This Itch of Writing

A web for Queen Elizabeth

Yesterday in No place for the muffins I said that the scholarly endeavour is the opposite of the endeavour of fiction. It was another of those things I didn't know I thought till it appeared under my fingers, and I've been wondering since what, exactly, I meant.

Yes, it's true that in academic writing you have to show your working, make your theoretical position and reasoning clear, own up to your forerunners, credit any words/ideas/opinions that aren't your own. And no problem of punctuation in creative writing gives me as much grief as getting the commas right in the references. But that's just the housekeeping part of the job. It's actually surprisingly hard to make a watertight definition of the difference between writing history, and writing historical fiction. Both are about choosing and connecting facts into a web of imaginative narrative which helps the reader to understand and experience the past. The novelist is allowed larger imaginative leaps in connecting historical facts, but even we have to anchor our web to them. And, I realised today, with neither history nor fiction would the original characters have recognised the narrative we put them in, because you can only see the shape of a life - or an era - after it's over.

So what is the difference? I think it lies in not in our product - a story's a story, after all - but in our process. My cry to aspiring writers is, 'Write about what you can make me believe you know.' Whether it's love, or knitting, or the Old Kent Road, what people know they don't have to give references for, explain how they know it, or search for previous holders of that knowledge: it just is, in their consciousness. So the facts I root out for writing fiction with must, somehow, end up being in the book as un-selfconsciously as that. The world I create must seem as un-thought, as natural, as breathing.

To do this, as Rose Tremain says, 'You have to leave the research behind,' but I think there's more to it than that. The other evening I watched the Cate Blanchett movie of Elizabeth, and I can't wait to see the new Golden Age one. The political history's very inaccurate, I know, but I don't think it matters a jot. To my mind, if the point is to understand that world, the accuracy of the characters and the sense of the times - urgent, dangerous, brutal, idealistic - is just as important, and those the film gets triumphantly right. They're different truths from those of the historian, less pin-downable and proveable than Acts of Parliament or subsidies to the United Provinces, but they're truths nonetheless, and just as valuable. I'm sure it's not coincidental that the director had apparently not heard of Queen Elizabeth when he was sent the script. He was thus free, as a historian is not, to be inaccurate with some truths in order to be accurate in others, and in doing so, he showed us human history that we thought we all knew through wholly new eyes. That, surely, is what fiction is for.

No place for the muffins

I've been thinking about acknowledgements, and now I'm going to sound like an aged granny shaking her head about how you used to be able to buy penny buns for a penny, nobody needed GPS and boots to take a country stroll, and you were lucky if... no, let's not go there. Anyway, when I first remember noticing books, 'Onlie begetters' had been left behind in the grave along with Mr W.H., and fancy engraved humble supplications were erased just as republican Beethoven did his dedication to Napoleon. In the books I read there was sometimes a brief dedication, often mysterious - 'For T.C.' - and the acknowledgements were a little list of standardly-phrased gratitude for permission to quote copyright material. In non-fiction that list might be a lot longer, and include less formal acknowledgements of 'long conversations' and 'correcting numerous small errors': the number of long-suffering, typing wives is salutary. That's part of the academic project, after all, a representation of the essential, wonderful network of scholarly knowledge and help and, of course, of the wives that made it all possible.

So when did the acknowledgements in novels become a piece of creative life writing in themselves? Agents, editors, spouses, family... Family, ouch! Who do you include, who do you not? Even the ones who never helped, just asked you over Christmas drinks when you were planning to get a proper job? Neighbours, vets, pets...

Sometimes it sounds faux-humble - little naive me, and look, all these grand people wanted to help! It can even spoil the book for the reader. In the UK paperback of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda the acknowledgements are at the front, and I read them first. So I knew that Oscar's father was based on Philip Gosse, and since I know a little about him I found it impossible not to read with half my mind on the possible facts, instead of the beautifully-written fiction. In the end I gave up on the book, and when I go back to it - which I will, it's too good not to - I'll be skipping that beginning.

