This might not seem very topical in the middle of May, but New Year’s resolutions are supposed to last for the whole year - not that I take them seriously.

The year I’m referring to was the one that marked my forty-ninth birthday and it seemed like a good time for reflecting on what I’d made of my life so far, and, more importantly for looking at what might lie ahead. (Apart from death, of course - which could arrive unannounced for anyone, any day of any year.)

Old age was a different matter. I’d already noticed how it shifted its goal posts further back with every decade. Nonetheless, putting my head in a bucket of sand wasn’t the most helpful position from which to plan the rest of my life. One thing I did know was: as you grow older you have to run to keep up with yourself – in other words, to stay at the same level of physical and mental fitness, more effort is required.
So that year, my resolution was to look after my inner and my outer self. After years of being a happy homemaker and part-time bread-winner (not to speak of the occasional bread-making) I was going to do some things that I’d always wanted to do for myself. Top of my list was a course with the Arvon Foundation.

The second on the list was as much for my outer as my inner self: a cheap and cheerful holiday in the sun – sun that could be relied on to shine every day, unlike the May-time Breton sun, which played hide and seek with the clouds for the whole of our annual family camping fortnight. Yes, I had enjoyed these, but it was time for a change.

Now, something more enduring for my outer self: I’d always loved walking, but had never done much in the way of strenuous exercise. I joined the gym at the nearby council leisure centre, and got fitter than I’d been in my 20s and 30s.

All this led to other thoughts about aging, and how I might cope with the eventual, inevitable decline. Some things maybe beyond the sheer will of the individual to avoid – illnesses and loss of mental and physical faculties, but I’d decided that rather than sit back and wait for this to happen, when I reached what might count as old age (late seventies perhaps, or early eighties?) I would found a society for like-minded people who would rather go out with a bang than a whimper.

I was only half joking when I told my friends that I’d start up a club for anyone who wanted to join me in taking up any dangerous or extreme sport they’d never dared to try in their youth or middle age. I’d call it The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society.
(How this became the title of my first published novel is yet another story)

(This post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)

And life went on, and real life caught up with me at last, and I had to take on teaching more adult literacy courses, and then several hours a week supporting the Adult Basic Education Co-ordinator, and then a permanent part-time management post, which left little spare time for the writing that wasn’t getting me anywhere, except for the enjoyment and the learning and the honing of my skills. But none of that was helping to support the increasing expenses involved in bringing up children through their pre-teens and teenage years.

That stage of having the writing pushed onto the back boiler probably did my craft a deal of good. Writing can’t take place in a vacuum, and I was lucky enough, in those days, to actually love my work, both the teaching, and the interviewing of new students coming forward in trepidation to ask for help with their reading and writing. Actually, it was a joy to help so many people to put their thoughts and stories onto paper, regardless of the state of their punctuation and spelling – I could tell, within a few minutes of listening to someone at the initial interview, when I had a ‘real writer’ in the room.

Tape recorders were useful tools for those who had lots to say, but whose writing skills were still in the embryo stage. One of the sayings of the original ‘Right to Read’ scheme, from which the ABE service developed, was ‘ A beginner reader is not a beginner thinker.’ To see the look on people’s faces when they realised that they were being listened to – that what they said was valuable and interesting – that they weren’t being looked at as ‘thick’, it used to fill me with a mixture of pleasure at their enjoyment, and inner rage at what our education system had done to them.

The courage and persistence of so many of them was and still is an inspiration for me.

(This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this)

My mother was one of the big influences on me as a writer – she was an expert story teller of tales for children. At the time, we didn’t realise that the reason why she insisted it was time for us to go to sleep wasn’t necessarily anything to do with her wish for a bit of peace and quiet before her own bedtime, or that she was deliberately leaving the main characters in an almost impossible situation, in order to whet our appetites for the next instalment, no, it was more likely that she needed time to work out what was going to happen next .

So it was natural for me to make up stories for my two children. And one story grew and grew so long that they insisted I should write it down. So I did. And after school I had to read them the next chapter, and the next, till it had reached 40,000 words, which happened to be the end of the story, and what felt to me like the right length for a children’s novel .
In spite of being a creative writing tutor, my ignorance about the publishing world knew no bounds. It was a bit late to look in the Writers & Artists Year Book to see what they said about age groups and required lengths according to these clearly demarcated boundaries.

