Do I need a university qualification to become a writer?

The short answer is no. There are many successful authors who never went to university. Having letters after your name, or spending years in a university’s hallowed halls, does not necessarily make you a writer. Becoming a writer is all about learning the craft of writing and actually sitting down and writing.

 The downside of university courses about creative writing is that they are not able to just focus on the craft of writing. Most university courses in creative writing are taught in tandem with English studies and the university exam boards insist on there being up to 50 per cent academic subject matter to make it a ‘proper’ subject. That means you might have to take courses in post-colonial theory, the legacy of modernism or medieval poetry. Don’t get us wrong. These are important and interesting subjects, but our experience of teaching in higher education is that most writers want to focus on learning how to write well and that academic study and literary theory can result in an over-intellectualisation of narrative and literature, be distracting and actually block the flow of their writing.

We have built the Creative Writing Programme as an alternative to university but at the same level. Our approach is more akin to that of an art school or music academy. Our priority is the teaching of techniques that are required to write well. We do this by focusing on your writing, building confidence in your evolving style, separating the writer from the critic and engaging the mind and body in the writing process, and encouraging a sensitive awareness of the conventions of narrative. When we use theory we only use it in the context of understanding how to construct compelling, dramatic narrative.

Our two-year structure is based on a helical model (think of the shape of a tornado). You start at the bottom, on first principles: bringing a scene to life on the page, engaging the totality of your reader, generating character etc. and you build upwards, accumulating understanding of the writing process as you go, learning about character interaction and dialogue, before you tackle the complexity of longer narratives: character development, theme, structure, dramatic tension and, of course, finding an ending. Most university courses do not follow this model of continuous writerly development and tend to put too much emphasis on the cerebral and intellectual, forgetting that reading and writing is also a physical and emotional process.

So at the end of the two years of the Creative Writing Programme, you won’t have letters after your name – we’re not an accredited qualification. What you will have is the skills to write and at least 20,000 words of a first draft of a novel or collection of short stories (many of our writers have a completed first draft) - all for a fraction of the cost of a university degree. You can study online, or in person at our centres in Brighton, Worthing, Eastbourne and Tunbridge Wells.

But don’t just take our word for it. Listen to what our students and alumni think and if you’re interested in finding out more, why not come to one of our taster sessions in September to see if the programme is for you.