J’ouvert

J’ouvert, from jour ouvert, the day’s opening, pronounced jouvé, as in youth. Six in the morning on Sunday, the very beginning of children’s day, a hundred or so people are loitering at the top of Ladbroke Grove, a small stall is doing a slow but steady business in coffees and roti, and a couple of floats are getting ready. Almost everyone but us is wearing paper boiler suits and cradling containers of liquid and bags of flour.

The floats trundle off down Ladbroke Grove at a carnival pace. One float has a full steel band, one little kid doing the simple rhythms, full of that musical concentration that borders on nerdiness. The second float is just drums: drums made out of bins and gas canisters. The players loop complex rhythms which comeback round to a unified triplet: doof - doof - doof, before flying off against each other again.

The crowd follow, coalesce and start covering each other in flour, talcum powder, washing up liquid and mud squirted from squeezy ketchup bottles. A few have eggs, some have (I hope water-based) paint. It’s all good-natured, childish fun, at least partly because it’s first thing in the morning, and no-one’s had enough to drink yet to turn nasty. Occasionally someone darts off out of the crowd in hot pursuit of another. Two kids slip and fall over in exactly the same place as one chases the other. This is the time to get caught in the crossfire. A kid in a pristine white muscle T and gold chain is laughing till he gets mud on his shirt and trainers. A bloke, clearly woken by the noise, emerges from his basement flat, looking with bleary eyes at the procession.

The Caribbean tradition of j’ouvert, the opening of the carnival with a messy, smeary food fight is the kind of phenomenon with multiple origins: a spiritual ceremony warding off the bad ones; a tradition borne of an identity-concealing rebellion in Port of Spain; or even an imported Indian ritual. This j’ouvert is a relatively recent addition to the Notting Hill Carnival, organised by CD Jam, a small collective of Carnival performers. Like all traditions, Carnival reinvents itself continually, adding new aspects as others are taken away. The procession itself used to go past the end of our street: alas no more, as it all gets corralled below the Harrow Road.

The CD Jam crew have a little truck laden with mud, water and flower, to replenish the revellers. Little clouds of flour smoke up explosively from around the steel pans. We leave them as they go under the Westway. Later, someone tells me that on the TV news they saw a policeman, with his uniform all covered in mud and flour. That’s gotta beat borrowing his helmet for a dance.

 

A blockage at the Elephant

Several things have already gone wrong with our journey by the time we surface at the Elephant & Castle looking for a bus. Unfortunately, the bus at the stop is decanting its entire cargo of bemused-looking passengers: a woman in an electric wheelchair has parked it right in front of two buses side by side, blocking the traffic back up to Kennington, in protest at not being allowed on a bus already jampacked with passengers and pushchairs.

‘You’re so selfish,’ they shout. ‘There’s thousands of disabled people in London,’ she shouts back, before plugging her headphones back in and remaining there, impervious, impassive. Someone tells her to fuck her mother, she tells them to fuck off. Someone suggests moving her. ‘Anyone touch me, and I’ll do you for assault,’ she shouts. Her face relaxes into an unhappy mask of defiance. ‘She’s an attention seeker, she’s done this before.’ A boy with a blingy bluetooth earpiece starts circling her. ‘If you’re going to assault me,’ he asks, ‘where’s your blade?’ shuffling his hands up and down in his pockets.

One of the buses backs up: she follows it, blocks it, and parks her wheel right back against the other one. It looks heavy, but it’s a nippy vehicle, a tight turner. Eventually, a bus comes along in the outside lane, the driver kicks some cones and barriers out of the way and establishes a third channel for buses and cars to sluggishly filter through.  We jump on a bus taking the third way. It’s only when we reach the New Kent Road that we hear the sound of sirens approaching, coppers to sort out another fucked-up Sunday in South London. It takes some balls to gridlock the Elephant. Who is she? Why is she so angry?

 

West

I only used to come here for the Carnival. Westbourne Grove, Portobello Road and even Kensal Green were a strictly annual affair, packed streets to shuffle through, shops shut and pubs packed.

