The Tongues of Men

In search of an alternative chunk

2012-02-15T18:00:00.000Z

Henry Miller's writing commandments got me thinking again about how to motivate oneself to write.

Towards the end of the first draft I established a good system. The weekly word target was no good – invariably leading to 3 days of doing very little followed by desperate, guilty cramming on Thursday and Friday. I started aiming for a daily word target instead, but with a twist.

A simple daily goal was not that helpful. Firstly, I would leave it late in the day to try and reach it, wasting at least the morning. And if the going was hard, I would think never mind, I'll just make up the words tomorrow. Then the pressure would be on the following day to write even more, and the cumulative effect would make the past two days just as scrambling as before.

So the twist was this: the daily goal was 1500 words, and as soon as I wrote the 1500th word I could pack up and do whatever I liked with the rest of my day.

It was a daily reward for progress. Some days I hit the target by mid afternoon and smugly went off alone to the shops, or turned up at the school to surprise the boys by picking them up. Other days I kept on writing past the limit because I was in the zone. On tougher days I might labour up to the last minute, or not manage to hit the target at all. The beauty of the system was that the words did not stack up throughout the week: if I missed the goal one day, I'd just start afresh the next.

Henry Miller also had fresh start concept: 'Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it the next day'.

Something about the daily, reward-driven but guilt-free chunk of work helped me to finally to finish a first draft. I discovered too that freedom is my favourite reward: I relish the prospect of free time in which I can do anything I choose, rather than any one favourite activity.

But this formula doesn't work for the second draft. It doesn't work because the work can't be quantified in as simple a term as a word count. I have a terrifyingly long list of changes I want to make to the book, of things I need to check for, new scenes to add in and others to delete. I have extra research to do. I want to overhaul the speech of some of the characters. I need to zoom in on words and phrases as well as stand back to see if the whole works as a story.

I'm overwhelmed. On any one day don't know where to start.

Miller says: 'Work on one thing at a time until finished,' which is good for focus, but I never know how long each task is going to take, or how entangled it is with others. I don't know how to turn a task that I start into a chunk that I can reward myself for completing.

He also says, 'when you can't create you can work', which reminds me of something Eric Griffiths once told me. He said, 'there is no such thing as study; there is only work'. Forget the wall you have to build; simply lift up the next brick and put it on top of the others.

Perhaps then I need to work in chunks of time, like the Pomodoro technique. Anthony Trollope used to write 3 hours a day, every day. Perhaps I should set myself a target in hours that allows for some free time at the end of the day if I get on with it quickly enough.

Whatever I do, I need to try it fast. I feel like I'm sinking in the mire.

January roundup: prizes, free books and a writing group

2012-01-16T10:37:00.001Z

Apart from the shocking news that the refitted Co-op round the corner started stocking cinnamon whirls again before withdrawing them a second time (the heartbreak!), I thought I’d start my first writing week of the year with a roundup of news to get the fingers working for another week of editing.

Remember Anjali Joseph and Christie Watson? Anjali’s Saraswati Park won the Desmond Elliot Prize, awarded to best first novel published in Britain. And Christie, not to be outdone, bagged the Costa First Novel Award for Tiny Sunbirds Far Away and is in the running for the overall Costa prize this month.

Not bad. I like that Christie is not giving up nursing. It’s difficult to run two jobs but there are rewards too. Both ways. And the combination means she can write intelligent things about nursing like this in the Guardian: NHS reforms must give nurses time to care.

Suffice to say you should read both those novels. And congratulations to another friend, Jon Cullen, on the publication of Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open. I have said it elsewhere, as well as down the pub (the Old Spring, astoundingly the most middle class pub I have ever set foot in), but here’s another shout for some great ideas and all that hard work. The New Scientist seemed to like it.

What else? Still no one knows the future of publishing but I found these predictions interesting. They imply that publishing is affected considerably by technological development, down to specific devices. They also paint a more cheerful picture for authors, suggesting that ebook royalties and copyright terms will improve this year, and that self-publishing is going to work for more and more writers.

I’m trying something new by going to a writers' group. I met a playwright at the boys’ football who told me about it. (I love Cambridge. The week before I was chatting to one of the other dads about combi boilers). They meet to talk through two or three people’s writing each week. Sadly it’s during the day, but on my writing weeks I can give it a shot. It will make a nice change to sitting in a room on my own all week not knowing if what I’m writing is bollocks or not.

Finally, you should apply for World Book Night to give away 24 copies of one of these marvellous books. Now for some editing. Laters.

Editing the monster

2011-12-12T12:05:00.005Z

Ah, remember the giddy days of early summer, when a Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were crowned anew, cherished Fitzbillies Chelsea buns were rescued from oblivion and I finished the first draft of my novel? Well, sort of.

By first draft some people mean an initial version that they would be happy to show to agents and publishers. What I mean is that I filled out the plan I had for the book.

Early on I plotted the story out in detail, both the current action of the book and the backstory. So when I wrote all of those chapters, I felt rather elated. In software parlance, the novel is feature complete. I sketched a skeleton for the book and now it has flesh on all of its bones. I projected a book of about 100,000 words and the draft comes in at over 105,000 (about 300 pages if you think in those terms).

It was a huge relief to get that done. It is by far the longest thing I have ever written. By over ten times. I jubilated just to achieve a novel-length word count. First big question (can I actually compose a cohesive single work of such length?) answered.

However, after the feature-complete stage comes the testing and bug fixing and user interface design and spit and polish. Or, to use the skeleton and flesh analogy, I've stitched together a Frankenstein's monster but parts of it are ugly as hell and the heart is not beating just yet. My creation needs LIFE!

So with a surgeon's knife, a brewing electrical storm, a bug-eyed hunchback and a limitless pile of cinnamon buns, I am tackling the following:

Continuity
Who knows what when? Does anyone notice that it's Christmas in the middle of the book? Is everyone the right age to be doing the things they're doing? Legally? What happened to Jonathan's coat? Had the Internet been invented when I need it to be? Does it sound like the same book all the way through?

Authenticity
Some scenes in the book are placeholders, glossed over just to get to the end without losing momentum. Now I'm going back over them to make them appear real. Last week I was researching how to put on tarty makeup and treatments for breast cancer. I made some assumptions that just don't hold up, and changing them has a knock on effect for other characters and other scenes.

Drama
Is the level of dramatic tension right throughout the book, building steadily to a climax? Not just overall, but in all of the narrative threads – will readers care? Is the pace right? Is it clear enough what all of the characters want and why they want it? The secondary narrative thread in particular needs augmenting to give it a slower burn.

Style
This is the wood and the trees. It's the voice. The character's voices. The texture of the language; the extent of the similes. It's not repeating the word 'tent' too many times. It's the shape of the sentences and paragraphs and chapters. These are not things that can be inserted mechanically but they can all be improved, by standing right back and by zooming in forensic detail.

Each change has implications for the whole book. Each time a scene becomes more authentic the list of things to check in continuity grows a little longer. I tell people that I'm editing but it is more like rewriting. I'm deleting scenes. I'm writing new chapters. I'm restructuring, I hope without damaging the foundations.

And overall I'm trying to keep a view of the whole thing. Is it any good? Why should anyone care? Is my monster alive and terrorising orphans and blind people at will?

I've been writing The Tongues of Men for over three years now, which seems like a lot (unless you're Jonathan Franzen), except that I only take nine writing weeks a year. 30 weeks is not long to write a novel with literary pretensions, especially when you have to continually dip in and out of it. I'd love to be nearer to finished by now yet I'm happy with where I'm up to and that the book is still moving forward, even when it feels like going backwards to get there.

How not to kill your writing blog after 2 years

2011-11-28T22:29:00.002Z

Tonight was fairly typical.

In from work and straight to the table to wolf something down before taking the boys out to swimming. Most nights we do eat together, the clamour of which has to be suffered first-hand to be believed. Last night I said, "the baby's quiet" at teatime. Mary pointed out that he'd been yelling for the last half hour, only I hadn't heard him beneath the shouting of the other three.

But Monday the kids eat early. And only the toddler greets me as I come through the door – the others are grouped around a computer game. So no stories about Club Penguin or school – just an 18-month-old desperate to play football with the yellow ball that the neighbours have thrown back over the fence. We exchange a couple of passes in the kitchen, then he follows me to the table where he copies my every move. He sits in the chair next to mine, frequently almost falling off, eats my pizza crusts, sips my drink.

We've only got 15 minutes so I shout to the boys to get ready. The four year old is barred from accompanying us since he made so much fuss by the pool last time. We can get from our house fully clothed into the pool with trunks in 10 minutes. I'm grateful we haven't got girls.

Girls. The boys change slowly afterwards in the hope that they'll bump into two of their favourite female friends who come for the later lessons. They try to impress them by doing head-over-heels down a grassy slope. It seems to work.

By the time we get home it's almost bedtime. We squeeze a bit of dinosaur origami in and then I promise to read to the oldest three if they get ready on time. It is impossible for them to stand around the sink and not wind each other up. Tonight it's all about accidentally drooling toothpaste on your brother's hands.

We start a new book by torchlight: The BFG. We have to read a good few chapters to discover that the giant is in fact friendly, so that the four-year-old won't be afraid of Bonecrunchers all night. By the time we've sorted out bedding and drinks and prayed and hugged and answered the sincere questions that they always ask at this point to prolong my presence in the bedroom – I shut the door and trudge down the stairs.

I'm thinking of all the things I'd like to blog about, all the ideas I've jotted down, and the embarrassing yawn of time since I last posted that makes it harder to just publish any old post. There’s also SmyWord that desperately needs updating, as well as Verbatim. But Mary wants to talk, about arrangements for later in the week, for the weekend, Christmas presents, which is fair enough as we've not had a chance to catch up yet.

I finally sit at the computer, but then a child starts yelling, so loud it might wake the toddler. I race upstairs to prevent that happening, knowing it will only be a case of my tummy hurts or he's copying me, which it is. Only with an added bout of singing. There is nothing I can say to prevent this occurring each night. It happens again, and this time I play the "next time someone gets moved to our bedroom" card, which seems to stick.

Back to the computer, but typing is difficult. The space bar is jamming. The beautiful Apple keyboard has long lost its virginal whiteness to scrawls of biro and the imprints of filthy fingers, but it's the fruit toast that is more annoying because it gets under the keys and stops them working. I discover just how hard it is to clip a space bar back on again.

So, the space bar is back and bouncy, and the C, V, B, N, M, <, >, and both command keys are back in place too. I decide to write about why I haven't been blogging so much, about how I'm still working on the novel and it's going well, but how most evenings by the time the kids are settled and everything else that needs doing has been done and those other things talked about I am so tired that I'll sink into the sofa while Mary plays yet another episode of some formulaic show like Escape to the Country or Masterchef because there isn't enough time to watch a whole film. Although I draw the line at The Apprentice.

And this is the blog post. I managed to spew it forth without any further interruptions. Masterchef is chugging through its banal liturgy in the other room, but I wanted to share my excuse for not writing so much of late. It's a flimsy one, I'll grant you, and I'd be the first to remind myself that JG Ballard wrote prodigious amounts while bringing up his three children single-handed. Although I'll bet he had a nanny. And there was no Club Penguin in those days.

So there we go: a little taste of evening leisure chez nous. I want to pick up the blogging here again. Next week I have a writing week so I'll let you know how the novel is progressing. I know some of you actually read this so thanks. Time for bed.

How not to kill your writing career after 8 years

2011-09-12T21:51:00.000+01:00

I met a guy at the Content Strategy Forum 2011 who is a content strategist like me. He works for a website agency in London, and has young children. And like me, he also writes his own material outside of work: screenplays and stories.

There was, however, one key difference between us. Unlike me, this guy has already had his work published, or rather, his story has been made into an animated film.

By a little company called Disney.

After his idea was picked up by an agent who turned out to be rather good and his story became an international kids' film, he had a run of eight years of being a screenwriter. Eight years of doing what he had only dreamt of – what lots of other aspiring writers would kill to be able to do.

And there we were, talking at a conference.

He was happy with his job, happy having kids even though it wears you out and you fall asleep in the evenings instead of accomplishing all the great things you imagine you will do with the time when they're finally in bed. His attitude towards writing was tempered by the realism of having been there already, but he still wanted to create more filmable stories in the future.

We only talked a little over lunch but I realised there was so much to learn from someone like him. And although I should probably have asked more questions about how he got to work with Disney in the first place (luck and a good agent played significant parts it seems), I admit I was more intrigued by the other end of his brief career.

Why did it fizzle out?

He told me, in a roundabout way. I was talking about when new ideas compete with existing work. The closer I get to finishing my first novel, the more ideas I have for the next one. And the one after that. And the kids' book I've already started writing with my boys. I've got a rough structure mapped out for novel number two, with character sketches and a couple of experimental chapters written to see how it feels. I've got a solid conceit for a third novel, and the other day between Cambridge and Kings Cross I wrote a synopsis for a fourth, out of the blue, inspired by a throwaway remark in a book, about a man who doesn't realise that he is in…

This is the problem. I'm not going to tell you what it's about. Because the more life I give to these ideas the harder it becomes to finish the lumbering old first book. The one that's not sexy any more. The one that needs redrafting and editing. 95,000 words that need squaring up to one by one.

I have come close to jacking it in and starting the next book. I know it would be stupid but there is so much promise in the new idea. In the blank page. What if this first one is just a limbering up exercise, and the next idea is the one that will actually have the legs to succeed?

The screenwriter nodded his head. He knew exactly what I was talking about. 'If I could sum up the reason that my writing career ended when it did,' he said, 'it was because I gave too much attention to the new ideas instead of focusing on the job in hand.'

Sobering.

So I'll be looking for a good agent in a while. And buying enough tickets at the tombola to give luck a fair chance of coming my way. But in the meantime, the only thing to do is to stop thinking about the new ideas and crack on with shipping the first. Focus!

Excerpt 9

2011-07-07T22:15:00.001+01:00

After New Year the Christmas decorations were still up on the ward: a small tree in reception and a cladding of greetings cards on the notice board. Davina arrived this time to find the woman asleep so she picked up the magazines from the floor and placed them back on the table. She filled the glass of water from the cooler in the hallway. She tried to look at the edition on top of the pile but kept reading words and scanning pictures without processing them, returning to the top to start again, expecting something to stick, burr-like, then giving up. She looked at the parrot picture above the bed for interest but met the same glossy indifference. She had glanced in that frame a hundred times before and still did not care what was in it. She walked the few steps to the window and surveyed the view.
Half of the prospect was taken by a facing hospital building, the other half by a sight across the city, both of which were made dark, almost silhouetted, by the white sky. A few windows in the building opposite were lit up, uncurtained little rectangles, a handful with people inside. In one ground floor window a cleaner or doctor, someone wearing a green scrub suit, sat at a desk and wrote. In a window higher up, nearer to her eye level, Davina saw a woman’s back, white, with only a thick, black band of bra strap to break the naked aspect. The woman reached back and unhooked it. The girl looked away. When she returned her gaze somebody else was drawing the bed curtain across. She noticed the strip light behind her reflected in the window.
Davina stepped back towards the bed and drank a little of the water. She drank half, then all, of the glass. She went into the hallway to refill it from the cooler. The male nurse was there, speaking quietly to a colleague. She walked past him, up to the desk, out of earshot.
‘Is it possible to choose which nurses look after someone?’ she asked the ward manager behind the counter, who was checking back between some notes and a monitor screen, only answering after several seconds.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If there was someone who a patient would rather not have change them and stuff – can a patient choose?’
‘No,’ said the manager, giving up on the screen and facing Davina squarely. ‘Unless the patient would like to do it herself. Have you any idea how busy we are? Never mind with Christmas leave and winter flu.’
‘What if I make a complaint?’
‘Do you wish to make a complaint?’
‘Well, that depends what happens if I make one.’
‘What happens,’ said the ward manager, ‘is my staff who should be caring for people like your friend end up doing more paperwork, being asked stupid questions in stupid meetings, and being taken away from the ward where I need them most. Usually, for absolutely nothing at all.’
The male nurse walked into the reception area and behind the counter to a box of files. She asked again, ‘Do you wish to make a complaint?’
‘Forget it,’ said Davina.
As she walked away the manager called after her:
‘You people come in with your baggage but we’re just trying to do our job.’
In the room the woman was moaning, her eyes flickering. Davina placed her hand on her bony shoulder and she woke up.
‘Oh God,’ she said.
‘It’s okay,’ said Davina.

