Special Edition: ASk Chats to UoC's Royal Literary Fund Fellow

Join the University of Chester's Academic Skills Team for The Skills Pod. In this episode we chat to the University's Royal Literary Fund Fellow, Caroline Corcoran, about her role and how students can access support from her. As a published writer, Caroline also shares some tips for academic writing and editing. This episode features Emma, Liz, and Alice. 

If you're a University of Chester student you can book an appointment with Caroline by emailing: Caroline.Corcoran@rlfeducation.org.uk. More information on Caroline and her books can be found here. 

Transcript

Emma: Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of the Skills Pod. I'm Emma, and I am one of the academic skills advisors at the University of Chester.

Liz: And I'm joined by my colleague. Hello, my name's Liz. I'm also one of the academic skills advisors at the university.

Alice: Hello, my name's Alice. I'm the head of academic skills.

Emma: And today we have a very special guest.

Caroline: Hello, I'm Caroline. I am the Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and I started here in September.

Emma: Hi Caroline, thanks for joining us. So today we're going to talk about the role of the Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and then we're going to also chat about some approaches to different academic skills. So Caroline, can you tell us a little bit about your role?

Caroline: Yeah, it's great to come on. First of all, thanks for having me, because one of my main jobs at the moment is seeding this out there and getting it more well known what I'm doing, because it's a bit of an odd concept, really, in that I am completely external to the university.

So I work for an organisation called the Royal Literary Fund. They put writers in universities all around the country, so professional writers who have had a certain amount of work published, a kind of pass a threshold of them being experienced enough to go out there and hopefully pass that wisdom on.

And how it works is that I have an office, I'm in Binks, and appointments are available two days a week for students to come and see me about their writing. And that can be absolutely any level. So it doesn't necessarily need to be that you're struggling or that you're finding things really difficult. It can be that you're just firing on all cylinders, but you want to do the absolute best writing you can. And there's this resource here, so I would love it if people came and used it.

Emma: Thank you, Caroline. And it would be really interesting. Obviously, I know you from outside of work, but it'd be really interesting to hear more about your background and what kind of writing you've done.

Caroline: Yeah, absolutely. So I've always been a writer. I was a journalist for a long time, so I worked mostly for women's magazines and pop culture, celebrity magazines and newspapers. And I'd always, always, always, like a lot of journalists, like a lot of writers, I'd always really wanted to write fiction.

And when I went freelance, which was quite a lot of years ago now, I just decided that I'd never have a better time, really, and I'd never have more flex to actually get on and do it. So I started writing fiction, and I had my first book published in 2019, and that was a psychological thriller called Through the Wall.

So since then, I've had three more published, and then I've got two more out next year. So yeah, they kind of, they come under this sort of psychological thriller umbrella, kind of domestic noir. Sometimes they get called, but probably the most relatable way to describe them is if you know Girl on the Train or Gone Girl. So it's that kind of get-in-your-head creepiness rather than guts and gore, really.

Liz: Oh, amazing. Can I jump in and ask you what you studied at university, if indeed you attended university?

Caroline: Absolutely. Yeah, so I did go to university. I went to the University of Sheffield, and I did English literature, perhaps unsurprisingly. And then I did a postgrad at City University in London, which I think has been changed to a Master's now, the course, but at the time it was a postgrad diploma in periodical journalism.

Liz: So can I ask you about your journalism career?

Caroline: Absolutely.

Liz: I'm just interested. I did some work for a magazine many, many years ago, and I was on the other side. I was a sub-editor, so I was changing things, cutting things down and that sort of thing. How much more do you have to write than potentially is going to appear in print? We find a lot of students overwrite and then they get quite precious about cutting their writing down, and that must be quite a difficult thing to see. I just wondered how you've developed your editorial stance in terms of knowing that what you write isn't what's going to appear in the end. There will be other people inputting onto it.

Caroline: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think hopefully I'm quite a good proposition as a fiction writer because I understand the editing process, and I think that can be quite hard for people that come at it from other professions to grasp how much of a process that is and how much you have to be all right with that.

Whereas, like you said, I'm very used to working with sub-editors. I've also been an editor for quite a few years myself in magazines as well, so I've very much seen it from the other side. And for me, writing and editing are quite indistinguishable. When people talk about, "Oh, I'm editing at the moment," I find that quite hard to grasp because I edit as I write. I obviously have more formal editing stages. I'm proofreading and editing my fifth book at the moment.

