Why I'm Not a Writer

There is an essay in the Writers and Artists Yearbook 2012 (Bloomsbury) by Alison Baverstock called Is There a Book in You? It is a very thought provoking essay:

I graduated from Bath Spa University, where the English and Creative Writing staff are some of the best in the country. Spa's MA writing course has a reputation for producing a long list of published authors alumni.  So - budding writers flock to the West Country.  My classes were filled with very talented people, amazing writers with potential basically oozing out of them.

I went to a uni acclaimed for producing authors, I did a creative writing course, and I'm not an author. Why?

I went to university with my GREAT NOVEL unwritten.  I had no big idea to give, really. I already knew that that feeling I saw in my classmates, the great work that just needed to come out of them wasn't in me. I loved my Literature modules, carrying on where I left off A levels with MORE reading, and taught by some fantastic tutors. Creative Writing was my fun. My cathartic 6 hours off from reading (and everything else) to write.

Lecture 1 of my second year I had one of the most simultaneously depressing and inspiring lectures of my uni career. Talking to this tutor was like being hit over the head with your favourite book. You love it, but it hurts! He told us to basically forget the dream of making a living out of writing. That raised some hackles, I can tell you! He probably pushed one or two of the people in the room to really focus on their goals and prove him wrong. But I never wanted to be a writer, and what he did over the next two years was give us some excellent examples of alternative routes that would still keep us in contact with books. I now realise that that is all I've ever really wanted. 

That tutor and many others drilled a sense of hard work and the importance of reading into me.  I have never met a more well read man in my life. He ended up lending me three pivotal books as source material for my dissertation, that he just happened to have! He used to make us read our work out loud to the class so that we could hear how the writer intended it to sound. And he made us comment on people's work, out loud and to their faces.  If I didn't know it before, I knew it after every one of my creative writing seminars.

I'm not a writer because I am an editor.