From the first draft.

In which I finish my first draft and share teenage love on the internet

2011-07-01T18:16:00.001+01:00

Today was a funny one. Firstly the hand-crafted envelopes bearing my teenage infatuation with Mary got retweeted to high heaven and much-viewed on Flickr. People seemed to enjoy them, and it reminded them of their young love and the creative things they used to do for their partners, which was entirely the point (I have decided afterwards).

But what a distraction, because today I was hoping to complete the first draft of The Tongues of Men, not talk with strangers about how the postal service has declined since the 1990s when a postman would do everything within his powers to decipher an obscure address for the princely sum of 26p first class!

I even had an offer from a journalist keen to get my 'love story' in a woman's magazine (that's the envelope one, not the novel).

But eventually I managed to buckle down and write for a good portion of the day, finishing the final chapter just at the close of the day. It probably isn't quite a full first draft, because there are a couple of additions I need to make earlier on in the book, but it is the complete writing of all the sections I planned to write all that time ago when I planned it, a sort of filling-out of the novel's body. It lives, with all its vital organs.

There are all sorts of levels of pain still to come with redrafting and revising and editing like a Samurai (with a massive Samurai sword) before I even approach the shores of publication, but this is some sort of milestone.

And it feels great.

Most of it may be rubbish but it's 95,000 words more rubbish than I had when I started so that's something. Emergency babysitter is procured and Mary and I are going out for a wee supper to celebrate (with prosecco, not envelopes).

Thanks for all your kind words.

Sarah Palin found poems

2011-06-23T10:06:00.001+01:00

Yesterday The Guardian website featured some found poems from Sarah Palin's emails. They weren't particularly good. Marika challenged me to do better.

So here are a few. None of them is good enough for Verbatim Poetry, except the first, perhaps, for the dinky rhymes. Turns out that Marika was right – Sarah Palin does lack poetry.

THE TANNING BED

And the old, used
tanning bed that my
girls have used a handful of times
in Juneau? Yes, we paid
for it ourselves. I, too,
will continue to be dismayed
at the media and am thankful you
and Sharon are not part of the strange
going's-on in the media world of today.

NEITHER COLD NOR DELICIOUS

And no, we didn't
participate in eating
the moose meat.

CAN SOMEONE FLAG

Can someone flag
the lie in the blog
sexy highway talk among governors
that claims Trig
was in the fender
bender
with me
and he
wasn't in a car seat
on my commute.
Sheeeesh.

HI MOM

I'm smiling at u
in the camera.

ACCESS

I am a hunter.
I grew up hunting –
some of my best memories
growing up are of hunting with my dad
to help feel our freezer.

I want Alaskans to have access to wildlife.

METAPHORICALLY ECLECTIC

I hear from the worker bees in the field
that Industry is on a roll against us
on a rampage because they had no idea
they wouldn't get their way on all issues.
We don't win ball games merely playing defense.

I'M FREE

I'm free – noon
on – to do
ktuu

ALCOHOL FREE

With so many kids and teens
coming and going in that house
especially during this season of celebrations
for young people, proms, graduations,
I want to send the message that we can be –
and the People's House needs to be –
alcohol free.

SUPPORT

If the new cheese manufacturer
wants us to do anything with them
to help kick off their venture
(if you think it's a good idea)
please let Kyle know
we can come cut a ribbon or something.

I am me, doing this now

2011-05-18T23:41:00.003+01:00

I love that. Christopher Eccleston, in the This Much I Know interview in the Observer, says that his earliest memory is:

turning right at the top of our path on my bike and saying to
myself: "I am me, doing this now." I was about four. I
turned right, said that to myself and shot off.

His simple, non-specific definitions of identity and activity perfectly convey the sense of being fully in the moment. This is what children do. Usually without the words. Reading this took me instantly to a handful of strong childhood memories, times of a strong sense of me-ness and now-ness: knocking yellow plums from a tree with my school bag on the walk back home; skateboarding down a long, gently sloping lane, sitting between my sisters on the board as we steadily picked up speed; squeezing through the cool gap filled with pencil-thin branches behind the shed in the garden.

I find myself reaching in my writing for moments like this. Not literally, because my childhood is scarcely big enough for a bookful of characters and stories, but in creating episodes that have a similar nature; a quality of immediate, body-stored immanence like those childlike saturated moments.

Moments that stand irrefutably as testaments to life, to reality, to truth. Moments that just are.

Of course, the paradox is that to describe the time in writing is to stand outside of it, to judge it from an older, removed standpoint. To take what was actually in the muscle and the nerves and translate it into words for the mind. To be through time instead of in it.

As soon as a writer thinks about how she will describe an experience later that she is now, the moment is lost. Incessant notetakers and analysts become the photographer who is always there but never in any of the pictures, and whose subjects always look first and foremost like they are being photographed.

The four-year-old Eccleston had perfect words at the time for his moment, although the power of them is brought through a description that he gives us as an adult. At some point I'd like to write a book in the first person present tense exactly to capture that immediacy and identity.

But how to convey it now, in the third person, past tense?

Eccleston's words reminded me of Dave Eggers, in a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, when he somehow makes a moment more vivid by positioning us at some distance from the scene:

Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little
red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above
us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car
hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward
trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless,
sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1.

This is ludicrously clever, conveying the sensation of driving by observing from a distance, yet by imagining oneself flying in a helicopter or fantastically on a bird's back, projecting the experience of motion and giddiness and thrill onto what one sees.

He gives the reader a position from which the moment comes alive.

I'm trying in my own writing to take a position inside the musculature of the characters, to feel the physical sensations of the moment. How successful this is, I don't know yet. But that's how I'm trying to do it.

And I am me, writing this now.

The roller coaster of confidence

2011-04-20T22:38:00.000+01:00

If you are involved in a work of creativity, I’m guessing you know all about the confidence roller coaster.

There are some weeks that I read through what I’ve written and smile at the genius of it, enjoying the little flourishes in the prose, and the cadences at each chapter end. The following week I have another look, find all the mistakes and inconsistencies, and am struck by how much work there is to do to make this book work in any way at all, and conclude that, to put not too fine a point on it, IT’S ALL SHIT.

One of the reasons I have not blogged in a while is that I was in a belly-lurching low over the book (don’t feel sorry for me though – the other reason is that I’ve been on holiday smoking Montecristos in a hot tub).

I’ve heard it said that if you don’t think what you’ve written is rubbish then it won’t be any good. That makes some kind of sense. Like spotting the best musicians in an orchestra because while other people are showing off during the warm up, they sit silently, waiting for the conductor. Those that show off their ability still have a long way to go. Perhaps because thinking they are already great retards them at that stage, whereas the awareness of our limitations allows us to improve.

The funny thing about the roller coaster of thoughts and feelings about creative work and ability is that awareness doesn't seem to put the brakes on it. In (my amateur version of) psychology, awareness is usually the first step to dissipating many problems. But I can be acutely aware of the ups and downs I experience in confidence – and they come around again all the same.

Where awareness does help, though, is that the roller coaster does not have to run the show. Whether my feelings are ridiculously inflated or miserably pessimistic, I tell myself that they are just par for the course, and I book in my writing weeks anyway, buy a couple of cinnamon whirls and sit down to write.

And I suppose if the average artists are the ones who don’t experience the crisis, then perhaps those of us who are on the roller coaster have the chance to create something pretty special, eventually.

But I might only be saying that because I’m on an up.

The God Lab, Tiny Sunbirds, Fingersmith

2011-03-08T22:45:00.001Z

Congratulations to Roger Bretherton, senior lecturer in psychology at Lincoln University and extremely nice bloke, whose book The God Lab is now out and can be ordered on Amazon. It's psychology meets the sermon on the mount. Whenever I've heard Roger presenting this material it has been insightful and intelligent, and the book will be equally so.

I've known Roger since student days. Three years ago we were presenting a church leadership training weekend together and sharing a room. I warned him that sometimes I talk in my sleep, even walk around a bit, and after the first night I checked with him that I hadn't done anything inappropriate. He quietly said that I had pulled back my covers in the middle of the night and patted the bed, encouraging him to climb in.

Just the sort of thing you don't want to do to a psychologist. Still. I'd rather you heard it from me.

Another book launching this week is Christie Watson's Tiny Sunbirds Far Away. It is a novel about a privileged Nigerian family having to adapt to poor country life, told in the voice of the daughter. I met Christie at Anjali Joseph's book launch – they did the renowned UEA Creative Writing MA together. I have every reason to imagine that it will be brilliantly written too.

I have never asked her to climb into my bed.

If you like following authors on Twitter they are @tinysunbird and @anjalij.

Finally, if you want a copy of Fingersmith I still have some to give away. Just say aye in the comments and I'll work out a way to get a copy to you.

A window in Perthshire

2011-02-24T23:25:00.001Z

The view of Loch Tay from my friend's house, set into the hillside overhanging it, is always changing. This last weekend I woke and peered under the blind as I lay in bed, to see snow falling over the water and the fields, fluttering, eddying, plummeting through the huge volume of air between the hills.

By breakfast the snow had stopped but tufts of mist were pulled out of the forest on the other side of the loch like unkempt hair, yanked upright. The mountain tops above were as white as the sky, so when I came to photograph the horizon the two melted into each other, a dark ring of pines near the summit appearing to float away into the atmosphere.

Later there was sleet and there was rain. At no point did the sun break through but the light kept altering in subtle ways. For one moment, as we started down the muddy slope towards the shore, the panorama suddenly crystalised, with deep colours in high definition, and the wind stopped playing to let the scene echo deeply in the surface of the loch. It only lasted a few minutes. By the time we reached the water's edge it was no longer glassy but ribbon-crossed with a symmetrical wave pattern, neat and black and white.

It was perhaps the dreariest weather I've experienced by Loch Tay, but the wetness plunged the tree stumps and bracken into deep orange hues, the fleeting snow filled in the mass of air above the valley and the dim light gave body to the sodden grass, the thick hills, and painted the loch as a luminous, dancing streak through their midst.

And I remembered looking at the same view one April morning, from the same bed, not that long ago, when the day was brighter for the sunshine in it, and the ground dryer and more workable. I had no reasons left not to write a novel, and my friend had asked me the previous evening if I was going to write a book. I had said 'I'll tell you in the morning' because he did not mean, casually, do you think you might write a book one day. He meant will you commit, to actually making it happen, to starting tomorrow and not stopping until it is done.

So I looked at the scene and rehearsed my answer. There could hardly be a better view to make a decision upon. The answer could only be yes.

Looking through the same panes at the same view this weekend served a silent reminder that I did start writing a book, and have kept going, slowly at times but never quite stopping, sometimes in great bursts of enthusiasm and at other points just plodding on, and that seemed to be the truth: that the vista last Saturday morning may have been dimmer than that occasion in April, when the sunshine roved in patches over its waters, but it was the same view; always changing, yet always the same.

I said I'd write a book, and I haven't stopped yet. I said I'd blog about it, and I'm still yapping on. This is how it feels down the line: like February by the loch; damp, earthy and vivid.

Succeed as a writer: stop wanting to be one

2011-02-07T23:07:00.000Z

Bowling with my son at his friend's birthday party at the weekend I met a published novelist who also teaches English and creative writing. I won't name her because I'm not entirely comfortable with reproducing private conversations in public without permission, but I thought that you might find something she said interesting.

She has held positions at both universities in Cambridge and has ambivalent feelings about teaching creative writing (although from her tone and the look on her face on Sunday I would say that the negative feelings are winning out). I asked her if that was because you can't really teach talent.

'No', she said, 'because you can teach technique. The reason I hate teaching creative writing is the high levels of delusion among the students. They want to be writers.'

They picture satisfied authors whose works of fiction are published and admired, who have made it, to the point of being able to devote themselves to penning whatever they want for the rest of their lives.

And that's not how it works for most people.

So she tries to instill some realism. About most people who create fiction having to do it in their spare time. About the fill-in jobs and the bits and pieces that you have to do if you do want to make writing pay. About the hard work to produce a book that you are actually proud of, and then the small likelihood that anyone will want to publish it.

None of this will be new to you, if you're writing yourself, or if you've heard me whining on about how hard it can be, but the next thing she said was more surprising:

'The ones who are just doing the course for fun are the best, or the ones who are using the course to get something finished; because they don't have unrealistic expectations, and because they actually get on and write.'

If you want to be a writer you've got the wrong focus. You've got to want to write, and then actually do it. Almost as though there is a paradox that to become a writer you've got to stop wanting it, and just start writing instead.

You've got to write because you want to, not because of something you want to become.

I talk about both on this blog: writing and being a writer. I do want to be an author but am realistic (I think) about the path I'm on. It takes time. There are no guarantees. My first novel may not get published. Nor my second. I already know how many I'll produce without publication before giving up on that particular form. Then I'll try something else.

So a good reminder, as my son came last in the bowling and I encouraged him that I was pretty sure he had scored more than the last time he played. Don't worry about being a bowler, son, just keep on bowling.

Excerpt 8

2011-01-24T23:13:00.000Z

‘That’s one dropped out already,’ said Davina, ‘I was told four. Well, she’s got more sense than you have.’ She lifted the vacant chair from next to the dark-haired girl, positioned it square at the end of the table and sat down. The girls went to remove their coats but she stopped them. ‘Don’t bother,’ she said, ‘we won’t be long.’
‘I thought we was trying out,’ said the first blonde girl. ‘I’m wearing me lacy kecks and everything.’
‘A little interview first,’ said Davina. ‘Or more of a chat. Steve wants you to have a little chat before he sees you. If he sees you.’ She looked round at the girls faces, and then round again at their torsos.
‘How old are you anyway?’ she said.
The first blonde said ‘eighteen’ and the second ‘nearly eighteen’ at the same time, the second adding ‘next month’.
‘Have you got ID?’ said Davina.
The girls showed their driving licences and Davina tried not to read their names. ‘February’s not next month,’ she said.
‘It is nearly,’ said the second blonde.
‘What about you?’ Davina asked the third girl.
‘Yes, I got,’ she said, without moving. Her accent was Polish or Bulgarian.
‘Okay,’ said Davina. So Steve got your numbers at some point and that’s why you’re here. The first thing you need to know is that you’ve been bloody lucky already. He’s the only guy I know in this industry who gives a shit. If you’d got in touch with anyone else in the business first you would be fucked by now. That’s not a joke.’
The blonde girls fell silent, sitting orderly at the table like schoolchildren reprimanded at their desks.
Davina continued, ‘I don’t know why he cares but he does. Maybe he’s just covering his own backside, but there we go. You can count yourself lucky that it’s happened this way. Just a minute.’
The girls watched her stand up and walk to the counter, in front of the queue and ask for something. The barista paused, looking at the line of people behind her. She said something else and the boy turned away and got her something. It was a cardboard cup of tap water. She returned to the table and took some pills out of her bag, popping four and swallowing them with some of the water.
‘So he wants me to talk to you,’ she said. ‘And what I want to say is this: what other options have you got? If you could do anything else, anything at all, then you should do it.’

