You imagine a creative writing degree teaches you how to become a writer. It doesn’t. What it really does is strip you down, hand you a mirror, and tell you to stop lying on the page. I learned that in the first fortnight and kept learning it every week after. Nobody warns you about any of this. So here it is, straight.
1. You won’t graduate with a book. You’ll graduate with questions
People outside believe you spend tthree or four years finishing a novel. Most of the time you spend three years unlearning every voice that isn’t yours. You leave hungry and slightly confused which turns out to be the perfect state for a writer.
2. Your confidence will evaporate before anything gets better
There comes a moment when you realise your story isn’t genius. It’s ordinary. That moment feels like being dropped down an empty lift shaft. The climb back up is where the work starts and you come out sharper than you went in.
3. Feedback feels like being mugged until it doesn’t
The first workshop is chaos in the head. Ten strangers telling you the truth while pretending to be polite. Eventually you start craving it because you learn the difference between opinions and insight and you stop flinching every time someone breathes near your metaphor.
4. Talent matters less than turning up
Every class has a prodigy. They vanish. The ones who sit down and graft stick around. Writing turns into a job and that suits me.
5. You discover your writing is about your life even when you swear it isn’t
You think you’re inventing characters. Then someone points out that your villain talks exactly like your uncle after three pints. You pretend you knew that already.
6. Reading becomes homework and pleasure at the same time
You study novels like crime scenes. Fingerprints on every page. You learn how sentences work and then you stop noticing because it moves into your bloodstream.
7. You will write something terrible and hand it in anyway
Deadlines don’t care about inspiration. You submit, pray, and wait. Later you read it again and realise you survived.
8. Nobody tells you that publishing isn’t the goal
The real win is building stamina. Finishing drafts. Knowing why you’re writing. If you master that you can handle everything else.
9. Your family will have no idea what you do
They think you sit around waiting for a muse to tap you on the forehead. Meanwhile you are wrestling commas like they owe you money.
10. The degree doesn’t make you a writer. Writing does
You walk out with a student card and a sense of purpose. You keep going because you can’t stop. That’s the truth nobody tells you at the open day.
A creative writing degree won’t unlock a secret door. It gives you time, pressure, and people who take writing as seriously as you do. That turns out to be enough.
YOU CAN FEEL THE HISTORY OF WRITING
Bloomsbury is London’s literary heartbeat, where rules were meant to be broken and ideas tested. In the early 20th century, the Bloomsbury Group—Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey—turned drawing rooms into laboratories for art, politics, and scandal. Woolf’s experimental novels, Forster’s sharp social critiques, Strachey’s irreverent biographies—they weren’t just writing, they were challenges to society.
Hogarth Press, run by Woolf and her husband Leonard, made Bloomsbury a hub for publishing the daring and unconventional. Cafés, libraries, and garden squares buzzed with debates, affairs, and creativity that refused to stay polite. Even today, wandering its streets, you can feel the ghosts of typewriters and whispered revolutions. Bloomsbury isn’t just a place—it’s a statement: literature is alive, messy, and unafraid.