Oscar-winners do it, but must we novelists? Call me inconsistent (I'm always going on about how the world needs to be shown that writing novels takes graft and craft and good childcare), call me curmudgeonly, but I think lavish acknowledgements in print, as opposed to lavish and richly-deserved thanks in person, are missing the point. I don't put bibliographies in my books, though if I wrote scholarly non-fiction they'd be very long, because the endeavour of fiction is the opposite of the scholarly endeavour. Scholars must show their working. At any point the reader should be able to track back and check the evidence that's used to support what's being said: the seams, the reinforcing of the buttonholes, the composition of the fabric. But novelists hide their working: what I'm making is a whole outfit, on a person, swishing along a catwalk or striding up a hill. Even to another writer the experience isn't about how it's hemmed, how you wash it, where the fastenings are. Later, if you choose, you can re-read for that, flip through the PS section at the end of the Morrow/Perennial paperback of TMoL, come and hear me talk at a festival, look up my website: it'll be nice to see you there. But that's after the book, and separate, and only people who want to know something about its origins in mine and others' lives, need to go there.

My mother once had a very clever but notably reserved and self-contained student, who wrote in an A Level essay, 'For once, the poet does not bother us with his private life.' You can hear the sigh of relief. When I read a book that doesn't have a couple of pages of thanking the neighbour's dog for bringing much-needed comic relief (and possibly a basket of muffins) to the writing of this novel, I feel the same.

There's good, and then there's good...

I've been reading a thread on a forum about what makes 'good' prose. Needless to say, the camps were quickly established: 'fancy, pretentious tosh' versus 'banal, lowest-common-denominator crap' versus... No, I won't go on, you've heard it all a hundred times. So instead I've come over here to sort out what I think and, as so often, what I think is: it depends what you mean by 'good'.

The basic level of 'good' prose, it seems to me, is 'functional'. It does the job for the book it's making: conveys the story and characters adequately, doesn't baffle the reader, keeps them reading to the end. And then there's 'good' as in a bit more interesting than that, conveying things more than adequately, getting the reader's imagination working so we 'get' things more clearly and immediately, but also with a wider (deeper?) sense of their significance.

But there are a lot more 'goods' than that, I think. There's 'good' as in every word earning its keep on the page, nothing slack, no awkward rhythms or stumbling sentences, no turns of phrase which have lost their mojo, nothing you could cut without weakening it, nothing missing that might strengthen it.

There's 'good' as in faithfulness to the dialect and/or register of the characters' voices (voice in the broad sense, not just dialogue) where it's original and where it's clichéd; vivid and authentic in how it's written; faithful to the narrative voice that the writer's chosen to use.

Or 'good' as in choosing, using and arranging words in a new way. It might be rhythm, vocabulary, imagery or syntax, but the hundreds of thousands of tiny decisions about these can add up to many different new ways: spare and tough, rich and baroque, fastidious and contemplative, off-the-wall and hilarious... but it's something original which makes the words sing in the reader's ear, and conveys the story and its meaning with greater richness and depth.

I think we probably all have particularly different tastes about this last kind of 'good', and arguments will rage forever along what one might roughly call the Hemingway-Joyce divide. It's the originality of such writing which raises it, at its best, to art, but therein may lie its commercial downfall. We all need some aspects of a novel to be familiar, so that we can cope with the originality of other aspects. The more that's original, though, the harder the reader has to work to understand the basics, and then get all the more out of it that there is to be got. One of my tests of a good book is whether I get more out of it each time I read it, but that implies that I didn't get everything first go. Some readers hate that feeling, and that's fair enough, while others love the sense of yet-unplumbed possibilities. What's a pity is when readers assume that such a writer's trying to show off, or being difficult deliberately (though there are some 'literary' writers one might not acquit of that crime) rather than honestly following her/his creative impulse. And, equally, it's a pity when readers with a strong taste for originality and obscurity turn up their noses at all 'commercial' fiction, as if great story-telling and good craftsmanly writing can't exist within at least some foil-embossed covers. Both kinds of reader are missing a lot.

