This Itch of Writing

Clothes and food and dropping presents

One of the Chapter Titles - one of the Big Issues - in the how-to-write books and courses and seminars is Characterisation, and I'm putting capitals all over the place because that's how it feels that aspiring writers talk about it. Whereas when agents and editors and experienced writers talk about it, they just say, 'I love the characters.' And having written that first sentence as a run-in to what I really want to say, I'm realising that it's the abstraction of the idea of characterisation which is daunting for beginner writers, not the process. After all, thinking about how different humans tick is what we all do most of the time, as soon as we enter a room or a world which has other humans in it. Non-writers may not be aware that we've been speaking prose all our lives, or that we emplot our existence as a way of understanding and finding meaning in it, but we all know that we spend an awful lot of time trying to work other people out: what they are, why they're like that, whether they're telling the truth, what they'll do next, what they'll do if we do X.

Indeed, working out how things work is the fundamental nature of childhood, and it's not an accident that so much of the best and/or most popular children's fiction involves the protagonist landing in a strange world, without parents who can or will help, where they have to work out the rules in order to survive: boarding school, space, time travel, shipwreck, being orphaned, evacuation, or anywhere with magic or science which operates differently from the known world. The experience of working it out, and eventually understanding if not altogether mastering that world, embodies a child's experience of the real world. And not just children, either: I write as one who's just started reading Robinson Crusoe.

So I don't think it goes without saying that the best way to develop your characters and write your novel is to work them out in detail beforehand, but you wouldn't think that to read some of the how-to books. I even know of a writing teacher who hands out questionnaires to all her students: what does the main character wear/drink/drive, what do they think/feel/see/understand about all sorts of things? What's their middle name, their taste in garden ornaments, their star sign? (I'm trying not to snort derisorily here, though of course one of your characters might believe in astrology.) Some of the students probably find this useful, if only as something to cling to in a sea of possibilities, but I know don't. I tried it dutifully for an early novel, and no doubt the pages are gathering dust somewhere, along with the Christmas Present Five Year Diaries (with lock and key) which are filled in for the first two weeks. To me - and I'd never say this is how you should see it - it all reads like a pop psychology piece in a glossy magazine: "My father always said that... so I grew up being very... but then... and eventually..." To me, it's unhelpful because drama is essentially character-in-action, and this is all character and no action. A story based on it is likely to be all analysis and reflection, with illustrative moments as a substitute for real drama.

Having said that, of course, one driving force for the imagination in shaping a novel - may even be the origin of the novel - is the "What if?" which goes, for example, "What if you were that kind of person and had that sort of marriage, and then she died?" Of course, then you start thinking about how that kind of marriage, and that kind of person, would result in what kind of widowerhood? Character does form action, so of course we need to know what the character is like. A story with all action and no character, with no sense of the action's roots in human nature and desires, is no real drama either.

Simply put, I think you can develop characters from the inside out, or the outside in. Neither is the only right way, and mostly I suspect we all do a mix of both. The two are essentially different, though. If the fundamental nature of drama is character in action, then one starts with the character, and the other with the action.

From the inside out, from the general to the particular, uses your understanding of how people tick to work out what your character would act:

Childhood with very judgemental parents; what does that make her like? She feels judged all the time; what emotions does that rouse? It makes her tense and nervous; how does that show physically? Makes her constantly fiddle with her fingers; what does that make her do? She keeps dropping things: what does she drop this time? She drops the present the new boyfriend gave her. Which is both likely, and symbolic of the fact that she can't even accept a present without thinking that it's in some way a judgement of her, which she doesn't want.

From the outside in, from the particular to the general, discovers the character as we do with real people in real life, moving from how they act towards working out how they tick:

The present was from the new girlfriend: what happened? He dropped it: why? Because he keeps dropping things: why? Because he's always fidgeting: why? Because he's tense and nervous: why? Because he feels the present is a judgement of him: why? Because he had very judgemental parents. Which is both likely and, when he drops it, symbolic of how he doesn't want the judgement that he can't help accepting.

There's an assymetry, of course, in that a novel is built of the particular, and it's the convincingness of the particular which persuades the reader to forget to disbelieve that none of this actually ever happened. So if you're working from the general inside to the particular outside, you need to do a fair bit of working outwards before you start. Whereas outside-to-inside can work itself out as, pen in hand, you ask yourself the particular, "What would she do next?" which will embody this moment's manifestation of the general nature of the character.

In practice, of course, it's not as tidy as all this: we all do both, often not even aware of the change of direction, so well-trained are we by life to move between the two. And there's a lot of other stuff you do need to find out, if not in a questionnaire. But I think the key is to think about them in whatever ways keep character and action both in play. If you do want to think, say, about how characters dress or eat or vote, then think about them in contrast to each other. One person's clothes (or car, or food) say something about them and how they fit themselves into the world. But two people's clothes (or cars or cooking) for the same occasion not only tells the reader that, but also sets up (inter)action between them. Do they see the occasion differently? Do they see the occasion in the same way, but dress/cook for it so differently that the other misreads them? Does each see their own relationship to the occasion differently from what the other sees? It doesn't need to be about politics to  bring out the conflict - implicit or explicit - in the situation. It's not that they have to launch into a battle over superiority, only that everything they do in the scene will be coloured by the place they think they have in it, and whether they feel that place is acknowledged, or challenged. So never mind character questionnaires, now the scene's really getting going, and without a word of pop psychology: just clothes, and food, and dropping presents...

Under your skin and into your core

The ever-admirable Litlove, of Tales from the Reading Room, asked me this in the comments on the differently fascinating Dirty Sparkle blog:

As a writer you've had a great deal of external validation for your work, more than most writers are fortunate enough to have. How will you feel when you get some really stinking reviews? I mean,I hope it never ever happens, but you're going to have to have some solid core of trust in your own work to withstand that, and it can only be developed (I would think) by committing in the act of writing to doing what pleases you first, and others as a delightful second.

It's certainly true that I've been very lucky with the quantity and quality of external validation, from the wholly commercial, such as Headline Review taking the front and inside front cover of The Bookseller to advertise The Mathematics of Love to the trade, to some terrific print and blog reviews (not excepting Litlove's own for The Mathematics of Love). But I've had some very curate's-eggy ones in print, and some pretty rude reviews on the blogs too, not to mention passing comments: the one-star ones for A Secret Alchemy on Amazon give you the idea. No doubt some day, and probably soon, the print reviewers and the well-respected bloggers will read something of mine which they hate, and make no bones about saying so. After all, there's very little point in publishing a really bad review of a debut novel by an unknown, but once an author's an existing, if tiny, plant in the book world, they're fair game.

