Always judge a book by its cover! What I learned teaching life-writing lessons
This summer I became a teacher, which would have sat badly with all the teachers who told me I’d never amount to anything. I’ve been teaching life writing all over the place: bouji retreats, online classes, university courses and festivals. A lesser mind would buckle under the responsibility of the job, the fear of having nothing to say. But as I remind the sallow face in the mirror every morning as I slip a Berocca under each eyelid: baby’s gotta make that cheddar. Also baby’s gotta get significantly better at paperwork.
I love my subject, which helps. The confessional form is the genre de nos jours. It’s elastic, taking in literary memoir, journalling, personal essays, even autofiction and Instagram captions. Of course, any life in writing is lucrative and glamorous. As I upcycle a heap of final-demand energy bills into makeshift toilet paper, I rally.
So what are the crucial lessons an aspiring scribe might learn from me, the first and best writer of my generation? My first tip is obvious: start with a title. You can always judge a book by its cover, because that is where they keep the title. Nineties actors’ autobiographies nail them (see Stori Telling by Tori Spelling, Coreyography by Corey Feldman, Don’t Hassel the Hoff by David Hasselhoff. Spare by Prince Harry is good, too – credit where it’s due). Next, you will need to experience debilitating trauma or addiction issues. Partly for material, mostly to get a good title (see Pour Me by AA Gill, Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher). If you don’t have any, go out and get some.
Other teachers may tell you that the best writing exhibits something called empathy. Perhaps they think art is a way to grapple with authenticity, and thereby make a joyful pact with life itself. Rubbish. Writing is a way to settle old scores. If someone pulled your pants down in PE 28 years ago, now’s the time to bury them.
Sadly, I don’t get to fire half of the arrows in my quiver. That’s because there is one internal question that consumes most students’ time: who cares? “Who cares?” is a comfortably paralysing futon bed that unpacks into a litany of vicious self-talk. “Who are you to write about yourself?” it hisses. Nothing interesting ever happened to you. Or it has, and you’re too talentless to do it justice. Either way no one would read it, so what’s the point?
I understand. I first wrote in the first person not because I was a fan of myself, but because there was no other territory that was mine. No country I belonged to. No skill, or special identity. All I could lay claim to was a single vertical mark; the thinnest rupture between the whiteness of nothing, and the darkness of something. I kept making that mark, until words fell into line behind it, and a story above them. And it surprised me.
It’s a pervasive belief that only important people get to tell their story. It doesn’t help that cricketers and pop stars automatically knock books out, books that they didn’t write, containing scintillating vignettes about how they never liked spiders, but always loved to sing. Other disciplines, like plumbing, don’t let anyone have a go because they fancy it. Olly Murs doesn’t have his own brand of PVC push-fit piping. Though weirdly I can imagine this.
Nonetheless, we are all instinctively writers to some degree. As for having a story, we already relate through narrative, if only over a pint and packet of crisps. We all have a point of view, a problem, various beliefs. We have people we wish to protect, impossible
situations, enemies who test us. And we all change. Stories need nothing else. All you have to add is paper.
I do sense a disdain in the literary world; an assumption that life writing involves less artistry, or that a preoccupation with one’s feelings is trivial. There may be a glancing interest if some seventh-tier aristocrat has scaled a mountain, or founded a FTSE 500 company. But I care far more for the granularity of ordinary lives – the details of how people fall in love, or experience childhood, what they do with pain. This is the privilege of a life-writing circle. You learn things it might take a close friend decades to share. No one is ordinary when you get to know them. Ultimately, people are deeply strange. They have underground rivers of strangeness, rivers that carry the odd silt of their particular being. Slather me in it, bathe me in beauty.
Don’t wait to feel empowered to write. That’s like waiting on muscles to lift weights. Be like Hemingway. Writing his memoir A Moveable Feast (poor title – digestion-wise, it’s better to eat sitting down), Papa countered his creative block by advising himself he only ever need write one sentence. So write the simplest, truest thing you know about yourself. There’ll be another sentence behind it, I promise. Now if you’ll excuse me, baby’s gotta make cheddar. On a cracker. And call it dinner.