In which I ponder lessons in horsemanship and humanity.

Today, my darlings, I lifted up a horse’s ribcage with my feet. If you were not lifting up horses’ ribcages with your feet then I don’t know what you have been doing with your time. (Especially Anne Westminster and her Grenson’s. Which is a reference only four people and a very posh dog will get.)

There was a wonderful moment before I got on. Robert Gonzales, horseman, gentleman, spectacular human, said, in his gentle, easy voice: ‘Just start warming her up there.’ I’d made an absolute cack-handed farce of the groundwork the day before, at one point managing to swirl the rope round my arm and corral myself, but I’d been thinking and pondering and brushing up overnight, so I thought: now he shall see what an old British gal can do. He watched for about three minutes, out of the corner of his kind eye. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘There are five things you are doing wrong right there.’

‘OF COURSE I AM DOING FIVE DIFFERENT THINGS WRONG,’ I bawled, in hilarity. The mare blinked at me as if to say: decorum. I doubled over with laughter. I think I may have actually slapped my thigh. Oh, the flap flap flap of the hubris angels’ wings.

Robert showed me the five wrong things. He then showed me how to do five things right. I did five things right. The mare, forgetting for a moment that she is an aristocrat, and all this trundling about the valley in trailers is quite beneath her dignity, looked first surprised and then delighted. Round she went, relaxed and athletic, using her whole magnificent body, her head down searching for softness, a lovely bend in her body. We never really get bend, but there it was. All because I was now standing in the right position and directing my energy in the right direction and putting my hand in the right place.

‘Poor old lady,’ I said, when we stopped. ‘What you have had to put up with.’

‘Right,’ said Robert, quietly pleased. ‘Get her saddled up.’

So, we rode. Under that brilliant, eagle eye, we found a glorious soft trot, we disengaged the buggery out of the hindquarters (‘move, move,’ said Robert, when he saw I was falling into mimsy), we did easy transitions, we made delicate changes of direction. I lifted that ribcage with my heels, so that her powerful thoroughbred arse could be free to do its job.

I did whoop a bit, I must confess. The new feeling coming off the mare was like a rolling, liberated wave of energy. ‘It’s as if I’ve being trying to dance Swan Lake in clogs,’ I shouted, ‘and now someone has given me a pair of ballet shoes.’

I learnt to let softness run all the way through my own body, from my shoulders to my pelvis to my calves, so that her body too would grow soft, from ears to tail.

‘Wow,’ I bellowed. (When I grow excited, I lose all volume control.)

Robert, still quiet, still smiling, taking all this on the chin, looked me in the eye. ‘Good work,’ he said.

Out on the wild shores of the internet, there is a very lovely woman who also writes a blog, and also has an adored thoroughbred, and also loves almost nothing more than a good canine. She and I became blogging friends, and then real life friends, since it turned out, rather amazingly, that I knew her brother in my university days. She often writes, very bravely and lyrically, about difficult subjects. A few days ago, she wrote a piece on loneliness. Successful, professional woman are not really supposed to admit to such frail emotions, and I thought it took a great deal of courage. One of the anonymous keyboard warriors went at once into battle. Instead of saying nothing, or writing in empathy and encouragement, Anonymous was ungenerous and unkind. Pull yourself together and stop moaning, was the burden of the mean song.

It made me think about the art of criticism. All humans make mistakes and get things wrong and fall into muddles. This morning, that good horseman told me, without apology or embellishment, that I had got five whole things wrong. He did not mean that I am a bad person or I should go into the garden to eat worms. He wanted me to get the things right, for my sake and for the sake of the mare. I sensed he had faith that I could, and so I did. Not perfect, but better. Better and better and better; every day in every way.

The critique was all practical and hopeful. That is why I laughed instead of being downcast. The anonymous critic who attacked my friend had no positive end in mind. The harsh words were purely destructive, tearing down the house with no thought for the real, feeling human who lived inside. The criticism had no utility. All it did was bruise an already bruised heart.

The cruellest voices often come from the lacerating gin-soaked critics in one’s own head. I’m learning the art of not falling into category errors; it’s one of my quiet obsessions. I do drive myself onwards, because smugness and complacency are horrid companions. I make mistakes in writing, and mistakes in horsing, and mistakes in life, and I like to look those mistakes in the whites of their eyes and strive to correct them. This does not mean that I am feckless, pointless, useless and hopeless, and that there is no health in me. It just means I got something wrong. The good critic is a lovely voice, and should be welcomed in and given cake. The bad critic should be locked in a room with a bottle of Gordon’s and left there.

And this is what I love about my red professor and all the things she teaches me – I can go from lifting a ribcage to category errors to the art of constructive criticism all in fourteen paragraphs.

