This Itch of Writing

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A friend, the novelist Rosy Thornton, went to hear Sebastian Faulks talking, and reports thus:*

He said that the advice ‘write what you know’ is the worst advice given to anyone, ever. He says that when he talks to young writers he says, DON’T write about what you know. He tells them, write about the past, the future, other words, a Bohemian desert, the south pole - but absolutely not about what you know.

Now, I often get asked about 'Write what you know' at readings, because it's so very obvious that I don't. And as I've said before here, I see why it's said but I agree with Faulks (though for different reasons) that it's frequently un-fruitful advice. 'Write what you know' is good advice in that you can write tastes, textures, emotions, authentically: it develops your documentary capacity, as it were, and without the pressure to invent, you can concentrate on the accuracy and vividness of the writing. To that extent, it's the gold standard for good prose. It's bad advice in that most of us lead dull lives. Staying within the boundaries of a ploddingly literal definition of 'what you know' isn't going to help you grown and change as a writer, and certainly not to enlarge your imaginative capacity. As I'm finding with drawing, documentary and imagination are quite separate talents. But the other thing in Faulks's talk which Rosy questioned, I would question too:

he talked about Saul Bellow (as an example) and said that if you are a Jewish American with a family background in eastern Europe, then you somehow trail with you the scent of holocaust and Ellis Island and generations of struggle, so that you can write about an ordinary glove-maker from Newark and it has ‘grandeur’, as Faulks put it. But that if he himself tried to write in the same way about, say, a schoolteacher from Leicester, it wouldn’t have this same ‘grandeur’, the same resonance.

I'm really not sure about this, though it wouldn't be fair to dissect a conversational remark too ruthlessly. I'd defend the capacity of a really good writer to find grandeur in an ordinary life. It's not easy to do: it's probably much harder than finding grandeur in an extraordinary one, but surely the right eye, mind and pen can plant seeds of ordinary Leicester lives in the earth of fiction, and grow transcendance, courage, passion, love and beauty from it. (Actually, of course, you rarely meet the most ordinary person, at any length, without it turning out that there are some extraordinary things in their background: hence the fascination of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are series.) It's true that perhaps it's easier to find grandeur when the scruffy fiddliness of our common lives is stripped out by time (hist fic) or space (spec fic, foreign settings), or obscured by darkness, and the literalness of colour can be escaped by working in monochrome. It's also true that dramatic action needs obstacles, and great drama needs great obstacles: easy divorce, the end of the Iron Curtain and the rise of the mobile phone have forced many a novelist to scurry into new corners of the world and the human psyche.

The other thing which worries me - which I'm worrying away at - are two implications of Faulks's example. First, that some subjects are automatically grand. I was deeply moved, for example, by the wonderful film of Fugitive Pieces (and promptly put the book on the top of the TBR pile), but I do wonder if it's all too easy to use the Holocaust, say, or child abuse, or death, for a bit of instant gravitas; and most competition judges would agree with me. And second, that it's Bellow's own background which trails this grandeur through his fiction. Are those of us without that background not allowed to imagine our way into it? I don't think Faulks is arguing that no imaginative use of someone else's history is permissible (how could he be?), but this seems to me to run counter to his previous advice to write what you don't know. Indeed, it gives ammunition to the literal-minded philistines who can't cope with verisimilitude, but need to prove that fiction is 'real', before they can accord it any value. To me, the value of fiction is the exact opposite: that it's not real, that it's not a weaker, because less 'accurate', form of documentary, but rather an imaginative (re-)creation of possibilities. As Una in A Secret Alchemy discovers, fiction is 'An opium dream of the heart.' In Xanadu, in other words, did Kubla Khan...

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*Rosy's an academic lawyer, by way of a day job, so we're both anxious to point out that this is her memory of a small part of Faulk's very interesting talk, not a verbatim account.

