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

Perhaps this woman had found a way to prevent the sad things that happen to us turning into secrets, then percolating through the subconscious and causing havoc in the dangerous territory of memory. The trick might be to proclaim your story, rather than hide it.

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

Then Jules arrived, bearing tea and biscuits. She was easy to please because she had no ambitions to publish, only to enjoy writing. She showed me a piece written in a hurry, she said, because she and Jim had spent the afternoon reading Agatha Christie to each other in bed. My mind was busy with this image for most of the time I was meant to be

there was a sense of people arriving at a house party to which not enough men had been invited.

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 guest appearance was usually a highlight of the week, although I sometimes felt that the group was less welcoming than they might be. Historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett had been left sitting in a room on her own. The explorer Benedict Allen had been asked to change a lightbulb ‘since you’re so tall’. Much later Allen had stripped off his clothes to

By the time I was twelve, my brother and sister were in their twenties and lived away, first at university then in London, where they worked. Every few weeks they would come home trailing cigarette smoke, casually swearing and starting arguments about politics. My sister, who worked in advertising, might bring a copy of Vogue which I could look at

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