It could be a disheartening experience, too. Arriving full of energy, the first task would be to meet up with friends who were a) inevitably on the other side of the carnival and b) possessed of some kind of inexplicably degenerate musical taste. Time and again, the most beautiful sounds would boom from street corners, and I’d attempt to linger, only to be dragged forcefully along to the Ministry of Sound or Sancho Panza (if there’s anything worse than house, it’s Latin house) where I’d reluctantly shuffle around, silently hating my friends and wishing I was listening to reggae.

This tendency reached its apogee the year that I went with Rob and Sharon and we followed a techno float around the carnival route, the only float I could see whose crew and audience were entirely white (though of course hardly short of dreadlocks). It was like being the White Man in Hammersmith Palais year after year. In my mind I can still see a small, mythical static, just a few large speakers, playing roots and dub. A young man toasts while the old dreads sit around smoking collie weed and nodding slowly to the righteous riddim… of course everybody says the Carnival’s not really about reggae any more. I stopped going after the year I had to pull S out of a rowdy crowd at the Good Times system and nearly got into a fight. And that year there were only half a million people there.

If I ever ventured west out of August, the place seemed somehow naked without the floats and systems. Portobello was exotic enough for an N9 boy, with shops like Wong Singh Jones and the punky market under the Westway that wasn’t crowded with eurogoths like Camden. But visits were far and few between. Settling in Stoke Newington, Brick Lane felt more like my scene: West was even more foreign than South.

Now I find myself within spitting distance of the Westway, the top end of Portobello Road (near enough for two of us to carry a second-hand bureau home) and Maida Vale. But I’m also in a place without a name. Previously, I’ve had ‘Stoke Newington’, ‘Greenwich’ or ‘Brockley’ to put between my street address and the postcode: the true sign of a Zone 2 snob is that they live not just in London but in a place with an identity of its own, often with the imaginative help of local estate agents. Here, I simply fill in my address as ‘London…’. The A-Z says ‘West Kilburn’, but Kilburn proper is more or less due north. The bus stop says ‘Maida Hill’ and we get the Wood & Vale through the door: if you bought a house round here, the estate agent’s amenities pack would have Maida Vale tube on the map but not Queen’s Park. But it’s certainly not Maida Vale: rather than ubiquitous mansion blocks, three-storey terraced houses subdivided into flats are the norm around here.

To compensate, I learn local facts. Local Fact #1: Joe Strummer played at the pub round the corner with the 101ers, before the Clash were even formed. And if there’s a ‘here’ here, it’s the Chippenham. Grocers where you can buy a red pepper at ten o’clock at night, a hardware store and a bakers, barbers and dry cleaners even. Creole, Thai and Lebanese restaurants. A constant flow of people day and night, a school and a college, bus routes into town.

At Christmas, L bought me a handful of badges with the Trellick Tower on, Erno Goldfinger’s ‘brutalist masterpiece’ that like the Barbican complex is one of the few high-rise apartment blocks to have survived London’s apocalyptic rage at elevated living to become some kind of modernist exemplar. Of course, looking casually at the image, it could just as easily be the Balfron Tower, the nearly identical one in Poplar, which Goldfinger built first and even briefly lived in to demonstrate his confidence in the new manner of housing proles. Unlikely, though: even the new new East End hasn’t reached the Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach Road yet.

You see a lot of the Trellick in Much Ado About a Minor Ting, and west London is important filmic as well as musical territory. The first black British feature film, Horace Ove’s Pressure takes place along the Harrow Road and the Grand Union Canal. Isaac Julien’s Territories, one of the key experimental films of the 1980s, brings Carnival, race, class and the politics of local housing together in an overlapping DJ mix. It’s all a long way from the carefully restored white terraces and shopkeepers of Notting Hill. But buying a copy of Charlie Phillips dark and intriguing book of photographs Notting Hill in the Sixties (you’ll have seen his famous portrait of a mixed-race couple in the Tate’s How We Are or on the cover of London Is the Place for Me Vol.2) in the very same bookshop still trading on its moment of Hollywood fame, you realise that even radical history eventually finds its realisation in the price of a home.

