On the Seventh Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

...Seven Swans A-Swimming, and there is no prettier sight than one of them gliding along the water towards you. Their passage is elegant and effortless - you never see their black feet beneath the surface, hammering against the current.

It's the same with writing: your story should wash over your reader, your prose eddying, your characters making headway against the ebb and flow of your plot. Enough of the extended water metaphor, already! The point is that your reader shouldn't be aware of any of the effort you've put in. If they are conscious of all your hard work, it suggests that you are either showing off or asking for thanks and neither is good.

Some of the invisible graft that you should be doing includes:

• Researching your story – make sure that you visit any real location which features in your work and that you take plenty of pictures. If you are setting your book in the past, read everything you can about the period you have chosen. It won't do any harm to read books by other writers that cover similar ground to you, either.
• Getting to know your characters – they should never be far from your thoughts. Becoming acquainted with your hero or heroine is a bit like falling in love, you should be filled with a craving for more and more information about them. Make notes if it helps you; think about their past lives, their tastes, their ambitions, their aversions, their strengths and weaknesses. Be consumed by them.
• Planning your plot in enough detail to avoid you having to make expedient additions to it at the last moment because you haven't thought things through properly.
• Being clear about the themes of your story – remember that the plot is there to help you explore a wider world view; if it only exists as a thing in itself, your book will your book will be less satisfying.
• Editing your work – when you think you have cut every extraneous phrase that you possibly can, cut another ten percent so that you polish your prose until it sparkles.

These are some of the ways in which you can support your inspiration, the black feet hard at work beneath the surface, so that your story floats free.

I hope that 2013 challenges and rewards your creativity - Happy New Year !

On the Sixth Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

...Six geese a-laying. If you are very very lucky and have worked very very hard, one of the six just might be the goose that lays the golden egg – a book which gets published and even goes on to be a bestseller. A Christian interpretation of A Partridge in a Pear Tree would have it that the six geese represent the six days of creation and creation is very much my theme for today. I'm interested in the genesis of a story – where people source their ideas and what they do with them; how the same starting point can result in so many varying fictional interpretations; whether ideas arise more or less fully-formed or have to be teased out over a period of time; how the finished product differs from the first thought; the knock-on effect of seemingly insignificant changes. I'm obsessed by the whole process. That's why I keep a writing diary – it's a record of all the ideas I have, when I have them, and what I go on to do with them. As well as an aide memoir it's like a map to me, it tells me where I'm going, I'd be lost without it.

Writing fiction is such an idiosyncratic activity, there's no prescriptive way of doing things: over a period of time you discover what works best for you. Some people plan ahead, others take inspiration as they go along, or depend upon a bit of both. Some writers use pin boards or post-it notes or index cards, but most of them record their ideas in some form or another, so if you don't, it might be worth considering. In the end it doesn't matter how you go about it, as long as the darned egg gets laid.

On the Fifth Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

...Five gold rings. It's been suggested that these gold rings represent the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Alternatively they may refer to the gold ring around a pheasant's neck – some think that the early verses of A Partridge in a Pear Tree are a reference to the custom of stuffing one bird inside another inside another for the Christmas feast. Perhaps the rings also symbolise the gift of gold brought by the three Kings to the baby Jesus. Who knows?

It's all a question of interpretation, which is a source of endless fascination in fiction, where stories function on a number of different levels, each one accessible to different people in different ways. The act of interpretation is what connects the reader to the writer, It is an active process of enquiry. The trick for you as an author is to ensure that your work remains just elusive enough for the reader to have to work on it with their own imagination in order to experience it properly. If you do everything for them they will only engage with it in a passive way. If you make them do some of the work themselves, checking that two plus two really does equal four and not five as the plot seems to suggest, they will become actively immersed in the world you have created. There should be a sense of open-ended enigma in your narrative. This can be expressed through the unfolding of the plot, or by a character not being all that they seem, or in any number of other ways. Think of writing as a form of flirtation with your audience, promise and withhold, spurn and cajole, leave them in a state of creative uncertainty...

On the Fourth Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

.......Four calling birds. Aha! You might think they were calling birds, that's certainly what I've always sung, but it only takes a little light fact checking to discover that in the earliest version of the song they are actually four colly birds, which through its association with collier and coal means blackbird.

The creative writing moral for today is to do with accuracy. You should always check your facts when you are working on a story. If your narrative is set during a period when people would have spoken of colly birds, that's the term you should use. If it's set when they would have said calling, go for that. Try to avoid anachronisms as they will break the spell that you've been busy weaving. Your readers will forgive a little bit of poetic licence, but inaccuracy is unpardonable: it suggests laziness, and if someone is investing their precious time to read your book, you should pay them the respect of ensuring it is error free.

On the Third Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

......Three French hens. Now it turns out that the French hens in question are actually Faverolles, a heavy breed of utility fowl which originated in north central France in the 1860s and are characterised by their beards and muffs. They are excellent layers and good meat chickens, but because of their docile natures are prone to being bullied. Thank you Wikipedia. 

Here's a picture of one that I took -  in north-central France!

I'm telling you all of this to explain a little bit about the role that research plays in writing fiction. What I've done in the paragraph above is to overwhelm you with facts, but facts are heavy and dense and can weigh a narrative down when you actually want it to take flight. Facts can be interesting in themselves, but rarely contribute to the alchemy of good fiction. They need to be buried in the foundations of your story, underpinning of the architecture, but they shouldn't intrude too much. In creative writing terms, if I were writing about three French hens, the most interesting detail from the trove of information I've uncovered is about their docility, which is something I would be able to show in my story, rather than telling as I would a straight fact.

The hard-core information should stay privy to you, it provides the tinder to set your imagination alight. The occasional evocative detail is something you can share with your reader, but don't tell them everything, never do that, always keep them guessing, wanting to know more.

On the Second Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

......Two turtle doves who, because they mate for life, symbolise undying love – one of the great themes of fiction. Almost every major novel has a love story at the heart of it (though if you can think of ones which don't, email me because I'd like to know!)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the course of true love does not, and in the case of fiction, should not, run smoothly. In the world of the novel love should be unrequited, thwarted, unacknowledged or forsworn. Happily ever after isn't the subject of a good book, although it may be its conclusion. The basic plot of a love story has been summed up as boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back and although it is up to you as a writer to make this simple trajectory your own, you need to centre your story on the process through which your protagonist realises they are in love and that securing the affections of the loved one is worth any sacrifice. The element of questing which is crucial to a romance dates back to the mediaeval age of chivalry and in that sense it's a tried and tested formula.
So, if you have time on your hands during the holiday period (hah!) try sketching out a story that follows the basic principle boy meets girl etc while appearing not to. Make the story individual and distinctively your own, break any rules you like, but stick to the basic path of loving, losing, redeeming.
Think turtle doves...

