This excerpt is taken from: pp66-8 Vintage paperback edition (2003)
From the essay entitled ‘Elitism and English Literature, Speaking as a Writer’

A typical misconception when beginning as a writer, when you start creating literature, is that before you get down to the writing itself you have to rush away and do a course in English. You study for your ‘O’ grade and then you study for your ‘H’ grade and then the ‘A’ grade and then you start thinking maybe you should go to college or university and study for your ‘Degree in English Literature’ – because it seems somehow obvious that the more progress you make in the study of the subject the bigger the chance you’ll have of becoming an actual writer, a creator of stories or poems. Absolute rubbish. This lies at the heart of the fallacy that when you are studying English literature within the higher education system you are at the same time studying the ways in which literature is created. Some people even believe that a person who qualifies to teach English is therefore qualified to teach ‘creative writing’. They would be as well to believe the person was qualified to teach ‘creative sculpting’, ‘creative musical composition’, ‘creative movie-making’.

Maybe it is time to stop using the phrase ‘creative writing’. Maybe we should talk about ‘literary art’ or ‘literature’, about people creating literary art or people creating literature, instead of people ‘doing creative writing’. Everybody uses language creatively, even teachers of English. If we are forced to use the phrase ‘creative writing’ let us insist on adopting a fuller phrase, let us call it ‘creating creative writing’. But even that does not work properly, so just to avoid confusion we should stick with ‘literary art’ or ‘literature’; literary artists create literature. Generally speaking academics will prefer the phrase ‘creative writing’ in its current application because it allows literature to remain their property.

When a person writes a poem, play, short story or novel the person has become involved in the creation of literary art, the person is creating literature. The one way to write a poem, play, short story or novel is to sit down at the desk with your computer or your typewriter or with your pen and paper, and start writing. Literature is no different to other forms of art: when you want to create it and you have the tools and the materials then you just get to work, you begin. The writing comes first, not the theory. When people are involved in creating literature they are involved in a practice, they are engaged in an activity; in other words they have to be doing something as opposed to talking about doing something, or listening, reading, thinking about doing something. The vast majority of those who have studied literature at an advanced level, including English teachers, university lecturers and professors, have never created one piece of literary art in their entire lives. Of course a few have. But there again, so have a few doctors and lorry drivers; painters and construction workers; shop assistants and builders’ labourers; people who are on the broo, people forced to be housebound while having to raise their families. Anyone who is able to read and write has the capacity to create a poem or story. And by practising and paying attention to the work they are doing it cannot help but improve. Everything else is secondary.

Of course it is difficult to make the start and it is difficult to continue having faith in what you do, in the face of what often seems to be straightforward hostility. Writers have to develop the habit of relying on themselves. It is as if there is a massive KEEP OUT sign hoisted above every area of literature. This is an effect of the hopeless elitism referred to earlier. But there are other reasons. The very idea of literary art as something alive and lurking within reach of ordinary women and men is not necessarily the sort of idea those who control the power in society will welcome with open arms. Maybe it is naïve to expect otherwise. Good literature is nothing when it is not being dangerous in some way or another and those in positions of power will always be suspicious of anything that might affect their security.

True literary art makes some folk uncomfortable. It can scare them. One method to cope with being scared is not to look, to turn away and then kid on whatever it is does not exist. Another method of coping is to get your tormentors to stop what it is they are doing. In some countries writers find their work is no longer being published or produced. Writers in other countries can get dumped into prison or banished into exile. Occasionally writers disappear suddenly and are never heard of again. In this country writers are suppressed and censored. It takes different forms. Censors can cut out words and lines from poems, stories, plays or films. They often ask the writers concerned to substitute other words and lines. Sometimes they just substitute words and lines they have invented by themselves. The censors may search through a writer’s collection of stories and poems and take out ones that offend them; the censors will emphasise the ones that do not offend them. This is a method of silencing criticism because it makes it seem as if they are dealing fairly with the writers they have just finished censoring.

In this collection of essays James Kelman discusses a diverse range of isssues literary, artistic, political and philosophical – from the asbestos scandal and destruction of the steel industry in Scotland to Chomsky’s role in 20th-century thinking, racism in Britain, and an absorbing essay on Franz Kafka.