This is how it begins: in 1940, a 22 year-old woman travels up from her home in Georgia to be the first creative writing student at the first-ever Writer’s Workshop, in Iowa City, USA. She meets its director, Paul Engle in his office. She tells him what she hopes to achieve, but her Southern accent is so impenetrable he can’t understand a word she’s saying. So he pushes a piece of paper and a pen across the table and asks her to write it down. That young student was Flannery O’Connor, who became one of the greatest American writers. And Engle’s idea to ‘write it down’ has endured for over 60 years.

Since that day in 1940 around 6,000 fledging writers have passed through the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, including Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, Jayne Anne Phillips and Ethan Canin. And the experiment in Iowa has engendered hundreds of like-programmes all over the USA and, in the past five years, all over the United Kingdom too. If it is the case that a programme’s success is judged on the number and quality of published writers it produces, it is also true that around 80 per cent of alumni are never heard of again. If our business were running medical schools instead of writing schools, the National Health Service would be in far worse shape than it is.

From a different angle the writing workshop is a new and innovative way of learning. It has turned literary studies into a very live subject and created a strong reading culture. By engaging in creative writing, students discover how to live inside the novel or short-story, which compliments rather than contradicts the exterior view offered by academics. Since our host is the academy, writing students get taught by both writers and academics and the two approaches to literature deepens their understanding and helps them interrogate and find their place in contemporary literary developments. The success of this enterprise depends heavily on the quality of teaching.

The way the teaching goes is more or less universal. Over a one-year full-time programme, students take a couple of contemporary literature classes taught by academics and a couple of writing classes taught by a writer, in which they take turns to expose their stories or novel extracts to the class. The idea behind the workshop is to find fault; no-one pays the fees just to be flattered. The role of the teacher is then to find where possible, a consensus, a place where the criticism converges and to suggest writing strategies to improve the work. Writing necessarily involves failing and writing is re-writing.

Teaching writing is a very intimate business, because fiction tends to begin – but doesn’t end – with autobiography. It can also be painful when some piece of personal history thinly disguised as fiction is shaved back to the bone and criticised in terms of structure, technique and style. And when a comment like, ‘This character doesn’t seem real,’ is answered by its author thus: ‘But she’s my mother...’, that author is having an early experience of trying to satisfy a reader; the first step towards becoming professionalised. A piece of writing can only ‘belong’ to the reader when its characters are real to themselves.

Due to its geographic location, Birkbeck College, University of London, where I run the MA programme, draws from the city’s heterogeneous population, but also attracts students from countries as diverse as Jordan, Greece, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, Pakistan and the USA. All classes are held in the evening to accommodate those students who need to continue with their jobs while studying. This turns out to be good fortune. For it is an inalienable truth about fiction that its characters tend to have jobs: the prism through which narrative voice passes. Fiction is not like life, but has to have life and its authors need to be close observers of where this life occurs. Birkbeck students draw from the worlds of gambling casinos, health industries, hotels, finance, armed forces and journalism in various milieus around the world. Our duty as tutors is to help individual writers transform their wide experience of society into works of the imagination. This is the live game we play. There is no systematic advice given and no recordings or notes made for students to refer to if they miss a class. And no creative writing course book can ever substitute for the live performance.

The argument: can creative writing be taught? has more or less been won. Art schools, drama and music colleges are the oft quoted examples. The argument has now moved on to: can you afford not to attend a writing programme? Talent cannot be induced, but where it already exists, a programme can usually accelerate progress by correcting long established bad habits and practices. They also bring students into close proximity with agents and publishers, whose contribution is limited, but essential. They extemporise on what the market is doing at any point. Students should never be encouraged to simply satisfy a market however (that for example may be dominated by romantic fiction), because markets always change. But it’s as well for writers of the avant-garde to know they may be going in a different direction to what is selling at the tills. Ideally, students will be innovative enough to create the next market. We are or should be in the business of creating a culture. There are far easier ways of making money.

In an age of the six-figure advance it’s worth noting that 85 per cent of writers earn less than £15,000 per book. Writers then do need to keep their day jobs and one of those day jobs available is teaching writing. So it all becomes cyclic and perhaps a bit problematic. Certainly you will need to protect yourself against pernicious influences of the day job on your other job as writer. This might include developing a wilful amnesia towards the dreary language of administration, never writing about campuses, attending boxing matches as well as literary festivals and maintaining associations with the gaol house, as a counterpoint to the asylum of the gifted that pays your salary.

Russell Celyn Jones is the author of five novels, including Soldiers and Innocents, which won the David Higham Prize, The Eros Hunter and Surface Tension. He was a Booker Prize judge in 2002, is a staff reviewer for The Times and Course Director of the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.