So, how do you cope? How do I cope? With the proviso that I may well rescind all this when a respected reviewer explains, in detail, in public, just why a book of mine is so very bad, here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

1) Reviews are fodder for reviewers, and food for readers, and only incidentally feedback for the writer. A reviewer has no obligation to consider your feelings or teach you things, except in keeping the review to the book in their hands, and not taking pot-shots at your or its reputation or prospects. But, equally, the writer has no obligation to read, let alone take on board, the review. Your prime duty to your writing is to protect your writerly self, in order to write better. That doesn't mean stopping your ears to all negative comments, but it does mean taking only what's useful from reviews, as judged not by what pleases others, but by what makes sense to you. In other words, you need to make your own decision about accept, adapt, ignore from a review as with anything else. But do actually read the review, or get someone else to. Inevitably we're hyper-sensitive to what's said about our work, and we react far more strongly than the actual words would suggest to anyone else. If the first sentences of a review sound unpromising, I tend to read the rest with one eye, to protect myself from further hurt. Only of course I miss any nice, later things, and log it as a 'bad review' in my head, when by any normal measure it's nothing of the kind.

2) A central part of your writerly self is exactly that "solid core of trust" that Litlove talks about. It is essential - though it's inevitable that the outer edges of your core are more solid some days than others, I think. But how you acquire/grow/solidify that core I'm not sure. Saying that self-belief is vital, though it is, doesn't actually get you much further, for reasons I explored in Learning to be Bad: any self-belief worth having is the product of understanding your craft, and knowing that you understand it. That  includes knowing just how much you don't yet know, so self-belief is not a replacement for that understanding. The core is partly formed by what I think of as conditional validation: the detailed, thoughtful assessment by someone whose judgement you respect, that your work has objective merits. That's where doing the right course or class, or even getting an editorial report, at the right moment in your development, can be incredibly valuable: even where friends and writing buddies are knowledgeable, and willing to tell you the negative things, they may simply be too close to you and your own work for you to be able to mark their approval up in the "Am-I-any-good?" ledger in your mind.

3) I think Litlove's right, too, that the rest of the solid core comes, not from external validation, but from a certain integrity in what you do. I don't mean that you should only write morally impeccable, socially engaged, haut-lit tragedies about Real Life, or that you should never wonder what readers are buying at the moment. But I do think that you need to feel that what you write is worth writing, not just as self-expression for you but as a story worth telling to others, and that you're writing it as well as you can. Yes, the more of your heart and soul you put in (which may not be Tolstoy's, but rather the heart of Victoria Wood and the soul of P G Wodehouse, and none the worse for it), the more painful the knock-backs, from rejections from agents to hatchet-job reviews. But knowing that you've created something from nothing which deserves its existence as a creative work, means that judgements from outside can't entirely destroy its value: it was worth doing. As long as you believe that you won't look back on a piece of your work in five years time and think 'I wish I hadn't bothered', then your core is beginning to solidify.

4) Remember that there are lots of different ways in which a review can be negative which you can ignore. As Updike says (do read his rules for reviewers) a reviewer should "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and... not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt". If the blame your book attracts is for the latter, then you can safely ignore it. You can safely ignore a reviewer who gets the plot badly wrong too (unless several do, in which case maybe you really didn't make it clear!): reviewers are pretty badly paid and would usually rather be writing their own stuff, so sometimes they're operating on a pretty sketchy read. And some reviewers just don't get it. Most of the one-star reviews that A Secret Alchemy got on Amazon are by readers who read historical fiction as history lite, and didn't like what they read as my version of history. The central point of the book - that fiction-telling is at once less true and more true than history-telling - eluded them. And both ASA and The Mathematics of Love picked up blog comments from readers who don't get parallel narrative and aren't equipped or don't want to look for reasons why these two stories are in the same book. Okay, they don't have to, but I don't have to write to please them, either. Since I take no pleasure in excluding readers, not least but not only because I want to sell books, I felt bad about that for ages: in our consciously inclusive age we're uneasy about excluding anyone. Then something much more robust suddenly grew inside me, and I found myself thinking, "Well, I can't help it if you don't know how to read." No doubt there's a more politically correct way of putting it, but that, too, has become part of my core: there will always be people who don't get it, but as long as I get it, and some people get it, that's okay.

5) The impulse to resist, given reviews which get it wrong, is answering back. Yes, it's incredibly frustrating to know that there are potential readers who will get a completely wrong idea of the book and your writing. But it's never, ever a good idea. The only time I'd be tempted would be if the whole review, in a major newspaper or blog, was founded on a mistake. If a hatchet job was firmly based on my writing of a character or battle which isn't actually in the book, say, a calm letter correcting the error of fact, with absolutely no opinions or emotions attached, might - just might - be all right.

5) But there will always be reviews which do review the actual book, which have no beef with the kind of book you're writing, which understand what happens and what you're trying to do, and... don't think you did it well at all. Those are the ones which really hurt and, to a degree, so they should: you're writing for an audience - or why are you writing? - and an intelligent, responsible member of that audience has booed. Anaesthetics help for a while: I'd never say that a bottle of wine, a bar of chocolate and a well-exercised credit card don't cheer one up. But a review like this hurts your core and in the end you can only mend that hurt by attending to it. It will take time; it may mean you wince away from certain topics or forms or ways of writing - or any writing at all - for a while; it may mean that your writing process is hamstrung by self-consciousness. It's counter-intuitive, but only in really knowing and feeling what's going on with you and your work, including the damage and its consequences, can you get your core's strength back for the long term.

Twisting the tale in cold blood

A lot of talking about writing ponders and circles around the mysteries of inspiration: the genie, the zone, the muse, the cloud of unknowing, the necessity for darkness or music, the fetishism about notebooks or mascots, the alcohol, the drugs, the digging in the garden, the long country walks, the endless games of patience (Heyer's preferred method, along with 'a little gin and benzedrine'). Some of the best-selling - and best - how-to books, including Brande's Becoming a Writer and Cameron's The Artist's Way, are all about such things, and the hands-down winner in the Most Often Asked Festival Question stakes is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' It's the great, and therefore fascinating, mystery.

