Bethan Roberts

When I was the swottiest student on the BA in English and American Literature at Warwick University in the early 90s, one of the options during the third year of the degree was a Creative Writing module. Despite writing fiction from an early age (I penned most of a very bad Judy Blume-esque novel called Bitsy Michaels: My Mother at thirteen), and loving everything to do with story-telling and language for as long as I could remember (I used to read the subtitles on Watch and feel very smug because I understood what the quotation marks meant, and where they should go), this option completely passed me by. Because by the time I became a student, I’d decided: I was going to be a literary critic (when I was feeling confident) or a school teacher (when I wasn’t) or perhaps even a librarian (when I hated myself). Mucking about with stories wasn’t for me. Oh no. Creative Writing? At university? The very idea. That wasn’t academic discipline. That was self-indulgent bollocks. It just wasn’t serious enough. You didn’t even have to use footnotes. And, anyway, being a writer isn’t a proper job. It’s like being a painter, a politician, or an actor: not for the likes of ordinary people like you and me. I remember, though, feeling a sneering kind of jealousy of the students who’d had the guts to take the Creative Writing module, while I slogged through another essay about gender politics. Possibly even then I knew I was a fake. I was too scared to do it, because writing meant too much, and I suspected it would involve failure, and that would be too hard.

After Warwick, I went to Sussex University to do an MA in Twentieth Century English Literature, and realised I wasn’t a literary critic. I didn’t really care about Derrida, Foucault, or even the then-hyper-cool Judith Butler, but I pretended I did for a while. When I’d finished, I thought I should work in the media, because that’s what everyone at Sussex wanted to do, it was much cooler than being a teacher, and it was even a bit like writing - wasn’t it? - but it paid much more. Well, it paid.

It took me seven years to gather the courage to face writing again, and by that time I really didn’t have any choice. It was either that or become very miserable indeed. I tried, for a while, to do it on my own. I still had a feeling that Creative Writing courses were a load of mumbo-jumbo, taken by people who loved talking about themselves and how special they were. I did write a little - not much - but I had no idea if it was any good, and I needed to find out. What would be the point of continuing to squeeze words out at my bedside desk (made out of a door and two trestles) otherwise? So I braced myself and applied for the MA in Creative Writing at Chichester. I had a good friend at work whose partner, Dave Swann, worked there, and he seemed nice and even quite normal. If they were all like him, it would be OK.

To my surprise, I was accepted. Then I began to feel afraid. Going into a university again - what was I thinking? Seminars and essays and reading lists and pretending to care about literary theory. And all those other students who would be better, cleverer, than me.

But the course was completely different to what I’d imagined. The tutors were, like Dave, friendly and approachable, for a start. I understood almost everything they said, and some of it chimed with me: I recognised it, somehow. They were all writers, but they were all (fairly) normal. They had a practical approach to writing, talked a lot about the nuts and bolts of getting words on a page, about the craft and graft of writing. They had helpful advice on how to keep going. They loved reading for reading’s sake, and they loved stories - and they were academics! I couldn’t quite believe the liberation of it: I was allowed to make things up. I handed in assignments without footnotes. I didn’t back up anything I said with quotations or examples. I just made it up.  What a joy.

I studied part time for two years, and managed to persuade my amiable employers to let me have a day off a week to write. The fact that you could pay-as-you-go, term by term, helped enormously. The course was exactly what I needed, because it did not encourage showing off or competitiveness amongst its students. Instead, we were asked to be supportive of each other’s work, whilst being critically rigorous, in workshop situations. Having worked in the media and studied for a critical MA, this was not what I was used to. I was used to big boys arguing, loudly.  To show my work to people who read it carefully and offered balanced criticisms - and then listened to what I had to say about their work - was a great relief.

The course was structured into themed modules: Sources and Transformations; The Fantastic; Writing from Life; Form and Meaning. This encouraged us to experiment with different approaches to writing, and forced us to be versatile. It also forced the very few students who were a bit obsessed with talking about themselves and how special they were to stop it. We were also encouraged to explore different genres. As someone who hadn’t written a piece of fiction for ten years, this approach worked for me: it gave me an overview of some of the options out there, and helped me to narrow down my own interests.

By the end of the course, I was about half way through my first novel, The Pools.  The greatest thing that the MA did for me was to let me know that I wasn’t alone, and it was OK - even necessary - to fail. It taught me that, when you’re writing for assignments and workshops, you should expect to fail: being told what’s wrong with your writing is the greatest gift a course can offer you. It’s a real privilege to receive this information in a supportive environment, rather than immediately facing the vicious blank page of the agent’s standard-format rejection letter. Through being surrounded by people who had the same ambitions as me - and through meeting people who had actually had books and poems published, and were willing to be generous with what they’d learned - the idea of being a writer began to seem not so ridiculous; it began, in fact, to seem almost ordinary.

Bethan Roberts graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester in 2004. In the same year, she won an Arvon / Jerwood Young Writers' Apprenticeship Award, which took the form of a six-month mentorship period with the novelist Andrew Cowan. In 2006 she was awarded the Olive Cook Short Story Prize by the Society of Authors. Her novel The Pools will be published by Serpent's Tail in August 2007. She is currently working on her second novel, Things I Never Should Do.