The Writing School

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 mem

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’

Come to think of it, a whole exercise could be planned around forking paths, perhaps even a workshop. It would be a good way to do something different, get everyone out of the house. Sheena and Peter wouldn’t be keen, though, and it was probably too late for this week.

Today I saw a white Jaguar pull up on Bond Street and out stepped a young man with bleached hair dressed in a white outfit and carrying a little white dog. An amazing sight, but not useful material for a writer because the picture was already complete – there was nothing I could have added to it.

We probably all felt that nature writing, however fashionable, was too much of an effort. How should you approach it? Should you wander about in it, like Wordsworth or the Brontës? Dig in it, get your hands dirty like Seamus Heaney? Should you train a goshawk, like Helen Macdonald, and run with it bloodied and muddied, tearing through thorn bushes,

Puddings came with lumpy custard and were meant to be a challenge because being British meant never fully surrendering to pleasure.

I recognized them immediately. They radiated the mild anxiety that attends all residential courses. It was already palpable on the platform. By midweek it would reach a peak and someone might decide to leave.

Tom had devised an exercise connected to our theme based on the five senses. ‘We want you to travel back to some point in your life and evoke the feeling of that time. Concentrate on all the senses. Don’t just tell us what you saw, but what you smelled, heard, touched and tasted. So, if you’re writing about a café, we want to feel the sticky Formic

After twenty-five minutes everyone returned to the table. Some of them had produced pages of script, despite an instruction to write no more than two hundred words each. Aspiring writers often seemed contemptuous of word counts, perhaps feeling that no limit should be placed on creativity. But shape and rigour are important too. Letting it all ‘flo