Since it's easy to believe (not helped by the publisher's need/desire for high-concept, elevator-pitch promotions) that all writing a novel takes is a brilliant idea, writers then spend much of the school visit/festival session talking about how hard they work to cut and shape and re-cut and polish the idea. Or they talk about how we let characters walk in and misbehave, or find the ending was quite different from what we expected. (Dodie Smith said this of I Capture the Castle. How I'd love to know what she did expect!) Good writing courses, such as the Open University one I'm teaching, start by exploring how you find the material for your work - freewriting, clustering, keeping a notebook and what to note - and then tackle the cutting and shaping. In other words, even if there's lots of toing and froing between them, everything tends to assume that, fundamentally, inspiration comes first, and technique later.

It's undeniably true, at the fundamental level: you can't shape an idea till you've had it. But, just as I was arguing that you could ask your talent what it wants to work on, rather than expecting it to do its best with whatever you want to write about, maybe we should stand this idea, too, on its head occasionally. Maybe it's not always a matter of inspiration first, then technique.

Well, to be honest, there's no 'maybe' about it, at least not as far as I'm concerned, because I know that I've done things in my writing which began as cold-blooded, technical decisions, but became part of how the cloud of unknowing condensed into a whole world for the reader. For example:

1) One of the comments on The Mathematics of Love which was made, in passing, by one of the Glamorgan tutors was that all the sex in it is good sex, which she felt was a bit unreaslitic. At the time I probably just looked smug, but the comment must have stuck, perhaps even stung, because I was about a third of the way through what wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy when it occurred to me that so far this, too, had only had good sex. Time for not, I hope, a bad sex scene, but rather a scene of bad sex. Sorry, Una, but if you're in love with someone who isn't in love with you, and you're twenty and a virgin and someone else is desperately keen, wouldn't you? And would it be wonderful? Most unlikely. And a couple of readers have said it's one of their favourite scenes.

2) More recently, I realised that a character in the work-in-progress, who hardly appears but sets off the whole plot, had dropped out of view. This is not only unlikely in terms of realistic plotting (and if I told you any more about why, I'd have to kill you) but is also a bad practice from the storytelling point of view. Real life may be full of random appearances and disappearances, but storytelling is all about making patterns and connections: there's a basic assumption in the reader that everything in the book will tie up, will make sense as part of a whole. On the other hand, I can't have this character cluttering up my plot, since it's already planned, in a chamber-opera sort of way, for a small number of characters we know very well. So the poor bloke had better turn up dead. Murdered, in fact. No bad thing, either, to crank up the sense of danger, of latent violence, specially in a part of the book which is, perforce, a lot about talking and planning and not so much about action. Now, which chapter is quietest? Which could do with a body in a ditch? Let's have a look at my grand spreadsheet plan...

3) When I started work on The Mathematics of Love I already had the voice for Stephen, my 1819 narrator, as well as his letters and much of his backstory. And so for the parallel, 1976 strand I needed a narrator who would contrast with him as clearly as possible. That was partly because the whole parallel project was to cast light from different angles on the same questions - transgressive sex, lost children, voyeurism and so on - and different angles need different eyes and minds to see them. But it was also because one of the dangers in alternating first-person narratives (or alternating limited third-person narratives, come to that) is that the reader wakes up in the middle of a page and realises that they've no idea where they are. The more different in every way my two narrators were, the less likely that was to happen. So, Stephen was male, old in experience if not in years, melancholic, gentle, horrified by his own latent capacity for violence, compassionate, faithful, and frozen by a lost, ideal love. I needed a female, very young, resentful, stroppy, horrified by others' capacity for victimhood, promiscuous, and doesn't do the children thing, any more than she does the falling-in-love thing. I called her Anna, and off we went. The cold-blooded decision was even at the level of their sentences. Both think in long sentences, because I do, but they're very different: Stephen's are balanced, grammatically sophisticated, syntactically flexible and full of antitheses, while Anna's are looser, simpler, jointed by commas and lollop along with a series of 'ands'.

Of course it goes without saying (or I hope it does), that I wouldn't have stuck with these or half a dozen other cold-blooded decisions I could name (if I could remember them), if they hadn't worked out in practice. The test of a good idea for your work is how well it curls in among all the others. Indeed, perhaps it's because they worked out that I can't remember most of them: the goal of the writer is to melt inspiration and technique together, so that the reader experiences the story as a single whole. The last thing I want is for readers to see the component threads - research, technique, inspiration, borrowing - of my story separate out. And even if a reader chooses to separate them out later (and I won't pretend I don't enjoy seeing my writing heard so thorougly) I hope the threads curl themselves back together into a rope as thick and strong as ever. But which thread was made how and for what reason shouldn't - needn't - doesn't make any difference, once the tale is spun.

Not the 'right' book

So, I've got the work-in-progress - let's call it Three - which will absorb me for at least another nine months of revising and editing and contracts and editors and stuff. And Four, which I've told my agent I want to write next (up to and including a half-page pitch and a highly provisional title). Then there's the one which I thought was a short story till I took it for a walk in the park: now it's a novel. So is it Five? Or is it so compelling - so much sparklier and meatier - that it should be Four? And there's the short story which a writer friend gave the once-over before I put it in a competition, and said in passing, 'The mark of a great short story (for me) is that its ten or so pages open up an entire novel in the reader’s mind.' So of course I started thinking round the edges of the story, which is one I've known for ages: could this be Five? And the people in Spain who said 'Would you set a novel here?' and I said, 'I don't think so,' but on the way home found myself thinking, 'Well...'. And I daren't start flipping back through notebooks, because then there'll be more.

I've thought before about writerly adultery, but that's not what I'm thinking about here: I'm not about to cuckold the WIP. But how do you choose what to take seriously next? What will you be living and breathing even when you're nowhere near a notebook or a screen? What - without your trying - will make you suddenly see newspaper cuttings, and comments and pictures and fleeting ideas, as you go about the rest of life? Where, for your serious project, do you go next? 

You could ask your talent. What will give you most opportunity, not merely to play to your strengths, but to use the nature of your soil to grow the best plants? Good gardeners (and I know this only by repute, being someone who can kill a spider plant) exploit the pH of their garden rather than trying to fight it. They regret that they can't honestly grow rhododendrons, but the azaleas are glorious.

