Creative Midlands Events

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Student Writers’ Toolkit… Coventry, March 2013 Posted: 26 Mar 2013 08:02 AM PDT By Jonathan Davidson Our first Student Writers' Toolkit turned out to be a great success. I shouldn't be surprised. Our larger version, The Writers' Toolkit, is always good and typically sells out, and this new low-cost Student version had many of the same characteristics. Essentially, it was a crash course in where a writing career might take one, assuming one did not career off and crash, and there are plenty of writing careers that have done just that. I won't waste time listing the sessions and who spoke because I'm more interested in what it means to so actively support emerging writers. Our rationale is simply that we should help create as perfect a market as possible for writers and part of that is to give many writers the chance to meet and talk to industry professionals to enable them to shape their writing careers as appropriately as possible, or to decide to do something else. If ours was an industry that treated all alike – that happily scoured the country from shore to shore to find writers worth investing in – then there would be no need to do this, but sadly it isn't. Coventry – where the Student Toolkit took place – and the West Midlands may only be 55 minutes away from London but this isn't a region that presents itself as being on the fast-track to the world of fiction or poetry or publishing generally. This is frustrating for us. Frustrating because there are wonderful writers in our region who should be read or heard by more people, and frustrating because any industry that demands so much personal involvement in the form of readers and audiences should really take more time to get to know more of those readers and more of those audiences, and even those who might write for them. I'm in danger of repeating a common complaint, that the world of traditional publishing has a few well worth paths from a few key locations but otherwise operates in isolation. And of course this is fatuous. It is a much more complicated industry working on many levels. But it is true that writers in some parts of the UK do feel themselves at a disadvantage from those in other parts. Or perhaps I'm not talking about place; perhaps I'm talking about class and the aspirations that go with it? Yes, I think I am. When the tide went out in manufacturing in the Midlands and other regions in the 1980s, literature and cultural activity did not automatically replace it as an industry. There's plenty of good stuff, no doubt about it, but more than a 13% of literary endeavour appears to be located in London and 13% is the relative size of London to the whole country. Anything we can do to encourage the writing industry to work in our regions and others is good. So although our Student Writers' Toolkit was only a small start, we hope and expect it to be the beginning of much else. Write. Connect. Onwards.

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