On Centre Court

Judging by the comments on the previous post, (I nearly said 'last post' in the cause of linguistic simplicity, but that could mean at least two other things - such is the necessary nerdiness of the writer!) Inner Editors and Inner Critics, the discussion I linked to touched some tender spots in other writers too. Writers Girl's right, of course, a chill pill's what's needed for your Inner Critic. The difficulty is in recognising the IC, because s/he's a master of disguise. And then there's getting him/her to swallow the damn pill. After all, anyone with enough confidence in themselves to write in the first place can ignore him, can't they, let alone someone who's bagged a prize, a contract, a royalty cheque?

Well, yes, as they say, and then again, no. I won't rehearse here what was said on Bookarazzi, but as Vanessa says (and Rachael implies) in the comments trail, it is weird how success, which ought to boost your confidence, can knock you for six (it seems) as thoroughly as failure. The thing is, just about anything can fuel your Inner Critic, because it's had a lifetime's practice. Picture you've spent hours on? Blue Peter competitions have thousands of entries, pet, you mustn't be disappointed. 95% in the exam? Pity about the other 5%, maybe next time. Gorgeous new frock? Well, you don't want to be over-dressed now, do you? First serve on Centre Court? What will your coach/father/fans/tabloids/posterity think if you screw this one up? No wonder we then can't enjoy the party or hit a ball straight. So it's child's play for the Inner Critic to seize on writing successes, and use them to make its own horribly convincing protests in the cause of furthering its own agenda.

In The Market for Ropes I was ruminating on what thinking about the book trade does for your writerly sense and confidence. Even when you hit writing success of any sort - first little poetry competition win, published story, two-book contract, or even (presumably) big novel prize win - that success still, in a way, comes from outside. The most confidence-boosting success I've had was meeting an agent and then an editor who really 'get' my work. They're almost as 'inside' it as I am, and their knowledgeable, detailed approval tells me that what I write works for others. The least confidence-boosting, I well remember, was when my editor emailed that they were buying the front and inside front cover of The Bookseller to promote The Mathematics of Love. I've worked in the book trade and I know what that says to the trade about my book and how my publishers see it. I was thrilled to bits and deeply grateful and yes, I have framed the cover, though thanks to the Great Study Move it still hasn't got as far as the wall. But that morning I looked back at the raw, exploratory, very ugly-duckling first draft of the new novel, and thought, 'Oh, help, they'll never buy The Bookseller for this!'

That was because it was a purely book trade - as opposed to writerly - success: an external judgement about how that book fitted with all sorts of market forces and tastes which are nothing to do with my creative mainsprings. Setting out to write another book that will be worth a Bookseller cover is the worst possible recipe for finding the true heart and drive of the new novel. As is writing to garner reviews as approving as TMoL's, or avoid the less-approving, or please the occasional reader who found TMoL 'hard to get into,' or to get on shortlists for... Oh, no, I'm not a debut novelist any more, those prizes are closed to me.

And maybe that's the other side to it. For years, perhaps, your drive has been to achieve something. And you do. So what now? There's a deafening silence from your publishers who are, very properly, busy publishing books rather than telling you daily about every minute production decision. And there's a struggle-shaped hole in your life which qualitatively if not quantitatively you could call a bereavement. Something that dominated your best thinking, harnessed and drove your most selfless (in some ways) and certainly most personal impulses, has gone. The personal is suddenly laid out naked for public consumption and judgement, you will no longer be able shelve your failures and move on, and what's more, can you do better, next time? Can you? Now there's potent fuel for your Inner Critic! We blame the book trade's economics for demanding bigger sales for each book, but it's far more fundamental than that, I think. It's hard-wired in almost all of us, because onward-and-upward is the default drive of the Western consciousness: simply doing the same, again and as well, is not good enough.

