Writing is now widely taught, not only in universities and schools, with the aim of teaching ambitious young people how to become professional writers, but also in prisons, clinics, mental heath care, on continuing education courses and for pleasure, as part of your summer holidays. Obviously teaching methods, and the desired results, differ dramatically depending on the context. Teaching creative writing as a form of mental therapy is a highly specialised field. Some writers in this context are battling to control, contain and express their own experience, order their thoughts, lay claim to their identities, make sense of their realities. They are not writing with the intention of producing literature. Autobiographical writing can be a dangerous terrain to cross, unaided and unaccompanied. The attempt can be liberating, a revelation; but many people who have tried to capture and express personal experience have found the process traumatic. The writing which results from these courses is sometimes overwhelming, compelling, on fire with all the urgency and vivid rage of the living witness. But more often it is dull, derivative, and self-indulgent. The structures and meanings of the language resist writers who cannot master them. It can be devastating to feel that one’s own experience is second-hand, boring and trite, especially if you are writing love poetry. Learning how to escape from, or manipulate cliché and how to transform the meanings built into the registers of our language is the writer’s business. You can never learn these things if you do not read.

The novelist Jill Dawson, author of Fred and Edie and Wild Boy, begins her writing class by looking in detail at a poem or a piece of prose which sets a standard of excellence for her students. Young people who do not have a long history of reading and thinking about literature need a map of the territory they wish to occupy. Writing is made of language, not personal experience, and the language itself has a history. I have never severed the practice of literary analysis, that is, intense, informed critical reading, and the practice of writing. In my experience these skills are complementary and can be taught as such.

Writing exercises, begun and sometimes completed in the workshop, comprise the standard teaching method at beginners’ level and for leisure courses. I never expect undergraduates to write in the class, but my colleague, the novelist and poet, Michèle Roberts disconcerted her postgraduate students by making them play some deadly serious writing games in her advanced workshop, ‘Problems that Writers Face’. Her approach is highly subversive, combining a demanding intellectual reading agenda and a frisky insistence on unleashing the Lord of Misrule. This has a wonderful, liberating effect on the students. Suddenly, writers who were terrified of sex scenes found themselves writing poems about S&M, others who avoided deep emotions at all costs, wrote passionate pieces about the person they hated most in their family. Michèle Roberts places a strong emphasis on the element of play in her teaching and often evokes the metaphor of children making a mess in the sandpit. Her students could no longer be constipated or self-consciously precious. They had to hurl down the words, surprise themselves, use sudden registers of language they had never attempted before, unlearn all their fears. The final effect was immensely productive; all meretricious sententiousness disappeared into the carnival games. They became better writers.

The assessment of imaginative writing in higher education remains a vexed and disputed subject. Most university assessment criteria once included dubious phrases such as ‘indisputably original’ or ‘of publishable quality’. I have never found two writers who agreed on a precise definition of ’originality’ and how it could be assessed. So much badly written nonsense and best-selling vacuous cliché is published every year that being ‘publishable’ cannot be a failsafe guide to quality. In my own institution we are overhauling our assessment criteria. The emphasis now falls on more obviously technical aspects of writing, control over language and form, a clearly developed individual style and an intelligent inventiveness. I don’t usually assess content as an examiner, but I am beginning to think that it is very relevant when a student is treading an exceedingly over written path where many have gone before. If they are not aware that they are writing on themes that are very well worn indeed this is a dire indictment of their reading, which will effect their language and make them desperately boring. I happen to think that it is a crime to bore the reader, any reader.

The publishing industry now has its tentacles firmly clamped around the potential future stars at writing schools throughout the country. Every course has regular contacts with agents and editors. This is a very positive development in that all young writers acquire a realistic assessment of their publishing options. But as a university teacher I prefer to keep the industry out of the classroom until my students have sufficient confidence in their own abilities to defend their ambitions for their writing with verve and panache. And have read enough to know the difference between pearls and swine.

Patricia Duncker is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Manchester. Her most recent books are Mirror, Mirror and Miss Webster and Chérif. She has taught creative writing alongside Professor Michèle Roberts, Jill Dawson, Stephen Knight, Andrew Cowan, Professor Denise Riley, George Szirtes and Val Taylor.