Writers' Tuesday - On Becoming A Student Again.
After teaching writing for 15 years, I signed up for a course...
I’m writing today looking out on a snowy landscape from a sparsely furnished room. I have just finished using the communal bathroom before my lesson this morning. It is strange, at the age of 67, to be student again - a student of the very subject I teach, storytelling.
Ted Hughes used to live in this sprawling 18th century pile, Lumb Bank, just outside Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire ( Sylvial Plath is buried a short walk away). Photos of the many writers who have taught here are emblazoned across the walls. I myself have taught here on several occasions. But this time the wisdom is flowing in the other direction, from the two esteemed playwrights - Simon Stephens and Carmen Nasr - running the course towards us dozen or so students, mainly young, but with a few veterans like myself in attendance.
The teaching hasn’t started yet, but I have submitted the play I am trying to write for feedback from the tutors - and I am nervous. I am exceedingly - some might say inappropirately - self confident about my fiction and memoir writing abilities, but I have never written a play before and I have only half a clue what I’m doing.
I am perfectly ready to have my work torn to shreds, as I have been a writer long enough to know that this is a healthy part of the process, not a personal attack. All the same, having your writing judged is scary, even though there isn’t necessarily an enormous amount at stake - the bulk of my writing career is behind me and the attempt to write a play, although a serious attempt, has nothing riding on it but my personal curiosity.
I haven’t had my first lesson yet, and I’m hoping I resist the temptation to stick my nose and and be a know-it-all about storytelling, which would be a very unattractive look. But I feel genuinely humble about this experience, a feeling helped by the lovely people, students as well tutors and house staff who are running the course. The very worse thing for me about writing is its solitude, the endless hours spent alone wondering if what you’ve written is a pile of cack, and not really wanting to know the answer. Here it is different. We are knitted together with a common aim and a love of writing, and I am reminded, not for the first time, what a great bunch of people writers are - interesting, interested, full of ideas and wit and conversation.
The communal aspect is also one of the reasons I want to write a play. Theatre writing, with the involvements of the whole theatrical team, must feel very different from fiction writing. Having actors and directors and an audience to bounce of excites me in the way writing novels no longer does. You write a novel, you send it off to your publisher and that’s the end of that ( more or less) You write a play, and that’s just the beginning of the process.
I don’t expect that this week at the Arvon will lead to me getting anything produced. I don’t even expect to produce anything close to a professional play. But I am excited to make a start.
What’s my play about? I’m not really sure, but I suppose the dryest way of putting it would be gender power relations across 50 years. It’s called ‘Men and Women’ and the sole cast members will be - a man and a woman.
At my age the thing that worries me most is being out of touch. The culture wars are still running hot, and although my play is not ‘political’ , I worry about missing cues, so to speak. There is nothing about Queer culture, for instance, or race, or trans people. It’s just about two couples at different periods in recent history, living out the narratives that occupy that space in time. That’s pretty much all I know at the moment - except that it’s fun to write. And it takes a LOT less time than a novel.
I’ll report back next week about how it goes, in the meantime, I’m off to my first writing lesson since I was at school…and yes of course I’m taking an apple for the teacher.
What a brilliant idea, Tim. Enjoy the course and the company. I look forward to hearing more. A few years ago, also as a veteran, I did a course at Lumb Bank on creative non-fiction. The teachers were excellent and the students talented and supportive. The course gave me a much-needed kick up the backside and helped me to finish my travel book.
Wow! That is so cool. Hope it goes fantastically. And if one or two other students might read your dialogue aloud (as work in progress) that could be wildly beneficial. I am super jealous. Sounds such a wonderful place.