It doesn't matter

I've been teaching myself to draw. It seemed a nice way to spend my convalescence (nothing scary, don't worry), sitting in bed with the sun and the birdsong coming in through the open window and Quentin Blake and John Cassidy's Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered on my duveted lap. The book's very funny, very encouraging, very clever about how it gives you rock-bottom basic technique, and gets to the heart of the matter. And it's also being extremely salutary, because for the first time in a long time I'm trying to do something at which I'm a total beginner. Indeed, by almost all the measures you care to apply, I am Very Bad at drawing. I don't lack visual skills in the broader sense (my proudest qualification is my A Grade in A Level Photography, and I also have one in Art History), and I'm a good observer, and a better one since I started wanting to write what I see in my mind's or my bodily eye so that others can see it too. So why am I completely incapable of putting non-verbal marks on a page so they do the same? What neural channels are so blocked that my ducks don't just look wonky, they look like scribbles? Why does eye-mind-hand work about as well in me as I contemplate a teacup or imagine a tree, as it does in my two-year-old nephew?

I don't know. But I do realise the following things which I'll hope to keep with me when my self-ban from writing and doctor-imposed ban from driving and lifting ends in a couple of weeks:

This must be what a lot of real beginner-writers feel. There's stuff in their head or before their eyes which they yearn/burn to get down on paper. And when they try? It reads like scribbling. Awkward, ugly, incompetent, even incomprehensible. The one writerly skill I've always had is the capacity to bend words to my purpose (I just had to learn everything else about writing fiction). So I've never really had the feeling that the words in my hands won't do what my mind wants them to. Now by analogy I know how it feels, and as a teacher that's a lesson worth its weight in red biros.

It's lovely to do something creative which lasts a bit longer than making and eating a cake, is quicker than making a dress, doesn't need the rest of a cast or a piano accompanist, and doesn't involve a computer. Interestingly, virtually all my writer friends also have a second-string creative hobby. More seriously, it's a joy that there's absolutely nothing riding on this new hobby of mine. Once you start trying to earn your living by creative work, for good and ill your whole relationship to it changes, and what the world thinks of it matters too. My drawing doesn't matter in the least, it just satisfies me. Hurray!

Because there's nothing riding on it, and because any individual drawing doesn't take long, it's got easier to accept the contingent nature of the process. The book comes with artist-quality drawing pen and two water colour pencils, but it doesn't come with a rubber (US=eraser). First few lines are clearly wrong? Abandon them and move on. Happy accident of pencil turns your witch from scary to funny? Take the credit. It's all practising, all just eye-mind-hand. Wimbledon starts tomorrow, and I've realised that an artist with a sketchbook is like a solitary player with a basket of tennis balls hitting serve after serve after serve. Some work, some don't, and in a way that's not the point: it's the feedback of eye-mind-hand-mind-eye-mind-hand that matters. Same for us writers with our notebooks. Not everything we write has to be part of The Novel.

Having to draw something in front of you makes you really look at it. That's part of my reason for learning: I want something I can do when travelling that helps me inhabit a place but in a more sedentary and less strenuously technical (and these days less suspect) way than photography. Yes, I do have a fantasy of sitting at a café table with a glass of beer, sketching castle walls and gothic tracery. But, more to the point, it makes you think hard about what's important about what you're looking at, what needs detail, what needs definition, what needs an impression or a squiggle, and what doesn't matter at all. And oh the bliss of being able to just leave out the damn telephone wires and traffic notices!

Having to draw something from your imagination makes you really imagine it. One thing that most beginner writers have to learn is not to generalise, because generalisations don't live and breathe for the reader. When the character approaches the door of the castle are the planks thick or flimsy, solid or mouldy, painted red or sun-bleached? Is it what they expected or does it make them hesitate (character-in-action)? How does the latch feel under their hand: rough? rusty? heavy? well-oiled? And so on. New writers can find it incredibly difficult to find and keep up that level of imaginative attention: these days it's second nature to me in writing, but still hard in drawing.

But Blake and Cassidy have shown me that there's a fundamental difference between the two kinds of drawing/writing, which I'd never really thought about before. In drawing/writing from your imagination the difficulty is to create enough detail, but the aspect of it which is necessary to the story - that the door is already open, that the lock screeches like a banshee - will probably be the thing which occurs to you first. Whereas in drawing/writing things which are in front of you there's a problem of too much information. It 'feels a bit like trying to catch a waterfall in a cup,' they say: how do you chose and then catch the drops which matter? We all know the kind of passage in a book which goes into tons of detail. Sometimes there are clues or time-bombs buried in the housing estate's concrete walkways and squabbling children, themes woven through the beloved's hair, but sometimes such passages seem to have no real narrative purpose and therefore no real narrative drive.

