‘15 things a creative writing student should know’
This was an exercise set at the very end of our Creative Essays module a couple of years ago which I caught sight of again recently. Kirsty and I loved the original list by the architect Michael Sorkin, titled ‘250 things an architect should know’, for its attentiveness to small, sensual details in a discipline that is, perhaps, more attuned to structural details or the monumental, and so Sorkin’s ability to surprise in lines such ‘the distance of a whisper’, ‘the feel of cool marble under bare feet’, ‘how to sit in a corner’, ‘what the brick really wants’, ‘how the crow flies’, as well as its references to particular theorists and thinkers—Jane Jacobs, Walter Benjami, Marshall Berman,Lewis Mumford, Patrick Geddes amongst others—is refreshing. The unexpected and surreal (in terms of the discipline) such as ‘sentence structure’ or ‘the need for freaks’ also features on the list and defamiliarises. With those qualities in mind, we asked the students to read Sorkin’s list and come up with their own variations. Here is a selection from that class…
Callum Gavin
The sheer terror of the blank page.
Once the terror subsides, the promise the blank page holds.
How to make the universal feel personal.
How to make the personal feel universal.
That an essay can (and should be) considered a 'trial' or 'attempt', as was intended by Michel de Montaigne, the first person recorded as describing his writing as an 'essay'.
How to abandon a line or an idea if it isn't working...
even if it's really, really good.
How to discover yourself in the words, rather than hide in them.
Not to shy away from ideas that are weird, uncomfortable, ambiguous, or scary
except when you should.
How to acknowledge the writing process within the writing, and the power of an interruption.
How to write the self without being self-indulgent.
The desire to tear up a piece of paper or throw your laptop through a window.
How to let go of ego (or try at least).
Mirrors and windows.
Ella Ferguson
Something about pre-industrial Literature.
There is always something underneath.
Sometimes silence is loud enough.
How many rooms are in your house.
How to take criticism on something you thought was perfect.
It's not perfect.
A list of favourite songs.
Where those songs came from.
How much space there is in your head.
How much of that space are you willing to fill.
You will always fill more of that space than expected.
Colour is only there if light is.
What your writing is for.
Who your writing is for.
You 're not done.
Lara Luyts
The sound of pen on paper.
How to question anything and everything.
The meaning of your name
and all the different ways it can be said.
How to dissect a sentence, word by word.
How to dream
a ghost story.
What it feels like to have a cat curled up on your lap.
What it feels like to lie on cold tiles in the summer.
The lyrics to a song that makes you cry.
The layout of your local library.
The scent of old books.
When to speak.
When to let silence speak for itself.
How to write with honesty.
Katherine Stewart
How to read your writing.
How to write with your reading.
How to hack away at things you love.
How to engage the senses.
Some pieces must be read aloud
others seen.
The smell of a book.
new
old.
The texture of crumpled paper.
How to listen.
How to try new media
and make them work for you.
How to strip an idea to its core.
The location of a quiet coffee shop.
Teddy Rose
How words look on a page.
How words can change a page.
The page itself.
White space.
What the concept metaphor of a library is.
First thought, best thought
but edit ruthlessly.
Start with what you know
but do’t stay there.
Know your past.
Know yourself.
Forget yourself.
Remake yourself.
You can write about anything, as long as you
keep asking questions.
8th August 2025
In that time, before the realities of the world impressed themselves upon me, I lived in a place imbued with magic—a place that felt utterly and entirely limitless. A place I thought to be eternal.
Within this familiar world existed a haven known intimately only by the few who chose to weave their lives into its tranquillity, a quality that I adored and came to resent in equal measure. When I invited friends to visit, that sleepy solitude served only as an embarrassment, a secret to be shuttered away. But now, as I return, having moved away, I appreciate all that I previously took for granted. Yet, no matter how I press myself in it—that place, that time, no longer exists, nor will it ever exist again.
*
I read Kirsty Gunn’s Flight Path: the descriptions that float throughout the story reawakened these memories. It exposed how the natural world had been something I took for granted. In my adolescence, its predictability seemed a snare—something tightening, suffocating—but now I realise my mistake and can see how the clouds and mountains and trees had rooted themselves so resolutely in me. How I craved their sanctity, their comfort, so much so that I could never imagine a world without them. For within them, there were promises. Promises of forever; of past and present knitted together in a vow of the future, where each sunset was a reminder of the sunrise to come.
But now, it is all gone.
*
It is odd…seeing a wild place become property. To watch as the magic of it is destroyed by the clinical formality of planning applications. Greens and blues, and browns condensed into the jet-black ink of pamphlets flooding through the door.
I knew then. Knew nothing we said or did would halt those crushing wheels of progress.
*
Flight Path’s unflinching approach to the exploitative disregard capitalism has for nature is suggested via the story’s vast mechanised imagery: energy-generating windmills juxtaposed against the delicacy and significance of the feather. It layers the dramatic scenery with the darkened mechanisation of human destruction. The juxtaposition of nature and machine jars—‘turbines like a forest of white columns’—bridging the gap between the two, and combining the natural and unnatural imagery in an eerie manner. It makes clear that our ideas of what the place should be are not its actuality. Cal’s grandmother serves as a stand-in for the reader having ‘grown up here, when there were still some villages and crofts left.’ The explicit removal of these aspects of place helps to destabilise our expectations of what the countryside is, contrasting memory and reality in such a way that urges this reader towards introspective reflection… the words on the page encouraging an interrogation of a world that has all but gone.
*
Change had seemed like an impossibility previously, but now, its tendrils strip the land bare. A carrion carcass to nourish the concrete and great, imposing frames of silvery metal. Man-made. Eternal, perhaps.
I remember…
The glasshouse heat of the car, ocean blue ahead in the windscreen, empty of clouds unmoored. The way back was longer than I had expected, our winding main road was closed, not shown even by satellite navigation. Though through the smudged glass, I could see, great behemoths lumbering over the pot-holed tarmac, crushing the place where I had learned to ride a bike and, the place just ahead where I had first fallen off... Plastic grew as weeds in wildflower verges, red squirrel carcasses rotting on an asphalt no man’s land and all my beautiful trees carted away in hearses…
All of it now gone.
*
In the story, Flight Path, nature is figured as something learned, something prescriptively taught within windowless classrooms, something found within the vellum binds of dusty books—to be pored over, coveted. The idea of the wild in Gunn’s story as something that exists only in memory hints at a dystopian world that seems to brush up against and meld with my own disillusionment…
This past now lives on in my memory. Every detail that my eyes once glossed over now a cherished thing. But they too will fade with time, blur around the edges and bleed out the colours—never dying, but still lost to time. Whether we realise it or not, these treasured memories will one day be all that remains of the world before.
*
Just as the feather arrives to announce the story of Flight Path, so too did it invite and encourage my own creative and critical response to its themes, asking me to reflect upon both a real and imagined place. Analysis of the story and exploring the memories evoked by it, also blurs the line between fiction and reality, and emphasises the power of literature to mediate upon real-world issues and also enter into the memory of my own life.
All too often, those who are most impacted by change cannot stop it. When I was a child, I could not do anything to save my home, the world of trees and hills. But hope should not be lost. For there are still places to love, havens to build your life around. Places that seem without limit, without time. Eternal.