In Praise of the Creative Writing Course

In F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Beautiful and Damned, the writer Dick Caramel tells of a conversation with his uncle from Kansas: “All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his and then he says: ‘There’s a character for you! Why don’t you write him up? Everybody’d be interested in him.’ Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says: ‘Why don’t you write a story about that place? That’d be a wonderful setting for a story!’”

Anyone who has ever claimed to be a novelist will recognise this exchange. What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer? Or rather, what is it about writing that makes other people think they know how to do it?

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