In other words, this simple difference is also the difference between 'write what you know' and 'write what you want and make me believe you know it'. They're fundamentally different mental processes: one isn't just an extension of the other. In fiction, we're in the latter territory, or we should be. I think it'll be a while before I can sit in my study and draw a picture which makes you believe I was sitting at a café table in the South of France, but that's okay. It doesn't matter, after all. Bliss.

Twenty minutes and no clarinets

Over on Radio 3 they're knee-deep in Haydn at the moment, it being his bicentenary and all. In his lifetime he was considered the greatest composer in Europe, the kind of accolade which seems to end in plummeting stock once someone's heirs begin to have their Oedipal way (cf Mendelssohn - another revelation of this year of anniversaries - being murdered by Wagner). But not any longer: Haydn's risen again in critical esteem since the 70s, when I was told that if it sounded like Mozart, but was duller and you didn't recognise it, then it was Haydn. And of course art is art and craft is craft, so there's much for a writer to chew on in what's being said about a composer of consummate craftsmanship, erudition and humour. Ages ago, in Brainy and Sexy, I was brooding on how all fiction balances new-and-strange with familiar, and how seeing it that way abolishes the gap between the Calvinists who preach that only the painfully difficult can defend us from the vulgar pollution of likeability, and the equally tedious Philistines who argue that anything not instantly likeable is so much showing-off and snobbery. So here's the fortepianist Robert Levin, contrasting the high Baroque of Bach (first prelude of the Forty-Eight) with Haydn's classicism:

it's very demanding of the audience because Bach does nothing to help you fit which chords belong to one sentence and which to another. You listen to the succession and decide where to breathe... he's not helping you by making things regular. Whereas a composer like Haydn... maximum clarity... give[s] the listener a sense of where he or she happens to be at that moment... then you can constantly predict what's going to happen... and be astonished, delighted and confounded if once in a while you don't get what you expect. Haydn is the master of masters of feeding you just enough material that you think "- maybe - maybe not - "

In other words, just because we go on and on about what's new ("fresh", as the book trade so often calls it, which always makes me think of lettuce), doesn't mean that new is the only thing which matters in writing. New can't work if it's not springing from a bedrock of old, unexpected only works if you were expecting something. And when it's done perfectly in both tone and timing, as Haydn does, it's wonderful because both new and old become a different kind of new: in Kearney's terms, in  configuring our experience the music refigures it.

And then today, Stephen Johnson was explaining how Haydn could write 104 symphonies, when his successors rarely managed more than nine. (Yes, I know they're shorter, but not that much shorter). Haydn's position as court composer - a liveried, indentured servant - at the court at Esterhazy, would seem impossibly restrictive, composing to order in the middle of a malarial swamp hundreds of miles from anywhere, at the mercy of the musicians whom his lord chose to allow or refuse, and with a harridan of a wife back in his apartments. But as anyone who writes sonnets or three-minute pop songs would recognise, perhaps it was having to cope with the oboes having been given a holiday, or the awkwardly-syllabled name of the princess's fiancé, which prompted him to come up with new things. Maybe being miles from anywhere made him have to dig within himself for inspiration: he suggested so himself.

Maybe the likes of Beethoven did us a disservice in some ways. He was young when his idol Haydn was old, and he was the first generation of freelance composers, the epitome of the Romantic and revolutionary movements, of the artist as a passionate, uncompromising, misunderstood man (always a man) bowing the knee to none, a soul above and beyond mere mortals. But what do you do with a blank page if there's no reason to write on it except to express your grand vision of humanity and mortality? Should you fall short, then surely it wouldn't have been worth doing at all? Maybe having to come up with the goods for Saturday's concert, or Good Friday's vigil, year after year, meant that Haydn was free to get going, without the terror of the blank page which Stravinsky described (another composer who could only write once he knew, in Johnson's word, that it had to be twenty minutes and no clarinets). Helen Dunmore too, talking about writing stories, suggests that you commission yourself as if you were a magazine editor, in a given style, for a given space. It's not a philistine conviction that all this artsy-fartsy fussing about muses is just so much egocentricity and procrastination, which makes me think it's helpful. It's that once you've got something to start from, to chew on, to build in - even if it's only that the first violin's eloped with the third oboe, and his understudy is a drunkard - then you've got something to start thinking against. And it's in thinking against - looking at the old to find the new - that you just might actually find that grand vision.

