In our times, a great number of Creative Writing courses operate on the fallacy that those students who choose such courses are innately talented writers and who can be directed, shaped and nurtured towards publication of their works. Students are admitted into my novel writing course on the basis of a folio of previously written creative pieces. Some of the short stories and narratives are exciting, I am told by the selection panel. That is not the ideal criteria, I argue. It's like saying that a sprinter with a good track record can also succeed in running a marathon. I get nowhere, of course. I am invited to look at the waiting list for the course. I am supposed to feel triumphant and justified by the fact that I have a full class every year. The course is popular and it must go on. Economic rationalism prevails. The number of students in a class determines funding. Never mind the talent or the quality of writing.

My Sisyphean struggle has to continue.

It is my embarrassing confession that in ten years of teaching Creative Writing, I have not had a single student who has produced a manuscript, worthy enough in content and structure, that I could pass it on to my agent or publisher for consideration. My only consolation is that I have encountered a number of writer-teachers with an equally abysmal record.

As a novelist, it is my firm conviction not to question the source or the nature of processing my ideas while I am writing. I do not spend time agonising how those ideas are transmuted into words or, indeed, how I achieve a structural wholeness in a novel. It all happens. I do not need to explain anything to myself. It would be so simple to let it rest there and get on with the business of writing. But, of course, I had to complicate my life by undertaking to teach Creative Writing. Teach Creative Writing? I am more of a facilitator than a teacher. But that is a conclusion I have reached after a decade of classroom experience, mostly with idealistic undergraduate students with naïve notions and pronouncements of commercial publishing. I do sympathise with them. They make me reflect on my own ignorance about publishing after I had finished my first novel.

My first class every year is a routine affair. I try to be honest by declaring that I do not have a definitive explanation of creativity and nor do I have the ability to teach anyone how to write creatively. I can discuss the tools of novel writing and the process of creativity. Perhaps I can even enhance students' awareness of the creative incubator in the imagination. But I am unable to formulate a method that can be applied to every piece of fiction. The expression of my limitation is usually met with polite silence. I can almost hear the students thinking. Confessions of an incompetent teacher. Fancy spending a whole year with him. Fortunately, most undergraduates eventually understand the need to focus and learn from themselves, operate within the frameworks of their imaginations, why I emphasise the necessity of finding an authentic 'voice', and my motives for existing on the periphery of their journeys of self-discovery and creation.

In Australia, there has been an astonishing proliferation of Creative Writing courses in tertiary institutions, sometimes at the expense of studying Literature. It is not a trend that I view with great enthusiasm. I hate to think that we are following the American way. Over two decades ago, in 1982, the American essayist and novelist, William H. Gass, observed:

'Creativity has become a healthy, even a holy word. Its popularity is recent, its followers alarmingly American. The command has gone out from gurus of every persuasion: be creative! An injunction which is followed by the assurance that it's actually better for you than bowling; and millions have eagerly, anxiously responded. The pursuit and practice of something labelled creativity is now an epidemic as tennis or jogging, and apparently as difficult to discourage, now it's here, as trailer parks, poverty or movie going.'

(Habitations of the Word: Essays, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985, p.118)

Our predicament is not quite as severe as the American experience, but hypergraphia (the exaggerated desire to write) is seemingly on the increase. Publishers are overwhelmed with unsolicited manuscripts, literary agents are hounded with self-proclaimed masterpieces and the reading public is exposed to a bewildering diversity of fiction. The problem has become so acute, that some of the major publishers now refuse to read manuscripts unless they have been recommended by literary agents. My own agent, Lyn Tranter, of the Australian Literary Management, has often told me that literary agents have to be quite ruthless for the sake of efficiency. In Lyn's case, if the manuscript of a first-time novelist does not engage her in its first few pages, then she will not read any further.

