Three nuggets of advice from my master’s in creative writing

When people learn that I studied for a master’s in creative writing at the University of Limerick, where internationally renowned figures such as Joseph O’Connor and Donal Ryan are among the teachers, they invariably want to know more.

What did I learn from them?

How do they go about teaching?

Can you teach creative writing in the first place? (Yes, you can. And I can recommend the UL one very highly, a topic I’ll return to on this blog – but only in a very broad sense, not to give away the course’s many secrets and gems, for, apart from anything else, they’re what make the course so valuable, and more to the point, they’re not mine to give away).

Many readers have a deep interest in the whole craft of writing.

The teaching approach of Joseph and Donal – and of Eoin Devereux, Emily Cullen and Fí Scarlett, the teachers with whom I had most contact – primarily involves working with what the writer has already written. Or, as I will show below, responding to specific quesions troubling the writer at a particular moment in time.

Buy On The Way Out in your local bookstore or from our online store

Feedback is tailored to match the writer’s intention for the submitted piece. In this way, each of them locks in on the work itself. I got great value from this approach.

I want to elaborate on three pieces of advice that directly changed how I write.

1. Keep going

The first, from Joseph O’Connor, involved encouraging me to keep writing and to resist going back too soon to polish what I’d already done. Like me, Joseph started out as a journalist, but he has long since shed that journalistic tendency to edit after a few thousand words. It was something I had to shake off if I was to complete a novel.

The idea of writing tens of thousands of words without editing them, or without making sure they’re properly in place and contributing to the story, was quite scary for me. Joseph’s advice is simple: keep writing, just keep writing, even when you know there’s something broken or not fully functioning earlier in the work.

We had a very good one-on-one mentoring session where he talked about simply staying at it until I got to the end of my novel, On The Way Out. It’s how he approaches his own writing. He has developed confidence in his ability to go back in latter passes and fix what needs to be fixed.

This remains a liberation for me. It relieves me of the pressure to have everything sweetly in place as I go along.

2. Get in close

The second great piece of advice came from Donal Ryan. It was a Friday afternoon class. He was talking about writing effective ‘close third person’.

At the time, I was working on On The Way Out, which deploys close third person. I was doing too much of ‘she looked out the window and spotted the car’ stuff, followed by something like, ‘she saw the car was red’. I was over-navigating the reader.

In that class, Donal talked about how, in close third person, you can simply say, ‘the car was red’ or ‘the red car’. When you’ve already established the viewpoint character earlier in the chapter, you don’t need to say who saw it.

Nor do you need to say she looked out the window. If you have earlier placed your character indoors, we are pretty sure the car is outside. It’s where cars are almost all of the time.

The reader will figure out the car is outside, and who sees it. It’s not difficult for them. They’re tuned in. And they don’t like to be spoon-fed.

Donal explained very simply how you strip away barriers between the reader and the scene. You bring the reader right into the scene, and that’s gold. The reader can scan around the screen as if wearing immersive goggles. That was huge for me, and very timely.

I remember asking Donal a couple of questions during that class, and from then on everything got easier. From that day onwards, I have become better at hooking the reader into the scene, and keeping them there. In this way, the reader almost forgets there’s a writer.

3. Trust your instinct

The third piece of advice came from Siobhan MacGowan, author of The Trail of Lotta Rae and several other novels. She was a guest lecturer in one of Donal’s Friday afternoon classes.

She talked about ‘writing by instinct’.

Don’t overthink it. If you feel your main character should suddenly lift an apple from a vegetable stall and throw it at the man behind the counter, let them do it. If something tells you it’s time for the family to have a major falling-out, sow the seeds.

If it feels right in that moment, plough on.

Your instinct is telling you something; trust it. And taking Joseph’s advice into account, you can always fix it later. What’s the worst that can happen?

You’ll probably end up having to edit a chapter – you’ll be doing that anyway. You might delete a chapter, but that’s highly unlikely. There tends to be value in most things you write, and it’s good – and very enjoyable – to allow yourself to go where your instinct suggests you go.

Buy On The Way Out in your local bookstore or from our online store

Another liberation manifests itself here. It gives me a licence to veer off wherever the notion takes me, even if I have little idea how everything will come around in the end. It’ll be fine. There’s plenty of time to tidy it all up later.

And the beauty of writing is that there is always something else to learn. There can be no complacency.

MORE ON THE CRAFT OF WRITING: See HERE. I’m adding to this on an ongoing basis. As I learn, hopefully you can too. Every day is school day for us all.