The novelist and writing tutor delivers bracing advice that demolishes familiar ‘stick to what you know’ nostrums
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rope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world.
What writers used to say to small circles of students in an attempt to help them improve their storytelling technique has become a familiar way, often parodic and self-knowing, of interpreting the grand and not-so‑grand narratives of our time. “Don’t worry about Liz Truss’s YouTube series – she’s just having a main character moment.”
The most intense distillation of this system of thought (if you can even call it that) has always been the craft book, the writing manual. These are sometimes written by the most successful in the profession (like Ursula K Le Guin’s Steering the Craft) or the most successful at advising the profession (Robert McKee’s Story) but most often they are put together by novelists and screenwriters towards the close of their academic careers as creative writing tutors. John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction is the grandaddy of this subgenre.
