This Itch of Writing

The market for ropes

There's a kerfuffle in the book trade over the likely defection - or earlier defection, or certain defection, depending on what you read - of a variable number of high-powered agents from the agency PFD. I do feel sorry for writers whose agents are directly involved, but for the rest of us it's all good soap opera. For a moment I even allowed my decision not to talk book trade on this blog to wobble.

But only for a moment. Because I really do believe that allowing too much (any?) book-trade stuff into your writer's consciousness is absolutely inimical to creativity. And that's true whether you're writing at the sharp edge of literary experiment, or well within the boundaries of good stories comfortably told. It's not that agents don't matter: after talent, a good agent is probably the biggest blessing a writer can have. Nor is it that we can afford to ignore how the book trade works, at least, not if we want to find readers, let alone make anything approaching a living.

But the book trade deals in product - it has to - and it sees and judges writing in those terms: the end result. Good editors know that real writing comes from somewhere else, a core of self that shrivels and hardens if it's exposed too often to such corrosion, and they may try to protect us, but equally their job is determined by the product, not the process. What is it in us that takes threads and scraps and hairs of the real world and spins them into the thick, sustaining rope we call a novel? None of us knows, and we'll only know if the rope's strong enough by spinning it. Which is fine, until The Ropeseller says that best-selling ropes next year will be orange. Is it too late to weave some in? Would a bit of red blend well enough with the yellow to fool the world? Never mind that orange looks dreadful with the wonderful kingfisher blue that runs the whole length. Our fingers stumble, and suddenly there's a flaw in the rope. And then we discover our rope-dealer is paying someone else more than us. Maybe this rope's the wrong kind of thing altogether, or maybe just unpicking a bit will somehow please them without changing the rope too much...

This consciousness of product, in other words, messes up a writer's process. The ease, the natural fluency, the inborn or acquired sense of the right thread for the right place, the talent-guided skill, is gone. I suspect this is one of the big reasons for Second Book Syndrome: for most writers, the second book - under contract or not - is when that consciousness of product really begins to bite. Even the good things that happen to our product - the prize shortlistings, the great reviews - shake our confidence in the second book: what should we be doing differently to get a product that will do as well?

I said that a good agent is a great blessing. Of the many good things my agent's said to me, one of the best was when I was fretting about how unlike, and like, my current novel was to The Mathematics of Love. 'Just write it how it needs to be,' she said. 'We'll worry about everything else later.'

About to Take Off

I go strangely brain-dead when I'm travelling. In the normal way of things I'm fairly observant, quick on the uptake, sharp-eyed. But once I'm through passport control some of my brain turns to mush (does mush come under the 100ml rule?). I can't see the signs to the loos, I read gate numbers wrong, I ask stupid questions of ground staff whose faces are already tight with weariness and the idiocy of the Travelling Public. They're usually quite nice about it.

As you may have guessed, I'm posting this from airside, Gatwick North Terminal, on my way to Madrid. It's a short, straightforward trip for a nice reason, launching the Spanish translation of The Mathematics of Love, and I'm no longer worried about missing trains, wrong terminals or disappearing flights (yes, I am that neurotic). But I still feel weirdly spaced out. It's like being drunk: I'm at once over-sensitive to some things and deaf and blind to others.

Which is not unlike how I feel when I'm writing, in a way, but without the focus. I feel thin-skinned, hyper-aware, but that awareness can't fasten onto one thing and shut out the others. There are too many lights, notices, announcements, music, faces, words, glossy goods to buy. Whereas when I'm writing, focus is all: it's like having my peripheral vision - peripheral brain, peripheral feeling? - switched off. I think that was one of the first things that drove my desire to write: when I found something (or something found me) that gathered me into that absolute focus, that complete submersion. At its - I won't say best, because it isn't always nice - but at its most complete, it's like dropping through a hole in the ice of my normal existence into the world below.

Mind you, there are some things no newish author neglects to do, however spaced out. I've still got a big grin on my face from finding a wodge of copies of The Mathematics of Love, face out, in W H Smith, nearly seven months after the paperback was published! See you in a couple of days.

