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Writing, Editing and Publishing Info Session video transcript

It is a pleasure to have you all here tonight. I would like to begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians on the land on which we gather today. I’d like to pay my respects to their Ella’s past and present, and extend that respect to any aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person here with us today, as always, was and always will be, aboriginal land.
And a big welcome as well to everyone at home who decided to stay inside and not come out in this wet weather. It’s lovely to have you here, I will let you know that your microphones have been muted as well as your screens, but if you do have any questions, you can just use the QA. Function at the bottom of your toolbar? And we will endeavor to answer these questions right at the end of the session during the Q. And A.
So here we are, everyone. Tonight at the showcase. We are going to be joined by some industry experts learning about the insights and different career opportunities available in writing, editing, and publishing, we are going to hear about some alumni success stories as well as discover exciting different project opportunities that we have here at UTS.
We’re gonna learn about different flexible program options and finding a way to balance that work life study a lifestyle. And we’re gonna get direct answers from our guest speakers that you will have for your questions tonight. So without further adieu, I would love to introduce our guests that we do have here tonight we are joined by Dr. Claire Corbett.
She is a distinguished writer, lecturer, and fiction editor, with a background in film and writing from UTS. Dr. Corbett has contributed to notable films and publications.
Her debut novel, When We Have Wings, received critical acclaim and accolades, while her second novel Watch Over Me, further solidified her literary prowess as a teacher here at UTS, in the Creative Writing program Claire is also a board member of Varuna, the National Writers House, and Dr. Corbett is dedicated to nurturing emerging talents. Claire, thank you for being here tonight.
We are also joined by Dr. Andrew Pippos, who is a lecturer in writing, editing, and publishing here at UTS. He is a renowned writer in fiction and narrative nonfiction. With his novel Luckies, shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. He holds a doctorate in creative arts from UTS, and has been a valuable educator in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs.
Andrew’s works have been featured in prominent publications, and he has been a speaker at major literary events, including the Sydney Writers Festival and the Adelaide Festival.
We also have Tom Langeshaw here tonight, who has been working across Australian trade publishing for more than a decade. He started his career at Penguin Random House in various editorial roles, and since 2021 he has been working with Sydney-based independent publishing house Pantera Press.
Tom is currently a publisher at Pantera, working across genres, including memoir, narrative nonfiction, personal development, and commercial and literary fiction. Hello, Tom! And finally, lucky, lucky last we have Hugh Mcgonagall, who is a lawyer by profession, and currently serves as the chief operating officer at Proto Axiom. In 2018, Hugh Mcgonagall, who is a lawyer by profession, and currently serves as the chief operating officer at Proto Axiom. In 2018, Hugh embarked on his journey in creative writing by pursuing a diploma in the field. Recognized for his talent, he was awarded a Varuna fellowship in 2022, and currently, Hugh is engaged in crafting a novel. Hello, Hugh!
Well, with our introductions over, I’d love to get the night started, and let’s hear from Tom Langshaw to begin. He has extensive experience in Australian trade publishing, and tonight he’s going to give us a bit of insight into the dynamic, giving some insight into the necessary skills and attributes that you will need to find success in these fields. So, Tom, if you’d like to come up.
Good evening, everyone. I thought I’d begin these remarks by casting my mind back to when I first entered the publishing industry way back in October 2013. This was a real moment of doom and gloom for the industry. So it was an interesting time to be a bright-eyed university student, hoping to carve out a career in my first job as an intern in the publicity department of Random House. I remember being struck by a bit of a contradiction at play.
The people working around me were passionate, dedicated, and smart, and they would do anything to promote the work of their authors. And yet, despite that optimism in the details of their work, the big picture of the industry seemed really tough. Going for a bit of context, the first half of the last decade seemed to be a uniquely imperiled moment for the Australian publishing industry. Self-publishing and ebooks seemed to threaten core business models. The Red Group retail chain, which owned Borders and Angus and Robertson, had just collapsed, and my colleagues were in the midst of a large corporate consolidation between the large behemoths, Penguin and Random House.
It was, as you can imagine, a time of great uncertainty, with many of my colleagues worried about the future of their job specifically, and about the industry generally. Given I was an unpaid entry-level intern, the smart thing for me to do might have been to make a quick exit and enter a more lucrative or sustainable industry. And yet what I remember most about those early days is the passion and dedication of my colleagues. They cared deeply about building relationships with authors, crafting the words on the page, and connecting books with audiences. So I made a conscious decision to dig my feet in and stick with this publishing thing and keep at it for as long as I could.
