The first version of this post described how I got emotional at a workshop at York this year, but every time I go back to my earlier drafts I feel I’m just adding to the shit-heap of whine and opine, so I decided to spin gold out of shit and turn it into a writing experiment.

Let’s just say: we live in a divided culture. We squabble over politics, over our place in the world, over other people’s places in our small world, over our leaders. Some of our political leaders qualified for office on the basis of careers as newspaper columnists whipping up emotions with falsehoods, so it’s no surprise that in public life logic counts for little, facts count for little, and experts and expertise have been derided. The people have spoken, and that’s that.

No, it’s not. The people spoke on the basis of a pack of lies, and I think the main reason I got emotional in that workshop (called Raising The Tone) was that words are my livelihood, and this summer words have been devalued. The tone of public discourse has been debased.

So how do we work ourselves out of this mess we’re in?

No answers to that. But I do know that one of the most helpful things was reading a couple of very thoughtful articles. They were written by proper writers, not pedlars of tabloid falsehood. Writers can help. Reading and writing can help.

Few places have produced as many great writers as Ireland, and few places understand the UK’s relationship with power better than the Irish, so it was not surprising that great clarity came from a piece in the Irish Times incorporating a cross-section of views from Irish poets and novelists: UK Was Groomed. Published on 27 June, it came as a sobering but necessary read: elegiac, raw, and not a wasted word. Two different writers there chose a particular word to describe the leader of the opposition: pointless. That word lodged in my mind all summer, and it’s still there, defining. Pointless.

So: 1. one thing writers can do is choose their words carefully.

Another good piece came from Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books: Fences: A Brexit Diary. Zadie Smith is another special writer, with her own type of insight and brilliance, and in reading this I was reminded of something she said about politicians in an interview in the Standard in 2013. Her interviewer reports:

Certainly, she would run a mile from politics. When I ask about Barack Obama, she shudders and expresses her horror at his drone strikes, and the ‘inhuman’ decisions that anyone who enters politics must make. ‘Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error,’ she asserts, ‘because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. Individual humans are being killed by anonymous planes in the air, and artists should be interested in individual humans. I would no more give support to Obama than I would to David Cameron — the decisions they have to make are not conceivable to me.’

So: 2. we don’t align ourselves with politicians. Writers and wordsmiths are the tricksters. We can (and must) tackle political topics, but we align ourselves with politicians at our peril. We are here to see through the bullshit and lies, and keep politicians on their toes. Only connect. That’s what E.M. Forster urges in his epigraph to Howards End. Our guiding principles should be truth and empathy. The Buddhist ideal of Right Speech is handy too.

I was also reminded of attending a Zadie Smith reading for her novel NW. It features, at one point, a character walking across London, and during the Q&A someone asked if she felt intimidated by Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, one of her literary heroes. She replied very simply that we have to write ‘from love, not envy’.

So: 3. Write from love, not envy.

Truth and love and empathy. We’re not getting these things from our political leaders, so let’s write them into the world. I certainly felt empathy from writers at York (thank you to those people attending that workshop). Writers might be weirdos, but we’re writers for a reason.

For this week’s writing experiment: Walls seem popular among many of our politicians, so write about a wall: some description, perhaps, that’s concrete and specific and creates some mood out of its presence.

And then tell us what and especially who is on this side of the wall.

Then describe what and especially who is on the other side of the wall: that what and who will be markedly different in some way.

And then write about a door in that wall. And then tell us how things on either side of the wall can be made to connect. Maybe a miracle will happen (more on miracles another time).

Feel free to adapt, e.g., a fence instead of a wall, a gate instead of a door.

As you write, really work with the symbolic power of doors and walls and maybe the idea of the miracle in. Dig deep. And remember:

1. Choose your words carefully.

2. Be your trickster self.

3. Write with love.

And PS after reading a staunch defence of Gary Lineker’s right to have an opinion penned by Marina Hyde, a newspaper columnist I mostly certainly trust for her trickster spirit:

4. Stand your ground against bullies.