So there are points where it is consciously being edited, but it also goes hand in hand through the whole process to me. And I am finding it really interesting speaking to students about that being here, because I mean, it just goes across the board from the absolute most big household name fiction writers to the students I'm seeing, to journalists. Everybody overwrites and needs to pare it back to different degrees. But I'm a real advocate of cutting your word count down. Getting it as succinct and concise and tight as possible is a good exercise for absolutely any writer, I think.

Emma: And what are people's tips? You made a really good point, Caroline, that editing should always be part of the writing process, so it should be continual. But I just wondered if anybody had any tips to kind of help you get your editor on, if you like, think things that you can do or tell yourself or ask yourself in order to be able to make those cuts and pare those things down.

I mean, my thing is always, and this is always tricky to say to students with approaching deadlines, put it away. Leave it, even if it's for an hour or a couple of hours or a morning, ideally, a day or so, and then you come back to it just with a different kind of connection to it, a less personal connection, I think. And I always find I'm much more able to be brutal and make the kind of decisions that a good editor needs to make if I haven't seen the writing for a while.

Liz: No, I absolutely agree with that. I think sometimes you just, you literally can't, you just can't see it anymore, can you? You're just staring at it. And one of mine, one of my favourites, which I must have said probably to everyone who's walked into this room since I got here, is to read it out loud.

And I know it sounds, it can feel so unnatural and so awkward and so weird, but you hear it. I think it's really similar to that leaving a gap because you just hear it. In the same way you have fresh eyes with the gap, you then, you know, you've got fresh ears, I suppose. And that hearing, you know, when you've got a phrase that you've been repeating over and over, I think you will notice that in a way your eyes might have started to scan over it because you're so used to seeing it.

It's like I always find audiobooks really stick in my head because I read fewer of them than I do in paperback and hardback. And I think that's it. It's just using a different sense to edit and to read. And I think that's really, really helpful. And you hear, you know, when I made a student do it in a video call the other day, and he literally ran out of breath in the sentence. And I was like, you don't really need me to say what needs to happen here, do you? It's like punctuation. So just, I think that's a really, really useful way to do it as well.

Emma: Yeah, absolutely. Do you have specific types of students that you are starting to see? Are there particular disciplines that, you know, I would have thought maybe would be English literature, people in the arts and humanities that maybe come to see you most frequently? Is that what you've found, or is it from across all the disciplines?

Caroline: No, that's what I was expecting, and I know I'm talking to people who are doing this role at other universities. I think some other universities that's been the case, but I don't think I've seen an English student yet. I have got some booked in. But here it's been really varied, which I've been really pleased about.

I think especially because in September I saw a lot of PhD students because I think they started, hit the ground running. But the subject matter has been really varied, and actually I'm really pleased with that because I think for starters there are often people who need possibly, writing might not come as naturally to them as it might to an English student or a humanities student.

And secondly, I think there's something I can bring from not really understanding the topic. You know, a lot of them talk about putting it into layman's terms and finding this sweet spot with academic language, but making it understandable. And so often if I don't know the subject matter, I can kind of go, "I don't know what this means, tell me what this means." And we can really boil it down in a way that obviously with English essays, I'm much more likely to understand the content.

So yeah, I've been really pleased, and not least because it keeps it interesting for me as well, because I'm learning all kinds about all sorts of topics.

Liz: I think we all feel the same way. We know a lot of stuff now, different disciplines.

Caroline: Yeah, especially with the PhDs and the theses, they're obviously such experts in these topics, so I don't really get to read the whole thing, but I'll read a fairly big chunk, and yeah, come away feeling like I've learned something, which is brilliant.

Alice: That's really interesting. I'm fairly new to the institution as well, and that's something that's really struck me to spend a lot of time with, you know, well, nursing students are a good example. And they are just so aware that writing well and presenting well and designing ways to deliver information to a non-expert audience. And everybody in our team, it's one of the things we always start our emails or our conversations with students with, "We're not subject experts, we're looking at the mechanics of your writing."

Yeah, so just that they have this real appreciation for improving their writing skills and a real understanding of how far that will get them in their future roles. It's really, yeah, it's really exciting.

