The Museum of Words by Georgia Blain

Author:Georgia Blain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO007000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2017-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

Georgia, Seven Mile Beach, NSW, 1997

When I started writing, it was a long time before I had anything published.

I submitted stories to anthologies and literary journals, and I entered competitions. Anne would tear out entry forms for me, and she would console me when I was rejected yet again.

I am not someone who usually persists in what is seemingly a fruitless endeavour, so it says something about my desire to write that I kept on trying. Perhaps I was also comforted by having read of other writers’ rejections. It seemed to be a rite of passage you had to go through.

And through it all I kept reading, learning by osmosis, not yet able to pick a book apart, unstitch it at the seams, but nonetheless gaining a sense of what I liked and didn’t like, trying to skirt around the danger of simply emulating a voice I admired.

I eventually decided to apply for a creative writing course at university. I submitted my best stories and dressed up my CV. I was working as a journalist at the time, first at a local paper, and later at a press agency. I wasn’t a good journalist — I was too shy and too polite, too eager to be liked to bowl up to someone and ask invasive questions. I also wasn’t particularly political. But I could write, always managing to shape a story from not much, and able to do it quickly. I photocopied some of my articles and attached them to my application as well.

Needless to say, I was rejected. Not once, but twice.

I’m not sure what I wanted from a creative writing class other than contact with other writers, both those more experienced than me and those that were on a par with me. I may have also wanted the chemistry of a class, the group enthusiasm that can be something more than the sum of its parts.

In terms of learning to become a better writer, I do feel you can teach the elements of writing, and skills to become more adept at navigating your way through a text, tricks to help you keep going when you feel all is hopeless. But there has to be something else, and maybe it is as simple as saying that a writer has to need to write — they have to have a fundamental urge to shape experience through language, to create art out of existence. But where does this need spring from? Your environment? Your genes? A combination of the two?

Most universities offer writing courses now — they’re relatively cheap to run and are popular with students, despite the fact the publishing industry is shrinking. And because of that shrinking industry, many writers have taught at one stage of their career.

Some years after those unsuccessful applications, I taught a short-story course and another one in narrative, at the university to which I’d originally applied.

I was there early on the first day (writers are notoriously punctual), and I was surprised at how nervous I was as my students filed in.

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