A newsletter from Falmouth University College’s Professional Writing MA wends its way to us. It raises an interesting question: if you’re a hedge fund manager, can you transfer the skills you’ve acquired into professional writing?
Falmouth’s Professional Writing MA has recently seen a rise in applications from the professional sector, as accountants, company directors and corporate lawyers seek to escape the City, harness their inner muse and write for a living. Boyd Tonkin, the Independent’s softly spoken yet acerbic literary critic, was cynical about this development. “Writing – fine,” he said. “For a living – in your dreams, hedgies.”
Christina Bunce, who heads the MA course, was forthright in her rejection of this view. “What Tonkin failed to recognise is that the MA – unlike many creative writing courses – does not aim to help students produce slabs of navelgazing fiction, but focuses on commercially viable forms as well as teaching a range of skills that are highly transferable to other areas,” she said. “From our students’ point of view, the key to making a living from writing is flexibility. You may well have a wonderful literary novel in development, but it makes sense to make money from your craft in other ways until you get that killer advance: copywriting, public relations, writing for the web or magazine and newspaper journalism.”
Bunce added that “Writing courses have come in for a lot of stick from critics who say they are a waste of time. But the evidence of our graduates suggests that there is a growing awareness in the business world – from banks to telecoms companies – that strong, practically focused writing skills make for good business outcomes.”
Who’s right – Tonkin or Bunce? Anecdotal evidence suggests that the recession has made being a freelance writer harder than ever, and yet Tonkin, in also saying that even established writers struggle to equal the national average wage, is wrong. Successful writers make a good living, but no doubt Bunce and her colleagues make it very clear to their students that this will never be within reach unless they are prepared to work very, very, hard – and to accept that at the outset of their careers, they will be engaging in loss leader work.
Which means that a wealthy hedge fund manager, wishing to carve out a new life, might just be ideally set for professional writing.
Image courtesy of Chaparal (Kendra) on Creative Commons.
For a certain poet, an unspoiled stretch of seaside was like “the holy hush there is in the land on Christmas morning. The roads fairly empty, the sky almost free of aeroplanes and you begin to hear and see and smell once more”.
But who uttered these lines?
(It’s a Monday, and this is your starter for 10 – and yes, we’re fresh to the metropolis, from a coastal sojourn.)
The following words appeared in a Times article in 2003, about the paper’s recently departed Head of Legal, Alastair Brett. They’ve been doing the rounds in the wake of Brett’s sudden exit last week, though without attribution. Who, we wonder, wrote them? Two suspects present themselves – our own occasional scribe, Alex Wade, and Dominic Carman, son of the late, great George (an old mucker of Brett’s). Or was someone else the author? Whatever: the fact remains that Brett was a fearless, tenacious and excellent newspaper lawyer, a man whose commitment to press freedom coursed through every vein in his body. We don’t know the precise reasons for his departure, but he will be missed.
“[He] is known for his impassioned commitment to press freedom – so impassioned that he has been described as “certifiably insane”. Capable of an intimidatory snarl or two, and prepared to be stubborn, Brett is far from mad. He is erudite, charming (so the ladies say), and not known for sitting on the fence. If his sanity has, tongue firmly in cheek, been questioned, one thing not open to doubt is that Brett epitomises the old school Fleet Street lawyer”.
Pictured: Fleet Street - not the same as it used to be.
A curious observation leaps at us from Roy Greenslade’s piece about whether Conrad Black, shortly to roam the high-class hotels of the world again as a free man, will return to the UK and carry out his threat to sue his biographer, Tom Bower, for libel:
I somehow doubt that he would have the appetite, or the funds, to pursue a libel action, but Black marches to the sound of his own drummer, so he might just do that. Even if he did, my money would still be on Bower winning.
Hang on, Roy – what about suing via a no win, no fee deal? Funds or no funds, a CFA would see Conrad through – though maybe he’ll remember what happened to the last press baron who sued Bower. Anyone for Richard Desmond’s curious dalliance with libel?
Pictured: the kind of place in which Conrad Black may be spotted (if not at the Royal Courts of Justice).
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Released almost a year ago, Spada’s groundbreaking research report, British Professions Today, is available for free download
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A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Πλάτων, Greek philosopher.