Find your own voice in writing and follow it, said Julian Fellowes at the Literature Festival last night. What good advice. Sometimes it’s tempting to capitulate and try to emulate someone else’s style e.g. I can’t abide a lot of the ‘navel gazing’ of modern poetry or it’s fairly obtuse expression. My poetry is usually easy to understand and uses no long words for the sake of. Of course I don’t win competitions but do we compromise or remain unpublished? There’s the dilemma. We were taught in a workshop I attended over the weekend to use the ‘Pub test’ for our writing i.e. whatever you have to say imagine you had to run into a pub and say what it is in one easy quick sentence. This should incapusulate the best writing – easy to assess and straight to the point. I wonder what modern poets would make of this advice?