From the first draft.

48 Books absolutely free

2011-01-18T20:44:00.000Z

How would you like to receive four dozen books completely gratis? There are only two catches:

1) it will be 48 copies of the same book, and
2) you have to give them all away.

I guess World Book Night are trying to appeal to the largesse of readers, who having delved secretly into the imaginative world of a book now want to share the experience with others. They are going to give away one million books altogether, in batches of 48, to volunteers who apply for the task.

The big drop will happen 5 March and you have until 24 January to apply.

You can choose from 25 titles including classics (The Spy who Came In from the Cold, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Booker prize winners (Life of Pi, The Blind Assassin), modern classics (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Cloud Atlas), poetry collections (from Carol Ann Duffy, of course, and Seamus Heaney), translations (Love in a Time of Cholera, All Quiet on the Western Front), memoir (Alan Bennett’s A Life Like Other People’s, Nigel Slater’s Toast) and even a children’s book (Northern Lights).

All you have to do to qualify as a volunteer is choose one of the books and fill out an online form explaining your selection, then say who you’ll give the books to. I chose a title I had never heard of, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, because I’d like to read it myself and chat on the Blogs and the Facebooks and the Twitters with the 47 other recipients who are also reading it.

My pitch for ‘why me?’ was something to do with putting physical books back in the hands of digital consumers to remind them what it felt like, especially those whose attention span and field of vision have diminished to about 36 seconds and several inches of LCD respectively. I may have also promised to inscribe every copy I give away and encourage online chat about it here on my blog.

The last I heard they were still encouraging applicants (they need 20,000 after all). Distribution in the end may come down to what you’ve chosen (promising) and where you live (less so) but worth a punt, don’t you think?

You can follow the whole thing on Twitter at @worldbooknight (World Boo Knight?).

Keep reading.

Dick King-Smith

2011-01-05T20:42:00.000Z

Dick King Smith died today. I remember reading his animal stories as a kid, especially Daggy Dogfoot and The Sheep Pig, and being completely gripped. If I remember rightly, my siblings and at least one parent consumed them as excitedly too. His books were a whole family event, in the way that James Herriot's and Gerald Durrell's were (spot the theme?). It only seemed right that his films converted to Hollywood success (in Babe).

What I didn't realise until now is that those books were some of the very first he wrote and that he went on to create over a hundred more. And that he didn't write the first one of those until he was well into his fifties.

I like that. On the one hand there is a single mum whose global writing success comes only after years of rejection and dogged perseverance. On the other, an aging farmer who has never considered himself a writer pens a small tale about vengeful chickens and goes on to become one of the UK's most prolific authors.

In a radio interview a few years ago Smith said that he had been chewing over the chicken story for ten years without writing anything down. The following writing career must have surprised him as much as anyone. I don't think it's fanciful to suggest that the years of farming life in Gloucestershire steeped his animal tales in an authentic kingdom. His is an example of a life lived coming alive in literature.

So, RIP Dick King-Smith. I can't wait until my kids are old enough to squabble over who gets to read his books next.

Africa United review

2010-12-14T15:31:00.001Z

It’s a curious feeling driving to the cinema to see your friend’s debut feature. You want it to be brilliant. You know how much hard work has gone into it and how talented the director is.

But you also attempt ambivalence. It will be okay if it’s not perfect. Like sitting on the edge of your seat in the ultrasound room as the nurse scans your wife’s belly, knowing that any moment she will proclaim the sex of your next child, hoping that it’s a girl (having got 3 boys already), yet accepting that it’s okay if it’s more of the same. Which of course it is. And was.

Because the first time you make a feature film can’t be easy. Especially with a small budget (only £3m for a multiple locations overseas) and a ludicrously short period in which to make the film. I spoke to Debs, the director, recently about just how challenging the time frame was, especially for a cast and crew who were largely first-timers. It was, she said, her annus horribilis.

In the event, waiting in Cineworld, I decided to suspend as much of my hope and resignation as I could and just try to enjoy the show.

Thankfully, it was easy. Africa United baptises you into colour, story and tongue-in-cheek humour from the opening line. It’s the tale of a random band of African children, starting in Rwanda, hitching, stowing, walking and paddling their way through thousands of miles and several borders to reach South Africa for the opening ceremony of the World Cup (or ‘warldcap’ as I now can’t help but hear it).

It’s instantly funny. The children’s wry comments are sometimes conscious, sometimes unaware of the satire, about AIDS and charity handouts and sex trading and the unavoidable stains of poverty and genocide. Though strange to imagine how one could laugh at these monumental atrocities it works perfectly. The children deliver the witty script in passing with a light touch.

The ensemble centres on the cheery, malaprop-prone orphan Dudu (played by Eriya Ndayambaje). He is relentlessly optimistic, like Mike Leigh’s Poppy in Happy Go Lucky, and invites the same kind of scorn from people who do not like happiness thrust upon them. Upbeat characters hold up a mirror to the miserable and judgemental, and I can’t help wondering if that is not in part responsible for some of the film’s less favourable reviews.

In context Dudu’s optimism and vision is the soul of the film. He and the editing move us quickly from scene to scene. This flitting could be seen as a weakness but it is essential to the tale. While we in the West like to cogitate about what this-or-that means, analysing the matter ever so seriously, in Africa you’ve got to lighten up. Move on. The horrors of the past cannot be changed. You begin to realise as you watch the film: this is the way to deal with deep tragedy.

The overall result is a southern Africa that dances swiftly and colourfully past our eyes, acknowledging ethnic warfare and disease and poverty in the lightest but sincerest fashion. There are segues into a charming animated story that punctuates the live action and is Dudu’s device for motivating the group. The deliberately rough collages reminded me of Wes Anderson’s Steve Zissou and evoke the improvisation of people without riches, while providing the play-within-a-play motif where the story has power to make sense of the present. As the characters move on from tragedy, we are invited to move on from our present stereotypes of Africa, and given a new story to tell.

Africa United tips its hat to Stand by Me and has been compared to Slumdog Millionaire but the most wonderful thing about it is its originality. The style is generous, hope-filled, visually rich, intimate, flighty, unrefined and, well, African. It feels like a fresh story-telling mode, a new voice and eye in cinema, with a novel narrative about the world’s oldest continent – fitting for the first ever feature film made in Rwanda.

I remember cooking for Deb Gardner-Paterson when we were students together, and she would sit on the floor mopping up curry from her plate with her fingers. Though based in the UK her background and life take in several continents, not least Africa, and this tumbles out gloriously in her work. Her poetry is in there and her belief in other people, drawing former child soldiers and local non-actors into the film. She has a unique history and this has given her an original voice. She has used it, admirably to paint countries like Rwanda in a new light.

Whatever the box office returns or the critics write, Africa United is a delightfully original movie. I always knew Debs would make great films and it’s a joy to watch such a sweet beginning. No need to worry after all. It’s a girl!

Of Middles

2010-11-29T21:20:00.000Z

Somebody said, not that long ago, and I paraphrase, that most novels do not have very good middles.

I thought about that last week when I was writing. Somehow, I managed to surprise myself by arriving on the cusp of the ending all of a sudden. Maybe this happens when you leave your writing for a few weeks at a time before coming back to it. A few times I have sighed at a scene in the synopsis that I am dreading having to create, have opened the blank document prepared for it, and have discovered the chapter already written. Either I wrote it and forgot that I had, or I am being assisted by the awkward-chapter faerie (these being the only two rational explanations).

By ending I don't mean the last chapter, much less the last page. I refer to the approximate final third of the book. I realised that the incline up to the natural climax of the story had steepened when things were actually happening in the plot and emotions were intensifying. Finally I can begin to disclose some of the characters' secrets, some of the past which has made them act as they have up to this point. The proverbial will be not long distanced from the fan.

One little unplanned scenario gave my Superpastor a spontaneous chance to vindicate himself but he couldn't take it. As I stood in the middle of the room, shoulders bulked up and half-twisting my neck as he would do, talking to someone behind him, trying to feel what his words would be in this impassioned moment, I actually started to cry a bit. This ending stuff is powerful.

And although this is only the beginning of the end it's rapidly uphill from here. Drama and invective; pleas and pigheadedness; sex and disappointment; pain and surprise. Actually, that might sound like rapidly downhill to some. But as the writer it is like getting gripped by the ending of a novel you are reading, passing the can't-put-it-down tipping point, only much more potent, because I get to make it up as I go along.

If I'm crying now, goodness knows what I'll be doing when the guy finally gets the psychotherapist to … but I don't want to give that away just yet.

The pessimistic part of me (the 'lizard brain!' quoth Seth Godin) suspects that it was just a fever, or another faerie, an aberration last week and the grind will soon return. But the rest of me thinks there really is something in this ending lark – an energy, and excitement, that will carry me (and eventually the reader) through to the end.

All of which leaves me reflecting: bloody hell that middle part was really hard. At the start it was hard to get going, and there was a lot of uncertainty, but every idea committed to the blank paper was like a fresh print in the snow. No one had traversed these pages yet; all things were new. The end has its own power source, the gathering pace and adrenalin of the climax. But the middle! Nothing happened! It wasn't new and it wasn't clever!

I wonder if middles are just like that, or if mine needs some serious work come editing time next year. Either way I'm glad to be over it for now. It was definitely a dip of sorts and it feels good to be climbing again. See you at the top.

How long is too long?

2010-11-24T14:55:00.000Z

How long is too long to spend on getting to where you really want to be?

Is it better to spend 2 years working on something that you really want to accomplish or get a mediocre job that pays the bills right now?

What if it turned out to be 5 years? Or 10? Or 20?

Medics commit to a decade of learning to get to the point where they are more or less doing what they wanted to do. Even then they can specialise and retrain with more learning and more exams and more work. You've got to want that to go through with it.

I know someone who trained as a teacher but she really wanted to be an architect. Retraining in her early 20s would have meant 7 more years of learning and lots more debt. A scary prospect but fast forward 7 years (and time flies, we all know that) and she would have been 30 and looking for architect positions - bottom rung of the ladder, sure - but architect positions, and starting to pay off the debt. By 40, and then 50, who knows what she could be doing?

Instead she chose 40 years more teaching on teachers' pay. Both options had a bearing on what she would be doing at 50, not just the architect route. (Of course, teaching is not a mediocre job, especially not if it is your dream - but for her, it was definitely second best).

Failure does not make it a bad decision

If you were guaranteed success how long would you work for it? Of course this is a mug's game. The success part is (mostly) out of our control. That was always the deal. We can only do our part and hope for success. If we don't get it, we are however-many-years-it-was wiser and more experienced to go for success again. In that sense we can't lose. We either gain success or experience that counts towards it.

But it wasn't a bad decision just because we couldn't predict the future.

We have to make the decision now, with no hindsight. And surely, if the decision now is between pursuing a dream – something that connects with you on the inside, something that brings you alive at times – and a mediocre job; then no amount of failure in the future gets to claim that it was a bad decision to go for the dream.

So how long is too long for your dream?

I ask because I've been working on my first novel for two years now, part time. It will be at least another year before it is finished and then it may not be very good or be of interest to any publishers or readers. In which case I'll have to write another one. I dislike the long timescale involved but then I dislike waiting for dinner. Do I really have a choice?

Sebastian Faulks wrote two novels which were precisely that (of no interest to publishers). His third and final attempt got published. Worth it?

Jonathan Franzen took 9 years to produce 'Freedom' – dark times by the sound of it – but an acclaimed novel at the end. Worth it?

Jennifer Donnelly worked for 10 years, writing on the side, being rejected by every publishing house in New York, until finally her first book was published. She later won the Carnegie prize. Worth it?

How long is too long for you?

Ahem

2010-10-20T20:31:00.001+01:00

When you haven't blogged in a while it seems harder to do so. Not only because you feel you should re-enter with something spectacular, but because your voice seems to have dried up.

Consider this a little clearing of the throat.

Now enjoy the excellent, searching interviews with famous authors at the Paris Review.

Hello to you and bye bye to publishing as we know it

2010-09-20T21:39:00.001+01:00

It's been a while.

Since I blogged, yes (I find queueing posts for publication while I'm on holiday fairly easy; but starting up again upon return really hard) – and since I had a writing week too.

The last couple of writing weeks have been postponed because of deadlines at work. It means that I've got 4 writing weeks to squeeze in October to Christmas – I'm looking forward to having a more intense time writing. Hopefully I'll be tucking into Christmas dinner with 30,000 more words under my belt. (Please Santa).

In the meantime, more links about the future of publishing sprung to my attention recently.

It is no secret that Seth Godin, blogger and best-selling author (several times over) of marketing and leadership books, thinks that the 'architecture of [publishing] is fundamentally broken.' Last month he acted upon his assertion by announcing that his latest book will be his last published in a traditional way. It's all electronic hereon in for Seth.

While this is not quite as seminal in indicating the demise of publishing as Radiohead's last album release was for the demise of music labels, where they cut out the label to sell/give directly to their fans electronically - it is getting close. Godin knows the publishing industry intimately. He has had 12 best sellers and knows what works. He is also highly influential. When he personally bets on something being the future, it probably is.

Tim Ferriss (he of the Four Hour Work Week) is certainly excited about the prospect. He crunches some of the numbers to show the differences between print and e-book publishing in a hefty blog post that must have taken at least two of his four-hour weeks to write. Mitch Joel does a shorter job on the subject, listing the 6 things you need to make it work like Godin. Definitely worth a look.

Finally, one I missed: a comprehensive piece on the end of publishing as we know it from New York magazine in 2008.

The first lot of links about changes in publishing are here.

I'm becoming dangerously close to having an opinion on some of this stuff. You?

Holiday poem

2010-08-23T08:00:00.002+01:00

I am on holiday. No you can't rob my house, because my dad is in it and he sleeps with a metal bar under his pillow.

While I am away, I have left you in the company of another poem. This was written on another holiday, several years ago, in Cyprus. It has not been previously published. We did actually swim among the ruins of ancient Salamis, now half slidden into the sea.

Of Salamis

A sun blind as Elymas oversees
the lilting sway while stateless children pick
and sell you on in pieces of mosaic.
Your heads are gone, and this long it took

to find all lemons are bitter, in breaks
along the south coast where dead hives prove
that tourists leave no ghosts,
not least in Famagusta, nor stay in love.

Gilt edged Cyprus stole over your posts,
like Barnabas pilloried in golden silt;
swimming in the ruins of Salamis
we cut our feet on what remains.

How the Internet is changing publishing

2010-08-16T08:00:00.004+01:00

Confession time. As a web content strategist and an aspiring novelist, I should have a strong opinion about the future of publishing. After all, it is a future in which I hope to be implicated.

But I don’t. Not yet. But I have been bookmarking interesting articles on the subject, for to read them one day, for to become incredibly knowledgable on the subject. Then I’ll tell you how it’s going to work.

Until then, why don’t I share those links with you, so that you can become knowledgable too? Then we can talk about, in excitable ways, who would win in a fight between Amazon and Google, what printers are going to do for a job next, and how on earth authors are supposed to convince enough people on the internets to throw a penny or two towards them for their tales.

These links are the proverbial tip of an iceberg, just to get us going. There are many more – please share good ones you have found in the comments. And don’t think me rude if I don’t reply posthaste: I’m on a beach in Cornwall, and will be for some time.

ReadWriteWeb’s four part series ‘Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Industry’ is a good place to start:
Part 1 assesses the impact of Amazon, Google, e-books and print on demand.
Part 2 explores how this will affect readers, authors, printers, publishers and sellers.
Part 3 is about the publisher/retailer relationship.
Part 4 looks at authors in all of this.

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future at the New York Review of Books is a shorter launchpad into the subject.