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I shan't be around for a couple of weeks, and may not be able to okay comments for a bit either, but I'll be back.

How about flying to the moon?

One of the nice things about doing festivals, as opposed to other readings and events, is that you actually bump into not just other authors (I have lots of authorly friends, but mostly writing for the same kind of readers as I do myself) but other kinds of authors. This time, it was the Hay Festival, and I found myself sharing a car back to Hereford Station with Paul Stewart and Chris Ridell. They write The Edge Chronicles and other children's fantasy together, and we started talking about what it's like writing as a team. Scriptwriters often do it, in writing sitcoms it's almost obligatory, and of course anything which is illustrated may well have two parties to its creation. In adult fiction it's less common, though the well-established crimewriter Nicci French is of course actually a husband and wife team.

It's not just that it would be nice to have the company when doing festivals and events, though it would. (At the Swindon festival I watched Ruthie Culver with envy, not just because she has a jazz singing voice I'd die for, and a fascinating way with poetry, but because she gets to travel with her band. Sure, they have a lot of clobber, what with the double bass and all, but it would be worth it not to be alone.) Writing as a team is also a more integral kind of not-being-alone.

Paul and Chris and I were talking about editors, and they said that they've rarely had to change anything at the editorial stage: by the time it gets to Random House it's pretty much ready to fly. That's surely partly because they're hugely experienced, but it suddenly occurred to me that to write in a pair is to have your trusted reader – writing-circle-mate, husband, agent, editor – permanently available, and vice versa. I'm one of the people who thinks that neither Lennon nor McCartney every wrote as well on their own as they did together. "Someone to bounce ideas off" is the usual idea, but what does that consist of, really? If you can find a voice which you can both write easily and well, then it's almost as if your Inner Reader, whose training is such an important part of learning to be a writer, has stepped outside you, and become independent flesh and blood. And in turn you become their Inner Reader.

I'm not suggesting that we should all work this way; generally speaking fiction writers are temperamentally suited to working alone (we'd soon go mad if we weren't), perhaps because fiction is mostly consumed alone, and not all of us would be able to adapt. And if, as I sometimes think, it's the filtering of craft through an individual consciousness which makes it become art, then it's conceptually quite hard to imagine how that would work if it was two conciousnesses. In other words, perhaps team writing works better at the end of the spectrum where craft is all, so that readers (or viewers) can rely on a book to do exactly what it says on the tin. I'm a confirmed non-talker about the work-in-progress, partly because I don't know what to do with feedback, or even passing comments, until I know what the book is. But writing as a team wouldn't be like an editor coming in, seeing product not process, commenting from outside the novel: you'd both be living inside it. Then, how wonderful to have someone who you could ask, 'Should they run away, or should they do battle?' and know that they might say, 'Neither, those are both terrible clichés. How about them flying to the moon?'

Doing your exercises

One thing I very often find, when I'm working on an aspiring writer's novel, is that the narrator, or the main character, disappears from the event. I'm not talking about an omniscient narrator simply moving their focus to a different part of the story. Nor am I talking about true incompetence in a writer who doesn't actually know what the story should be focussing on. What I mean is something like the following:

He rattled the doorhandle, and when there was no answer, let himself quietly in. Time was ticking past: there wasn't long left. Bags and boxes were strewn over the floor; the remains of a hastily-eaten pizza lay by the window. A hand touched something cold and wet and blood thumped in ears. It was only a pile of soggy washing heaped on the table, several days old by the smell of it. Sand crunched underfoot, eyes were dazzled by light from round the edges of a crooked blind and over it all there seemed to lie a pall of grey dust. The doorhandle rattled, which was totally unexpected; who could it possibly be? No one could have seen the stealthy approach, the cautious glance round, the quiet move round the side of the house. Could they?

The first time that I tried to work out why a passage in this style was so unengaging, despite being full of action and even suspense, I accused it of being full of passive verbs, because it has exactly that distancing effect. But, actually, there aren't very many passive verbs in the above, the physical detail is quite vivid, the image of the man checking out a suspect room is quite strong, so what's going on?

