The first lesson I ever gave as a creative writing teacher was at Pentonville Prison. This was about ten years ago or so, before prison teaching was privatised. My ‘training’ consisted of sitting in on the class that I would be taking the following week. It seemed straightforward enough. The teacher I was replacing, who was impressively energetic and efficient, was giving up teaching to concentrate on his fetish-wear mail-order business. The following week, fortified by a rummage through the creative writing manuals on the Foyles bookshelves, I took my class. Next door was Yoga, on the other side Woodwork. Across the way was the most over-subscribed class, Soft Toys. In the corridor was a prison officer, to be called in the case of trouble.

Trouble, or at least the sight and sound of it, emerged at the beginning of the class. A heavily tattooed, thick-tongued Geordie leaned forward and asked me if I thought truth was stranger than fiction. I can’t remember my reply to the question, but it was possibly something arch. For the next ten minutes, the Geordie was walking in a semi-circle behind the back of my chair, ranting. I couldn’t make out most of what he was shouting but ‘fucking’ seemed to be popping up every third word. I didn’t call out for the prison officer. Neither did I do what I most wanted to do, which was to burst into tears. Instead, with what I hoped was an amiable smile, I chewed on the lid of my ballpoint pen and waited, hoped, for the storm to blow over. It eventually did. The rest of the lesson passed, filled with exercises copied from my predecessor or the manuals on the shelves of Foyles. The Geordie apologised at the end of the session. He was being released the following day and was, as he said, ‘gate-happy’. It was about this point that I realised that my purpose in Pentonville was therapeutic rather than educative or artistic.

They don’t have Creative Writing at Pentonville anymore, but they do, it seems, just about everywhere else. Undergraduate programs, postgraduate programs, evening classes, certificated classes, week-long retreats in the English countryside or on Greek islands: creative writing is a huge growth area. Why?

Most recently I taught a third-year undergraduate class at a university. I was surprised by the lack of variety in the students’ writing styles – a sort of unconsidered naturalism that had grown out of TV rather than the novel seemed to be the norm. I was also surprised by the career path that is now in place. Half the class had applied to do an MA in creative writing. To my anarcho-Romantic way of looking at things this seems a mistake. Surely, for the purposes of creating good fiction, there needs to be a period out of the academy? Some encounter with real life, as it used to be called, is, I think, helpful for the making of literature. Now, the route is clear: undergraduate degree, MA in creative writing, agent, publishing deal, career.

At the risk of biting the hand that feeds, whenever I teach creative writing, which is about once or twice a year, I like to tell the class that this is a subject that can be learned but it’s not one that can be taught. Of course, as a novelist, I can pass on one or two tips that I’ve picked up along the way, but it’s all about doing. The point about the workshop model, which is the way I go about it, is that it encourages the development of a sharper critical scrutiny towards the work of others’ that can then be turned on to one’s own. A few writing exercises can be helpful, but much of the rest is charlatanary. It can be well-paid charlatanary, with some choice locations to practise it; but, as we’re moving towards the point where there are more writers than readers, unread writers can make a living holding forth to new (often unreadable) writers.

And where do they come from? These hobbyists, neurotics and psychotics, with the occasional, usually timid talent amongst them. As in my class at Pentonville the urge to write, to have a witness, to confess, is often essentially therapeutic. Sometimes it’s self-deludingly ambitious, the desire to write a thriller that will command a ‘five or six figure advance’. And writing a thriller like Jeffrey Archer doesn’t feel so out of reach to someone who can compose a shopping list or an e-mail. Everyone, the cliché goes, has a novel inside them.

But, just as there’s a structural, economic reason for writers to teach these classes, there’s one for the students to take them. When I was starting out, in the 1980s, we were still in the golden age of supplementary benefit and cash-in-hand jobs. The black economy was an unofficial subsidy system for aspirants in all the arts. One day a true sociology of late 20th century British culture shall be written, which will demonstrate how the Brit Art and Brit Pop and Brit Lit booms grew out of the carelessly inadvertent funding of a lackadaisacal state, before Thatcher’s reforms took effect. That structure doesn’t exist anymore. Would-be practitioners get professionalised early; it’s the safest of options, even if the writing itself becomes overdetermined by institutions and perceived professional standards, even if it comes to reflect nothing but its own traditions, even if there is no space for experimentation and wild failures to take place. And the graduates of all these writing programmes will be qualified, at least, to teach future writing programmes.

David Flusfeder is the author of four novels Man Kills Woman, Like Plastic, which won the Encore Award, Morocco and The Gift. He is a regular book reviewer for the Daily Telegraph.