The old argument about whether writing can be taught or not is "nonsense", according to Graham Joyce, a 46-year-old senior lecturer in creative writing at Nottingham Trent University who has just won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel for an extraordinary fourth time.
"It's the only art form where anybody would raise that question. With any other art form - ballet, music - of course there has to be teaching. It's the same with writing."
He prefers a spare prose style. In the mining village of Keresley near Coventry, where he grew up, anybody using words of more than two syllables was instantly suspected of being a homosexual. "Generally fantasy writers write long. I write short."
He adds: "You cannot teach inspiration or grace, but lots of craft elements can be taught. Dialogue, for instance, is something people find tricky, but there are all sorts of tips on how to make it work. It's all about editing down. Narrative structure, character development and sense of place can all be taught."
From a mining family - his dad, grandfather and brothers went down the pit - Joyce was brought up in a house with scarcely any books. After failing the 11-plus, he went to a comprehensive in Bedworth, Warwickshire. "Education was a closed box to my parents," he says. "But they could see it was a way out of mining. They knew that intuitively."
There was, however, an oral storytelling tradition in his family - his dad loved recounting anecdotes and several relatives on his mother's side used to tell a good tale. "You have to be able to imagine a scene," he said. "This addresses the hoary old question of the difference between telling and showing in a story. A lot of people can write stuff, but for some reason they cannot impress in their mind's eye the thing happening live and therefore cannot render a scene."
As well as talent, would-be writers also need doggedness to finish, for example, an 80,000-word novel. "I have seen loads of students with a natural flair for words," he said. "but they just do not have the persistence." Joyce is a great believer in writers spending time serving their craft before becoming fluent at pushing the words around on a page.
"What I do at the university enriches my writing because I am constantly having to break down the craft elements to communicate clearly. It's kind of exporting the knowledge from the intuitive to the rational mode. If you are claiming to be a craftsperson, you should be able to replicate these effects time and time again.
"Intellectually that is quite challenging because then you can start looking at other great writers and see how they do it. Some literary rather than genre writers seem to be terrified of breaking down the art and craft of what they do.
"It's almost like an old priesthood, who want the Latin mass so that people do not understand it. Writers have worked up an almost sacred mystery about writing and they want to preserve it. What I am doing is trying to break that down."
After making an initial mess of his O-levels, he passed seven at a second sitting. In the sixth form he started writing poetry and made his first stab at a fantasy novel. A-levels in English literature, language and history followed, before four years training to be a secondary teacher at Bishop Lonsdale teacher training college in Derby.
At college he wrote for the student magazine - getting drunk, as he puts it, on his own published words. After staying on for a fifth sabbatical year as union president, he did an MA in modern English and American literature at Leicester University, where he met his future wife Sue, who was training to be a lawyer.
After a short spell as a poet on the dole - at university he had won a poetry prize - Joyce spent eight years as a training and development officer for the National Association of Youth Clubs in Leicester. In 1988 he and Sue married and drove in a Citroën 2CV to Greece, where he spent a year testing his dream of becoming a novelist.
In Lesbos they shared a shack on the beach with no electricity or mains water and scorpions crawling up the walls. Here, and later in Crete, he completed his first novel, Dreamside. At the end of the year a shepherd came to the door saying that Joyce's London agent was on the phone to the local café saying that the novel had been placed with Pan Macmillan.
Today nine of his fantasy/supernatural thrillers have been published - and four of them, including his latest novel, Indigo, have won the British Fantasy Award. Stephen King has recommended Joyce's The Tooth Fairy, which has sold more than 200,000 copies in the US alone, as one of his favourite books. The film rights to his novel Dark Sister have also been bought by Trimark Pictures.
Four years ago he started teaching creative writing two days a week at Nottingham Trent University. With two young children - Ella, 4, and Joseph, 2 - he wanted more financial security: "I know writers who are better than I am who have suddenly been unable to find a publisher. Also I am fairly gregarious and it drives me crazy to be locked in a room with a word processor day after day.
And does he have anything in common with his great literary forebear DH Lawrence, another scion of a mining family? Not much. He does have a bit of Lawrentian routine, however. "All these spitting, snarling miners," he mimics gustily in a broad East Midlands accent. "Do you want to make a stool-arsed jack of him?"
Hobbits and hobbyists
Donald MacLeod
Fantasy and academic life have gone together happily since the Mad Hatter's tea party.
In real - or at least academic - life Lewis Carroll was the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, a lecturer at Christ Church and author of various treatises on the subject including Euclid and His Modern Rivals. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of the greatest and most original fantasy novels, appeared in 1865.
The story originated in a boat trip with the young Alice Liddell and her two sisters, but is full of characters who might have stepped out of a college commonroom and who argue in the impeccably logical but often daft manner of academics at their most infuriating.
The whole genre of modern fantasy was reinvented by another Oxford don, JRR Tolkien, who tapped into the Anglo-Saxon tales and Viking sagas he studied. The Merton professor of English language and literature, he published a number of philological and critical studies, including the influential Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.
The Hobbit (1937) and its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, built up a mythology which has proved extraordinarily popular and spawned a thousand sword and sorcery books, complete with elves and dwarves and goblins and noble warriors. Hollywood followed suit. Now there is even fantasy noir.
CS Lewis, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, during Tolkien's time, was one of the first writers to reflect this influence in his Narnia stories, in which four children step into a fantasy world to find elves and dwarves and goblins. His stories come with a strongly Christian message.
