ABSTRACT
When I was a student, I asked a question about sonnets; the lecturer, poet and academic Grevel Lindop astonished me by saying that the best way to really find out about sonnets was to write one. I think I was astonished both by the audacity (that I might dare to write a sonnet! As if I were an author and not like the literary critic I was being trained to become!), but more by the obvious simple rightness of this suggestion. After all, no one learns to swim on dry land. In English, though all reading is active, creative writing particularly stresses heuristic learning: heuristic means learning by doing, finding out, rather than being told or by simply analysing.
