Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw was so inspiring that I spent the whole of the lunch hour walking to Borders on Oxford Street, around Borders on Oxford Street and back from Borders on Oxford Street in a quest to buy her latest book, The Importance of Music for Girls, in time for her to sign it for me. Oh, they had one, the man at the desk assured me. The computer said so. But it wasn't in Biography. It wasn't in Fiction, or alongside her poetry books, or even in Music (although Toby Litt's I played the drums in a band called ok was, and that's definitely a novel.) Wherever it was, I couldn't find it, and I thought being punctual for the afternoon session was probably a sign of more respect than wandering round a bookshop pitted against the stock computer.

'Once I had a character,' she said, 'I didn't have a poem, I had a story.' I loved that. It's difficult to tell, sometimes, where poetry ends and novels begin, particularly when you're reading someone like Marilynne Robinson. On our own writing: 'This should be a disturbing process for you.' And, 'How can you articulate the unfamiliar except through the familiar?' 

On dialogue: 'Remember how much of conversation is not about what is said.'

On description: 'Describing is part of writing, but writing is not describing.'

This was a wonderful session which highlighted the problem with writing courses. For example, we were working hard on the second writing exercise, using the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to create a storyline of our own. I had an arrogant but brilliant A level student being given a second chance at a major scholarship; his teacher was shaping beautifully; I thought I had something. I wasn't alone. The Faber and Faber boardroom was in complete silence; the concentration and creativity were tangible. And then Thomas Hughes suddenly piped up, 'Monica, you'll know this - what was Peter Andre's hit single called?' And the spell was broken - whether because of the interruption or because of the forced contemplation of Peter Andre's singing I can't say. Writing courses are about a group of people. Writing itself is only about one. And sometimes, that contradiction doesn't work. Perhaps the irony is that the better the tutor, the more strongly felt the contradiction is. 

As engaging in a completely different way was Hannah Griffiths, a Faber editor who led the session on 27th May. She gave us the uplifting perspective that 'Synopses are rubbish. If they've read 60 pages of it and loved it, they're not going to reject it because of the synopsis. Unless it's rubbish. It can only be bad.' Having spent almost as long trying to write synopses of my novels as I did writing the novels, Hannah Griffiths instantly became my personal hero. That status was confirmed when she told us that she's publishing the new Barbara Kingsolver novel this November.

Louise was back from Skyros the following week. Ironically, we had a session on synopses. We imagined ourselves as commodities and wrote blurbs for our own novels, which is only slightly easier than writing synopses. 

Since last posting, I've had two more sessions with Maggie O'Farrell and E. Annie Proulx. And it is these that have meant that I'm 30,000 words in to my first draft. And that, my friends, is the point of writing courses. Identify one or two people whose work appeals to you and mentor each other outside of the course. Then the course becomes the luxury and the inevitable interruptions and irrelevances become funny stories rather than blood-boiling grievances.