Most creative writing classes start off with the grisled instructor telling those assembled to back out while they can. If you can do anything else, you should. But no one leaves. At least until the first critique comes back and that percentage that think they’re the next Jack Kerouac and don’t need to read or be edited throw a hissy fit and storm out. Anyway, Kennedy thinks it’s a waste of time, trying to turn people off “the writing life” (whatever the hell that is…) I agree. My suggestion is that we save our breath and slowly stockpile sarin gas for the day when we get them all assembled in one room and… wait, I’ve said too much…

Naturally, I don’t believe anyone will be deterred by my mad-eyed rantings. Once somebody wants to write it’s almost impossible to stop them without also killing them to some significant degree. Nothing beats that raging delight at three in the morning when sentence number 15 finally agrees to do what you want, and never has banging wiggly marks on to a computer screen seemed so heroic – even if you’re simply ensuring that the orthopaedic surgeon ravishing your senior nurse in the sluice room doesn’t seem implausibly limber and can meanwhile reawaken echoes of that summer afternoon with her funny uncle … And if you think you might actually be doing some good, amusing someone other than yourself – making them less lonely, more alive, more informed – well, you’re just not going to chuck that over in favour of crafting, long walks and a quiet life. Hence the number of regimes and leaders who have discovered that killing writers until they are entirely dead is a highly effective method of slowing literary output. And may angels and ministers of grace preserve the students and indeed myself from any shades of that. We may feel hard done by, but we’re not doing that badly – for individuals trapped in a society intent upon eating its own tongue.