IT is not a working day today. You can afford, maybe, to look to your inner self, instead of outwards to the world of telegrams and anger. Do you believe that there is something inside you that is not being expressed? Last week I went to the last session of an "introduction to creative writing" course I've been doing.
The course was six weeks long - too short for me to get anywhere with creative writing, but long enough to get a few ideas about things connected with it. It was held in the Writers' Centre in Parnell Square, on a Tuesday night, for two hours. They do about a dozen courses a year. This one cost £65.
I mention all these details because a lot of people do feel they have a book or a poem or a story within them, and they believe that if only they could get started, or pick up a few tips about starting, this something or other within them could be brought out. You would be amazed at how many people said to me, when I mentioned the course, "Oh, I'd be interested in doing that". That's why I'm writing about it today.
It seems to me we are hampered by half romantic notions about writing. There's a vague idea that if a person sits around long enough inspiration will alight on them. But is writing not also a skill, like knowing how to fix an engine or how to plan an election campaign? Aren't there aspects of it you can go to classes to learn?
To get the obvious question out of the way first - on one level, I know how to write, of course. I can write anything this paper might ask me to write. But certain kinds of writing don't get into newspapers and I had recently been making a feeble attempt at one of those kinds, the autobiographical memoir.
The bit I managed to do came out like one long opinion column. It had no shape. First this happened and then that happened and then that happened... I wanted to find out how to encapsulate things in scenes, and how to vary the tone of voice, and to have dialogue carry the story, and how to describe characters and atmospheres.
To get away from the first person, in short. But now I suspect that I always knew that no one can teach me this, since no one but myself is in there with the raw material inside my head. If I had sat at a table for the two hours every week and worked at turning my narrative into dramatic scenes - just sat there and toiled at it - I'd have got further than going to the class got me. Going to the class, I fear, was a way of evading plain work. Writing is work.
THAT was the main thing I took away from the course. The teacher was marvellous. She is a writer herself, through and through. She was brimming with ideas about writing and reading and she brought in a range of stuff for us to analyse and think about and assess and compare ourselves with.
One of the men in the class, for instance, wrote a story that had not just sex quite a few of us wrote about sex - but violence in it. This brought up the question of the real difficulties of getting away from cliche in this area, sex and violence. So she brought in five or six examples of how others - from Hubert J. Selby to John McGahern - had found their own ways of making these old things new.
That is one way of coming at writing - raising your consciousness about how others do it, becoming familiar with the world in which it is done. We read Raymond Carver's story Fat, for instance, and Aidan Matthews's wonderful Fathers. I began to agree with a friend of mine who teaches a course like this - you can not be taught to write, but you can be taught to read. "You should read as if your life depended on it," our teacher said. This is the kind of thrilling thing that you don't hear said every day.
And even if you are not able to read like that you can at least learn that there are people who'd do.
But as for getting something written there turned out to be no substitute for doing it yourself. This was our teacher's refrain. An Olympic runner doesn't wait for inspiration to strike before going for a training run, she said. Athletes train all the time. Similarly, you train yourself to your writing.
Oddly enough, though I've known tens of writers, and edited a lot of writing, and been on the boards of magazines and a judge of literary prizes, though I have lectured on English literature and studied great texts, and reviewed books in print and on radio and television and asked thousands of questions about them, I have managed to forget that a writer is first of all a solitary labourer.
I bought Eavan Boland's Object Lessons as part of the same effort as going on the course. It deals with very deep things: its subtitle is "the life of the woman and the poet in our time". But work is a theme there, too. She spent years learning her craft. As a young woman she went back to her room, night after night, and served her apprenticeship. Anyone who needs to be a poet has to do all that.
I DON'T know that my own writing venture will ever succeed. But of the 12 or so people in our group I'd say that three or four are the real thing. They have gifts they need to express.
I presume - nobody said it - that most of what happens in groups like ours is as private as Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't want to reveal anything I should not. But I read a lot of unpublished work, one way or another, and it is usually not very good. So I was amazed at the originality of the pieces that were read out on the course.
Our teacher gave us an exercise one week. We were to come back with a thousand word story about something that happened in a bathroom, and the title was to be "And it was cold outside".
It was marvellous to hear how different from each other the responses to these suggestions were.
Leaving writing aside, "creative writing" helped restore my faith in humans. The daily news can leave you sure that the world is full of badness and stupidity.
Grandfathers rape children. Terrorists preen. You get disgusted at what we are. And then you sit in a room full of irrepressible creativity, and that is also what we are. Just by being in the group, in fact, even the least talented of us was standing up for the imagination, and saluting its power, and paying our respects to its importance in our humanity.
This didn't solve the problem I'd gone on the course to solve. I still have that. But it solved other problems. And of course it reminded me why we burden ourselves with the problem of writing well in the first place, and how we know ourselves whether we succeed or fail.