Of G-men and bohemians

[sawyl]

According to an anonymous creative writing tutor in yesterday's Guardian, government workers tend to be better writers than bohos:

The students who look like creative types – floaty scarves, dangly earrings – often produce terribly banal work. They express all their artiness through their clothes; there's nothing left for their writing. Civil servants are usually the best writers. Perhaps it's because they spend their lives in the most soul-sapping of environments, so everything gets channelled into their fiction.

It is also the case that most civil servants will have spent years of their professional lives honing their creative writing skills, working to convert the absurd ramblings of troupes of surrealist conceptual artists — events know to the wider public as meetings — into some sort of coherent, rational narrative...