This Itch of Writing

What do you like with your coffee and croissants?

What with the piece I did on A S Byatt's Possession for normblog's Writer's Choice slot, and my very occasional appearances as a bookfox on Vulpes Libris, I've been thinking lately about reviewing. In much internet reviewing there seems to be a principle that you mustn't lie, but what you say should be mainly positive. But when does that become mere blandness? Then there's the issue of whether you review a book you bought for yourself differently from one you were sent unsolicited to review. And what if you know the author? Is it different if it's their first book? (Some of the reviews I most cherish of The Mathematics of Love said it didn't seem like a first book at all, so there must be some stereotype operating...) What if you really hate it for personal reasons, rather than thinking it's just a badly-written book? And we've all read reviews that seemed to have more in common with blood sports than rigorous no-holds-barred literary criticism: it may be a terrific read in bed with coffee and croissants on a Saturday morning, but can it ever be justified?

I mind what is said about my work: it's far too important a part of me not to, and it's part of the thin-skinnedness that made me a writer in the first place. I mind more if it's someone whose opinion I respect, or if that opinion will be read and believed by a great many people. But even a nasty or stupid remark on an obscure blog hurts quite a bit for a while, as it would if someone said it to my face. More surprisingly, even wonderful reviews skew my judgement of the work in progress: should you do more of X, which won such praise? They didn't like Y, but, help! there's lots more of it in the new novel. And what about Z, which they don't even mention?  A review, in a way, is an external thing as much as anything to do with the book trade is, as I was thinking about in The Market for Ropes. But, more to the point, after I've got over the painful writerly self-consciousness of the moment, I've yet to read a review of my work that made the slightest difference to what I actually write.

So what should a reviewer do? Whether the chief function of a review is to pass judgement on the merits of the book, or to say enough about it for readers to decide whether to buy it, the central point seems to be that you should review the book: what it actually does, what it actually says, what the writer is actually trying to do. Your discussion should transmit the flavour of the book, your judgement should be about how far they've succeeded in what they're trying to do. But I've read many reviews over the years which berate a novel for not doing something it was never trying to do in the first place. There are the ego-trip ones, where we learn more about the reviewer than the book, or see it used as ammunition in some professional battle. Then there are the awestruck or snide ones which talk more about the author (their looks, their advance, their private life) than their work. None of these kinds of reviews is justified, to my mind, however delightful the schadenfreude, because it's not the point: a review should be about the book, and however experienced and erudite a reviewer is, they should remember that it is only their opinion that they're expressing.

I've been incredibly lucky so far, for an unknown debut novelist, with reviews, in both quantity and quality. But of course there have been things said that were less than positive: with many I could see why they felt that way, though I disagreed; with a few I just thought, 'Well, you just didn't get it, did you?' which is both more, and less, annoying. Yes, I would rather get perfect reviews just as I would rather look exquisitely beautiful, and be dressed to match. But it ain't gonna happen. If something in a reasonable review hurts, that's my problem, not the reviewer's. They're not writing it for me, they're writing it for potential readers. Their only duty is to read the book as intelligently as they can, represent it fairly, and remember that possibly, just possibly, it's not the book that's wrong, it's them.

Brainy, sexy and starbursts

In Brainy and Sexy I was discussing the interesting trickiness of trying to write novels that engage both the story-loving heart and the idea-loving head. And now the whole question's come alive again for me because it's just been announced that The Mathematics of Love has been long-listed for Le Prince Maurice Award, given for (alternately English and French) 'romans d'amour', which usually translates as literary love stories.

As well as being very, very thrilled - it's TMoL's fourth prize listing, but I rather thought I'd had all the high-profile fun there was to be had with it - I also really like what Tim Lott, the founder, said to The Guardian of the reasoning behind the prize:

'I'm very much a writer of the heart myself, rather than a writer of the head... It is an instinctual - but valid - way of writing, but many literary prizes are prejudiced against those who have the skill to capture emotional rather than intellectual realities. The Booker, for example, rewards technical ability, but neglects humour and love stories.'

I haven't read enough Booker winners, let alone with a statistical pair of glasses on, to be able to agree or disagree with that. But it does seem to me that the usual binary opposition that gets discussed, between literary and commercial, doesn't explain the half of the possibilities of good fiction. Depending on whether the speaker's snobberies are inverted or the normal way up, the range is always discussed as if it's a single line from life-enhancing originality to trite pap for the celeb-obsessed masses, or from up-its-own-arse clever-cleverness to good, honest storytelling that sells because it's what real people want to read.

