When I was ten years old my parents moved to a farm in Sussex and sent me to a small school that smelled of polished wood, urine and mashed potato. A craze for instant mash was sweeping the country that year, sparked by some TV adverts in which visiting aliens laughed at Earthlings for bothering to boil and mash up real potatoes. It was the 1970s a

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.

Tom had read aloud a Seamus Heaney poem, ‘Blackberry Picking’, and was talking about landscape as a source of allegory, as well as political and social commentary. The challenge was to find fresh ways to describe nature, he said, to see its potential for secrets, for clues.

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 h

Everyone has a story inside, but in most cases extraction proves too difficult, even for talented writers; because having a story isn’t the same as being able to fill a hundred, two hundred or three hundred pages with incident and atmosphere, to create breathing characters, to calibrate the tension, hit the moments of revelation at the right time a

You can’t help hoping, as a writer, that some quiet stardom may attach to your name. It’s not that you want admiration, exactly, just an acknowledgement of the trials and the triumphs of the writing life. Most authors have had so much more experience of the former. They have sat at a table in a book shop or a festival tent and had no one come up to

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 w

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

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’