The Writing School

‘I hope you enjoyed this morning’s workshop?’ ‘Well yes,’ he said with a chuckle that sounded as though it had been selected from a range of chuckles, each conveying a marginally different degree of condescension.

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,

like the man in Robert Frost’s poem, took the less travelled path, then continued up, half running, half walking, towards the brow of the hill, thinking how Frost’s poem had been misconstrued as an argument for taking less obvious choices in life, when in fact it had simply been meant as a joke about an indecisive friend. I had read somewhere that

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

I could see Peter walking steadily up the hill from the house, the bald patch on his head glinting as he moved between patches of shadow and sun. With every step he planted his walking stick in the manner of someone who would not suffer fools gladly, as though he knew this was something people said about him and didn’t shrink from the aspersion. It

It isn’t always easy to tell apart the people who really do want to write a book from the ones who need a kindly ear. But my feeling was that if someone wanted to write about sad events in their life, then talking about them was both a good preparation and a way to find out whether those experiences would – or should – make a publishable book. Writ

Always get there before the others. Why hadn’t I remembered that from the last time? If you arrive a few hours early there’s time to go for a walk, arrange your room as you like it and to start building the persona of a writer, the first creative exercise of the week.

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.

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.