Writers Digest briefly summarises the current publishing environment in An Exciting Future For Authors That Can Succeed Without Publishers Or Agents, including a mention of vertical publishing, all to tell us about Kickstarter – an online model for patronising creativity.

Another successful online publishing model is the self-publish print-on-demand service. Lulu is a good example.

I always love Seth Godin’s take on publishing and writing and influencing – not least in the post Why Write A Book which turns out to be a promotion for his own volume. Good ideas, clever marketing. Although more general, Godin’s Random Rules for Ideas Worth Spreading also informs the publishing business.

And here’s an author who is taking Seth at his word: Ray Connelly is serialising a book on his blog, while selling the whole book as a download and publicising through social media, with a little help from the Guardian.

And to finish, I couldn’t mention authors and social media without giving you 15 Twitter Users Shaping the Future of Publishing.

UPDATE: More links in a subsequent post.

What it takes to be a writer

2010-08-11T13:57:00.001+01:00

I apologise that these all begin with the same letter – they just did.

1. Commitment

This is the big one. This is the factor that above all others determines whether you will be a writer or not.

Commitment is more than deciding to do something, because a decision can always be reversed. Commitment is vowing to cease making excuses, to start tackling obstacles, to deal candidly with inner and external circumstances, and to do the work, repeatedly, until it is finished.

The hardest part of writing is committing, followed by getting started. Once you have committed, you will find a way. Most people give up not because their task is too hard, but because they never really committed to it in the first place.

At this point, you should quit if you don’t want it enough. But if you commit, the rest will follow.

2. Confidence

‘But am I a real writer? Am I meant to be a writer? Am I good enough?’ After commitment, confidence is the key for persevering. You might have to write an entire draft of a novel on your own before anyone sees it. Then you might have to throw it in the bin. If you’re lucky you’ll get rejected lots; if unlucky, you’ll be downright insulted. You’ll have days of writing utter crap and days when you can’t seem to write a word. Your friends and family will fail to understand why you are not becoming an accountant instead.

The only thing that will get you through all this is self confidence. Don’t delegate self-approval to a publisher, or friend, or parent. Keep it. Approve yourself. Tell yourself that you are disgustingly talented. That every bit of feedback, however nasty, feeds your powers as you learn to write better and stronger. That at your best you write stupendous prose and at your worst you are simply walking through the same creative crises that have beset every other phenomenally successful author.

When it comes to how good you are, everyone else is just making it up. They might have half an idea (only half mind) of what sells in today’s market, but that's different. Put them straight. You own the rights to the story of how good you can be.

3. Creativity

There are two parts to creativity. Firstly the inspired connection-making between ideas – finding fresh ways to select and tell a story. Second is the actual creation, one brick on top of another, word following word, realising the concepts into something concrete.

Some people seem to be naturally gifted with one or both of these parts of creativity. Others think that they are not. I think that whatever your starting point, some creativity can be ignited in you: by the creativity of others, by consciously growing as a person, by new experiences, through suffering and love, and most of all by practice.

In my experience creativity follows commitment.

4. Craft

This is the one element that I am not sure everyone can have. This is learning the trade. Like creativity, craft is acquired, very consciously, through practise and feedback, but there has to be a certain amount of aptitude to begin with.

I don’t believe everybody has the necessary ability, however much she practises, to become a great writer any more than she could become a concert oboist or Formula 1 driver. But every person can learn, and become a better writer, if not a great one.

And remember that authors who get published are not the best writers; they are the best at getting published. They have learnt enough craft to convince a publisher or agent to print their work.

5. Contacts

You need other people for your book to succeed. Traditionally that means agents and publishers, promoters and reviewers, but even if you self-publish online, you need fans who will spread the word – otherwise no one will read your book.

Why should any of these people care a fig about you – if you’re a stranger? As soon as you know someone, the situation changes. For writers to succeed they need to know other writers and people in publishing at the very least.

The chances that your manuscript will be picked out of the slush pile anonymously are negligible. Get to know people. Make it a collaboration, not just for your book but for all the other great ideas you might have together.

Artists die on their own.

What have I missed?

Excerpt 7

2010-08-02T13:36:00.002+01:00

For John W.

Jonathan on the other hand was not aware of the feelings within his body even though they were strong. If he had been forced to label them however he may have decided upon resolved. It was his body that had carried him step by step across the park tonight in the cold, and stood him now on the doorstep staring at the small circle of light afforded by the peephole a few inches from his face. It was his body that had driven him to the industrial estate the few weeks before, and his body that had dumped him down in the chair at the café by the river. His mind was a blown glass full of smoke, unsure what these events meant, tongues curling around each other, dissipating and blending, feigning control while still his legs carried him from one meeting to the next.
Muffled footsteps and a darkening of the peephole followed by the catch being drawn and the door opening led to him standing face to face with another young man, about twenty-five, wearing skate clothes and with his hair scruffy and waxed.
‘You must be Jonathan,’ the man said.
‘Yes,’ said Jonathan.
‘Come in.’
They walked down the narrow entrance hall where the man turned uncertainly and asked:
‘Can I take your coat?’
‘You already have it,’ said Jonathan.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Cool. I’m Ollie, by the way.’ When he said this he projected both hands forward, flatly, with his fingers spread out.
‘Is Esme here?’ said Jonathan.
‘Yeah, she’s just upstairs. I’ll give her a shout, dude. Um, wait in the kitchen. I’ll be right back.’ Still his fingers worked hard to prove their independence from each other.
Jonathan stepped into the large kitchen. There was a chunky wooden table with lots of chairs at one end, and French doors out into evening blackness at the other. The room smelled of warm pastry and dark sugar. On a big pin board on the wall there were rotas and lists: a cleaning rota with coloured stickers; a ‘Wall 2 Wall Prayer’ schedule comprising the week broken down into hours through the night as well as each day; a calendar on which the housemates had written who was in for dinner, who was cooking, and which guests were expected, with names for almost every evening including his own for that night, written in a large hand and underlined. It appeared that ‘O’ had been due to cook but had been scribbled out and replaced by ‘E’. Around the planners were notes carrying motivational phrases he assumed from the bible, and postcards advertising the prayer week, a student event called ‘the Gathering’ and a reminder about the Power Life evening meetings with a picture of Pastor Wes with his arm raised. The fat hand floated toward Jonathan's head again and he felt yellow down his oesophagus. If he had known the other housemates better he would have taken the pen hanging on a string and drawn a huge cock on the Pastor’s head.

From the first draft.

How reading aloud helps

2010-07-20T17:11:00.003+01:00

I'm writing this week. One of the things I did today was read a whole chapter from the first draft out loud. It required a large glass of water, being such a warm, dry day, but it was immediately illuminating.

Apart from the fillip of enjoying the prose and wanting to write more of it, reading the text aloud gave me instant feedback on some things that I had missed:

1. Clumsy phrases

'A visitor to the city' seemed fine when I wrote it and reread it in my head. I still think that it should work. But I can't say it – not clearly, deftly. It's the double [t] of '…tor to' and the similarity between '…sitor' and 'city'. So that's got to change.

2. Repetition

'City' this, 'city' that, blah blah blah 'city' … unintentional repetition can make prose so dull. A lot of repetition I can pick up reading in my head, but not all of it. I was surprised at some of the words that kept chiming out of the text – when you hear them they become obvious, you start to listen for them and they get more annoying each time.

3. Odd punctuation

When I ran out of breath, or was forced to pause when I didn't want to, I had to alter the punctuation. I felt instantly assured in changing it: that is, reading aloud gives me a stronger sense of what is correct for a sentence. This is true for the syntax overall.

4. Unnatural dialogue

I love writing dialogue, and it's fun to read. You have to act a bit to read it out loud, but you spot the unnatural bits straight away. I also removed a few 'he said' 'she said' phrases when they arrested my performance mid-flow. Not now Bernard!

5. Contradictions

Surprising number of these. 'It made it harder to speak but drove on the speaking'. Huh? I think that when I read in my head I accept and study the words more, as though searching out their poetic resonance. But when read aloud, phrases like that just sound stupid.

And they were just the obvious things. Worthwhile, this reading your work aloud. Which is what these guys said.

A book launch and some advice

2010-07-08T09:59:00.006+01:00

A few days ago I went to London for the launch of Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph. She is the first from our Trinity College English set and also from among her UEA Creative Writing MA peers to get a novel published.

Anjali has already been picked out by the Telegraph as possibly one of the best young (that’s under 40 in literary life) novelists in Britain – not bad to be listed alongside Zadie Smith et al at any rate. If you’re looking for something to read over the Summer, you could do much, much worse than picking up a copy of her debut novel.

I loved the launch and after parties because of all the other writers there. Some had deals done and were approaching launches of their own; others were redrafting their manuscripts, half way through, or still mulling over ideas. But we all shared a common identity, multifarious as it is. We were all writers, and writers of fiction at that. In Cambridge I’m more often surrounded by small children or IT geeks (pretty sure my colleagues don’t read this blog, but in case they do, I know, not all of you are small children), both of which can be delightful.

But this felt like coming home.

It may have been the wine, but I felt tremendously energised by the evening. It was fun to meet some other writers from Cambridge especially, one of whom turned out to be my five-year-old’s best friend’s mum. She is going to introduce me to other writers and groups in Cambridge. It is such a relief to find other people round the corner going through the same creative processes, who might understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, and might give me feedback and advice. A welcome tonic to the hours spent alone coercing words to come out onto a laptop.

Most interesting of all was that all nearly all of the writers I spoke to gave me the same counsel. The first guy leaned toward me on the Tube and said, ‘let me encourage you like a trainer encourages an athlete when he slaps him in the face: the pain is only just beginning.’ He was on a fourth draft of his novel, that is, his third complete rewrite. ‘Take your time,’ he said, ‘don’t let anyone rush you. Publish when it’s ready.’

Others said the same thing. Take your time. There is no point pushing something out before you’re really happy with it. It takes ages to edit, to redraft, to rewrite. One girl said by the time she got published she could recite the whole book word for word. She said that by then she ‘hated the characters, the good ones and the bad ones.’

This isn’t advice I’d had from anywhere else. Most people just want to know when I’ll be finished.

I’m still aiming to get the first draft completed this year. But after that? Don’t rush me. I’m a writer.

Three things

2010-06-28T13:39:00.003+01:00

1) Last week was a terrible writing week. I'm not going to blame dodgy refereeing decisions. The players simply weren't good enough.

2) Why can't I buy a fresh cinnamon whirl anywhere in north Cambridge? You know, those coils of pastry lined with sweetened cinnamon. Co-op seem to have stopped doing them. I found a small, dry version in Budgens, lily-gilded with white icing. Too sweet, too hard, too small. Can anyone help?

3) Also, I love my writing place, but it doesn't work so well when inhabited, as it has been of late. I'm looking for an alternative for the occasional week when my normal pad is not entirely free. Criteria here. I'll leave you treats (cinnamon whirls when I can find them). Anyone?

Thanks.

Lunch hour poem

2010-06-10T12:27:00.000+01:00

Perhaps trying to combine paternity leave with a writing week was a bad idea. I managed one day. I have another writing week coming up so more on the novel shortly.

In the meantime, a poem. Our house is full of poetry at the moment. Most of it begins, 'Atticus, Atticus, duck-billed platypus' and descends into nonsense tortured by inadequate rhyme. Or in my four-year-old's case, the word 'poo'. But it's fun, and we're getting it out of our system. The pun, that is.

A little while ago I wrote a poem in my lunch hour to submit to the Guardian's poetry workshop. The subject was 'fathers'. They didn't publish it. Writing about family is a sensitive endeavour so a little reminder that poems are fiction too.

Lines on my father

Pete's father was a doctor.
He looked intelligent and paused
before he said things. He moved his family
to a bigger house with an orchard
and a pantry full of vegetables and fruit
where we ate carrots if we hadn't filled
already from the apples in the garden.

Ed's father was not his real one.
He was a photographer with a secret
darkroom through a cupboard upstairs
who never said a word but hung his black-and-white
pictures halfway up the stairs where we'd stop
to look like we did at his camera magazine
when the erotic issue came out.

Donald's father was an accountant
but he used to play for Scotland.
He still dressed up in shinpads
and shorts to boot the ball round with all
of his sons. He bought one of them
some drums and Donald who couldn't play
but joined our band anyway a guitar.

My father was absent in his room,
there but not there.
There is little to tell except the time
he got angry with my mum and threw
the radio at the wall.
It smashed, but he never hit her.
He never did anything.

Answers: first lines from which novels?

2010-05-24T08:00:00.000+01:00

1. 'What's it going to be then, eh?'

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

2. It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips.

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

3. "Home to stay, glory! Yes!" her father said, and her heart sank.

Marilynne Robinson, Home

4. Mr Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth – a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World

5. This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

6. We had succeeded, my friend B. and I, in dispensing with almost three of our six months' engagement as Conducteurs Volontaires, Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Un, Ambulance Norton Harjes, Croix Rouge Américaine, and at the Moment which subsequent experience served to capitalize had just finished the unlovely job of cleaning and greasing (nettoyer is the proper word) the own private flivver of the chef de section, a gentleman by the convenient name of Mr A.

e.e. cummings, The Enormous Room

7. All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

8. When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

9. Of writing many books there is no end;

And I who have written much in prose and verse

For others' uses, will write now for mine—

will write my story for my better self

As when you paint your portrait for a friend,

Who keeps it in a draw and looks at it

Long after he has ceased to love you, just

To hold together what he was and is.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

10. I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie

Quiz: first lines from which novels?

2010-05-17T08:00:00.000+01:00

I love a good first line. How many novels can you recognise from the opening sentences below? Before and after you use the Internet to find out?

Hint: one of the lines contains the title of its novel.

Post your scores/comments underneath - but don't give away the answers. I'll post those next week.

1. 'What's it going to be then, eh?'

3. "Home to stay, glory! Yes!" her father said, and her heart sank.

4. Mr Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth – a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self.

5. This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

8. When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

9. Of writing many books there is no end;

And I who have written much in prose and verse

For others' uses, will write now for mine—

will write my story for my better self

As when you paint your portrait for a friend,

Who keeps it in a draw and looks at it

Long after he has ceased to love you, just

To hold together what he was and is.

10. I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

Baby stops play?

2010-05-11T21:43:00.006+01:00

Any time from a week last Monday our next baby is going to arrive. The last time a baby arrived in our house he had no name for 6 weeks and stopped me writing my novel for a year.

This time it's going to be different.

Why?

Firstly because we have such a strong shortlist of first names (you can vote on them below).

Secondly because we should be better at the fourth attempt than any previously at receiving small, vulnerable and disruptive persons into our family with the minimum of fuss. (This is not a family blog, but if it were, the advice would be to accept all help offered, sleep in separate rooms, plan absolutely nothing for 3 months, move the baby into a nursery posthaste, and remember that you always hit the wall before you stabilise).

Thirdly, it's going to be different because I know what I'm doing with the book a lot more. Last time I was writing in an adroit style that felt rather put on. It was clever and droll and too hard to sustain. I was still trying to work Rowling-style in a café and my job was more emotionally engaging and hard to shut out during writing weeks.

At least these were the excuses: if I had really wanted to make progress I would have recognised these limitations quicker and solved them.

I feel like I've grown a bit more of a writing backbone since then, a bit more of an ability to sit down and get on with it as well as a ruthlessness in tackling excuses. The style is now adjusted to something sustainable, I've found a private place to work, and now plan my writing weeks a year in advance and observe them religiously when they come round.

The next few writing weeks might be tougher than normal, but I'll attack them nonetheless. It's going to take some earlier nights, some writing through the tiredness, continuing regardless if the words are poor, perhaps some obstinacy in sticking to my allotted days even when the rest of the family are stretched too.

