romancing the fox

advice for creative writing students

Throughout my PhD, I often found myself thinking about a dream Ted Hughes had about a fox. The story goes that Hughes was struggling through an essay on Coleridge one night whilst studying literature at Cambridge. Eventually, he fell asleep, essay left unfinished on his desk. In his dream, a burnt, human-sized fox walked into his dorm on two legs and stood over his desk. Pointing to the essay, he said: ‘stop this—you’re destroying us.’

Hughes, who used foxes as a symbol of poetic inspiration and imagination, read the dream as a warning about the impact of formal study on creative practice. As a result of his vision, he switched from studying literature to anthropology.

I loved my Creative Writing PhD and was fortunate to be funded for it, but there were times when the fox’s accusation haunted me. Was I destroying my relationship with writing? Proposals, overanalysis, progress reviews, deadlines, writing endless summaries, tying everything back to research questions, and that nagging sense that you should always be pouring something out of yourself—it’s enough to exhaust anyone’s fox. And yet, if you’re a writer with the opportunity to study literature or creative writing, I still believe you should.

But how do you keep the fox alive? Looking back, I can see that a few practices saved mine. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Romanticise writing. For me, this means getting back to a physical notebook. Groan. I know, it’s creative writing 101. But for a reason. Don’t just write in it. Collect things: observations, leaves, fragments of overheard conversation, photos, bus tickets, terrible drawings of bookshops in new cities. Half of writing, maybe more, is experiencing, noticing, taking note. Let yourself out into the world. When my fox is waning, I can come back to my creative journal and remember what I love about writing. Much of writing is sitting at a desk with a white-grey word doc open. But returning to the physicality of putting pen to paper, and to the experiential component of writing, that’s when the magic is restored. Sometimes, a little romanticisation is necessary.

2. A radical re-approach. When you’re sick of the sight of your writing, ask yourself: if I had the opportunity to approach this in a radically different way, what would I do? When I was halfway through my PhD, my supervisor asked me to scrap the thirty-odd poems I had already written and start again. This could have been traumatic—okay, it was, for like a month—but it gave me a chance to shed the dead weight and use everything I had learned to start afresh. To create new poems, I massacred essays, interview transcripts, and diary entries. I circled words I liked in obscure theoretical texts and presented the fragments, feral and unfootnoted, as ‘poems’. This frantic period ended up being the most exciting and creatively fulfilling part of my whole PhD journey. This works on a smaller scale, too. Sometimes, the simple thought experiment of asking yourself how this narrative, dialogue, or stanza could be executed completely differently is enough to release a creative block. As the late great Christina Grimmie once said, ‘when you think you’re stuck, just go another way.’

3. Practice being bad. I’m not sure I know any writers who are not also perfectionists, and academia can ramp up perfectionism tenfold. If your need to make everything flawless from the beginning is keeping you from writing, try being bad at something else that matters less to you. Take up knitting. Try candle-making. Practicing a craft you’ll be rubbish at to start is great for neuroplasticity, and it makes you more resilient with the tasks that actually do matter. It reminds us that our writing, too, is a practice. Personally, I like to make watercolour paintings of pretty places I’ve travelled, which I then try to Mary-Poppins my way into by jumping up and down on them. But you’ll find your thing.

In the final year of my undergraduate, a writer I admired told me that I shouldn’t bother doing an MA in creative writing. If I wanted to be a poet, I should just go and be one. I understand this perspective. Unless you want to be an academic, further study might seem like a waste of time and money. And yes, whether you can get funding or not matters. What you want to do afterwards also matters. But I also know people who funded themselves and struggled and don’t regret a thing. Welcome to being a writer: our creative fire keeps us warm when we can’t keep the heating on. Just kidding.

Had I listened to that writer, I would have missed out on years of developing my craft with guidance from brilliant writers, not to mention getting paid to do what I love.

So, risk the fox. Just remember it needs more than words to live. Romance it. Let it out into the world. Let it bring you limp scraps from the rubbish heap of your discarded ideas and praise it for them. It might be onto something.

May your post-poetry dreams be filled with foxes running free.