All together now, those who've been reading this blog for a while: It's not as simple as that! Where, in that range, are emotional, practical, synthetising (as opposed to analysing), mystical or non-verbal intelligences? Just as people aren't simply either clever or stupid, whatever the IQ merchants would have you believe, so books needn't be either dry-as-dust clever or warm-heartedly stupid. It isn't just a spectrum: good books relate to each other like a starburst, not a line-up, some closer to others, some far-flung, and their different intelligences combine words and ideas and feelings differently, to fill the literary sky with fireworks.

What does a blackbird singing mean to you?

It's nearly dark outside (yes, it's taken me all this time to get my cold-sodden brain round The Wasteland, for tomorrow's seminar) and out in the street a blackbird is singing. Not the full song that's like the trickle of spring water on stone, but the chink-chink-chink alarm call. It's such an evocative noise: for me it's a London sound that evokes layers of childhood, specificities of light and scent that I can't begin to write, but I think many people would find it had a very particular resonance, metaphorically speaking. Just not the same resonance.

And thinking that, I was reminded of the one time I've been asked to read a film script for a friend. Yes, the questions of structure and narrative were not dissimilar, but where was everything else I would put in a novel? Subtext, thoughts, patterns of ideas and images (in the literary sense). Some, of course, is supplied by director, actors, director of photography. But there's so much that film simply has no way of showing. Human consciousness, for a start: without making a character say it, how could a film show what that blackbird evoked for them? Yes, of course, there are things that can be done with montage, flash-back and so on. But in a novel you don't have to resort to specific techniques outside the normal narrative flow: what characters are thinking and feeling is all part of the same forward-movement of the prose, the stream of that human consciousness.

I'm not trying to be rude about film as a medium or an art form: there are all sorts of things it can do that prose can't easily. Because I tend to 'see' scenes before I write them, I've often thought of a joke or a point I could make, then realised it's purely visual, and would take longer to explain - feebly - in words than the point is worth. But prose and poetry are the only art forms which have no sensory content in themselves. Paintings (including abstract ones) evoke images, but the colour and texture of the paint is part of them; songs have words which say things, but some of what they do is about sounds that strike our ears there, in the concert-hall or the club. This immediate physical experience the artist can control, as she or he can't control what the work of art makes the audience think. But a book is just paper and ink under the fingers.

So I'm wondering if the less tied a narrative art is to the realistically visual, and the sensory experience of the moment, the more free it is to expand its audience's experience in different directions. CGI is a wonderful thing, but am I the only person who finds most special effects faintly plastic-looking, begging for a kind of knowing wonder not so different from how we look at Tinkerbell on her wires? Whereas with a bare stage and a few props good actors can travel the world before our eyes. And, with even less physical presence, there's nowhere a novel can't take its readers. Only, of course, where the readers go may not be where the writer intended.

Sometimes you have to stop

A couple of days ago I stopped working for lunch. My head was still full of the plans I'd been making for the last stage of my PhD. With A Secret Alchemy finished, I now have to hold onto the whole of it, mentally speaking, and write 'a commentary on its structure, its use of narrative technique, its relation to other literary works and an exposition of the aims and concerns that lay behind its composition.' When you learn that according to the university regulations I must also make it clear that I am 'well acquainted with the history and contemporary developments of the genre... and the critical field associated with it' and am 'able independently to analyse, interpret and evaluate the debates and theoretical positions associated with it,' you'll understand why writing a commentary on my novel feels a bit like trying to map a mountain after I'd climbed it in a mist.

But at the moment every which way I turn there's work. So on my way down to the kitchen I took with me what you might call work lite: the latest edition of Writing in Education, the journal of the NAWE. It's a special edition on writing in Higher Education, and full of interesting stuff that I've not really articulated to myself before. Maybe it's not everyone's idea of a rip-roaring read, though in the nature of things most of it's extremely well written. But it's full of lots of ideas. I found myself arguing, agreeing, discussing, and smiling, all in the empty silence of my own kitchen, all inside my own head. Only there wasn't room for it all among my ideas for my PhD, and as I read I started to feel weirdly feverish: I wanted to grab at ideas that slipped aside to make room for the next one, write everything down, underline all the good things on each page so that none of them would be lost, grab someone's sleeve, if only in an online way, and pour it all into their ears... It felt as if it was either that, or explode.