You could ask your writing friends - your trusted readers. What worked for them in your writing? But a novel is ''written' by the reader, decoding black marks on the page by an agreed system of signification, as much, perhaps, as it is by the writer. What worked - what resonated, what moved, what bored - is as much about them as it is about you. As writers, our only supremacy is that we get to make the marks in the first place, and without us the readers would have nothing to 'write', so to ask what they want to find - you could argue - won't tell you what you ought to put on the page in order for them to find it.

You could ask The Ropeseller. But anyone who's been around on this blog for a while won't need me to unpick why that may well not be a good place to go for advice.

And don't forget that ideas aren't mutually exclusive. One of the recurring metaphors for writing I find myself using is the stewpot on the back of the fire. Into it goes everything that might be tasty and interesting and add to the overall flavour of the dish. Given that, as fiction writers, our basic mode is 'What if?', why not chuck in various things from different cupboards, and see what happens? If you have to fish them out again in the end, so what? Like a bouquet garni in the cassoulet, you don't want your readers to choke on it, but it will have left a faint perfume which makes all the difference. (Don't believe me? I'd have sworn I'd removed every last whiff of an old plot in The Mathematics of Love, and my editor would agree, but every now and then I meet a blood-hound reader who can still scent it.) So if you're agonising between two ideas, why not throw them in together, and see what happens?

To some extent then, I think, these things select themselves. What do you find yourself thinking about most often? Forget the market (unless something you read about suddenly gets your creative mind whirring), or what you've heard agents are looking for, or what would be easiest to research, or what your partner thinks you should write next. As my sister said once, 'The thing you should be doing is the thing you keep finding yourself doing.' She's a singer, and she also said, 'The only person you can sound like, better than anyone else, is yourself.' There's Buddhist saying, 'When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears'. What this means to me is that, in the context of writing, you may have to accept that you're not entirely in control of what's right for you, but that in recompense, if you let go of the outcome, the right thing will happen.

It's not easy, in our Western way, trained to goals, control, progress and development, to accept that we'll have to choose, not between better and worse, but between two roads that diverge in a yellow wood, without anything as clear as an idea of which is less travelled. Nor is it easy to accept that we might write just as good books if we'd taken the other road, but that we'll never know. Just as, as a writer with sleeves rolled up and first draft in hand, you learn to accept what swims up from your unconscious without necessarily knowing why it should be given its place, maybe we need to let go of the idea that the next book must be the 'right' book, and accept that it will only be the book which seemed right at the time.

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In other news:

My friends at El Pais did get me on the back page here.

The booking for the Festival of Writing, 9th-11th April 2010 in York, has opened, and I'm teaching various sessions there. It's organised by Writer's Workshop and is stuffed full of good things: workshops on everything from point-of-view to foreign rights, one-to-one with agents, publishers and book doctors, a gala dinner, and mini-courses on the Friday. It's focused on book length projects and writers who are looking for publication but, as the poet Sheenagh Pugh said, it's none the worse for that!

The tree of life - and other anecdotes

I've been a tad busy this last few days, so I'm afraid this is a bit of a catch-up post. First, I've actually submitted my PhD! I can't quite believe how happy it's made me, not just because the last stages of a research project are notoriously fiddly and tedious and so I've been dying to get rid of it, but because, finally, I realise that I'm actually really quite proud of it. As well as A Secret Alchemy, which I can enjoy again now that the tooth-pulling process of writing it has faded from my memory, I do think I've found some interesting things to say about historical fiction and how it works. I celebrated with my very long-suffering offspring, who bear the brunt of whatever's happening in my professional life, by opening the last bottle of the fizz which the Hay Festival gives its authors. It seemed appropriate.

And since then I've been in Spain, giving a lecture (twice) on Creative Thinking: the Darwin family in the Arts and Sciences. After the first, in Valencia, the university had organised a dinner cooked from Emma Darwin's recipe book, which was delicious. I was also given the most beautiful edition of The Origin of Species, made by my hosts, biologists Juli Peretó and Andrés Moya, with exquisite illustrations by the scientific illustrator Carles Puche. Carles even drew me an iguana on the title page of my copy: I felt very inferior in only being able to write words in his. Before the second lecture, in Elx, I found myself asked to do a spot of plaque-unveiling, and was very pleased that the image on the plaque wasn't the god-like old man with a beard, but the heart of the matter: Darwin's original sketch of the tree of life. As longstanding readers may know, I still find it odd when the outside world takes me as a representative of the family, but I've got more comfortable with it now: with an actual body of my own work out there, the balance has changed between us. And besides, Elx is now full of people tucking into their signed copies of La aritmética del amor, I'm even more awed by the skill, calm and general niceness of translators both professional and non-professional, and if the journalist from El Pais has his way back at the office, there'll be an interview with yours truly on the back page of one of Spain's national newspapers any day now.

And as I sat in planes and trains and hotel rooms, I started looking back on my PhD. When I first started wondering whether to do one, I was often asked 'Why? You've already got a Masters.' When I signed simultaneously on the dotted line of the Goldsmiths' application form and the dotted line of a two-book publishing contract with Headline Review, the question changed to, 'Are you going to give up the PhD, then, now you've got a deal?' These days, I'm much more likely to be asked what it's like and whether the questioner should be doing one too: Creative Writing PhDs are becoming big business.

I now have lots of answers to Why? Indeed, so many that I've put a page in the new - and as yet small - Resources section of the blog: Creative Writing PhDs: the paradoxical beast. At the moment, Resources has two pieces, the other being on How to get the best out of an editorial service, which you may know. But I'm planning to add to it when I have time and a new topic occurs to me. Next, I hope, will be Show-don't-Tell, or maybe Point-of-View, and I'll be enabling comments, so that I hope others will chip in.

The pause that isn't a pause

Trust a drummer to know about silence. Over on Radio 3's Private Passions last Sunday, Stewart Copeland, late of The Police and more recently not unknown to opera houses, was talking to his fellow composer Michael Berkeley. I'm saving his comment, about how the beauty went out of modern music when it became an algorithm rather than a sentiment, for my official rant about what might happen to academic creative writing as it finally follows music into universities. But he said so much else which made sense to me as a writer.

