My time on the MA Writing for Young people

Fleur Hitchcock regales us of her time during the MA Writing for Young People and what life after looks like.

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It must be at least twelve years since I began the MA Writing for Young People at Bath Spa.

I had the haziest notions of what would happen, how it would work, what it would achieve – and I was, I remember, deeply shocked to have to write an academic essay.  I was also unprepared. In the queue for enrolment, as we stood there clutching our various BA certificates, two people babbled happily about the manuscripts they were going to write, what books they’d read about children’s books and how they were going to approach the whole thing.

I had that feeling that you have on the first day of school when you realise that you have your brother’s PE kit and it’s not at all the same as the one you’re supposed to have.

I went home and drank gin. Probably.

Then we had our very first session. We’d been asked to write something from our hearts, from our own memories. We didn’t have to send it round, we just read it aloud. We were a small group, only seven, and I still remember exactly where I was sitting, and more or less exactly what I heard.  I was stunned. The writing was already so good, so heartfelt so compelling. Why did these people even need to do an MA?

I went home, moderately dispirited and my husband asked me how the day had gone. “I’m going to have to up my game,” I said, with no clue of how I was going to do it.

In explanation, I have to say that my tiny group contained later luminaries, Gill Lewis, Sarah Hammond, Sam Gayton, Che Golden and Giancarlo Gemin.

I dug deep for the second session and realised that I still fell well short of the standard, but the prospect of working alongside such amazing writers, guided by other amazing writers was very exciting and each week I revelled in the assignments. Drank every drop of the critiques, learned how to look at other people’s work, learned how to look at my own, listened to great writers talks, read books about writing and practised and practised until I too had learned to be a better writer.

Publication seemed a far off dream, but we put together an anthology of our manuscripts and thrust it out into the world along with a load of canapes on a hot and sweaty night in Foyles. Agents came, publishers came and I seem to remember leaving Sam Gayton on the platform in Reading with a load of surplus sandwiches and an inadequate railway ticket on our way home to Bath.

It was a bit of dream.

But our collective push got me an agent – the truly wonderful Kate Shaw. And, after a couple of false starts, some crushing rejections and compensatory bars of chocolate, she found publishers who liked my work. Not the MA manuscript, but another book, one that came after because, you see, once I began, I couldn’t stop.

Now, looking back, eighteen books published and another two out this year I know, 100% that the MAWYP was the catalyst, the firework that has powered my career and I know, the careers of many other children’s writers.

Without it, I’d still be sitting here wondering if publication would ever come my way.