This Itch of Writing

Better than Googling, any day

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you are, in a tiny sense, a public entity. This might sound ridiculous in a culture which has replaced gossiping about the neighbours - because we don't know them any more - with gossiping about Big Brother. And no time soon are you going to be mobbed by paparazzi, or have your bins rifled by the gutter press for receipts for things the government shouldn't have paid for, or know that every bullet the Taliban own will be aimed at your platoon now the world knows you're in Helmand.

Plenty of people have some kind of public existence, of course, if only enough to get them worried that a prospective employer might Google them and find not only the conferences they've addressed and the public bodies they sit on, but also their wickedly scurrilous blogging alter ego and the pictures of the children dressing the family dog up as Julian Clary. Maybe it's simply a measure of how very un-public indeed you can become when, thanks to the cost of childcare and the obsessive compulsive disorder known as being a writer, it's years since you had a proper job. For whatever reason, though, until 2006 the only people who had opinions about me were people I had actually met, and in return I had opinions about them: it was a two-way relationship.

So it's a small but recurring shock to be confronted with the fact that I and my work are out there, and not only is anyone in the world free to have an opinion of us, but I haven't the faintest idea who they are. Suddenly being known only goes one way: they in a sense 'know' me, without my having any communication with them. Sometimes it's nice, of course: I've had some wonderful emails through my website from people whom The Mathematics of Love spoke to in some particular way, and some old friends who wouldn't have got back in touch if they hadn't stumbled across me online. (There have been some oddities, too: why on earth should I sign someone's copy of The Origin of Species?). In fact, apart from the occasional nasty comment about my work deep in the blogosphere, I do realise that so far I've got no cause to object. It's simply that it's like standing out in the High Street after years of being ensconced invisibly under the duvet back home.

This thought's been prompted by the approaching date of the first reading that I've given in a while. (Monday 10th March, 8pm at The Stoke Newington Bookshop, London N16, if you're interested. How to get there is here. I'll be reading from The Mathematics of Love, and also giving A Secret Alchemy its first public outing.) I can see what I've said above sounds as if I hate doing readings but actually I love them: some wonderful writers find them terrifying, but for me it's definitely the good side of the public world. I like bookshops, for a start, and booky people: anyone who makes, buys, sells, reads, writes, edits, curates or librarians them is okay by me. And the Drama graduate in me is interested in the technical as well as the creative side of performing. But in the end it's that the communication travels both ways, instantly, that's the real pleasure. Normally writers don't see their words being heard, just know (you hope) that they are from the sales figures, the PLR returns, the LibraryThing listings, the Amazon rankings. (Well, what else do you think we do when we're procrastinating?). Again, it's a one-way thing: this is where readers leave their traces, but in the human sense they're a dead end.

So to stand up there and say what I think and project what I wrote and feel it in that instant reach an audience, know in that instant it's heard, is a joy. I hope you can come: it would be lovely to see you.

Bodies crying out

My new novel arrived today.

It fell in a lump into my mental lap, rather as I imagine telepathy would happen if it did, just as I was scooting round a particularly tricky little pair of mini-roundabouts by Brockley Station. (My fellow south east Londoners know exactly where I mean.) I was on my way to Goldsmiths to lead a seminar, and my students were very tolerant of how long it took me to wrench my mind away from the new novel towards John Donne and Allen Ginsburg.

Of course it's not really a hand-me-down from the Muse, though I do see why it's so often describe in those terms. I've been letting myself think about all the different bits properly but undirectedly, open-endedly, un-demandingly, in the gaps of the rest of life, for about six months now or even a year, ever since I began to see the light at the end of A Secret Alchemy. (Maybe when it comes to writing novels I'm just naturally adulterous.) Sometimes I've decided to think about it, even to sitting down with pen and paper for notes and diagrams, and sometimes the reverse happens: it decides to borrow my brain to work itself out. This can result in my buying all the wrong things in the supermarket, but is basically A Good Thing.

Whereas with The Mathematics of Love I had a longstanding character - Stephen - who needed to tell his story, and with A Secret Alchemy I have two real people whose story is irresistible, the new novel has come from something I want to explore... embody... anatomise. An idea at the core of humanness, which I want to gut. If that sounds a bit physical, maybe that's right: novels are physical things, or they are when I write them. They're about bodies: touches, looks, eyes and ears, wounds and scars, passionate sex and off-balance love, the electric charge across your skin when a particular person looks at you, the pain of an old battle injury which is also an unfathomable kind of guilt. 'Theme' is too abstract a word for fiction - it belongs to the absolute abstraction of music - and for some reason I'm allergic to using it about my writing. For me writing is all about embodying ideas in real, exact, detailed, particular existence. I find I think more in terms of not themes but threads: from dark to brilliant light, from smooth silk to lumpy twine, from coarse hemp to fine cotton to fragile spider's web. And there are other threads too, of plot, of voice, of 'now' and of 'then', of love and hate and indifference, of all the material things which embody so much more than material existence.

