Miscellany
THE WORLD OF WRITING
Comedy quibbles, the best baddies, romance reimagined, dark days and definining drive... serious matters weighed up in the wide world of writing
Drive to work
Ben Myers, of the New Statesman, reviewing DBC Pierre’s Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out of It, referred to ‘the age-old question: can creative writing be taught?’
He continued: ‘To which the answer is invariably: well, yes, probably, a bit, to wildly varying degrees of success. To dismiss academic degrees, residential writing courses and writing guides outright is to deny budding writers from all social backgrounds a chance to have a go. Nevertheless, the best a teacher can do is inspire and encourage, or add finesse to any existing talent. Because the real work takes place alone in rooms, day after day, month after month, driven largely by delusional desire – a point DBC Pierre notes here. No one is born a writer: rather, you are shaped by experience, stimulus, ambition. You can’t teach hunger.
‘Nor is writing a science to be broken down to simple formulas, which can render “how to write” books problematic. The only fixed factor is that the novelist crawls to his or her desk to play God. Words are their weapons to be deployed in deadly combinations, and the imagination remains a largely unexplored planet, through which the writer wanders, treading a thin line between brilliant and batshit mental.’