‘You mean fictionalizing your experience? Or writing something different inspired by it? Or just totally different?’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘I think making stuff up is harder.’ It was like being a doctor sometimes, sitting there at my desk, hearing about symptoms and trying to locate their source, dispensing advice while discreetly keeping an eye on

You could write regularly in a notebook – or keep a diary – do you ever do that?’ ‘Not really,’ Susie shook her head. ‘Not for ages.’ ‘It might help you identify what you’re good at and what you’re interested in. You could try writing every day, about the things that happen, the things you think about. Use the diary to explore your feelings and

These are the stories we hear every day. Some people are really good at telling them, polishing them up for entertainment value. Even when they embark on an anecdote to which we all know the end, we still want to hear them tell it. Others have harnessed technology, unrolling their stories in posts or tweets that gather likes as they progress.

The exercise is about describing an object and a related incident. It doesn’t have to be about anything significant or revealing. You could remember the tumble drier catching fire, or, I don’t know, watching a television show. Not all memories are loaded.’ ‘OK. Yes, I suppose I see what you mean.’ ‘Most of the things that happen in homes are boring

For that morning’s exercise each person had to draw a floorpan of their childhood home, then swap it with the person sitting next to them who would mark a cross in one of the rooms. The assignment came in two parts: first to describe an object in that room. Then to use that description to lead into a piece of writing about a person or an event

like the man in Robert Frost’s poem, took the less travelled path, then continued up, half running, half walking, towards the brow of the hill, thinking how Frost’s poem had been misconstrued as an argument for taking less obvious choices in life, when in fact it had simply been meant as a joke about an indecisive friend. I had read somewhere that

Perhaps there was an element of envy in what I hoped was mostly a protective instinct towards my students. I was drawn to write about the circumstances of my own life but had always felt it wouldn’t be possible to do that without betraying or upsetting my family. I feared the instincts of a writer might overpower the instincts of a daughter, a

We often talk about heartache as though it were a metaphor, but grief really does hurt in the chest cavity, something to do with stress hormones constricting the arteries. To doctors, a broken heart is ‘stress cardiomyopathy’

An idea had taken root in the general consciousness that ‘creative writing’ meant reaching into the soul to bring out secrets. Some tutors fed that need by encouraging their groups to explore terrible things that had happened to them, instead of writing about the more mundane aspects of life – the difficulty of walking a powerful dog, of