So Mermaid’s Rock (later re-written and re-named The Tide Machines of Mermaid’s Rock ) earned lots of rejections slips too, though not as many as ‘A Head for Heights’, because there didn’t seem to be as many agents and publishers who handled fiction for children. And I’d illustrated it with my own drawings too! As I later discovered, another no-no. Still, my children loved it – as did several of my nieces and nephews.

One of these days, I might take another look at it and see if I might be able to do something with it.

(This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this)

There’d been lots of other writing-related developments in the twenty years between writing that story and launching my published novel. There were many more ‘boomerang’ short stories and I thought I was becoming quite hardened to rejection. Little did I know that I was still a mere novice in the art of, ‘Oh well. Maybe next time…’

Perhaps it was that minor success which gave me the impetus to write a full length novel – that, and all the ‘How to Write’ books I was reading in order to help ‘my’ creative writing students.

Whoever first said, ‘Ignorance is bliss,’ was dead right. In spite of my B.A. Hons in Eng Lit, followed in later years by everything I’d learned from my students’ work, and from reading all those books about writing, I was virtually clueless.

In spite of that, or maybe because of it, I revelled in the experience of working on a novel. Instead of facing regular blank starts as I struggled with the plot of another short story, or tried in vain to catch the vague feelings that were hovering out of reach above the part of my brain marked ‘Poetry’, my ‘novel’ was writing itself.

Somehow it managed to uncover the peaks and troughs in my generally uneventful life, and shape these, (together with a few imagined disappointments, joys and expectations) into something like a coherent whole: approximately 70, 000 words of a novel, the title of which, I’d taken from that short story, A Head for Heights.

So, armed with my ignorance, and my first Writers & Artists Year Book, I set out on the long hunt for an agent. Even now, that hunt goes on. Or, to be more accurate, has only just been halted – but I’ll come to that later.

A lot has changed in the publishing world since then – For a start, the NET book agreement still held good – not that I had the least idea of what that meant for authors.

In those days, some agents were prepared to nurture talented new writers, even if their first published novel stood only a small chance of making much money for anyone. They could afford to be patient, because they knew that (in those far-off, happy days) commissioning editors had some level of autonomy, and could trust their own judgement in spotting a promising writer, whose big success might not materialise until their second or third novel.

I can now appreciate the handwritten letter from one agent who said that while H for H was not for them, she’d be happy for me to send her my next novel. My next novel!! Didn’t she know that a novel took at least a whole year to write – that it wasn’t a matter scribbling down yet another short story, or a twenty line poem. This was bulky stuff. Serious work. And that woman could glibly refer to ‘my next novel’!

Some time later (several years, in fact) I was profoundly thankful that it hadn’t been published. It was, as the astute agent had seen, a ‘bottom drawer’ novel – an apprentice piece, a hotchpotch of semi-autobiography. It also demonstrated that, in patches, I could write well, but it wasn’t something I’d want to have my name attached to.

(This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this)

Clarissa was able to maintain a civilised exterior when she came to stay with us, but I knew that her condition was worsening rapidly – it was becoming increasingly worrying for all her friends. And that was what my story was about. The title, A Head for Heights, referred to an episode at school when we’d climbed out onto the school roof and hoisted a skull and crossbones flag, while a visiting group of priests on some kind of conference were strolling around the grounds. But really, it was about the ‘me’ character’s worry about the ‘Clarissa’ character’s decline.

I’ve still got the cutting from the local paper about that prize-winning story – I vividly remember how excited I was when they sent a photographer to my house. The title of the prize-winning story made the headline of the article, and it made me sound quite professional, until the final ‘quote’, which had definitely not emerged from my lips, ‘I want to be a famous novelist one day!’

And here is the picture from the newspaper cutting. I discovered it a few years ago.

At that stage, I hadn’t seriously decided to write a novel, let alone dream of having one published, though that would have seemed more likely at that time than the major transformation in Clarissa’s life which began a couple of years later when she entered Promis, the Recovery Centre in Kent.