Being a snow-leopard

If you've clicked through to About, you'll know that I'm writing my current novel as part of a PhD in Creative Writing. When I did my first degree in Drama and Theatre Arts kind enquirers assumed that I sat in a library and read plays, whereas actually I spent my university years in a rehearsal room. That was very unusual, then: when my singer sister wanted to do a PhD musicologists across the land couldn't understand why part of her doctoral submission would be a recital. But now - at last, some might say - this idea that you should study how an art works by doing it is gaining ground, and Goldsmiths College, where I'm doing it, is in the vanguard.

Practice-based research, it's called, but the interface between the arts and academe isn't always comfortable. A writer friend found an audience of historians distinctly hostile to her discussion of how she uses historical material to make fiction. Ethical standards for research - that no one's experience should be used without their full understanding and consent, that the division between facts and interpretation should be clear - are hard to maintain when you're making a film. The word limit for a PhD thesis is less than my novel is long: do I really only submit half of it?

But people who give law lectures are fascinated by my worries about handling a writing workshop. A psychotherapist explained to me the different kinds of response a mentor might give: not only is it relevant to my helping writers, I can see that understanding creeping into my fiction. And above all it's very good for me that nothing I might say at Goldsmiths about writing goes unchallenged. The basic way of discussing research, as my mathematician sister put it once, is that one person proposes an idea that appears to be true, and everyone else tries to think of reasons why it might not be true. 'Truth' in fiction is a different animal, but what I say about how writers work - about storytelling, about fact and fiction, about why historical fiction is a special case - gets picked apart in the pub with relish, while the police sirens race round the New Cross one-way-system outside.

Yes, this is on the edges of my identity in the book trade: there are plenty of editors who wish the 'MA novel' didn't exist, and 'PhD' doesn't make you sound like the user-friendly teller of tales that booksellers need. And what I do is on the edges of the academic world too: a commercial publishing deal and a profile in Tatler seem rather vulgar in that company, and plenty of academics outside Goldsmiths don't think the likes of me should be cluttering up their universities at all.

But as any evolutionary biologist will tell you it's at the threshold - the liminal spaces - between two environments, where no one set of genes and behaviours will keep you alive, that animals adapt. Unlike a leopard evolving thick white fur as the ice-age creeps over the generations, I've chosen to inhabit a liminal space. I want to think about how story-telling works while I'm telling a story, and I want my own experience of telling stories to illuminate others'. But of that, more anon.

Practical parenting

Creative freelancing - singing, writing, photographing - is a jigsaw of both time and energy. I remember a mezzo-soprano friend saying that she had seven jobs, and that was only the regular ones. Unlike her, most of my jobs happen at home. But still, there's the teaching, the editorial reporting, the blogging, the tax return, the friendly conversations with aspiring writers, the occasional treat like next week in Madrid, the accounts, the library-runs... At least I'm between novels in the promotional sense, so there's not much to do on that front.

But those are the dishwashing and bed-making of the writing life. Novels as children is such a cliché, but just at the moment, struggling to do the right - the best - for what's closest to my heart, it's hard not to see it like that.

The current novel - still nameless - is in its final stages before I wave it off to university with my editor. Every now and then it still needs real, off-the-wall creative thought - that title, for instance - but for the most part I'm doing last-minute packing and admin. My editor's been helping with tutoring and admissions, but when it's gone to her for good - signed in, copy-edited, paid for - it will never, wholly, be mine again. Other people will tell others they love it or tell themselves they hate it, or vice versa. Or they'll pass by without even knowing it was there. I shall hover on the margins of its life, encouraging where I can, spreading the word, trying not to mind when someone doesn't love it, doing all I can to smooth its path. But it isn't mine anymore, it belongs to itself.

The critical paper element of my PhD is the dutiful school-child turning up on the doorstep every afternoon, demanding milk and biscuits and hours of help with homework. There's a lot to do, but these are familiar processes. It can be hard to give it enough attention, hard to convince it of its own value, when other things are more urgent or less daunting. But I know, roughly, what's needed, what may be a problem, where I might find help to tackle it. Not soon, but inevitably, I shall be tidying, revising, and sending it in to be examined. A viva voce exam is like the parents' interview when you apply for a school at 11+: I shall be speaking both for myself and for something else - for my writing - and all I can do is hope that we'll both be admitted.

