The Creative Writing Course

In a couple of weeks I’m starting a creative writing course with the Open University, just for fun, just to see how it goes. Mostly I’m doing it for a bit of external pressure to write; my inner motivation being in dangerously low supply in these days of full-time work, demanding toddlers and chronic sleep deprivation. In truth, if I had the nerve to write when I’m supposed to be working, (and let’s just say that some of my colleagues skive off all the time to do grossly more unproductive things) I could probably get in four or five hours every day and no one would notice or care. Such is the challenge of my workload.
But sadly at some point between seventeen and now a social conscience seems to have silently crept up on me and I’ve now discovered that I’m simply incapable of misusing time that I’m being paid for. I’m still deciding whether I’m pleased or not.

Another reason for enrolling on the writing course is that I desperately want to know how good I am. Ultimately, in a meaningful sense. This is quite a difficult issue, more so than it might at first seem. I mean, yes, I can spell (go me!), and I usually write with some regard for the rules of English grammar. This much I know. And false modesty aside I also know that I write well enough to get an A* in English GCSE without the slightest pang of an effort. My mother thinks I’m great.
But out there, in the big wide world, in that mysterious world of real writers and publishers and agents, in the world of the good, where do I figure? Am I yet another aspiring writer, destined to remain so for the rest of my life, believing perhaps that I’m much better and unique that I am? Am I in the thousands of the moderately talented, whose prospects of publication are in the hands of the goddess of luck? Am I already a writer that just needs to get off her backside and write? What is my place?

However it might be, I hope the course will help me to become a better writer. I’ll let you know how it goes.