Can creative writing be taught? The panel at English PEN's Writing By Numbers debate last week might suggest that it can, consisting as it did of three professors of creative writing and one successful graduate. Yet instead of a ringing endorsement of creative writing classes, the debate that followed was fraught with doubts and qualifications, until eventually the novelist Fay Weldon, currently a professor of creative writing at Brunel University, admitted that the very idea of teaching has "very little to do with writing, I'm sorry to say".
Creative writing programmes have nurtured a clutch of highly successful writers, including Raymond Carver, who attended the first ever course at the University of Iowa. Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Tracy Chevalier are all graduates of Britain's most famous course at the University of East Anglia. These figures hover over any discussion of the issue - clearly the courses must be doing something right? Yet the professors themselves weren't convinced. Terence Blacker, a novelist and recent professor on the UEA course, argued that such courses foster the illusion that everyone can write, whereas even after a great deal of study some of the most committed students "still write a load of old cobblers".
Russell Celyn-Jones, course director of the MA in creative writing at Birkbeck University, described a kind of "alcoholism" that sets in as students become addicted to their courses, signing up for an endless stream of classes in a confusion of literary endeavour with personal therapy.
A bigger danger for the panellists was the effect such classes have on the students' actual writing. For Celyn-Jones, language must come out of "a private place", and the desire to read and discuss unfinished work threatens that necessary solitude. The chair of the debate, the critic and novelist Louise Doughty, made the point that writers had always discussed their work with their fellows, and that such classes were merely an institutionalisation of a very old practice. But for Blacker the institutionalisation was the problem - for him the discussion of unfinished work carried the real risk of "letting the air out of it".
Had writing classes helped any of the panel? Doughty is a graduate of the UEA course, and Celwyn-Jones studied at Iowa, although he admitted that at the time he was writing "terribly". Weldon had never been taught to write, and began by writing government propaganda that was occasionally read by a "slightly senile" Churchill, before moving into advertising, television scriptwriting and finally the novels that have made her famous. For her, certain aspects of the "craft" of writing can be taught, but she summed up the views of the panel as a whole when she said "none of that's important if you don't have something to say".
Yet the evening ended on a positive note. Staring down the doubts of the professors, a student rose to say that she had recently attended a course at Goldsmiths College, and as a result had gained an agent and was about to publish a novel. Despite all the doubts, it seems that for those with something to say, a creative writing course can help them find a way to say it.