The new novel (which hasn't even had its birth registered: there's no dedicated notebook, no files on the computer) is asleep much of the time. But when it wakes up and yells I can't ignore it for a moment. Its needs are noisy but simple: I must do what it wants, now, or placate it with notes and book-buying until I have time and energy to do more. I don't know much about its character, its shape or what it will need in the future, except that it will be a lot. But though it sleeps, though it's still so amorphous, it comes with me wherever I go. Sometimes, when I'm tired, I wish it wasn't there, I wish I'd never said I'd have it. But it's happened, and I can't give it back: this book exists.

A horse's view

Where I sit at the computer is between the two windows of the upstairs front room, with a horse's view of the street: I can see everything slightly to each side, but nothing in front of my nose. It's almost embarrassingly symmetrical, with Victorian semis very like my own stretching away to left and right.

This Sunday morning (yes, I know I should be Getting On With It) two neighbours are washing their cars, one visible from each window. To the right is a man I know slightly, a substantial husband and father in khaki shorts and a grey tee-shirt, with the ruddy skin of fair genes long exposed to sun and wind. His Lexus saloon is as plump and sleek and glossy as a six-foot Asiatic otter. They haven't had it long, this car, and he (the husband, not the otter) has three different cloths, a large pot of what looks like flourescent yellow wax, and a very cool-looking MP3 player plugged into his ears. He polishes without hurry, feeling each curve and angle, but the job's nearly done: he does it most weeks.

To the left is a new face: a woman a bit younger than me, in combat trousers and hennaed hair like an electric shock against her purple tee-shirt. The car is a G-reg Peugeot, and it's a much longer job. I can see that the seats have those covers you put on when the native upholstery is too shabby to be borne. On the roof and bonnet the paint is dull and rough-looking, and now that the car's clean, she's rubbing wax into it more like a nurse than a lover, treating scratches and blisters and sticky bits, making it well.

For some reason the contrast between the two, each in their frame, makes me want to giggle. True, there's a good, Disney-grade comic contrast in the shape and size of the two neighbours. And I know - which you can't - that the man almost never drives his car. He goes to work on a scooter, a round of beef sitting on a congestion-charge-avoiding robin. The car stays behind for his wife and three children, two of whom have their own licences, and drive the family's 'second' car. I also know - which you can't - that the woman lives in one of the demi-semis, because these houses divide very nicely into two flats to be profitably rented out.

When I started this blog I swore it wouldn't be about what I had for breakfast or any of the other things which give blogging a bad name. So I ought to wind up this post, Pause for Thought style, with a neat little generalisation that provides a smidgin of profondeur, gilding the day's forthcoming banality with the illusion of intellectual interest.

But I shan't. These observations - I can hardly call them an anecdote - have no point. They go nowhere and say nothing, except possibly that most people conform in most ways to the stereotype of their kind of person. I observed these two for a while, and it made no difference to them, and very little to me. I don't suppose this post makes much difference to you, either, except to point out that all three parties to it - them, me, you - exist. Existence - the world as it is - is where we all start from. Who knows what happens next?

Believable Dragons

In the perennial argument about whether you do research before, during or after you write a novel, one answer is that you do it when the children are away, the hangover's wearing off, and the bailiffs are out of the house: in other words, whenever you can. But given the choice, I found myself saying the other day on a forum thread, there are some kinds of research you have to do first, so that you've got something 'to start thinking against'.

Something to start thinking against. It was one of those ideas I didn't know I had till I saw it on the screen. So much of what non-writers ask us about research is about 'getting it right', about correct facts and authentic detail. That's where non-writers assume the challenge lies, especially when they read historical fiction, and boy, are they (am I!) critical if they spot an error. I'm told the naval history buffs are the most terrifying. Of course incorrect facts matter if they'll trip a reader up and shake their faith in you as a storyteller. That must include subtle facts of manners and morals, which is usually where weak writers get it wrong, as well as convict ship journey times and period underwear. But, as Rose Tremain says, you have to leave the research behind.

