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 Unpublished, still, but I’ve never sent anything off anywhere, never known where to send something to, and never have anything I want to send off.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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Just a quick post:

I went to a writing careers fair at the University of East Anglia today. Besides reaffirming my ambition to study on the MA course in Creative Writing there (the places for which are very competitive) it was interesting.

One of the most interesting parts of it was that I met Stephen Foster, a published author. While I can’t say that I’ve come across his work, being, as I am, stuck in a bubble of mostly pre-War literature, talking to him was a positive experience, particularly because he had studied on the course that became the course I’m on now, and he had the same tutors as me, and it was on that course, in his final year, that his final submission was marked by someone who worked at Faber, resulting in him being offered a publishing deal straight off the course. Which is encouraging. He also went on the MA Creative Writing at UEA, since he had already applied for it when Faber picked up his work, and said he would highly recommend it. Since then he’s written I think four or five books, all of which were well reviewed, though not all of which sold particularly well, until the fourth one which was more of a bestseller-type book.

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