The final curtain

The six month course finished in July, which doesn't really explain why I haven't posted since June. I think, to be successful, this blog would have had to have been more open, less guarded about commenting on individuals and their writing. I would have had to be less sensitive to sensitivities. Some people wouldn't even allow their novels to be referred to. Some refused to let me use even first names (hence the idea of adopting an established writer's name for each member of the group.) At the end of the day, though, if you're on a writing course and can't even mention the nature of someone's work in progress - if you're sitting commenting on each other's work and are prevented from recording those comments - if you find yourself unable to describe personalities and tensions in anything other than a bright, sunny, aren't-we-all-wonderful way, you end up with a bland account that's not really a record of anything.

And that's a shame.

It's also spectacularly untrue to the terrible insecurity, the fears and the difficulties that are part and parcel of trying to forge a writing life. And as that's what most of us on this course were trying to do, it's ironic that the participants themselves should have put the kybosh on an open record. I don't think anyone would have stolen any of our plots, or started stalking us. I think they may have picked up some ideas about how to make the most of such an opportunity (the next six month course is starting in October, I think). I think we all might have been entertained a little more; I'd certainly have posted more often.

I also can't help wondering whether I should simply have written what I wanted to write and taken the fallout as and when it came. You read certain columnists and wonder how on earth they get away with the wholeheartedness with which they expose their partners, children, families... And yet they do, and people follow them assiduously. I can't do that. Maybe I was the wrong person for the blog.

Perhaps the first thing a writer has to do is to be prepared to be laid bare. It's taken me a long time to say, 'Yes, I've written four novels and am still trying to get published,' openly, when people ask what I do. It's hard not to start apologising for your writing and for your ambitions. It's easy to think you're being laughed at, that you don't deserve to be taken seriously. The biggest difference I have noticed between published writers and unpublished writers (I'm talking about the good unpublished writers here - on this course, me, Maggie O'Farrell, Monica Ali, E. Annie Proulx) is that the published ones tend to be someone (Alan Titchmarsh, Tony Parsons), or to be married to someone (Isabelle Fonseca, Rebecca Miller), or to be someone's child (Rebecca Miller, Sophie Hannah). That doesn't mean they shouldn't be published - it simply means that they've grown up with, or lived with, a sense of entitlement. Why shouldn't I have childcare and support so that I can write? Even before I've earned anything at it? Why not indeed. But it's not going to happen, and so my writing continues to be crammed in around my three (soon to be four) tiny children, my husband, my homemaking, my teaching. That's how it is.

And it is happening. The first draft of novel number five, The Ship will be finished by Christmas.

With that sense of entitlement - the lack of any need to justify themselves - I think the Faber Academy students would have taken it as read that strangers would be interested in their ideas, their progress, their thoughts on each other's work. My hands would not have been tied from the start. People would have been affirmed, encouraged, offended maybe - but they'd not have been neutral. They'd have responded, posted, argued, defended, attacked. It would have been fun.

I hope something comes of this course. I hope that someone finishes a great novel, and that the novel is published. I hope that the Faber Academy becomes a forum for aspirational, intelligent and driven unpublished writers. I hope that I'll be able to return one day as a tutor instead of a student. 

And Austin Mallon, I do remember you. You were one of the most original and interesting teenagers I ever taught. I hope you're still aspiring to something beyond Dorking and that you've thrown off the shackles of that parochial Surrey commuter idyll. Thank you for finding this blog.

The Faber Academy students' reading will be on 30th September; that'll be goodbye, and I reserve the right to post about it. Probably two months afterwards.