Emma: It's great. Well, I think when me and Emma put our heads together last week, we just realised how much crossover there was, and it's great that there are these two resources there for people who want it and who want to push their writing like that, isn't it? It's brilliant.

Liz: How do your appointments work? Are they similar to ours in that ours are typically half an hour or so?

Caroline: So the RLF appointments are 50 minutes. You have to email me. I'm sure we can put the email address on here or somehow some clever techy way. And so they email me the first time, and I send quite a long email in the first instance with some information, various bits and pieces, and then a link for how they can book to see me. And then after they see me once, they can just book through that link, and it's really, really simple. But yeah, it does need to be by appointment.

And yeah, then they just pop along to Binks. And yeah, so we get a good chunk of time there with the 50 minutes, I think enough time. Usually students have sent me some work ahead. I don't know, is that how it works with you as well?

Liz: Not always, but I do, yeah.

Caroline: Because then it's really, I've found that really helpful, and then I've got a bit of a head start, so we're not playing catch up when they arrive, and we can hit the ground running when they come in, which has been great.

Emma: So we've already spoken about editing and that's something that comes up and making work more concise. Are there any other common things that you're seeing come up in work that you're reading and giving feedback on?

Caroline: Yeah, it's really interesting how much the same things come up. I don't know if you find that as well. So I definitely find this kind of, and I can remember doing it myself as a student, I really can, this kind of trying to write very academically, you know, a lot of "thus".

Liz: The swallowing the thesaurus thing.

Caroline: Swallowing the thesaurus. You know, saying exactly your quote earlier on, Liz, saying in 25 words what you could say in eight, and that you're trying to persuade them that that's not great and that actually it would sound so much better if it was simpler and clear. So that's happening a lot.

I think repetition, not just the phrases like that, but of the same word choice or the same sentence structure. So really trying to get them to step back and how could I say this differently? How can I rephrase this?

Emma: Yeah, the thesaurus thing that you just said about, you can definitely, it's so clear, isn't it, when you can tell that someone's done that, and you're going, "No, just step back, strip it back."

Caroline: So they're the things that are coming up most often, I would say. They're the things that I do find, and yeah, just the sentences repeating and just really getting that down to which parts of this sentence are the important part, which parts are serving you and which parts are just extraneous and unnecessary.

Alice: That's the thing with academic writing, isn't it, that a lot of people think it has to be convoluted and flowery and difficult to follow because that's what makes it academic, but actually the crux of academic writing is that you are communicating very complex ideas in a simplistic way so that your reader can follow. And I always think that's a sign of a good writing style is if I can have no understanding of the topic, but I can grasp what you're saying.

Liz: It's interesting what you were saying as well about that kind of, it can be a real revelation, can't it, when someone else reads your work of those grooves you get into in terms of ways you express things, ways you construct sentences. And I've found in the past as well that repetition of words or particular wordings is often a really good way for me to diagnose the ideas and concepts that I'm not confident about. And in fact, when my writing gets more and more wordy, when I'm aware that I'm just kind of throwing words at the page, what that always means is, "Okay, stop, this is something you haven't figured out yet. Go away, decide what you think about it, and then come back and express it." So it can be a kind of diagnostic process as well, editing as well, flagging up to yourself by your use of language, what it is that you're not confident in explaining yet.

Emma: I think it's important as well that all writing is practiced, so that, you know, your first draft, I always say to students, your first draft is messy, it's chaotic, because if you think too much, well, obviously you think about your topic and what the evidence you're including and the criticality and stuff like that. But if you stop thinking too much about word choice or word count, you're going to stop yourself writing. You're going to get writer's block. So for me, the most important thing is getting that first draft down.

I can never remember who said it, but the common phrase from a writer, the famous phrase from a writer was, "I can fix a bad page, I can't fix a blank page." And that's what I kind of try and cling on to and I try and encourage students to lean into is the chaos of that first draft.

Liz: Definitely. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that because I think it gets more and more daunting as well. The longer you don't do it and the page is blank, the more and more blooming and daunting it starts to feel, doesn't it? If you've got something to work with, you can get into it and you can, you know, go from there. But there's something to start with, isn't there?

Emma: Absolutely. We talk a lot, don't we, about the trials and the tribulations and the challenges of writing, but that feeling when you look at a page that is yours and you've got a bit of distance from it. And Caroline, it must be amazing being able to hold like multiple copies of your books and Emma in your hands, and thinking, "Yeah, I did that, I wrote that." That's just such a thrill, isn't it?