On the First Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

... a partridge in a pear tree, which in creative writing terms is an excellent example of alliteration, so this is what I'm going to look at in the first verse of my Creative Writing Christmas Carol.
Alliteration is when you cluster the same consonants together for acoustic effect. The Partridge in a Pear Tree, which dates from 1780, is stuffed full of them and the fact that you have to get your tongue round the lords a leaping and the maids a milking gives the lyrics a bright staccato quality that compliments the music.The reason for using alliteration is to make your prose (or poetry) more resonant, so that the words you choose capture the sound of what you are describing. For example, seven swans a swimming perfectly sums up the slow glide of the swans swimming upstream (you see, I'm doing it too.). Alliteration isn't just used for decorative purposes, it can give emphasis to phrases (think tabloid headlines) and helps to create atmosphere as well. Used judiciously, it can add a certain je ne sais quoi to your work as it suggests stylistic confidence. It's a handy tool in the creative writing kit.

Creative Writing – Getting down with the Detail

I love this picture, taken in France last summer.

I like it because of the moody sky, the black trees, the dark earth. I like the layered light of the setting sun. It's a brooding scene, full of atmosphere.

There is - you've guessed it - a creative writing lesson to be learned from it. The presence of the three solitary birds sitting on the telegraph wire adds enormously to the emotional weight of the image. They seem so separate from each other, waiting for we don't know what. To me they add poignancy, suggesting something transitory, something small and vulnerable. In terms of the composition of the photograph, they are a tiny part of the whole, the smallest detail.

The moral for today? That it is here, in the detail, that great things occur. When you are working on a story or an individual scene, concentrate on the big picture by all means, but remember that a tiny but telling detail could do all the hard work for you.

Have a great weekend.

(Christmas) Presence for Writers

In my chequered past I was an actress. An early and indelible lesson I learned was about stage presence: if you sidle on to the stage looking as if you have no right to be there, uncertain of what to do with your hands, you're doomed from the start. You would do better to follow Laurence Olivier's advice – zigzag on, find your light, sweep your eyes once round the dress circle and begin. In this way you will take possession of the space and ensure that everybody's focus is fixed on you.

The same is true with writing. If your work is hesitant or imprecise (using too many adjectives and adverbs), if it isn't sufficiently edited, or if the construction is weak, you won't command attention. Command is the operative word here, because to write well you need to write with authority, which derives from confidence, which in turn comes from investing a good deal of time and thought into your craft until you are certain of what you are doing. Practice makes perfect, it really does.

To have a presence as a writer, to dominate the page, you need a strong and distinctive voice. You can only develop this by writing copiously and editing endlessly. Oh yes, and by reading. You should read with passionate eclecticism, leaving no page unturned.

Better get started then.

The Narrative Hinge

I took this photo of a hinge in France during the summer.

I think it's very beautiful: it is functional but the decoration of leaves and fruit (acorns? vines?) prevents it from being merely utilitarian. I like the contrast between the dark metal, the gilding and the pale wood.

I took this one in Chipping Sodbury. It is on the door to the old police station and is altogether more florid and – well – blue. Both hinges assist in the transition from one location or state to another, opening the door admitting you to the interior or ejecting you to the exterior depending on your direction of travel.

In literature, plots need hinges too. In order to propel your hero on his journey through your narrative, to make him leave his ordinary life and enter the world of your story, you might need some kind of hinge – a device such as a message, a setback or a challenge – to open the door and send him on his way. As he progresses, different portals might need to open for him, some of them leading up blind alleys, others closer to the heart of the adventure. These moments of transition, like my decorative hinges, need to be more than purely functional. If you bolt them on because you discover that you need them, the mechanism will grate and grind. If they exist as events in their own right and are neatly integrated into your story, they will operate smoothly. It's the difference between being expedient and going for an off-the-shelf option, or crafting something specific and individual.

If you are planning a story or a novel, spend some time thinking about the transitional moments in it and how you can best engineer them. Change  - in location, in outlook, in expectation, in fortune - is an essential ingredient in any narrative. If the hero doesn't change, his experience will have been in vain. A narrative hinge is the device which makes this possible.

The Literary Chicken and Egg Question?

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him, according to legendary sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury who, to be honest, makes it sound all too easy, but perhaps he does help to resolve the literary chicken and egg question of what comes first – plot or character.

If you come up with an ingenious plot and plonk in any old protagonist to service it, my hunch is that the end result will be two-dimensional and emotionally unsatisfying. If you start by creating a character, building her wants and needs, her hopes and fears layer by layer then you will be able to devise a plot that tests her strengths and exposes her weakness. If you know in advance what your heroine's heart's desire is, then you will be able to thwart her and subsequently to discover how far she is prepared to go to achieve it. This is the difference between a linear plot: a) happened, then b), which led to c) and one which is more organic: a) happened, which had this effect on your heroine making her feel something that caused her behaviour to change thereby influencing  your hero, which provoked him to do such and such. Putting character first enables you to explore the relationship between psychology and action and ultimately to look in a fuller sense at cause and effect.

So if somebody asks you the literary chicken and egg question, the answer is definitely chicken – it's character that should come first.

Exploring the Past by Degrees

Without getting too metaphysical and going way beyond my pay grade, we experience time in a number of different ways. How we relate to the present differs from how we relate to the recent or even the distant past, and all the way stations in between have their own subtle distinctions. As writers we can express these through the tenses we select.
Here are some of the ones we commonly use:

• Present: I write
• Present Continuous: I am writing
• Simple Past: I wrote
• Past Imperfect: I was writing
• Past Perfect: I have written
• Pluperfect: I had written
• Conditional: I would write 
• Conditional Perfect: I would have written
• Future Perfect: I will have written

In these examples the present is condensed and authoritative: I write – it's a statement of fact, whereas the present continuous I am writing sounds a little more hesitant and open-ended. The real nuances start to make themselves felt when you venture back in time. I wrote is direct and straightforward, but I was writing is somehow more suggestive: I was writing... (and then something happened to stop me?) I have written sounds emphatic, taking three words to hammer the message home. I had written takes you farther back still. It's a dead tense, an inaccessible one and I don't like it at all. I would write  sounds like someone hedging their bets - I would write but... but... but - it's an uncomfortable tense, a mitigating tense, but it's not quite so hand-wringing as the conditional perfect – I would have written (but it's too late now.) The future perfect sounds wonderfully organised and efficient, redolent of forward planning: I will have written. It's self assured in a way that the imperfect never can be.
Try substituting different verbs: I would have loved, I was hurting, I rejoice, and you start to see what a crucial contribution the choice of tense makes to what you are trying to convey. Choose wisely and you will have done yourself (!) a great favour.

How to Make Your Reader an Accomplice

Have you ever watched someone you love hurtling headlong for disaster? I hope not. It makes you want to reach out and physically contain them – in your arms, in a safe place, even in an institution, if that's what it takes. When a person is, for whatever reason, powerless to influence what is happening to them, it is easy to blame events on a malign fate engineering punishment, whether it's justified or not. For the saddened spectator, knowing what is coming further down the track when the victim can't or won't see it for themselves provokes extraordinarily complex emotions – guilt, terror, and despair; maybe even relief that your own life isn't like that.

When you are writing fiction, putting your reader in a similar position – that of omniscient spectator - is called dramatic irony. You manipulate the story so that the reader doesn't just have the pleasure of finding out what happens next, they are privy to it some time before the protagonist. This puts them in an ambiguous position. It can increase the suspense of your story if you hold up the possibility that your hero might, at the eleventh hour, realise what is afoot and avert disaster; it can arouse intense feelings of frustration or pity when this doesn't happen. In Othello, the audience knows about Iago's machinations and deceptions while Othello himself remains in ignorance. Using dramatic irony is a fantastic way of engaging your reader more directly with your story. It changes them from being passive recipients of events into  active participants because you are effectively implicating them in what is going on. Give them more information than your hero has and you are turning them into your accomplices.

A Long Day's Journey into Writing

I've had a long day's writing and I'm tired. You would think this might mean that it's time for me to shut down my computer and go and have a cup of tea – even a biscuit! However, I've learned over the years that I often write best when I'm weary. Perhaps it's because my defences are lower and I'm less resistant, so feelings and ideas can surface more easily. Perhaps the brutal truth is that it takes eight hours work to set the flow of words in motion. Whatever the reason, I often think it's best not to stop work when you're beginning to flag, that instead you should throw yourself into it even more. Write until you become almost incoherent; write until you're exhausted. You might find it's rubbish when you come to reread it in the morning, but my guess is that you will find nuggets of pure gold that would normally be inaccessible to you.

How to Give Your Writing Voltage - by Voltaire

Voltaire,  historian, philosopher and designer of doors (see my earlier post) was no slouch as an author either, his satirical novel Candide, which charts the passage from optimism to disillusionment, vying for attention with other literary and philosophical masterpieces. He was also French, which to my mind suggests style, pure and simple. For all these reasons it is worth paying attention to what he has to say about writing:

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.

There. A perfect example of clarity and directness, qualities we should aspire to in our work. For the sake of absolute clarity, it's worth mentioning that a noun is an object and an adjective is a word which describes it: the red (adjective) house (noun). You'd expect the two of them to work together in harmony and often they do. Prose without any description at all would provide thin pickings, but to extend the food analogy a little, too much of it is like bad cholesterol: it clogs up the arteries of your narrative. You need to use it in moderation.

Here are some pitfalls to avoid when writing descriptively.

• If you use adjectives with abandon, the weight of unnecessary words becomes a burden and will slow your story down.
• If using adjectives becomes your default setting and all you ever write is adjective / noun, adjective  / noun, adjective / noun (the tall house, the deep sea, the little baby) the rhythm of your writing becomes predictable, which means that the attention of your reader will start to wander.
• Factual accuracy is important in your work, but literary accuracy is vital too. The reason that adjectives are the enemies of nouns is not just that they swamp them, they also suggest a fundamental inaccuracy in the noun itself. Instead of saying tall building, say mansion, or skyscraper, or brownstone. For deep sea you could substitute ocean; for little baby, infant.

It's a kind of distillation: the heat of creativity leading to the essence of truth.

And here he is – the man himself, surveying the grounds of the château at Cirey en Blaise where he lived for many years.

Pared down, as you might expect, to the minimum.

Writing - A Kind of Renewable Energy?

When you're preparing to write a novel or a story, you need to be in a receptive state, alert to all the diverse scraps of conversation, news, visual images and situations that come your way. As Margaret Atwood wisely observed, it's all material. How you collate everything is an intensely personal decision – I use a notebook, but I've heard of other people using index cards, box files and pin boards. The important thing is to nail something while it is still fresh, otherwise you may forget an idea or it might lose some of the vividness that drew you to it in the first place.

It's a kind of hoarding and when I'm researching I spent quite a lot of time, like Silas Marner, counting my gold, fingering the coins, holding them up to the light with greedy glee. I think about my stash of ideas often and add to it when I can, so that over a few months it becomes a bit of a ragbag, but I think that's a strength rather than a weakness - anything that doesn't fit when you come to start work can always be recycled somewhere else.

If you want a writing exercise for the weekend, try this one for size. Have a rummage round in your own ragbag and come up with something you've heard (this can be some gossip, a snatch of conversation, a news item), something you've seen, something you've been given and something you want but can't have. Mix them up together and see if the seed a story starts to germinate - writing as an exercise in thrift, as a source of renewable energy, perhaps.

Pathetic Fallacy in November

I'm sitting in my writer's block (shed) gazing out at the downpour outside. The sky is like wet newsprint, running with grey. The rain that is currently drumming on my shed roof, reminding me of wet camping holidays as a child, expresses some of the gloom I feel at the approach of winter and the loss of daylight.

November is the perfect month for pathetic fallacy, a literary device where you attribute human emotions or characteristics to nature, or to inanimate objects, for  example the sullen river, the hostile facade of the building... You'll notice I've chosen negative examples in both cases, and this isn't purely coincidental, because pathetic fallacy is often used when human actions are so intense they are uncontainable and spill over into other things. Wuthering Heights is stuffed full of pathetic fallacy – the wild weather on the moors expressing the turbulent emotions with which Heathcliffe and Cathy are wracked. It can be a great way of giving your writing resonance, ensuring that the feelings of your characters reverberate and echo.