In the decades since I made that decision, I’ve seen firsthand the qualities that make people best suited to careers in publishing, and here are the 10 qualities in no particular order that will help set you up over the long term in an industry that, to be blunt, can be poorly paid, where success is hard-won, and where progress can often be frustratingly slow-moving.
Number one. It's cliche advice. But you need to read widely and deeply whether you want to become a writer, editor, or publisher. It's important to read across genres and think about why and for whom a book has been published.

Number two: become a sponge.
The most valuable industry knowledge I've picked up has been incidentally from colleagues. When I was an intern, and then an assistant. This often meant being a fly on the wall in meetings and learning by osmosis
Number 3. When you see the right opportunity, take it without hesitation. Among my current colleagues. Some entered the industry through editing literary magazines, others worked at Dimix as booksellers, others interned with writers, festivals. So no career pathways look alike.
Number 4 back yourself, taking up new opportunities often means combating feelings of imposter syndrome. So don't be afraid to say yes and learn as you go.
Most of the soft skills in this industry can be taught informally by mentors or even self-taught.
Number 5. This doesn't mean you need to always say yes. It's important to be discerning to. As you learn by trial and error. Figure out what you're best at, and then take a long view of what it takes to get there.
Number 6. This doesn't mean you can't be surprised by where your career takes. You don't tie yourself to one job or one company, your whole working life. It often pays to move through different workplaces to get ahead.
Number 7, learn to listen effectively surround yourself with people whose opinions you trust and respect, and find the right mentors.
Number 8. Communicate, communicate, communicate.
This is an industry that's founded on networks of mutual trust, support, and respect, all of which starts from being on the same page, so to speak.
Number 9 relationships are everything. We often think about writing and editing as solitary careers, but collaboration is at the heart of the publishing process, with authors, with colleagues, creators, booksellers, and readers alike.
Number 10. It's hard, but it can be worth it.
Writers and publishing workers do have notoriously bad pay, long working hours, and it's often difficult move to move through to mid career, level and beyond. But if you learn like a sponge, take up opportunities, listen and communicate. Well, then, you can put yourself in the best position to take what this industry has to offer.
And there is, despite my gloom and doom and gloom, introduction much to look forward to in the future. Working and publishing is a fundamentally optimistic act. Optimism about books, authors, ideas, and stories.
I know now that nothing there was nothing unique about that moment when I started working in publishing in late 2013, and thought there might not even be publishing jobs in a few years.
Over the past decade the industry has faced threats from the likes of Amazon. Further corporate consolidation, rise of audio books, covid inflation, cost of living pressures, the looming threat of AI, and in spite of it all there will always be cause for hope. I don't mean that in a naive way, either. The industry is far from perfect. But when I say I feel optimism, it's because there's good reason to believe the industry can find ways to be resilient and remake itself.
Which brings me to all of you. It's heartening to see so many of you who are considering a career in writing, editing, and publishing. There's always a new and latest existential threat to publishing, but there are always new opportunities as well. I have no doubt that as the next generation enters the industry, we'll keep finding reasons to find for optimism reasons to preserve what we know is worth fighting for and working towards. Thank you.
Thanks for Tom. Really inspiring way to start the night. If any of that resonated with you, then you are probably in the right place, but I think we should get into a bit more of the nitty gritty and the details of the course that you're interested in getting involved with. So we'd love to invite Claire and Andrew to come up and tell us a bit more about it.
Okay.
So what is graduate certificate in writing, editing, and publishing? Who was it for?
We will be getting into these details of the course soon. But a snapshot. You study 4 subjects, 2 are writing focused subjects. The third is an editing subject, and the fourth subject explores book production. So this course is ideal for people who want to take that step and devote more time to their writing to finally get serious about their writing to learn some narrative techniques that will help them with the project they might have in mind. Or you may want to develop your editing and publishing skills and change careers and enter the the publishing industry you may have a manuscript you've been working on might want to improve your sense of structure.
In short, this course is for people who want to publish their own work or publish the work of others.
Did you want to say anything about them. Well, I guess the main thing I would add to that is that many people who start off as writers or editors often end up going. Excuse me all the way around. So, for example, I would like to mention, like I am the fiction editor of Overland Literary Journal, which I would claim is Australia's most important literary journal, and I probably I probably publish edit and publish more short fiction than anyone else in Australia. But I started off, only being interested in working on my own writing. But writers are gatekeepers for other writers. They edit. Other writers work, they assess them, for grants.
You. You learn to give back to the industry. So whichever part of it you think you're interested in, you may well end up doing a number of things within it, and you need all of those skills.
