In my year out before my postgraduate degree, I made the momentous decision to start writing fiction. I’d recently got back into reading novels, and thought becoming a novelist would be an ideal way to commit my name to posterity. I started with short stories. I wrote about a man who moved to France and discovered that French milk was tastier than English milk. I wrote about a man who hated growing up and so spent his days playing with his miniature toy truck, ‘Little Truckie’. I wrote about a man who wanted nothing more than for his thesis supervisor to think he was the cleverest person in the world, though, in the end, said supervisor could never remember his name. Who said that fiction never strays far from autobiography? None of my stories got published. Shocking, I know.
I say I ‘wrote stories’, but what I really mean is that I spent most of my spare time vomiting a few paragraphs onto the page before losing all faith in what I was doing. Writing fiction turned out to be one of the hardest things I had ever done, a kind of self-inflicted torture rather than anything enjoyable. I began story after story, each time convinced that this would be the one that would make me famous, before running out of steam and lamenting the worthlessness of ‘making stuff up’. Not long after starting postgrad, I gave up altogether. No Nobel Prize for me, then.
So naturally, I was ecstatic when I discovered that there’s a ready-made explanation for my struggles: namely, Oxford. Susan Sontag, in an interview, once asserted that academic and creative writing are “worse than incompatible. I’ve seen academia destroy the best writers of my generation”. Once you’ve heard this kind of damnation, you start noticing it everywhere. Steven Pinker tells us that academic writing is antithetical to writing comprehensibly, let alone writing with style. Creative writing programmes are accused of being mere production lines for generic writers who go onto churn out generic novels – the very opposite of creativity. Humanities and arts degrees are being closed down everywhere in the name of preparing students for the ‘real world’, for which they supposedly must have a STEM degree. Given all this, it’s difficult to escape the idea not only that a university education sucks all creativity out of you, but also that creativity itself is worthless.
I couldn’t help being pleased with all this because, even if it turned out that the institution which was supposed to make me better at everything has in fact been depriving me of my chances of greatness – it’s always nice to have something to blame for my own failings. In any case, there’s something intuitive about the idea that academia drains creativity. It’s surely not a complete coincidence that I put away ‘Little Truckie’ altogether once I’d come back to Oxford after my year away. When there’s so much pressure to do well in your degree, not to mention all the things that might get a job once you graduate, it’s hard not to tell yourself that any pastimes that conceivably come under the heading of ‘fun’ must be forgotten. And if creative writing is about putting ‘thinking’ aside and instead just letting the words flow, then in many ways a university education seems the opposite of that. After all, we are taught to define our terms at the outset, identify the hidden premise of the essay question, and signpost our argument every step of the way – in short, to ‘think’.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to think that, maybe just this once, we’re being unfair on academia. For one thing, many highly-successful novelists have been academics, so it can’t all be bad in academia. More to the point, though, the idea that academic and creative writing are somehow incompatible misunderstands what the two involve in the first place. It’s easy to imagine that the so-called great writers, when they finally find the voice which makes them great, do so only because they put thinking to one side and let their true selves out onto the page. In reality, things are often very different. Take a closer look at how most writers produce their best books and you’ll see just as many abandoned starts and agonising over the futility of it all as I experienced in my own short-lived career as a novelist. In other words, just as much thought goes into creative writing as it does into my thesis – and probably a whole lot more.
With hindsight, a large part of the reason why I found writing fiction so hard was because I’d unknowingly bought into the false dichotomy of academia versus creativity to begin with. I had the idea that writing fiction should be the very opposite of writing a tutorial essay, and when it turned out that it wasn’t, I gave up. Ironically, maybe if I’d put a bit more thought into it, I’d have gotten further. I haven’t gone back to writing about Little Truckie yet, but I have a feeling that one day I will. It would be nice if everything just flowed out onto the page without any thought on my part, but I won’t get too frustrated when that doesn’t happen. And maybe I’ll even do a paragraph plan before I begin. Just maybe.