But the west is no longer what it was. Take Nathan Barley. When Charlie Brooker originally wrote the character in 1999, he had West London written all over him. ‘A twenty something wannabe director living in Westbourne Grove’, he was instantly recognisable as one of the post-Trustafarian generation of moneyed pricks who had completed the cycle of regentrification of Notting Hill, filling its bars and restaurants with their self-regarding yammer. By the time of his 2005 TV debut, however, there was clearly no place for a Cunt but Shoreditch: East London had been fully transformed into the only natural habitat of privileged, posing, talentless wankers. The Mighty Boosh are exceptional in remaining funny after moving to Shoreditch, while in some kind of weird reverse-Dorian-Gray effect, Noel Fielding becomes more and more of a twat in real life.

And it’s this, at last, that makes West London liveable. Its moment is over, its history, for the moment stalled. There are no more Napoleons in Notting Hill. No panicky Harlesden-is-the-new-Willesden Time Out specials about where to live. No mass-scale conversion of dead industry into overpriced living space. It’s not unapproachably posh: some of it you can even afford to live in. Like the rest of London, council estates and Victorian housing interlock in the same easy-uneasy jigsaw. It all feels, somehow, more like real life.

 

Self-promotion round-up pt. 94

Alas the S&S column is no more, but my chapter on online documentary is in the recently-published Rethinking Documentary, I’m slagging off scots nats on the Big Ideas podcast, I’ve got a short poem in Right Hand Pointing, and Ten English Trees was read, but not recorded, at Liar’s League (though Mark’s Fortunes: A Story in Eight Parts is better).

 

An Englishman’s dog is his lion

If you’ve ever seen Blake’s illustrated plate of Tyger, you might wonder whether Blake had ever seen a real tiger in his life. The creature standing beneath the tree has more in common with poor Hobbes than with the scourge of Bengali villagers. But the more I see lions in London, the more it seems that the English make their lions look like nothing more than dogs.

Your monumental lion in London, whether it’s helpfully holding a ring in its jaws, sleeping watch over the dead, atop a grand country pile or just resting is positively canine in appearance. It’s not so much their anatomy as their attitude, the subservient, position they take, guardians rather than hunters, teeth never bared. Entirely missing are either the inscrutability or the fierceness you see in the face of any actual lion.

Landseer’s pack of four guarding Nelson’s column are typical. No lone predators here, their heads are alert, their paws forward and they wait for the order to stand just as if Barbara Woodhouse herself were waving a tasty treat at them.

 

The painting of not-so modern life

There’s a look you sometimes see in the eyes of people painted around the turn of the twentieth century. It’s an enquiring, intelligent look, sometimes pompous, the look of a person self-consciously trying to be Modern. It’s also an unknowing look, one that can’t see the horrors of the century to come. The wars, the trenches, the camps, the gulags they may end their lives in: they can see none of it. Like Patrick Hamilton on the eve of the blitz, you want to cry ‘God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us’.

This look appears on the faces of people in the paintings in the Ballet Russes room in the Royal Academy’s From Russia exhibition. Like the Tate’s Modern Painters show about the Camden Town group, it’s an extraordinarily conservative portrait of an extraordinarily radical period. If Virginia Woolf was wrong about human character changing in December 1910, revolt and revolution were waiting to change forever the circumstances of human existence, and literature lacks visual art’s capacity to imply the utter transformation of the phenomenal world

But the response of the wealthy Russian collectors and their artists to French avant-garde technique was to merely reflect the aesthetic: the challenge to life itself was lost in translation. Just so, the facile exoticism of Gaugin is revealed as no more than cultivated taste: portraits of nude Pacific Islanders lined the walls of Shchukin and Morosov’s mansions, all the better to shock you with. Gaugin appears again referenced in a salon painting at the beginning of the Camden town story: a reminder that modernity means sophistication.

