And the story rolls on...

After I finished my PhD in 2005 I didn't write any new stories for nearly a year. At that point it had been over six months since I had finished the creative part of the thesis, so it added up to a break of over eighteen months. When I came back to writing fiction it was with a new voice, a new approach and new stories, many of which surprised me.

The thing which surprised me most was how much of myself I was now putting into my stories. Whole chunks of my autobiography would find their way in, often without me noticing. It was at times, disturbing to discover how much of myself I had inadvertently used, but over time I got used to it and learned to control it.

For different reasons it has once again been about eighteen months since I have written a full story. In that time I have finished a novel and written a number of flash fictions, but these are different beasts from a full short story. They're more like keeping an engine ticking over than opening it up full-throttle and taking it for a burn.

And then, over the weekend at a conference, a discussion provoked an idea for a story and I found myself taking notes during sessions, waking up with my mind already word-processing, and even took a time-out to start writing it. This morning I finished writing it and now I'm stepping back to look at what I've done.

My original idea was heavily autobiographical, calling on a range of things that have happened to me in the last year or so. But, having written it, I am slightly surprised to see how much fiction is in there. Yes, there are elements of myself, as their must be in any work of fiction, I feel. But the reality of situations has been twisted further than has happened in a while, all to fit the themes of the story.

I guess any extended break is going to change you as a writer, but it's always interesting, and, to be honest, slightly discomfiting, when it happens. All of this is part of my progression as I writer, I feel. I started with fiction as pure as I could make it, but little emotional engagement. I then engaged with emotion, through autobiography, but perhaps at the expense of story. Maybe I have now found the balance between the two, serving the story but also the reality of emotion too. I can only hope that's the case.

Ahead of me lies the rewriting and editing before submission. And then we'll see if it's good enough by other standards than my own. For myself, I'm pleased with it, not least because it felt so good to be writing again that I know I can use it to motivate my writing over the oncoming summer.

Art meet life. Life, this is art.

Today I have started work on my conference paper for this year's Great Writing conference at Bangor. I plan to look at the way in which fiction writing and life-writing cross over and interact.

The paper was inspired by my first experience of teaching Life Writing, which was this year at Edge Hill University. I had previously taught elements of it in Adult Ed writing courses, and done some 'Reminiscence' writing with older people for Stockport Education Authority, but had never taught it at HE level before. It was a steep learning curve, but one I enjoyed immensely.

I discovered that there were a host of problems with teaching life-writing, as it is not something that students normally do once they are past the age of 11 and no longer writing 'What I did on my holidays'-style essays. One is getting them away from exactly that juvenile style of "We went here, then we did this, then we did that, etc." auto-biographic writing. Another is to get them to write about a more interesting topic than just a holiday or a party but to deal with something more emotional, more personal, and more involved. Lastly there is the whole problem of how much they are allowed to bend the truth to fit the art.

Over the course of the year I devised a range of exercises which allowed the students to stretch themselves in all these areas, and many of them rose to the challenge and will feature in my paper. Some of the exercises were invented during my drive to the University to teach the class, and then were later quoted back to me by the students as being incredibly useful.

In my other job, I was also still teaching fiction writing. However, my experience teaching life-writing made me realise that I could use the same exercises to fix a whole different range of problems in fiction writing: lack of realism, lack of emotional involvement, poor dialogue. So I did.

All of which has made for a fascinating year in my teaching career, but also a great topic for a paper. Now, all I have to do is finish writing it.

And all you have to do is decide whether any of the above tale actually happened, or did I make it all up?