I don’t think either of us would have believed what was in store for me in October 2005, when my novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia was launched at the Orange Studio during the Birmingham Book Festival (the descendant of that same BRMB Readers and Writers Festival ).

It was thanks to Clarissa’s new position in life that I was able to have such a high profile venue for this launch. Her story was even more amazing: there she was, a very public figure, having dragged herself back from the brink of drunken oblivion to build a whole new career for herself as a famous cook, TV presenter, and champion of countryside pursuits, among numerous other occupations and talents (including, by that stage, having 9 or 10 published books to her name) .

So much for my worries about her survival, expressed in that story twenty years earlier.

This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this

My teaching and learning continued, and my pile of rejection letters grew, and then one day another phone call brought some exciting news – It was from the competition organiser of the Birmingham Readers and Writers Festival – I’d entered for the short story category, and the man from BRMB radio station was telling me that my story, A Head for Heights had won fourth prize – my first ever recognition as a writer! The smile on my face lasted hours.

The subject of my story was one that would provide yet another strange link across the years. My best friend at school was a skinny girl with thin straggly hair and an occasional Australian accent. She’d turned up at our convent boarding school halfway through the year, and, unlike the rest of our class, wore actual nylon stockings instead of knee-length socks. (I discovered later, after we’d become friends, that her mother had been misinformed by the woman in Harrods school uniforms department about the regulations for the required clothing in the different years ). This put her at an added disadvantage, as it made her look like a sissy, choosing to subject herself to the discomfort of suspender belts a whole year before it was absolutely necessary, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, she had an unusual Christian name and a double-barrelled surname – I mean, I ask you, Clarissa Dickson Wright!

She was adopted by a kindly group of girls, who took her under their wings and showed her the ropes, but after a few weeks, one of them approached me and asked if Clarissa could join our small gang instead, as she was too naughty for them, and that was it – we’ve supported each other through the ups and downs of our lives ever since.

So, back to my prize winning story, which features a character based on my friend – It’s no secret to anyone who’s ever shown the slightest interest in Clarissa since she became famous that she’s a recovering alcoholic and that before she went into a treatment centre she’d had several years of slow decline. She continued to visit us throughout those years, and was dearly loved by my two children, her godchildren, who had no idea of what was happening to her. They both took for granted her store of green Gordon’s bottles that she brought with her whenever she visited, and they’d compete with each other to be the first to pour her tonic and fetch the ice cubes from the freezer.

There was one occasion at the pre-school playgroup when I sensed some strange looks from one or two of the helpers. I was later enlightened when I was told about my three year old’s offering of a doll’s size plastic cup and saucer to a visiting playgroup leader, with the words, ‘Would you like a gin and tonic?’

(This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this)

It was during my teaching experience in Dublin – when I had to help a particularly keen group of sixth form girls to explore the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - that I first realised I was learning as much from my students as they were from me. That’s been the case all through my teaching life, and still is.

One of the things I enjoy about my day-job of working with adults who want to improve their literacy skills, is the way it helps me to see teaching and learning (at any level) as part of the same continuum line.

I love the way subjects and activities and bits of learning come together in the most unexpected ways - there I was last month, in that mountain village in Spain, reflecting on my writing life and wondering what direction it’ll take now, and I pick up that book about the early years of the Arvon Foundation,with its links to the start of my writing life.

I skimmed through enough of that book to see that it says succinctly a lot of what I’ve learned about writing (and life in general) over the intervening decades. One thing The Arvon Foundation seemed to have set out to achieve was to do away with the boundary line between ‘writers’ and ‘people who want to be writers’. The Memoir states that Arvon’s ‘door is open to anyone interested in exploring their gift to write.’

So, who’s to say if another person has a ‘gift to write’ or not? I’m not suggesting that no piece of writing can be judged more effective than another – I do think there are some objective standards that can be used as benchmarks – Mmm… maybe I’m venturing into dodgy territory, here - the word ‘objective’ doesn’t fit comfortably with judgements of creative work – I think it’s virtually impossible to keep subjectivity at bay. But discussions like that could go on forever –

And when I read that sentence again (‘anyone interested in exploring their gift to write’) I realise it’s the individual’s exploration that’s the crucial thing.