Perhaps that's why an old hand of a novelist said to me, 'Don't worry, the second is the worst. It'll never be as bad again!'. I'm only just moving on from this stage myself, and I'm certainly not sure what the answer is. In the end we writers can't guarantee, to ourselves or our publishers or the world, that the next thing will be bigger and better, a career move onward and upward. All we can guarantee is that we will try. And our trying won't bear fruit if we're trying for the wrong things, any more than you'll hit a ball just where you want it on Centre Court if you've got one eye on the Daily Mail reporter. 

Inner Editors and Inner Critics

Sometimes I think that the road to good intentions like blogging regularly is paved (or rather, not paved) by something fairly hellish. Some small devil, it must be, expert in constructing quicksands of laundry, cooking, phone-calls, tense nervous headaches of waiting to hear what my editor thinks of the latest version of the new novel, and, of course, loud music from the half-term children in the sitting room below.

And now it's gone eleven, and the washing machine's just finished and needs dealing with, and I've still got stuff to prepare for a seminar at Goldsmiths. Never mind the mega film deal, what I really need is Mrs Tiggywinkle. So rather than not post at all, I thought I'd provide a link to a really interesting online discussion I took part in, about Inner Editors and Inner Critics. It was in a private forum, but it's now been edited and made public here.

Of course as I post, my own personal Inner Critic's looking over my shoulder and telling me that it's not really that difficult to combine all these things and I should count my blessings instead of whingeing or giving up, because I'm just being feeble and should Pull My Socks Up...

The memory of an elephant

Yesterday I went to the Golden Age of Couture exhibition at the V&A. It's a gorgeous tribute to a vanished age, a last post-War gasp of the pre-War world, top-down fashion for a world that was growing out of top-down decisions about everything else. The great and the good designers dressed the wives of the great and the good ruling class, and the rest of the world followed the suit, literally and figuratively. One desirable figure, one prescribed hemline and nothing done by machine if doigts de fée - the fairy fingers of Dior's seamstresses - could do it better. There was footage of the ateliers of London and Paris, relics of an industry of embroidery firms, corsetières, glove-makers, milliners, and bi-weekly mailings of the latest textile samples. The couture houses courted celebrities, which is perhaps one way that world hasn't been lost: it's hard to believe that the wife of the British Naval Attaché in Paris was an important show-case, but easier in the case of Margot Fonteyn. I assume the low lighting, which makes the frocks glow spectacularly in the darkened exhibition rooms, was necessary for conservation, but it was frustrating because you couldn't always actually see the seaming, the cut of five or six panels for the back of a jacket, the tiny hand-stitches that shaped the dress to a particular client, whose name we know, who is a real person, perhaps, even now. I don't know much about the art of fashion - firmly in the I-know-what-I-like camp, me - though I find the cultural history fascinating (if you read Alison Lurie's The Language of Clothes you'll never buy a garment un-selfconsciously again). But I do know a little of the craft and when you see great craftsmanship in action and in completion it's extraordinarily compelling.

I lingered, and the museum began to close. I wanted some postcards, and to come down gently from my small high by poking among the glossy catalogues and exhibition-inspired scarves and children's workbooks. But the shop was shut and I had to leave, still slightly glowing despite my sore feet and aching back. Maybe that's why walking back through Belgravia to my bus hardly felt as if the last fifty years had passed: there was even a very couture and tail-coated wedding emerging from the Brompton Oratory.

There are the seeds of all sorts of writerly things in this: stories of Dior's muse-models or the keeper of the elephants in Avedon's famous photograph (scroll down for it). There's a chain of thought which recalls the discussion on here about needlework as a metaphor for what writers do, and which could be taken further. There's the small yearning it's started in me to get my sewing machine out and buy some patterns. Will any of these things get any further, with me or anyone else who sees this exhibition? I don't know. I didn't even make notes, though I always have a notebook with me. One day maybe something from yesterday will float back up to the surface, and find itself in a story, or a blog-post, or a wardrobe.

