In the past week, one of my friends posted on Facebook that she had been recently rejected by The New Yorker. Cue for most of her friends to reassure her that eventually the magazine would take her work. Well-meaning, of course, but I noticed two subtexts in most of them: one, the majority, was that those idiot editors just didn’t recognise talent when they saw it, but surely would in the end (though what grounds they had for such optimism, I don’t know). The other one was that she just had to persist with her writing—in effect, that her writing wasn’t quite good enough yet, and all she had to do was be patient and perfect her craft.

            It’s possible that either view is correct, or both.

‘The most accomplished living novelist in the English language,’ John Irving said of Greene before the latter’s death in 1991—and yet how many Creative Writing students, especially in North America, have even heard of him these days, let alone read him? When I taught at a US graduate program, and recommended him, I generally found that my students did not know his work, even if they had heard of him. Of course, they had been stuffed full of novels by more ‘diverse’ writers.

So I shall stick my neck out and proclaim: You can save yourself thousands of dollars, writing students. Read half a dozen of Greene’s best novels carefully, as a writer does, and it will yield you more benefit than most MFA programs, especially those of the fashionable throw-the-western-canon-out-of-window variety.

Roz Morris: The publishing business, like all arts businesses, has been through many upheavals in recent years. Has this affected creative writing courses? Do some students come to a course because they think a qualification will give them an extra foothold for a publishing deal?

Garry Craig Powell: I don’t think it’s affected creative writing courses enough. They have a responsibility to be absolutely honest with students, who often do begin their courses thinking that the degree will give them an excellent chance of getting a publishing deal—which as you know, is far from the case. In fact no one in the publishing world cares what your academic background is, as far as I can tell.

Last year Roz Morris interviewed me on the subject of creative writing courses, specifically, and more generally, how to learn to write. It was a long conversation, so we’ve divided the interview into four parts. This is Part One.

Roz Morris is a professional writer, editor and blogger. She is the author of the Nail Your Novel series, as well as the novels My Memories of a Future Life and Life Form Three. She is also the author of Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction, (for which I interviewed Roz in this blogzine exactly one year ago, January 26^th, 2018). She teaches masterclasses for The Guardian newspaper’s writing classes, and has ghost-written bestselling books.