Success stories

The cliché of the lonely writer is far from the truth for the many illustrious names who have drawn on the strength of others.

- BY GREG BRUCE

When Rachel Paris arrived for her first workshop in the University of Auckland's Master of Creative Writing (MCW) programme, she was well established in her day job: a senior lawyer and partner at Bell Gully, one of the country’s biggest law firms. She left the workshop an hour later flattened by the volley of criticism from her peers.

Paris, 48 and a Harvard University graduate, had volunteered to be the first of the cohort’s students to have their work critiqued. When she'd arrived for the class several minutes early, the only other student there, who was in her 20s, asked if she was the teacher. When the class started, the onslaught of feedback about Paris's writing made it clear she was not.

The teacher was, and remains, celebrated New Zealand novelist Paula Morris MNZM (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Whatua) who has modelled the one-year, full-time course on the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which she attended and which has been the launching pad for some of the world’s most lauded writers, including Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, John Irving and New Zealand's Eleanor Catton.

As at Iowa, Auckland workshop students aren't there to supply platitudes but to make each other better writers. As part of the course, it is expected that students will share and critique each other's work. Paris's fellow students had arrived at that first workshop having already read several thousand words of the novel she was writing. They immediately began telling her what was wrong with it.