I was a bit embarrassed to work out that 100 days had passed without me writing anything in this space. After all, if you’re not making your work available, are you even a writer at all?

It has to be said, though, that I have been busy since sharing my thoughts on the General Election result back on July 7. It’s just that I can’t share the project I’ve been working on, because it needs to be marked. I’ve mentioned in a few posts that I’ve been studying for an MA in Creative Writing and the End of Module Assessment (EMA) was due at the beginning of October. Having chosen to write Creative Non-Fiction (CNF), I had a very specific set of instructions to follow:

Choose one of the following three options:

  • a continuous section of no more than 15,000 words from a larger work of creative nonfiction
  • a complete piece of no more than 15,000 words of creative nonfiction
  • multiple complete pieces of creative nonfiction, each with a minimum length of 500 words, adding up to no more than 15,000 words in total.

Please explicitly state which option you have chosen.

The Master’s Journey

When I enrolled on the course, I always intended to focus on a larger project which could become a book. I had identified two potential subjects I was passionate about and would be happy to commit to. However, soon after the course started, I became concerned that neither project offered enough ‘creative’ elements.

One potential subject, the history of Prescot Cables Football Club, fell outside the definition of CNF, as taught at the beginning of the course because, in CNF “the presence of the author is important to the text”. While I was involved with Prescot Cables between 2016 and last summer, any authoritative history of it would not mention my role other than in passing.

Another potential project was centred around the long-defunct Liverpool Overhead Railway. A place writing project centred around the Railway was virtually impossible without taking ‘flights of fancy’; seven decades have passed since it was dismantled. While imagining an alternative Liverpool might have been fun, it is not ‘non-fiction’.

I became drawn to memoir, simply because it was the CNF genre I felt most comfortable writing. I have never held much interest in nature writing. I enjoy reading travel writing, but my circumstances would not have permitted the necessary immersion in the subject. I was concerned that if I attempted to be an essayist I would ‘run out of steam’. At the beginning of A802 I was still coming to terms with being diagnosed with an Autistic Spectrum Condition and felt that writing a memoir, particularly one that looked at my life afresh and took the diagnosis into account, would be a satisfying project.

You’ve probably guessed by now that I took the first option offered by the OU and submitted three chapters of the Work-in-Progress memoir that has been brought to live by my studies. Putting this together – and submitting it for assessment – has been harder than I thought.

One challenge for the memoirist is that, by immersing themselves in the past, the writer risks reawakening long-suppressed memories or relieving traumatic events. Indeed, that may be the point. My decision to write memoir was driven by a need to understand myself and a desire for some sort of catharsis and while there has been some progress in terms of the former goal, the latter remains some way away, presumably because the project remains a work in progress. I have dredged up recollections of embarrassing or traumatic events and attempted to channel the pain triggered by previously buried memories into my writing. All storytelling requires conflict to hold the reader’s interest, so it was important not to ‘shy away’ from the difficult moments, although initially I skirted around painful memories. The visceral and vivid writing of fellow students taught me that I needed to mine those traumas to drive the narrative.

My EMA comprised three chapters of what will eventually be a complete memoir. While I was working on my 15,000 words, our fourth child – a beautiful daughter – was born in traumatic circumstances. There are lots of things I want to write about, but being a Dad was my first priority over the summer, with the Assessment coming second. I stepped away from both Prescot Cables FC and the wider non-League community before the baby arrived which, after more than three decades of football being the special interest which most informed my identity, was a big decision (and is a subject for another day). Not having a new football season to distract me probably helped me get the EMA over the line, though and I’ve completed the course.

Reflections on studying an MA in Creative Writing

While I wait for the piece to be marked, I’ve been reflecting on my experience of postgraduate study. One question I’ve asked myself many times is ‘what the hell were you thinking?’. When the course began, in October 2022, I was working full-time on top of family and football commitments. The Master’s did tie in with my job, which was as a Website Copy Writer but the main reason I enrolled was to stretch myself. Doing an MA was actually my wife’s idea; she thought that I needed that kind of challenge. But if either of us had thought about it properly, I might not have enrolled.

Our son has complex needs and major challenges around sleep, which made completing assignments and relevant reading even harder than it might have been. On nights when he just couldn’t drop off, my Kindle proved invaluable. Over the two years I’ve read all the course material, thousands of words written by my fellow students and some 90 books from start to finish. Thirty of them were Kindle editions. There were also eleven audiobooks, heard during commutes to and from work but, after I left that role in September 2023, that method of reading fell by the wayside. I kept up with coursework via the OU app and website and the WhatsApp group for our Tutor Group was (and is) a tremendous source of support, humour and a safe space into which most of us have launched at least one rant.

My Tutor Group are one of two reasons I hung in there and got to the end of both modules (the other being my wife). At the start of the first year, eight random non-fiction writers were thrown together. We were drawn from all four nations of the United Kingdom, plus Kenya, thanks to an expatriate student. Oddly, there were more autistic writers (three, including myself) than male writers (just me). Two of our number didn’t progress to the second year of the module, but six of us (and our WhatsApp group) did. During Year One, we had lost our Scottish and Northern Irish students but the hardy half-dozen were joined by new students from both Caledonia and Ulster and the self-contained writing community the eight of us have built is a joy to be part of. We have stared down triumph and disaster together and helped each other survive both. When I fell ill in February 2023, my phone trilled with ‘get well’ messages and recommendations for books to read while I languished in hospital. Whenever one of other of us has got stuck with a formatting issue, or a pacing problem, it has been talked through on WhatsApp. That group chat was, and is, one of the best things about my phone.

Which probably makes the group the greatest gift our Tutor for Year One gave us, because creating it was her idea. Her advice to ‘read as widely as you can, especially in the genre you want to write’ was invaluable and is a big part of the reason I read so many books while studying for my MA. It is absolutely the reason why 39 out of the 90 were memoirs of one form or another (as is the book currently on my bedside table). Grateful as I am for these two contributions, I have to say that the value of our Tutor really became apparent in Part Two of the course. We were assigned a different educator for the second half of our studies and post-assessment feedback became much more detailed and was returned more quickly. Emails of encouragement landed in our inboxes more frequently. The second half – which carries all the weight in terms of whether a student passes or fails – was much tougher but I felt I got much more out of it and not just because I had more deadlines to hit. I learned so much from the Tutor’s feedback and from my fellow students.

Was it worth it?

There’s an argument that I’ll only truly know whether the reading and the endless drafting, redrafting and editing were worth it when I get the module results, which should be in December. Getting the letters after your name is the point, isn’t it?

Well, it’s a point of taking the course, but there are other benefits that go far beyond the obvious. There’s the fact that, regardless of whether I pass or not, the process through which I create work has been enhanced and altered forever. There’s the fact that I have a group of incredible new friends and even got to work with one at the University of Liverpool. I know that I’m a better writer than I was before the course and while I’m sad that I won’t be applying those skills in the role which helped inspire me to take the challenge on, I’m really glad I did it.

Postgraduate study isn’t for everyone, especially distance learning where everything’s online. You need a lot of discipline to keep logging in and working on assignments without face-to-face tutorials at which you can ask awkward questions. But if you find yourself in the kind of super-supportive group of students I did, even having to fight for precious study time can feel positive and even fun.

Now the final assessment has been submitted, I hope to make better use of this space to write about the things that matter to me. I also need to finish my memoir, but that isn’t something I will be putting out into the world until it’s absolutely ready.

Pass or fail, the last two years have been a tremendous experience. I’ve worked with a massively talented group of writers, for whom anything is possible. I’ve learned about myself and made myself vulnerable. I’ve learned so much.

It was totally worth it.