Teaching & coaching
Teaching creative writing
A timetable, a cohort, and the strange pleasure of being paid to talk about sentences.
Universities, adult-education colleges, and private schools of writing hire practising writers to teach. The work is preparation, marking, office hours, and the moral duty not to pretend that talent can be downloaded. It is also, for a large number of working writers, the closest thing they have to a salary. A book helps you get the job. The job then buys you time to write the next book.
- Typical pay
- Hourly rates in adult education; fractional or hourly contracts in universities (widely variable, often less glamorous than the job title). A salaried lectureship is a different life, with meetings.
- Ceiling
- Solid ceiling
- Speed
- First money in months
- Effort
- A job in itself
- Needs
- Needs a name
How it works
- 01
An institution hires you to design and/or deliver a module, a short course, or a visiting workshop series.
- 02
You teach, you mark, you attend the meetings you cannot escape.
- 03
You are paid on the institution's payroll or as a visiting freelance.
How to start
- 01
A publication record, and increasingly an MA or PhD in the subject, is how university doors open. I say this as someone who went back for the doctorate.
- 02
Adult education and independent writing schools care more about whether you can teach than about the letters after your name.
- 03
Offer a specific course — 'writing humour', 'the research-driven novel' — not 'creative writing, general'.
Watch out
- 01
Precarious hourly contracts can expand to eat the writing they were meant to fund.
- 02
You will be asked to do unpaid extra. Practice a polite no.
- 03
Teaching your own unpublished theories as gospel is how you create disciples, not writers.
I teach. I am also, at the time of writing, finishing a PhD in Creative Writing. I do not pretend that a classroom is the same as a study, but I have never found a better way to be paid for caring about how sentences work — except, occasionally, writing them.