Most creative-writing courses are BS

A good barometer of where the writing and editing sector stands are the number of courses devoted to the same subject, usually led by someone with decades of experience in the same.

The worse the economy, the more you see as experienced writers and editors look for additional revenue streams as their normal ones begin to dry up.

And I get it. I totally do. My work has slowed significantly since I was working across Expert Investor, Reinsurance News , and PropertyWire in 2022 (along with all the other freelance bits I was doing for places like Intelligent Insurer , PensionsAge , and European Pensions ).

But while I get it, I don’t like it. I don’t think experienced writers are selling an education to younger aspirants, but false hope. And these workshops and courses only benefit those who already benefit from being in the financial position to afford them.

So here’s the thing: You can learn everything about creative writing that you need to know, or just the basics, in a couple of hours with the right resources.

I know; I did one creative-writing module in the whole of university and I’ve written one well-received book (Death of a Boxer, with Biteback Publishing , that’s been called ‘a literary sporting masterpiece’ by talkSPORT ), I’m writing a second (A Duel of Bulls – The Strange But True(Ish) Friendship Between Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles, also with Biteback Publishing), and I’m talking with an agent about a non-fiction travel book (TBA).

Most creative-writing classes, workshops, and courses are bullshit. The two things you need are an ability to read and the discipline to sit and write each day.

So where you should look for the mythical tomes on how to write?

Here are the ones I read/liked/pass on to people:

1)??? Story by Robert McKee . This is a lodestone for those wanting to learn how to write, breaking down story structures by genre.

2)??? Screenplay by Syd Field. This is invaluable on learning the three-act structure—or, in Fields’s case, the Act 1, Act 2A, Midpoint, Act 2B, Act 3 structure—that is largely the only one you’ll ever need to tell a decent story.

3)??? On Writing by Stephen King. Part memoir, part guide to writing from one of the last century’s bestselling, most entertaining writers. King has been there in the trenches for over half a century and knows what he’s talking about.

4)??? And an online resource I often direct people to is this one, known as the Stephen J. Cannell Screenwriting Seminar. If you don’t immediately recognise the name, you’ll the man – he also created The A-Team, The Rockford Files, and Wiseguy.

And here are some things I learned along the way from writing Death of a Boxer and A Duel of Bulls.

1.??? Everything on the page should add depth or propulsion.

If reading is a form of entertainment, then the main purpose of writing a book is to entertain. If you are writing to persuade someone to your argument, your overall goal should still be to entertain. Otherwise, how are they ever going to reach the end and be won over to your side?

So here is a tip: everything that happens within your book or story should either move the action along or it should add depth to what is already on the page. One of the worst novels I have ever read is The Godfather by Mario Puzo, which tacks on multiple, extraneous subplots that add nothing in the way of momentum or depth to the main story. That this terrible book became a masterpiece of cinema is because Francis Ford Coppola looked at it and stripped out that extraneous material.

Be merciless with your cuts.

2.??? The most-valuable thing you can tell yourself is ‘FIOTE’.

Writer’s block can be crippling for those of us who have chosen to not have a real job. The words that are supposed to flow onto the page are clogged up, coming out in horribly tangled clumps and clots, all of which are bad and should never be read, never mind written.

And it is easy to give up. Until you tell yourself a magic phrase I have come up with while writing this book—FIOTE, or ‘Fix it on the edit’. Actually, there is usually more swearing involved in my version, which is ‘FIFIOTE’, the first ‘I’ also standing for ‘it’.

It is a magic phrase. And you cannot be a realist unless you believe in magic. What happens is that you say it and when you come to look at that errant, bastard sentence when you edit later, it does not read as bad as when you wrote it. The chances are that you were overthinking it in the first instance.