I think it's important to stress that anybody can write.
Anybody is allowed to write.
That this is not some divine calling
that only settles upon a few special individuals.
If you can actually write
in the language of... that you've grown up with
then you are a writer.
I'm reminded of a story
something that happened to me
or that happened to somebody else that I knew.
There was a Big Issue salesman in Northampton
that I'd got to know over the times
when I'd gone up to buy a copy of the Big Issue from him.
He was what Tom Waits called a "rain dog".
He was somebody
who stands in a doorway in the rain
selling the Big Issue.
His name, not his real name
but the name he was called was Traynor.
And he had the most wretched look
of any individual that I'd met.
One day, his mother had died.
He was completely traumatised.
But a bigger problem for him than the death of his mother
was possibly the fact
that in order to attend her funeral
he didn't know how he could do that
without his father and brothers
finding out that he was on the street.
He was incredibly ashamed of this.
He could not go to his mother's funeral
wearing his...
trainers, his tracksuit bottoms
his kind of windcheater.
He couldn't do that. So...
his obvious answer to this problem
was that he would steal a suit.
He would go into a gents outfitters
and steal a suit
suitable for his mother's funeral.
He hadn't realised that in order to steal a suit
from a gents outfitters
you first have to be dressed in a suit
from a gents outfitters.
So, obviously he got caught.
I don't think they even had the heart to prosecute.
But he was devastated.
And I remember
him talking to me about the loss of his mum
and his terrible circumstances
and I said to him, "Why don't you write that down?
"Why don't you have a try at writing that?"
I was talking about my own mother's death.
When I was left with...
huge, senseless, pointless emotions
crashing around inside my head, and nothing to do with them.
And so I decided to put all of that down
into a poem
a performance poem called The Birth Caul.
And I was telling him about this and I said
"You don't have to put it down into a poem.
You don't have to put it down in any form at all.
Why not just start writing about your mum?"
And he said, "Oh, I can't do that.
I'll never do that. I'm not a good writer."
I said, "You don't have to be a good writer.
This is not for anybody to read, necessarily.
This is just for you."
I didn't think that he would ever do it.
Because I've urged people to write before
and their resistance to it
"Oh, I'm not really a writer, I can't write..."
You know, they probably won't.
But the next time I saw Traynor
he was looking at me with astonished awe.
Not at me
but at what had happened to him.
He was saying
"I did what you said.
I started writing about me mum
and I didn't think
I'd be able to do more than a couple of lines."
he said, "And before I knew it, I couldn't stop.
There were pages of it."
Now...
he died a couple of years after that.
He got moved on by an ultimate policeman.
But he expressed himself.
For once in his life
he actually put his experience down into words.
He expressed himself.
He sang his song
with his mortal tongue.
And, if nothing else
that was the first and only time
that he had ever done that.
Everybody can write.
Probably, everybody should write.