My half hour was up, my plate empty. Normally I take some coffee back upstairs with me, to counteract the after-lunch doziness, but I was far too wired to need it. Of all the things that needed doing, what would be the best use of the time? Preparing the next day's seminar was most urgent. Making sure I've got the tax I owe lined up and ready to be sent is horribly important and horribly depressing, but needn't be done today. (I've been saying that for weeks...) The talk I'm doing for Darwin Day is slightly less urgent and considerably more intriguing, but needs work and, worse still, telephoning aunts. The academic paper I'm planning, about writing across gender, is going to be fascinating, and even the abstract doesn't have to be there till the end of March, but if it's earlier, will that improve my chances of getting a slot at the conference? There's a novel to write a report on for Writers Workshop, which is a long, concentrated but predictably-shaped job, and hard, much-needed cash when I deliver. Or can I go where my heart really wants to go: the next stage of the story I started over New Year? It has no deadline, but those are the things which so easily never get done, and I want to know what's going to happen next...

For once I made the right decision: in a state somewhere between panic and intellectual elation I put on a jacket and went out for a walk. It's easy to forget, when you work for yourself, at home, at something which grabs your mind and your spirit in such a grip that your heart starts to race, that sometimes you just have to stop.

The ugly duckling and the life-raft

In the comment trail of Demandingly ‘wrong’-headed, David Isaak describes a writers’ group reacting to his explaining why ‘don’t use adverbs’ is not a good - or even practicable - rule. Their reaction, he says, was along the lines of ‘It makes us really angry when someone tries to dilute a perfectly good and understandable rule by getting technical.’ That's the thing, isn’t it: people feel very insecure when something they thought they’d grasped, turns out not to be nearly so easy to hold on to. In the short term they feel themselves falling back into the almost overwhelming sea of possibilities that they first encountered when they started to think about writing.

But I do wonder if people are particularly upset, therefore defensive, therefore attacking, because of the way most of us learn how to write. First we write instinctively, with the joy of expressing ourselves. We write more, we want to be heard (or why are we writing?), we sense that something’s getting in the way of our expressing ourselves more fully, we tell ourselves we want to improve. So we ask teachers or how-to books or other writers what they think. And someone gently or roughly starts to point out how we could do it better, where it doesn't work, where it’s ‘wrong’. Generally speaking, that hurts, a little or a lot. We were proud of our writing, it had our heart stapled to the pages, and someone with experience or even authority has told us it’s lacking. Slowly we see what they mean, and try to put it into practice, with false starts and more hurts, and awkward ugly-duckling phases where our aims outstrip our technique. But if, instead of this unpredictable feedback spiral of learning, grubby brown feathers and all, we're taught neat ideas of what will help - rules of thumb, clever little tips, tick-box revising techniques - ‘success’ comes more quickly. We're doing things right, we're good at it, everyone approves.

So to be told that what healed you, what made you a ‘better’ writer, what perhaps even won you prizes and certainly approval, is fundamentally flawed, is pretty hard to take. If you’ve got as far as making something of a writing life - teaching, reviewing, or any milieu where your opinion carries some weight - it's even more threatening. To have it explained in unarguable detail why the way you've judged your own and others' work for so long is inadequate is almost impossible to handle.

So no wonder people lash out, particularly if they hit the water just as a swan is passing. They've been cast adrift from the life-raft of 'the rules', but because they've always had it, they never even learnt to swim.

Singing the story

The other day I was commenting on someone's work, and found myself saying, ‘Women may be unreadable to men, but as a writer you have to convey that they could be read.’ Leaving aside the truth or falsity of the first half of that sentence, it still raises an interesting question about how you imply what you don't say outright. Poets assume that readers will unpack their poems (although I'm never sure if that's a safe assumption of the listeners who have to be such a large part of a poet's concern these days). But those of us who write prose fiction - most of all novels - have to assume that our words may only get one pass, as it were, from a reader.

The question's most acute when you have a narrator who's also a character in the novel. Even if they aren't technically unreliable they are, inevitably, subjective, with a partial (in both senses) view of the events they take part in. But even with a third-person narrative which could potentially be both objective and omniscient, the fun starts here. One of the things I keep finding myself saying to writers who've nailed the basics of the right word for the right place is that, ideally, every word should be doing not just the right job, but two right jobs. One is probably just naming a thing, joining a sentence, describing an action. With apologies for raising the bar just as they've cleared it, I say that that the second job is where the real writing starts.

