Save Creative Writing in TAFE

Cemil Bilici
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/ #27 City of Culture

2010-11-24 12:32

Melbourne is a unique city of culture and artistic expression. The proposed changes to the Prof Writing courses in TAFE are undercutting our future writers of tomorrow. Who will write the next great Australian novel, play, and movie scripts? I implore those who read this to consider how the proposed changes will impact the character of our city. If you hamstring the education of writers our grass roots culture and artistic brilliance will be nothing but a fable we tell our kids.

 

Edit:

 

Dear David,

I know you're well meaning but I believe your central premise is incorrect. You're idea of a bandaid elective being an effective method of being effectively trained how to write is ridiculous. OK we have 5 people who want to write a novel, 5 people who want to write scripts, and 5 people who want to learn journalism.

Where do we find one individual human being who can competently teach all three of these topics to three different groups of students? Those are three completely different streams of writing with their own individual mindsets, craft, and lesson plans. Two thirds of the year isn't going to apply to two thirds of the class. So why turn up?

Secondly, assuming we've found this magical Great Teacher of Everything. How can anybody learn anything of value about the craft of writing short story, comedic writing, script writing or anything inside of a term and a bit, or if we divide the class into study groups with only part of the teachers attention? It takes 2 full years of short story 1 and 2 to learn how to write a decent short story. It takes 2 full years of scriptwriting and then screen writing to learn how to write a proper script. And it takes a lifetime to learn how to write a great novel.

Please, give these ideas a lot more consideration. As we learn in actually doing the proper amount of training in this course: criticism isn't a personal attack, writers give honest feedback to encourage each other to do better. Which takes longer than a split year to learn 5 hours a week.

Regards,

Cemil Bilici.