I haven’t been great about blogging lately (I haven’t been great about writing lately), but I think my life has actually gone mad, or else merged with someone else’s. I keep having the sensation that I’m swimming through my days. The water is viscous but beautiful; it’s a slow going and dreamlike route through the week.

Sunday, for instance. Which started with a church and ended with Blondie – from Mary to “Maria” in just a few hours.

We spent the morning in Christ Church Cathedral for a christening. I’d never been to a christening before. We were running late as always and my shoes had rubbed the side of my foot raw. Irrationally I fretted over the right way to behave. I worried the blood from the blister marked me out as an impostor amongst the Christian lambs. Churches always make me feel this way. I am awed by the architecture, the dark alcoves, the stained glass and the weight of history, but the rigidity of the ceremony – more than that, the implication of a shared knowledge – gives me the same anxieties that being at a party full of people I don’t know does. I don’t know what to do or not do, where to go or not go, and the insecure part of me is like a child who wants to be part of a club she doesn’t belong to. Everyone else is doing it so why can’t I?

We sang hymns. I can read music and I can read words but I can’t do both at the same time. I sing quietly because I still don’t know the rhythms of all these songs, can’t anticipate the collective extra breath that everyone will take at the start of a new line.

In front of me sat a little girl with long blond hair, a pink dress, and pink shoes. While the rest of us rose and sat like a bunch of finely-dressed, mad meercats, sticking our heads up to try to see the choir, then bending them in prayer, she pored over a book. Her hair spilled into her face and she pushed it back impatiently and got through several chapters of something by Enid Blyton. That’s a club I could belong to; but the funny thing is that for all the freedoms adulthood grants you, it also prohibits so much.

And then there was a sudden moment, like a breath between lines of a hymn, full of joy. Behind us were babies laughing and crying and toddlers squirming. Up ahead, as the deacon poured water into the bowl, our friends’ ten-month old son grinned before the entire congregation. He put his fingers into the water, miming the symbolic action. People laughed. Yes, okay, I thought. So we’re in a church but we can laugh. This is good. He was welcomed. He is welcome. (Later he sat on his mother’s lap, eating his mushy lunch, smiling broadly. I remember him as a 5-pound newborn, too fragile to hold up his own head, wearing a generic expression of sleepiness and hunger.)

We refused communion. “Oh, I’m hungry, but not that hungry,” we joked, the Man and I, quietly to ourselves – still reverent even in irreverence. Outside we stood overlooking the quad. That’s the fountain they kept putting Anthony Blanche into, I said. I walked up to the fountain, peered past its lily-pads, into the blackness. Dark fish, mouths gaping, came to the surface, disappeared again. A few bright orange ones flicked their bodies. No, I wouldn’t like to be dropped in there, not amongst the scaly bodies. So that’s fine; look up, at Tom Tower gleaming handsomely, coloured like a honeycomb.

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Then we were backstage at a Blondie gig in Gloucestershire. Things I never knew: security guards smile at you when you have a special wristband. They look relieved that they are not going to have to tell you off for anything. One of them even gave me earplugs so I could sit nestled up at the base of the stage without losing my hearing.

Debbie Harry wore a black kilt and put the microphone up and 6,000 people sang the chorus to “Maria” with her. I remember the year that song came out and I remember buying No Exit and listening to it over and over again in my CD player. I particularly remember that I wore a blue jumper with a white stripe across it often then.

We drove back with Little Fish in their tour van. I had a cider and then, half-asleep, I sort of sat there just thinking: the more you look at your own history the more interesting it becomes – not in a self-obsessed, navel-gazing way, but in that suddenly you become detached from it. You can see it from an outsider/insider space, an overlap of perspectives. It’s both harder and easier to write about. Am I penning fictions every time I remember something on paper? Yes, of course, in a way.

We got back to Oxford after midnight; it was a hushed, special Sunday darkness. No one around, not even the drunks. We stopped for chicken kebabs. Hunger seemed inconvenient at such an hour but I had reached a point in the night where it was impossible not to eat. As if everything might be erased by sleep, unless sustenance was first obtained.

Nothing was erased by sleep and we woke up tired and smiling.

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It’s nearly midnight but something about the quality of light puts me in mind of an earlier hour. It doesn’t feel fully dark yet. Perhaps it’s the warmth. My espadrilles make no noise on the walk home. I can see the flashes of people’s televisions, a few late night conversations over bottles of wine. Everyone seems civilised and subdued. Hush, says the moon, and we obey. The pubs are shut.

In the mirror I’m startled to realise that the brightness in my cheeks is actually sunburn; I’ve caught the sun today, somewhere on my walks from town and back, to a friend’s place for dinner where we sat in pools of twilight, candles staining our eyes with bright spots.

