Yesterday evening I had my first Advanced Writing (Non-Fiction) Workshop session. I was rather nervous about it because I'd only ever taken one non-fiction module before (in the first year of my BA) and was, quite frankly, rather abysmal at it. It frightened me off the whole idea for a while. So what made me go for it in the MA? Well the other option was to do screenwriting. I did this for all three years of my BA and was even more shockingly awful at that. I think I actually got worse as time went on. In fact I know I did. I reworked a script from my second year for my third year and managed to drop from 65% to 57%. Needless to say I'm not terribly enthusiastic about trying it again.
So non-fiction it is - and I am happy to say that the first lesson exceeded my expectations. We look set to study lots of different styles, such as history, journalism, political writing, biography... and all with a focus not just on the creative but also on viewing writing as a profession. This is something I have often struggled with. Only in my wildest dreams do I imagine that I could actually make a living through writing novels and it will be nice to look at other ways of earning an income.
Hopefully both with this and Tuesday's Publishing Project module I should have something of a better idea about how the whole market works. Either that or I'll be so intimidated by the whole thing that I'll run away to a 9-5 office job, where I will wallow and rot in a puddle of boredom until my brains leak out of my ears. Lovely.
I was planning to happily report that the cursor is behaving itself today but it seems to have changed its mind and instead wishes to continue darting every which way around the screen.
Today's title is an example of how to quote Shakespeare badly.
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