I paid over £3000 for a creative writing course, was it worth it?

My experience with one of the most prestigious creative writing courses there is and what I took out of it so you can decide whether it is something worth your time and money.

This is The Manuscript, a column where I journal about the process of writing my novel, trying to find an agent in the UK and (fingers crossed) getting it published.

The plan for 2022 was to focus on writing my novel. I had entered the year having quit a big part of my job and I wanted to dedicate all that freed-up time to telling this story I’d carried inside for a long time. So that’s what I did. I dragged my desk across the room, placed it under a big window and used the mornings for writing, sometimes bleeding into the evenings. But I got stuck, or should I say blocked?

I began with the outline, and once it was all fleshed out I got (fatefully, if you ask me) invited to a book launch. Ellen Miles was publishing her timely book Nature is a Human Right and the party was held in a little independent bookshop in Bricklane. I was the first guest to arrive so I moved towards the back to greet the only people there who, I hadn’t clocked yet, were the editorial team. At the end of the evening, I ended up, very self-consciously, pitching my novel to one of them who told me they had an agent friend who they thought would love this story and I should definitely pitch it to them.

This is the first industry problem I encountered. As an outsider, as a writer who loves writing but has zero contacts, like most, the publishing industry is very obscure. There are rules to a successful pitch –which is what will land you your first foot in the industry–, but what those are isn’t very easy to find. I googled the hell out of it, I read endless articles, watched hours of youtube videos and came up with the best version of a query letter I could. I sent the email on a train out of London, I was headed to a little cabin in the woods to start writing the novel. I never heard a word from the agent –which is fair enough as I hadn’t even started writing yet.

I got writer’s block pretty early on. Writing has been a dream of mine since I was a little girl, I began telling stories to the camera when I was 3 and I wrote my first short story when I was 8, but now that I had allocated a slot of my life purely for writing and I had the real, tangible, accountable goal of doing my best to get it published, the stakes were much higher. The way I approached the writing was by polishing each chapter before moving on to the next, I wouldn’t allow myself to write the next before each one was a smooth and shiny crystal ball. But of course, this is not how writing works, and this is something that’s only really landed after doing the course. So when I got to a place where I knew there was something that wasn’t quite working in the story but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was exactly, I was truly stuck, I couldn’t move forward until I’d fixed it, not understanding that sometimes you just have to keep going, that you can only fix something by moving forward and then looking back with the gift of perspective.

I knew there was more to this process. I knew the story was good, I knew I was a good writer, and I knew I could do it. But I also felt there was a gap I couldn’t bridge on my own. So I googled again, I typed on the search bar: Writing Course London, and the first thing that popped up was Curtis Brown Creative. I didn’t look any further –I actually did but nothing compared. I applied and I think I might have screamed when I got the email saying I had been accepted.

But I had loads of questions before committing such a huge amount of money to this, would it be worth my savings?