Because it's effective, pathetic fallacy can easily be come a default position and you need to be wary of that. You might consider writing a scene in which your heroine is having a major emotional crisis against a background of utter delight – radiant sunshine, the perfect vista, the ideal home – whatever floats your boat. My hunch is that this will enable you to explore feelings of alienation and isolation that are not available if you rely on pathetic fallacy all the time.

So, instead of the sodden garden with its great burden of water that I'm gazing out at, here's a field of young sunflowers newly opened up, turning their faces round to find light.

Drama v Reality

I watched Michael Winterbottom's new film Everyday on Channel 4 last week. It's been described as a sketched drama, which is a difficult term because although I think it means that it was largely improvised, it could also imply that it wasn't fully realised. Hmm.

The film's USP is that it was made over a period of five years. It explores the relationship between Ian (John Simm), who has been sent to prison for drug smuggling, and his struggling family headed by his wife, Karen (played by the luminous, resilient Shirley Henderson).

Winterbottom's genius lay in finding  four real siblings to play the kids and he filmed them every six months, an arrangement that allowed this understated film to explore whether love can survive a long period of separation and whether it is possible to keep the detail of family life going in such testing circumstances.

The film was beautifully performed and the photography was outstanding – those huge, expressionistic East Anglian skies - but in spite of the fact that the production took so long to complete, the end result was weirdly static.

As a writer, this gave me plenty of food for thought. Over the five years that it took to film, given that the circumstances the characters were facing were so challenging, one would have expected to see profound changes taking place as the tectonic plates of family life shifted, but this wasn't the case. The children grew older, the mum seemed more worn, the dad couldn't resist smuggling some dope back into the prison after some home leave – the crime that landed him inside in the first place. Plus ca change - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Everyday worked best as a meditation on human behaviour. It was reflective, mirroring the lives of people under stress. I'm not sure it worked as drama. For that you need crisis, change, a journey to self-knowledge, none of which were much in evidence. Drama distils human actions so the audience can experience catharsis, but I'm not sure that realism has these magical powers.

Nick Dear - A Masterclass in Writing From Life

It was a play about writing, and words, and love, and what inspires them all. It was full of beauty and sadness, cadenced.

I'm talking about Nick Dear's new drama about the poet Edward Thomas, The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, which has recently opened in London at the Almeida Theatre. If you don't have the chance to go and see it, although you will miss the heart-wrenching performances of Pip Carter and Hattie Morahan (playing Edward and his wife Helen), you will still be able to read the script.

As well as being astonishingly articulate about the process of writing – Thomas has a close literary friendship with the American poet Robert Frost and the two of them explore the fascination of the writer's craft - the play is a must read because it reveals some of the alchemy of bringing characters to life. In Dear's perceptive, clear-eyed incarnation, Edward Thomas is shown to be capable of the strongest bonds of friendship, both with Frost and with Eleanor Farjeon, but is a vile husband and an indifferent father. Yet his love for poetry seems to transcend mere earthly ties, and that is what transfigures both him and us. Thomas's character is revealed to us facet by facet, from the point of view of the different people who knew him, in all its inconsistent, cruel, passionate, inspiring humanity. It is a masterclass in writing from life. Look and learn, look and learn...

If you want a writing exercise for the weekend, here's a thought taken from the play, uttered by Robert Frost.

Words exist in the mouth, not in books, and you can't read a single good sentence with the salt in it unless you have previously heard it spoken. That's what I think. The ear does it all, the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Spend some time listening, listen for the salt in a good sentence, use your ears, then write about something that you've heard...

All Work and No Play

 Yesterday I wrote for twelve hours with barely a pause for breath and I've done six hours today: write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write - you get the picture. I'm off to London now, to see Nick Dear's new play about Edward Thomas at the Almeida, and tomorrow I'm going to a talk about The Wasteland - what cultural riches. I'm mentioning this partly because it means my blogging will be a bit thin on the ground this week, but also because I firmly believe in finding ways to feed your creativity. If you do nothing but write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, you'll soon find that inspiration turns to stupification (which I don't think is a word, thus proving my point).

Take time out to read and think – absorb the best and worst writing you can lay your hands upon, because you'll learn from both. Stiffen the sinews : dream, walk, wander. Make a list of all the books you've read this year, then resolve to double it  next year. Don't just sit at your desk and grind words out.

That's my excuse, at least....

Creative Writing - Making Plans

I've been appraising manuscripts for a couple of literary consultants in London recently and there is one thing which crops up time after time in the books that I've been reading and that is a lack of planning. The most brilliant conception is going to lead to an extremely poor delivery if you don't make proper preparations.

Inspiration honestly, truly isn't enough and the perspiration which is said to be a necessary accompaniment should consist of at least some careful planning. You won't do justice to your genius idea if you don't spend time thinking about the execution of it. The stories I've been working on are well-written – no problems there -  but the characters are on the skinny side because the writers haven't lived with them for long enough, and the plots are prone to hideous expediency, because the necessary traps haven't been set in advance.

Great artists do preliminary sketches for their paintings, and in order to fulfil your own potential it wouldn't do any harm to come up with an outline plan for the story you intend to write. Nothing needs to be set in stone - the process of thinking ahead will have made you ask important questions about your plot and that is the main thing;  the answers may come later and will perhaps surprise you.

Be prepared. Otherwise you may sell yourself short, may not do justice to your ability. Because planning is a practical thing to do, it may feel like the opposite of creativity, but it will provide you with a structure for your story and a gilded frame for your talent.

At the Edge of the Precipice with F. Scott Fitzgerald

The other day I started re-reading The Great Gatsby because it's recently out of copyright and as a result there has been a lot of brouhaha about it, with dramatisations and new editions galore, and I wanted to remind myself what all the fuss was about. Then I spent a guilty half hour in our local Amnesty bookshop (guilty because generally I believe in buying new books so that authors get their due royalty, but I was poorly and didn't quite know what I was doing. Guilt partly assuaged by supporting Amnesty though...) and bought The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, which has sidetracked me a little, but THEN I stumbled upon the wonderful quotation below, which has catapulted me straight back to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and you'll see why...

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story.

Here is a thought that sums up what is exciting about great writing. First of all, it subverts, it takes you by surprise - Scott Fitzgerald isn't saying draw your chair up to the fire, or closer to mine, he's taking you to the brink of something extraordinary.
   
