Writing a Literary Novel Workshop

Sarah Moss | on Novel Writing

My writing career started in academia. I did an English Literature degree and then a doctorate in romantic poetry.

At the time, creative writing teaching didn’t really exist in British universities, and it’s contradictory to say, given that I now do teach creative writing in Irish and British universities, but I’m not really sorry that I did English literature first.

I think that training in reading and critical analysis set me up very, very well as a writer, and I went on from that to a teaching career in eighteenth, nineteenth century lit. But meanwhile, I was quietly writing fiction on the side, and I think that gave me permission to be as playful and experimental as I wanted, because the stakes were very low.

I was getting my professional kudos from publishing in a very different way and writing very different stuff. So it really was just play, just wildness, just fun, really, for the first two novels, and then I started to edge over into creative writing teaching, partly because I was finding that what I was saying when I was teaching literature was dissonant from what I was actually doing.

So, you know, we’d read Jane Eyre, and I’d say to the student, hey, you know this isn’t really about whether you fancy Rochester or whether you like Jane. And then I was writing fiction, I absolutely wanted characters, wanted readers to be feeling deeply about the characters.

And that gap got wider, and the creative teaching began to look more and more fun. So I gradually, kind of edged over. And I did both for quite a long time. I taught English Literature and Creative Writing, but as my own practice settled very much in the writing and not in the academic lit crit, my teaching came with it, but I think the background in teaching English literature meant that I was able to bring a different kind of expertise to the teaching of creative writing, and I was very clear about why I wanted to teach creative writing and how and what I wanted to do.

So that’s been that’s been exciting. I’m not interested in teaching people to write the way I write. I’m interested in helping them learn to write the way they write, which is not the model of having the expert come in and tell you how to do it. It’s having the expert come in and work with you on how you do it.

And of course, creativity thrives on constraint. We need to understand our traditions. We need to know our own artistic lineage, and there some more formal teaching can be useful.

But the exciting thing about teaching creative writing is that you’re really holding and supporting and encouraging people and directing them to find out what they do, which is not what anybody else does.

The course falls into two streams. Let’s go for things, moving along, organically flowing, one of which is the playground, which is an ongoing experiment, game about writing, artistic form, invention, experiment and play, because that’s where the wildness gets in.

That’s what we really need. Play is the bit that AI will never be able to do, and it’s really the spring of art and craft.

But we also need structures, tradition, a measure of hard work, close attention to our own and each other’s reading and writing, and this course moves back and forth between those two intimately related practices.