Simon Holloway, University of Bolton, gave a very good
presentation about this at the final session of the
2013 Great Writing Conference, held at Imperial College, London.
I do hope he will publish this somewhere. His prose was elegant, and although
he read what he had written, he engaged with the audience and he was absolutely
spot on in what he said. This wasn’t really an academic paper but it deserves
to be out there. Yes, he was right: we whinge, we find it hard to squeeze in
our writing aka “research” and we’re very reasonably paid so we should be
beholden to our employers.
One particular part resonated very much with me: even if we
publish a book that threatens to do well we don’t have the time to get behind
it to promote it. That very day
Crooked Cat Publishing, who have published my
young adult paranormal romance
Spooking, were
having a lightning sale. My duty was with the conference. I couldn’t get behind
my book to promote it.
I disagreed slightly with some of the other delegates who
saw little relationship between marking students’ work and their own writing. I
actually see a very strong connection here. It makes me a more skilled editor
of my own work. I almost approach my marking with glee, even though the
pressure to turn it around in a relatively short time creates some tension. I
learn as much from this about editing as I do about writing when I read.
Yes, of course, some of the admin can seem onerous. This
week, for example, I have a meeting every day and that really fragments a chunk
of time that would have been useful for research. But it is what we’re paid to
do.
Yet we are so lucky to do this job. There are so many
aspects of it that we’d probably do even if we didn’t get paid. Hand on heart I
can say I never really stop working. Sleep and food hold body and soul
together. As I swim I think about my characters and swimming is keeping my body
healthy… so that I can write more and give the university more of what it pays
me to provide. My activities with a local choir are good for my mental and
physical health and help to make me a better writer and teacher.
What counts as work is extraordinary: visiting the
Ministryof Stories, chasing a 1940s’ character to a local primary school and telling
the students there that we need stories to fuel the time machine to take her
back … , evaluating responses to
Fibbin’Archie and conducting an Interim Examination of a Ph D
– all in a day’s work.
Maybe watching the news counts as relaxation? Hardly:
there’s always something there that could be made into a good story.
