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Nuts & Bolts: The Value of Creative Writing Courses With Author Ray Cluley

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By Tom Joyce

Taking a creative writing course is a concept that some of Ray Cluley’s fellow authors seem to find puzzling. Even objectionable. If you’re calling yourself a writer, shouldn’t you already know how to write? Since it’s such a personal endeavor, how can it even be taught?

In this month’s edition of Nuts & Bolts, Ray discusses the full range of benefits from a creative writing course, and how even seasoned professionals can use one to hone their craft.

Why do experienced writers need to take a creative writing course?

Well, you don’t need to, but I’d say if you’ve the opportunity to do so then take it because however much you think you know already, there’s always more to learn. It’s funny, but creative writing as something that’s possible to teach or learn can sometimes be a contentious subject. Occasionally it’ll come up on a panel at a convention with some writers becoming strangely passionate against the idea, even aggressively so, which I find odd because it is very much a craft and as such there are techniques that can improve your work and activities that can stretch your capabilities. Some people seem to think that all you need to do to learn to write well is read the work of great writers, but that’s like saying you can learn to cook by eating at great restaurants. The learning comes from the doing, and creative writing classes are all about the doing, and doing, and doing it again. Of course, you can do that on your own, but doing it with guidance can save an awful lot of time in the development process – you can learn from a teacher’s feedback what might otherwise take a year’s worth of rejections from publishers to realise.

Creative Writing classes also encourage you to try a variety of different forms you may have otherwise ignored. You might come to class thinking you write short stories but discover a whole new passion for writing plays, for example, or poetry, but even if you don’t, you’ll find this kind of exposure and experimentation still improves your preferred writing. Sometimes it takes a class to buck you out of your habitual writing practice, and that can only be a good thing.

What a creative writing class also provides is a group of like-minded individuals who will critique your work constructively and perhaps more honestly than you can yourself (without first giving yourself some space, at least). You don’t have to agree with them, but you still might see something through their eyes you’d have otherwise missed. Alternatively, their take on your work might actually reinforce the choices you made. Writing for a group with the knowledge that they will critique it forces you to think about the why of writing – why am I using first person, why use this metaphor, why this genre, etc – because you’ll be anticipating similar questions from your classmates. You might find the answers to the why change your work before you even submit it for feedback, which is in itself a hugely valuable lesson, perhaps the most valuable.

And of course, creative writing is fun. That’s the main reason to do it, right there.

What do you consider the essentials when it comes to teaching/learning creative writing?

I’d say this is more about an attitude than, say, a selection of required core lessons. Yes, you’ll need to learn about character, and plot, and the different ways of stringing a sentence or stanza together, and all of that is important, but most essential is coming with, or providing, the right attitude. With this in mind, I’d say having a “safe” environment in which to work is most essential, by which I mean an environment where everybody is focussed on producing a better piece of work, where criticism has a positive outcome, and praise is more than simply being nice. Once you know you can trust everyone has the work’s best interest at heart, it makes it easier not only to receive criticism but to give it as well. It’s also amazingly productive just being in that kind of environment, as if creativity is an ever-growing snowball you roll back and forth between yourself and your classmates.

The other essential is to come to class knowing that Creative Writing is hard work. It’s fun, but it’s also hard work. I’d say it’s easy to pick out those who’ll do well and those who won’t when it comes to any kind of writing success because it’ll be those who are willing to rethink, rewrite, restructure their work who’ll produce a better finished piece. Some people only fix typos in their redrafts, whereas others try a whole new narrative sequence, or they gender-swap their protagonist, or they play with the form, and even if they revert to what they had before, the experimentation is likely to lead to a stronger, more certain version of that initial idea. Variation is key, even if it takes you back to something familiar. Try a variety of things in your work, try a variety of forms and genres, read a wide range of them, question them. It’s easy to work yourself into a rut as a writer, retreading ground you know and are comfortable with and getting stuck on the same path, but if you mix it up a bit (which a creative writing class actively encourages or even forces) you’ll find everything improves exponentially. One of the best ways to improve prose is to read poetry, for example. There’s such economy there, and such a wealth of figurative language, not to mention the sheer joy of sound that prose can benefit from.

The strongest “essential” I’d say is learning that everything in your work should be essential. There’s a Venn diagram that does the rounds on social media sometimes, you may have seen it. One circle says something like “what the author meant” and the other says “what your English teacher thinks the author meant” and the heading provided is “the curtains were blue.” Ignoring the fact that it doesn’t actually work like a Venn diagram anyway, and ignoring the whole discussion we could have about author intent and reader interpretation, it’s the so-called punchline of the meme that bothers me. The teacher claims to know what the curtains represent whereas the author claims the curtains are just fucking blue. It’s nonsense. Okay, the teacher’s view may be wrong (at least as far as the author is concerned), but if the curtains are “just” blue then there’s no need for them to be blue at all and you’ve wasted a word of description. The curtains are never just blue, or at least they shouldn’t be. It’s just a joke Ray, let it go, I know, but it highlights one of my personal views that everything in the final piece of writing should be essential to that piece of writing. If it doesn’t add, it subtracts, so get rid of it.

