In the weeks after my grandfather died in 2019, I spent a melancholy few days sorting through the “Gramps” section of my filing cupboard, mainly the many letters he’d sent to me over the years. It was a way, I suppose, of continuing the 40-year conversation we’d had about books, of keeping his voice loud in my mind. One letter struck me with particular force, though – a page and a half in response to a short story I’d sent him aged 10. It was typical of his letters about my writing: warm yet forthright in its criticism, even at this early stage showing something that I came to recognise as a gift – the fact that he took me seriously as an author, that this was feedback from one writer to another.
It’s one of the central messages in Cathy Rentzenbrink’s wise and generous book about the writer’s life, Write it All Down; this idea that one of the hardest things for a writer to do is to take themselves and their work seriously. There is, as she acknowledges early on here, an awful lot of snake oil sold in the creative writing industry: “Books that are too focused on structure make me want to cry,” she says. “Their authors seem to enjoy discussing the classical three-act structure, protagonists and antagonists and all that, but it is just too cold a way to go about things for me, and I know it would never lead to anything good.” Write it All Down is not a book that gives you structure; rather it helps the aspirant writer fashion a vessel into which they might safely pour the contents of their heart.
In a series of short, chatty chapters, Rentzenbrink doles out advice that conveys one central message: that in writing, we become writers. This is not a book whose intended audience has had the privilege of a creative writing MA (or a sternly encouraging grandfather); it’s for anyone who picks up a pen, or sits before the ominously blank computer screen, and wonders if they have it in them to write. Rentzenbrink’s own background is salutary: her father was a miner who couldn’t read or write for most of his life. Her youth was marked with tragedy, as recorded in her devastating memoir The Last Act of Love. She is now a furiously productive author – since that memoir in 2015 she has written four other books, including a brilliantly caustic first novel, Everyone Is Still Alive.
Rentzenbrink teaches classes on life writing for Arvon, and at Kestle Barton in Cornwall, and reading Write it All Down feels like a decent second best to being in the classroom with her. She is disarmingly frank about both the limitations of creative writing as an academic discipline – “I don’t have all the answers and don’t believe that anyone does” – and on the challenges of entering an industry that is perhaps the most competitive and least well remunerated of any. Not to mention the physical and mental challenges of getting anything down on paper at all – “almost all writers exist in a continual vortex of despair and doubt”.
What Write it All Down does more than anything, though, is to make the reader – the writer! – feel part of a community. Rentzenbrink peppers her work with thoughtful answers to the questions that get in the way of writing: “Should I work if I am ill? What about when depressed? How do I know if I’m doing it right? I keep getting stuck… I’m so confused!” At the end there are messages of solidarity and inspiration from a host of other writers, from Lucy Mangan to Matt Haig to Maggie O’Farrell. They underline the collaborative, confidence-building ethos of the book, which provides an arm around the shoulder as we struggle with that most difficult of things: the “tricky, slippery business” of writing.
Write it All Down: How to Put Your Life on the Page by Cathy Rentzenbrink is published by Pan Macmillan (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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