It’s Monday. Ben and I are in the Mr Morris wine bar again.

“My students want me to talk about procrastination this week,” I say.

“Been putting it off?”

“Very funny. Basically, most of them have trouble just getting their bum in the chair and writing something. Got any ideas?”

“Maybe they should look at it like a business. I mean, if I don’t open the book shop at nine every morning, I’m not going to make any money.”

“Sounds like you don’t make any money anyway these days, what with Amazon bagging all your sales.”

“Fine, so tell your students that they don’t need to get up in the morning, or go to work, or even switch on their computers. If they wish hard enough, the writing fairies will deposit a novel at Random House with their name on it and they can just sit back and let the royalties come tumbling in.”

“If only.”

“The problem you have, Terry, is that you need to tell them that they can’t dodge the hard work and the sheer number of hours needed to produce a novel. At the end of which, there’s only the slightest chance in hell that a publisher will buy it from them; and even if they do, they aren’t going to make any money from it.”

“And you think that’s the reason for procrastination?”

He shrugs. “At least if you’re putting off failure, you haven’t actually failed yet.”

At which stage, I decide to change the subject, since he’s clearly still fretting about how publishers’ falling sales are threatening his livelihood.

I decide to get the views of someone not involved in the business.

#

So, now it’s Tuesday, and I’m in The Ladywell Tavern with Nige. We’re standing at the bar and I think I’ve hit the right moment. He’s just taken a large dunk of lager and can’t speak until it’s fully swallowed.

“What are builders like at putting off things they need to do?”

He finishes gulping and nods. “We’re experts,” he says. “We do it by prioritising and bullshitting. The two pillars of a successful one-man business.”

I sense that what he’s about to tell me won’t necessarily be useful for my group but I know from experience that I’m powerless to divert him once his mental masonry drill is spinning.

“Think about it, Tel. Jobs never turn up nice and consecutive; they always overlap. But you can’t tell the punters that. They want to know that you’re going to start tomorrow. So you do. Start, at least. But you might not actually finish until a lot later than they expect.”

“So, what do you tell the people you’ve made low priority?”

“Anything: you’re ill, someone’s roof collapsed in the baby’s bedroom, you broke your ankle playing footy. But make sure you don’t ever have more than two dead grandmothers though. That can be a bit of a giveaway.”

Then I remember something from several years back. We’d hired Nige to re-decorate our house. We were going on holiday for two weeks, the idea being he’d have it all finished by the time we returned. But when we came back, the house was exactly as we’d left it apart from a pair of rickety stepladders with a note attached to the effect Nige had been called away on urgent family business.

I tell him this. He has the decency to blush slightly, hiding it behind his lager glass.

“Shit,” he says, “I should remember that you should never tell anyone a builder’s secrets.”

#

So now I’m back home, sitting in my study with the lights off, looking at the trees out back with their leaves flitting silver in our neighbour’s irritating decking light that stays on all night.

I’ve talked to people in the street about priorities, and I’ve learned that builders can have more than two dead grandmothers, if they don’t use a calculator. But now I have to work out what priorities mean to me, in such a way I can put it to the group next week.

I find myself thinking about the system of SIMPLICITY-COMPLEXITY-SIMPLICITY, which can be applied to just about any human pursuit.

Take writing.

As a child, you love to write stories. You do it without thinking and you have some natural talent for it. Your parents love your stories. Your teacher gets you to read them out to the class. Hey – you decide to be a writer.

You write a novel. It’s sort of about your friends, doing the sort of stuff people really do. They have long conversations that are just how you’ve heard them. Something nags at the back of your mind about plot and purpose, but you ignore it. You have talent. Everyone’s told you so.

You send out your novel to some publishers and agents. You wait for the offers to flood in. But no one replies for a long time. And when they do, it’s just a standard rejection. You can’t believe it: have they actually read your book?

One editor writes a few comments in her rejection letter. She says that your writing shows promise but that you need to work on plot, show more than tell and learn to make every word count.

This, of course, can be a turning point for you. It probably won’t be; you’ll probably carry on writing, submitting, getting rejected and deciding that publishers know nothing, for some years to come. But let’s assume you get the point quickly. Under your burning indignation at the editor telling you your writing isn’t up to scratch, you have the uncomfortable feeling that she might be right.

What you then face are the complications and difficulties of a) having to learn a craft you thought you already knew but didn’t and, worse still, b) having to re-learn, to make conscious, the things that you’re naturally good at.

Many of course don’t want to go through this complexity stage. They fear it will destroy their natural talent. They may be right. But you aren’t likely to ever sell a story if you can’t structure one properly, and know when enough is enough.

And so you begin the long journey of learning the craft. Of complicating your talent. Of taking the risk you may smother it.

What will keep it alive, however, is passion, desire, love of what you do and discipline to learn and see it through.

Finally, you come out of the complexity, back into simplicity. Now, you can write free again, like you did to begin with. Only now, you’re throwing words on to a robust and instinctive structure, both at plot level and prose level. And when it works, the exhilaration is ten times greater than it was when you wrote as a child, because now you know what you’re doing. You’re not thinking about what you’re doing but if anyone asks you how you do it, you’ll be able to stop and think and explain in detail. And if they are still in their first simplicity stage, they will wonder how on earth you can produce anything creative when you’ve got all that going on in your head at the same time.

But I think there is another variation to this equation that writers need to bear in mind, which is:

PERSONAL – NON-PERSONAL – PERSONAL

Most writers tend to start with material that’s personal to them. Many never move on from there; some make a good living from it: magazine columnists, bloggers, etc. But if you’re going to be a good fiction writer, you have to learn to write from a non-personal standpoint.

You need to create your main character with detachment, and use the plot to torture him dispassionately. And if you can, you may build a very good career for yourself. You could write Thrillers, or Fantasy, or Romance, or Crime, or Literary, and the ability to take a non-personal view, to keep your own emotions, will be a big advantage.

But then . . .

Special writers go back into the personal. Only now they know how to use a little of it to maximum effect. Now, every character they write is built upon an aspect of themselves. Every scene is derived from an event in their own life. They know that using oneself is the key to injecting emotion into their work. Their own life is their story-telling base camp.

Now their work has character, quality, style . . . a specific resonance that readers will love, as opposed to simply liking a non-personal novel.

So perhaps the priorities for a writer who’s serious are not so much about making time to sit in the chair and write – even though that’s important – but are more to do with intention: first, to learn the craft and second, whether to aim for being a good writer or a special one.