I would like to suggest that you devote a small chunk of your weekend to fairy tales.

I do not mean sweet and magical stories with happy endings: most fairy tales do not have happy endings, they have brutally ironic endings where most of the characters end up maimed or dead.

On that note, I direct you to a few of my recent fairytale-inspired writings:

• Storytelling is a strange little Snow White story of role reversal. Read it at Seven Letter Words.
• Matryoshka is a queer Cinderella story without the happy ending. Listen to it at Red Room.
• Tiny Meat is a modern fable about getting what you want. Read it at Alice.

When you’ve done that, tell me your favourite fairy tale.

Surely I’m not the only person to see the undeniable connection between these two songs…

I hope the Black-Eyed Peas are paying Flight of the Conchords some royalties.

So maybe you’re a writer, and maybe you’ve been thinking: ‘Hey, my writing could be more intellectual/less intellectual/more commercial/less commercial if I got a degree in Creative Writing – and all the lit mags love those degree kids!’

As a recent Creative Writing MLitt graduate, I present to you my list of Nine Reasons Why A Creative Writing Degree Is Freaking Sweet.

1. I have some extra letters after my name. Obviously I don’t use actually sign things ‘Kirsty Logan, BA Hons, MLitt’, because I’m not a total wanker. But it’s nice to know I could.
2. After my undergrad degree I spent several years working crappy minimum-wage customer-service jobs and saving money. Every time I thought about the money, I thought about the painful existential angst I suffered from dealing with The General Population all day. Now I have spent all that money on tuition fees, so I need never be reminded again.
3. My girlfriend does not want to live outside the city, and I can’t afford to live in the city. Therefore we can’t live together, and I will never have to know how it feels to bicker over whose turn it is to buy toilet paper.
4. Being both A Writer and A Student (and A Waitress to pay for the first two) leaves no time for household chores, so I never have to pull hairs out of the shower drain.
5. My contact with other university writing programmes has resulted in the publication of much of my writing which would otherwise be in the shredder – for example, a series of haiku written by an automatic generator based on a letter I wrote to my tonsils before I had them removed.
6. Spending much of my time with other writing students has led me to write things like experimental haiku based on letters to my tonsils. I am convinced that if I were not an Mlitt student, I would never have written such things.
7. Attending dozens of Reading Parties, where I listened to other writers read stories about communing with Mother Bear or the journey of a sperm through the vaginal canal or the joys of hot beverages (”o cup of tea, how I love thee”), has given me enviable poker face skills.
8. The ‘I have to study’ excuse can be used to get out of most unwanted social and work commitments, but with a creative writing degree any fiction reading can be classed as university work. This is why I did not feel guilty about skipping my cousin’s graduation party to stay at home and read an X-Files novelisation.
9. Furthermore, anything that contains a narrative – or even words – can be useful to your development as a writer. This means never feeling guilty about spending the day watching The Ricki Lake Show, listening to nostalgic 90s rap, or reading alien abduction magazines. It’s all learning.

In conclusion: if you quite like the idea of being a shiftless, city-wandering, window-gazing, minimum-waged, library-lurking, takes-themselves-far-too-seriously, takes-nothing-seriously-except-a-bunch-of-words-on-a-page, pretentious dreaming overthinking waster of a writer, then fuck it. Do the degree.

Everyone I know has two job titles: the one they get paid to do, and the one they wish they got paid to do. I’m a waitress/writer. My girlfriend is a graphic designer/musician, and my brother is a lighting tech/filmmaker. They do the former to afford the equipment and studio time to do the latter, but as a writer I don’t need to pay for electronics or locations.

Writers don’t really need tools to create their art. A paper and pencil, a laptop, chalk and a pavement, a stick and an expanse of loose dirt; anything can be utilised to put words together. I’m sure it would be nice to write on thick sheets of handmade paper with a Mont Blanc pen engraved with your initials, but a ballpoint and a school jotter work just as well. There is one tool that all writers need. These necessary parts of the writing process – the initial drafts, the typing, the submitting – all cost time. I have to work my day job to pay for this time.

Time is a hard-won tool, but once a writer earns some time they can spend it when they please. Some writers are larks, arriving at their desks before dawn; some are owls and can only work when everyone else is in bed. Some prefer to write just after the lunch rush at their favourite coffee shop. Writers can work at midday or at midnight; at dawn or dusk or only between 3pm and 6pm. Time, once earned, is flexible. Not all creative individuals have this freedom to utilise time however they please. In the main, musicians and filmmakers must collaborate. It’s very difficult – if not impossible – to make a film or record an album entirely solo. Again, time is a tool that creative people cannot work without. We must wait for others to be ready; we must organize our own creative output around our collaborators’ families, day jobs, or other responsibilities. As a writer I rarely collaborate, and so I do not have to pay this time. All I need is a pen, a piece of paper, and a few spare minutes. I do not have to wait for other people to be ready, or for their equipment to be arranged, or for them to get just the right angle or light or tone. I can write as and when I please – excepting my own domestic and financial obligations. As I don’t have children, and share household chores and bills with my girlfriend, these obligations are minimal. All of the time I earn can be used as I choose.

None of this is trying to suggest that writers do not squander time. They frequently do, and I am certainly not exempt from this. If I wanted to hang a picture I would buy a hammer as a tool to help me; similarly when I want to write a novel I earn time. But I don’t wield time as effectively as I might wield a hammer. Every week I work as a waitress to earn enough to buy a little free
time for writing, and then I spend my hard-won Wednesday morning playing silly Facebook games and making unnecessarily complicated plans for lunch. I do not spend all of my precious minutes churning out beautiful, effortless prose and opening acceptance letters from London publishers. Although I work hard to earn time, I do not always take the best care of it. If I did have a Mont Blanc pen engraved with my initials then I’m sure I wouldn’t use it to dig loose hairs out of the drain; if I had thick sheets of handmade paper then I wouldn’t use it to mop up spills. But this is exactly what I’m doing with the only tool I have: time. Spending an hour on social networking websites is like letting decaying grass build up in the blade of my lawnmower.
What is the point in earning time only to waste it?

In writing this essay, I used several tricks to fool myself into feeling productive. I haven’t had my breakfast yet, which is a conscious attempt to feel super-productive and say to myself: ‘Look, you produce work before your day has even begun! Who needs meager foodstuffs when you have the sustenance of words? How wonderfully conscientious you are’. I also have a numb rear end, as I write at the wooden kitchen table and forgot to put a cushion on the chair. Getting up to fetch a cushion would be an admittance that my concentration has waned, so I must suffer the numbness until I have written my final paragraph. And so on.

It’s 9.30am on a Wednesday. My girlfriend is off designing corporate websites to pay for new guitar strings, and my brother is winding wires around his elbows to pay for camera hire. I spent the weekend making cappuccinos for strangers to pay for this time. Writing this essay isn’t as wasteful as playing FarmVille on Facebook, but it’s not improving that car-chase scene in my novel either. I’m going to get some cornflakes and a cushion, and then I am going to spend this time properly.

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This essay previously appeared on the PANK blog.