The Writing School

‘Arrange whatever pieces come your way’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary, and it’s good advice, even when the pieces – a half-remembered conversation, the subtext of a smile – seem at first not to lead anywhere. They can go in a notebook or diary until the meaning becomes clear, perhaps not until months or years later.

The centre director made mollifying gestures. He tended to wear mollifying jumpers. Jumpers designed to reassure, to defuse tensions, to make the unlovable feel loved; jumpers with a whiff of Ted Hughes. ‘Of course,’ he said and, spreading his hands, ‘Look, there’s always someone.’ ‘Anyone else complain?’ I said. ‘Not really. Peter thinks the wine

When I’m in the thick of a project ideas come all the time, but they’re more likely to strike in the middle of the supermarket, or on a walk, than at my desk. So now I’ll stop, wherever I am – under a tree, beside Frozen Goods, at a bus shelter – and note the thought down on any scrap of paper I can find in my bag – a receipt, the back of a ticket,

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

Even so, I was entranced by the woman’s story. To lose your sense of everything, to have to relearn everything, even how to use a cup, sounds like a rare opportunity to start from scratch, to grasp the workings of the world in a way we never get as adults, because we have been picking this stuff up since babyhood. There was something intoxicating 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’

I looked out of the window, thinking how universal an opener it was to ask strangers where they had come from. The Queen famously started conversations this way, although my son said South London gangsters often asked where you were from, too, before advising you to stick to your own postcode.

Peter’s face settled into the arrangement of ridges and furrows in which his pained certainty had found expression over many decades. I wondered briefly if a comparison could be made between his undulating forehead and the hilly landscape and decided that was too much of a stretch. Peter’s forehead was not like Yorkshire.

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.