The answer, I realised, was that the character isn't there. After 'let himself in', he vanishes. Even 'his hand' has become 'a hand', and the subject of just about everything other sentence is not him. In a commendable effort to ring the changes on 'He went in... He saw... He looked... He thought' the writer has lost track of the actor in the drama. And in doing so, we've lost our place in it too. Of course there's no reason to make him the subject of every sentence. But to a greater or lesser degree in all novels, the characters are our representatives: it's through their physical presence in the events that we experience them, whether it's Mrs Dalloway's London, or the Big Bad Wolf's teeth. So to break our connection with our representative is a risk. It's necessary, of course, if, for example, you're shifting point of view, moving away from one character and towards another. But you need to know what you're doing, and why, and how to do it.

The post springs from an incident which I can't resist adding. On the writing forum The Word Cloud, I'd pinpointed exactly this problem, and the next day, the writer got in touch with me. He'd seen what I meant, and realised that he'd written it all as a distant observer, even though the whole story was of this young man's growing up: his experiences are the novel. So the writer set out to re-imagine the scene with himself, as the character, in the centre of it. And he saw and felt all sorts of things which he hadn't known had happened, all sorts of sensations that hadn't occurred to him. It's a close-reading version of the overarching idea which I was discussing in Ask your talent. So much of the time we assume that the process of writing is a matter of having an idea, a feeling, a vision, and then using technique to express it as effectively as possible. And yet here was an entirely technical idea and problem, the solving of which in a small way led to inspiration. Which is another reason to buy into the Showing up for the genie principle: imagination, inspiration doesn't have to come first. Like a singer before the curtain goes up, sometimes it starts with doing your exercises.

Town, gown and its own best self

One of the questions that’s asked a lot in creative writing workshops and similar contexts is ‘Why did you do such-and-such?’ And since you’re a thoughtful writer, you have a reason – you did it on purpose, after all – so you explain, and although the fact that someone stumbled over it may mean you do a bit of fine-tuning, that will be that. You have, in a sense, rebutted the challenge and proved your point: it is the right thing to have there. So it was a shock when my editor first asked, ‘Why did you do that?’ about some aspect of The Mathematics of Love, and listened to my reason, and then said, ‘Yes. But it doesn’t work.’ The reader - or rather, the editor as my representative reader - didn't get it, and the fact that I had a good reason for everything I'd done isn’t enough to justify leaving it like that. Ignoring such feedback from a trusted reader isn't an option: I've either got to do what I was trying to do better, or do something else.

I would never say that for this reason editors in the book industry are more rigorous than teachers in the academy: it’s a different kind of rigor. My PhD supervisor is thinking about “the qualities of authenticity and innovation in the process and/or results” of my work, to quote the National Association of Writers in Education Research Benchmark Statement, (Yes, I know, but it's important if you've got anything to do with teaching or studying CW, and it's good.) And authenticity and innovation matter: workshops are about learning to write better, and good writing must always have something new and genuine about it, something which makes us think and see afresh, however traditional the story or un-boundary-breaking the language. My editor, on the other hand, is thinking about making it a satisfying read which booksellers and reviewers will like, and which will get the book groups talking, with prize shortlists in one corner of her mind. Selling books and thereby finding readers matters too. So I’m certainly not saying that commercial editorial judgement is superior: some stunning and innovative writing will never find a home in an industry which needs ever larger sales, and ever safer and more likeable bets, to survive. At the practical level, much good writing does sell but not in enough numbers to support a human being, let alone a couple of children and a serious book-buying habit. If society wants its arts to grow and change, then the academy is one place which can support writers and foster excellent and boundary-breaking work. But it's not the only way to support writers and foster excellent work.

Of course in a perfect world, workshops work as editors and editors work as workshops. A good writing workshop wouldn't let a piece off the hook just because the writer has poured forth lots of excellent reasons for leaving it as it is. (Indeed, I now know that the fiercer my resistance to change, the more likely it is that the thing needs changing - the darling needs murdering). This is not to be confused with a workshop trashing a piece: the key is that they really hear what it's trying to be, understand it, and go on pushing for it to become that thing better. A good editor will be broad-minded about what works in the context of that particular novel, rather than just making sure it ticks all the 'right' boxes and none of the 'wrong' ones: s/he, too, will really hear the book, and help it become its own best self.

