‘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

And soulful investigations can make for dull writing; emotions are not only hard to describe but boring to read about when isolated from the other experiences of life because, in fact, they never are isolated from those things. Rachel Cusk’s description of a tooth extraction in Aftermath is also about extracting herself from a marriage. The nurse

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

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’

For the poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie, ‘wild’ is a word like ‘soul’. ‘Such a thing may not exist, but we want it, and we know what we mean when we talk about it.’

Her husband’s defence, that he wanted a last chance at happiness, casually wrote their marriage off as unhappy, when Susie felt sure that wasn’t how he had experienced it. Her hunch that this was some kind of mid-life crisis seemed borne out by the fact that, a year after leaving, her husband had got back in touch, saying that he thought he had

For Flannery O’Connor, ‘the teacher’s work should be largely negative . . . We can learn how not to write.’ But it would be terrible to discourage novice writers by pointing out their failings in public.

Fear, vanity and selfishness make people do terrible things to each other. For thousands of years these have been the engines of stories. But there was no discernible arc to this particular one; Susie would have to be a good writer to make it fill two hundred pages. ‘Is this something you would really like to write about?’ I asked. ‘It depends on

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