How It’s Going – Not Well, Apparently

There are fewer than six weeks until the end of the Masters, and I’m behind on my EMA project. It’s planned and almost half written, but I’d hoped to be further on by now. Life keeps getting in the way.

As well as writing, I’ve finished and reviewed Milkman, the Booker Prize winning novel set in an unnamed Belfast. I’d held off reading it in case its free flowing narrative and organic structure bled into my own work and gave it a style that isn’t mine. In fact, I found it loosened up my prose. This novel is not for everyone, though, and I’m not sure if I’d have enjoyed it if it hadn’t been about a time and a place I find fascinating. After this I plan to read something by Kazuo Ishiguro.

For ‘factual research’ I’ve been reading Hands Up, an account of teaching in a challenging urban school. The author, Oenone Crossley-Holland, comes from a privileged background that has afforded her both an expensive education and the contacts needed to be hired by the Guardian. This is an engaging book that gives an insight into secondary school teaching. Now I’m looking for another book to help with realism and atmosphere, and I’m considering Stasiland, which describes how it is to live in a real police state.

I’m also supposed to be studying the craft of writing itself, but that part never grabbed me, and it keeps dropping out of my schedule. I’ve said it before, but to make most of a course like this, you need buckets of spare time.

I had planned to look up competitions and other publishing opportunities. It seems like a valuable thing to do during and even before the MA.

I’d barely been on the Open University website for months. Going there this evening, I find that the deadline for the final workshop is in two weeks. I missed the last workshop. According to the timetable, we’ve been on ‘summer break’ for the last fortnight. The forum is quiet, with just a handful of names cropping up—mostly the same people who hang out on the Facebook forum. I read a thread that asks ‘how it’s going’. Not well, apparently. A few quotes:

‘I confess to wanting the whole thing over. I have not enjoyed this last year.’

‘Looking back, I realise I should have waited to take a taught MA at a real world university.’

‘I feel stifled. I saw immediately this year wasn’t for me but they wouldn’t refund me.’

‘I’m really struggling. I did really well in my assignments for part one but then my EMA flopped and I barely got a pass.’

‘I thought that I was the only one who was unhappy—like most of you, I have not enjoyed this year. I think that part of the problem is the lack of organised tutorials where a tutor is in charge.’

‘I really don’t think there have been enough of us to make the course work properly.’

I would like to know what Masters degrees are like at brick and mortar universities. This course has lacked guidance. We’re expected to teach ourselves, and it feels like we’re submitting assignments blind. At a cost of more than £6,000 I expected a supercharged writing course, with plenty of feedback, but in fact we have the opposite. Maybe that’s how MAs are supposed to be, I don’t know, but it’d be a damned sight cheaper to buy a few creative writing books and join a club or online forum.