It has taken me a couple of weeks to decompress from it … but after 2 years the MA I was studying in Creative writing at the Open University is over.

The last assignment is submitted, the last few forum messages/threads have been read and responded to, the tutor group WhatsApp group is active (Yay!). The mark for my final submission is now in the hands of the Gods – or at least the tutors that will get to read it.

I’ve not really blogged about the course as I’ve been going through it, in fact I’ve not blogged about much – a good deal of my creative writing energy has gone into the course itself. Those who have undertaken such an endeavour will know that the time is consumed with exercises to do, workshop submissions to critique, forum messages to post, respond to, and pass comment on (relating to any and all of the above). Plus, the assignments of course; the more significant undertakings that you get marked on.

But having reached the end, I did think I’d creatively write about it … just for me (which coincidently is pretty much the entire readership of my blog).

The first year

This passed by relatively uneventfully. For a portion of it, covid lockdowns kept everyone home working, life was in some ways simpler without having to slot in commuting.

My other hobby/passion is running, and that is equally as time consuming. Scarce a day went by when I didn’t engage with the course material/objectives in some way, and likewise running too is an (almost) daily activity.

But the first year was, on reflection, a time to experiment, to learn and attempt new things. The marks for it don’t carry through to the second year, so in many ways scoring just highly enough to continue to the second year was outcome enough (although me being me, it did matter).

My first piece, a short story crime whodunnit (spoiler alert, they all did it) ran into my recurring barrier, too many words and too big an idea for a fixed word count. This resulted in a tale that was reminiscent of the end of an Agatha Christie novel or the iconic “An Inspector Calls” where the policeman outlines the events of the case.

This fell foul of having too much happen “off camera” which is a fair assessment. The action did indeed all happen in the days before the narration commenced. The idea though, is filed away. One day the four intertwining stories that I had to summarise and cajole into 2500 words might make a fuller (and less “told”) story. As was fed back to me, “exposition isn’t plot”, so next time expect to see everything that happens.

The second, a foray into creative non-fiction, was written in the challenging 2^nd person. It was running themed and autobiographical. Recounting the way my own marathon running developed over the course of several races. Using the style of Lorrie Moore’ How to become a Writer, I relived the training, highs and lows and ultimate success of my sub-4-hour marathon journey. It was a story filled with passion and emotion (for me) and tears were shed when editing it.

Then the third and final “continuously assessed” piece was another story: A tragic tale of workhouse life and a brother and sister wrongly accused of a crime.

This Victorian workhouse setting was deliberately chosen – my final piece (the “final exam” if you like) was to be set in a similar, but futuristic equivalent. It was narrated by the two protagonists and swapped point-of-view between them. And if there was one criticism that stayed with me, it was that it didn’t need to. Maybe the lesson there was to write for the reader rather than how you want the story to be told (a lesson that I must admit is a controversial one in my psyche).

Then the final piece, the so-called EMA, came to life. A longer story about a girl in a futuristic corporation-run orphanage/workhouse. A dystopian take on the direction of society. It was deliberate in its setting and theme as looking ahead, I had a plan to work on another piece of dystopia for the larger end of year 2 piece. Hence, The Unwanted was something of a practice run.

In an attempt to ape the style of the greats like Atwood and Orwell I told my tale but crashed into the “exposition” challenge slightly that I’ve realised is my writer’s Achilles heel.

The year, however, was a success, a good mark, a sense of accomplishment, and onto the next challenge – year 2.

The second year

The first thing to stress is that while year 1 was 9 months long – September to May – year 2 was a full 12 months. There were more assignments, and the final piece (akin to a dissertation) was a sizeable 15,000 words. Writing and editing a piece of that size was going to be (and was) a big ask.

In fact, the whole year was a big ask.

Home working had been replaced with three days in the office, in the October my Dad sadly died so I had his illness and then his funeral and then his estate to sort out. Then as gthe course drew to int conclusion I was to be moving house. It was, it’s fair to say, an emotional time – the sort of time when an uptick in workload takes some coping with.

The assignments started well, the highest mark so far was for the first one – a first-person story in diary-format of a small boy who is bullied at school, so under the cover of lockdown Zoom-based education he changes school by himself. His mother, the villain of this particular piece, then finds out near the end. She was a hateful woman – don’t have any sympathy for her. Unless you happen to read the short follow up piece I composed for an activity; that was very dark.

The second story a was thriller set in an airport departure lounge, in the city where a marathon was being run, and in a hotel. It was a nice idea but did suffer from being a touch implausible. While the plot didn’t have holes as such, there were some thinner bits on closer inspection.