The thing about drummers (I've a feeling he'd refuse to be called a percussionist) is that although all music exists in time, percussion has no sustaining pedal, no lungful of air, no length of a bow, to hold the note. Neither, of course, do words: once a word is said or read, it's over. Poets get closest, because they can assume that we'll hear the sounds as well as the sense, and with both we'll try to do the overlapping, the chords, the echoes, the harmony and the counterpoint, for ourselves, if only by re-reading the poem. But  we prose writers have to assume that our readers' experience is nothing else but reading one word after another to the end: we have to earn our re-reading.

And so, Copeland said, just as visual artists work with negative space, the arts which work by putting one beat/word/foot in front of the other work also work with silence and stillness. In music, his examples were reggae, and the Arabic music of his diplobrat childhood in Beirut, (but I also thought of the Scotch Snap in a strathspey, and the inimitable way that Viennese musicians push the second beat of a waltz in the opposite direction). There, in the lift just before the next beat strikes is "That little hole that sucks you in, that absence that creates impact when there's a presence... It's a very potent force." And then there's the silence between movements, and though I dislike the snobbery of those who scorn the applauders, I do prefer it when there's room to breathe - and think, and feel - where the composer intended. I wonder if Copeland ever regrets the way that the beginning and end of a rock song, played live, is always swamped with noise?

You can see where this thought's going, can't you? Poets play with enjambment, because simultaneously ending a line and refusing to let it end has a different effect from an end-stopped line where sense and sound coincide. And so, of course, can novelists. That pause that isn't a pause, at the end of a paragraph or a scene or a chapter, is fraught (in the proper sense of 'freighted') with energy. But how much can you control what the reader will find when they're sucked into in "that little hole": a space which contains... what? John Cage's 4'33" takes the question to its logical conclusion, by being nothing but space, but in fact he has the presence of the concert hall, audience, soloist, surrounding the absence of the music.

It's made more interesting and complicated for writers and readers, though, because, while music takes as long as it takes, in fiction we're running several kinds of time at once. There's the infinitely expandable and compressible way we can tell a story, entirely independent of the time those events it took for the characters. In fiction you can live a year in a sentence or a minute in three pages, so what's in the sentence that would be there, if you hadn't put a double-line-space instead? And what's in the three minutes after the chapter ends? Then there's the time it takes to read, and that we really can't control: some readers take two (chapters) daily at bedtime for weeks, others don't sleep till they've finished the book as the sun rises. Does an ordinary day between chapters work as an echo-chamber for what's in the spaces, or is total immersion the only way to hear what's in them? You can't control how readers read.

And then there's how writers read. I'm not sure I'd agree with the writerly equivalent of Copeland's assertion that "musicians have terrible taste in music", but I do think he's got a point. As he says, sometimes we and they "listen to the wrong things; they're listening for either the dreaded competition or... they're stealing ideas... but never for the right reason, which is just to emotionally respond... This applies to your own music... You start to go for things that are clever, and that stimulate you intellectually, and you're ready to move on from the elemental, visceral things." As I was thinking about in Leaving Eden, I think it's not wrong for a writer to read with their intellect, but rather a necessary and natural aspect of training for their craft. I also think that intellectual excitement can itself be elemental and visceral. The brain, after all, is an erogenous zone: in Brainy and Sexy I was exploring whether it's possible to write novels which really succeed in conjuring emotional and intellectual responses. What's a mistake, whether you're trying to write a crossover novel that a publisher will buy, or trying to use Gamelan instruments ("which aren't in tune with the next village, let alone a symphony orchestra") in a classical concerto, is to lose the truly elemental, visceral things. And many of those won't be in the words at all: they'll be in the black holes between them.

The Inner Critic's dressing-up box

Your Inner Critic's real nature is the anti-writing demon: personify him/her as you will (mine is short and plump, with blue and green scales and a tail: he's well-intentioned, and his intention is to protect me from failure, shame, embarrassment and danger, by stopping me writing). In a coda to Making the Skeleton Dance I was suggesting that anything which stops you writing can also be a costume hung in your Inner Critic's wardrobe, because most of the time the demon's in disguise.

For the avoidance of doubt, I should define my terms: there's all the difference in the world between the Inner Critic, hard-wired by parents and teachers and the world in general, and what I call the Inner Editor. The Inner Editor engages when there's there's a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter or a novel on the page to edit: s/he reads the words, and from that reading decides what needs to be changed. None of us would write anything worth reading without an Inner Reader-Editor. The Inner Critic, on the other hand, spends most of his/her life in costume, pretending to be something entirely useful. This is particularly true when you've learnt to ignore her/his obvious "you're no good" "you'll never succeed" schtick. Then s/he opens the wardrobe, and with fiendish (s/he is a demon, after all) cunning, picks out the costume of whichever adult in your life you're most attuned to, and begins to talk:

Inner Editor: “You don't know how this new bit should go, better to fiddle with Chapter One till you do.”
Inner Writing Tutor: “There's no point in moving on till you've got the first bit right.”
Inner Headmistress: “You can't write it till you've done all the research you might possibly need, or you might Get Something Wrong.”
Inner Mentor: “No, you absolutely must finish this and revise it to the last inch: it's your Inner Critic who's insisting that the new idea is more promising.”
Inner Parent: “The children are little for such a short time, you must make the most of every minute.”
Inner Domestic God/dess: “You do want a beautiful house/fresco/cake, don't you?”
Inner Nosey Neighbour: “I don't know how you can write with the bathroom/kitchen/front lawn looking like that.”
Inner Gardener: “It'll get away from you if you don't get out there this morning.”
Inner Trainer: “Writer's bum, writer's bum, writer's bum.”
Inner Spouse: “I'm paying most of the bills, the least you can do is iron my shirts.”
Inner Sex God/dess: “Saying 'no' because you're finishing a chapter is the thin end of the wedge.”
Inner Granny: “Do get out while the sun's shining, darling.”
Inner Counsellor: “Your husband/best friend/barmaid will be hurt if you don't go down to the pub.”
Inner Psychotherapist: “You're not a writer, you're just using writing to avoid acknowledging your neediness.”
Inner Socialite: “Everyone will forget who you are and not invite you to their parties.”
Inner Agent: “It's awfully like the last one of yours/McEwan's/Keyes's”
Inner Agent's Assistant: “It's nothing like the last one so they won't want it.”
Inner Reviewer: “Who cares about vulgar commercial fiction?”
Inner Supermarket: “Who reads poncey literary fiction?”
Inner Publisher: “Crossover fiction doesn't sell.”
Inner Literary Critic: “You can't be original: it's all been done before. And better.”
Inner Realist: “No one remembers the shortlist.”
Inner Bestseller: “This'll never deserve a launch like your last one.”

