Terry Pratchett and Marcel Proust - almost neighbours

This morning I emptied the bookshelves because we're redecorating. Here they are, stacked on my office floor like towers in a strange city, dark alleys weaving between them.

Moving books is a task I do alone because no one else in my family understands my absolute need for my books to be in strict alphabetical order.

You'll either understand this, or you won't.

If you don't, bear with me.

It means I can always find a book in minutes. It leads to happy and strange combinations of writers and titles side by side. And it represents my refusal to categorise my books beyond the fact that everything in the living room is prose fiction or drama - so I make happy discoveries every time I run my finger along the spines.

So Virginia Woolf and PG Wodehouse are chortling together on the bottom shelf.

Jane Austen is urging Paul Auster to lighten up a bit.

Leo Tolstoy's Anna and Colm Toibin's Eilis are having coffee, having met by accident on a street corner and recognised some glint of misery in each other's eyes.

Are you persuaded?

I don't care. I'm off to read a book off the floor.

Do creative writing courses work?

There's been a lot of bad press about creative writing courses recently, and I have to say that I sometimes agree: doing a course is no substitute for getting down to work and putting words on the page.

You don't need a course to be a great writer, obviously. Equally, just doing a creative writing course doesn't make you a decent writer.

But, but, but ... twenty years ago or so, I signed up for a creative writing BA at my local university, taught by Susan Wicks. I was a book editor and had never written more than teenage drivel before, and it was a transformative experience: among much else I wrote poems that weren't awful, comedy dialogue that was, and discovered that I wasn't at all bad at writing copy. I'd assumed everyone could do it if they tried, but it turns out they can't.

I dropped out of the course because I was about to have my second child and was working more or less full time, and simply couldn't pack in a weekly writing assignment.

A little while later, though, emboldened by what I'd learned, I gave up editing and became a copywriter.

I didn't write any more poems because I was rather busy, and not always very well and the copywriting took up all my creative juices. But another few years later, Sue asked if I'd like to join a small writing group that she was tutoring.

I wrote my first short story for that group. I'd written lots of opening lines before, but always lost my nerve before finishing them. Now I had a group demanding to know what happened, so I just had to plough on to that final line.

Now I might have written that story without the group - the bones of it had been inside me for ages, and I read widely and reasonably critically so I had an idea of how a story might go. But I would never have sent it out. It wouldn't have occurred to me that it might be good.

Sue told me to send it out, so I did because I trusted her judgement. It was rejected and she told me to try again, and The Warwick Review accepted it, and then Nick Royle asked to include it in that years' Best British Short Stories. I was stunned.

I stayed in the writing group for quite a while because it was a great place to try out new ideas on a supportive group of people, and the writing exercises taught me all sorts of skills and approaches it might have taken me years to unwrap on my own.

In the end, though, I decided to go it alone: I found I was writing for the group - neat little nuggets of fiction that would fit into the time allotted - and not for me.

I wrote more stories, a handful of poems, and a play. I learned to use my own judgement, to try new approaches, to take risks.

And I began to gather notes for a novel. I did research, I sketched characters, I wrote a trillion opening lines. And I never went further. Each time I started, I got scared and put it all back in the box and did something else. I wanted to get it right so much that I couldn't bear to get it wrong, and I needed to get it wrong to find out what was right.

So in September this year I signed up for the How to Write a Novel course with Stephen Carver at the Unthank School. It's an online course, just 12 weeks long, and it was exactly what I needed.

It's structured and demanding: we looked at openings, endings, character, voice, plot, themes,  perspective, pace, dialogue, descriptive writing, and more. We dived straight in: look at these openings, which work for you? Why? Choose a couple of books you like and examine their openings in detail. Now write five possible opening lines for your novel. What do the rest of the students reckon? Pick one and take it further ...

There was no time to draw breath, to allow doubt to creep in. I wrote lines, scenes, monologues, dialogues. I sketched out a plot, finally, and then drew it in more detail. I worked out why I wanted to write this story so much and threw a whole load of unnecessary stuff out.

And every single day I wrote a bit more of my novel. Up at the top of this entry is the current word count. As you can see, I'm a slow writer, but I've discovered that if I write about 500 words a day I make tangible progress. I can even write this many words on a day when I have no spare time - I can write them while the potatoes boil if it comes to it. I can always rewrite them. In fact I've already rewritten the whole thing, changing it from a third to a first person narrative. I've learned to play, make mistakes, not to worry. I've had huge fun.

I chose the Unthank School course for pragmatic reasons: it focussed on the novel, was online, flexible and short. It was amazingly good value. I didn't know Stephen but I learned long ago that having a big name tutor doesn't guarantee that a course will be good: how many famous writers can be bothered to create really great materials, week after week, and deliver them ego-free?

So thanks to all the tutors and fellow students I've worked with! I'm off to finish my novel now.

A silver carrot for a writer

This is a motivational talk to myself.

I saw a beautiful piece of silver jewellery yesterday. It's made by Charlotte Tabor of Kara Jewellery, and it's just what I've been hankering after, though I didn't know until I saw it. I don't have a lot of jewellery, glitz not really being my thing, but occasionally I see something that feels right and usually I walk away.

