To talk about the role of creative writing in “the marketplace” as we did on Tuesday, in the 2nd morning of the Worlds09 literary salon, may seem to be anathemic to most writers; but of course, the majority of writers in the room act, work, write within that marketplace, even if what they are being paid for is not the creative work themselves.

It struck me, catching the news later that day, how appropriate a couple of articles were to our discussion. The first was the news that British SF writer Alastair Reynolds had been given a £1 million advance for 10  novels in 10 years. The whole culture of “large advances” that had perhaps dominated literary discussions around the millennium, and still probably exercising the minds of neophyte writers hoping to make it big with their debut, had seemed a little gross in the current marketplace. Yet here was that most unfashionable of genres, SF – and its most unfashionable sub-genre, the space opera – able to command such a figure; and – as staggering in many ways – to insist of a writer a prolific output for his money.

The other news, far more depressing in many ways, was that a group of University of Chicago students were looking to rewrite the classics as 140 character Twitter texts. An idea not even having much originality about it (Arts Council England in the NW funded the-phone-book.com a few years ago for the writing of original SMS fiction), not to mention John Crace’s Digested Reads. Well done, Penguin for falling for that idea. Is this then the contemporary marketplace? Writer’s caught between appropriating new internet technologies as a gimmick, and working in a well-paid genre salt-mine for a decade like a tenured servant.  Luckily our discussion flew far and beyond these highly contemporary extremes.

Opening the conversation, Jon Cook reminded us of the previous days debate, where two positive reasons had been given for the studying creative writing in universities: to contribute to the quality of literarture; and as necessary for our emotional and cultural survival. He then  introduced Vesna Goldsworthy who had been asked to look at some particular questions, not just about writing “saleability” but how literature is affected by censorship. As a Serbian writer who had come to England in the early 90s, she had experience of a censorship that is still too common around the world.  Discussing how creative writing can operate in a “market” that may still have its gatekeepers, its orthodoxies and its barriers, she talked at length about three different types of censorship: when the censor is your enemy, when the censor is your friend, and when the censor is yourself.
The first of these, and one she’d encountered as a young writer and editor in Serbia,  is perhaps the easiest. For you are on the side of the angels, and so are your friends, and other writers, whilst the censor is the devil. It echoed Coetzee’s speech from last year, where he’d talked about how he’d latterly discovered how his writing had been received by the censorship board in apartheid South Africa. His surprise had been the names on that board, middle class friends and acquaintances.

Agonising over a particular phrase or sentence as editor, Vesna had been able to hide between the ambiguity of metaphor. What about when the censor is your friend? She talked about how censorship in the west most often impacts on those voices from the right, and it is these that are silenced, or at least not offered a platform – and by raising this as a concern, (how many writers or writers organisations offered support to David Irving for instance when he’d fallen foul of Germany’s holocaust denial laws), she was asking us to question our own politics as libertarians or as defenders of free speech.

The censoring of self is even more complex, as it implies a whole set of conditions under which you can and can’t speak out. These may be with regard to how you refer to your employer, or write what the market doesn’t have time for or want to hear. If writing is the art of choosing what to say, and how to say it, then isn’t it always possible that the writer self-censors, for reason’s of taste, comfort or something else?

The discussion covered a wide range of issues – bringing it back to the questions that had come up the day before around whether or not creative writing could be talk – after all, if a creative writing degree is about preparing a writer for the marketplace then some of that preparation may be about reducing difference and difficulty. I was struck that, even though Vesna felt herself underqualified to talk in depth about the internet and the impact of digital on writing, it is in this very area that there are some important questions to be answered. Whereas a young writer may once have written something in an obscure magazine; now everything is there at the touch of a button, on a Facebook page or an online blog. The distinction between “private” and “public” is one that has been a legitimate subject for writers for a long time – it’s there in Anais Nin’s diaries, or in Robert Lowell’s later poetry – yet the young no longer make the same distinctions as we do between the online and offline world.

Those discussions would have to wait till outside the salon. Correctly, we were brought back to remember the distinction between the real state censorship that could imprison a writer (such as Yemen’s Mansur Rajihs, who read at that evening’s reading, now an exile in Stavanger, having been imprisoned falsely for 15 yeras),  and the little compromises that are perhaps necessary to sustain a literary career in the liberal west.
Speaking more directly about the market place, Xu Xi spoke next, and talked about her observations with regards to Asian/Pacific origin writers. First, of the time that it took for books in Chinese to go from original into translation, and second, in the surprising statistic of the proportionally higher number of first time novelists to win the Booker from the east. With judges in the room who’d sat on panels for the Booker, Impac and Foreign Fiction Prize, the difficulty of any such generalisation was made clear – yet there still remained a sense that “something” might be going on; either a love of the exotic, or an expectation that certain nationalities were expected to have particular tropes in their work. Like the film industry or the music industry, the book industry isn’t immune to wanting copycat successes, whilst at the same time requiring something new, something original. Yet the international marketplace also has its own stereotypes, so that Chinese is perceived as bad, and the West as good in some of those novels published and lauded in the latter.

As the market changes – and the sense of change, of something systemic happening across the board, whether a direct or indirect result of digitial technologies, was there underneath much of our discussion – the contemporary creative writing course will surely reflect this. Yet, as Andrew Cowan pointed out, his students were less enthusiastic about the internet, wanting the imprimature of a physical book, and, rather than chasing the market, had as theiThere’s no doubt there are market-led trends in literature, but also, that by the time they filter down to the writers (books taking a while to write) they may have moved elsewhere.Writers at UEA, at least, perhaps perceiving the prestige of carrying on the university’s success, have a strong sense of literary ambition, yet a career in writing might well be only open to a few, even here.

If yesterday had concentrated on the role of creative writing within the university, today, how creative writing was perceived by the marketplace was seen equally as important. With students becoming writers becoming teachers the relationship between writer, market and institution is not an uncomplex one, and is always evolving. Sub-texts of this second day abounded. I was surprised to hear from Chris Bigsby how dramatic writing was so marginalised within the creative writing schools. He noted the lack of playwrights at the salon as an example. Yet Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller had benefitted from creative writing’s infrastructure. Perhaps the best latter day models – writers’ rooms for American cable TV comedies and dramas – were too collaborative; yet clearly some of our best writers are finding their feet in writing dramatic work in what is a competitive, but potentially lucrative market. As Chris Gribble mentioned, in collaboration with the BBC writers’ room, Writers’ Centre Norwich will be running such workshops – and yet the potential scriptwriters often go nowhere near an English Literature or a creative writing department. I guess coming from the small literary economy that is Manchester I was surprised, as many of the writers I know have kept going through a mix of writing for the stage, radio and page and my own literary heroes include playwrights like Pinter and Churchill every bit as much as poets and novelists.

The day’s final point, and one that was strong enough to be repeated on Wednesday as the week was summed up, was from Jon Cook, a reminder that as all economists know, “market’s aren’t everything, that they fail. That “market failure” is another challenge for the creative writing course, to prepare students for the market, but not just for the market. Having such a diverse range of writers from so many different countries reminded us that just as censorship was different depending on where you were writing, so were the markets you were operating in.

Digital technology was skirted around, underpinning our discussion, but not central to it. The digital world – through Kindles and Sony Readers, to the use of the web to show work – was changing how work was displayed and read; but it was felt that it had not yet led to the creation of new literary forms. We may well have to wait some time for that. Yet, in Japan, mobile-phone based text novels – teen soap operas though they may be – are all the rage.

I may pass on the Twitter version of the classics, however.