I fear I have offended someone tonight

Every Tuesday evening a dozen or so of us gather to discuss literature, our own literature. Plays, poems and stories we have written and which we would really like to see gaining a wider audience. It's a writers' group, a workshop ( http://manchester-writers.org.uk/ ) and it seems to improve our writing even if most of us remain unpublished.

In recent weeks we've tried a new technique. Rather than reading your own stuff and then looking up expectantly for helpful comments, you ask somebody else. You can select a reader or accept the next random volunteer, and you have to listen to your own deathless (or lifeless) prose while you watch the faces of your audience.

Another kind of artificiality you might say, but I've learned a lot. Think about the way you read a book.

The first time you see a page is almost always the last time you see it. You make just one attempt to read it, and if the intended meaning doesn't come through that one time, it's the last chance the writer has. And I've seen evidence here and elsewhere that some people don't get much out of reading - looking ahead, interpreting the syntax and punctuation as you go, are all unused skills.

The offence I may have caused came when I said that I could have read my chapter better than the person who took that responsibility. I know what it's supposed to say, how it's supposed to be read.  I could perform it on stage or on radio.

But if all that isn't actually on the page, then either I'm not doing my job properly as a writer or I have unrealistic expectations of my readers. I can't judge how much of each is true, but it makes me think.

My brain bits move in mysterious ways

I'm writing a novel. Number seven as it happens, and it'll probably join the others on that great unpublished shelf in the sky. But I've also been reading, and listening to podcasts, about the way the brain works, and my writing "technique" seems to offer persuasive evidence for the idea that various parts of the brain work almost independently of each other. Each one goes its own sweet way, occasionally coming up with an idea, a decision, a bodily movement... Many of these are actioned, some of them actually come to the notice of the conscious part that we tend to think is the "real" me, and some come as complete surprises.

You'll hear authors (if you have any interest in listening) saying things like "I don't write the story:  it writes itself" or "then this character did something I wasn't expecting". I've used those lines too, and recently came out with "my main character hasn't told me what the story is about yet". Some of this is affectation, but it is surely a gloss on the feeling we have that the mental wheels keep on churning whether we are aware of it or not.

An idea comes to the fore - half-formed, fully-formed - and you find yourself typing it in. Sometimes it's a second or two before you realise what is coming out. Sometimes it's as if that idea "has always been there". It's because you have more than one pair of mental hands at work all the time. You're not on your own in there.