Make no mistake, there are times when the voice speaking is the real Mentor/Spouse/Agent. But the Inner Critic is a brilliant mimic, as well as a master of disguise. So, what are your Inner Critic's favourite costumes?

The second simplicity of a bowl of cherries

One of the classically irritating things non-writers say to us is "I've always wanted to write a novel, I just need the the time to sit down." Once we're out on bail, most writers still burn to explain that just sitting down isn't all it takes to write a novel. It takes hard work, craft, imagination, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, learning, practising, and more sitting down than most people would believe possible. It's also frequently frustrating: some days/weeks/years the words come about as readily as wisdom teeth pull out, and I'm sure I'm not the only writer who's been known to pummel her forehead when the brain-cogs won't turn properly and shape the sentence or the idea into what I want. And all to make something which may be read with one eye while strap-hanging on the Tube, or get a single, missing-the-point, one-star review on Amazon. Indeed, most of us spend a lot of time, like ballet dancers, practising very difficult things to the point where we make them look easy. Am I alone in disliking books which parade how difficult they were to write? (That's with my reader's head on, of course: my writer's head is most awed by books which pull off things which as a writer I know are very difficult.)

Okay, so writing's not up there with gold-mining in South Africa or looking after dementia sufferers for hard work, but still. Combine the hard work with the fact - also unknown to non-writers, who only see the occasional headline figure - that we are paid so little for what we do that most us need other sources of income, and it's hardly surprising that we all spend a lot of time trying to convince the world that being a writer isn't an easy or soft option. The trouble is, that can lead to a certain macho posturing, either about the craftsmanly agony of writing and re-writing and re-writing, or about staring at the page till your forehead bleeds, or about mining your innermost soul-agonies and exposing them to the world. At the risk of sounding like the Grumpy Old Woman of the writing world, each of these may have a grain of truth in it, but each, when protested about too much, annoys me, in a different way.

On innermost soul-agonies, as some may know, I dislike the non-writer's conviction that the only guarantee of authentic writing is that it's mined from the author's own experience or research. As with cooking, yes, the quality of the ingredients is worth thinking about, but far more interesting, surely, to most of us, is what we make of that raw material. I also know that slush-piles are very full of writing which may be very good therapy, but is certainly very bad reading. On staring at the page till your forehead bleeds, which I think was said by the scriptwriter Gene Fowler, I can only say, have you tried NaNoWriMo? And on craftsmanly agony: well, what did you expect? This is a job, and for most of us metaphorical gold mining still beats the physical kind any day.

And yet I can't be the only writer who knows that, on a good day, writing is easy. Yes. Easy. If I've found the voice and know what needs to happen in this scene, I'm off and away. It's bliss, like flying or galloping (Joyce Grenfell's term for those rare performances which just take off, was 'horses'), it's a walk in the park, it's a bowl of cherries. Probably, as a writer, there has always been one thing which came easily for you: an ear for a good sentence, a mind for a good joke, an instinct for brilliant plotting, or a deft hand with a character.

It's true, too, that if you're anything of a writer you learn and get better so that, like reading and spelling, things which were once hard to do become easier, and eventually you're hardly even aware you're doing them. But this, too, can lead to many experienced writers saying things which frustrate the apprentices: "Just write, it's easy, just get on with it. Cut away everything that isn't a duck." "No it isn't easy!" the aspirers cry. "The words/knife don't do what I want them to! How can I make them? How do I find my voice, tell a story, make it funny, make my duck look like a duck? " And others of us say, "But that makes it sound facile, that makes it sound as if anyone can do it. And they can't: it took me years to learn to make my ducks look like ducks, and beautiful/scary/comical ducks at that. And how do we hold our own in the industry, with the funding bodies, with our peers, if everyone thinks it's easy?"

It seems to me that the heart of this is a muddle of the Protestant work ethic, 21st century-style, a misunderstanding of the nature of craftsmanship, and the ambiguities of the term "hard". "No pain, no gain!", "You just have to want it enough!" are good ways of encouraging people to keep going when the going gets tough. But "hard work" in the sense of keeping going, putting in the hours - which all writers do - is not the same as work being "hard" in the sense of difficult: which writing is at some times, and not at others. Moreover, our sense of whether a piece of art is worthy, and therefore worth making and buying and admiring, is messily bound up with what we judge of its merits as hard work in the Protestant sense (hence some of the ire directed at contemporary art which seems to have been flung together, and even more ire if some of it was done by assistants). Does it "deserve" our gaze: has the artist "earned" our admiration and his fee? And if the Protestant work ethic sounds old-fashioned, you can substitute the relativism of the modern variant which, like any good parent or teacher, very properly values the intentions and effort of the maker and the process, not just (and sometimes instead of) the objective quality of the outcome and the product.

Maybe it comes down, not just to the fact that "easy reading is hard writing", but to the fact that, like all craftspeople, some of what we do came naturally, but we also get better at it. And the better we get, the easier it feels to us as well as looking easier to others. Most of us compensate for that by constantly trying new things which we're not sure we can do: on our way back from the Guildford Book Festival Elizabeth Buchan and I were agreeing that one always begins a new novel not at all sure whether one can pull it off. The process of writing a novel is a hard-work process of working out the problem we've set ourselves... with varying degrees of success. But long-term, surely, what we're trying for is what the musicologist Alfred Einstein called the "second simplicity... a fullness in brevity": the absolute mastery born of such a complete synthesis of the craftsman's tool-kit with the artist's vision that there is no real distinction between art and craft. As Grayson Perry puts it, "I am the tip of the knife." Faced with a masterwork, all the reader/listener/viewer sees is the vision, and even the brushstrokes, the thumb-prints, the crack in the voice or the echoes of other words, are just the traces of genius, or maybe of the genie.

How to get the best out of an editorial service

More and more writers are using editorial services - hardly surprising when in any one year there are apparently one million manuscripts trying to find a publisher in the UK and two million in the US - but a full editorial report is very expensive, and I'm always anxious that writers should know what they're getting, and get what they need. So here are some thoughts, garnered from my own and other editors' experience, and from the many friends and students who've told me about the reports they've had.