I like the fact that in this line there is an implicit contract between the writer and the reader. The writer is asking something of his reader and promising a reward in return. In reading a book you form a brief but intense relationship with its author. You open up your imagination and your emotional experience and allow him to work upon them. It's an intimacy that is almost sexual, and the vertiginous excitement that can result from it is what Scott Fitzgerald is referring to here.

There is danger in what he is proposing: the edge of the precipice. You are still on solid ground, but only just. If you lose your balance, either literally or metaphorically, you could plunge to your death, or to some hitherto unexplored depths of your interior world. He is not locating you anywhere comfortable; he's not offering you an easy ride; on the contrary, he is throwing down a challenge, but in doing so he is also asking you to trust him. Perhaps that's a writer's  greatest task – to challenge his readers, but to bring them safely home.

Whether you're reading or writing, finding a story that skirts the precipice's edge is the most exciting thing of all.

Throwing a Sickie...

Vile cold.
Here's a lovely door for you to be getting on with. It might lead you somewhere...

Normal service will resume shortly.

Help from Your Favourite Heroines

What is it that makes a character in a novel memorable? Perhaps it would help to answer this question by asking it in a different way: who are the characters you most remember? If you can come up with the who, it might lead you to the why and that in turn might be of help when you are conjuring your own protagonists out of that thin, thin air.

In terms of heroines, my younger self would probably say Scarlet O'Hara from Gone with the Wind, but more mature contenders would be Anna Karenina, Nana, the heroine from the Zola's book of the same name, and Tess of the D'Urbevilles 

 Why Scarlett O'Hara? Because she is so flawed and so beautiful– she behaves badly, has no moral compass and no self-knowledge. Because she is punished for all of these things and remains indomitable.

Why Anna Karenina? Why Nana? Both of them find themselves on the outside of society, one as an adulteress, the other as a prostitute. They're not conventional, nor are they seen as ideals of womanhood. They are compromised and unhappy and the dilemmas they face seem real. Anna ends by hitting the self-destruct button, Nana ruins every man she comes into contact with. The terrible workings of cause and effect in both their lives are plain to see. The same is true of Tess, whose unfortunate seduction by Alec is her social and moral and doing. She is both victim and avenger.

Perhaps there's a bit of the theme emerging here. The women I have chosen all have tragic stature because their fall from grace is so vertiginous. With the exception of Anna,  these women fight back, they show resilience. Their behaviour is extreme and in some ways subversive, and three out of four of them end by dying, something which makes the stakes of their respective stories extremely high. They are passionate, risk-taking and rebellious, and yet beneath this we glimpse their vulnerability, qualities which form a combustible mix.

When you are thinking about your next project, it might be helpful to conduct a brief survey of the heroines you admire. If you can work out what it is that attracts you to them, you are halfway to being able to endow your own protagonist with their feistiness, or their fragile glamour, or whatever it was that drew you to them in the first place.

Room With a View

Pulitzer Prize winning American author Edna Ferber once observed, 'The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.'
Perhaps the blank brick wall might serve as a timely reminder that trying to write well and be published is a bit like hitting one, time and time again, and I can see that a cloudless stretch of sky might lend itself to blue sky thinking, but I'm rather fond of the clutter of green that I can see from my window.

I guess Ferber was advocating minimal distraction and perhaps I have spent too much time watching my neighbour's runner beans ripen and gawping at the builders re-pointing the swimming pool chimney, but I'm thinking while I'm looking out, honestly, I am.
Rather than being a distraction, a view can often provide inspiration. At the moment sunlight is streaking along a cobweb that's been loosened by the wind, and the leaves on the silver birch tree won't be there much longer. When I'm gazing out across the muddled gardens I'm learning to notice  detail, I'm absorbing subtle changes and the effect of light and weather. Some of the time I stare attentively, sometimes I have no idea what I'm looking at, what I'm seeing is all inside my head.
Perhaps distraction is no bad thing, in any case: if you let your mind wander, who knows where it may lead you?

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

I went to see Cheek by Jowl's sensational production of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at the Bristol Old Vic on Monday. Declan Donellan re-imagines John Ford's Jacobean tragedy for the 21st Century and the macabre and incestuous behaviour of the protagonists Annabella and Giovanni fits uncomfortably well with the hedonistic, decadent contemporary society that he conjures for us.

Nick Ormerod's set is a feverish red and the play opens feverishly with a song and dance number. Music and movement inform the action throughout. The drama is visceral, to the extent that the heroine's heart is brought on by her bloodied brother after he has cut it from her chest. It was inventive, funny and horrifying by turn.

One of the things I liked most about it was the tension between the modern setting and the Jacobean text, a provocative clash that raises questions about human nature and what we have learned or not during the centuries since it was written. I think there's a creative writing lesson here too. You can add different dimensions to your work by exploring areas of tension within it: Donellan counterpointed language and setting, but you can do the same thing with aspiration and actual achievement, appearance and reality, thought and deed. There are any number of opposing forces or ideas that you can bring together and if you're very, very skilful, you'll achieve the same combustible excitement that we witnessed at the theatre  earlier this week.

Writing Fiction – Keeping a Sense of Proportion

When you're writing and the white heat of creativity is upon you, it is easy to get so caught up in what you are doing that you start to lose a sense of overall proportion in your work. Just as visual artists step back from their canvases to take in the bigger picture, so you should find a way of stepping back from what you're writing in order to make sure that your work retains a proper sense of proportion. If you don't disengage from time to time and take a critical look at what you've done, you may find that a particular character is becoming dominant, or that you are concentrating on one strand of the plot at the expense of another. Equally, you might discover that you are overwriting and that how you are telling the tale is becoming more attention grabbing than the tale itself.
Reviewing the whole narrative every three chapters or so is a great way of making sure that the emphasis of your story is where you want it to be. If you don't keep a proprietorial eye on things, the proportions may become skewed and you'll end up with something looking a bit like this...

Free Critique of Your Creative Writing

All of us tell tales. We share our triumphs and tribulations with each other, we pass on gossip, we search for meaning and significance in our own experience and in each other's. Sometimes this involves reading fiction, which at its best universalizes the particular, thus offering us understanding, catharsis and a sense of being healed.

If you have time on your hands over the weekend, you might like to have a go at a writing exercise. Think about the narratives which people create for themselves, try and explore the need for that narrative and then look at what happens if it is breached or subverted. There's a whole short story right there, waiting to be written.

