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...

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.

Re-Imagining Material - How to Use Research in Your Writing

The allure of an interesting doorway is very similar to  that of a gripping book; it is to me, at any rate.

Both provide a portal to a vivid new world and every time I pick up a book, even a dog-eared paperback, the literary equivalent of the battered old door above, I'm  transported  to a different realm.

This has never been more true than with Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. I won't rehash the story for you here -- suffice to say it follows the downfall of Henry VIII's queen, Anne Boleyn, as seen through the eyes of the consummate politician, Thomas Cromwell. There are countless reasons why, if you are interested in writing, you should rush out and beg, steal or borrow a copy: Mantel's characterisation is faultless, she can turn a phrase so that the axis of your imagination shifts while you are reading it, her pen sheds light on people, places and events so that the novel becomes positively luminous.

All of these are reasons enough to read her work. However, the greatest lesson that a fledgeling writer can learn from her is how to take hard facts and turn them into magical fiction.  It's a kind of alchemy, honestly, it is.  Her research is inexhaustible and meticulous, meaning that she writes with accuracy and authority -- you believe the truth of what she is saying, but it is never, for a single instant, like reading a history book It's like being at the beating heart of a lost era. She knows how to translate historical events into living, breathing actuality by means of beautifully observed, vividly drawn characters.

Writers new to the craft can sometimes lack a lightness of touch when it comes to using research they have unearthed, either historical, emotional or plain factual. Perhaps it's thriftiness, not wanting to waste anything, or perhaps it's a kind of security blanket. When you are sweating blood trying to bring your material to life, here are a few things to bear in mind:

• Don't include everything you know about the subject, use just enough information to give veracity to your work.
• Don't be literal about anything - only include information if it is significant, suggestive, seductive.  It must show the reader something as well as tell them.
• Reveal, don't regurgitate.
• Don't be afraid of including more than one version of the truth.  Look at an event or a person from several different angles.  Leave it to the reader to decide which speaks most clearly to them.
• In fact, leave as much as you can to the reader. Use your imagination to work on theirs -- you are handing them the tools -- your words -- to do the work for themselves.
• Find the telling detail -- a single pinprick of light will be more illuminating that a blanket of grey fog. 
• Go for the small picture rather than the large -- from little acorns...

Bring up the Bodies -- Old Books Laid to Rest in Cuisery

As promised, here is another ravishing bookshop from the enchanting book village of Cuisery in the Saone et Loire department of France.

We wandered around the ancient streets peering at irresistible doors, including the one to the 13th century chapel, with its (timeless) plea not to piss against it as the urine  then enters the church!

I found myself feeling vaguely compromised: here I was, pressing my nose against the windows of wonderful bookshops with their precious cargo of rare and characterful books, with my recently acquired Ipad, loaded up with Hilary Mantel's latest, lying heavy as a bad conscience in my bag.

I won't stop buying books, real books, paper books, books that smell, books that age, books that crack when you bend back the spine, ever. But I can't promise that I won't continue some kind of illicit relationship, a guilty affair, with my Ipad, even though I hate the fact that it doesn't have page numbers and I can't weigh in my hand how much I have read and how much there is still to go.  I miss looking at the cover of the book when I start reading, I didn't realise how much it helped to locate me in the story.

Electronic reading is convenient and pragmatic, pallid virtues which kind of compensate for the loss of orientation, for the intensity of the relationship between the reader, ink, and paper.  But the story is king, always, and the vehicle is secondary, and I'm devouring Bring up the Bodies page by weirdly backlit page.

Losing my E Book Virginity

Windswept with the weather on the Saone - wind, and then when you think it can't blow harder, more wind, making the light dance on the water.
But I'm breathless with excitement anyway as I've just downloaded my first ever ebook: it had to happen sometime and today, the day of my three hundredth blog post, is the day. And the book is...
Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's sequel to the dazzling Wolf Hall.
So no one will get a peep out of me for weeks.