HOW TO BE A WRITER

Hint: Don’t sign up for a creative writing course at Crunchem Hall

I knew I’d made a terrible mistake when she started talking about amateur butchery. But I was in too deep. By the time I understood that I was being scammed, I’d already handed over my money and signed my name on the dotted line. I was officially a student on a creative writing masters degree. And the Butcher was my tutor.

Imagine Miss Trunchbull, but in the body of a small, arch, snippy little London literatus. That was the Butcher. She was a vicious miniature-sized narcissist who had somehow blagged her way into running a creative writing course, despite the fact that she was not actually a writer.

Now why, you may ask, did I think it was a good idea to sign up to a course about writing taught by a woman whose hobby was not writing, but rather killing, skinning, and carving up small woodland creatures? Well, in my defence, I’m an idiot. But it’s also true that I believed a degree would help me to become a better and more successful writer. Everyone else was doing an MA or MFA, after all, and they seemed to be finding wealth and fame and having a totally wonderful time. And surely a writer needs to learn their craft, the same way a painter or a plumber does? Surely the course would be a hothouse of creativity and original thinking? Surely?

Anyway, yeah, turns out that’s all bullshit.

At the start of the first semester, the Butcher gave a speech which went something like this: “Listen, you snivelling little wretches. Writing is hard, and this course is hard, and most of you don’t have what it takes to make it. So unless you’re ready for pain and humiliation, you should leave now. There’s absolutely no shame in giving up before you’ve even begun, except of course for the fact that it makes you a pathetic loser.”

Not wanting to be a pathetic loser, I stayed seated. What followed for me was a year of being dragged into fugly little offices with the increasingly unhinged Butcher. It turned out that I was the Matilda to her Miss Trunchbull, and her plan was to put me in the chokey, forever. She regularly ranted at me that my writing was mediocre, uninspired, boring. My ideas were silly and unoriginal and didn’t make sense. She snarled that I was lazy, arrogant, not even trying. Then she added, with a smirk, that I would never get anywhere as a writer because I couldn’t handle constructive criticism.

Meanwhile, my classmates formed a weird little cult of worship around the Butcher. Which didn’t make any sense, really, because she talked a lot of crap. For instance, she told us that we should never try writing any scenes containing more than two characters because “it would be too difficult.” She took great pleasure in tearing apart writing she deemed bad, but extolling the novels of Will Self. She pretended that she could speak French, but really all she could do was pronounce Barthes and Derrida in an offensively hammy French accent. She had an axe to grind with the first person POV, finding it utterly incoherent for any first person novel to be written without some kind of narrative frame. This was the subject of almost every lecture she gave. I’m not entirely sure why, except for the fact that she enjoyed saying things like “narrative positionality” even though she clearly did not understand what it meant.

Then she started up an affair with one of the young Butcherites, and this was awkward, because her husband (who seemed gentle, bookish, and nice) also taught on the course and we all had to pretend that we didn’t know.

No doubt this was a topic of many difficult conversations in their house. Him standing in the doorway of the kitchen trying to persuade her to go to couples counselling. Her with her hands in the sink, arms bloodied to the elbows, a skinned and jointed rabbit laid out in pieces on the marble counter top. Saying, “Do you think you could stop going on about this? I’ve still got a badger and next door’s puppy to get through.”

The Butcher made the mistake of confusing being a horrible person with being a good writer. It’s true, of course, that the best writers are nearly always selfish, dirty, and shameful people that you wouldn’t want to skin a rabbit with. But being revolting and cruel isn’t what makes a person a writer. It’s the other way around.

But the Butcher didn’t understand that. She assumed that if she used enough long words and waffled on about French philosophers, who were themselves high on the fumes of their own farts, then idiots like me would hand over their money and keep her lucrative scam going for a while.

And she was right, of course.

The course did not, you’ll be amazed to hear, make me a better writer. Instead, it prevented me from writing for about five years. Some may consider this a service to the world, but a non-writing writer is a monster capable of just about anything. Anyway, I lied, earlier, when I said I’d thought the course would teach me how to improve my writing. Deep down, I knew it wouldn’t. But I needed to run away, and this seemed like a good way of doing it. Now I look back, I think of course I ran from one narcissist straight into the clutches of another. The universe is a bitch like that.

The moral of this story is that the world is full of scammers and dickheads and some of them have noticed that writers are easily seduced with promises of publishing contracts and book deals and access to a world of smiling, laughing, good looking people crowded around a table of cheap wine, eating hummus and talking about how much they loved your latest novel. But caveat emptor, bitches! Hold on to your money, because the truth is it’s way more likely you’ll end up in the chokey.

Are you a pig, Amanda? Or are you something worse? A writer, perhaps?