Or maybe not. As someone said, the human memory is very bad: in evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest terms, its sole function is to help us predict and cope with the future, and anything surplus is discarded. I don't know which of yesterday's experiences is significant and what is surplus. Maybe I'll only know when I see where they turn up next. Or, more disconcertingly still, maybe these events only actually become significant, or surplus, as time passes and my memory makes them so. 

Applying the Bus Test

Mooching along my bookshelves while I was writing the previous post Jasper Fforde writing flash, I realised that I have read quite a lot of books in the last twenty-odd years, and that's not counting a whole TV-less childhood's worth of reading still at my parents' house. And I know the world is crammed full of books I'll never read, including many of the greats, because when so many of my fellow-novelists were at university swallowing quantities of Richardson and Joyce, I was at university pretending to be a tree. But also, there are a salutary number of books on my shelves that I haven't read. Some are presents, and giving them away says too loudly that they're not my cup of tea. Some are waiting for my next novel: buying books is one way of muffling the clamour in the back of my head (see Practical Parenting). But some I've started or not even that, but I certainly won't finish.

By default I'm a fast reader so giving up on a book isn't a matter of it taking too long. If I gave up on a book I used to feel that either the book was a failure and a Bad Book, and trying to read it had been a waste of my time, or I was a failure, lacking moral fibre to go on with a Good Book that I Ought to Read.

And then I was doing my MPhil, and having to find a novel to study for the critical paper element. My brief was quite narrow. I wanted a book that was doing the same as The Mathematics of Love: a parallel narrative, where the two narratives took place in different times, and had completely different casts. Someone said Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman but that had no real modern story that I could discern, plus I find fiction where women are irredeemably Other uncongenial. And someone else said Atwood's The Blind Assasin. I got about a third of the way through that, and then happened to pick up the third suggestion in passing: Possession. Hurrah! Byatt was perfect, and she even, obligingly, writes with great clarity and intelligence about her own and others' fiction.

So I gave up on Atwood, and suddenly realised that for the first time ever I didn't feel guilty a bit. It's a terrific book - no failure on her part - and I had been enjoying it, though I'm missing the sf/f gene so have trouble getting the point of speculative worlds, which is one of its layers. But there was no failure on my part either, because most of what there was for me to get, I'd got in that first third. Not by any means all that's in the book, of course, but most of what there was for me. Maybe I'll get a fleet of comments here telling me what I'm missing. But life is short, and libraries are large, and you can't read everything. Why should I spend time reading something after I've got what I need from it, unless I'm emotionally compelled to?

It's wonderful to have been freed for ever from the guilt of abandoning books. Noel Streatfeild had a bus test for her characters: if one of her readers saw the family on a bus, she used to ask herself, would they recognise them? My bus test is different: if I left this book on a bus, would I a) rush to the bookshop to buy another one, b) buy one next time I was there anyway, c) borrow it from the library just to finish it, d) only pick one up if I saw it secondhand for 50p, d) not bother, e) not notice. No 'ought', no 'should', no Good or Bad, no moral judgement necessary.

Jasper Fforde writing flash

I've recently got my books sorted out, after phase three of The Great Study Move, so there's a right place for every book, but it sometimes takes a moment to remember what it is. And yes, sorry, there's so much fiction that I do have it arranged alphabetically by author. When I dropped Neil Gaiman into his slot I couldn't help wondering what the inhabitants of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford think of their new neighbour, green tentacles and all. And the more I looked along my shelves, the dafter it got.