Its own best self. Sometimes I think that writing a novel is entirely a matter of translating that cloudy but utterly real entity in my head into marks on the page. It has a self: words are just the language in which it must be embodied. It has a self, and I will do my best to do it justice, with a little help from my friends of both town and gown.

How writing works

The majority of literary criticism doesn't seem to me to be any use to a writer at all, and in my grumpier moments I even think that writers shouldn't read it, for fear of their fiction becoming an exploration of literary theory, which really is putting the cart before the horse. I certainly know several people who, being determined to become writers, read English at University, and were then too daunted to put creative pen to paper for a decade. Equally, at the other end of the spectrum, I find many how-to-write books too prescriptive of a single way to write, and a single kind of good writing to aim at. But in between are what I call the how-to-read books. There are really rather few of them, but they're more useful, I'd suggest, than a whole library full of the others. By talking about how novels actually work for an attentive general reader, they offer the best possible pair of glasses for a writer, for a writer is always, actually, a writer-reader: we are our own first reader, and it's our readerly response to our words which trains and refines our writerly process. And the other important thing about these books is that, although ostensibly works of criticism, they're all written by practising novelists.

The granddaddy of them all is E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel. As he says, you could take six novels which everyone agrees to be really good, and yet find they have almost nothing in common: therefore no conclusions can be drawn or rules promulgated about what makes a 'good' novel. What we can do is talk about how good novels work. When I went back to the book recently, though, I was surprised to find how slight it is: as I recall, it was one of the first books of this kind which I read, so it pinpointed some things which seemed to me a revelation at the time, but are commonplace to me now. Or maybe that's a measure of how completely I absorbed what it says.

The next one I came across was David Lodge's The Art of Fiction. There seems to be something about this genre which means it's often spawned in non-traditional breeding grounds; Lodge's book (like Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem) began as a newspaper column. It still has something of that serendipitousness about it, hopping between 'Teenage Skaz', 'Lists' and 'Narrative Structure', using a single novel to illustrate each one as Padel uses a single poem. But in fact it covers a lot of ground in a highly readable way. I also like the way that the serendipitousness seems like a refusal to offer a comprehensive how-to guide: no prescription for the way to read here, or the journey one should take. It's more like being handed a torch with a brilliant beam, for whatever journey you choose to take.

Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer is very interesting, because she thinks in terms of units of writing, so the first chapter headings are 'Words', 'Sentences', 'Paragraphs', 'Narration', and we're halfway through the book before we get to 'Character' and 'Dialogue', which to non-writers might seem to be where you'd start. So, compared to the Lodge, it has a stronger sense of how all the parts of the machine fit together. And if you've ever wondered why some of us are so passionate about Chekov, her last chapter is the best explanation I've ever read of why.

John Mullan's How Novels Work was also born in a newspaper column, though they were book-by-book, and extracting the general issues from that format has left a good few repetitions. But it is very interesting, and perhaps maps best onto how we conventionally think of novels: different options for voices, structures, character, style and so on. And I'll love the book forever, first for coining the concept of the 'inadequate' narrator, and then for stating so clearly what I've long believed, that the more that fiction tries to assert its factual respectability with bibliographies and historical notes and academic apparatus, the more it actually casts itself as something less than non-fiction, a pale imitation of dubious legitimacy, instead of the triumph of imagination which it should be claiming.

I'm sure there are other books of this kind, and if anyone wants to mention them in the comments, I'll be really grateful. But I confess that I held out for a long time against James Woods's How Fiction Works, purely on the grounds of what I felt was a very annoying, de haut en bas article in (I think) The London Review of Books. I didn't think I'd care for his take on writing, plus he's more of literary critic than a novelist, though he has written a novel. So when my PhD supervisor lent me her proof copy of the book, I took it with faith in her judgement that it was what I needed, but also a certain bristling.

