Credit crunch prompts aspiring writers to turn professional

University College Falmouth's MA in Professional Writing is drawing many highly qualified people seeking a fresh direction, from airline staff to hedge-fund lawyers.

As the UK economy reels in the wake of corporate bankruptcies and massive job cuts, many professionals - or recently ex-professionals - are re-evaluating their lifestyles and goals. And while redundancy or the threat of it can be a source of intense anxiety, for some it is proving to be a catalyst for a new and more fulfilling career.

At University College Falmouth in Cornwall, the highly respected MA Professional Writing course has been receiving rising numbers of applications from well-qualified people rediscovering aspirations to write for a living, including accountants, company directors, an airline manager and a corporate lawyer working for hedge funds in the City of London. And with graduates from the course now working in many different writing and editorial roles, one of the main attractions of the MA is its realistic focus on ways in which writers can actually make money from their work.

Before taking up a place on the course in 2006, Judy Heminsley had set up and run a highly profitable cleaning business and worked as a business adviser. Judy drew on this experience to develop a book about working from home for the non-fiction unit of the course.

"Trying to break into a new industry as an outsider can be incredibly hard," Judy says, "but not only did the course refine my writing skills, it also gave me an in-depth knowledge of how publishing works and what publishers are looking for. I learnt how to put together a professional book proposal that won me a contract within months of completing the MA." Work from Home is published by How To Books in April.

Pete London, currently mid-way through the intensive one-year course, had worked for 25 years at industrial companies, most recently as a senior commercial manager. "I'd reached a point in my life where I needed a change," he explains. "I'd actually been writing for a few years, mainly about aviation, and started to wonder whether I could make a living that way. I came across the course, and its practical focus really appealed to me. I suppose it was a big leap to make from a secure and pretty well-paid job, but I know that if I hadn't made it I'd always have wondered ‘What if?'"

Pete feels the MA has stretched his creative imagination as a writer as well as showing him ways to put his work in front of a wider audience. He sees the variety of backgrounds and age groups from which his fellow students are drawn as a real plus: "It's a rich mix of experience that people bring to the course, and that adds a lot to the critiquing of each other's work that's an important part of the way we learn to improve our writing."

For Frea Lockley, who completed the MA in 2007, it was while taking time off from her job as a secondary school teacher that she began to think more about her long-standing ambition to become a writer.

Frea says: "When you're in a demanding job it's easy to get stuck in the day-to-day grind, to the extent that you forget what's really important to you. For me, taking the course was a way of gaining the confidence as a writer that I'd always lacked." While on the course Frea developed a feature film script, but after completing it she was commissioned to write a non-fiction book, Things to Do Now That You're a Mum, which was published last year by Octopus.

For others, skills learned on the course have proved to be useful in ways that they might not have expected. MA graduate, Tamsin Doyle, for instance, went on to be recruited as an IT project manager for a major bank. But Tamsin says that lessons learned at Falmouth have proved very relevant, particularly the time she spent editing the course's award-winning online magazine, bloc-online.com: "Conducting research, co-ordinating editorial team workload, working to deadlines and applying IT skills in online publishing have all proved to be useful transferable skills."

Christina Bunce, who heads the MA course, says: "Writing courses have come in for a lot of stick from critics who say they are a waste of time. But the evidence of our graduates suggests that there is a growing awareness in the business world - from banks to telecoms companies - that strong writing skills make for good business outcomes.

"Many organisations are now recognising that improving the ways they use writing to communicate, both to external audiences and internally, can give them a real competitive edge. There's also been some fascinating work done recently - by Stephen Denning and others - on the power of storytelling as a motivational tool within large organisations, particularly at periods of major change. We're convinced that writers who know how to develop compelling narratives will be in more demand than ever in these interesting times.

"From our students' point of view, the key to making a living from writing is flexibility. You may well have a wonderful literary novel in development, but it makes sense to make money from your craft in other ways until you get that killer advance: copywriting, public relations, writing for the web, or magazine and newspaper journalism. That said, we also encourage our students not to give up on the dream. And there's no better way to do that than show them examples of alumni like Gareth May, who recently managed to transform his MA project - a website called 21^st Century Boy - into a major book deal with Random House."

From this year, the MA Professional Writing is also being offered as a part-time, home-learning option over two years, making it easier for people to take the course while continuing to work or look after children. The course team - which is made up entirely of successful practising writers - is also running a one-week summer school in Falmouth in July, aimed at introducing people to the same range of writing skills as are developed in more depth on the MA (for fiction and non-fiction books, screenwriting, copywriting for business and features journalism).

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For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email: jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

NOTES TO EDITORS

1. For more details of the MA Professional Writing course (full-time and part-time) and information on how to apply, please see http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/professionalwriting.

2. The Introduction to Professional Writing Summer School runs from 6-10 July 2009. Details and an online application form are at http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/summerschool.

3. Judy Heminsley's website, Work form Home Wisdom, is at http://www.workfromhomewisdom.com/.

4. Pete London's blog is at http://petelondon.blogspot.com/.

5. Stephen Denning, former director of knowledge management at the World Bank, has a website on the power of storytelling in organisations at http://www.stevedenning.com/.

6. Gareth May's 21^st Century Boy website is at www.21st-century-boy.co.uk/. There is more information on Gareth's book deal at http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/151/news-from-university-college-falmouth-5/press-releases-47/ucfs-21st-century-boy-comes-of-age-2516.html.

7. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) is reporting increasing numbers of mature students seeking university places, with the 21-24 age group showing a rise of 12.9% and an increase of 12.6% from applicants over the age of 24. See http://www.ucas.ac.uk/website/news/media_releases/2009/2009-02-16.

8. University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name. It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing. The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2012 that will be unique to the South West.

The College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union, the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall County Council.

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