It's like fan fic of the head, or Jasper Fforde writing flash. Walter Scott crossed with Vikram Seth could be interesting. I feel as if Swift's Gulliver's Travels maps onto Swift's Last Orders, in a mad sort of way, though it would have to be a very drunken Christmas paper game that married Heyer with Hemingway. I haven't read much recent Jeanette Winterson, but crossing Sexing the Cherry with What Ho, Jeeves! would be a technical challenge, whereas the spirit of Malory surely lives inside Olivia Manning's Balkan and Levant Trilogies, a world at once epic and painfully human.

Parody and pastiche are always fun, but I wonder if there's a bit more to it than that. It's hardly a quick route to a new novel, but it has made my brain spark off in odd ways. Why does Trollope (Anthony) write so ruthlessly about his own time, and Tremain so shrewdly and passionately about other peoples'? Measured by the bookshelf-inch, why do what the book trade calls genre authors like Dick Francis seem to write more than what it calls literary ones like Jonathan Franzen? Did Dickens (Monica) and does Trollope (Joanna) have as tricky a relationship with their own Great Ancestors as I do with mine? My fat little Everyman hardback of Tristram Shandy couldn't be more different from the slim and leggy Penguin of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and not because of the two centuries between their writing. And yet there's the baroque take on an everyday world, the delight in language, the fast-and-loose games with time and narrative...

Mind you, maybe it's really just a new paper game. Literary Consequences, anyone?

The Leopard met Judith Krantz in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He said, 'Identity!' She said, 'Mr Phillips!' And the consequence was Uncle Silas and An Invitation to the Waltz.

The most human anyone can be

I'm teaching a seminar group of first year English-with-Creative-Writing undergraduates. It's part of a literature course on the short story, but it's hard for me to talk about reading for long without it creeping into talking about writing. When you earn your living as I do it's easy to assume that anyone writing more than a shopping list is secretly dreaming of the Booker or the movie deal, so I thought I'd better check. And it was as well I did, because the range is wide, from those who just enjoy it, by way of others who didn't want to have to squeeze their writing in round some other subject, to some for whom it's a big part of their life, and who hope it might be bigger yet.

Before we went round the room, I said that just because I am a professional writer doesn't mean I think everyone who writes should want that. And no, it's not because I don't want the competition, nor is it because I'd spare them the struggle to get published. Nor am I being patronising by downplaying something that's clearly important to me. I said it then, and I've said it elsewhere and meant it, because I believe passionately that much (most?) of what's worth doing about writing is wholly unconnected to 'being published'.

Human creativity is a Good Thing. I sometimes wonder if it isn't, along with love, the thing that makes us most human, that finds the best in humanity. When I'm in the mood to think in those terms I think that it's in creation, as in love, that humans come closest to whatever it is that you might call God. A creative act is one which makes something which seems to be greater than the sum of its parts. Just because we don't all, always, make the greatest possible thing from those parts, doesn't mean we shouldn't have done it. To read some reviews - let alone some book blogs - you'd think it was a moral outrage to write and publish a book that falls short of perfection in some ways. My grandfather was a schoolmaster all his life and he used to say, 'If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly.' Not carelessly or without effort, mind you. What he meant was that most of what you learn from doing something, you learn regardless of the outcome. For someone born in 1899, who spent his entire professional life in the hang'em and flog'em boys' public school system of his day, that seems to me rather enlightened, and, more to the point, I'm sure it's true.

No, not all art - literary or otherwise - is worthy of lasting fame, or even of a space on your own sitting room wall. I won't say writing is good if I don't think it is, though I'm not so conceited as to think my judgement infallible, and what I say instead depends enormously on who I'm talking to. We do need ways to talk about art, and that includes talking about whether it works, whether it's original, whether it has importance beyond today. But sometimes what I think of a complete creative act isn't the point. The point is that it happened: that a human created it, and for that time, they were the most human anyone can be.

We seem to have come back to letting go of outcomes, don't we. Did you know that that's what my screensaver says? Only the phrase is too long for the template, so what it actually says is 'Letting Outcomes Go.' As I keep saying to my students, apropos the newspaper word-limits and deadlines that the great short story writers worked to, no creative act exists independent of its context.