Creative writing has as much to do with style as content. Those who have ambitions of becoming published writers must also read to develop an awareness of the trends in writing. And by 'reading' I am not necessarily referring to those standard and sometimes 'tired classics' prescribed by conservative and unimaginative English Departments around the world. During a conference in Kolkata on Globalisation and Post-Colonial Literature earlier this year, I had the privilege of meeting a couple of Bangladeshi students studying in India. One of them requested me to look at the first few pages of a novel which he was writing in English. He gave me a synopsis of the work before handing me the first chapter. The content sounded interesting. But after reading the first few pages, it was painfully obvious that this novel would not be publishable. The writing was clichéd, sentimental, melodramatic and suffered from an Edwardian correctness which plagued so many subcontinental writers until Salman Rushdie came along to break the shackles of Imperial formality. It was the kind of English that was induced by deference to a foreign language, and not something that had been adapted, absorbed and energised by the cultural imperatives of the subcontinent. I spoke to the aspiring novelist about style in contemporary fiction, and it became evident that he was not familiar with most of the writers I mentioned.

But what about creativity itself? The difficulty of explaining creativity or, indeed, the creative process, lies in the disconcerting awareness that we are dealing with the intangible, something that does not manifest itself clearly in a recognisably consistent form. There are no rigid rules, no fixed guidelines or principles. It is a murky world of variables without any constants. It is the weightlessness of drifting in space without coordinates and without the support of a mother ship.

The problem has bothered writers for centuries. For instance, in a conversation with Dr Johnson, Boswell once enquired, 'Then, Sir, what is poetry?' And Johnson's reply was, 'Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.' And it is that distinction between the 'knowing' and the 'telling', that large gap between perception and articulation, where the dilemma exists.

We are all blessed with the ability to imagine, and this most elusive of human wonders can be viewed in two ways--first as a faculty capable of reproducing images of a pre-existing reality, and secondly, in a creative sense, with the capacity of producing original images in their own right. The question that immediately arises is how do these images originate? We are also compelled to ask, what is it that provokes their development in the human consciousness? The possible explanations can only be speculative and varied, since they are inextricably tied to individual experiences.

Creativity is a volatile and an unreliable force. In the 1970s, when physicists began to pay close attention to the observable irregularities in the natural world, there evolved the science of process that we now know as Chaos. But long before it leapt into prominence, the pivotal role of chaos in creativity was recognised by both artists and writers. James Joyce is said to have written to an aspiring author: 'Young man, you do not have enough chaos in you to write a novel.' The notion of chaos was not as complex then as it is now, and it is a pity that Joyce did not further elaborate his views about the state of inner turbulence he regarded as being essential for a novelist. I think he was talking about a state of emotional upheaval and that peculiar condition of mental feverishness and their effects in stimulating the imagination to produce those images that are the raw material of novel writing.

During the process of writing, one tends to turn inwards and scan a labyrinthine landscape that can be barren or dense and teeming with life. You wait patiently for clear sounds and distinct movements. Even when you intuitively know that there is 'something' in the maze, it is often shrouded in a mist and appears to recede as you approach it. Frequently you settle for fractured sightings and fleeting images, sporadic eruptions and, occasionally, violent earthquakes.

But to assume that the imagination is all that matters in writing is to ignore the crucial element of an indigenous cultural environment which becomes a key determinant in shaping a work of art. To dismiss the pivotal role of a cultural incubator is tantamount to a failure to recognise the uniqueness of a writer's personality which is the life-centre of an individual's creativity. The imagination not only has to contend with the external world, but must come to terms with the inner self- the ways in which we think, feel, perceive and generally respond to people, events, situations and ideas. I can think of no better example to illustrate the necessity of the meeting between the imagination and the rational mind than the lines from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: "Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?"

A novelist has to strike an agreement with the imagination about the cultural margins of creativity. The shape of that boundary is mutable- it may be oval, round, square, elliptical or rectangular. The landscape is variable, but there is ultimately the recognition of the framework within which the imagination functions meaningfully. Wander too far beyond its limits, or try to extend them forcibly, and the result is often contrived and artificial.

The entire process is subtle and complicated. Its understanding takes time and reflection, and cannot be guided by the demands of a semester's work requirements at a university. With each draft of a novel, the process becomes more comprehensible and facilitates the shape and direction of the final outcome. But the ultimate realisation is a sobering one. The process is unique to the specific work. The next novel will inevitably require a different approach. The struggle with the imagination will be just as intense. As Roland Barthes wrote in Writing Degree Zero: 'A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.'

Adib Khan is a Bangladeshi born Australian writer.