Writing

There's a new book published about 40 years of Creative Writing at UAE. The course was begun by Angus Wilson, continued by Malcolm Bradbury - I don't know who runs it now. Philip Hensher reviews the book in this week's Spectator. He is surprised to find, he writes, that there are so few famous names out of the 300 or so who'd been successful - about 20, he believes, in the last 40 years. And of those who have been published Hensher has "heard of precisely 50 and have read 20, not all of whom I would regard as significant or even particularly interesting authors."
Well, I was a tutor in a Creative Writing class for about ten years: there were two of us and often 20 or so "students". These were not full time courses but weekend ones, about three or four per year. I can't recall one "student" achieving success after leaving the courses. I had the idea that many of them came (a) for somewhere to go to pass the time (b) because they had once achieved some modest success but were getting nowhere now (c) because there was something psychologically wrong with them. The first lot did very little writing and weren't particularly creative - one German woman who had been a biologist in industry told me "I 'ave no imagination". She was right, she didn't. Of the second set there were a few who had been published but something had happened, usually of a psychological or psychiatric nature, that made it impossible to take up the pen, or lap-top, to try again. We had some success with the (b)'s and (c)'s in that they went away happy, believing that now he/she had got down to work again so success would surely follow (if they returned for another dose of tuition they said that success had not, so far, come their way).
There was one successful "student" whom the Principal of the Adult College would always boast about: she had gone on, he said, to publish a stack of children's books. The truth was that she had done this before arriving at the course; the course didn't help her because she had already helped herself. Why she came there, I don't know. Probably to boast to us about her success.
I could have murdered her.