So you want to be a writer …

Last week Hanif Kureishi dismissed creative writing courses as ‘a waste of time’, yet they have never been more popular. Other leading author-teachers reveal their advice to students: The Guardian

Good writing is a mixture of the calculated and the instinctual. No one writes through pure dazed inspiration; questions of craft and calculation enter in quite quickly. Last week, speaking at the Bath festival, Hanif Kureishi cast some doubt on the existence of transferable, teachable craft in writing by witheringly classifying 99.9% of his students as “untalented” and saying that writing a story is “a difficult thing to do and it’s a great skill to have. Can you teach that? I don’t think you can.” (Kureishi teaches creative writing at Kingston University, apparently ineffectually).