While many people think that creative writing is what journalists get up to every day, we're actually a breed that is rather fond of facts. Nicely verifiable and capable of covering huge amounts of column inches, your fact is an entirely different man to your fiction, and the difference between turning out a trim 1,000 words for Tuesday week and turning out a trim 14-line sonnet is actually rather great. So I was fairly alarmed when Jessie Lendennie, the facilitator of Salmon Publishing's creative writing weekends in Clare, placed an intricate candle-holder in the middle of a table, and suggested that we would-be James Joyces on a weekend course should write anything that came into our heads inspired by the object.
Others, too, looked a little aghast, and Jessie might have had a rebellion on her hands had she not suddenly said "go" in a tone that brooked no argument. "The cat sat on the mat. Every good boy deserves fruit. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog . . ." It's amazing the bits of nonsense that whizz around your brain when you have been asked to write for exactly five minutes. "Thirty days has September, April . . ."
A bit like being back at school, it was only the sight of everybody else scribbling that got me going at all. Pen scratching furiously on paper, out came a rather random selection of words and phrases that didn't quite know whether they wanted to be a poem or a piece of prose when they grew up. Before you knew it, Jessie indicated we should stop.
It's an exercise that says a lot about writing courses and about the different reasons why people are flocking to them in increasing numbers, regardless of the debate about whether writing can be taught or not. While the challenge for me was to stop writing as though it was going to appear on page nine the next day, the exercise brought others on the course up short for different reasons. The sticking point for some was getting the words down on the page in the first place, terrified that what they wrote was "not good enough", while for others, the moment of horror was when others read their work. Still more just felt they were stuck in a rut and weren't progressing at all with their writing. The speed writing exercise, like perhaps the writing course itself, was a kind of ice-breaker to get our brains moving and to get those initial few words actually down on the page.
Then the time came to read the results out, and some of the participants had the rather wan look of those who've just heard the sound of the dentist's drill. They need not have worried - one candle-holder had produced an astonishing range of higgledypiggledy nuggets of writing, and every one had something of interest about it. Jessie listened carefully then scribbled furious notes - a worrying moment when suddenly school report cards didn't seem such a distant memory.
In fact, Jessie was plucking out phrases from each person's piece, which she asked them to expand on, as a poem, a piece of prose or whatever took their fancy. This time we were given a lavish 15 minutes to produce a piece of literature, and by the number of people who had their tongues protruding from between their teeth and were chewing pen tops like gum, it was obvious that this time it was serious. Jessie had suggested that I work on the phrase "still within themselves" and much to my surprise I found myself with something passing for a poem at the end of the time. I thought this was marvellously advanced, and immediately began making plans to quit the day job, until the other participants started reading out their work. While hugely different in style, there was truly something good in each, and we soon got stuck in, giving opinions and asking questions of each other. One woman had produced three poems in the 15 minutes, and revealed that she had written over 60 poems since she had taken up writing just a few months previously. Another woman seemed rather astonished when we all remarked on how much we enjoyed the piece she read out: "Is it not terribly Hallmark-y?" she said, wrinkling her forehead. It wasn't.
There is a limited amount one can do in a weekend, and there is also some truth to the argument that there is a limited amount one can teach about something as ephemeral as creative writing. However, there are certain concepts such as finding a true voice, be it narrative or poetic, learning the discipline to write each day, and learning to evaluate your own writing, that can be explored well on a writing course. Over the weekend, spent sitting around Jessie's table overlooking the Cliffs of Moher, it was surprising how much everybody, including myself, developed. No more unholy terror at the thought of actually committing nouns and verbs to paper, by Sunday evening we were knocking off pieces of prose about our own likenesses to bottles or the like, as though we were writing shopping lists. On the bus back to Dublin, I realised that everyone had suddenly started to look like characters in a putative novel - I didn't know a single fact about them, but then I know how to get creative now.