Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world.

What writers used to say to small circles of students in an attempt to help them improve their storytelling technique has become a familiar way, often parodic and self-knowing, of interpreting the grand and not-so‑grand narratives of our time. “Don’t worry about Liz Truss’s YouTube series – she’s just having a main character moment.”

The most intense distillation of this system of thought (if you can even call it that) has always been the craft book, the writing manual. These are sometimes written by the most successful in the profession (like Ursula K Le Guin’s Steering the Craft) or the most successful at advising the profession (Robert McKee’s Story) but most often they are put together by novelists and screenwriters towards the close of their academic careers as creative writing tutors. John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction is the grandaddy of this subgenre.

With A Long Game, Elizabeth McCracken* has come pretty late to the party. And she’s determined to liven things up. For a start, she does not agree with craft books, either their sentiments or their usual tone: “chipper, cheerleaderish, generally with an encouraging second-person narrator meant to make the whole exhausting process of writing a book seem possible”. It’s obvious she’s thinking of such motivational titles as Walter Mosley’s This Year You Write Your Novel.*

We know from her big entrance – sentence one, page one – that McCracken, novelist, memoirist and former tutor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is going to cause more than a few cocktails to be spat out or spilled. “Nobody knows how to write a book,” is how she starts. “I don’t like craft books. It’s possible that I’ve never read one through.” She proceeds to demonstrate how she has more than a few thoughts on the cosy consensus that preceded her. She’s a self-confessedly epigrammatic writer, and her quips yearn to be underlined: “To feel ashamed about writing isn’t interesting, but writing about shame is fascinating.”

In this, she’s not your usual wise old literary hand. Instead, she is naughty, perverse, quietly exhibitionist and bracingly unashamed. She reminds me of the teenage older sister of one of my best friends at school. She lived in a world I didn’t. She behaved or misbehaved just as she chose; and sometimes she did the wrong thing, the bad thing, because it was more interesting.

McCracken’s is the naughty older sister view of writing. And I agree with it. Writing isn’t about compiling a list of rules and then obeying them. If it were that, then none of the really great writers I’ve ever read would have been interested in it. Not for half a day. Writing is a form of sustained mischievous truancy. It’s not about being good.

This attitude will be amazingly freeing for many rule-haunted writers. If you are being poisoned by a particularly cliched piece of workshop feedback, “Show, don’t tell” or “Write what you know”, McCracken will supply an antidote. It will be intense, distilled from experience, and the inoculation may cause you pain. But afterwards, you’ll stop sweating and shivering, and get on with living. Here McCracken is on that most hated and hackneyed piece of advice, “Write every day”: “Every-day writers have a clear answer to the question, How will you get your work done? Me, I harness the power of my own self-loathing.”

Not your usual piece of creative writing workshop advice, but true to the particular insanity of this scribbled life.