I'd be interested to see what you come up with, so if you'd like to send me five hundred words or so of what you have written, I'd happily critique the first ten that I receive for free.

Have a great weekend...

Making a Commitment to Your Writing

When you're sitting in front of your computer, staring at the blank screen *what shall I blog about today* and you can see a big, fat, writers block out of the corner of your eye, making some kind of external commitment about your work may help you to get off the starting blocks.

Writing can be such a cussed, solitary thing to do, that I would heartily recommend you to find yourself a writing buddy at the earliest opportunity. Your buddy could be a partner, a parent, a friend or a fellow writer. Because the relationship is often reciprocal,  it has the potential to develop into something constructive, critical, supportive and empathetic, all in a wonderful one-er.


Most writers write because they can't not, so motivation isn't usually a problem, but some kinds of writing are more fun to do than others, so if you're struggling with something and running out of steam (and inspiration), making some kind of literary commitment to your writing buddy might be the answer. Promise them that you will show them your draft synopsis/final chapter/article pitch by Friday week, and you will find yourself extraordinarily motivated to make good on that promise.


Saying something, makes it so. We write in order to make the magical world inside our head seem real. In the same way, promising to deliver a piece of work will help to make it happen.

Fiction Writing - The Unwritten Rules

 Somerset Maugham sums it up pretty neatly,

 There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are.

I think my three guiding principles would be something like this:

1. Don't write for effect – always serve the story.
2. Edit with obsessive stringency.
3. Read other writers. 

What are your unwritten writing rules?

Writing Fiction – How to Structure a Story

I rather like this ramshackle old window, snapped in some mediaeval village in France. I like all the different textures: the painted tongue and groove planking, the peeling frame, the cracked, occluded glass and the partial sight of a brick wall beyond that.

Think of it as a metaphor for the structure of a book. The planking is the setting or background, the frame is the concept - the single, illuminating idea - on which your narrative is based, the broken glass is the way in which you subvert your original idea with a change of perspective or an unforeseen plot twist, while the brick wall could be the kernel of truth at the centre of your story, or  the glimpsed heart of darkness, or the end of the road for one of your characters, or the suggestion of the existence of another world beyond the one you are currently exploring.

What I think the picture illustrates is the fact that writing a novel is not an entirely linear process, although most plots need a beginning, middle and an end. The task for the writer is to build up layers – you don't establish the background, then introduce a character, then set the plot in motion – the challenge is to do all of them at the same time, rather than sequentially.

If you want a writing work-out for the weekend, try writing a scene with this in mind. Approach it as if you were painting a picture. While you are filling in some of the background, think how the figures relate to the fictional landscape you are creating - are they central to the composition, or are they doing something intriguing in the margins; do they blend in or stand out; do they attract or repel? Your lit pic might allude to some action taking place just beyond what is currently visible, to give a sense of onward momentum. Perhaps you could frame your scene, setting it in a context that counterpoints or highlights the picture you have drawn. None of this is easy to do, but if you can pull it off it is a way to synthesize what you have written and it should lend a satisfying depth and texture to your work.

The Wo - Man Booker Prize

I'm giving three resounding cheers for Hilary Mantel, throwing my  cap in the air and cheering to the rafters.
The first cheer is because Bring up the Bodies is skeined like silk and woven into a literary tapestry as fine and detailed as any 16th century needlecraft could ever be. I adored Wolf Hall and opened its sequel with some trepidation, believing that it could never live up to the first volume, but it did and it's sublime.
The second cheer is because Hilary Mantel is fighting a rearguard action to make genre fiction respectable. It's fantastic to see historical novels take their place beside so-called literary tomes and it reaffirms the fact that it's not what you write, but how you write it which matters.
The third cheer is because the divine Ms M is the only woman ever to have won the Man Booker prize twice, which means that all her literary sisters can walk a little taller today...

Just Suppose You Juxtapose...

Juxtapose means to put two things side-by-side. If this was all you did with them, it wouldn't be much of a literary trick to pull off. However, it can be useful if you want to make one thing that comment on another, to highlight their similarities or differences, to question the relationship between the two objects, or to explore the effect of context. Colours change tone when you place them next to each other. The same can be true of people, who adjust their behaviour to suit different circumstances.

Juxtaposition is a tool for highlighting or offsetting something, for showing it in a different light. It can be used humorously and may introduce traces of the absurd. This van, parked in my street today, is perhaps a little exercise in juxtaposition - when is a door not door?

It made me smile, in any case.

Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty: Why Detail Matters

British short story supremo VS Pritchett once observed, "Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better," advice we lesser mortals should ignore at our peril. The use of detail is one of the major tools we have for bringing characters to life. It can also be an antidote to cliche and stereotype. To describe a woman as having blonde hair and blue eyes tells your reader nothing of any use, but if you mention that her eyes are myopic and water when she is tired and that her golden hair is showing pewter at the roots, a more distinct picture starts to emerge.

Not only does detail help to bring characters to life, it adds drama to events. If you describe a man walking into an abandoned warehouse and finding a woman lying bound on a plastic sheet, it tells your reader some of what they need to know, but by no means enough. You need to show how the man enters: does he break in, does he wander in by accident, is he expecting to see the girl there? Are there people on the streets outside, or cars passing, or are they miles from anywhere? Is there evidence of violence? Can anything be heard? Does the smell of a recently struck match suggest the presence of someone else not very far away? You can see how these minutiae transform a situation into a living, breathing drama.

Think of detail as layers of paint which an artist might add to a canvas, then sit yourself down in front of a blank page, start with the briefest sketch of a situation – perhaps the one I've outlined above, if it interests you – and try to add colour and definition, stroke by stroke. I'm channelling grit on the floor, traces of washed blood, the sound of a chain, swinging... I might have a go at it myself!

Have a great weekend....

How to Do Dialogue When Writing Fiction

Good dialogue is plausible, life-like conversation which reflects the character of the speaker and helps to provide necessary information to advance the plot.

Ah-ha! But how do you write good dialogue? Spend some time – lots of it, if you have it – listening to how people speak. Eavesdrop on buses, do whatever it takes. Then, when you are ready to set to work yourself, follow these simple steps and they should help make it easier for you.