Letting go of the outcome

One of the things that readers ask endlessly about is the mechanics of how we write: longhand or computer? Lined yellow pads in the garden shed, or a leather notebook in Starbucks? Tea or whisky? Morning or evening? Before I was a writer I didn't understand this interest: it seemed a bit like asking someone whether the bowl they'd made the delicious pudding in was white or brown. But I think now that when readers ask these things they're touching a finger lightly on something really important about writing: that how you do it - the details of the process - makes a difference.

First, there's the voodoo. None of us really knows why sometimes writing works and sometimes it doesn't. We don't know if our brain will be working when we sit down, whether the words will happen, and if they do whether they'll be any good. Performers are notoriously superstitious, and with good reason. No matter how much you've warmed up in the dressing room, there's a moment when you're standing in the wings, and you think, 'I have absolutely no guarantee that when I open my mouth, a single squeak will come out, let alone a concert aria in tune, on the beat and full of all the thought and feeling I've been rehearsing for weeks.' Writers in a sense are performing every time they sit down and start trying to think of the first word, so a little propitiatory magic is also in order for many of us: the good paper, the favourite postcards, the mug of tea, the right music or the perfect silence. I know writers who can only work in bed with the curtains drawn, others who have to line up a row of beloved ornaments.

And second is that the materials you like to use do affect your process, and, at the risk of stating the obvious, the process is what makes the product. Did writers think longer before typing each word when a change of mind meant those awful scratchy correction rubbers that make holes in the paper, or retyping? Is the prose livelier on coffee than peppermint tea, or too nervous and distracted? Are my books more cheerful, or less profound, now my study has two big windows facing south west, instead of one small one facing north? I'll swear my serotonin levels are higher, at least.

The clearest example of this is in the longhand-or-computer debate. Do you plan and brainstorm on paper? It's easier to draw arrows linking things and people, sketch maps of how the houses relate, express how one axis of ideas runs at right angles to another. And what about your first draft? Is that brainstorming - free-flowing forwards in pen - or an attempt at something finished: neat black letters on a clean white screen? Do you need to read to and fro easily, or does that just lure you into fiddling and losing the feel for the arc of the scene? Red pen on a manuscript shows your thought processes and changes of mind and notes, as the always-perfect on-screen version doesn't. But finding a particular phrase is infinitely quicker with search-and-destroy on the computer, and so is changing characters' names when you discover you've got five which begin with 'J'.

And even when you've decided what process suits which stage of the novel, it's good to be alert to other possibilities. Like many writers I sometimes use free writing, not just as a standalone exercise, but when I'm stuck at a point in the novel. You start with an anchor word or phrase - perhaps the character's name - and write, non-stop, for, say, fifteen minutes. You don't stop, cross things out, correct spelling or worry about grammar. If your mind goes blank you just write the anchor phrase over and over again till something floats into your mind and you're off again. Around ten minutes you usually hit a wall of boredom and blankness: it's when you've written through that that the really strange and interesting things emerge. Yes, much of what you get doesn't look 'useful', but 'useful' is about product, and that's not the point. If you could produce what you thought you wanted, you wouldn't be stuck, would you? The aspiring writers I know who most resist free writing are the ones who like to be in control, who like 'rules' about how to write, and who 'research their market' thoroughly. To do something which is pure process - that has no goal or outcome in mind, but acknowledges whatever turns up on the page - is very threatening for some, and I can see why. You might have to acknowledge some things you wish weren't there.

Free writing, in a sense, is why I normally write first drafts longhand, and usually regret it if I don't. A first draft to me is about bringing out all the things I didn't know were there, so couldn't set myself to produce. Until recently I thought that free writing was the only writing you really can't do on a computer. But now I've heard of a writing teacher who suggests just that: you switch the monitor off while you type. Now that really is the ultimate in letting go of outcomes.