As our creative writing course draws to a close, I find myself reflecting not only on what I’ve learned, but on how I’ve changed.
We were a small group — five or six of us, none particularly young — and that intimacy made all the difference. Under Francesca’s guidance (herself a comic strip writer and media artist), we explored emotion, character motivation, plot architecture, and, perhaps most importantly, the discipline of revision. Because we were few, each of us had the chance to read aloud. Feedback was immediate, focused, generous — and demanding.
Francesca’s notes are the kind that require rereading. They do not flatter; they refine.

Stripping to the Essential
One of the most valuable lessons I learned was how to cut. I would write a piece generously — perhaps too generously — and then be required to strip it back to its bare essentials. What remains after that process is often stronger than the original abundance.
Purple prose, I discovered, must earn its place. It can heighten a moment, illuminate a character, or intensify atmosphere — but it cannot exist merely for ornament.
This is something the great short story writers mastered with extraordinary control.

Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant wastes nothing. Every detail serves irony, psychology, or plot. His prose may appear effortless, but it is disciplined to the bone.
And then there is:

Anton Chekhov
Chekhov leaves space. What is unsaid resonates as powerfully as what is written. His restraint creates emotional depth.

The short story, I’ve come to realise, is a laboratory. One can write it in a few days — but shaping it properly requires clarity and courage.

Writing as Translation
Another discovery concerns language itself.
I wrote in Italian during this course. I was born in England. I have lived in Italy for over twenty years. So what language do I think in when I write?
The answer is: neither — and both.
There are traps everywhere. A curva becomes a “curve” instead of a “bend.” “Nervoso” becomes “nervous,” though the meanings diverge sharply. In Italian, mi viene il nervoso expresses irritation. In English, “I’m getting nervous” signals apprehension.
False friends are not simply lexical errors; they reveal cultural differences in emotional posture. English “nervous” turns inward. Italian “nervoso” flares outward.
When I write, I am not translating from English into Italian. I am translating experience into language — and sometimes translating it again. Every revision is another version, another emphasis, another shading of meaning.
Living between two languages creates a third space — a hybrid territory. In England I feel more Italian; in Italy more English. My wife and I, of mixed heritage, speak a language that is neither entirely one nor the other. We sometimes scold ourselves for it — but perhaps we should celebrate it instead.
This double linguistic vision feels not like division, but expansion. It sharpens nuance. It multiplies perspective. It deepens metaphor.

Synesthesia and Structure
One of the course’s most exciting concepts was synesthesia — the crossing of senses. Sounds that have colour. Music that can see. Paintings that can hear.
It made me more alert not only in writing but in reading. I now notice how authors build suspense, how they layer emotional tension, how they use sensory overlap to thicken atmosphere.
And as I read, I learn.

The Layered Novel: Time as Architecture
At the moment, I am reading the draft of a friend’s novel set in Rome — and it is structured in layers of time.
Ancient Rome.
Renaissance Rome.
Contemporary Rome.
Three temporal dimensions coexisting in one narrative structure.
This kind of “time-layered” novel is much sought after — and extraordinarily difficult to execute. It is a kind of literary architecture: a three-dimensional construction in which past and present speak to each other across centuries.
What impresses me even more is what comes next. The author, having written a rich and substantial draft, is now engaged in the harder task: sculpting it. Cutting. Sharpening. Refining.
I confess I would struggle with that stage. After writing pages of what feels like wonderful prose, who willingly removes it?
And yet — economic prose is essential. Especially now, when readers are short of time and long novels must justify every page. A sculptor removes marble to reveal form. A writer removes excess to reveal meaning.

Art as Transmutation
Ultimately, what this course has reminded me is that writing is not merely craft. It is also transmutation.
One cannot write only from encyclopedias. Facts may be verified there, but substance comes from experience — whether directly lived or deeply absorbed from others.
Joyful experiences. Painful experiences. Haunting memories.
The challenge is not to confess them raw, but to sublimate them — to transform them into something autonomous, something shaped, something that stands apart from the original wound or joy.
All artists do this.

George Orwell
Orwell transformed his experiences in Burma into Burmese Days. His encounters with poverty became Down and Out in Paris and London. His anxieties about totalitarianism and propaganda became 1984. Personal experience became enduring literature.
So too with painters, composers, and novelists across history. Deep feeling is not left raw; it is shaped into art. In doing so, something happens: the ghosts do not disappear, but they lose their power to dominate. They are transformed.
This is sublimation in its most creative form.

Why Write?
Writing, then, is many things at once:
Discipline
Precision
Experiment
Therapy
Translation
Sublimation
But above all, it is an offering.
It gives pleasure in the making.
It gives pleasure — one hopes — in the reading.
And perhaps that is the final justification.
To shape experience into something that can move another human being — across languages, across time — is no small thing.
As this course ends, I do not feel finished. I feel opened.
And that, I suspect, is exactly what good teaching should do.