing will then be bad - narrow, limited, boring, derivative and so on. As someone who has taught in a creative writing faculty as well as learned in one, I must say that this is not the case. The timid and shy, those with no confidence, will surprise with sharp wit, amazing risk taking and originality. Frequently the confident and assured are those who will not learn and refuse to explore anything outside their own, narrow area of expertise. Contrary to expectations, they refuse to take risks, because they are confident that they do not need to. End of generalisation.

lf creative writing degrees encourage and support the timid writers, I would say that is enough reason for their continued existence.

Hockey (the game, not the politician)

Junior has found my old hockey stick and we have been using the waning daylight savings hours to practice dribbling and stopping and passing on our tussocky grass and on the concrete down the side of the house. I have been remembering how much fun I used to have playing hockey with the Mountain Districts team as a young feller, and wondering why I stopped in the first place.

I was telling the Noodle about the time we lost a game because our team was laughing so much, and he wondered why we were so bad. So I told him about how we often only had 8 or 9 players, and that even though we were technically the under-17s team that we only had about 3 or 4 players around the 16 mark and our youngest player was 11 (she always wore a skivvy to play in, too, and must have weighed about 22 kg ringing wet, which we often were).

Then I thought about how most of us had only played one or two games (or zero) before we joined the club and we were often playing against girls who had picked up their sticks at age 8 or 9 so that their teams had collectively 77 years of experience, and we collectively had about 12 or 13 days. Our first game was against a team in which half the girls were state representative players, and they beat us 10-nil. Our next game against them they only beat us 5-nil, which I think was the most satisfying sporting triumph of my admittedly-limited careeer.

So I think I didn't keep playing because once I hit university, everyone took it all so seriously and were expecting to win all the time. There are not so many hockey teams out there for a social hit-and-giggle experience. No doubt that attitude of ours irritated our coaches even at Mountain Districts, but it did mean that we all had a fantastic time, a great team spirit and a wonderful attitude to losing. The only people who disliked us were the second-top team, who we pretty consistently beat over our two seasons of existence, to their lasting astonishment and shame.

Playing hockey also me the opportunity to watch the Nylex clock (on the silos) click up from 4 to 11 degrees, thanks to a scheduling bungle from our team secretary. We were cold, but it was worth it. Yes, it was a long way from the mountains to Olympic Park, but not as far as it was to Werribee or Essendon, where we also played.

Also our home ground was a swamp, and frequently so deep in water that you really honestly could not see the ball, and just had to flail around with the stick until someone had the good fortune to hit it.

But I still miss playing, 20 years later. So if there are 20 to 30 middle-aged, unfit, not-very-fast running women (or men or children, for that matter) who would like to arrange a hit of social hockey from time to time, they so should get in touch with me. We could start with ten minute halves and move up from there. I know it's a bit harder to arrange than a game of social tennis, but surely it can't be impossible.

BYO oranges.

Like, oh like

You can like some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time but it seems rather difficult to like all of the people all of the time.

But then, I am not sure than some of the people like me all of the time, and some of the people definitely don't like me all of the time, so that's probably fair.

YouTube oddity

The Noodle and I have been playing some music on YouTube, which all started because we were talking about the separation of Germany (What is West Germany, Mum?') and obviously had to listen to Meatloaf*.

So we listened to Took the Words Right Out of my Mouth and were suitably astonished at the power chords (not power cords, which are more useful but less astonishing, although now I think of it, quite important to the production of power chords). And also at Meatloaf's hair and pallid face.

Then we obviously had to listen to The Smiths, kind of to prove that we could in a post-Meatloaf world, and we listened to my favourite-ever Smiths song, There is a light that never goes out, and also Panic and Big Mouth Strikes Again. The Noodle was this time astonished at the generally violent and misanthropic tone coupled with the airy beauty of Morrisey's voice. But mostly he was extremely unimpressed with Morrisey's dancing on Top of the Pops.

So then we had to listen to Paul Kelly, and the Noodle's astonishment was pretty much limited to how amazingly much a person's appearance can change when they are suddenly 30 years older and also wearing a hat.

*No, I don't get the link either, but it seemed reasonable at the time.

Law

So I think that law is competitive textual analysis. If you have the greater insight and close reading, you win! Yay!

Great for those of us who behave badly when the Pictionary is brought out.

Not convinced it's the best way to run the country, but.

Case analysis

One of the useful laywering skills they are teaching us idiot-not-lawyers is how to do a case analysis. I am doing The Minister of Immigration and Teoh for my first mini-assignment.

The butler did it.

Question for Canberra locals and/or dam engineers

Anyone know why the water at the bottom of Lake Burley Griffin smells so bad? Sulfurous it is, as if the devil himself lives down there with the carp.

I would like to add that I have not been snorkelling down there without nose plugs, it's the run off from Scrivener Dam.