Novelists, Go Back to School!

Writing a novel can be lonely, if you don’t count the made-up people walking around your head and clamouring for attention.

After three terms off, I’ve gone back to my creative writing evening class and it’s like coming home. Over the years the group have unwittingly become good friends. We bond over our common drive/love/sickness to write. We get excited about and share books. We go to the pub afterwards. The class are an eclectic lot, from romance-writing accountants to Daoist bus drivers to dystopian opal miners. Yes, I know, less plausible than the characters in your novel but that’s reality for you.

Nicky, the charismatic and endlessly inventive teacher leads us through exercises, discussion and homeworks. She helps us hone our writing skills and stretches us in different directions. Poetry, flash fiction and reviews refocus my novelist approach to rhythm, cutting surplus words and integrity.

With the homeworks, I complete, I finesse, I finish and as they’re only a page long, it’s almost instant gratification. What an antidote to scaling 80,000 words! When sharing writing, any praise, of course, is lovely but more crucially, the constructive feedback is gold. For example, on my own, there was nobody to point out my blind spots. In class, somebody will ask, ‘Are your characters floating in space?’ and I’ll remind myself to include an indication the story is set in a coffee shop.

The class is also a wonderful distraction from my current phase of researching and sending out to agents. The waiting and hoping game might have been eating me alive right now, but it’s not because I’m considering how to interpret my next homework. I’m also reading a borrowed book many miles out of my comfort zone.

Most of all the class is fun. And isn’t that why we pick up our pens in the first place? It’s easy to forget that when you're on the third draft of your novel and discover a gaping plot hole. The class helps me get back to those simple motivations; to create, to entertain, to connect.

So, novelist, don’t sit in your garret with only your protagonist for company; remember the real world! I wish I’d come back sooner. In class, I’m always learning, and it’s always fun!