Before you enrol in an expensive and entirely inappropriate creative writing course, read Sonia Henry’s “Put your feet in the dirt, Girl’.

It’s a memoir and not fiction but that doesn’t matter. If you can’t write as well as that, give it away.

Her book has forward drive, characterisation through action, excellent dialogue, exceptional scene setting, wit, humour and pathos.

Henry didn’t go to any creative writing salon. She just started writing. A Kiama girl, like Charmaine Clift, who also didn’t attend a writing program.

So if you’re sitting in your inner suburban kitchen thinking you have a book in you, stop.

Unless you have some significant life experience, you are in danger of falling into the 80 per cent of literary novels published by people under 40, which are eye-glazing and self-referential.

No creative writing course can provide you life experience.

Get up out of your chair and look at a map of Australia.

Pick Broome, Darwin, Cape Tribulation, anywhere far, far away from where you are now and go there.

Take a journal. Meet people. Listen to their stories.

Make notes and then have a crack.