So why study writing, editing, and publishing? Well, in this course, you're learning skills in writing and publishing, and no matter where you want to end up among those 3 coordinates. It helps to know about the other 2 practices. So as a writer, you need to understand the process of editing. For one thing, you need to revise your own work. Revision is how you make a piece of writing good.
And you need to know about publishing which can be an opaque industry at first, the more you know, as a writer about how the publishing world works, the better you can navigate that industry.
And for people who want to work in editorial, is it? Or as a publisher.
it's always a good idea to understand narrative strategies and traditions, an insight into writing craft will make you a better editor, agent, publisher. Everyone in publishing is ultimately in the same business, and that's the business of storytelling.

And why UTS well, you're learning in one of the oldest writing disciplines in Australian universities. So we're frequently updating our subjects. But we're also drawing on a long tradition of of writing at UTS, and our writing degrees have been successful. Every year there are 2 or 3 novels being published, or works of narrative nonfiction being published that, you know, have begun life in one of our subjects at UTS.
The degree is designed to be studied one year, part time. One year comprises 2 sessions at UTS, autumn and spring, so we call semesters sessions. At this University. There will be more detail on the individual subjects on a later slide, and Claire will speak to what each of those subjects offer students. But you'll take publishing workshop and creative nonfiction in spring.
Publishing workshop explores the book production process and creative nonfiction is a writing focused subject that takes students through the many forms of of nonfiction writing that are popular today. Most of these forms of nonfiction are are narrative driven.
In autumn. You study professional editing practice in which you're trained as an editor, and you also take narrative and creative practices. Another writing focused subject that delves into narrative techniques for good characterization, plot, and point of view, among other elements of storytelling, then.
But we also have a number of commonwealth supported places available, which means you pay lower course fees effectively. So please do apply for those commonwealth supported places.
So what can you expect from this course?
In the writing focused subjects you will learn from other writers effectively. Not just your tutor, but the authors you study as you unpack their craft and read as writers do, the exercises and assessments are designed to train students in essential strategies for dialogue, for example, managing narrative time, establishing, setting. driving, plot, the exercises and assessments will give you a writing portfolio. If you're not already building one.
And the publishing and editing subjects are designed with current professional practice in mind, including the juggling of many roles that publishing professionals often do. So. Publishing jobs, especially in editorial, require a wide range of skills, some of which you develop in courses such as this. One or these skills might already be part of your sensibility and some skills. As Tom mentioned, you continue to develop on the job.
Thanks, Andrew. I'll go into a little bit more detail about how these courses work together, and you know what they're aimed to achieve, because they all support and bolster each other.
And it doesn't matter whether you feel at the moment that you want to be a writer or an editor, or working any particular role in publishing. They all give you a very wide range, but also depth of the skills that you need for any of those roles. So the first one I'm going to talk about is narrative and creative practices.
And I'm speaking to this, partly from my experience as an editor, not just as a writer who has been lucky enough to be edited by, you know, some of the best in Australia.
I'll say something that may be surprising to some of you. Most people don't know how to read.

They know how to read for pleasure. It is not the same as reading as a writer to think about your own craft. It is certainly not the same as reading like an editor, and it is absolutely not the same as reading like a publisher.
It takes real work to learn, because writers don't want you to think about their craft when you're reading their book, any more than film technicians want you to think about film technique when you're watching a film. They want you to be immersed.
They hide what they're doing from you. And so a subject like narrative and creative practices does a number of things. It helps you to analyse what you're doing in your own work and the things that you've never thought about. And again, you partly do that through analysing the work of fellow students in the class. When you workshop what's working, what isn't working? And Andrew mentioned some of the kinds of devices that emerging or new writers don't even think about such as point of view handling of time. How to frame the story. I'll just give you a very quick example, if you're writing a short story.
You start the story after the thing has happened. You don't lead up to it. So a writer who doesn't know what they're doing will start leading up to the thing that happens. But if you actually look at the way short stories work, they all start after thing has happened. 
And then what do you do about it? So that's just the kind of thing can save you years of struggle as a writer. So the important thing about a subject like this is that writing is part of a conversation. And this kind of subject gets you up to where we are in the conversation so it can save a lot of time as a fiction editor. When I look at the stories that are submitted to Overland, I can tell very absolutely right away. Whether the person who's submitting the story has had any kind of training or thinking about a background in creative writing.
And whether they have any idea of where we're up to in the conversation, or whether they are writing stories that are the kind of thing Overland would have published years ago.
Some of them haven't caught up with Hemingway, who still seems quite radical a hundred years later. So that is part of the purpose of understanding as well as being able to then apply those ideas and techniques to your own writing.
Professional editing practice is just as useful for writers as it is for editors. And while it doesn't involve generating creative writing in the assessments.
We do actually go through real copy edits of real stories with permission from the writers. Of course it is an absolute revelation to the students to see the amount of work that goes into the structural editing and copy editing, and it has a huge impact on how they approach their own work as well as talking about the work of others.
Also, we focus in that course on the kinds of skills that publishing houses do not have the time to teach you.
They don't have the time to brush up your grammar or your punctuation, or how the different ways you think about copy editing, copy editing, nonfiction, completely different to copy editing fiction totally different.

Completely different set of skills. And you need both because the majority of jobs are going to be in editing nonfiction. And you need to know about the different kinds of things that are involved with that and one of those. And Tom mentioned soft skills.
Oh, boy, do you need those?
You do not want to upset the writers that you're working with, particularly with big publishing house. And so one of the things that we work hardest on is getting the tone of those comments right? Not having a kind of schoolmarish approach to, you know, you haven't got that right. It's about building these collaborative relationships. And that's another good thing about being in these classes which then goes to publishing workshop, which is and again, I think both Tom and Andrew mentioned.
It's there's a lot of collaboration in every aspect of this industry, whether you are just writing your own work, or whether you want to work in these other areas. And even as a writer. As I said before, you'll find yourself editing. Other writers work assessing their work, etc. So professional editing practice is about the work inside the engine room of publishing to make that book the best it can be. Publishing workshop is about the book in the world.
How does it fare? How does it go in the marketplace. What kind of cover does it have? What is the audience for that book? Who's going to read it? So that, appropriately, is a more sort of team or group-based subject.
Creative nonfiction. Oh. this is a very special subject. It's one which has a history of great success at Ets. Most students come into it, not knowing what creative nonfiction is. It's not journalism.
It's a very creative approach. There are literally dozens of different forms that you can learn about. There's a lot more outlets for publishing and nonfiction work than there are fiction. So you will learn how to think about different ways of you know you can work with experimental essays. We can do what we call hermit crab essays, amazing essays where people will take one form like a list or a recipe or a series of rejection letters. And then through that, you actually get like the person's history. It's it's amazing. And so a lot of students go into that subject thinking, well, nonfiction's not my interest, it's not my thing, and they end up loving it. They learn so and often their first published work comes out of that. So I hope I've given an overview of how all these subjects work together and sort of bolster this really wide range of skills that you need and again, all fiction writers write nonfiction as well, and pretty much we all do that. 
I'm also the academic lead on the UTS writers. Anthology. As far as I know, it's the only publication of its kind in Australia, as far as I know.
And so every year we publish. It's a professionally published book. We work with a publisher, and we select a student committee to work on it, and we spend the entire year producing this book of student work, which includes nonfiction, fiction, poetry, sometimes scripts depending on what the students are working on. We always have usually a wealth of material to choose from. So it's very high quality, and they get to experience all the things that I've just spoken about with those subjects because you're actually producing a real, proper book that goes into bookstores and is beautiful to look at their students work out what the cover design is going to be in cooperation with the publisher they come up with the title. I want to give you an example. You see the empty sky there.

This was an incredible thing that the committee did, because they got together at the end of before the pandemic hit before we'd ever heard of it, and that was the title it came up with. I I swear I think there was some tuning into the site. Guys there I don't know. So they then get that experience of working with authors doing the rounds of edits, doing the proofreading, working with the publisher. We even get to sit in and watch the on zoom. We watch the publisher live doing the typeset. So again, you get that real sense of putting all that study and learning into practice and actually having a book that you can be proud of.
Another program that we have is working with the copyright agency. We get funding for a writer in residence at Uts, and they can be nonfiction writer, a novelist, short story writer, range, and they become another resource for our students because they will be available to talk to students about their work, and also to give a sense a bit, as Tom has done, of what different pathways are. 
So, for example, our current writer in residence is Vivian Pham, who's very young and had her first book published by the Penguin Random House when she was, I think, 18, I think they waited for her to finish her Hsc. And so she has this really interesting range of experiences that she can share with students like working on zines and things like that, and also somebody who comes from a very different part of Sydney to uts. She told me she hadn't really sort of been to the center of the city before. So again, it's wonderful to kind of bring these different worlds together. So that's another sense in which we bring in outside influences from different parts of the industry, and I should have mentioned that with the subjects as well, because we have guest lecturers, such as the wonderful Tom to come and talk to us and keep us abreast of what's actually going on.
Thank you.
So here we have. The staff in the writing and publishing discipline at UTS.
There's Delia Faulkner, the author of 2 novels and 2 works of of nonfiction. Her first novel, The Service of Clouds was shortlisted for the miles. Franklin Lucky is my novel, shortlisted for the miles. Franklin Claire is an author of 2 novels, including When we have wings, and Anthony Mcchris is author of 5 books. 2, 3 works of fiction and 2 works of nonfiction. Graham Ackhurst, first novel, Borderland, was published last year, and Sarah Atfield is a published poet academic who's interested in working class literature and a very experienced teacher of creative writing.
Okay? I wanted to talk, not just about recent publications, but also some industry success as well. So as you can see up there, there's a couple of recent novels. So, for example, Nadine Cohen, who again worked with Tom, didn't she? And Sydney Kuhn, who was a student of mine, very interesting. YA kind of horror fantasy called the Spider and her demons. She actually started that novel in one of my classes.
Tracy. Alice didn't just win the caliber essay prize. I think she won the that year's short story award from the Abr. As well and I had Brendan in one of my classes as well, but I also wanted to mention 2 other students, recent students. One is Shaw Mullican, who is now working in nonfiction publishing at Penguin Random House. So I'm bringing her back to talk to our professional editing practice class as our final week to sort of talk to about this editing life. What is it actually like? Because Charlotte's really working? I think it's called nonfiction lab, or something like that. So she's working at real kind of cutting edge nonfiction practices.
So I'm going to be very interested to hear about that, and she had said like doing. The postgrad was kind of like her last ditch shot at getting into the industry busier than I can tell you, because she's also my reading coordinator for Overland, and I gave her the chance to drop that she's like, no, no, I don't wanna keep doing that. That's my, that's my link into literary fiction. So she treasures that. And the other person I wanted to mention is Lily Cameron, whom I just saw at graduation today, actually. And she's very happily ensconced at Pan Mcmillan. And she's working in their marketing department. And she's really happy there, and was saying that she actually finds it very creative and fulfilling. So just a brief glance at a couple of recent. Also, he was too modest to tell you. But the round that he applied for the fellowship at Varuna, which is the National Writers House, and I was on the board there for 6 years, but I had nothing to do with selecting you. Was like one of the most hotly contested rounds in Varuna's history.
Hope you remember that here?
Thank you so much, Claire and Andrew. It's just wonderful getting such a clear insight into what you could expect if you were to come here at Uts. I'm now gonna give us the dry administrative details. So if you are interested in applying application deadlines are coming up we do have. The round is due by the 20 sixth of May 2024 classes will be commencing on the fifth of August.
You do need to have a completed uts. Recognized bachelor's degree but otherwise, if you don't, you can come in with an updated Cv, a personal statement and a writing portfolio of no more than 3,000 words as a submission.
If you would like to know a bit more detail about the fees that will be required. They are here on the screen, and there are commonwealth supported places available as an option.
But I would like to move along now to Hugh Mcgonagall. Who is one of our alumni here at the writing, editing, and publishing graduate certificate, and Hugh has got a lot of insight into what it is to be a student here balancing that work life priorities. So, Hugh, if you wouldn't mind if you that's all working for you there. Well, excellent!
So, Hugh, based on your experience. How was your time at UTS writing? And what did you enjoy the most about your program?
So I love the program. I'd started doing it. I I'd studied law before, so probably a lot of you have got no background in writing or editing, or publishing either.
But I I loved every minute of it, and the things I think I kind of got 3 things out of it, one as you'd expect. It was a writing program. I think I became a better, better writer out of it. But there were 2 things that I really hadn't expected so much and second one was that I became a much, much better, reader. And you get that. And Claire's mentioned that already. But you really really do appreciate that
And the third thing I got again again, that what kind of surprised me was that I met really great people. So I made friends through the program. I also those are the people I call now, when I need, when I'm stuck on a technical problem in writing, or when I need someone to review a draft of something. And the same comes back like towards me.
When I was thinking about what I might say today, and when I was thinking back in the course, one of my most vivid memories from the course was actually my first lecture with Claire and it was kind of mid covid, and it was mid winter, and I was sitting at home kind of feeling sorry for myself at the kitchen table doing the lecture on screen and Claire said something that kind of made me forget about the cold and the covid for a minute.
She'd said that good fiction is something that is objectively measurable, that it just is not a matter of opinion.

That it is. It's not a subjective thing at all, as I'd always thought that it was that it was pretty much like a scientific fact like, and your opinion doesn't come into it. So it's a bit like gravity is a scientific fact, and if I fall off the stool doesn't matter if I believe in it.
And the reason I thought that was really really good and really, really powerful was because if it's an objective thing, it is something. It's got objective attributes, and it's something that can be identified that can be taught. And there could be learned. and that really was what we did through through the subjects and I was at. I went to a writing workshop recently because kind of when you start doing good writing courses, you you want to keep on doing them, and you want to do more.
And it was by Claire Claire Keegan, who is who is shortlisted for the Booker a couple of years ago, and the first thing she said to us was that you know there's a lot of bad writing advice out there.
And one of the things that I felt in UTS that was that we were in really safe hands.
Every lecturer's approach was different. All their styles were different, but I could see that they were kind of taking a consistent and very straightforward.
I suppose. Approach that there's kind of a methodology that was sitting behind it.
I  kind of saw that there was 4 steps that they were all taking. I kind of thought thought of them as stepping stones.
And the first stepping stone that they would take is that they would. They would identify the principles that we would we would have to follow.
So, for instance, if they were teaching us about the beginning of a story. The fundamental things that they'll teach us is that you know quite quickly. You have to know who the story is about when it's sent of where it's set, and they might do that by setting a reading, or they might do that by giving us a brief lecture.
And then, when you've you've got that one, you move on to the next stepping stone. The next stepping stone was that you would have read some pieces, and it might be essays, or it might be short stories, and you get to see how people like Hemingway as you'd mentioned, or Margaret Atwood, or you know Helen Fielding, who you know, all of these people who have written good books. They all do these things.
When you've mastered that you're halfway there. The next stepping stone predictably is that you're writing something for yourself, and you're looking to to apply those principles yourself and the fourth one it's the one that I like that scared me a little bit. The thought of it at the beginning. It was that you had to hand your writing over to other people.
And they would tell you what they thought of that. So you do the workshopping process. And really it's it kind of sounds it intimidating. But it really it really wasn't often it would just serve as a one to one sometimes there was a few people in a group, sometimes you read aloud, and sometimes you didn't. Really it depended on on you what you wanted to do.
I think the other thing I wanted to cover was around the time commitment. Yes, please. Most people who I was on the course with were working full time.
They did 2 subjects per semester, and that was very manageable.
I kind of wanted to just do one subject semester. I kind of I thought you know I kind of wanted the course to go as long as I could, because I was really enjoying it and what that looked like for me was one night a week. There would be lectures.
There would be a bit of reading during the week, but it pretty much replaced, you know, whatever reading you'd be doing for pleasure. So it wasn't. It wasn't a big time drain at all and then we would normally have a little bit of writing to do for the following week, so I'd spend like 20 min half an hour before dinner on a Sunday was my time, and I just sit down and do it, and then head into class. You know, whatever day that week I think that was well, I did have one more question for you, cause you do have this valuable insight as someone who has done the course. And now you've moved into the industry. Is there anything that you still think on today in your work that you come back to, that you learned while at UTS?
So I don't work in should say, I don't work in actually he said that he remembered in my first lecture that I said that writing quality is something that you can measure objectively. That's true. What's subjective is whether you enjoy a piece of writing or not okay. So everyone thinks writing is subjective. It is in terms of whether you like it. Yes, whether your your experience of life or your interests chime with that writer at all. But when you are trained and when you're a writer you can tell whether a piece of writing is good. It doesn't mean you'll enjoy it.
And in all my time teaching here at UTS, because we cross Mark, and you know, look at Marx. My opinion has never differed from that of another creative, creative creative writing lecture. So I have years of experience to show that it is objective. But what is subjective, as I've said, is whether you enjoy it fantastic. Well, I think this is a great time to move into our QA. Session. Thank you all, everyone. So far for your insights. We now are going to open it up to you guys here tonight. If you do have a question, you can just raise your hands and we'll bring a microphone over to you, but also for all of our folks at home. Please do keep sending your questions into the QA. Box.
And we will be asking them here on your behalf as well. But I might get us started with a question. So, Claire, maybe you could give us an idea of how the course plans to engage with industry, professionals, and organizations. To make sure students are going to have a pipeline into the industry once they finish well.
Partly it's through guest lecturers. So we always try to have guest lecturers in the courses who particularly the more industry focused ones like professional editing practice and publishing workshop, so that can be incredibly valuable in terms of keeping up to date because things are changing when we rewrite the courses ourselves.
For example, I rewrote and refreshed professional editing, and attended the this conferences only once every 2 years of the Australian professional editors Institute, and they're sort of like days and days of talks and lectures on that. And that field is moving very fast. So that's one way. Another way is that most of us have not just our own experience with publishers, and often and ongoing, but we also have industry. Roles ourselves like will be on the boards of writing centers, or I was on the board of Runa, or we are judging things for is it creative Australia now? Or we you know, Judge prizes you know. Andrew was talking about like giving talks at writers, festivals. A lot of us have international networks and communication. So there's a sort of whole range. Obviously, you know, I mentioned being fiction editor of Overland. So that's like a sort of big ongoing role. So, for example, I have a pretty good idea what is happening with almost, you know, with a very large number of writers in the whole of the country, because we get submissions from right across. So I kind of know what people are doing, where they are in their careers, who they're going on to, you know who are their agents. They judge prizes as well. So it's a whole range of things. And I think I was trying to get that across earlier. That idea, that to really become a writer. Yes, you need to spend a lot of time alone writing. That's obviously critical. But you then move into taking on these other roles and actually being part of a community as well. That's really important.
Thank you. Everyone in the faculty in the discipline has a active publishing career. We have ongoing relationships with editors, agents, publishers, publicists, and these contacts that have been helpful to students in the past.
Does anybody have any questions? Yes.
Thanks for the super clear, insightful picture that you painted of all of that. I'm just wondering if you could give us a picture of what the lecture tutorial setup is. It's I'm thrilled that it's face to face. What does it look like? Are there lectures and tutorials? You can probably say it's been a long time since I attended university. Thanks.
It really depends on the subject. So we're still coming out of the post pandemic things and getting back to live lectures. For some subjects some lectures are recorded, and some are live. So sometimes there's a mix, and that can be useful. If they're very information, dense or heavy, it means the student can go back. And actually, you know.
Re-look or re-watch the information. Obviously, when the lectures are uploaded, they generate their own transcripts as well. So that's available. But then there are these sort of face to face, lectures as well, where you can ask questions. In that case some lectures would give the lecture first, then have a discussion, and then the tutorial. But other lecturers. We've that material through the whole seminar. So yeah. And then, as we get to the end of depending on again on the course, if there's workshopping in the last couple of weeks might be focusing on that as well. Did you want to add?
No, just that. Classes will be 6 o'clock Tuesdays and class will be at 6 o'clock Tuesdays and Wednesdays and for the most part lectures will be online, I think.
You'll have one and a half hour, 2 h seminars. Yup, we just got a question online. Are there any memorable authors or writers you've studied and their impact on students that we've studied?
Yep, that you've studied. Well, Claire mentioned Hemingway. That's a pretty pretty good, pretty good one to study.
George Saunders.
I'm thinking about short stories. So it's interesting to mention Hemingway, because we're talking like quite a long way back. But it's not really that long, because it's so foundational. What it does is, it gives us a way of talking about all these techniques that are still being used. I, personally have a great interest in speculative fiction, Gothic and horror and science fiction, as well as kind of mainstream literary work. And so really important writer for me to talk about, and teaches Edgar Allan Poe because he's also one of the great originators of the short story along with Hemingway. As I said more recently, George Saunders, we mentioned Claire Keegan, who?
We're sort of a great admirer. I don't know if you've heard of her, but there's an amazing American fantasy writer called Kelly Link, who is doing absolutely mind-warping short stories, and I'll also throw in Ken Loo, who's a Chinese American writer whose short story oh, gosh! Help me out here in Avenue.

The paper menagerie always makes my students cry so there's a there's a little taster. George Saunders, Laurie Moore.
So many writers have a long history at uts. Look when we when we study a writer, we're usually focusing on a particular technique characterisation in Laurie Moore. Narrative time. In Saunders point of view. There's usually some lesson about technique that we're extracting out of that reading in nonfiction. As well. We might look at a writer like Joan Didion.
I'm sure there's more, but my mind has suddenly gone blank. But there's a sort of range of important nonfiction writers that we study as well.
Truman capote. Yep.
yep, Montane.
Yeah, so we just got a question online. This is for Hughes. So you've mentioned that you don't actually work in the industry? So we've actually have a little case here where? They are, research and policy professional. And they're just wondering as a person how would this how would support be available for them as someone with limited creative writing skills moving into developing those skills.
So I also had no background in creative writing. When I started the course and it was never my objective to to go looking for a job, and what I wanted to do was for myself, to to learn how to write but as Claire mentioned one of our one of our classmate, Charl. It was something she she wanted to do, and getting the diploma as it was at the time. I think, really enabled her to get that job at at Penguin.
Thank you.
Sometimes publishers.
I wouldn't want to overstate the case, but it's definitely happened a few times. They might be saying, Hey, do you know anyone that we could, you know try out or and it's kind of up to the students themselves to let us know how keen they are, you know. So we can. We have passed on names at times.
Could you just explain the difference between an independent publishing house, and then some of the bigger like the Penguin Random House. And if you're an author or an editor, what does that mean to you?
Essentially, the larger publishing houses they're known as the Big 5, and they're multinational conglomerates owned internationally. And the independent ones are Australian owned, locally owned, they're more likely to be smaller. And there's usually a bit of a it's pros and cons from an author point of view, usually with multinational publisher, you might have more commercial heft behind the publishing process, more money to go towards in advance or marketing publicity efforts. There's more staff on the ground.
But often the argument for being with an independent publishing house is, you get more time and attention effectively. There's a small list of authors. Editorially and in terms of promotion, you're more likely to be treated as a big fish in a small pond. I can add something to that which is currently given the kind of divisions within the market. The Australia's small and independent presses are vastly the majority of the names in the prize lists.

Thanks.
Do we have any final questions for this evening? Yes.
I was wondering about if you were working on your own manuscript before taking the course and whatnot. What would be the steps you do before giving it to a publisher or a professional editor if you were working on the manuscript before. If you've made Jim. If you've made your manuscript and you're working on editing it yourself with maybe Beta readers before, what would you suggest doing before handing it over to a publisher.
I mean, if you're confident that it's the best it can be, then it's time to send a query letter to an agent.
Look at manuscript prizes with direct submission to a publisher.
Those are the the options.
Yeah.
One warning I would give is you get the advice you pay for.
Most people don't know how to read a manuscript. People don't know how to edit it. I'd be very careful about who beta readers are like. I say, you get what you pay for.
You get one chance with a publishing house. You don't get to resubmit your manuscript again, so you have to be very careful about not slamming doors behind you. I've had to. I had to say that to one very over excited undergrad, who is sending his manuscripts to all publishers, all in sundry. And I said, Stop doing that right now. They will look at it again.
So yeah. It always needs a lot more work than people think it does. It's very hard to judge.
I would also look at whether you feel the manuscript is fitting into a particular thing that a publishing house is doing.
It's hard to chase the market because there's a lag time. So by the time a writers thinks, Oh, you know, vampires are hot like that's over, and something else. But it's it's good to be aware of what people are reading. If you're looking for that kind of publisher. If you are, gonna go the more independent route. Then look at what they're publishing, and it's the same with agents. They'll tell you the kind of thing that they're looking for. I mean, if you can find good advice, I mean what a lot of writers do is might find an independent editor and pay for their advice because that's hard. One expertise. Send a manuscript off too early. You can often. It's the case that you're ready to be a published author before the manuscript is ready.
Yes.
I'll just add one more thing from a publisher point of view in terms of the market research piece, which is that, and it's a small bit of practical advice. But in terms of figuring out the best bit of agent or publisher.
One easy way is to look in the Acknowledgement section at the back of a book which will list the agent and the publisher for books that you've enjoyed in that particular genre which you can see sitting on the bookshelf alongside the book that you hope to have out there. And I think that's always an easy way to kind of find a way in to start that process.

Yeah, one of the things that probably distinguishes people who have sort of part of the industry or not? Is those acknowledgements pages are fascinating.
Always read them.
I think we had one final question.
Sorry, from a high school student's point of view. What bachelor degree would you sort of recommend to do this before the post grad like, what do you think would best complement this course?
I'll answer.
I think. Do what you're interested in. There were so many different backgrounds. One of the people in my writing group. Now it does. IT. Another person was an actress someone else didn't do a degree at all. I did a law degree. So it's very diverse. So I think, do what you're interested in and it will work out.
I mean, obviously, I would have to mention the BA Comms and creative writing, because that offers a lot more actual writing that then if you went on to this, you know, you would be polishing. So you'd get a lot of experience doing that. Obviously, I agree with Hugh. It's good to also think about what you bring to writing, besides writing skills. So you can't lose really you could. Certainly. I I mean I did the Va. Communications in writing and film. I then went out into the public service for years.
And that was just as the Va. Comms was critical. It may. I wouldn't have done anything that I have done since, but working the public service was great because it taught me how the world worked, which is something that a number of Australian writers could stand to know a little bit more about.
Also, I did a lot of writing. There's nothing that crushes writer's block, you know, more than like being a lawyer or a public servant. Writing policy briefs.
Well, with that final question, I think we are going to conclude this evening. Thank you, everyone for coming, and I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to our industry experts here tonight. It's been wonderful hearing all of their insights and valuable knowledge into the course that we do have here at UTS and for everyone here tonight. Thank you for participating, and we hope to welcome you at UTS very soon. If you do have any further questions, you can just scan the QR. Code.
And you can book a one on one session with our team, and you can also contact us at fast marketing@uts.edu.au, for everyone interested in applying applications are now open for the August fifth intake you can submit your application via the Uts student portal. Have a great evening, everyone, and if you are in the room. Please stay to enjoy some drinks and some food, and thank you again.