Then came the non-fiction assignment, about Margaret Atwood and her influence on my writing. If I made one mistake here it was that I focussed on her ability to create ideas and write across so many genres at a general level, rather than her writing style in particular. But influence works in different ways and comes in different forms. I’d stand by my assessment of how she influenced my writing. The dystopian future she paints in The Handmaids Tale and Oryx and Crake held particular relevance, given the year one speculative fiction “practice run” EMA and the plans I had for year 2’s longer piece.

It did mark the start of the path to the year 2 EMA, as this assignment also included a proposal for the EMA…

… and that’s where things got complicated.

The concept: “1985” – a sequel to 1984 – was one of my favourite ideas and had been gestating in my brain for some time, before the course in fact. But for a university submission, using the same world and characters would be seen as lacking originality, and to then get published (once complete) would encounter probably insurmountable copyright issues. Thus, on two fronts, the concept fell down hard – but after some panic, and then more reasoned thought, the idea morphed. It turned out to be a different story set further in the future, with a similar idea for plot but new characters and a new backdrop. Forum was born.

People say the movie Starwars is a western, but no one will accuse it of ripping off The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I followed a similar strategy.

So, dissertation proposal revamped and completely changed we reached the fourth assignment, and the last standalone one – another short story. Set in a fictional version of my Dementia-addled mum’s mind, narrated by someone in the same mental state, a tale of misunderstandings and confusion came to light. It held some emotional baggage for me.

The marking for this one I felt was harsh. I was there for most of the factual versions of the fictionalised events. Getting stuck in the porch wasn’t a more dramatic event to dwell on, the angst of committing a loved one to a care home was the hard part. But it’s OK, I wrote it the way I wanted to. It was a piece for me, not the reader. I think those with loved ones affected by dementia would get it.

The fifth assignment was ungraded – it was an appraisal of the start of the final dissertation. Unimportant from a mark point of view (in fact there was no mark), but the feedback and comments were vital and absolute gold dust to the success in the later assignment.

And then, in parallel with work having started on the dissertation, we had to write about our learnings and experiences on the course. How we’d grown, been educated, what influences and inspirations we had drawn leading up to that final EMA submission. As a journey, it had been a long and eventful one. I wrote about it, and once again, this came back OK.

The final act

The last 3-4 months were then dominated by writing 15,000 words of the start of the novel, Forum. I’d say writing it was probably the easy part. I got 15,000 words down in good time.

But editing – PHEW – my tutor group and I all read and re-read our own work, shared it with others who read it too and provided their comments, and the whole cycle went around and around ad infinitum (or almost).

I added, chopped, changed. At one point I added so much to the early sections that a whole chapter later on had to drop off the end. The stories we all wrote, gradually tightened up as they were polished. And then, in the last week of September in the middle of 3 crazy weeks at work and a week out from a marathon in Scotland, the deadline came and the submit button was pressed.

A silent prayer drifted up, and a huge feeling of gratitude for all the people that took the time to read and provide comments – I owe you all. The final draft was significantly better than the first. That much is certain.

It’s done.

OH GOD!

What’s next?

So yes, it’s over, in a way at least.

The marks don’t come back till December (when I will have to revisit this blog) so that’s a long wait and could make for a really nice Christmas. The work is over, but in another sense it has only just started.

Having written the start of Forum, I now have to write the rest. I handed in 15,000 words, I’ve got another 2,500 in the chapter I had to drop off the end, so I’m 100% finished on the course, but only 25% through the full novel.

I better get on with it. But I wanted to stop and write something else first.

You’re welcome.

It’s strange to be starting a new blog. It’s not the first, so perhaps I should get this one right and persevere with it, rather than adding a few posts, leaving it to lie fallow, and then forgetting about it.

The past ones have been a mixed bag:

• Runningpiers.blogspot.com – the first blog I set up, mainly to write about running, but then drifted into topics as diverse as porridge and pop music
• Medium – within which I uploaded my two “playing with my food” photo blogs, and a couple of other experiments
• Vocal – which is just a story I wrote, that was going to be a whole series, but not really a blog

I do also write blogs for work, and most of those are published. No byline though.

But then in the second year of my Creative Writing MA (with the Open University) the course materials suggested creating a blog, and none of those past ones seemed to be the right starting point. So here I am – and here you are!

I’m not sure how much attention this is going to get paid in the short term… I currently have:

So it might be sporadic at best.