Of course, I'm phenomenally blessed to have a healthy young family and the opportunity to write a book in the first place. I'm grateful for this, every day.

So thanks to all who have been asking how the book is going. I'm keen to get on with it, just as my wife is keen to get on with the birth (for it to be over, at least). We appreciate your support – and might need it a little more pressingly over the next few months.

To babies and novels!

PS. The current shortlist for baby names is: Atticus, Elias, Irving, Lewis, Ossian, Sebastian, Soren, Wilder and Wilf. Vote for your favourite in the comments below. Hat tip to workboywork, who named his bicycle in this manner.

Most people have got what they wanted

2010-05-05T22:04:00.006+01:00

You're a writer. You should write. Some people write just anything - the important thing is that they're doing it. Others only want to write certain things. I'm like that. I want to write novels. If you're like that you've got to get serious, organise your life around it, enrol your wife in the vision, find a way to make it work.

It won't work without commitment. Not passion-commitment or persistence-commitment, but the kind of commitment that is a decision from which you will never back down. You choose to make this work - and that's that. I suspect this only works when the decision connects with the deeper commitments of who God has made you to be. Don't wait for God. He moves when you commit.

Realise that the writers who get published are the ones who keep writing, keep editing and keep trying to get published, not the ones who are the best at writing.

It's important to be realistic. Writing is hard work and it might not make you happy. Who would read or buy what you're writing anyway? What are you aiming for here - is it possible and does it ever happen?

You've got to decide what you want. Getting published is easier than ever. You can self-publish online, either as a blog, or a free e-book, or with no overheads through a publish-on-demand service. Getting published with a traditional publisher is still very hard. Making a little money off writing is pretty easy. Making a lot is difficult, but possible.

Make the most of opportunities to write while the risk is low. You should always start with a back up plan, not because you'll quit trying to write, but because there are many variables and success might take time to come.

And it takes time to learn how to work at writing. I started my novel in 2007 and then quit for a whole year when #3 son was born. It wasn't going very well anyway - I hadn't learned how to sit down and write. I started the whole thing again in Sep 08 and again took about a year to produce not very much. But I was learning what my demons are, and how they win, and how to beat them sometimes, and how to carry on regardless. I still struggle but have written with much more discipline over the last 8 months. I feel like I'm starting to get there - learning the trade.

I just wrote this to a friend who wants to be a writer (personal references removed). The thing I forgot to add was that life is too short to think about being a writer instead of getting on and doing it. You have to want it enough. You have to want it more that the type of safe, uncreative job that most people prefer (whatever they say). And then you have to do it.

Calling

2010-04-27T21:07:00.005+01:00

Alright, alright. I'm working on it.

Excerpt 6

2010-04-20T21:42:00.001+01:00

Just west of the city centre the river swept by, almost touching the tall office buildings of the financial district. It was an ugly river, brown and slow. A visitor to the city, driving over the solid, wide bridges and trying to pick out a relevant road sign from the tangle overhead would not have known the river existed. The city straddled it so squarely that it was more of a huge culvert buried beneath the concrete, far from the dales where it began and the estuary where it emptied. Through the hills the river was small and clear; in the city it was dark and wide. There was no one place it changed. In the country it was one thing, in the city quite another. It would change again, for the estuary, becoming salty and flecked with birds, but here in the city it was a dull fixture. It moved so routinely that it never seemed to alter.
Once a founding part of the settlement, the old docks now had been replaced by skyscrapers and cinemas, which brought chain restaurants circling in the absence of gulls. Between the flat ground where the chains alighted and the University halls of residence further south, a patch of independent shops had struck out across a foot bridge from the centre of town. The patch bordered the river, and along this edge, cringing slightly under the looming towers across the water, locally owned cafés and restaurants put out tables to look down into the water from atop the channel wall.

From the first draft.

Some of my best friends are writers

2010-04-07T14:44:00.007+01:00

This is an Easter shout out to some other writers I know who are plugging away at their books.

My friend Jim has a publisher for his long-awaited leadership book. His coaching is unique and incredible; I hope that the writing catches in print his voice and what is behind it.

Another friend Roger is writing something that promises to be extraordinary. Not since Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb (Is it a cookbook? Theology? Or really about bread knives?) has a book so eagerly set about blurring two otherwise discrete disciplines – in this case, two disciplines that are usually hostile to each other.

Roger is a psychology lecturer and church leader. He could not decide whether his publisher should be academic or Christian. In the event he has a deal with Integrity (the latter) to publish God Lab early 2011, and hopes that the book, ostensibly exploring the Sermon on the Mount, will provide an apologetic to unbelieving psychology colleagues.

I suspect that it might help woolly-headed believers appreciate the truth in psychology, too.

Meanwhile, well done Claire, who was at King's when I was at Trinity, for finishing the first draft of her thinking-woman's romantic comedy novel (not-thick chick-lit?). Unlike these other recluses, you can follow Claire on twitter and find out more about the book on her blog.

And, most exciting of all, an English classmate from my college and year has become the first of our peer group to publish a novel. Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph will be available to buy in July 2010. It's published by Harper Collins and looks fantastic.

Congratulations Anjali. You beat me to it. And you're not even 33 yet.

Hilary Mantel’s guide to writing description

2010-03-23T21:53:00.005Z

Perhaps she's on a roll after winning the Booker prize, but for whatever reason, Hilary Mantel’s rules for writing are far more useful than the other 28 authors’ offerings in the Guardian’s recent list.

The others are good – real advice from successful authors – and enable you to see which 4 bits of advice are most repeated. Yet many of the suggestions are to do with getting on with writing, that is, the motivation behind it, as opposed to what those words actually should be.

And as someone who has already committed to writing, who has found a good place and time to work, is pushing through the dip and learning to overcome his own hurdles, it is the how-to advice that I need the most.

Like how the chuff are you supposed to write description?*

This question vexes me the most about writing a novel (it’s rather embarrassing to admit, but I will be nothing if not honest on this blog). I get stuck when I have to write the bits in between the dialogue.

I started the book with two things: the notion it would be about 100,000 words; and the anxiety about where on earth they would come from.

Dialogue is fine. I love my characters and their voices. I put them together and they talk. Usually they end up saying the sorts of things to each other that I had hoped (although they occasionally rebel) and all these little ambiguities and tensions and energies flow out from their conversations.

Small bits of description come naturally in between their speech because they speak with their bodies and not just their minds. For example:

The friends wriggled on their chairs and ducked into each other to talk. A thin, brown-haired woman walked straight up to the table.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she said.
The blonde girls looked at each other and smiled.
‘We’re waiting for Steve,’ they said. The other girl stopped watching the people and looked towards the woman.
It was Davina. They had never met.

But it’s not those bits that worry me. It is the blocks between dialogue, of longer description, that terrify me and induce paralysis in front of the blank page.

Look at Melville, writing whole chapters on harpoons and other technicalities of the whaling industry in Moby Dick; or Steinbeck, with his passages on dust and tractors in The Grapes of Wrath. Where did they get them from?

It’s not so much the point-of-view dilemma (is the narrator invisible or evident; omniscient or limited to a character’s point of view?) although this is part of the problem. Anne Enright says: ‘Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand’, which sums up the difficulty without helping to solve it.

Mostly it’s just knowing what to describe, when, how much, and in what style.

This is where I find Mantel’s advice invaluable

Firstly she says:

Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change … When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don’t notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they’re trying too hard to instruct the reader.

This is brilliant, and it makes me realise that most fluent passages of description that I have already written come when a character is new to a place. It takes off the pressure to describe everything, and inspires me to think about whether or not enough is new or changing in the story so far – is that the real problem?

Her second point tackles the point of view question:

Description must work for its place. It can’t simply be ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; … from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.

Many writers have written from an all-seeing perspective, or from a self-conscious narrator position, but Mantel is probably right that it functions best as a viewpoint of a character. I like the idea that then it becomes part of the action, rather than floating, detached, each passage of description killing the story with stasis.

It is not the only way to do it. Steinbeck’s dispassionate exposition of the bare countryside prepares us for the indifference with which his characters will be greeted in the story. Melville’s whaling chapters ensure that the experience of pushing through the book is a taste of a gruelling journey across the sea. Passages of detached description can create mood, or misdirect the audience, or progress the narrative.

But I’ll take Mantel’s advice as a good place to start.

* I’m indebted to Roger B for the subheading. Perhaps they all say it around Lincoln but he’s the only person I’ve heard employ ‘chuff’ as a substitute swearword.

29 Successful authors can't be wrong (except Will Self perhaps)

2010-03-15T22:13:00.008Z

I had a great writing week recently. Over 1,000 words each day, more than 9,000 in total, pretty much half the first draft now written. Thanks to everyone who has been asking. The daily target and reward approach is still paying off.

In other news, as if to satisfy my appetite for writing advice from real authors in digestible chunks, the Guardian recently published the top 10 rules for writing from 29 successful authors.

Misunderstood the assignment?

The most useless rule – apart from Philip Pullman’s ‘say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work’ (who says atheists are no fun?) – came from Zadie Smith. She recommended: ‘When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books.’

Great. Next time I get to still be a child, I’ll remember that. In fact even before that, I might preselect some literary parents too, to give myself a head start.

Richard Ford’s ‘don’t have children’ also comes too late. But the most bizarre advice predictably hails from Will Self, who said nothing about plastering your walls with Post-It notes, suggesting instead:

Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Or perhaps get out a bit more, Will?

The 4 big rules for writing

The Guardian published the lists all at once, which was an opportunity missed for a weekly series, but handy for looking through and seeing which tips recurred time and time again across the spectrum of authors. A spot of meta-analysis if you will.

If Hilary Mantel, Roddy Doyle, Neil Gaiman and Jeanette Winterson all say it … well, it’s got to at least be worth considering. So here are the four tips that appeared many times:

1. Read lots

I feel like a kid at school who got one of the answers right. Although it is rather obvious. This is one of my golden rules for inspiration. PD James says to ‘read widely and with discrimination’ because ‘bad writing is contagious’.

I’m reading more than ever these days, but mostly blogs and newspapers, a few books to the children and a bit of poetry before bed. I’ve also been dabbling in Theology and Content Strategy but when it comes to fiction, I will admit shamefully that I stalled in the middle of Satanic Verses several months ago. I need to either pick it up again or ditch it and start something else.

2. Write lots

It’s Rushdie’s carpentry simile again. If you make tables for a living, you go out and make tables. If you’re a writer, you go out and write. Lots. One word and another.

You’re only a writer if you’re writing.

I’m beginning to realise that for all the advice in the world from other novelists there is a lonely path to be walked for each person learning how to write, and that is to spend hours and hours in solitude actually doing it, eventually discovering how to navigate publishing and praise and criticism and success and failure, but always to return to the act of writing again. We’ve just got to do it.

3. Edit, edit, edit (cut, cut, cut)

I’ve not got to the editing process yet. I’ve found a new freedom in writing my draft my treating it simply as that – an imperfect draft that will be edited later. I only read enough of what I’ve already written to pick up the threads again, or to remind myself how much a character has previously divulged or some other aspect of the plot. This brings freedom to face forward and write fluently, but I’m apprehensive about the editing process when it finally arrives.

I know I will have to be merciless (‘cut until you can cut no more’ says Esther Freud); I’m worried that nothing will survive.

4. Read your work aloud

This was a common rule that I would not have anticipated. It makes sense, and I do it to a small extent already, but I was surprised at its ubiquitousness among the established writers. Diana Athill explains, ‘prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear’.

So there we have them – the four overarching rules for writers. I was also struck by how many of the other tips I am already doing, and some that I am deliberately not. There were many obvious rules, and many helpful, perhaps fewer that provided insight into the actual craft of writing that will change my practise. Of all those I will blog more later. For now, I have a chunky novel to either pick up or supercede – I'll keep you posted.

How to edit like Margaret Atwood

2010-02-15T23:06:00.004Z

Having made the claim that many established novelists are Luddites, I should be grateful for 70-year-old Margaret Atwood.

Sure, the Booker-winning author’s tweets don’t make any sense – but at least she’s on twitter! (Most of the authors on twitter you’ve never heard of, or else their publishers write their comments. Douglas Coupland is another great exception, mostly linking to zeitgeist-y clips on YouTube.)

Best of all Margaret Atwood has a blog where she appears very genuine, mixing top 10 tips (go girl!) with tour photos, book recommendations and other personal updates. Her blogging is far from expertly written for the web, but it’s authentic, clearly not ghostwritten by a publisher, and provides direct insight about writing from one of the greatest living novelists.

For example, she posted an article called Ten Editing Tips, for Your Fiction Mss. It is not hard to see how that title could have been improved, nor that each tip should have had its own snappy heading (mine are below – go on Maggie, I'll swap you those for a bit of coaching). But real editing tips from the author of a Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin!

That’s more like it.

Margaret Atwood’s 10 editing tips for your novel

Set the tone in the very beginning
Create – wait for it – suspense!
Nail subject-verb agreement
Use tense consistently
Avoid the gerund mistake
Describe just enough – the reader will fill in the gaps
Write dialogue that works in a novel, not real life
Pick the point(s) of view carefully
Handle internal second person material with care
Sign off the way you want to be remembered

(Don’t panic, she explains what the gerund mistake is in the original post.)

Excerpt 5

2010-02-02T22:24:00.004Z

Inside the room she found the usual arrangement. A bed, with a small table by it; on the table, some reading glasses and a glass of water under a lamp fixed to the wall and controlled by a large dial; on the opposite side of the bed a stand with pouches of fluid and at least two lines dropping down under the covers; beside the stand a table with monitoring equipment, again with lines running to the bed. The room was painted blue, and a small picture of some people on the beach hung above the headboard. Jutting rudely out from the wall a large, plastic arm groped into the space with a flatscreen monitor and telephone for a hand, the coiled telephone cable and headphone wire drooping from it like cheap jewelry stolen from a box, or like guts strung out from a corpse.
Under the monitor, in the middle of the bed, a body lay under the blue sheets, already looking smaller than an upright, walking body does, as though shrinking in preparation for a coffin that looks too small when carried into a church. The shapes made in the sheets were both soft bulges and angular points, made by a body with a new geography, a tumultuous landscape formed by conflict and unrest. Above the collection of sharp and lumpy shapes was a round face, cheeks cracked with red, thin strands of orange hair fighting each other down either side. The eyes were closed, not dead, not sleeping, but held closed by the mind behind them. When the girl’s footsteps ceased at the end of the bed, and no further noises were made, the eyes opened and the woman spoke in a flat voice:
‘Oh it’s you. Hello Davina. I thought you were the nurse.’
‘Hello Diedre,’ the girl replied. ‘Is now a good time?’
‘It’s always a good time for you’ said the woman. She added: ‘have you ever played a nurse?’

From the first draft.

Hail Janus

2010-01-27T16:13:00.003Z

I’m in the middle of a writing week this week. For this first one of the calendar year, I thought I’d try a different way of working.

Instead of spending the whole of each day trying to reach a smallish word count, I have raised the count and allow myself the rest of the day off once I’ve reached it.

So far I’ve hit the target every day, written an extra 1,000 words (because you can’t just finish mid section) and also had time to file my tax return, look after little boys with chicken pox and write the odd blog post.

Is it a better approach? The fillip of a new year? The 33 factor kicking in? Who knows. But at this rate I’ll achieve my goal of finishing the book this year.

That’s a good thing. Long way to go, but a good start.

Are you writing something? How has this year started for you? How about sticking up a link to your site and sharing some tips about how you reach your targets?

Why writing advice is woeful on the web

2010-01-11T22:31:00.006Z

There is an awful lot of writing about writing on the Internet. Awful used to mean inspiring reverence. It doesn’t any more.