How wrong I was. Indeed, I've now gone out and bought my own copy so that I can pencil notes in it with a clear conscience. It's nothing like as comprehensive as most of the others, being more a series of observations - this of all of them, might be best titled 'Aspects of the novel' - in fact it's a decidedly slim vol, although everything he says is worth reading. But what I've chiefly taken from it is a masterly exposition of free indirect style: how it works, why it works, and why it offers some of the greatest possibilities in narrative. The writer/reader who recoils from being told what to think by an authorial voice is missing the point, Woods argues. Once we've stopped being so childish, then we're open to the irony inherent in any narrative form which slips and slides between the narrator's and the character's point-of-view, voice and sensibility. Of all the narrative arts, this is the possibility which is unique to fiction: that we can be at once both inside and outside a character's consciousness. If you think that the greatest works of art are those in which form and content - medium and message - interact most inextricably, then surely free indirect style is the very embodiment of that inextricability.

Note number 24

Whether the how-to-write books are warning you about how agonising but necessary these days it is to be a performing author, or whether they're (more rarely) warning you of the risks of becoming a performaholic, what they don't say is how much time, beyond the edges of the event, each one takes. I had the most delicious time at the Daphne du Maurier festival, down in Fowey in Cornwall: a lovely audience, great questions, a wonderful walk, but the domestic fallout is considerable, and the writerly fallout is not negligible either, not least because there are one or two things going on which I can't blog about yet.

So, meanwhile, here's what had me doing the Happy Author Dance round the kitchen, despite the kind of weariness only seven hours of even well-behaved trains (blame Dr Beeching and his predecessors) can make you feel. It was sent by a kind friend because I missed it. Note no. 24...

The Jung of Pooh and Piglet

So I've spend a fair few days celebrating the fact that, in the week of 20th April, A Secret Alchemy was the fourteenth bestselling paperback fiction in the UK. Serious celebration, it's been, to top off the pleasure of seeing stacks of it next to The Times it in every W H Smith in the country. Even my agent, who has seen just about every variety of success and disaster the book trade can create, is very, very pleased. And all for that 'difficult' second novel, which has also just had its first advance review for the American incarnation, in Publishers' Weekly:

Historical sections, filled with allusion and mythology, make breathtaking drama ... Darwin's at her most powerful exploring Anthony's faith or Elizabeth's understanding of women, love and marriage in her time... a satisfying end ties the threads together.

And then today I had a bit of a revelation about the absolutely opposite end of the peculiar spectrum of experience we call being a writer. Anyone who's been hanging around this blog long enough will know that one of the recurring themes is about the difference, and interaction, between process and product. I'm a contrary soul so, because so much of talk about how-to-write, let alone what-editors-want, is in terms of product - what you want to have at the end - I spend a lot of time banging on about how process must come first, and then the product may not be what you set out to produce, but will work, be right, have integrity.

But actually, of course, if you want to produce a coherent story, what's really going on is a constant interaction between product and process. At some point you have to decide that you're writing a novel (product). Then you have to decide how (process) to work the material in your head/notebook/gut into something which will be... whatever a novel is (the harder you try, the harder it is to define. A protean form indeed). Then as you work it you're constantly checking to and fro between what you're trying for (product) and what it seems (process) to be becoming (product, but a different product). Your Inner Writer is all about process: it has to keep its ears pricked for surprises, keeping the faith that if your unconscious brings something up from the depths and into the pot of the novel it may well be for a good reason, while not giving up if it turns out to be useless. Your Inner Reader is all about product: it has to keep tasting the stew with a clear idea of what a good stew tastes like and what might make this one good, while being willing to go with the fact that casserole seems to be becoming cassoulet, even if it does mean days of hunting the net and the libraries for new ingredients.

This then mapped itself onto a conversation I'd been having about maleness and femaleness in writing. Bypassing gender-political arguments about the Orange Prize (because we're not talking about actual men and women, but the characteristics which are generally held to live in the baskets labelled 'masculine' and 'feminine') we came to the not very startling conclusion that, actually, the best writing and best writers are both. Let's loosely call 'masculine' such things as goals, problem-solving, linear thought, left-brain, analysis, lack of affect, objectivity, uni-tasking, compartmentalising, status, logic and reason: animus. And shall we call the opposites 'feminine'?: process, problem-finding, simultaneous thought, right-brain, synthesis, awareness of affect, subjectivity, multi-tasking, combining, levelling, a-logic (not illogic) and intuition: anima.