Sarah ran for the bus and jumped on, is the the basic job done. But how do I write it? Even at the simple sensory and metaphorical level, there are so many possibilities. If I write that cold fingers of air seem to catch at Sarah’s arms and drag her backwards, it says something different – makes the reader feel Sarah’s experience differently – from if I write that the sea of pedestrians parts as she races along. If I describe how the red bus ahead of her flowers and flames against the grey towerblocks it’s different from if I write of the grubby, warm breath of the open doors into which she dives.

And that's before I've thought about the meaning of the action in the wider context of the novel. If I wanted to be satirical or comic I could describe Sarah’s run to set up a pratfall, or make charicatures of the lookers-on. If I wanted to be magical or poetic I could cast my mind loose and dream up a montage in heightened language of the fantastical characters past which she runs. If I wanted to be psychological I might make Sarah feel that she’s running away, and hear the doors crash shut behind her, cutting her off from her lover. If I wanted to be philosophical I might write it as part of a series of events exploring the idea of running away from things, as against standing your ground or fighting back or being seduced, and I'd use metaphors to match. And all of those could be seen and felt by Sarah, or I could write them so that there's a counterpoint between how she sees it, and how the reader does.

No, there are no rules, and much of what I seem to blog about is letting go of outcomes, circumventing your Inner Critic, allowing the intuitive to come forward, speak, make your work true to its self, and the best it can be. But what I've been talking about here is technique, pure and simple. It didn't take me long to come up with all those variations on a theme of Sarah getting on the bus. It's just practice, like practising scales and arpeggios till you can do them in all keys and at all speeds without even having to think about it. Then when it comes to the opera it'll be the story that you'll be singing, not the notes.

Demandingly 'wrong'-headed

I put on my flak jacket a couple of days ago, when someone on a forum started yet another thread about 'the rules'. (I'd post the link, but it was in the private part of WriteWords.)The gist of the question was: when, in learning to write, had each of us realised we were following... no, I won't say 'the rules', but established ideas of techniques that work? And in the discussion, someone posted what's apparently a Buddhist saying, that 'When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears.'

At school, and in most homes, and in most jobs, there's always a 'right' way to do things and the quicker you learn to do things 'right', the more impressed your parents and teachers are with you, the more ticks, the better the mark. There's a goal of rightness, at least implied if not stated, and you try to reach it. These days they call them learning outcomes, but it's fundamentally the same thing: goals, outcomes, products. But learning isn't as simple as that, and certainly no art can be, in that sense, right or wrong. So there can't be a right or a wrong way to do it. As I was trying to unpick in Messes, Clones and Plots like a W, what worries me about 'the rules' is that the very term implies the idea that you must learn them, in order to get your writing 'right'. And yet if you want to learn something you know nothing about, it's hard to see where else to start, other than with someone telling how to do it.

The answer, of course, is that (unless you're one of the not-rare-enough people who don't think having read a book or two is a necessary qualification for writing one) you don't know nothing about writing. You're just not aware of the body of knowledge you have, because it's built up in you by stealth. One of the most important moments in my learning about what the academics call pedagogy (only I don't because I can't pronounce it and it sounds silly) was when after twenty years of taking photographs quite seriously I did my first ever course. Suddenly I was offered a vocabulary, a structure for my intuitive knowledge: ways of thinking about what I'd always done. Yes, I was shown new things, helped towards better work. But at every turn, every week, I was mapping these new structures of ideas and techniques onto my instinctive, almost physical, certainly un-unalytical and un-analysed experience. I was ready, and the teacher appeared. And more important still was the fact that, when I was offered a guideline, a 'right' way, a rule if you like, instead of doing as I was told, I couldn't help but measure it against that experience, and accept, adapt or discard it accordingly.

Of course it's not as simple as that. With the rare exception of the farmer's child who's been driving tractors for years, learning to drive is a good example of having to learn a set of rules with little prior experience to map them on to. But driving is a very both-sides-of-the-brain activity, of the kind I was exploring in Rhyme and un-reason, and because you can only learn about driving by doing it, what you're told are the rules, and what you learn as you try to follow them, can't help but form a feedback loop, a virtuous (you hope) spiral of physical, intuitive experience and explicit knowledge.