Caroline: It is such a thrill. I don't know about you, Emma, but is it kind of, does it go hand in hand with equal parts thrill and equal parts terror that it's going out into the world? And also my other big fear, once it's in its final form, is that I'm going to see something wrong. I'm going to see a typo and there's nothing I can do about that. So I will sort of approach it like a bomb when I see the final project. So yeah, equal parts. I don't know. What do you think, Emma?

Emma: Oh yeah, definitely. When I was doing my line edits through the final edits, I lost my mind over words. I started, my publisher had put all the comments, like her comments on, and I sent it back to her with more comments on than she had put on. Because I put replies to her comments, I'd added it, I'd gone even deeper. I'd just completely lost my mind over words. Because it's so terrifying that you can't change it.

Caroline: I'm doing edits at the moment, and I've got very, very clear notes from my editor that is, "This is for errors at this stage. This is not for rewrites," but you're like twitching because, you know, it's not an equation, is it? It's not, there's no right or wrong. So every time you see it, you see something. And that's what terrifies me about the final product.

I've never gone back and read one of my books in its proper book form because inevitably, even if I didn't see something wrong, I would see something wrong to me or something that I would like to change. And I think you could look at it 1000 times, and you probably do look at it 1000 times in the process of writing a book, but every time you'd find something that you want to change and you think could make it better.

Liz: And does that go for the... Oh, sorry, Emma.

Emma: I think that's the thing with the publishing process, isn't it? Because I know with Fragments of a Woman, it took a long time to get it published. So huge chunks of that novel had been written like, you know, eight years before. And as a writer, whenever you're writing, and this is the thing with academic writing, you're developing as a writer. So when you look back on work you wrote a few years ago, you inevitably feel really cringy. It's like, "I wouldn't do it like that now," and "I wouldn't say it like that now." So yeah, it's a bit of a weird thing when it's finally in print and you can't change it at all.

Caroline: Yeah, very, very weird. I'm not supposed to do a Taylor Swift and do a new version, like 2024 version.

Emma: Fragments of a Woman 2024. So is there anything else that we think would be useful or something that we could talk about to wrap up?

Caroline: I suppose from my side, I need to say that pretty much everyone I've seen so far has come with their work at a fairly late stage, and we've been, you know, looking at how we can rewrite it. But I am also very open to seeing students at a much earlier stage who are planning, who want to look at, you know, understanding their title and picking that apart or the structure in their argument. And it's a bit anything goes, really, this service, so there's no kind of right or wrong points to see me at. So that very much works too. I know before there is any writing to show me, hopefully it can still be of different use. But that's all from me, I think.

Alice: I was thinking we could wrap up by, because it's kind of like this fiction theme, we could talk about books that we're reading now. So what are we reading right now?

Liz: Liz, tell us about your sheep book. I'm reading a book called The History of the World Through Sheep. That's probably not the actual title, but each chapter is... I maybe got the audible as well. That's bad. The whole premise is how we've changed as a civilization because of domesticating sheep.

And each chapter is on a different aspect of it. So there's a chapter on different types of sheep, a chapter on sheepdogs, a chapter on shepherds and shepherdesses, a chapter on the weaving process, a chapter on how it's impacted talking about weights and measures and all sorts of things.

So I'm quite a history buff, and it just appealed to me. There's a particular type of sheep, they've got little black faces, little black knees, and the rest of them are white, and they're just ridiculously cute. So when I saw the book, I was like, "I have to read this book," and it's been really interesting. It sounds completely weird and random, but it's actually quite entertaining.

Emma: Brilliant, that was not an answer I was expecting. It's always good to hear about a book that you have no idea about at all. Shall I go next?

Alice: Yeah.

Emma: So I went to an event a couple of months ago in West Kirby, through West Kirby Bookshop, with Janice Hallett. And I'd never read anything by her, shamefully, but I'd heard lots of people talk about it, and I just, I wasn't sure the, you know, she, I don't know if anyone knows, but she writes in, the word begins with E, in a kind of, you know, when everything's done with letters.

Liz: Letters.