Storytelling works by taking elements of the real world and spinning them into something else: into a new pattern that the listeners haven't seen before. Even ancient myths grow and change as they're handed down, accreting wheels and city-states from the world of later generations. The only difference between writing fiction and telling other sorts of stories - legend, history, biography, politics - is that fiction is acknowledged never actually to have happened.

If people reading my fiction want history, they can go and read a history book. If they want to know the truth about hilariously drunk twenty-somethings trying to stumble into the arms of Mr Right, they'd do better to leave the bookshop and go and hang out in Covent Garden on a Friday evening. Our stories are stories because they're not simply these facts. 'What if... instead?' we ask ourselves. 'How would it have been if...?' The facts are a solid mass, and we have to think against them, break them up, rearrange them, add things and take others away.

But, unspoken, there's a pact between writers and readers about what you can and can't invent: in most genres you can invent a small African country, but not move the continent to be north of Russia. Which facts you can chip off the mass and rearrange or discard varies from genre to genre, and along the spectrum from literary to commercial. But some facts are like cliff-faces: unavoidable, indestructible. You can create mythical cities and fabulous beasts, even self-willed luggage with legs, but as a writer you can't breach the laws of aerodynamics, or the evolutionary biology which dictates that reptiles have pentadactyl limbs. In other words, even your dragons have to be believable.

Not all mouth, just new trousers

Yesterday evening I was at the launch of the latest issue of Seam, the poetry magazine. It was an excellent evening, with many contributors reading and reading very well. The poetry world was not always thus but, like it or not, in the last twenty years poetry has become an oral and aural art again, a performance art. How you do it - how you look, sound, speak, take the platform and leave it - makes a huge difference to how your work is heard both literally and figuratively. Poets know this, and novelists are learning it. Unlike them we can still (usually) earn some money writing, but we too have to stand up on our hind legs really quite often, in draughty church halls, feisty little independent bookshops and corporate sales conferences.

And then today I was trawling the shops, because the prospect of two days in Madrid to launch La Aritmética del Amor has made me realise the deficiencies of my wardrobe. It's not the first time I've realised it. After a decade or so when my life could be spent in pyjama bottoms and a fleece, an invitation to a smart West End restaurant, to meet among others the chief fiction buyer of Waterstones', is a severe sartorial shock. And how come all the other authors look so stylish? I should have asked, but of course the only people you're not supposed to be talking to at a trade dinner is the other authors.

So, here we are in Womenswear. But should I be Stylish Author (chic black suit and chunky gold)? Or Professional Author (tweed/cord suit with jewellery that will also do for the rain-drenched literary festival next week)? Friendly Author (flowery frock and soft little cardi)? Cool Debut Author (hand-made Peruvian dress shirt, scruffy jeans and disintegrating plimsolls)? Or what I am: rather nervous and unconvincing versions of all these and then some, with nothing sufficiently chameleon-like in my wardrobe to suit, let alone keep me warm on a station platform after a distant reading while disguising how disastrous a writing life is for the figure.

Many authors feel it shouldn't matter, of course, only our writing should. But what I wear and how it makes me feel does matter, because all writing is, in a sense, a performance. We chose print and solitariness because that's how we say things best, and get them heard most clearly. Readings and sales conferences are essentially a different medium for the same desire: a chance to explain what we're trying to say in print, and to be heard. When I think of it like that it doesn't seem so daunting, or peripheral, or superficial. It even sounds quite fun.

Cake houses and paper games

Children instinctively know what makes a satisfactory story: if that knowledge isn't coded into our genes, it's certainly wired into our brains. But I've been wondering what else in my childhood has fed into my writing self, and I realise that one thing I'm grateful for is childhood paper games.

Adverbs: The first person writes a column of quantities - a hatful, a fathom, a milligram - and folds it to hide them. The next writes a column of adjectives, the third writes nouns, then verbs, and so on. When it's unfolded you have the basics of rows of mad sentences to be read aloud: 'A mouthful of motherly ping-pong tables waltzed distractedly towards Richard Nixon holding a machete.' It would probably give a nervous breakdown to the doctrinaire avoider of adjectives and adverbs - the kind who takes endless Creative Writing courses but never actually reads. The rest of us just enjoy it.