So I don't think it's necessarily a mistake to start along the road to becoming a writer by signing up to a course. When it's well tutored, the usual structure of a series of workshops - critiquing writing done in class and in between - forms a very similar virtuous spiral. But I do think that it may not be the best way to start. Art is what you get when craft becomes the channel for an individual consciousness and personality, but it only comes about when that consciousness and personality can demand what they need of the craft. Which may well be the 'wrong' way, but if the first things you learnt about writing are not how to listen to that demandingly 'wrong'-headed voice, but how to get things 'right', then you may never hear it speak at all.

Rhyme and un-reason

Two of the very few poems I've written as an adult are sonnets. They're not good (none of my poetry is, and I know how much work it would be to make it better) but in working on them I discovered something I hadn't known about how writing happens. When you're writing anything creative, you have, by definition, to put words in an order they've never been put in before. But our sense of what words go well next to each other is mainly based on sense, on logic, on combinations of words we've heard before, and so getting beyond that, to wherever truly new things come from, is hard to do. 

One of the most interesting 'how to' books I've ever read about writing isn't about writing at all, it's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It introduced me to the whole notion that logical progression is only one way the brain can work, and when it comes to reproducing what we perceive, to producing things which are more than the sum of their parts, not always the most useful one. Betty Edwards maintains that it's our logical, left-brain, conceptual sense of how things 'ought' to be which hampers most of us in directly setting down lines which express what we do actually see. For example she gets her students to turn a portrait upside-down and then copy it, to circumvent their idea of how faces 'look'. I know many artists who look at their work in a mirror on the same principle: to see directly, intuitively, right-brainedly what's actually on the canvas.

A sonnet, I needn't tell any readers of this blog, is very closely defined. Meter and number of lines are both prescribed, though there are a few - very few - different rhyme schemes you're allowed. And, paradoxically, this strict, Rennaissance form, like other strict forms, continues to fascinate real poets (as well as the likes of me). I think that one reason is that strict forms can be very liberating. The thing about rhyme or any other restriction of rhythm or sound is that, like turning a portrait upside-down, it sets up a different search criterion for one's brain, a different kind of 'understanding' and not one that's based on the meaning of words. So in searching for the appropriate rhyme-sound (or alliteration, or dactyl, or any other aural element) our minds turn up all sorts of words that a logical search - as in a thesaurus, say, where logical connection is the whole point - would never have produced.

If you don't believe me, try dipping into a rhyming dictionary. Three syllables with the rhyme sound -EN, for example, gives you, among others: oxygen, halogen, prairie hen, Magdalen, cyclamen, specimen, partimen, gentlemen, poison pen, Saracen, mise en scène, denizen, citizen. I don't know about you, but already my mind is beginning to try fitting some of those together, and some very odd and interesting images are the result. Not, for me, a poem (though some of the lists have the magic of found poetry) but as a starter for a story, perhaps. Either way, I don't think reason would have come up with anything like the things that rhyme has.

Unspectacular decency

The Public Lending Right payments which have just been announced have made me think. If The Mathematics of Love alone can clock up that many loans for me in only eighteen months, how many books by how many authors are being borrowed by how many people nationwide? How many people have wanted to read a book, and gone and found it in a library, for free? How many have gone in to find a revision guide for their exam, and come out clutching a novel which will change their life? Or vice versa? Particularly touching, somehow, are the several hundred loans my PLR statement lists of the Large Print edition. PLR don't handle audio books, but I'd love to know about them, because then I could imagine more concretely that someone has sat in their car in a traffic jam, on the M3 or the M62 or on the Severn Bridge, and listened to Stephen and Anna speak. That's what drives us authors to write: knowing that our books are read, or listened to. A very badly-off friend apologised that she'd ordered The Mathematics of Love from the library, rather than buying a copy. I was being honest when I said that I don't care about sales, in that sense. I would far rather know that lots of people had read the book by whatever means; that it would sit on the library shelves for (hopefully) years to come; that I could imagine it going home with lots of people in an armful of books breathing that strange, unique, library smell.

It isn't, for me with a single new book, a vast sum. But for some authors PLR income can be a significant proportion of the whole. Expensive technical books, textbooks and self-help manuals, classic standard works on obscure and specialist subjects, and swathes and swathes of good honest fiction by little-known names can't easily command space on the painfully expensive shelves of your average high-street bookshop. Nor will the newspapers and magazines, always looking for new things, glance back at the older ones which have proved their worth over time. Nor will the ferocious accountants who loom over the trade publishers allow such books to be kept in print for the sake of so few sales per year. But those books keep being looked for, requested, borrowed, read, returned, and looked for again, year after year, and the income from PLR may be what keeps these authors in business to write books that, unarguably, people want to read.