Like Gissing, the Camden Town painters show a London recognisable in form, and even in poverty, though not in colour. Also like Gissing, conscience stands in for revolt against circumstances. The ‘socialist’ Harold Gilman plays Jiminy Cricket to Sickert’s grim carnival of the flesh, with patronising pictures of his housekeeper, brought brought right up to date Tate-style in the teaching notes (‘How would you describe Mrs Mounter’s expression? If she could speak what would she say?’ they ask, perfectly defining the colonial crime of exercising your imagination on the territory of other people’s lives.)

Even Wyndham Lewis’s bogus avant-gardism is missing from the Modern Painters show, but From Russia bizarrely finishes with a scale model of Tatlin’s Tower. Not only aesthetically distant from almost everything else in the show, the unrealised monument to the Third International and headquarters for the comintern is a building of the revolution, the revolution that chased parasites like Shchukin and Morosov into exile. It’s impossible to tell whether putting the tower here is a crushing irony or monumental inanity.

If the Bolsheviks terminated the Russian collectors (but kept their paintings) the death-knell of the Camden painters was the First World War. They could only respond by painting pierrots and a ward full of jolly moustached Tommies recovering from the fighting under patterned bedspreads. No ‘guttering, choking, drowning‘ going on here.

Curatorially, neither show pretends it represents a cutting edge: in particular, the Tate is at pains to point out that Sickert’s mob are an evolutionary dead end, far from ‘authentic modernism’. But both shows share a frozen moment before the onslaught of the twentieth century, a hesitation and rejection of the implications of modernity. Too late. God help all of us.

 

South by Southwest

I don’t realise how much London attitude I’ve got till I’m in the Hourglass Inn and spot a youngish barman sporting a tufty ginger beard and another youngster in a trilby: I’m cursing them already for the sheer affectedness of it all before I remember that this isn’t 93 feet east and sometimes people just wear beards and hats.

Phew. The next morning I find out that in Exeter you can pay what you like for a book, but the bookshop staff don’t get paid (”it’s in the constitution” says the dreadlock on the phone), and that culture exists outside the M25: Spacex have a pretty excellent Cory Arcangel show on.

I’ve been dying to play I Shot Andy Warhol, for a while… it’s based on an old NES game, Hogan’s Alley, one of the first to be played with a light gun. The cartridge has been physically hacked (the plastic sawed away, the chips removed, reprogrammed and soldered back in) to replace the baddies with Andy Warhol, and the don’t-shoot-’em goodies with Flavor Flav, the Pope and Colonel Sanders. Keep shooting Andy, and eventually you start to feel like Valerie Solanas. As a bonus you can also blast ricochets off spinning Campbell’s Soup cans.

In Sans Simon, Arcangel edits Paul Simon out of a 1960s Simon and Garfunkel performance with his hands, interjecting their shadow between a projector and the wall, which is then refilmed. In Colors, the top line of pixels of Dennis Hopper’s cop drama of the same name is stretched downwards to fill the whole screen, so the soundtrack plays to a rippling curtain of moody greens and purples. The Bruce Springsteen Glockenspiel Addendum takes the few tracks on Born to Run which don’t contain glockenspiel, and adds the missing instrument. The format is a giveaway CD. The track lengths remain unchanged: pop it in a drive and the CDDB will read it as the original. Put it up as a torrent, and the unauthorised version will spread, an invisible virus.

The centrepiece, a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould, reassembles the first of Bach’s Goldberg variations from the single notes of thousands of YouTube musical performances. Twin screens play separate melody lines, synchronised with simultaneous frame grabs from the amateur movies. For my money, Oliver Laric did this sort of thing better with his ICA piece Under the Bridge in which renditions of the Chilli Peppers’ ballad were similarly stitched together note by note as single frames accumulated in rows filling a four-times-normal-width screen. That piece had something about fandom and guitar-devotion in it that Arcangel lacks.