I wear a floral print dress. It’s ’40s, almost-frumpy, which fits my mood. My hair is messy. The glamour is in the not-glamour, or so I tell myself. The slightly sunburnt nose; I could get used to the way this weather makes me feel.

Last night was the summer solstice. A year ago I was with my mother in Bath. This year we celebrated, without meaning to, by listening to Stornoway in a hot, cramped upstairs room. They sang:

Oh and it’s a Monday night in June
And I should be sleeping
But it’s so damn warm inside
I’m in the garden dreaming

It was a Monday night in June. I should have been sleeping. It was so warm inside. And after, we lay dreaming with the window open.

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Here we are in that irresistible space between Spring and Summer. Everything smells good. The garden is a sea of green; the trees have shed their blossoms all over the table we used to sometimes eat dinner at on a hot night in August. We haven’t maintained the garden very well – the grass is knee high- but then, we haven’t maintained much else very well either. I have this sense that I’m sprinting to catch up with myself. We did the dishes just the other day, but now the cups of stale tea and dirty bowls have piled up again, although neither of us has been in the house much these past few weeks. Even my bicycle, yesterday, couldn’t cope; halfway down the High Street the chain fell off and I walked the rest of the way home with it limping along beside me.

I was in heels and the going was slow, but maybe this is good.

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Writers have it pretty hard. I’m not talking about money or status or the sheer hassle of it all – though there’s that too. I’m talking about the way in which they are talked about. To look at the discussion around writers and writing as a writer is to see yourself adrift in a sea of impossibility.

Literature – by which I only mean consumable words, be they in books or articles or blog posts – polarises people, and because it’s consumed so voraciously, so constantly, and so publicly, opinions are expressed vociferously, and often as articulation of fact, not belief.

The question as a writer – and indeed as a consumer of writing – becomes: who do you trust? The critics who say writing should be about writing? The critics who say that it’s all about telling a damn good story? The critics who say it’s all about message and meaning? Or or the ones who say a piece of writing must have all of these components, and more?

Surely it shouldn’t matter – write what you want, says the voice of reason, and let the world be judge only after – but the truth of it is that it does matter. I’ve written about this before. It’s easy, even natural, to feel compelled to take some opinion or advice under consideration. No man is an island, as the saying goes, and what another man feels can be integral to the development of a piece of writing. The difficulty comes in discerning what, after all that, you actually feel about your own work. The storm that results when two opposing opinions converge upon a paragraph of yours obfuscates your own beliefs.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. In a Books blog post on the Guardian website from 13th May, Andrew Gallix examines the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, writing, “The reality of any work of art is its form, and to separate style from substance is to ‘remove the novel from the realm of art’. Art, Robbe-Grillet reminds us, is not just a pretty way of presenting a message: it is the message” (a sentiment which calls to mind Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message”). In this case, simply by choosing to write, the author is making a statement – and a commitment to that statement.

Gallix ends his piece with these thoughts: “Whenever an author envisages a future book, ‘it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind,’ which leads Robbe-Grillet to state – provocatively – that ‘the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of saying.’ Creative writing classes should always start and end on that note.”

There are several interesting points in these concluding sentences, the most obvious of which is Robbe-Grillet’s “provocative” suggestion that writing itself – not the message or the story – is the true form of art. I’m not sure how provocative this is really – when we read books and poems in school, aren’t we (ideally) taught to look at phrasing, structure, word choice? Literary criticism itself rarely begins with what an author is saying, but rather discovers what the author is saying by first investigating the author’s method – Joyce’s stream of consciousness, for instance, becomes a window into his work.

But it is provocative enough – even radical – in the context of popular culture. Story is often heralded as the be-all-and-end-all of “good” writing (good writing on its own being empty of meaning), or at least publishable writing. So perhaps to be reminded of Robbe-Grillet’s statement that “the genuine writer has nothing to say” is alarming indeed, for it indicates that we have lost our sense of what makes a novel a novel, or even a poem a poem or an essay an essay.

The key is in the second part of the assertion, that, “He [the genuine writer] has only a way of saying.” A way of saying. Superficially, a voice. But contained in that way of saying, that voice, is much more. Meaning, story, urgency. Recently I read a review in the Observer. “There are poets who have nothing to say but a feeling for words,” begins the the author. “There are poets who have something to say but no capacity to say it. And then, rarely, you read poems…that have a tremendous, unshowy intent. The feeling is that they needed to be written.” As one commentator on Gallix’s piece writes, “Style over substance? Affect over story? Count me out.”

For my part, I certainly would not be inclined to argue that we should write simply because we like the sound of our own voices, or that we find a particular phrase too pretty not to share – but to ignore the importance of pretty phrases in the context of a writer’s way of saying would be an enormous shame, because it would be to ignore the medium entirely.