I’ve always disliked the phrase ‘wannabee writers’, as if the mere fact of having been published makes some people ‘real writers’ while the huge numbers of un-published writers, (or, worse still in some people’s eyes, self-published writers), aren’t worthy of that name.

As a writer (and even more so after having a novel published) I’ve wondered about what writers themselves count as ‘success’, so I was interested to read John Moat’s chapter on ‘Notes for Course Tutors’. This states that the outcome for the student isn’t the concern of Arvon, or the tutor. The important thing is whether it was what the student wanted to write, and was written in the understanding that ‘everything matters’, be it a distinctive secret journal, or a best-seller.

I like that.

(This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this)

Before I could get round to visiting the library as a first step in finding a creative writing course, I was phoned by the manager of a nearby Adult Education Centre, ‘I found your contact details from the list of English tutors. We’ve got a flourishing creative writing course on Monday evenings, but the tutor has had to pull out, so we need someone to take over for next term….’

After an initial hesitation, I thought, Well, why not be paid as a tutor, instead of forking out money to be taught?

I wasn’t deceiving anyone – I never pretended to be a published writer, and after all, I was a qualified school teacher of English, with a degree in Eng Lit from Trinity College Dublin (for what that was worth!) At school and even at university, I’d learned how to pass exams, but not how to think for myself.

It wasn’t until I’d begun my first job, teaching in a girls’ school in North Dublin – with no time to browse bookshops and libraries for other people’s interpretations of the relevant set books - that I had to use my own brain and think things out for myself.

Even so, the idea of teaching creative writing to mature adults was growing increasingly daunting as November slipped into December. How was I going to plan for a whole term’s worth of relevant instruction? What concrete information could I offer these people that they didn’t already know?

Here’s where John Moat comes in (together with co-author, John Fairfax) – their book The Way to Write was packed with inspiring and practical advice for writers and proved to be the most useful of the books I plundered for ideas on what to teach.

The introductory essay, written by Ted Hughes, was mainly about an organisation that ran residential writing courses. It sounded inspiring, and just what I needed at that time. It was called The Arvon Foundation.

‘One day,’ I promised myself, ‘When the children are old enough, and I’m earning more, I’ll go one of those courses.’

It wasn’t till years later that I managed to do this. As it turned out, that course changed my life.

I decided to start this blog because I wanted to share, with anyone who’s interested in writing matters, a little of what I’ve learned about the craft of writing over 25 years or so, and the highs and lows of these experiences – as well as giving updates about my novels and poetry, and any future talks or readings I’ll be doing.

I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I was staying in Relleu, an (almost) unspoilt mountain village in Spain. I’d enrolled on a poetry course run by Penelope Shuttle and decided to arrive a week early to give myself time to focus on my writing.

The weather was much colder than I’d expected - and wetter. For this first week, I’d rented a flat from the owners of Almaserra Vella, the beautiful house where ‘my’ course would be held.

Half way through the second morning, I realised that the heavy clouds were fraying at the edges, revealing patches of brilliant blue. I was just about to go out for a walk, when my eye was caught by the title of a book on a shelf nearby: The Founding of Arvon – A Memoir of the Early Years of the Arvon Foundation by John Moat.

This might not sound very exciting to you, but it seemed like a good omen to me, at a watershed in my writing ‘career’. That book was a direct link back across more than two decades, to when I’d first started writing seriously. My second child had just started school, and I was staving off the day when I’d have to take on more work. Two evenings a week of Adult Literacy classes didn’t bring home much extra money, but I wanted to keep the day times free to develop my writing.

Becoming ‘a writer’ was proving harder than I’d thought. The stories I was sending off to Radio 4 for their ‘morning story’ slot returned with the regularity of homing pigeons. By mid-November, it was becoming clear that I needed some impartial feedback, so I decided to look around for a creative writing course.

At that stage, I’d never heard of the Arvon Foundation – or any other residential writing courses, and even if I had, there was no way I could have afforded to spend that kind of money on myself. I knew that my (very part-time) employer, Birmingham Adult Education Service, provided weekly courses in all sorts of subjects, including Creative Writing, for a relatively modest fee. With any luck, there’d be a course nearby that I could join the following term.

There was a course, but not in quite the way that I’d expected.