Features and blogging

A year ago, I clicked on the first link of the first unit as the first cohort of a two-year online MA in Creative Writing – a new course set up by the Arts University Bournemouth*. A whole box of extraordinary adventures opened up that week.
As I type, I’ve signed off six of the appointed units, which brings me neatly (and slightly exhaustedly) to the halfway mark.
The units occur approximately every eight weeks, with a two-week break at Christmas and Easter; we study all through summer. Each unit gives us six weeks of learning; then a week to knead, prove, and bake the assignment; and then another week to lie down in a dark room before the next big adventure. The notebooks pictured here contain all my scrawls, and I spend our week off transcribing everything onto Word docs. This is partly to clarify what I have just learned, but also to ensure I’ll be able to read it all back because my handwriting is worse than a giddy doctor’s.
The road can be long, dreamy, precarious, smooth, arduous, flat-eared. We are the first set of students to carve a path through the content. We’re guinea pigs on a slightly rollercoaster-ish trip, but it’s what we signed up for, and for the most part, it’s been exciting.
I won’t go over all the units again because I’ve already covered that in several blogs – it’s varied, for sure. I mean, I’ve tackled an eclectic array of topics in my 30-year career as a writer, as you will know if you’ve waded through my blog posts here or on partlycloudy.co.uk. Now I can add poetry, portfolios, pitches, and manifestos to the mix. And for the last module, a plan for a six-part TV series, an outline for a collection of comic books, and a plot for an interactive theatre escape-room event – all part of a unit that also pulled out of me a floor-map, flow-chart, cast list, and several riddles written in the kind of quest-language I never thought I’d use. In short, I drank the whole bottle and went on a white rabbit ride for Transmedia Storytelling. No wonder I’ve been having odd dreams.
Highlights? In order of appearance, I loved our chapter on word-crafting. I enjoyed our eerie door-creak into the wyrd world of fantasy writing. I bodice-ripped and fast-rapped through the brilliantly-put-together poetry unit (after which I seriously considered training as a poetry therapist). And I totally got into the whole script-writing thing when I had a little window to do that. Favouring all the writerly stuff, in a nutshell.
Any revelations at the halfway mark? I’ve realised I’m not worldly (well-travelled yes, but that’s something else). I’m not great at research and I’m honestly not ‘academic’ (despite people well-meaningly but misguidedly suggesting otherwise). I won’t be discovered any time soon, and I won’t be catapulted into writerly fame. I can’t teach – I just don’t know enough, and I’m not nice enough. I probably won’t win any prizes for all the comps I keep entering unless I put in a whole lot more hard work, and that work is only just beginning: ‘Mary Wesley was old, Mary Wesley was old, Mary Wesley was old’ is and always has been my mantra.
No, I’m not fishing for big-ups, I’m perfectly adept at self-congratulatory back-patting if I feel credit is due (as my poor family will tell you every time they’re subjected to an over-dinner MA brag).
What I have done is confirm the big thing I suspected all along – that I adore writing, that it’s all I want to do, and that I don’t want to do it for anyone other than me. All of which pulls us up nicely in front of module no 7, Writing in the Anthropocene, dropping at noon tomorrow (Friday 30 May). Wallop.
I wish I had more clarity on the future, in particular a year from now, when I’ll hopefully be handing in my finished project and stepping back to see if anything has legs. But the big Ever After? No clue. Get used to living and writing in the Now? Easier said than done but I’m learning.
Back to the books, then, and now to dig out the walking boots and try on my nature-writing hat. See you when I come out of the forage-field in another eight weeks.

*AUB has been in the news this week due to staff cuts, and student protests about said cuts. While I’m comfortable with the idea of online study and grateful to be able to do it, not everyone feels the same. I’m so sorry for the way our education system, at all levels, is repeatedly viewed as expendable. It isn’t.