A further interesting point in Gallix’s conclusion comes with the seemingly arbitrary inclusion of “creative writing classes” in his final sentence. In a way it reads as a glib jab at those would-be writers who want to “improve their craft” – a phrase which, by the way, I generally despise, but feel is appropriate here. Certainly the very first commentator on the post, who simply quotes Gallix’s “creative writing classes should always start and end on that note” and adds, “can’t they just end?”, seems to have read it that way. This interpretation seems to be validated by Gallix’s own response to the aforementioned comment. “That would be a more radical solution!”, he writes.

The meaning is appropriately ambiguous – radical in a positive or negative way? a solution to what? – but it does bring up some interesting ideas about the study of writing itself. Classes and courses around creative writing are easy to dismiss as pointless, even harmful. “Can’t they just end?” is a common enough sentiment, often spoken with a tone of intellectual superiority – which may be deserved, I don’t know. The implication here is, again, that writing should come naturally, that it shouldn’t matter what others say about it – write what you want in the way that you want, and it will either be good enough or not good enough.

But this is rarely the case. Good writing – whatever I may mean by that, and however you may interpret it – is rarely a completely isolated enterprise. On top of the fact that we are often heavily influenced by circumstance, context, experience, and other writers, there is also the simple fact that any author will edit and revise his work, often a number of times, and for better or worse, before publication or presentation. Sometimes, amidst all this, advice – an exchange of ideas, a reminder that we are not alone – can be immensely useful, especially before we have learned to completely trust our own instincts. Moreover, practice itself is valuable, and there are those (myself included) for whom a class or a writing group or a degree is a way to grant themselves permission to practice.

I have my own reservations about creative writing classes – and I say this as someone who holds a masters in the subject. But my reservations are different, mostly rooted in experience. It can be dangerous, for instance, to let too many vultures feast upon the carcass of your confidence. Helpful suggestions are not always helpful when they come too frequently, and too frequently unmediated. Furthermore it is not always productive, as an artist or an advocate or whatever else a writer may be, to overthink things. Too much time wallowing, too many conflicting opinions shared liberally, too much consideration, will ultimately only help you produce a work which is ambivalent at best. So I understand reservations about creative writing classes – I live those reservations.

But still such classes are not something to be eradicated. Consider what Gallix has written about Robbe-Grillet: “Every novel, according to Robe-Grillet, is a self-sufficient work of art which cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that is ‘known in advance’. ‘The New Novel,’ as he put it, ‘is not a theory, it is an exploration.’” And if we start to look at writing as an exploration, it starts to make sense that some of us choose to explore our writing in an exploratory context.

What this all really means is simply that, as a writer, you’ll never win. You’ll never be immune to hard-hitting criticism (though why would you want to be?). If you’re too rooted to the past, too ahead of your time, if a sentence is out of place or a particular word not exact enough, you’ll have someone saying so.

The interesting space is the space between these criticisms – and this, I think, is probably why we should write. Between one extreme and the other is a whole world ripe for exploration. It may be that Robbe-Grillet’s “New Novel” has progressed again – “far from representing a rejection of the past,” Gallix writes, “the quest for a new novel was…very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed”. The new “New Novel” is not necessarily the novel itself but the area around the novel; indeed, the novel has been flattened, expanded, and democratized. Maybe it’s the internet – I can go online and read a blog about a French writer and filmmaker I’d never before heard of and in a matter of hours create and “publish” my own response. We all have a say now; we’re all in a creative writing class, and even those of us who wish such classes could “just end” are participants in it.

So I say again: writers have it pretty hard. They (we?) are standing at the centre of a battleground. It’s noisy and nerve-wracking – but I can’t imagine a more exciting place to be.

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• As you may have gleaned from this post, I’m leaving the admin job that’s plagued me for the last two years. As with anything, this is not as simple as it sounds. I’ve resented most of the work I do there from the start – photocopying, filing, playing with databases and excel spreadsheets – but the people I work with have made it bearable day after day, and it’s strange to be leaving such a strong community. But I’m moving on to do something more writing and communications oriented, which is what I’m trained to do and what I enjoy, so I can’t say I’m not excited.

• I won a scholarship to the Matador network’s MatadorU, an online travel writing course. I’m very excited about this opportunity to focus on my travel writing, especially as I flail around in the creative vacuum that is the first year post-MA. I’ll be blogging my assignments over at my MatadorU blog if you ever want to take a peek.

• The gorgeous Lady Who Lunches has given me an award!. I met the Lady last month , but I’ve been reading her blog for awhile and always look forward to her new posts. She’s a fellow American expat and writer, and I’m very honored to be included in her list of inspiring female bloggers.

• LV from Anglophile Abroad has featured me in her Major Breakthrough series over at Studentstuff.com. LV is a very talented writer and a good friend, and it was great to be able to help her out with this series, in which she interviews former students about the way their major in college impacted them.

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