• As an active listener, you will have noticed  that people use short, fragmented sentences, so keep your sentences short as well – multiple clauses and conversation don't mix.
• Most people are fairly self-centred and more interested in what they have to say than what the person they are talking to is on about. Often they will pursue the same line of thought through a number of short speeches, barely acknowledging anything which is being said to them. Have a go at recreating this scenario yourself.
• People have vocal mannerisms – little conversational tics – you know, I mean, right. Used sparingly, and I mean sparingly, these signature phrases can help to identify a character and make their speech seem naturalistic. Don't over do this, however, as it can be irritating.
• You can put spin on dialogue by close attention to how something is said, rather than simply what is said. The same sentence can have a vastly different meaning if it is spoken differently: I love you can sound, tender, or passionate, or even vengeful.
• Repetition is fine in spoken dialogue and can help make it seem realistic, though it is to be avoided in straight prose.
• Don't be afraid to chop things up illogically from time to time. People do murderous things with syntax when they are talking: try it out, why don't you? 

If you want a little writing exercise to be going on with, jot down a duologue between two characters and then remove all the identifying references – he said, she asked, Joan smiled, Sally sobbed etc - and see if you can make out who is talking from the way that they say things.

Must be time for a door...

Writing Fiction – Three Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

When you're appraising manuscripts, it's easy to spot the work of an inexperienced writer. The most common pitfalls I come across are these:

• Overwriting
• Lack of editing
• Lack of planning

I suspect that all of these stem from the same overwhelming urge to create. Once you discover the intoxication of spilling your thoughts across a page, it can be very hard to reign yourself in. If you enter that magical space where time passes without you realising as you write, write, write, you will feel extraordinarily protective of what you have produced there. Because writing is such a personal and intimate activity, and inspiration is not something you can always count on, you can be reluctant to make any changes to your work, in case something is irrevocably lost and the fairy dust disappears.

This is where tough love comes in. If you want to do justice to your writing, once the white heat of inspiration has passed, you may find you need to do some rigorous re-drafting.

Overwriting - It is easy to get carried away with reams and reams of superfluous description. If you discover you have a way with words, try not to indulge it too often. In fiction more than anything else, less is often more. How do you tell if you are overwriting? If you have chunks of description which aren't carrying out another function at the same time, i.e. advancing the plot, revealing something new about a character, providing a counterpoint to contrast with the mood of the scene, then that description is probably superfluous and should be cut. If you find that you are using two (or, heaven forfend, three) adjectives - the long, narrow, winding road – try and find one that will do the work on its own (the snaking road?) If you find you are saying the same thing twice, in slightly different ways, then ditch one of them. If you are repeating anything directly, jettison it right away.

Lack of Editing - Don't be over-protective of your work. The chances of getting everything right first time are zero. Apparently Martin Amis does up to six drafts of every novel and Stephen King has revealed he cuts twenty percent of the prose from his first draft. If they can do it, so can you. The dead weight of bad writing will drag your story down.

Lack of Planning – People who are starting out as writers tend to come up with a brilliant idea, so brilliant that they have to get it down straight away while it is fresh and crackling with excitement, and they charge through the first few chapters without drawing breath. Often, when this first surge of creative energy is spent, they come to a grinding halt. To follow the story's journey, at the very least you will need the sketchy outline of a map; you need to know the terrain. Some writers may find this inhibiting, they are fearful that it will impede their creativity, but my hunch is that it is much more likely to support the creative process. Having a plot mapped out doesn't mean that you can't make changes to it as you go along, but it is likely to mean that you will set up the necessary twists and turns in your story well in advance and that you won't have to rely on awkward coincidences or improbable events to get you out of a tight plotting spot. It will also protect you from the horrible moment when you sit down, look at the empty page, and think what do I write today? You will know that the next scene you need to start on is the one where they sail out of Paris on a boat, or whatever...When you know where you are going, you can go striding on your way.

National Poetry Day

In a recent question and answer session promoting the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Carol Ann Duffy said,

"For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we were and to who we will become"

 *Collective sigh of wonderment* The music of being human is the most perfect description of what poetry is, and because it is National Poetry Day I thought I'd offer up a  list of some of my favourite musicians. In no particular order,

W B Yeats
Paul Celan
Hugo Williams
Simon Armitage
John Masefield
Sylvia Plath
Wendy Cope
Paul Muldoon
Rupert Brooke
James Fenton
and the emerging talent of West Country poet Deborah Harvey...

I shall have The White Birds by W B Yeats going round in my head all day now – the first chords of poetry that I remember hearing...
Which poets will you be celebrating on National Poetry Day?

How to Get Published? Think Big!

What with the recession and the de-stabilising effects of digital publishing, writers are finding it harder than ever before to get their books conventionally published by one of the traditional houses. Editors' hands are tied by the marketing departments, who seem to blindly read the runes of what was successful last year to try and predict what will be successful next year, rather than judging each submission on its merits. The result is a succession of pale imitations of recent hits (Jane Eyre Laid Bare? Don't get me started).

The common consensus appears to be that editors are looking for something BIG. It doesn't seem to matter what, providing it comes super-sized. So here are a few thoughts about how you might go large in literary terms.

• Find a so-called 'high concept' for your story. This is an idea – a stroke of inspiration – so simple yet profound that it can be conveyed in one succinct sentence. Think One Day by David Nichols: charting the development of a couple's relationship on the same date over twenty-five years.
• As well as a high concept, you need high stakes: your protagonist must stand to gain or lose massively as your narrative plays out.
• High drama wouldn't do any harm, either. Don't swerve away from the big scene, leaving it to your readers' imagination; wring out every bit of intensity that you can. You need strong characters wrestling with big issues and overwhelming emotions.
• It might help if the scope of your story is wide: Hilary Mantel has made the court of Henry VIII her own in Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. Both books describe a personal story that is played out on a vast canvas and has national and historical significance. Find a big stage for your characters to act upon.
• Most importantly of all, even if you are working on a grand scale, don't confuse drama for melodrama. Guard the integrity and emotional truth of your characters and remember the importance of the small, but telling detail. It's like painting an epic fresco with a miniaturist's brush.

Architecture for Writers

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, according to Ernest Hemingway, an interesting insight with which to start the week. If you think of your novel as a work of architecture, you may find yourself looking at the way the story arcs and intersects with more pragmatic eyes. Try picturing your book as a building, think what you will need to support the spans of the narrative - strong characterisation and a slippery plot; give it solid foundations, provide somewhere for imagination to take refuge, house your reader, make them at home.