What do you consider essential for writing horror in particular?

This is a tricky one inasmuch as horror means something different to different people. The old argument of whether horror needs to be scary, for example, resurfaces often in genre discussions, though again different things scare different people, and should it be about the reader’s fear anyway, or the character’s?

My go-to answer used to be that writing convincing characters was essential for good horror, because if you didn’t have believable characters then who cares what happens to them? And I still stand by that for the most part. But go read Adam Nevill’s Hippocampus (and then his wonderful collection Wyrd and other Derelictions) in which there are no characters at all, and you’ll see he still manages to dial the horror up to eleven. Arguably, characters are still important here – it’s the imagining what happened to them that provides much of the horror – but ultimately they’re absent and it still works.

In writing horror you’re often attempting to create an effect, be it fear or dread or a deeply unpleasant realisation of some dark truth. Poe claims “a short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it,” and there’s much to be said in favour of the power of accretion, the gradual building of one image or feeling atop another, all culminating into something greater than the sum of their parts through a process of subtle repetitions or similarities. This “Unity of Effect” is part of what makes the shorter form so well suited to horror. Is it essential, though? Not really. It’s just one tool of many available to the horror writer.

What works best for me when writing horror is to be honest in the process. Write about something that scares/concerns/troubles you and be honest while doing so and you’ll get a pretty damn effective piece. Some advice I was given (in a creative writing class, no less) was to avoid trying to write some great universal truth and instead focus on something personal, because not only does it lead to more authentic, affecting, original work, but it often leads to a more universal truth in the process anyway. We’re all part of the same big narrative, after all.

Has teaching helped or hindered your own writing?

Both, really, but moving from hindrance to helpful. From a practical side, back when I was working full time as a teacher, it simply limited the amount of time I could spend writing, and in that sense it was a hindrance. Also, starting out, I was teaching all these great works, and it can be a bit demoralising at first thinking, well, I’ll never be as good as this so why bother? I quickly learnt to use my limited time more wisely, though, and to learn from the greats rather than be intimidated by them. Deconstructing texts and questioning how they achieve what they achieve, why the writer made this choice over that, is an excellent way to learn about what makes a piece effective and how you might utilise the same or similar techniques. There’s a Japanese proverb I used to have on my desk, To teach is to learn. I wouldn’t say it’s the best part about teaching, but it’s certainly a huge bonus.

What have you learned about writing and publishing outside of a classroom?

A good thing about learning is that it’s not limited to a classroom. I learn from everything I ever read or watch or look at or listen to, from everything I experience, literally everything, but one thing I have found particularly useful to learn has come from getting to know so many other writers. It’s through those friendships I’ve come to learn that every single one of them struggles or has struggled with the writing and/or publishing process at some point, and there’s a great deal of reassurance and comfort to be found in that. Another little quote I used to have on my noticeboard, back when I was starting out, was Work until your idols are your rivals, which had a certain ambitious hunger about it that I liked at the time, but I’ve since learnt there aren’t really any rivals in the writing community and so that quote went in the bin long ago. The writing community tends to be a very supportive one, and most people are simply keen to see great work getting out there for others to enjoy.

Do you have any projects you’d like HWA members to know about?

I’ve a couple of collections out there, Probably Monsters and All That’s Lost. One of the stories from the latter has just been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror anthology. It’s called The Wrong Shark and is something of a love letter to Jaws with a focus on some darker issues. For details on new stories as they appear (as well as a full back catalogue) it’s best to check out my website, www.raycluley.com

Where can people follow you online?

Well there’s my website, as noted, but I tend to shy away from the distractions of social media these days – I find it all far too depressing. I chat a bit through email, and occasionally I’ll post what I’ve been reading or watching at my Instagram (@ray_cluley), but that’s about it.

 


Ray Cluley holds a PhD in Creative Writing. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story with Shark! Shark!, while Water for Drowning was short-listed for Best Novella and Probably Monsters, his debut collection, was short-listed for Best Collection. His new collection, All That’s Lost, is available now from Black Shuck Books. Cluley’s short fiction is often reprinted in ‘best of’ anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres. He has been translated into French, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, and Chinese. He lives in Wales with his partner and their two mischievous but adorable cats.

 

Tom Joyce writes a monthly series called Nuts & Bolts for the Horror Writers Association’s blog, featuring interviews about the craft and business of writing. Please contact Tom at TomJHWA@gmail.com if you have suggestions for future interviews. For more about what he’s looking for, see here.

 

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