It's bleedin' obvious, isn't it, where this is going. If you're going to be any good as a writer, you have to be both, and they have to work together. Anyone who reads unpublished manuscripts knows the ones which are nothing but facts and events, and even if the characters do feel anything, it's left to the reader to deduce what. And there's the opposite kind, where the emotional state (journey, in the better ones) of the main characters is evoked for pages at a time, and almost nothing outside their head and heart actually happens at all. Even in good, published work one can often say that one or other aspect - anima or animus - dominates, and I write that as a fan of Virginia Woolf and Dick Francis. In ourselves, too, one or other probably dominates, though even in two people with the same percentage split, the effect will vary.* But the writers themselves must be using both aspects.

So if we're trying to bring the two into equality, not so much in balance as working together like top sawyer and bottom sawyer, we have to realise that Inner Writer and Inner Reader each work on their own aspects of process and product. The Reader has to be intuitively open to whatever the story is, as well as deciding what's making the plot machinery creak so loudly just here. And the Writer has to pull a sentence apart ruthlessly and logically to get it to do its job, as well as being open to whatever images or ideas or sudden, unnameable sensations flash across its consciousness. Atwood talks of the ordinary person and the slippery double, Jung of animus and anima. Then there's yin and yang, sun and moon, silver and gold, Sherlock and Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde... Or Pooh and Piglet, of course. 

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*Struggling to resolve hard-wired feminism with a child of each gender plus their friends, I decided that most of the boys, as it were, took say 60-80% of their characteristics from the basket marked 'boy', and the girls the same from the 'girl' basket. But which 70% they picked varied, so that the net result in an individual child challenges any gender stereotypes you might be wanting to indulge, and grants no quarter to sexism in parents or anyone else.

Ugly ducklings and wonky ducks

So I was flipping through a notebook, looking for something else, and I came across a scribble. Learning, as a writer, to get out of your own way/light was all it said. I can't remember what prompted me to say that, nor decide what exactly I must have meant. And then I was talking to an aspiring writer who's hit the ugly duckling stage, where their knowledge and skill in writing have gone up a step, but they have yet integrate that into their writing, so everything's awkward and self conscious, and in lots of ways the new writing seems worse than the old. And I suddenly remembered the story of the Wooden Duck Making Kit. Inside the box are a knife, some paints, a block of wood, and an instruction leaflet. The leaflet says, "Cut away everything which is not a duck".

Quite. In Just for the sake of it I was talking about Richard Sennett and the 10,000 hour rule for learning a craft. But this time I remembered Grayson Perry and Ian Bostridge, in the same conversation, talking about how self-consciousness creates physical tension, and how, whether you're a potter or a singer, that tension in your body affects how you work the clay, or the music. I often find myself thinking about learning to write in terms of learning to work wood. What the instruction to cut away everything which is not a duck embodies is the idea that in your mind the duck exists, and all it needs - all, hah! - is for that idea to guide your hand. If you're trying to build a wardrobe you may need to learn some technical stuff about joints and glues and different woods, and practice combining them, and that's what we think of as craft: something to learn.

But sometimes its helps to reverse that notion of craft as something we acquire. Instead, you could say that how ducky that duck turns out is conditioned by how much your hands can get out of the way. There's a mind's-eye view of the duck you want, and turning that into something physically real is as much about what your hands don't do: about relaxation, flexibility, responsiveness. In An Actor Prepares Stanislavski talks a good deal about how an actor must be physically fit in body and voice in the true sense: not so much strong to do spectacular things on stage, as fit - ready - for whatever the inner life part demands, so that every scrap of that inner life can show, without the body's tensions getting in the way.

We can train ourselves as other artists do, though it's news to many aspiring writers that they might write a story purely as an exercise. But we do indeed have our equivalents of pliés, five-finger exercises, sketchbooks, yoga, arpeggios, the maaah-maaah-maaah, moo-moo-moo that drifts from the open dressing room windows of every theatre in the West End. But in the end you can only learn to carve a duck by carving a duck. You find out the basic moves of knife on wood, and you carve another one. And another one. And they won't be good, as the world sees it. But as your hands work, they learn: mind, eye, hand, eye, hand, mind. And the result of that learning-by-doing, that parade of wonky ducks on your window-sill, is that the gap, the separation, between mind and hand gets less and less: you get out of your own way. As Grayson Perry says "I am the tip of the knife".