What could I teach these sharp, wary, vigorous Creative Writers? Only the grammar they should have learned in fourth or fifth grade, only the professional trickery which shocked them with its insincerity. They were terribly sincere, even when they divined that there was money in this writing racket if only you cut out the artsy-shmartsy crap. By professional trickery I meant and mean the use of repetitive verbal tropes to fix a character in the reader’s mind, helped along by ocular tics and patches of alopecia (give the character the name Fox, since he has fox-mange); how to describe a seething party with everybody talking at once; how to convey a stormy sea by raiding an arbitrarily chosen page of a dictionary (stairwells of foam, waves rearing in stalagmites, precipitating in stalactites, staminiferous in their stalwart stallion-balled stalling angles). Or I could concentrate on opening techniques, with reference to The Good Soldier or Middlemarch. What I could not evade was the dogged listening to dull work in progress. Wow, that’s great, Janice…If these young people learned nothing else, they learned how heartbreaking the writing game was.
You've Had Your Time (1990)
Use the link below to visit the website of THE INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, an English-based organisation which 'encourages and supports public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.' It also operates an archive/performance space in his home town of Manchester.
http://www.anthonyburgess.org/
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