Critical lesson

I arrived late and perspiring at the novel-writing workshop. Four would-be novelists and the tutor were seated around a table. I apologised for not being punctual and received amused, forgiving or complicit smiles, reminding me that it was art that we were about today, not commerce or industry.

Two rows of paperbacks divided the table. The tutor said that these were what she considered to be exemplary novels taken from her bookshelves and that we might take a note of the titles. I switched my phone off, took out my pen and notepad and looked eagerly along the rows. Three Tracy Chevaliers, two Jeanette Wintersons, two Virginia Woolves, an Alice Sebold, a Dodie Smith, an Emily Brontë and an Angela Carter. It was here that the small, glistening soap bubble bearing aloft my frail hopes wobbled and popped — that’s how I would have described my disappointment in my novel — and we hadn’t even started yet. Lurking obscenely in the shadows cast by these female titans, the weaker sex was represented by Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot (never heard of it), Conrad’s monumentally racist Heart of Darkness and Orwell’s Animal Farm, admired and selected, we learnt later, because the book was a famous early polemic for animal rights.

The tutor was in her early twenties and spoke with confidence and authority. Good fiction writing was a marriage of the two sides of the brain, she said: the critical left side and the creative right side. Writer’s block, she said, was procrastination brought on by bringing the critical left side of the brain into the writing process either too early or too completely and smothering the murkier, more instinctive right side. The best way to prevent this happening was to wrong-foot the left side of the brain by writing first thing in the morning, before it was fully awake.