But there's a wider point than keeping some excellent authors in business, and encouraging the rest of us, for whom writing can still feel a bit like singing our best, our most heartful poetry from the top of a mountain for only the four winds to hear. They're also about reminding the rest of the world that books aren't only about the latest mega-deal or highbrow-seeming prize, and that libraries aren't only about internet access and dodging the tramp snoozing in the corner.

The book side of libraries is constantly being nibbled away. Tim Coates is ex-Waterstones, and his blog is only one of the most sharp-eyed of the library campaigners. Susan Hill, too, has said her piece. Mind you, it's not necessarily the philistinism that the doom-and-gloom merchants of the right-wing press deplore that causes the demand for books to fall, if it does. These days, thank goodness, someone who wants to get a qualification or improve their prospects or enlarge their mind doesn't have their local library as their only hope. They're more likely to sign up for an access course at their local FE College, college library and all. And then there's the Net: I probably do about 75% of my in-depth, technical research for a novel without stirring from my chair. But libraries need to be THERE, and there with open shelves full of books: so often you don't know what you need, or what to search for. 'Access for all' only really works if it's truly open, needing the absolute minimum of confidence, prior knowledge, skill or education.

The PLR system isn't perfect, of course. If you regard it as a stand against the ruthless capitalism of the book market place, you'll be disappointed: the top earner was invariably Catherine Cookson, and is no doubt now Martina Cole (dead authors can't earn PLR), though the payout is capped, to leave more for the rest of us. Nor are the loan numbers perfectly accurate. They're based on data from a changing sample of 1,000 branches, carefully distributed across the eight regions, and multiplied up. The chief losers from this system are authors who have a strong but very local readership, if the handful of libraries where their books are most borrowed happen not to be in the sample at the moment.

But it's not only better than nothing, though it's that too. I don't know if our PLR was the first such system in the world, but I know it was pretty early. Certainly the UK used to have the highest number of libraries per capita in the world - maybe it still does. But to my mind the PLR system is symptomatic of the unspectacular, decent behaviour towards the needs and desires of the population at large, which is the mark of a civilised democracy.

Heavy engineering

In David Morley's review of Mimi Khalvati's new collection he quotes Theodore Roethke:

Form is not regarded as a neat mould to be filled, but rather as a sieve to catch certain kinds of material.

And though I'd never thought of it like that, and it's more obviously relevant to poetry, I was struck by how true this is. My Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory defines form in a literary work as ‘its shape and structure and the manner in which it is made.’ In poetry form shows up as the shape on the page and patterns within the sense and sound of the words. In prose fiction it's something a bit harder to spot.

I've had funny looks when I've said that in planning a novel it's thinking about form and structure that I really enjoy. If structure is the detail of which parts of the plot happen when and for how long, form is the bigger shape: how these things interplay with the style and substance of what you're writing. I think it's probably the thing readers are least aware of in a novel. When I'm working on a novel, the things readers notice - characters and events - sort of arrive, some from thin air, others from bouts of what I can best (if rather pretentiously) call guided meditation. They define what the novel is. But for me ‘how does this novel work?’ is the core of the problem that I'm setting myself, and it's solving that problem that is the process of writing a novel. Not, of course, that you know everything (or even all that much) about the characters and what they're going to do and experience. So, as Roethke puts it, it isn't that you decide on a form and then pour into it all those characters and events. What happens is that you need to work out a form - a structure, a style, an interplay of narrators and chapters - which will catch the right things: even things you don't yet know. And this kind of thinking is more active and less meditative than most of the rest of the early thinking. The damn thing has to work: the cogs must mesh, and the gears turn at all their different speeds, the beat of the different plot-engines must make a pleasing counterpoint and the chains of image run smoothly through it all, and all in a system that's no larger or more complicated than necessary.

So the moment when I draw up the big chart, with a row for every chapter and a column for every thread of the novel (which may mean six or seven) and start working out where everything needs to go, is the moment when I know that the novel will happen. And even though I do the whole thing in pencil, and much rubbing-out and re-writing goes on, I do my damnedest to get it right before I start Chapter One. Because though everything in the first draft of a novel is negotiable, every word can be changed and characters, voices and events can be re-written, if you get the structure wrong then re-doing the novel may mean rewriting it totally. Because if you've got the sieve wrong, to go back to Roethke's metaphor, you've been catching the wrong things, and you're going to have to re-weave that sieve, and only then set out to find the right ones.