As media art, Arcangel’s stuff is about the usual clever media art things - the ubiquity of video, low-tech techniques in a high-tech age, the accidentally aesthetic qualities of everyday media. But more importantly, it’s very funny - watching Paul Simon trying to sing from behind Arcangel’s hands, the crappy eight-bit sound as Warhol takes another direct hit, the fact that many of the instruments in the Glenn Gould piece are being played by cats and hamsters: each time, it’s a giggle.

Also made from what’s found, Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film, playing on the closing night of Animated Exeter, takes the archetypal Hollywood chase and projects it onto virtual origami. As the basic forms of the chase scene are animated with the folded-paper forms of racing train carriages and paper planes, each surface has embedded into it carefully-picked scenes from the entire array of movie history. Bond walks along an underground passage: as he passes behind pillars he ripples from Connery to Moore and back again. A woman is fiendishly manacled, but her head rotates on a lever-operated disk: here’s Janet Leigh emoting anguish - click - now Tippi Hedren. The cumulative effect, like that of Cremassticparkinator 3, is to demonstrate how alike films are not only in their plot and structure but also in their gesture and manner. The kiss, the punch, the laugh: all repeated a million times.

Films about other films are fantastic, and it took reading Dubravka Ugresic to make me realise that one of the simple and unpretentious pleasures of postmodern literature is reading books that are about other books. At seventeen, studying it for A-level, much of the emotional impact of The French Lieutenant’s Woman was missing from a work of literature that’s all about other literature. Visiting Lyme Regis for the first time goes some way to exorcising the ghosts of that spine-bent paperback illuminated with dayglo marker pen. However, it’s not the 1860s but the 1970s that are most immediately evoked: there’s a shop where you can still buy backjacks and fruit salads for a penny each.

In fact what’s most striking about the place is not the cobb (crowded, slippy and a bit short) but the long Jurassic cliffs stretching west. Here was once shallow seawater, teeming with spirally little ammonites dutifully dying, falling into mud and getting lithified into cute fossils. Tectonic action has lifted the resulting near-perfectly horizontal strata out of the sea and into cliffs of shale from which the fossils can easily be pried. Carl says that the creatures found in higher levels show clearly higher levels of morphological complexity than the creatures in lower levels, an irrefutable demonstration of the thesis of gradual evolutionary advancement.

How could the heart of a fervent atheist be gladdened further? Sadly, these days it seems to take more than overwhelming evidence for the scientific theory of evolution to prevent even the most po-faced bishop-basher to declare that they like getting Christmas presents anyway. Thankfully, the beauty of mere nature prevails: on the drive back to Exeter, we drive into the most gorgeous of sunsets: a burnished orange glow, filtered through the naked branches of windswept trees.

 

Rebuilding Britain

The National Film and Television Archive is not only a collection, but also a collection of collections. The way in which the nation’s moving image heritage is collected is often by acquiring smaller collections which have already been gathered or curated: the Mitchell and Kenyon collection, for instance, or the Joye films, which both keep their own identity and become part of the larger collection.

Some of these are company collections: many large firms historically maintained film units for the various purposes of record-keeping, internal communications and pubic relations. The Laing construction company was one such company, and on Wednesday night, at the NFT, Jez Stewart and company historian Alan Thorpe presented films from the Laing (pronounced mote like Laying than Lang, apparently) collection, which have now been donated to the NFTVA.

The audience was full of Laing workers and retirees, who seem to share some company spirit: Sir John Laing was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and a paternalistic employer who rewarded loyalty to the company with a sense of belonging and staff holiday outings. Laing Company Outing 1 from 1948 has many long shots of Laing workers, and some of Sir John himself on their annual jolly by boat from Tower Bridge to Margate, enjoying themselves by the sea.

Motorway through the Lune Valley documents the construction of the Cumbrian section of the M6 past Tebay and over Shap, through to Carlisle, in the early 70s. There’s clearly enough consciousness of the negative effect of roads on the environment that an effort is made to suggest both the harmony of the new road with its environment, and the scenic appeal of driving the motorway itself (it is actually one of the most spectacular stretches of motorway in England).