 

Today’s pictures:

I did not take the camera today. I wanted to take everything in with my eyes and my brain and my heart, and not have a filter. So there are just a couple more shots from yesterday:

Oh, and I have one more thought before I go. It is this: it’s never too late. I’m nearly fifty, and I’m learning something completely new. I hope I shall be learning it until I am ninety, because you never reach the end of a horse. What I like is that I find a joy in learning. I always was a bit of a girly swot. At the same time, there is an absurd voice in me which says that when you are a grown-up, you should know stuff; that there is something almost undignified about going back to the beginning and admitting rank ignorance. This is a stupid voice, and I mostly give it a Maggie Smith raised eyebrow. What is truly undignified is closing your mind, thinking you know it all, refusing to harvest wisdom wherever you may find it. I don’t think there is ever a moment when you are done. Hurrah, I say, without embarrassment, for going back to school.

Writing Workshop, Day Two. The Good Critic and the Bad Critic. Clue: one of them wears a white hat.

I spoke to my group today about the good critic and the bad critic. This idea is closely related to The Fear, of which I wrote yesterday.

I am crazy for utility, as I get older. I really, really like things that work, that have purpose, that do something in the world. I’ve always hated waste, but as I reach middle age and the hours whoosh past my ear, I particularly hate the waste of time. I like utility for many reasons, but one of them is that it saves time.

The good critic has utility. It is the voice of humility, which has a tenderness in it. The good critic, who should arrive, wearing her white hat, when you start on the second draft, says kindly, but very firmly: ‘Well, you are not very good at that, but we’ll work on it.’

The good critic is the one who makes you practice. Just as great musicians still practice their scales and arpeggios before they go out to perform an intricate sonata, so proper writers should practice the basics. Any form of daily writing will do it. I’m afraid I sometimes see this blog as my daily practice. I say afraid, because really it should be a selfless thing, devoted to the Dear Readers. But it builds my muscles; it builds the muscle memory that is needed for writing to stay fluent.

The good critic may say: chapter two does not quite work, or that character is flat on the page, or that passage is overwritten. The good critic does not say these things in glee or malice, but in a spirit of improvement and possibility. The good critic keeps you honest and keeps you grounded. It does not let you float into the fiery heights of hubris.

The good critic comes with a charming suitcase full of solutions. The solutions are not easy. They almost always are: work, and effort. And time too. And dedication and thought and care. Do it again, do it better, think about it harder. Don’t skimp. Don’t think you can cheat your readers, or cheat the process. The process must be honoured, and it is slow. The good critic is not about fleeting tips or quick shortcuts; the good critic has no magic wand. She is quite stern, and she should be.

The good critic is the voice of the possible.

The bad critic has no utility. It is really important that you trust me on this. I know her well, and she is a bitch. She is the wrecking voice of contempt. She smashes and trashes and laughs as she stomps all over your fledgling hopes with her beastly stiletto heels. She will grind you underfoot, if you let her. And then she will bugger off to torment some other innocent.

The bad critic is the bearer of shame. Shame is a wholesale destroyer. It does not say: you are weak at dialogue, so let us work on that. It says: you are entirely hopeless and you could not write fuck on a dusty blind and you should probably not be allowed out in public.

The bad critic is also relentless. It is the voice that never stops. It does not just home in on one area of frailty, but gallops from one field of idiocy to the next. Not only can you not write dialogue, but your office is a mess, your hair is a fright, and you can’t cook. You are too fat, too thin, too boring, too verbose, too shy, too garrulous. Whatever you do, it will be the wrong thing. The bad critic says: you might as well give up, because you will never amount to anything.

The wonderful thing about all this is that you have a choice. You are a sentient adult; you have agency. Every time you hear that barking voice of shame, you may choose to listen to it. If you really want, you can let it in, pull up a chair for it, give it a cocktail, and listen to its screeching song. You can do that. Or, you can say, no thanks, not today. I’m busy, and I’ve run out of gin. So fuck off.

Use whatever strategy suits you best. Sometimes, as you may have gathered, I find excessive swearing helps. You may imagine yourself punching the bad critic in the nose. Whatever gets you through the night.

The bad critic is cunning and invasive as bindweed. It may not be possible to banish the sound of shame from your entire life with one act of will. Like almost anything to do with writing, it involves daily practice, building up that particular muscle set through patient repetition. So you may wish to start small. Just tell it to bash off for half an hour. Promise yourself one single morning, with the door shut, whilst the bad critic hammers fruitlessly at the door. She may soon get bored and leave.

The most important thing to know is that this bad critic will not help your writing in any way. Shutting her out is the most generous thing you can do for yourself. With her in the room, your creative self will never be able to unfurl its wings, and you will never know how high you may fly. And that really is a waste.

You have the power. You have the choice. You can fly, if you let yourself.

 

No time for pictures again. Just the obligatory foal photograph. Because IT’S A FOAL: