The Truth About (Some) Writers... #sorrynotsorry

 The bar staff were lively, messing around with a playlist of watered-down indie disco music from our teenage years – The Kooks, Razorlight, The Wombats. I started to feel pleasantly drunk and nostalgic. I imagined him when he was fourteen, in a sunny bedroom in the London suburbs, putting on ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’ for a pretty blonde girl with a snub-nose and rosebud lips. I giggled to myself: it was nice. I didn’t resent him. I liked that he came from a different world, a world I’d seen on E4 and Gurinder Chadha films but had never inhabited myself. I chided myself for my earlier cynicism, and as the beers went down I was really looking forward to sleeping with him.

Eventually, inevitably, we got to talking about our experiences as undergraduates.

‘Yeah, I mean, I was part of a couple of creative writing societies in my, sort of, second year and, you know, it was fine, but I just don’t find that environment particularly sort of, didactic in a helpful way?’ said Seb.

I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he seemed to be taking a pop out of Durham’s ‘LitSoc’, which was fine by me. I was nicely drunk by now: the happy, trusting kind of drunk that makes you feel like everything you have to say will resonate with the other person so completely they’ll think you’re reading their mind.

 ‘Oh fuck, god, creative writing classes,’ I agreed. ‘Here’s something I noticed when I was doing creative writing classes at uni, right: there are certain phrases that, when people use them in their prose, their readers automatically think it’s fucking great. So, not-very-good writers have stock ‘this-is-really-good-writing’ phrases that allow them to hoodwink the undiscerning masses into thinking they have talent. Oh, let me think of one, right… Right, so if they’re writing a sex scene, and it’s a blowjob, rather than write, ‘I sucked him off for a bit,’ they’ll write, ‘I trailed my tongue down the length of him,’ or, you know, ‘he pushed inside me’ becomes ‘he moved until his full length was inside me.’ People read this and think, holy shit that’s fucking brilliant. Or, rather than ‘she had her hair up in ponytail,’ they’ll write, ‘her hair was piled high on top of her head.’ God, I mean, I love writing, I want it to be part of my life, but don’t you think so many people who do it are such knobs.

I knew people at uni who were into writing, and that whole ‘arts-admin’ kind of scene – not very nice people, a lot of them… some of them got stuff published, some are about to, some never will, but they’re all bloody ‘friends’ with each other, Tweeting each other in support of each other’s fucking massive manuscripts that they claim to have read, supportively, in a day!? And I’m seeing this, thinking, am I missing something here? You’re writing your own novel - how the fucking fuck do you have time to read all your ‘friends’’ unpublished manuscripts? It screams of paranoia to me, it just seems really transparent: I read it just to check it wasn’t better than mine, and it wasn’t, so now I’m safe to do a patronising Tweet about it because it’ll never get published, unlike my novel, which is excellent.

Or, you know, like, writers who arrange erotic literature nights when it’s totally obvious that they’re completely fucking repressed, and you’re going, am I the only one who can see that this person is TOTALLY FUCKING REPRESSED?! Or when people say to you, you have to write out all the crap first before you get somewhere, let it all spew out of you, and only one tiny part of that spew will be any good, so you have to start again with just that bit. Edit, edit, edit. A lot of it will have to go, they say. Okay, but what if everything I write and want to keep is what everyone else would call the warm-up, and get rid of?

 And bios! My friend got some of her writing published in an anthology and they asked her to write a bio and she wrote, you know, went to uni at bla-bla and then did bla-bla and lives in bla-bla. So when the anthology came out we looked at the bio pages and they all had stuff like, ‘after surviving two years of Tindering in Newcastle, Jerome felt it was only right (and in the interests of public welfare, ho ho!) for him to share his experiences,’ and we’re like, fuck’s sake Jerome! You wrote that about yourself! You total prick! It’s this weird suspension of disbelief thing - are we all supposed to pretend that someone has written that about Jerome, like, has he got some sort of superfan who writes his bios for him at this very very fucking fledgling stage of his career—’

Seb, I realised, was staring at me blankly.