80 weeks to Touchdown feels even more sinister: beginning with Michael Heseltine’s announcement to the commons that a proper airport was to be built in the Falkland Islands, it’s a CoI film of the construction of the airport, starting with the valiant pontoon landing of JCBs, complete with characteristic 80s bright video, incidental synthesiser music and a chillingly Tory-sounding voiceover.

Coventry Cathedral shows Laing’s contribution to Basil Spence’s great modern cathedral: the struts and wires that hold up its enormous edifice. There’s a lot about stained glass and the craft of stonemasonry, but the most amazing thing revealed about the cathedral, fundamentally a medieval gothic cathedral in form, is that the roof forms its own self-supporting cantilevered vault: the tall and fine pillars of the nave were only put into position afterwards to hold up the wooden beans that echo the form but not the function of traditional vaulting. This is a mutation even beyond Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, where the nave’s columns still support the roof; but in Coventry all is illusion.

From the high art to low living, Where You Live is a paean to Laing’s programme of cottage estates system-built in concrete with ‘Easiform’ metal-shutter moulds. True to the form of this kind of film, it invokes vox pops from newly-installed residents to praise the ramped underpasses ideal for pushchairs, and pans lovingly across (unvaryingly white) children at play while their mothers shop. It makes to want to run immediately to the history books to find out when the estate was demolished. The film takes a surreal turn when it plays Pete Seeger’s Little Boxes over scenes of estate life (making you think the filmmakers might just not understand the irony) before rounding off with a forthright attack on the satire, and defence of the necessity of the estates as both essential housing and a place where individuality can flourish.

But it’s Taking Stock, a film from 1961, detailing (in great detail) Laing’s contribution to the postwar construction boom that makes you understand most the kind of unauthored vernacular architecture that Laing is responsible for. Here are secondary modern schools, factories and industrial estates, office blocks and housing blocks, all in a suburban sub-International Style, large windows, flat roofs and intermittent towers. A kind of low-rent brutalism: even as the ribbons are optimistically cut, these places contain the seeds of future melancholy. They are the everyday, invisible ugly buildings that we still live among today: the ones we don’t mention when we talk about architecture.

 

Self-promotion round-up

Recently I’ve been getting poetic at nthposition; reading at writLoud and at Decongested; and talking memory at Big Ideas.

 

What they don’t teach you in creative writing class

I used to go to writing groups, in Brighton, more than ten years ago. Some were fiction, some were poetry; some just workshops, some long-running. They were emphatically not writing classes: no teacher to teach you anything about writing: you were there to express yourself and get feedback from others. There was usually somebody responsible for the organisation of the group (keeping the keys to the room where we met, setting a schedule) known as a ‘facilitator’. Sometimes the facilitator of a workshop would be paid, and paid for their writing-specific expertise, but their job would be to set and organise an exercise rather than give informed feedback. We generally paid something to belong to the group or attend the workshop, but the fees were well within reach of a parsimonious unemployed or badly-paid person.

The ethos of the groups was egalitarian; the underlying principle that everyone has a story to tell and a right to write (there were, of course, always unspoken intellectual hierarchies within this). Feedback on your work came from all other members of the group, and nobody would tell you that they didn’t like it or it was rubbish. Comments, in poetry especially, would concentrate on the feeling and mood of a piece rather then technique. The kind of writing and writing practice that resulted from this was mixed: at best, you read stuff that had both personal meaning and decent technique; at its worst, the work was sloppy and self-indulgent, therapy-writing.

Though the umbrella organisation under which many of the groups sat was oppositional, and saw itself representing a counter-culture against the world of a few well-known authors and many unknown readers, some of the people working within the milieu inevitably saw themselves as ‘proper’ writers trying to ‘make it’. But I’m not sure how much the groups led to improvement in our writing. A year in a poetry group certainly made me happier with what I was capable of producing as poetry, but mostly through practice and feedback: the group offered discipline and organisation rather than instruction or inspiration.