I weep about the standard of writing on the web. I weep about the advice given about how to write well. I weep that accomplished writers are coming online so slowly.

I get through a lot of tissues.

After mulling this over for some time, I’m beginning to think that the problems with the majority of writing advice on the web are as follows:

1. Lack of friction

The cost, energy, and time from the old editorial and printing processes do not apply. Any fool can click publish. Many do.

2. Greed

To some the Internet is purely a means to make money, creating a huge market for writing that sells on it, because words are essential to the medium. This means that most of the writing blogs, courses and advice are actually about marketing copy (hooky headlines, keyword dense sentences, ADHD paragraphs, all aimed at a reading age 13).

This is not wrong, of course, and as a content strategist I get very excited about planning great copy for web sites, all the more so when they are web sites that are doing something worthwhile. But the flood of writing-as-commodity drowns out the people who care about other aspects of writing: literature; poetry; writing as a record of language, keeping the soul of a civilisation keen; writing as philosophy, the mode of argument; writing as theology, telling the great narrative of humanity and its purpose; even writing for love.

I wish that true writers would fight back, against the copycat, plagiarist and me-too charlatans who propagate their rubbish by gaming the search engines day and night. But greed is strong.

Plus many established authors seem to be Luddites. Which leads me to:

3. The meta-careerist paradox

A meta-careerist is someone who writes about writing, sells ‘how to sell courses’, or has made a business out of entrepreneur advice.

There seems to be an infinite amount of them on the web. The paradox is this: the people who have the capability to teach widely are not doing what you want to learn. Or put the other way: the people who are worth learning from are too busy doing what you want to learn to teach.

In other words, the best authors are researching and writing books, not blogging search engine friendly articles. They are locked in creative crises, not setting up writing courses. It is possible that true masters will rarely give advice about their field.

That explains why Google returns page after page of writing advice from people you don’t want to learn from.

It explains why I weep.

But surely it doesn’t have to be this way? Surely some amazing, proven authors could cultivate an online presence as well? Surely there as some aspiring, emerging writers who could use the Internet not just as a marketing tool but as one to stretch the creative boundaries of literature: new media bringing new forms? Surely there are people who care enough to fight for language as the world moves online? Who can straddle high poetry and marketing copy without rupturing their intellectual groins?

How strange. That was supposed to be a preamble for a discussion of Margaret Atwood’s editing tips. We’ll have to talk about those later.

I think I just gave myself away.

Worky nosey grindstone

2010-01-05T20:58:00.002Z

Happy new year everyone.

I have one goal for 2010: to finish the first draft of my novel.

(Actually there is another one, which is overdosing on World Cup football matches until I’m immune to the drama of the final, which is just as well because England won’t be in it – but that’s not especially relevant to this blog.)

There are nine writing weeks this year. To finish the first draft I need to write another 66,000 words, or just under 7,500 a week. That works out at 1,500 per writing day.

I can do that.

Especially now that I’m 33.

There are probably ways to make it easier rather than harder, and certainly I need to get deeper inside some of my characters and environments to be able to describe them. I suspect that talking more with other writers and gaining inspiration from the sempiternal pursuits of sleep and reading will play a big part.

As will knowing my enemies: the old hurdles will need jumping each time, and somehow I need to find a way to welcome a new baby to the family in May without losing my energy to write for a whole year as happened last time.

But you know what? None of that really matters.

As an author friend of mine once said ‘you just need to sit your arse down and write.’ Make the table. That’s what will get 1,500 words written a day.

I know it will be hard, because I’m in the dip. The dip is difficult precisely because it’s worth doing. That means gritting teeth, writing imperfectly, going again even if last time didn’t work out, and getting it done.

What matters is doing it.

So here’s to 2010, and to getting worthwhile things done. Some of my friends are finishing PhDs, bringing up kids, looking for brilliant jobs, or fulfilling book deals. Some are making mainstream movies, pioneering new web sites, or leading churches. One is standing for Parliament.

I’m finishing my draft.

Let’s do it.

Let's write about sex

2009-11-30T21:59:00.007Z

*Warning: this post contains explicit language*

Jonathan Littell has just won the Literary Review’s 2009 bad sex in fiction award, for lines in his novel The Kindly Ones such as:

I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft boiled egg.

The book can’t be badly written, having scooped France’s highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, but I suppose the judges must not have taken to his metaphors. If I try hard I can just about relate to the head-like-a-scraped-egg feeling, but the problems are the cognitive dissonance (surely it’s not the head that empties?) and the simple fact that I don’t want to be thinking about eggs at all at this point in proceedings.

And there’s the rub (ahem). Having read through excerpts from the shortlisted novels, the chief transgression in bad written sex seems to be inappropriate metaphor.

How was it for you?

It felt to him as if he were tending a delicate weeping wound, and as he probed it with his tongue he heard her moan quietly. Excited by the oysterish intricacy of her he sucked and licked the salty folds until they became sweet…
The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn

Quinn’s prose was enjoyable up til these lines. And then, what, you tend a delicate, weeping wound by … licking it? If that doesn’t make you hurl, just wait for the ‘oysterish intricacy’.

I wanted to enjoy the example from Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Monro, but ‘nipples, like tiny secrets’ belongs to the world of lady gardens and Mr. Winky (remind me never to use the word ‘secrets’ in my writing). Nipples notwithstanding, Cave employs all of his Australian subtlety for the paragraph end: ‘and enters her like a fucking pile driver.’ Nice.

He takes a floating step forward until his chest is barely touching the tips of her nipples, behind which he senses all the gravid tremulousness of her breasts. She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans into him in a simulacrum of a swoon, making a mewling sound.
The Infinities by John Banville

I’ll admit, I was almost aroused by the barely touching nipple tips – before the author starting selecting words at random from the Collected Poems of Alfred Tennyson. Hold that thought, dear, while I grab a dictionary.

We could go on. Amos Oz compares his lover to a seismograph. Sexy. Sanjida O’Connell seems to be unaware of the euphemistic use for ‘morning glory’. Paul Theroux likens cunnilingus to a language (cue cunning linguist joke). All over, the metaphors are going awry.

To what shall I compare thy front bottom?

One way to avoid the horrific metaphors is to avoid them. The Tongues of Men (you should be reading that title differently by now) contains at least two sexually explicit scenes. I haven’t written them yet, but I want them to be consistent with the style I’m aiming for in the rest of the book – realistic, describing physical sensation in detail, with poignant dialogue.

I hope that a few fitting metaphors come to me when I write, yet I’m thinking the scenes will be quite literal. The problem then, as Sarah Duncan points out, is what to call all the bits without invoking the snickering school kid in each of us. She suggests describing characters’ reactions over physical detail, leaving room for readers to project their own fantasies. That sounds great, but physical sensation is a theme of my book.

I can’t just drop it for the climax.

How would you do it?

5 cracking films about novelists

2009-11-25T18:39:00.009Z

1. Shadowlands

(Richard Attenborough, 1993)

Anthony Hopkins gives his doleful, repressed, period Englishman treatment to C.S. Lewis, author not only of the Narnia novels but also some intelligent sci-fi. I love this film for the same reasons I love Radiohead: a bit of theology, Oxford, the human attempt to love, and redemptive sadness.

2. Capote

(Bennett Miller, 2005)

The story of how, through obsessively researching In Cold Blood, Truman Capote scaled to a phenomenal literary peak and ruined his life. A stylish but muted film, sensitive and unconventional in form, it explores a writer getting too close to his subjects, fiction versus non-fiction, and truth. Philip Seymour Hoffman is incredible as Capote.

(Apparently Infamous, also about Capote, is worth seeing too.)

3. Stand By Me

(Rob Reiner, 1986)

Although not directly biographical, Stand By Me is an adaptation of Stephen King's novella The Body, largely about his childhood. Reiner frames the film around a boy who can write, and who grows up to be a successful author. The story itself is a beautifully judged and defining American-boys-coming-of-age tale. I adored it age 15 and have enjoyed it more every time since.

(See also Spielberg's Empire of the Sun – even less literal, but another mesmeric childhood film, from J.G. Ballard's experiences of World War II).

4. Iris

(Richard Eyre, 2001)

I watched Iris while procrastinating during a writing week and it soon got me typing again, inspired by the sheer volume of accomplished novels that Iris Murdoch wrote. It has similarities to Shadowlands – set in an old University, superbly acted by one of the best (Judi Dench), and dealing with the pain of loss from a loving relationship. It also has Kate Winslet in the buff.

5. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

(Terry Gilliam 1998)

Hunter S. Thompson's novel was based on real incidents that occurred on a narcotic-fuelled road trip to Vegas as a journalist, with mad Samoan lawyer Dr. Gonzo in tow. In the film, Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro are perfectly cast. They mumble incoherently, the camera lurches, and we sink into in the druggy mire with no coming up for air. It's a weird immersive experience. In a good way.

After these 5 (plus 2), it strikes me that there are actually few great novelist movies. Sylvia (Plath), Finding Neverland (J.M. Barrie), Becoming Jane (Austen), and Quills (Marquis de Sade) are all about novelists but I don't know how good they are. The Hours is well made, and partially about Virginia Woolf, although also partially about Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose.

What have I missed?

The Obi-Wan Kenobi approach to writing

2009-11-17T21:22:00.006Z

Last week, a writing week, was somewhat overcast and wet. My sinuses were threatening to explode and I felt miserable. So I started by writing one of the greyest scenes in the book, when a girl walks up to the hospital in the rain to visit a terminally ill patient.

Cheery stuff.

It is so much easier to write a scene if I am in the same mood as the characters. I was so sleepy one day that I wrote a chapter where my heroine (of sorts) returns from work dog-tired but finds the energy to hold an important conversation with her housemate. I had instant rapport with the character, and if I wanted (which I very much did) to describe the physical sensations of tiredness – actual muscular feelings – then they were right there in my own body to pick off like low hanging fruit.

More frequently, and a more difficult task, a story teller needs to be able to write about many states and situations that are removed from his own. To write about balmy summer days in January, or about foreign cities when in Cambridge, or about nervous, frightened characters when he is in fact content, or about energised bodies when he is in himself exhausted.

How do you empathise with characters and environments unlike your own? I find re-reading previous similar chapters helps, especially speaking their lines out loud in their voices. This can be quite a challenge. The Yorkshire accent is fine (it's still under there somewhere) but the modified South African … well.

Another way to empathise is to get their feelings into my own body, by getting up and walking about the way they would, mirroring their body language, making my muscles feel how they would feel. This is very effective. Because changing your body changes your feelings.

At other times it's just reaching into the imagination and, well, making it up.

So I guess I should be thankful for when my feelings do line up with what needs to be described in the book, when the sky outside is congruent with the sky in the story. It's a good way to approach things when it's hard to get going.

Just remember: 'Use your feelings' (Luke).

What about you? Any tips for empathy in story telling? How do you get going on miserable November mornings?

Coming of novel-writing age

2009-11-02T21:15:00.007Z

Back in my twenties, in those what-did-we-do-with-all-that-time-we-had days before children, I did some tutoring. By the far the most interesting student I taught – although autistic Swedish Religious Studies GCSE boy might object – was a lady in her fifties. I was not qualified to diagnose her mental condition, with the old English degree, but let's just say that even though she paid for 10 lessons in advance no other tutor would teach her. A couple had tried, and backed out quickly.

And she smelt a bit.

So, third time lucky, I was sent, the youngest recruit in the agency, to see if I could prevent a full refund. It was fine. You can get a long way just being kind to people. She smoked her way in and smoked her way out again, and in the hour between fidgeted incessantly, but all that she wanted was some help with grammar for her own creative writing.

It became apparent that although she respected my knowledge of grammar, my restless student nevertheless found it amusing that I was so much the younger than she. When I said that I was wondering myself about writing fiction, she said, "you haven't got anything to write about until you're at least 30."

And for all the reasons I could have disqualified this lady's advice (the smell, the attention deficit, the hopelessly appalling writing), that thought stuck with me. That there should be a certain amount of experience, or maturing, that takes place in a writer before he or she has anything interesting to say.

Thinking of it again, and this time on the other side of 30, I had a glance at the prestigious Booker Prize list, to see at what age recent winners had started writing.

I found something curious.

The magic number for writing novels

This year's winner, Hilary Mantel, published her first novel Every Day is Mother's Day at the age of 33.

Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, was so good that it rocketed straight onto the Booker shortlist and won the prize last year, when the novelist was 33.

In 2007, the year before that, Anne Enright claimed the prize. She was in her forties when she won, but had kicked off her fiction career with The Wig My Father Wore when she was, you've guessed it, 33.

The 2006 champion might seem a little old in comparison, Kiran Desai scooping the prize for The Inheritance of Loss at 34. Two years before that though, Alan Hollinghurst was the judges' favourite. He penned his first novel, the award-winning The Swimming Pool Library, when he was, altogether now, 33.

The astute among you (and my readers are nothing if not astute) will notice that I skipped a year. That's because John Banville, Booker winner 2005, started writing aged 26, although he didn't gain the crown until he was 60, for his eighteenth novel, The Sea. I don't know whether to laugh or cry about John Banville. It's encouraging that his best work could be recognised later on in life, but pretty hard going to have to write 18 books before getting there.

Banville aside (and I would put him aside – ghastly over-poetic prose), all the others were 33-ish. Perhaps my nicotine-stained sage was right, not only that there's not much to say before the age of 30, but in a deeper fashion, that there's something about coming through the decade-turning mini crisis that prompts writers to undertake a novel with a more urgent commitment.

Or perhaps the judges just like what 33 year olds have to say. After all, Jesus was pretty profound around that age.

Either way, it was a little string of coincidences that encouraged me to keep on writing.

Did I mention I have a birthday soon?

I'm going to be 33.

I'm thinking about giving up

2009-10-27T20:45:00.010Z

*Warning: this post has a dualism rating of 4 out of 5.*

When should you quit and when should you keep going? When are hard work, tedium and things taking ages something to give up on, and when are they signs that rare success can be attained?

Seth Godin’s concept of ‘the dip’ inspires me. (I can’t recommend Godin high enough. If you’re a leader or in business or teaching or are creative or admire inspiration or pyschology or marketing, or are trying to create something of value in the world like a company or family or charity or church – you must read Seth).

What’s the dip?

The dip is what happens after the new thing you started is no longer energised and fun. After things have been getting harder and less enjoyable, until they reach the low point of being bloody difficult and no fun at all.

Then you’re in the dip.

According to Godin, ‘winners seek out the dip’ because ‘they realise that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it.’ The reason successful people seek out the draining and demanding graft of the dip is because they realise that:

a) success rarely comes without it, and
b) it will cause most other people to quit, so the rewards will be bigger.

It’s such an obvious idea, but it inspires me no end. I know that gritty determination is essential for success (in theory, at least). But what I love about the dip concept is the filtering process: we value what is scarce (diamonds/climbing Everest/winning the Booker), so the harder an achievement the more remarkable those who make it. By this definition the dip is not just a necessary evil to gain success, it is an ally in shaking off the competition to achieve greatness.

Winners quit

Careful though. Not all hard work is a dip. Godin also points out in his book that some tough situations are actually cul-de-sacs. No matter how much work you put in, things will never get better, and there is no way out. Your hard work will not lead to success. It is not a filter that cuts out the losers, because everyone who stays in the cul-de-sac will lose.

In the case of a cul-de-sac, winners quit. They give up quickly, without guilt, and go off to find a dip worth pushing through.

Losers, on the other hand, surrender during dip times, stick at it in cul-de-sacs, and never find the right dip to conquer.

Why do we stay in cul-de-sacs when life is so short? Pride? Denial? Conservatism bias? Fear of real failure – the kind when you could have succeeded but didn’t, as opposed to the kind where you worked your hardest and ‘it wasn’t to be’? Fear of success?

