Starting a blog yesterday may have been a surprise to me, but it was a pleasant one. I've enjoyed my Accidental Blog and have been looking forward to writing another post on it.

Between yesterday and now, I've been wondering if there is a formula for a successful blog. What would I tell my students if they asked me how to write one?

I suppose the form of writing that comes closest to it is an opinion piece in a newspaper, and the essence of that is for the writer to reveal their personality and views. In the tabloids, of course, it helps to be controversial, vitriolic even, and to make a name for yourself as a bitch. I don't think I'll be taking that line with this blog.

I don't claim to be whiter than white, but slagging people off and humiliating them in public isn't what turns me on. I'd rather my listeners logged off feeling a little bit better about life, a little bit more knowledgeable, a little more hopeful.

So why bother reading this blog? Well, I hope that by getting to know how I approach my life, my writing, and my teaching, you will get the chance to reflect on your own life - and maybe even to learn more about yourself by starting to write.

Everyone can do it. Everyone has something to say, even though you might not be able to think of anything off the top of your head. In fact, writing, like any creative activity, can be immensely therapeutic.

Over the past twenty years, I've sat in writers' groups where I've been enthralled by ordinary people's true stories of the most extreme experiences in their lives - how they've coped when members of their families have suffered serious illness, accidents, suicide attempts, even.

Several people I know have turned to writing to make sense of their lives when they were turned upside down by a traumatic divorce or relationship breakdown.

But the stories I've heard haven't been all gloom and doom. I still love to recall the true life tale of an elderly friend, now sadly dead, about how as a boy he used to play with children in a large Irish family. My friend was an only child, so compared with lots of children in the thirties, he was relatively well off, and always always got his meat and two veg.

The Irish family were poor in monetary terms, but happy and well cared for, and the kids were never short of someone to play with.

One evening, my friend had been playing out with them. It got to tea time and he joined them at the dinner table - they didn't have much, just a big pan of potatoes, but he thought this huge communal meal was better than a feast.

Then it got to bath-time and bed-time. That night, the father of the house was in charge of getting his brood ready. One by one, he dealt with his offspring, conveyor-belt fashion - ushering them into the bath, then packing them off to bed. To my friend's delight, he became part of the conveyor belt, and so he found himself being sent to bed with all his chums. The dad obviously didn't clock that there was one extra that night. Well, I did say it was rather a large brood!

There was my friend, happy as Larry, lying top to tail with all his chums, several to a bed, as poor children did in those days. He thought he'd gone to heaven! He'd have gladly stayed there all night if his mum hadn't come looking for him.

That was an example of what my students would call 'autobiographical writing'. But more than that, it's life writing. It's not just the 'who did what and when' that matters. It's the little details that make up our lives, that make us who we are - 'life writing' in the broadest sense.

And that's what makes learning to write different from learning any other subject. When you learn to write, you're not just finding out how to string words together in sentences. You're discovering yourself.

As I tell my students: 'You're the best person to write your story. It's uniquely yours.'

If you have a memory to share, why not write it here as a comment? It's quick and easy to do.