First, it's never, ever essential to get one of these reports. All that's essential for you to write a publishable novel is you and a stack of paper and a pen. And I'd always suggest that you take your work as far as you can on your own, and only seek feedback when you're stuck. I do understand the desire for an early 'Is this worth pursuing?' kind of feedback, but if you're still unsure what kind of a beast it is yourself, then you're not in such a good position to decide what to do with the feedback you get.

And no, an editorial report can't get you published. But then nothing can, except writing a book which a commercial publishing company thinks will earn enough money to make it worth it, and then finding an agent who thinks that and knows which publishers will too. Editorial reports are one way to help you write that book, while talent, hard work, perseverance and luck have even more to do with it.

SOME GENERAL THINGS TO THINK ABOUT, when you're considering a particular editorial agency. If you can't find the information on the website, then ring them up.

Who are their editors? One of the agencies only uses published writers, and all their names are up on the website. Others are coy about who they use. Good publishers' editors are wonderful, but busy: 'a publishing professional' may be an editorial assistant (though maybe a star editor-in-the-making), a literary agent's assistant, or from the marketing department. And the focus may be different: there are lots of things which agents and publishers say about a book which are perfectly true, and perfectly unhelpful to the writer, because publishing is about product. But, as all published and unpublished writers know, writing is all about process: what you're looking for is help with the process of making it a better book.

How long will the report be? Roughly how much about the book and how much about the market for the book? How long will it take? A few weeks is reasonable, several months is not.

Can you talk to the agency about what you need and whether they can supply it? Can they do that, or do they have a one-size-fits-all approach? If they're not helpful and friendly, as well as sensible and professional, then you don't want to give them your money, let alone your writing.

What is being offered? Is it possible to follow up on a report, either with a query, or with a proper conversation by email, or better still by phone? An editor makes their best estimate from the manuscript of, for example, how much technical vocabulary to use, but it can only be a guess (I've had people who needed show/tell explained in detail, I've had people who didn't need 'prolepsis' defined...) so there will always be things in the report which you could do with asking about, as well as some things which you'd like to discuss in more detail, or an idea of a solution to a problem which you'd like to fly by the editor.

Do they have relationships with literary agencies, if they think your book might be ready for that? 99.99% of manuscripts any editorial agency sees are nowhere near ready, but you never know. An editorial agency's reputation is on the line when they send a book on, so they only send on the ones which they're confident are fantastic. That means that a literary agent will really read it properly.

And if you're really feeling cheeky, ask how much of what you pay goes to the editor - though they may well not tell you. With many agencies, the editor only gets 1/3rd of what you pay, with others it's 2/3rds. We really want to help, but we do also have to eat: we juggle this work with all the other bits and pieces we do to pay the mortgage, since, as Hilary Mantel said at the Booker the other night, writing novels alone certainly doesn't. What you're paying for is the editor's time and experience, and to some degree you'll get what you pay for.

WHEN YOU'VE DECIDED TO USE AN AGENCY

Decide what you want the report to focus on, and make that clear in a covering letter (not just the 'here it is' email, which may not get forwarded to the editor). It's true that in some ways you want to know how the novel strikes the editor without, as it were, anticipating that. But it's hugely helpful to us to have a bit of a steer. Do you want to know how to make this book its own best self, or do you want to know how to make it fit the market? The two are very different goals. Do you want to know if you should give up on this book, or keep going? Do you want to know if your linked short stories work as something that would sell as a unit, or not? And so on.

Having said that, there's not very much point in an editor giving detailed tweaks to fit the genre demands of a very particular market, if the whole novel is nowhere near good enough to get the time of day from an agent: a good editor will discuss your concerns, but will also be very upfront about what they think the novel needs. We've all had the experience of a writer who is dreadfully worried about some aspect (characterisation, say) which is in fact absolutely fine: the characters are great, but the structure means there's a huge sag in the middle, and the prose really isn't up to scratch.

WHEN YOU GET THE REPORT

It hurts. It always does, even if they say lots of positive things. I don't know about you but, deep down, secretly, when I get feedback on my work I'm hoping that my agent or editor will tell me that it's completely wonderful and I don't need to change a word. Only it never happens, does it? And, actually, how much use would a report be if it did? So be aware that your first reaction may be furious resistance, especially if the editor has, sensibly, spent much of the report on what isn't working yet. I would suggest that you leave the report on your desk, and go to the pub. At least, that's what I do.

When you come back to it, bear in mind that, yes, it's one person's opinion. But it is an educated, informed opinion from someone (hopefully) with a knowledge of the craft of writing as well as how the book trade works. And you've paid for it. So try to read the report with an open mind. There are usually some 'Aha!' bits, as in 'Aha, they're right, though I hadn't seen it clearly.' And there are some bits which you just disagree with. You may well be right, but bear in mind that it could be the resistance talking. If you really feel that from top to bottom the editor has mistaken what kind of book it is, and based the whole report on that wrong assumption, then talk to the agency.

Equally, don't be so humbly grateful to have your work read and heard - and it IS a thrill to have several thousand words of professional attention directed at your work - that you meekly do everything it suggests even though part of you is screaming that it's killing the book.

If you do use an agency which offers follow-up contact by phone, have a think, before you talk, about what you want to ask. Even email a few outline questions first, perhaps? We engage deeply with your work, but if it's a few weeks since we wrote the report, your work will have had other books piled on top of it in our memories, and it takes a few minutes to bring yours back up to the top. And though it's tremendously important to digest the report and think it through first, if you're going to get the most out of such a conversation, don't leave it too long before you ask for that contact, because the longer you leave it, the less helpful an editor will be able to be.

In the end it's your book: as with any feedback, from anyone from your best mate to a copy-editor when the novel's in production, you have the choice: accept, adapt, ignore. Accept means 'Yes, they're right, I'll change it as they suggest.' Ignore means, 'Okay, but I think even a gently-bred Victorian lass would, actually, hit him. So the punch stays in.' Adapt is the interesting one. If someone you trust says something doesn't work, then you have to listen. For them, as a representative reader, it doesn't work: they're right, by definition, for them. But the solution they suggest may be completely wrong: they may suggest cutting it, when actually you need to do it better (go back and make the character's buried anger more apparent, so it's believable when she hits him). They may suggest a big family row when actually your character would drag his sole enemy to a lonely moor. One important thing about learning to be a writer is to learn to hear feedback fully and open-mindedly, judge the quality of the feedback not by whether it feels good but by whether it's useful and who's giving it, and learn to grow your own solutions.

A MORAL TALE

Sometimes I see a previous report on a novel that's come to me, and it can be stunning how much the writer has brought the book on with that feedback. But one report I did was the second of three by three different editors on the same book. There was a lot right with it, and a lot wrong: it had huge potential and huge flaws. I saw the other reports, and each one said the same things as the last. That writer had spent the best part of £1500 - half the cost of a Masters - and changed almost nothing each time. And s/he already had an MA in writing, so it wasn't lack of experience of how to deal with feedback. I can only assume that at some level s/he was deeply resisting the changes that s/he ostensibly wanted to make, so that each time s/he got back into it, a little voice was saying, 'But that's okay' and 'Well, it's got to be like that, hasn't it...' and s/he ended up waxing its legs, instead of doing major surgery. It was very frustrating, because it was one of the very rare books which was the beginnings of something which I could absolutely see on a bookshop table...

Making the skeleton dance

A friend is suffering from something which I think we all are at risk of: a passionate desire to write something, and a poisonous sense that everything they might write - every kind of character, situation, theme or plot - has been done before. And better. And worse. And in corsets and in spaceships and in Brixton. So why bother? What's the point? How can any of us, ever, say anything new? Anything worth writing, let alone worth reading? Let alone get it published? And I found myself replying like this:

There's a bird's-eye map you have in your head, a big but un-detailed map of the whole bookish terrain. You can see an awful lot of books, but only their most obvious features. And in those obvious features, they have a lot - too much - in common. Yes, there are only seven basic plots, and if you reduce a book to it barest bones - the blurb, the elevator pitch, the synopsis - it'll look like one of those seven (which is why we hate constructing those so much).

One reasons stories like fairy tales and myths seem so archetypal - are the archetypes of all our stories - is that they don't have particular, individual detail. Stepmothers are bad, princes are good, trees are trees (only oaks in Victorian dressings-up of them), cats are magical. There are very few individual motivations or peculiarities - it's all generic, in the true sense of the word - because we're dealing with the basics of human interaction (see Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment for Freud, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots for Jung). Which is why we have such fun with re-tellings and modern fairy tales and things: they play with the bare bones of our archetypal stories like a skeleton dancing at the Day of the Dead, and dress them up in silly clothes so that we re-see them. Of course fiction isn't like that: we have a couple of millenia of drama and now novels dedicated to bringing alive the individual human consciousness, from Oedipus to Hamlet to Hedda Gabler.

So, "It's not the subject, it's all in how you do it!" we cry, and it's true that what makes a book itself, rather than something else, is how those basic bones are fleshed and clothed and made to dance. That can sound trite, but only if you think of "how it's done" as a matter of window-dressing, of style over substance. But, actually, "how it's done" is about substance, because it's substance that the reader reads. They experience that world as substantial: full of texture, solidity, things and people, bricks and mortar, ravens and writing desks, which you build and make convincing, as Gardner says, by making everything particular: individual, peculiar to itself, a little surprising, a little bit new, not what we knew exactly, or so exactly what we knew that Granny's writing desk (or raven) lives again.

This is one reason (in fact the main reason) that I don't read fiction reviews, or booky blogs, or Amazon stuff or other chitter-chatter about books. And I don't browse the fiction in a shop as a pleasant way of killing time or staying out of the rain. The only books I really know anything about, if you see what I mean, are books I actually decide to buy, and then read. All those other ways of knowing about books - picking up the minimal details of lots and lots of books - just stretches that bird's-eye map even further, like the kind of computer game which draws more of the island as you move. It shows me the terrain, which I might otherwise explore for myself, entirely in terms of other writers' footmarks. Then I only have the choice of walking in one set of footmarks or another. Whereas if I haven't seen it thus, with the paths trodden and the snaps posted, it's all there for me to explore. And since I'm a different person - because everyone is - and so a different writer, my portrait (not map) of my journey over the terrain and what I write about it, will be different.

This is also why I have rather mixed feelings about the frequent injunction to "study the market", which is said so often by editors (and therefore agents) who need to sell books which do what they say on the tin, to readers who know what tin they're looking for (which is most books for most readers). Of course you should read well and widely of the kinds of book you're trying to write, but I think that understanding of the kinds of bones that your story's going to need (mixed metaphor alert!) is best acquired not by mapping the terrain from a helicopter, but intuitively, by prowling through the jungle. You want to be entering the room - or rather the jungle - with an electric torch, as Virginia Woolf puts it, not judging it as an artillery commander.

Fundamentally, saying "it's all been done" is a bit like saying "But I've done sex". Yes, you have, and yes, it was with your gender of choice - there are only two, after all - and yes, unless you're into something really weird, the possible permutations and actions are actually quite limited. And yet each combination of you, the moment, and the partner of the time is different, whether it's one of the gourmet weekends of your student life or a friendly quickie with your spouse of twenty years.

Thinking of which, I got very stuck recently, because the classic situation (yes, it was that kind of situation) I'd spent half a novel setting up suddenly looked like not a trope but a cliché. And if it was a cliché, who was going to care about it? I certainly didn't. I got stuck for the rest of the day. It was only when I went back and re-read quite a bit (which is something I almost never do in first draft) that I re-discovered these characters' particularity, and that of their situation. And then I could realise and write that scene as it would have been to them. Our characters, after all, don't know that they're clichés, they're just humans in human situations. They're real people to themselves, and so we should be able to make them real to us.

So that was my main idea. But it has a tailpiece - a coda - because anything which can stop you in your writing tracks is a costume hung on a peg in the wardrobe of your Inner Critic (Do read that link: it's really interesting). I said:

On a completely other tack, could it be your Inner Critic? The anti-writing demon? The part of you which is in charge of protecting you from writing? The Inner Critic is a master of disguise, and can put the right costume on for the situation you're in at the moment. Saying "it's all been done" is a very good disguise for the Inner Critic, because it works powerfully on the well and widely read. It hasn't managed to persuade you that you shouldn't be writing because you're no good, nor because you should be saving the world or schmoozing the boss or baking for the PTA cake sale, so it tries something else: "It's all been done".

No, it hasn't all been done, because YOU haven't done it yet.