Emma: And yeah, it's quite an old style, anyway, so she does it so it's all in emails. So yeah, so I just wasn't sure that style was for me, but I got one of her books and then I have now read all of them. So I'm on, I think, the last one of hers. And it is The Albert and Angels. That's what I'm reading at the moment. And this one is all in audio files. No, the other one was in audio files. This one is, this one is back to emails, but it's always like that. It's always in emails or audio files or different formats. It's been quite interesting.

Alice: I'm reading a book by someone called Rosemary Tonks. I don't know if you've heard of her. She was kind of writing through the 60s and, well, 50s, I think. She was a poet and a journalist and a novelist, I think six novels. And then, so the novel I'm reading is called The Way Out of Barclay Square, which is all about a kind of, it's just the sort of book I love, a sort of single female voice trying to make sense of the world in straightened circumstances. I love, you know, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor, I love those kinds of women.

And Tonks is just, I've only recently discovered her, but she had a fascinating kind of life and had this incredibly prolific writing career, but then just completely disappeared. And it turned out she had a series of problems. She had problems with her eyes, she had problems with her mental health. I think she'd asked for all of her work to be destroyed, and mercifully it wasn't. And I can't remember, I think it might be Vintage, is reissuing the novels one by one.

So it's just really surprising writing. And I think because she's a poet as well, there are just these odd phrases that sound these really kinds of intriguing notes. And you're thinking, "I've no idea what's happening, really." But in the other novels of hers I've read, I've no idea what's happening, but it doesn't seem to matter. Sometimes it doesn't matter if the writing is good enough, to say.

Liz: That sounds great.

Emma: Well, I've just finished reading Summer in Baden-Baden, which was incredibly stressful because the paragraphs were, the sentences were a paragraph long. And then some of the paragraphs were like eight or nine pages long. So that was quite... Is it by Emma? You could have maybe completely pronounced this wrong. It's Leonard Tiskin, I think.

Alice: Oh.

Emma: But it was, it was a good book, but it was incredibly stressful because I, I can't, there's something that feels really wrong about ending, finishing reading in the middle of a paragraph when you've not got a full stop. So it was a good read, and it was a short read, but it was a stressful read.

Liz: Somebody who likes to punctuate. You need something nice and calm now. I feel like it's that balance with books, isn't it? It's following it with the right book.

Alice: Yeah, that's the skill, isn't it? The alternating of different things to soothe yourselves in different ways.

Liz: Yeah. You need a comfort read to reset.

Alice: Yeah. Something you've read before. And that's why the pile of books by your bed has to be enormous, because you have to diagnose. You have to have the potential.

Liz: That's always my argument as well. You need choices, options.

Alice: 25 of them.

Liz: Yeah.

Alice: And books are fantastic wallpaper. That's my...

Liz: Absolutely.

Emma: Well, thank you so much for joining us on the skills pod, Caroline. It's lovely to chat to you.

Caroline: And you. Thank you so much for having me on.

Emma: And I'll pop your email so students can contact you and listen on as well, students, for details on how you can access support from the academic skills team.

Liz: Perfect.

Emma: Thank you everybody.

Liz: Thank you. Bye.

Emma: Hi there. If you're a University of Chester student, these are ways that you can access support from your academic skills team. You can access our Moodle pages via the green training and skills tile tab on Portal. On here you'll find a wealth of information discussing a variety of different skills such as referencing, planning, and writing.

You can send an extract of your work to our feedforward email assistance service by emailing ask@chester.ac.uk. You can send us 750 words or three paragraphs per assignment, and an academic skills advisor will get back to you within three working days with generic and developmental feedback on aspects such as criticality, paragraph structure, and referencing.

You can also use our one-to-one service. Here you will book on our system and meet with an advisor for around about 30 minutes, be that online or in person, depending on your preference, where the advisor will meet you and discuss any skills-related issues you have, and also talk through the comments that they made on your work to help you progress in your academic studies.

If you and a group of your course mates or friends are struggling with the same academic skill, then you can book an Ask Together session. And you can do this by emailing ask@chester.ac.uk with details of the skills that you want to talk about, how many people are in your group, and your availability. We can look to arrange a bespoke session with an academic skills advisor.

Of course, you've got the Skills Pod. And if there are any topics that you'd like us to cover or suggestions, or even if you'd like to get involved with the Skills Pod, drop us an email at ask@chester.ac.uk. Ask. Supporting your success.