A week ago I was pretty definitely doing the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Now I’m not so sure. It seemed logical: finish my BA in writing, don’t get a job; go part-time for two years on an MA course, use that time to write a novel and then hopefully get it published when I leave. But how old am I? Twenty. And how good a writer am I? I don’t know. Unpublished, still, but I’ve never sent anything off anywhere, never known where to send something to, and never have anything I want to send off. My course leader said a while ago that I was the best prose writer the course had had in ‘at least a couple of years’, but he seemed less confident in my ability to get onto UEA’s MA than I was. Big fish in a small pond? Maybe.

Besides, he suggested it’s usually better to take a break between BA and MA. But what to do in a break? I don’t want to work in a shop, I’m especially sure of that after the over-time I did in a co-op shop I’d never been in before. I want a job that either makes use of whatever writing ability I have, or one at least that I have to do some training for. Something semi- rather than un-skilled. I have no idea what, however. That’s why I’m going to see our uni’s careers adviser next Tuesday, a man I’d never considered seeing until he came to give us a brief seminar last week. He suggested that one shouldn’t do an MA just because one can’t think of anything else to do.
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