For the past two years I’ve been studying a ‘proper’ creative writing certificate course offered by a London university. The course fees are not trivial, but not beyond reason either: the annual cost of a modest holiday, perhaps. For two and a half hours a week, thirty weeks a year, we have a class led by a teacher, marked work, grades and termly; individual tutorials. A first year divided into a term each of prose fiction, poetry and drama is followed by a year of specialisation in one of these. The certificate’s credits work within the overall national scheme of continuing education. It’s about as legitimate as you can get.

Nevertheless, in many ways it’s not too dissimilar from the writing groups. Explicit or unspoken ground rules prohibit direct assessment of any work’s overall value; constructive criticism is encouraged. Despite the fees, usually the most useful feedback on your writing comes from your fellow classmates, who act as a kind of well-informed mirror for the work - if most people in the class don’t get what you’re writing, you’d better redo it, because no-one else will get it either.

Students look to the tutor for expertise, but expertise of a particular kind. When it’s time to scope out next term’s tutor, or make a choice for the second year, what students tend to ask is ‘how much have they published?’ Given the lowly status of the certificate course (the MA is where the action’s really at), it’s often surprising how much some tutors have published: a lesson already to those hoping to ‘make it’. The actual teaching ability of the tutors, however, is both widely variable, and certainly not related to the quantity of their output, just as high profile research academics do not always make good teachers. One tutor in particular implicitly relies on her own ‘success’ as a writer to avoid justifying their answers to questions about method (how best to draft, and edit, etc), just telling us that one way ‘works for her.’ Some make clear their disappointment at having to teach to support their writing.

When it comes to prose fiction, one of the course’s unspoken assumptions is that what we are all writing, or trying to write, is essentially literary fiction, which isn’t very well-defined. Some people’s personal styles are on the edge of pulpy, but few people are committed to writing ‘genre’ stuff (science or detective fiction for example), and it’s always noted when a piece looks ‘genre’. Most of us speak about ‘page-turners’ with derision, and though few would deny any dreams of making it professionally as a writer, if you wanted lessons in how to produce hack fiction you’d have to look elsewhere.

Consequently, the course concentrates on getting the traditional attributes of lit.fic. right: consistent point of view, developed characters, credible dialogue, tight description, etc. To some extent, the tutors succeed in teaching this, discussing not only how to punctuate dialogue properly, but how to avoid over-explanation; little exercises in character profiling to produce rounded, believable protagonists; pacing the relationship between action and scenery.

What isn’t discussed much is storytelling. Perhaps it’s like a life drawing class: you’re expected to actually learn to draw elsewhere, or to have the innate talent. One of the greatest surprises was to find that the drama module, rather than being ‘good for writing dialogue’ as everyone had expected, turned out to be best for discussing the actual mechanics of storytelling. Narrative was broken down into scenes and characters without the support of appearance or interior monologue: character objectives, arcs and story resolution were discussed in a way that would have seemed almost obscenely functional in the prose fiction module.

It can be socially awkward talking about doing a creative writing class, and not only because stories are where you put it on the line, expose yourself the most. Like drawing, many people’s attitude is that it ‘can’t be taught’, that if you knew how to write you would be writing; if you’re going to a class you’re just an optimistic failure. An Arvon course might be permissible if the ‘nov’ is already underway, but not much else. This might be more common among my generation and/or people I know who consider themselves ‘creative’; many members of the class itself have no problem reconciling the personal enjoyment of writing with the social enjoyment of the class.

Myself, I like both learning or being taught (I’ve got a few more problems with being taught badly), and I think I’ve got something to learn. Grades can be encouraging, if not inherently wholly trustworthy. The combination of scheduled submissions to class and group feedback is valuable: it’s all about the practice, and I wouldn’t turn up, let alone pay, to hear any of my tutors’ ruminations on character and location alone. Being part of the course also opens up a network of formal and informal opportunities for you: publication in the yearly journal (which can even attract the passing interest of a literary agency) and reading series open to course students only: from there it’s easier to start submitting to other reading series and publications. That’s when you begin to seriously think about what it’s like to have an audience for what you write.