Either way, I’m sure that we can have something invested in going round in circles in a cul-de-sac instead of finding a worthwhile dip that can be conquered. Instead of succeeding at something remarkable.

So why am I thinking about giving up?

I’m not. I’ve just been thinking about the nature of giving up.

Why would I quit now? I’m just getting into the dip.

I’ve finally found something that's worth the pain.

The truth about writing a novel

2009-10-19T20:04:00.007+01:00

Ever wondered what it's like to write a novel? For some people it carries a certain intrigue, and is definitely a boost to the conversation when people ask what I do. 'Wow!' they say, 'what's it about – if you don't mind me asking?' followed by these rather predictable questions.

Admittedly, there are others whose respond as though I had said 'I'm an accountant' and then looked at my own feet, and that's okay too. I really don't mind talking about something else.

In fact, now that I'm a third of the way in – official word count after hitting my target last writing week is 33,000 words – I feel qualified to disclose the truth about this mysterious and alluring world of novel writing.

What's it like to write a novel?

It's boring

There are exciting bits, such as moments in the writing when scenes come together or phrases turn out particularly delightfully, or when planning the plot throws up some new, energising new element in the characters' relationships. But on the whole, it's nose to grindstone kind of stuff, or before that trying to persuade the nose to go into the same room as the grindstone, or even stop being in denial that the grindstone exists and requires some attention from the nose ... you get the picture.

From Salman Rushdie to Zadie Smith I'm noticing that the experiences of novelists while actually writing their books are a long way short of glamorous. Zadie gets no joy out of it and feels guilty a lot of the time. Salman says 'you have to be able to just do your job' as though writing a work of long fiction were like building a house or filing paper. Lots of paper. Anne Enright said that she doesn't 'do "inspiration" or "blocks". I just do "work" and hope for the best.'

And that about sums it up. Just doing work. There's something about weaving a story to grip and move people when it is finished that it ungripping and boring while in process. Almost as though the only way to tell this story is in 100 thousand words. So you won't get much of a story if you ask how it's going now.

It takes a long time

Especially dipping in and out every few weeks. Last year, over nine writing weeks, of which only six were in any way productive, I wrote 33,000 words. That's about a third of the novel, although it feels less. Perhaps I'm going to need more than 100,000 to tell this story.

Anyway, assuming it is only going to be 100,000, at that rate it will be another two years before the first draft is finished. I can't wait that long. I've nearly outlived Jesus and I want to be able to describe myself soon as a novelist, that is, published, instead of just another wannabe. And I want my house in the country.

So I'm going to raise my word target by 50% to 7,500 per week, using all the experience and learning from this last year, and make the most of the next nine weeks to finish it off in 12 months.

You can remind me of that.

I'm aware that talking word counts is hardly exhilarating. I told you. Writing a novel is boring. In fact I might be entering the dip but more of that next time.

Are you writing a novel? How far in have you got? How are you finding it? If you just want to *sigh* in the comments that's fine. Perhaps you're already published. How does that feel? Please tell me it's worth it. Please.

I Don't Like Mondays. Now I Do.

2009-10-05T13:16:00.011+01:00

This week is a writing week. Today is Monday. So according to my last post I should have been procrastinating for England today. Instead I wrote 1600 words that I think are quite good (there's a sample at the bottom of the post if that's what you're looking for).

So what went right?

It's because I admitted that I never write on Monday.

I reckon two things might have happened since I confessed my procrastination. The first could simply be a bit of reverse psychology. I tell you that I don't write until Wednesday, then I rebel against myself to prove myself wrong. Ha, that'll learn me.

The second might be to do with how we change as people. I'm more and more taken these days with the idea that we only change when we stop trying to. As long as we strain and struggle to do the things that we think we should, to alter the parts of ourselves that we don't like, the more we become obsessed with those things. And as we position them as our opponents, they become bigger and stronger, featuring more prominently in our lives, in some ways becoming more unbeatable.

On the other hand, if we stop fighting them because we stop judging them to be wrong, and just allow them to be there, then they aren't the enemy any more. Instead of insisting what we should do, we just do what we can and that's okay. Instead of judging parts of ourselves as wrong (lazy! selfish! sinful!), we just accept that all parts of ourselves are legitimate and came about for good reasons in the past (preservation? authenticity? engagement?). When we do this, we can feel suddenly lighter. So-called vices seem to integrate into an overall healthy expression of ourselves and negative behaviours disperse.

And the next thing we know, we're changing.

I publicly admitted that I like to procrastinate, even bragged that I was getting good at it, and decided that as I never really write on the first day of the week so I might as well enjoy the time off instead and not beat myself up about it. That's acceptance. And all of a sudden I feel free to write on a Monday.

That's not what I had intended to happen.

The paradox of change?

Perhaps I'm getting better at jumping my hurdles. Or maybe the two days of planning I did last writing week paid off (more on planning v. writing later). But it certainly wasn't sufficient sleep or literary inspiration that caused it. I was up until 2am drinking Amarone and Sound of Islay on Friday night, and I've stalled in the middle of The Satanic Verses (the kind of haitus that if left much longer will force me to start the whole bally thing from the beginning again).

I suspect it's more to do with acceptance.

Anyway, enough with the psychoanalysis already. Hurray for Mondays and here's an excerpt from today's scribbling:

Wine still flowed down the street, but more usually beer, as students and residents alike made their way home from pubs and clubs, unaware that both the largesse of their opinions and the street's channelled acoustics amplified their voices to disturb the inhabitants of Whitelady Way at one or two o’clock in the morning, or whatever time it was. Esme had been woken more than once by drunk men relating to their inebriated friends about how just a few years ago these houses were going to be knocked down or were sold for a pound each, and now they were worth a million apiece, or proclaiming their love for the street quite barefacedly – what a fucking amazing street – imagine living here! – to which she would reply through her open window on the second floor, ‘it’s not so great when people like you walk down it shouting’ and invariably the drunken men agreed.

Time to write

2009-09-21T22:08:00.004+01:00

When I started this novel back in 2007, I tried to write one clear day each week.

Or at least that was the plan.

What actually happened was that other work spilled onto my writing day; that because the other job was not rigid, frequently taking up weekends or forming unusual patterns in the week, I moved my writing day here and there and often it disappeared completely; and that the emotional demands of the other days meant that even when the writing slot was in the diary unhindered with other commitments – I usually felt spent, inarticulate and as creative as a headache.

I lacked discipline. Conditions may not have been favourable but the writing days should have been anchored in the diary well in advance and protected fiercely.

But that wasn’t the biggest mistake. The largest clanger was thinking that I could write some of my novel in a day, forget it for six days, and then spend another day on it, repeatedly.

I couldn’t. Some authors can. Some authors can write in the evening after work and family commitments have taken the most part of the day. Some can compose some hasty lines in the minutes they have for lunch, or squeeze a few words out in other passing moments of interstitial time.

If I believed that that was what it takes to be a successful writer I would have given up already.

You’ve got to find what works for you. And then do it.

Before I can write a word I have to jump the old hurdles. Even without those, it take me time to get my head into gear, to remind myself what the book is about, who the characters are, how they feel, and most importantly of all, to reacquaint myself with the narrative voice of the novel so that it starts to flow out of me again. On a good day, even without the hurdles, I might be at that point by four o’clock. Dinner for a young family is at five-thirty.

Then our third son was born, and, because it wasn’t working so well anyway, the disruption to our lives shelved the book for nearly a year.

The right timing

Last year I left my job. It was time for a career change. It was time to be serious about becoming a writer. So when I got into a conversation with a friend about working as an editor for his web site consultancy, I knew exactly how I wanted to arrange the time. Thankfully he was accommodating, and my pattern of four weeks with the company followed by a week off to write the book began in September last year.

Coupled with finding a good place to write, this whole-week-every-five-weeks rhythm has been a remarkable improvement for my creativity and productivity. Not only does little now impinge on the writing time – because it’s blocked out solidly between two weekends off – I’ve now got much longer to find the narrative voice, get into the flow, remind myself of what is happening in the story and, once I have started writing new chapters, to write for a sustained period before other work comes round again.

Procrastination can easily eat a day, or two. Whereas before that would be my entire time gone (cue the guilt and misery!), I can now nonchalantly waste Monday, even Tuesday, and still hit my word target by the end of the week.

In fact the order of play invariably goes:

Monday – procrastinate for England (I’m getting good at this now, using the time to sleep and read to inspire myself for the remaining time)
Tuesday – battle demons, finally start writing, but the wrong things (like the next novel, or some poetry, or a new master shopping list)
Wednesday – battle demons and win, ease into the book, remember that I can do it
Thursday – shit hot writing and lots of it
Friday – more shit hot writing, knock off early because I’m so chuffed I want to celebrate

It doesn’t always work out that way. I have lost entire weeks to Monday's and Tuesday’s occupations. But I usually get there in the end. In any case, it is far better than the day-a-week plan.

There might be better still. I often feel that I would get more done if I was writing the following week too, although it’s more likely that I would just procrastinate for longer to begin with. It’s still hard to get my head back into gear, and then, having become utterly and inwardly absorbed with the book to have to come back out of it again and reenter the world of content strategy and web sites.

But it’s a big improvement. Along with finding an ideal place and getting enough sleep and inspiration, finding the best time to write has been a crucial lesson in learning how to write a novel.

What about you? Can you bang a few words out in your coffee break, or do you need a longer stretch to get back into your writing? Any advice for making the most of your writing time?

Zadie Smith and the lack of a huge amount of joy

2009-08-20T22:53:00.007+01:00

Because it's 11 o'clock at night, and because I've just written three other blog posts for SmyWord and Verbatim, because I'm about to go on holiday, and because my contribution to preparing for the trip has so far has amounted to getting the windbreak out of the loft and deadheading the roses, and because only one of those tasks was strictly necessary, and because my wife is having to do everything else, and because she keeps enquiring as to the exact time I might complete my scribblings and come and give her a hand, I will make this a short post.

(I don't allow myself long sentences on the other two blogs. My, that felt good.)

Having enjoyed watching Salman Rushdie, I searched for other novelists on the Charlie Rose web site and came across a young, recently-published-to-critical-acclaim Zadie Smith back in 2000. She had this to say about writing White Teeth, her first novel:

[Writing] wasn’t something that I had a total passion for. I wanted to be a star … I wasn’t aware of it as a massive passion. I always did it and always thought I was fairly reasonable at it. When I went to college I started doing a lot more of it.

I can’t explain it – I don’t get a huge amount of joy out of doing the thing because a lot of it is sitting around – there’s a lot of guilt involved because you’re not working and you should be working and you waste a lot of time – but when it does happen, on good days, when you do write 3,000 words and they’re as good as you’d want them to be, then it’s wonderful. I don’t think anything could beat it.

I agree.

I want to learn from successful novelists, in particular, because I am beginning to suspect that writing a novel is a discipline quite unlike any other form of writing.

Who inspires you?

Now I'd better go and pack some pants.

Excerpt 3

2009-08-17T13:58:00.004+01:00

‘Right. Let’s get this done.’
Next door the man walked back into the kitchen. When he walked his feet fell heavily and his voice carried a natural authority. He was significantly overweight, but on such a huge frame that the weight hung high and large and added to his presence. His dark eyes were more dark for lack of sleep.
Kenny followed him like a fly caught up in the draught of his wake. He flitted over to the pile of equipment boxes and bags and drew out a notepad and pen. Kenny was the director’s assistant and had been working for him for years. He seemed to have no independent energy but needed to be plugged into the director otherwise no one would notice him at all. Part of the success of this partnership was the way that the girls, sometimes even the new ones who were wary of every person in the physical environment of their inaugural shoots, hardly noticed or were bothered by Kenny, as though he did not really count. He seemed to be part of the equipment and was usually found wrapped in it, being responsible for the technical aspects of production. He said little and worked swiftly and had learned how to give the man what he needed and ride the frequent tirades because they were rarely directed at him.
The girl came back in from the hallway and crossed to the breakfast table by the window to await instruction. Her hand was on the belt of her cotton gown. The man glanced at her before looking back at the camera in his hands. He was jumping through the images on the small screen. He paused on one.
‘That’s better,’ he said. No one else said anything. ‘You look less…’ he continued, without looking up. He flipped the camera back into picture mode, and raised it up to his right eye, sharply taking aim and lowering it again. ‘…Glamorous. Where is she?’
‘She’s coming,’ said the girl. Her makeup had been subdued. The colours were the same, but muted. Without such tart red lips there was nothing to make her stand out, like the dull pond beneath the white sky.
‘She went to the toilet.’
‘Always waiting for someone,’ he said, without anger, and turned to a laptop on the breakfast bar, striking a key to waken it. ‘I’ve got to finish this now. I’ve got another shoot in forty minutes. If she turns up.’
The woman strode in from the hallway and asked, ‘we doing this then?’
‘Yep,’ said the man, ‘we are. The new girl’s here at four. Come on then.’ This was at the girl, who disrobed and walked across to the corner of the work surface where she had begun. She jumped up. It was still cold.

From chapter three, first draft.

Salman Rushdie and the passion that is enormous

2009-08-10T21:38:00.007+01:00

My ears pricked up when I heard Salman Rushdie say this in an interview. I immediately paused the video and wrote it down:

To write you need calm. To write a page of a novel requires from the writer enormous emotion and intellect, enormous passion but also self criticism. That's what you're doing all the time. If there's outside noise – that gets in the way. You have to somehow learn how to shut out outside noise in order to pay attention.

And the way to do it is discipline. Sitting down and doing your job. If you're a carpenter and you've got a table to make, you don't not make the table because you're unhappy. You make your table. Same thing. Pride in your craft is a very important thing. You have to just be able to do your job.

I think it grabbed me because it sounded like someone articulating the cost of writing even one page of a novel (somebody understands!), and then, thankfully, talking with 35 years of experience about how to do it.

You can hear the whole interview here (I also love the story about the difference between the Western and Indian reception to Midnight's Children).

Progress report: I've just put my next writing week back a fortnight from next week until September, because we're busy at Endis Solutions, which is a good thing.

In the meantime I will post up a third excerpt later this week for your delectation. Or perhaps disgust.

Two golden rules for inspiration

2009-08-03T17:07:00.013+01:00

What would you say were the most important things, the absolutely crucial ones, to bring inspiration to your writing?

A quick skim of the web shows that for inspiration people advocate everything from escaping up mountains to roleplay to dancing naked, and going to church, because it 'reconnects your energy to the universe'.

One writer even suggests spending time with children. He says that during the times he spends with his (six) kids, he is 'often reflective about life, about humanity, about love.' I don't know what kind of angels Leo Babauta has fathered but when I spend time with my children, I am usually too busy defending all my internal organs (and certain external ones) from three-feet long wooden swords and thick toddler's skulls to reflect on anything more than which room in the house I can hide in next.

Anyway, having been writing in earnest for a few months now, two things have emerged for me as fundamental preparations for being inspired to write fiction. They aren't necessarily what I would have expected but they have proved to be essential. They are becoming my golden rules for inspiration.

1. Get enough sleep

Dead simple. If I go tired into a writing week it's harder to write, harder to think of ideas, harder to put in decent length shifts. Sleeping for 8-9 hours the two nights before a writing week make an incredible difference. The odd nap during a writing day works wonders too.

In terms of inspiration this reveals that lots of what I need is already there. Sleep doesn't bring inspiration – it's feeling awake that is the best state to naturally inspire myself.

2. Read lots of fiction

Makes sense in a reap-what-you-sow kind of way. I find that reading other authors' fiction – and it has to be good; trashy bestsellers might have the opposite effect – not only inspires me with ideas of how to write but also gets my brain into gear in the same way that listening to Mozart can improve students' exam results.

I engage with novels differently now that I'm writing my own. I'm aware of stylistic technique as well as just experiencing the story. And it really helps. Steinbeck writes plain, mundane passages to carry the reader through to the next eventful episode. Not every line needs to be delightful. Rushdie delights more frequently, turning his lines with charm and jocularity and regularly intervening as the author lest you forget that he is telling you a tale. He gives permission for the author to be visible, and funny. Atwood plays with words blatantly through her protagonists, not embarrassed or too sophisticated to enjoy the medium in which the story is told.

I could go on. It seems important not to read books that significantly shift my emotional state (I remember after Catcher in the Rye seeing everything through a cynical and cocky teenager's eyes for several weeks afterwards) but just to be preparing my brain, motivating myself to write, and raising possibilities through the deliberately crafted words of others.

There you have it. My two golden rules. I've made them now, and intend to stick to them. Do forgive me if the weekend before a writing week I'm tucked up in bed with a Booker winning novel at 9pm. It's all for a good cause.

Mike Guglielmucci

2009-07-28T11:45:00.003+01:00

A couple of you have mentioned the Mike Guglielmucci story as pertinent to the themes of Tongues of Men (thanks Phill and Sarah).

According to Adelaide Now he is the former pastor with one of Australia's biggest youth churches who publicly staged a fraudulent two-year battle with cancer, raising money, and performing his popular worship song 'Healer' to thousands with an oxygen tube in his nose. Allegedly he has confessed that he did it to conceal a long addiction to adult pornography that apparently caused his body to break down.

I don't intend to comment on such news in this blog. We can never know what happened. And he is hardly the first to behave thus and won't be the last.

But there are similarities between the pastor in my novel and Guglielmucci. Their stories are different, even though my pitch is 'porn meets mega-church'. My pastor isn't addicted to porn. It goes much, much deeper than that.

The main similarity is that they share the same personality.

How do I know? I don't. I'm just guessing. But the psychological character styles of my characters are intended to be authentic, drawing explicitly on certain typological models. I'm not giving any secrets away, but let's just say that you won't find any narrow-shouldered pastors blowing it Guglielmucci-style (and I mean that literally: pastors with physically narrow shoulders).

There is one response that surprises me each time a hero falls in this manner. It's the how could it happen? comment repeated across forums and news reports. How could someone lie to their church, their family? How could they lie awake at night plotting to deceive for their own gain? (Because that's what they do, of course). How could someone pretend to be good when really he is bad?

Really? We have no clue how this could happen? We have no understanding of certain human behaviours, in others and ourselves, that allow generosity to mix with selfishness, that confuse faith with ambition, that equate power with blessing? We can't begin to understand the conflicts that rage inside powerful human beings when they have good influence and so want more, and the lives that they have to construct to protect this enterprise? Internal conflicts so apparently violent that they attack the physical body?

I think we can. That's what I'm writing a novel about. Both the conflicts, and the surprise when they are manifest.

Excerpt 2

2009-07-22T14:50:00.009+01:00

‘But when I met Jesus for myself’ he continued, ‘that man changed my life. He gave me a new heart. He forgave my past. He made me a new creation. He gave me a new name. And a new purpose. And now, if you are up for coming with me, it is time for this church to have an impact on the world in this century like Paul did in the first. Hallelujah! But you must give the devoted things to the Lord: your money, and future, and your relationships, and you must not hide your sin and pretend that it is going to be okay. God will not tolerate sin. He will forgive it, if you turn away. But you cannot fool God. These are the keys to staying in his presence. Let him deal with your sin. Do not associate with those who will not change. And do not, whatever you do, take for yourself the beautiful things that belong to God. In time, he will give you all you need.’
The young man spoke to the girl. ‘What time does this finish?’

‘It depends,’ she said. ‘That’s it for the talk but there is usually a time of … response.’
‘The freaky stuff?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, the freaky stuff,’ she said. ‘If it gets too weird we could leave early. I mean, if you want to. We could grab a drink or something.’
‘Sure’ he said.
The girl rested back into her chair, looked forward, and then turned to him again. ‘I could grab a couple of friends. There are some guys I’d love you to meet.’
But something was happening around the stage. A group of men and women were collecting at the front in the area between the seats and the platform. They were making eye contact with each other without greeting and turning to stand and face the congregation. The pastor had requested for the band to come up and start playing, and they were drifting up from the wings to populate the drum kit and keyboards and microphone and guitar stands, among pedals and wires and monitors. They began to produce a backwash of soft, major chords and suddenly the pastor let out a strange stream of words, repetitive and aggressive, hard sounds that twisted in their lines with consonants that rapped off the handheld microphone like gunfire.
The young man folded his arms. The girl folded hers.
‘Tongues, right?’ he said.
‘Yeah’ she replied.

From chapter two, first draft.

Hurdles

2009-07-22T14:21:00.015+01:00

Every writing week I hit the same hurdles. Each time they are hard to overcome. In the seven writing weeks since I restarted my novel I have got over them five times, and failed to get over them twice.

I call them hurdles because blocks sounds too permanent. Hurdles can be jumped over, soared over with practise. Some people even jump hurdles for fun.

The thing about my hurdles is that they are almost all obstructions occuring before I write a single word. They are not writers’ block, where the words just won’t come. I’ve got ideas and I’ve usually got the words. But these demons rear their heads before I even sit down to work.

I’ve heard it said getting started is the hardest part. In my case this is true. Once I’ve typed the first few paragraphs, I want to continue. I return the next day with anticipation and energy to continue what I’ve begun.

So it is frustrating that every writing week I have to overcome the same old hurdles before I can bring myself to write those first few lines.

I had rather hoped that it would get easier each time.

I think:

I can't do this
What I'm writing is not good enough
I'm afraid to look at what I did last time in case it's rubbish
I'm too tired to write
I don't know enough about this area to write about it authentically
This is hard work
I can't sustain my quality of work so far

I can rationalise most of them away. I can remind myself of the elation and euphoria at the end of each successful writing week, when having surmounted the barriers I have gone one to enjoy a few days of writing, have hit my word target, and believe, equally irrationally, that what I am creating is a delightful and important piece of literature.

But I still have to face them each time.

And sometimes they get the better of me.

Is this just part of the creative process? Does it get easier in time and with more experience? Have you any tips for overcoming these hurdles?

Old chapter list

2009-07-22T14:00:00.000+01:00

I've just been reading the very first chapter list in which I tried to plan out the events of The Tongues of Men before I started writing.

Originally I conceived of 12 long chapters. In the original list, the first few chapter notes are fairly detailed, the middle ones blank, and the last three like this:

Chapter ten
Penetration, at last.

Chapter eleven
Exposure.

Chapter twelve
Success of sorts.

I'd watch it, especially if directed by PT Anderson. Actually, it would make a stiff little poem for Verbatim, except I wrote it, so it doesn't count.

I still know what I meant by ten and twelve but a whole chapter on exposure? What was I thinking?

Finding a place to write

2009-07-21T13:26:00.003+01:00

How I envy Sebastian Faulks. Quite apart from the awards, prizes and CBE (all of which would be nice), he has his own quiet writing flat, 15 minutes walk from his home.

And how I envy JK Rowling. Not the riches and fame (they, too, would be nice) but the ability to dash off novels in a busy café. Harry Potter’s genesis was in an establishment ‘just crowded enough so that you blend in’, because, as Rowling said;

It is no secret that the best place to write … is a café; you don't have to make your own coffee, you don't feel that you are in solitary confinement while you work and when inspiration fails, you can take a walk to the next café while your batteries recharge.

Finding the right place to write has been crucial for me. Amazingly, most people assume that I write at home. With three small children and no study I am fortunate if I can concentrate enough at home to send a cogent text message, never mind write a novel, so early on in the writing process I started looking for a location out of earshot of our house (two to three miles away).

Taking a leaf out of Rowling’s book I found a café in town. B Bar in central Cambridge has four floors, and the higher you ascend the more peaceable it is. The décor is uplifting, there is always a decent chair and table, access to tea and fresh pastries, and for the most part no intrusion from the other patrons.

But there were niggles. Occasionally they would rope off the upper areas which were the best in which to write. The background music could be annoying. And every time I needed the toilet or to order another Earl Grey I had to risk leaving the MacBook Pro unprotected or pack it all up and take it with me. Worst, if I felt sleepy, I would have to call it a day.

How Rowling managed I’m not sure. I can hardly imagine her leaving new chapters unguarded on the table while she nipped off for a wee (even at home, now, her unfinished manuscripts are locked in a safe). She recharged her batteries by walking to another café, but all others in Cambridge are bustling. Rowling is perhaps a writer who can churn out words in any location, but I am not.

The solution has been to use a friend’s house while empty during the day. It has been brilliant. Once discovered, it has taught me what I need from a place to sustain my writing. The list is something like this:

Away from home, without it being too much of a trek.
Quiet, undisturbed, but with other humans nearby (walking or driving past).
Pleasant environment – temperature, light: some writers don’t care, but the physical environment significantly shapes my mood.
Allowing small ways to break up the day, such as popping out to Co-op for pastries or a sandwich, a mindless DVD episode, or simply making more tea.
Somewhere to snooze. No wonder so many Writers’ rooms have a comfy chair, sofa or even bed in the corner. 20 minutes nap when I feel sleepy clears my mind for the rest of the day.
No Internet connection. Annoying when I want to research or check something, but a godsend in obliterating time wasting.

It is working well so far. The napping is a revelation. I even have two houses offered to me, the second for when the teachers who live in the first are on holiday. I am still envious of Sebastian, but I guess he has earned it. After all I don’t suppose his first two (widely rejected) novels were written in an exclusive London flat.

Where do you write? What are the crucial factors that determine how successful your writing times are? Are you a Rowling, writing anywhere, or more of a Faulks, needing your own convenient place?

Excerpt 1

2009-07-20T12:15:00.000+01:00

Under this sky a quite unsingular man, who had feared turning thirty for so much of the last four years that now that he had reached it he was convinced that he must be at least thirty-three, drove a shabby Golf along the dual carriageways, sometimes in the left hand lane and sometimes in the right, gliding as though across a frozen lake in winter. The car ran well, if lacking significantly some cosmetic parts, and the man had always enjoyed driving it. On this autumn day, however, he was as impervious to his car and the driving of it as he was to the sky above, which was gathering the shades of dusk together. In fact he noticed very little; not the people nor the buildings, and hardly the signs and lights that paddled him along. He missed the nervous freshers wheeling along the pavement edge to the start of their pub crawl, the early prostitutes out to catch the worm, and the street sweepers with their noisy machines displacing the market sellers. There were lights along the street but no lights; there was noise from the road but no noise; there were road signs, crossings and filter lanes but nothing to be noted by the man. There was the smell in the car of the previous owner, a persistent, sweet and musty smell that seemed forever allied with the plastic coating of the steering wheel and the head of the gear stick. But to the man there was no smell. Outside there were no people. There was just gliding across the lake without friction.

From chapter one, first draft.

My pitch

2009-07-19T12:00:00.000+01:00

Frequently asked questions

2009-05-18T16:34:00.004+01:00

Questions I get asked frequently about the novel:

What's it about?
Or can't you tell me?
What kind of novel is it?
Why haven't you finished yet?
When will it be finished?
Would you publish it online for free?
Why are you writing a novel anyway?

The short answers are: 1. the collision of megachurch and the porn industry; 2. of course I can tell you, it's more whether you really want to know or not; 3. not a children's book, a crime story or a moral tale; 4. because it takes bloody ages and I have a job and a young family; 5. by the time I'm 34; 6. not this one, and 7. because I said I would.

If necessity demands longer answers I will link them from the questions above in time.

If you have any other questions, feel free to post them as comments on this article.

The Tongues of Men are go

2009-05-18T15:18:00.003+01:00

Why blog about writing a novel?

Because I know some of you are interested in following my progress. I’ll pop up some excerpts form the book so far as well as any news (when there is any).

It will be an added incentive for me to keep writing. A sort of public accountability. As long as you promise to be gentle.

I need the feedback. I don’t like feedback, but I need it. Says through gritted teeth: so let me know what you think about the book so far. Gulps.

I might stumble across writing tips. Like never say ‘I’ll see how I feel in the morning’ or ‘just one more episode of CSI’ or ‘another glass of Marsala should help’. If I do, I’ll share them. You let me know if they sound any good.

More likely by far, you’ll have tips to share with me. And I would love to know what they are. Does it get easier to overcome the hurdles later on?

I want to connect with other people working on books. This is my way of saying hello. What are you writing?

Blogging is a way of kicking up a bit of dust around the project and in time creating an online trail for friends, publishers, agents, other writers to follow. Hopefully that will lend to a build up of credibility and anticipation. We’ll see.

So there we are. The Tongues of Men blog is away. I'll be posting once a week, with a few extras in my novel-writing weeks. I'm looking forward to your comments, and am grateful to have some friends with whom to share this journey. Cheers.

About the author

2009-05-15T22:37:00.003+01:00

Epiphany would be too strong a word but I had a moment of truth driving around the Highlands of Scotland with a leadership coach friend of mine. As he painted a picture of the future that I would be delighted to live in, and one by one debunked my reasons for not wanting to become a writer, at least not yet, I realised that the only actual thing preventing me from writing my first novel was me committing to doing it.

Scratch that, reverse it: the single thing that will turn me into a novelist is me. I needed to stop making excuses and decide to do it. And then get on with it.

So I am. You see for a number of years I've been good at lots of things without committing to any of them. There have been specious arguments - I don't know which is the right thing to commit to; if I'm not single-mindedly passionate about one thing then I'm not cut out for it; if I get too focused my family will suffer - but the more insidious reasons, which have thus far rendered any concerted creative effort impotent, have been the deeper fears that may sound familiar. The fear of failure. The unappealing necessity of hard work. The fear of responsibility - if I make a decision to construct something riskier with my life, then I'll be the fool when it doesn't work out.

Then I turned 30.

And I realised that time is short, I'm not a kid any more, and if I wanted to create something more inspirational than a vague memory of a nice guy who was good at lots of things then I'd better pick one and commit to doing something with it.

I haven't always wanted to be writer, but I want to be one now. Not because God came to me in the night. Or because I dreamt of my calling or my destiny. But because I realise that if I commit to doing it, it will get done. Waiting for the right reasons, feelings or moment left me indecisive. Deciding first was the only way to do it.

And strangely, the passion and the calling seem to follow the commitment. Before, where I would lie awake straining to think of at least one decent plot for a novel, now it's hard to turn off the tap. In the words of W.H. Murray, 'the moment one definitely commits oneself then providence moves too.'

All that to say...

I'm writing a novel. I work on it one whole week in five. The other four weeks I am a content strategist for a website company, a lot of which is writing. For some reason (only a decade late) I have only just started blogging, and decided to launch three almost simultaneously: this one for the novel, SmyWord for my job, and Verbatim Poetry just for fun.

The novel is risky and hard work, and it feels like my first real attempt to make something happen in life instead of waiting to see what emerges. I remain afraid of failing, hate being criticised and still dislike extensive effort, but I'm not going to let any of that stop me.

As Sibelius said, 'no statue has ever been put up to a critic'.

Contact

2009-05-13T00:13:00.004+01:00

I welcome comments on the posts on this blog – it helps me to see what is efficacious on the site and turns it into a conversation instead of me droning on.

If you want to contact me by email then write to gabriel@smyword.com.

You can get free updates from this blog in an RSS reader (like Google reader) by clicking on 'Get free updates' just on the right there.

If you want to work with me as a Content Strategist/Web Writer/blogger, then it's best to contact me through Fluent.

And of course, you should follow me on twitter, here.