In 1993 I’d had enough of writing. I’d been trying since I left University to get published. I’d won an Eric Gregory award for poetry and some short-story competitions; I’d edited a couple of anthologies. I’d tried to support myself for the last ten years from this and other bits of journalism. I was broke, and newly separated from my partner. The only MA in Creative Writing I’d heard of was the famous one at UEA, and that I pictured as three men in a stuffy tutorial room with Malcolm Bradbury, quaffing wine and extolling James Joyce. It wasn’t for me: I had to earn a living. I enrolled on a course to train to be a psychotherapist. That would have to satisfy my fetish to hear and construct stories. For the first time in my life I considered giving up writing.

Then I saw an ad in the Guardian. A new MA in Writing. This one in Sheffield Hallam (the old polytechnic) in the North of England. Maybe this would be a more congenial place for a single mother of a four year old son, living on the dole in a council flat in Hackney? More to the point, maybe I had a chance of getting on it? (Beneath my dismissal of the UEA course was of course a king-sized anxiety about my writing). The MA course mentioned two writers I hadn’t heard of, let alone read: novelist Jane Rogers and poet E. A. Markham.

I don’t remember being accepted onto the course, or turning down my place on the therapist’s one. I do remember a perilous drive up to Hallam University in my rickety Renault Four, knocking over one bollard and spending two hours in the city centre, going round and round the one way system, looking for signs to the campus. It had taken a military operation to organise childcare to allow me to casually attend an evening get-together with wine and mingling in Sheffield. The ‘mingling’ terrified me. Many years of ‘going mental in my bedroom’ (a wonderful expression, heard recently from a student!) meant that I no longer felt very good at mingling.

'I don’t think I’ll stay,' I said snootily, to the first person I stood next to. Luckily it was Kathryn Heyman (now published too: three novels and quite a few prizes under her belt). If the MA had given me nothing else, it would have provided me with three of my dearest friends: Kathryn, and the writers James Pollard and Margo Daly, (with whom I’ve since edited two books). 'Why did you apply?' Kathryn and I asked each other, sipping from the plastic cups of wine. To finish our novels, we decided. For the discipline. That’s what we needed. Discipline, a structure, an incentive.

I still think this is the reason most people do an MA in Creative Writing. For the discipline, the structure, and the incentive. Tutors come second and possibly, because, like me, they haven’t given it much thought, the other students come third, despite the role they play in giving feedback and support.

I did stay, though. I managed to cram the lectures into two evenings, to cut down on the childcare costs and the complicated childcare arrangements. Most weeks I travelled up from London on the train with Jim Pollard and used the time to read the work of the others in our group, or discuss at great length the books we were reading, the work of the other students and to gossip about the tutors.

If I just finished my novel, that would be enough, I said. The MA cost, I think, £2000 and that, I felt would be value for money.

The first semester was something called: What is Contemporary? I hated it. Ten years out of education, it was a struggle for me to knuckle down to thinking and reading again. It was embarrassing to discover all the novels and poets I hadn’t read. It was awkward to find myself out of sync with just about everyone that year in not raving over Martin Amis and Nick Hornby. I took the poetry course with Archie (E. A. Markham) and cringed as my half-baked narrative slivers were discussed by the rest of the group and by a withering Archie as if I’d ever intended them to be fully-fledged poems (I had of course, but now I denied it vigorously).

There were memorable master-classes from writers such as Pat Barker, who had recently published (I believe) the last of her Regeneration trilogy. All I can now remember from her talk was that a writer needs an inciting incident. She drew a graph to illustrate what she meant. I copied the graph to my notebook. When I went home and applied it to my own novel, I discovered I had such a thing, on page six. I felt terrific.

James Kelman gave a guest reading at the University then stayed up until dawn drinking with us in Archie Markham’s flat. The novel he read from was How late it was, How late. He was inspiring. That year someone counted how many ‘fucks’ were in his novel and the figure entered the hundreds by the first chapter. Kelman spoke passionately of his right to use his vernacular Glaswegian voice, as imperative as any Black voice. I was ignorant, despite reading many African American writers (Toni Morrison had recently published Beloved: I had a signed early copy), but I was won over. I cheered when he won the Booker that year. I baited my mother –already scandalized by the ten million ‘fucks’– by casually mentioning that I’d ‘spent the night with Kelman’ (leaving out the fact that half the MA class was also present).

Apart from visiting writers, there was novelist Jane Rogers. Quiet, sturdy, serious. It was probably Jane who represented what was life-changing about the MA for me. Jane applied herself to the task of our unruly novels with a steady hand. Again, it’s curious that I can’t remember the nitty-gritty of what she said, only the essence. What she really offered was better than critical advice. It was the generous inclusion; the assumption that I could and would be a published writer, like her; more than that, perhaps aim to be a good writer, desire to be an exceptional one.

At the end of my MA I published the novel Jane was helping me with, Trick of the Light. That was ‘96. The number of MAs has swelled since I graduated. I’ve recommended many friends to take the Sheffield Hallam course and I’ve taught on quite a number of MAs in writing, including the one at UEA. Actually, it isn’t three people in a tutorial room quaffing wine. It offers many things, including the possibility of making better readers of the participants. But for the money, if you manage to finish your novel, read some books you wouldn’t otherwise have ventured, and make a couple of good writer friends, it seems to me like the bargain of a lifetime.

Jill Dawson is the author of four novels: Trick of the Light; Magpie, for which she won a London Arts Board New Writers Award; Fred and Edie; and Wild Boy. She lives in the Fens with her partner and two sons, and was recently the Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia.