Creative writing postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The hold music at the water company where I take calls lasts forty-one seconds before it repeats. I know this because customers tell me, often in the first sentence after I pick up, and how they phrase it says a lot about the next ten minutes. Someone who says 'I've heard that tune six times' is usually ready to laugh about it. Someone who just says 'Finally' is not. For four years I have listened to strangers arrive in the middle of a story they have been rehearsing, and that habit of listening is the main thing I want to develop into fiction through postgraduate study.

My undergraduate degree was in English Language and Linguistics. In my final year I wrote a dissertation on overlapping speech in local radio phone-ins. I transcribed twelve hours of broadcasts, using a simplified version of the notation that grew out of conversation analysis, and looked at when presenters interrupted callers and when callers talked over presenters. The analysis was descriptive rather than grand, and its conclusions were modest, but the work of transcription changed how I read. Once you have marked every pause and false start in a real conversation, written dialogue looks very tidy. I started to notice which writers let their characters interrupt, mishear and change the subject, and which gave everyone complete, well-shaped sentences.

That question has shaped my reading since. Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels, built almost entirely from talk, showed me how much cruelty and comedy can be carried by what is said in a drawing room without any narration to explain it. Grace Paley's stories went the other way for me: voices that wander, contradict themselves and still land precisely. I have also been reading screenplays, partly because the page layout forces dialogue to do work that prose can hand over to description.

My own writing is mostly short fiction. Over the past two years I have completed eight stories, three of which I think are good enough to show anyone. The strongest follows two sisters dividing their late father's tools in a garage, told almost entirely through what they say while handling each object. I wrote six drafts. The early versions explained too much; the later ones trust the reader to notice that neither sister ever mentions the father directly. I share work with two friends from my degree over email every month, and their comments have made me more willing to cut. What I lack is sustained, structured feedback from readers who are thinking hard about craft, and the time to attempt something longer. I have the opening chapters of a novel set in a call centre during a hosepipe ban, and I want to find out whether my interest in voices can hold up across a full-length structure.

Not everything I do feeds the writing, and I am glad of that. I share an allotment plot with a retired neighbour, which mostly means weeding and arguing amiably about runner beans, and I play five-a-side on Thursday evenings. At work I have been trusted to help train new starters, sitting beside them on their first live calls. Explaining to someone why a particular phrase calms a caller has made me articulate things I previously did by instinct, which I suspect is useful preparation for workshop discussion.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want to treat writing as disciplined work rather than something squeezed between shifts. I would bring a close ear, a linguist's patience with detail, and the steadiness that comes from a job where people are rarely at their best when they call. I hope to leave with a finished, revised body of work and a clearer sense of how to sustain it.