Dictionary: Not Call My Bluff, but made-up words, the madder the better. The next person writes a definition, complete if they like with faux-grammatical details and invented illustrative quotation, and folds over the word. The third writes a new word, folds over the definition, and so on. Some chains of word-and-meaning evolve a long way from their origins, others stay remarkably true to the kind of thing the first word evoked. A lot keep one foot in convincingness, so they sound like IKEA product names, words that Tolkein discarded as too silly, or what you think Pingu might be saying. Which isn't coincidental: we have a hard-wired sense of what the building-blogs of language are. This is like building a house out of bricks of cake, or designing some mythical beast: tiger's tail, eagle's wings and tortoise's paws, but you still know it's an animal.

Bouts Rhymées: You start by writing a line of poetry in an agreed metre (iambic tetrameter - 'The boy stood on the burning deck' - is traditional), and the next person writes another, rhyming line, and then a third which doesn't rhyme, folds over all but the last, and passes it on. The third person writes the second line of that couplet, and then the first line of a new one, and so on. However daft or dire the resulting verse (let's not call it poetry), learning to manipulate words so they rhyme and scan is incredibly good training for learning to manipulate the sound and rhythm of any writing.

Surrealist Poetry: On the LH side of the paper you write the first line. Opposite it on the RH side the next person writes a line reversing as much of the meaning as possible ('The black crows fly' becomes 'A white sparrow swims') and then continues with another line below it. They fold it so only that second line is visible, then hand it on. The third person writes a reversed line across on the LH side, and another line below it, then folds over... When it's all unfolded you have two poems (and these usually are poems) of wonderful, surreal sense. It makes connections where the writers couldn't possibly have meant them, and it's salutary to realise how much of a poem is what the reader makes of the words and their juxtaposition.

Title and Paragraph: The first person writes a title, the next a paragraph from the book and folds over the title, the third writes a new title, and so on. The Pratislovickirika Incident by Otto Plog, Not Wisely but Too Well by Pandora Rosemeathe, or With Faithful Fowling Piece in Hand, Memoirs of a Duck-shooting Life by Maj. Gen. Sir Crombie Smythe-Gordon (Retd.) is the kind of thing we handed on for the next person to write paragraphs for. Voice is one of my most cherished technical tools: The Mathematics of Love has two narrators of different genders and centuries, and one review praised its 'bilingual dexterity'. For that, clearly, my thanks go to Otto Plog, Pandora Rosemeathe, and the Major General.

PS: inventing those titles makes me realise how the standard booktrade genres have changed since I was ten. Now it could also be Winning Balls by Wayne Broome, as told to Jonathan Smugge, Hard Man in Helmand by 'Joe Crown', Oh No, Where Have I Put My Choos? by Sacha Brilliant, or Bashed-Up Brat, my life in Hell by Jane Brown.

From the Lascaux caves to the Booker dinner...

I've been joining in a very interesting online debate which was started by an aspiring writer who also helps run a small but relatively high profile publishing company. She asked the assembled members - beginner, seriously aspiring, published and bestselling - how the publishing industry ought to be run, as opposed to how it is. (Not much use to post a link, because it's in a private members-only forum on WriteWords)

Needless to say, the answers ranged over ground which any writer who's spent time in the pub with other writers will recognise: the time it takes for rejections/acceptances/publication/royalties to be paid; the reluctance of editors to take risks 'these days'; the rise of the agent; the rise of the editorial service; the rise of the supermarkets. I tossed in Danuta Keane's excellent piece about returns and pulping, but no one's picked up on it so far. (Just in case you thought this can't be an online discussion, there is of course one tiresome, ranting member who's funny enough to keep people reading, and just clever enough to get under others' skin and get them answering back, so the discussion derails temporarily. But luckily someone always gets it back to basics.)

