Reflecting on the experience, I have cause to ask myself: why study creative writing? Surely my own experience suggests you don't need to study writing in order to be a writer; why make a detailed study of one's own vocation, at the expense of time and effort a research degree demands?
Some brief, provisional responses:
- Firstly, every deep, complex field of human activity is, I think, worthy of study. The foundation of scholarship is not necessarily gain – that job, that publication – but interest.
- Now, you can't teach creativity, but you can, of course, practice it, and practice can strengthen.
- And practice can also refine. The self-reflection inherent in scholarly practice may not make me better, but it makes me clearer about my interests, my strengths and weaknesses, my influences, and formalizes of my techniques and approaches. Writing about one's own writing helps to refine intuitions and make them explicit.
- Finally, writing to a task and reflecting on that work not only allows you to apply skills but to experiment, to take risks and write out scenarios and possibilities that test ideas and your personal capacities. Not all writing in the academic context may be publishable, but it is constructive, a workbench for concepts and techniques.
Where this will lead next, I don't know. A new historical mystery is almost finished, and beyond that there are only sails on the horizon, suggestions of destinations. But studying creative writing has at least given me some sense of how I set the sails, what stars I steer by.
