THE STORY OF WRITING A NOVEL PART 2: LEARNING TO WRITE.

Can’t be bothered to read? Let me read for you.

Previously on The Story of Writing a Novel.…I got locked down at mum’s house. I wrote a book called Can of Worms. Agents rejected it. I moved to Oxford to learn how to write.

It was October, and I was walking into Oxford Brookes on my first day of my Master’s. What the hell was I doing here? I hated school. Why was I now paying to be back in a classroom at 30? Is creative writing even a subject? The playwright and creative writing tutor, Hanif Kureishi, said that creative writing courses were a waste of time and that most people who enrol are talentless. Was that me? Single, ageing, and talentless? If I were going to be a writer, surely I would have something published by now, even if it’d just be an article on BuzzFeed. Instead, all I had was an old Bloody Mary blog and a failed manuscript called Can of Worms. Sally Rooney, who was the same age as me, had already published three books. She was a writer. I was… well, I wasn’t sure what I was, except that I was a little lost on campus.

I went to reception to ask for help.

“Are you a teacher?” the student-child-man asked at the desk.

“No, I’m a student….A mature one.”

“Oh, right,” he said, rather judmentally, and then pointed me in the right direction.

Great start.

My elderly self eventually found the right classroom. There was a gaggle of equally nervous wannabe writers hovering by the door. They each held a laptop or a notebook close to their chests and were mumbling to one another, debating whether to let themselves into the classroom or wait for our lecturer. We decided as we were adults, we could be trusted to be in a classroom alone.

“Don’t quit your day job!” was the first thing the lecturer said as he came through the door. I got out my new notebook and wrote on the first line of the first page, “Get a day job.” He went on to explain, in brutal detail, that there was no money in writing. I thought of Hemingway and how he had a second home, so there must be some money kicking about. All I had to do was write as well as he did.

We were instructed to get out the first book on our reading list – Metamorphosis.

I had already been through a drama with my Metamorphosis book. As soon as I got the reading list, I ordered it to my new flat in Oxford. The delivery man took a photo of the parcel outside my door. When I returned home from my coffee, it was no longer by my door. I later found the parcel ripped into tiny shreds in the communal bin. It was going to be the first of many deliveries (a dressing gown and three pairs of Levi’s) that would end up missing. I reordered Metamorphosis and made sure I was home when it was delivered.

After a lengthy discussion about Kafka, the lecturer set our first writing exercise with a tight twenty-minute deadline. Write your own version of Metamorphosis. It was 2pm. My eyes were heavy. My quinoa was digesting. The classroom chair felt like a rock. My mind was as blank as the white page of my Microsoft document.

“Melanie woke up to find her arms were pigeon wings…” No. Backspace.

“Melanie woke up and flapped.” No. Backspace.

“On Monday morning, Melanie woke up to find she was a pigeon. Not a dove, a pigeon. One of those city ones with feathers the colour of oil who pecked at crumbs in Trafalgar Square.” Mmm. No. Backspace.

Huff. I felt irriated like an actress who was expected to perform without the right staging. How could I create under these crass lights? But my new peers seem to be managing just fine. All I could hear were twenty keyboards furiously tapping away. Tappy. Tappy. Tappy. I sunk in my chair. I was that talentless person.

Twenty minutes were up, and we had to put our writing up on the screen for everyone to read. Mortifying. Some had written a whole page; I had only managed to write a measly paragraph, which I thought was an okay paragraph, but my lecturer did not.

And it went on like this for the rest of the semester. I would present a piece of writing that I thought was good, and the lecturer would tell me how it wasn’t. As the weeks went by, I began to gather what it was that made my writing bad.

“Big verbs are a sign of an amateur writer.”

“Don’t describe the grass as manicured.”

“Don’t start your story with ‘I’.”

“New York can never be described as depressing.”

“If nobody laughs, it’s not funny.”

“How can he be hissing if there are no Ss in his words?”

“Your protagonist has no charisma.”

At the end of each semester, we had to submit a short story. I was given a Merit in both – not a bad mark, but not great. Grades have never stressed me out, especially in creative subjects, but I had a voice in my head. “Oh, Mary, Mary, Mary, how do you expect to be a published author if you can’t even score a high grade on a short story?“

I was learning a lot about myself as a writer. By the second semester, I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to be an edgy highbrow author who smoked and claimed to be inspired by James Joyce. “I just adore circular narratives.” I was going to be far less cool than that. I noticed that my best reactions were when I wrote witty things rather than dramatic things. I couldn’t describe landscapes like Carmen or write poetry like Ed. I did enjoy dialogue and quirky metaphors, though. So, I leaned into that, and it all started to feel a little easier.

It was good timing because we were about to start our final project, which required me to write the first 18,000 words of a novel. I sat down at my dining room table with A3 paper and started a mind map of ideas. One idea stuck: a comedy about sex drying up in a relationship. Genius.

I built from there. I created my protagonist, an awkward physics teacher named Amy Elman, and her fiancé, the gym bro, Josh Butters. I didn’t know it then, but I was going to spend the next three years of my life with Amy and Josh….