And then I found myself thinking even further back to basics. I was an aspiring writer for too long to underestimate the agony of a good writer who's learnt their trade and is trying to get published. Then there are the good writers who find their publishers demanding ever-bigger sales, or offering ever-smaller promotion. And there's the often poor fit between the publisher's duty as a business to stay solvent and profitable, and the slippery, incalculable, non-rational business of writing. But nonetheless, I wrote:

"When societies get to the point where not everyone has to be involved in producing food and defending food-producing territory, there is spare food for shamans and artists. Money is only a way of making that food-sharing more flexible. What it comes down to is that all societies develop ways of paying their artists, and some leave the artist freer (and/or hungrier) than others. Do taxes fund grants, which is the modern equivalent of the King having court painters? Do rich patrons employ a poet for the Christmas season? Do people who hear storytelling toss coins in a hat as they pass, or buy tickets to readings on the South Bank? Or does someone pay the novelist to produce a book expecting to make that money back in sales, and then a bit more money to pay themselves?

"It varies how much societies recognise that art is a Good Thing, and that some art which not everyone understands is needed and must be paid for, if the art which everyone does understand is going to go on developing. Think Arts Council subsidies. And in a society larger than a single tribe, it's always going to be very hit and miss who's able or wants to pay for what art. Either that, or the Politburo decides what's a Good Thing and every other artist is sent down the salt mines. But fundamentally, society won't feed artists whose art they don't want and can't imagine ever wanting. And you could say, why should they? The society may well be wrong, in the case of a particular artists, but that's their right."

Looking at it again, it reads rather brutally. I don't do brutal, but it seems to me to explain a lot, even if the individual worry/bafflement/frustration/pain is something we should also acknowledge, in ourselves, and others. 

Up close, and impersonal

Close writing and close reading seems to be what we've been talking about in the comments trails of the last couple of posts, and this from Writer Girl resonated particularly:

I think I first discovered the power of individual words in a story when I began to translate parts of novels from French into English... The translater has to find the right combination of words that will provide the correct meaning, rhythm and flow to the sentence. The writer does this without having an original script to work from. My question to you is this: do agents and publishers, with their eyes on the bottom line, appeciate this? Or is story and saleability the only thing that matters? I really wonder.

My experience of booktrade people is that they do care, a lot, as anyone who's had a line-edit by a good editor will tell you. But beyond that they may not be best placed to do the kind of close teaching that's needed to turn okay close writing into terrific writing. And, as always, they see it in terms of market: the kind of writing they want to put on Faber's list is different from the kind they want for category fiction, though both must be good for their purpose. Story (arc?) has to be paramount though, because that's what keeps readers turning the pages, so the job of the words as the medium has to work, while the job of the words as texture is something that only some writers and readers, and the publishers who are the marriage-brokers between them, care about, or are willing to try harder at.  One reader's gorgeous, startlingly original prose is another reader's baffling obscurity. Though I think because sometimes difficult originality is necessary for a good literary writer to say what they want, other soi-disant literary writers take obscurity as the defining feature - rather than an occasional, regrettable necessity - of highbrow art. As Nick Hornby says, it's fair enough (his example was Marilyn Robinson's Gilead) if the writer couldn't get it done any easier. The trouble with some modern literary fiction is that quite often they could.

WG, your post linked in with something that was posted on the mailing list of the Glamorgan MPhil, which I'm going to quote, from novelist, poet and translator Christopher Meredith:

Translating leads into some strange places. It's good for a novelist, I think... Makes you realise, if you write fiction yourself, that you aren't quite the paper method actor you thought you were... When it's that much more complicated thing, the voice of the whole piece, the author, then the translator's struggles start. In a way the translation can become a sort of meta-novel in which the author of the source text becomes another character whom the translator must act.

I was interested in this idea of the writer as a method actor living a part, as a transparent medium for the transmission of the story, or for someone else's story. Having done a certain amount of acting I know that what I feel when I'm writing an important scene and it's going well is very, very close to what I used to feel when acting. That's the writer's 'high', isn't it? And yet on another level we're still making micro-adjustments of word and phrase just as an actor is: our equivalent of being seen, being heard, not falling over the furniture, and remembering to extinguish cigarettes before going off-stage. Maybe even sitting in our studies we embody this dual involvement, this divided self: we're in the story, and outside it. But then in the rest of life, too, writers stand slightly outside their world as well as inhabiting it, don't you find?