Even the thought of buying it felt frivolous and extravagant. Oughtn't I to be spending my hard-earned cash on serious things?

But I bought it. That's it, in the box.

And here's the thing. I've justified it to myself as a silver carrot. When things get tough in the novel I'm writing - which they will, and I'll want to throw it in the bin at some point, I know that - I'll look at the box and I'll keep going, because I'm only allowed to open the box when I've finished the first draft.

That's pathetic, isn't it? I should be totally driven at all times by a pure desire to write this novel. I bet Ali Smith and Kate Atkinson and all those writers I admire don't need to bribe themselves. The thing is, there are many moments when I find it hard to believe I can write this novel. I could churn out a huge heap of words and be finished by Christmas, but I don't want a huge heap of words. I want to write a novel I'll be proud of, and that means overcoming my fear of it not being good enough, every single day.

I spent a lot of my adult life learning not to make rules for myself - random ones that just make life harder. But sometimes, they work. Just making the rule can be enough. And of course, rules are there to be broken.

The ghost of a writer faces her fear

Photo by @robselfpierson 

That's me, reading my poem, 'Unknown Matron's Mallet' in the Foundling Museum last Sunday as part of a special torchlit evening with the writers' group 26.

Poets were dotted all through the museum, each of us reading a work inspired by an object there. I was almost last on the tour so I spent a while waiting in the semi-dark, surrounded by the names of long-dead foundling children and the tiny tokens their mothers left with them.

It wasn't spooky, though if there are ghosts in this world there must surely be many in Joseph Coram's hospital. I used to be terrified of ghosts - I wouldn't go into churchyards, lay awake dreading the arrival of the owner of the hand I could clearly see creeping over my windowsill, and knew, absolutely that the gatehouse of the house where I lodged in my early 20s was haunted by someone or something deeply unfriendly.

But my fear of ghosts seems to have faded. Have I become more rational? I'm not sure I have. Perhaps I'm naming my fears these days, facing them in my writing? I know that writing without fear doesn't work for me. If I'm comfortable with the people or themes I'm writing about, I'm bored and the story dies on its feet. I need not to understand, to want to know more, and to be just a bit afraid.

Writing a novel: I need new shoes

I'm about to write my first novel. And my shoes are in a sad state.

These two things are connected.

My shoes are wrecked after two years of walking in them almost every day. I walk because it keeps me sane, and because it's often the only way I can think of the next line I'm going to write. Most of the time the next line is copy for a client. Sometimes, though, I'm trying out a storyline, or some dialogue.

On the day I took this photo - just last week - we'd just scrambled down Pillar, an especially steep mountain in the Lake District. We'd reached the top in a 40 mile-an-hour wind and hail and ate our lunch huddled behind a stone wall. Then we scraped our way down to the valley, a rock fell on me, and we squelched through miles of bog when the path vanished. We carried on, because what else can you do? You have to get to the end of the path somehow.

This week I've begun to write a novel, and I suspect it's going to feel like that walk on Pillar - exhilarating when the clouds lift for a moment, revealing the glorious views and the rush of being up so high, but for the most part simply gruelling.

This novel has been waiting in my mind for years. It's time to quit fussing, admit I don't need new shoes, just a whole load of determination, and get writing.

(I've signed up for the Unthank School online novel writing course - if I ever come up for air, I'll let you know how it's going, but don't hold your breath. Or is it me who's holding her breath? I'm dazed and confused already.)

I should cut back the marigolds and write my blog

The marigolds along the edge of my veg patch have gone to seed. I've been meaning to cut them back for a couple of weeks, but something else always comes along.

My blog's been sitting here untended too, for much the same reason.

I've been busy, is what I say to myself. And it's true: I've been seeing plays, reading books, at festivals, singing in choirs, thinking about new stories, making notes.

But is that excuse enough? Writing my blog forces me to reflect on what I've been doing, to consider it and find words to describe how it's affected me. That's why I like writing it.

This time, though, I'm going to leave it all to go to seed, like my marigolds. Next year I'll have a whole new crop of marigolds, self-seeded in surprising places. I'm hoping my unreflected summer will set seed in unexpected places too.

A foundling: pulling a poem from almost nothing

I've been quiet here on the blog for a while, not because I've had nothing to say but because I've been saying it in different places.

And one such place is the Foundling Museum in London, where I have a poem.

Yes, a poem! I don't write poems, or at least I do but I've no confidence in them so they stay hidden in my notebook.

This time, though, I gave myself no choice. I joined a project called 26 Pairs of Eyes (I'm a member of the 26, an organisation for professional writers of all types), and committed to writing 62 words about an object I'd be allocated from the collection at the Founding Museum.

My poem, 'Unknown Matron's Mallet' went on display at the museum last week at a splendid VIP launch where the most splendid thing by far was Jacob Sam-La Rose and Toni Stuart's utterly beautiful and moving live performance of their own long poem about the museum.

And today my poem went live online and you can read it and the blog post I wrote for the 26 Pairs of Eyes site here.

Ahem. It has been drawn to my attention that some people can't see the green embedded links above. For you, here is the link:

LINK TO SARAH'S POEM.