Back when I was in the second year of my university degree, which had a creative writing segment, a friend of mine on my course confessed that he was in "deep shit". He was due to hand in an assignment the following morning, a script for a short 25 minute theatre play, but he had managed to complete nothing. He'd started on numerous ideas which had tripped him over by the second or third page, then he'd torn them up, tried to begin again, but still got nowhere.
I, on the other hand, had been working on my script for months on end, and therefore, my friend felt, didn't have anything to worry about. "It's all right for you," he kept saying, "yours is bound to be good, you've put loads of work in... what the hell am I supposed to turn around in the space of an evening?"
I suggested a course of action to him. We would wander to the bus stop, sit there until the irregular and unreliable mini-bus service came to take him back home, and just have a very self-conscious, absurd conversation, observing random bits of behaviour, rubbish and tat as we went along. "Get on the bus, then type up what you remember of our conversation, exaggerate events slightly, make an artistic justification up for the script in your submission notes, and it will probably scrape a pass. It's better than nothing," I reckoned.
We did exactly that, and my friend stayed up all evening drinking Coke and strong coffee, and pulling together a script I think was called "The Number 17" (named after the bus he took home, naturally), editing and improving on bits and inserting Pinteresque pauses until he had something resembling an absurd piece of theatre.
You obviously know where this is headed next, so I'll spare you the long, shaggy dog story and just say it - my friend got given a 2.1 whereas I was given a third for my play. My effort was apparently over-long, over-written, and "without a decent conclusion", whereas his edit of a conversation we both had on a wet February night was "in places, fascinating, and with very naturalistic dialogue".
The way the grading system worked for creative writing at my university bachelor's course was reasonably simple. A first meant the piece of work could potentially find a place in the real world, outside the university walls, as a piece of accomplished, professional work. Anything downwards from that was effectively varying degrees of juvenilia and work in progress, so nobody was claiming that my friend had accidentally spat out a work of genius - just that it was a damn sight better than something I'd wasted months on.
For a few hours I was unsurprisingly very bitter about this result. It seemed unfair. How, when I'd put the hard yards in, had I almost failed my coursework assignment when someone doing a candle-lit rush-job could keep his overall term grade buoyant? It took me a few more months to get over the stinking grade, feeling that it was harsh beyond measure, but at the end of the year I looked again and I realised that it was a pile of shit after all. Rambling, waffly, filled to the brim with unrealistic dialogue and unlikely to hold an audience's attention for more than five minutes. I'd made the fundamental mistake of getting so droolingly carried away with the fun of creating a piece of work that I'd forgotten entirely about the audience along the way. My friend, on the other hand, had taken some unlikely raw material and sculpted it in a way that made a mundane chat seem sinister and interesting. Unlike me, he'd realised he needed to impress at least one person apart from himself at the end of the exercise.
Ours was a mixed block of university lecture rooms and halls, and we shared building spaces with people on teacher training courses and nursing degrees, and some of us lived in the halls alongside Business Studies, engineering and science students. Sometimes if you went to one of the stinking public toilets, you'd see graffiti above the toilet rolls saying "Arts Degrees - take one here". There were never any variations of this joke, and as such it became very dull very quickly, the toilet wall equivalent of a family comedy show that's never off UK Gold.
Sometimes, I worried that the other students had a point. They were spending long hours learning complex skills which had practical uses, whereas we were occasionally demonstrably winging it. And not just us, either - outside in the 'real world', as my older brother called it whenever he was ridiculing my left-wing politics, bands were knocking off songs in half-an-hour flat and having huge hits, and artists were employing assistants in their studios to do the hard graft for them.
For the most part, though, all of them had taken the long road of making many mistakes to get to that point, handing in or producing work nobody liked (but they loved), dealing with the criticism, and dusting off and starting again. We were all learning in different ways. And when they finally became so accomplished at what they were doing that they could occasionally produce great (or passable) work out of unlikely material really quickly, why resent them for it?
You should only get irritated at people who produce the same punchlines over and over, who would have us live in a world of Dad's Army repeats and reproductions of Van Gogh paintings. Sometimes the good stuff, the really surprising stuff, comes quickly, and it doesn't matter what the person who produced it was paid by the hour. Sometimes the best material for a play comes out of a conversation had with someone during a moment of minor crisis.
So if you just don't have much time in your life, pick up a pen and write to that tight deadline anyway, and hand it in, or at least put it to one side to see if it ferments into something bigger. You may be pleasantly surprised by the end results.