By concentrating on the structure of your story, you will be less diverted by the niceties of polishing your prose (that can wait for later), which means there's every chance your writing will be less self-conscious and the work as a whole more solid and robust.

 

The Kindest Cuts of All - A Guide to Editing

Having exhorted you to slash and burn in a recent post, I thought it might be helpful to give you an idea of the kind of things you should be cutting when you are in editing mode.

• Take the scissors to any adverbs (or -ly word). You shouldn't use two words if one will do, so instead of sounded loudly, blared; instead of walked briskly, hurried – and so on.
• Be wary of too many adjectives. When you are writing descriptively, it is easy to fall into a pattern of phrasing: an adjective and then a noun, for example tall tree, or two adjectives and a noun – tall, green tree. You need to keep an eye on this to vary the intensity of your description, so make sure you use various combinations of adjectives and nouns and sometimes go for broke and don't use any adjectives at all.
• Anything overwritten - see above.
• Anything trite - cliches, sayings, hackneyed phrases.
• Any repetitions. If you have used a word in the previous sentence, think of a different way of saying the same thing next time around. Too much repetition suggests either a lack of vocabulary, or sloppy writing.
• Anything that doesn't ring true - if your character wouldn't say or do something, get rid of it.
• Anything you stumble over when you read your work aloud - if it doesn't flow it needs to go.

If you are as ruthless as I recommend you should be, you will probably lose a significant percentage of your work. That is a very good thing (even if it doesn't feel like it at the time). Your prose will be infinitely stronger for being more concentrated.

If in doubt, chuck it out.

Lost in Translation # 4

There's a lovely moment in Cider with Rosie, where Laurie Lee is told  wait there for the present on his first day at school and he waits, and waits, but there is no present...

I was reminded of this when we were in France over the summer. We saw this sign in a railway siding,

according to my schoolgirl French, it appears to say (though I'm sure it doesn't) stop for pudding - a welcome instruction for an engine driver, or anybody else for that matter.

My excuse for including it in my writing blog is because I love the intricacies and surprises of our own language – that is the essence of being a writer – but when it collides with another, the delights can be irresistible. Things are sometimes lost in translation, but more often than not they are found, as well.

Extended Gardening Metaphor Alert

Over the weekend, while the weather was still fine, I edited my garden. By editing, I mean sawing off whole branches of our aggressive Buddleia, cutting back leggy shrubs and unwinding bind weed, endlessly.

Slash and burn, horticultural style. By the time that we had finished, and it took the best part of a day, we could make out individual plants, see the path winding down to my little shed at the bottom, see the shed itself. Even though the garden looked shorn, it had definition. Some of our chopping seemed radical and I hope we haven't killed too many tender perennials along the way but, perhaps it was because we were doing hard physical work in the sunshine, it felt elating, and the end result was a vast improvement on how the garden looked before.

Editing is hard intellectual work. It can be hard emotional work as well, because sometimes you end up chopping out something that you really like for the sake of the story as a whole. A highly polished phrase that you spent half an hour crafting, if it slows down the action, or is out of character, or overwrought, simply has to go. You need to learn to be ruthless. Just as cutting back a rose permits new growth, so clearing the dead wood from your work will create spaces in which you can write better. And although you may end up with a pile of paragraphs (and even chapters) as big as my heap of garden waste, it can be weirdly elating: it makes you prioritise value over effort, and that's the starting point for writing well

Lies, Damned Lies, and Anton Chekhov

I watched  Imagine on the BBC the other night, Alan Yentob's reflective programme about the new memoir Salman Rushdie has written about the time he spent in enforced hiding following the Ayatollah's fatwa. The book is called Joseph Anton -- this was the pseudonym Rushdie adopted at the request of the security services who were protecting him, a fusion of the first names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Which brings me, by indirect means,  to my thought for the day – a quotation from said Anton Chekhov,

"My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying."

I love the idea of writers lying, given that fiction is nothing but an extended, intricate, beautifully crafted lie. What interested me about this pearl of wisdom was the notion that most of the lying – I'm taking this to mean dishonesty, rather than invention – occurs at the beginning and end of a story, and I wondered why this might be?

I think fiction doesn't ring true, or as Chekhov would have it lies, if it loses its integrity. This happens when you include something that is expedient, or sloppy, or inconsistent, and I can see that these traps might snap shut on you more easily when you are busy with your exposition, setting things up, because it's a period of great contrivance. Once you have your story in motion everything moves more seamlessly along and I think you are less likely to make ill-advised, rash editorial decisions.

Similarly at the end of your tale, some narrative threads need tying up with a tight knot in order to get them to hold, and this can strain credibility, or disappoint, or confound - more lies, in fact.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Chekhov was right about the need to cross out beginnings and endings – they present some of the greatest challenges in creative writing, and if he found himself re-writing on occasion, you shouldn't be dismayed if you find you need to as well.

Have a great weekend...

Writing Groups - What's Not to Like??

During the last couple of days I've been moving into a new computer -- nightmare -- and for a twenty-four hour period it has felt as bad as moving house: all my metaphorical boxes are piled up just anyhow and I can't find where anything it is. However, I've done most of the unpacking and quite a lot of migrating, with the indispensable help of the people at Geek Squad (thank you agent Peter!) Probably too much information for you, but it's a kind of apology for my silence yesterday.

As a treat after all of this discombobulation I'm going to my writing group this evening. I've been working with this particular band of inspiring scribes for more than ten years now, and if you aren't already a member of a writing group, I couldn't recommend it more highly. You could try looking online to see if there is a group near you, or pop into your local library, or failing that, start one yourself. Here are some of the benefits I think you will enjoy:

• Writing is an incredibly solitary occupation; not just solitary, there are elements of obsessive compulsiveness about it too, so to meet up with people who share the same imagination/ambition/disorder can be extremely life affirming.
• It can be very difficult to find constructive help when you are starting out.  Enrolling for a creative writing course at your local college can be useful, but what writing groups give you is something more long-term than that. There's nothing to beat the fulfillment of seeing each other grow, develop and mature as writers as the years roll by.
• You get incredibly valuable feedback from a range of different people who, over time, will have come to know your weaknesses and the giddy heights that you are capable of attaining.
• Through listening to other people's efforts, you will develop your editorial skills and be able to bring a keen critical appreciation to your own work.
• Each meeting provides a fascinating, intricate and stimulating analysis of what makes writing work - who could ask for more?