I've known the actors of my drama for a while, though I don't yet know them as what writers commonly call characters, and I've known which voices will tell their story and on what terms since Sunday: that's another thing which suddenly arrived after weeks of not-really-thinking about it. What came to me today is the basics of plot and structure: the mainspring which will power the interaction of events and relationships which is a novel. All I want to do now is submerge, to plan, to write the first sentence knowing the rest will follow.

But I can't. There's the commentary on A Secret Alchemy for my PhD to finish, manuscript reports to write, seminars to prepare, essays to mark, clothes to wash, children to feed, a Mother's Day card to buy. Until now, I could just let the new novel do as it wanted, think or be thought, speak or be silent. Now it's not silent, it's crying out.

Saving sanity and ignoring Caliban

Anyone who frequents writers' online forums know that the way they work varies widely, from relaxed gossip, rigorous critiquing, swapping information, answering cries for help on 12th century journey times and 21st century divorce laws, celebrating success and supporting disappointments, to sophisticated arguments about voice, structure, narrative technique, characterisation or the possibilities of second-person narrative.

One member - let's call her Calliope - of a big site which encompasses all these elements, received a private mail from the resident nasty piece of work - let's call him Caliban - bemoaning the fact that the site was no longer sufficiently 'serious', as witness a thread I'd started in the forum specifically dedicated to things not to do with writing. Calliope wasn't a good person to try this particular divisive effort on, as she's one of the most serious members, with a contract for a book critiqued on the site under her belt, an excellent agent and a bright-looking future. And since a really big booktrade prize win had been recently announced, and at least three members were in the process of being taken on by big agents, it would have been hard to persuade anyone that the site was descending into trivia. Nor was I exactly the best target for an accusation of lack of seriousness, perhaps. There wasn't so much as a ripple on the site: I think Caliban is losing his touch. Once upon a time he was much better at picking a correspondent who would be flattered at the confidence, a subject with some truth in it, and a target more likely to be upset.

But since I know of forums on other more volatile sites which have been nearly brought down by such tactics, it's made me realise that the writerly world would be much the poorer without the good ones. Yes, they get cliquey, yes, some are sadly lacking in discrimination and others in compassion. No, they won't get you a book deal, and no, they won't make you into a good or successful - let alone great - writer if you aren't built to be one anyway. But writing seriously - especially before you are published - not only demands isolation, but is in itself very isolating. Such sites are everything from a sanity-saver to a writing tutor to an agent-attractor. I remember someone starting a thread on WriteWords which asked members who in their normal lives understood their writing. The number of members who said 'no one' was frightening. From the friends who said you must hate them because you were finishing revisions instead of going down the pub, to the parents who told you you were wasting your time, so many members had stories not just of lack of understanding but of downright (if hidden) hostility. I know serious writing is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder which not everyone suffers from, but the only reason I can see for some such reactions is that many social groups find it deeply threatening when one of their number chooses do something - passionately, committedly - beyond their own narrow horizons. Perhaps Caliban, too, feels threatened by others' commitment and success.

There were touching stories too: partners who never read your fiction or anyone else's, but willingly supported you financially so you could write, and someone whose published book was the first book of any kind her father had read in twenty years. But there are some things - many things - that only writers want to talk about. Like what do you do if the only agent who wants to sign you after dozens of rejections thinks your book is chick lit when you though you were writing a searing indictment of modern urban society (or the other way round). Or whether the third round of revisions to your novel has made all the difference. Or the fact that true-born short fiction writers aren't just practising for the novel and won't be publishing 'a real book' any time soon. The publishing trade, which takes little account of how writers reach the point where their work is publishable, let alone published, scarcely knows most of these sites exist either. But they do. And they're very necessary: without them, there'd be less good writing to publish.

A Great Cathedral

In response to Tim Lott's lament in The Guardian that heterosexual love stories are no longer considered a properly literary and sufficiently substantial subject for a novel, even though they power much (most?) of the great fiction of the past, Susan Hill argues that our ordinary love lives are too prosaic, that these days writing about great love can't be done in a world with easy and blame-free divorce, and that it has to include writing about sex, which is impossible to do well. As a result, she says, we cannot write the sweeping narratives, the high drama and heartbreak that great love stories demand. (I did post a comment on her blog, but it seems to have got lost in the ether).

I do agree that the lack of impediments to our modern western sex lives can make writing a 'big' modern love story very difficult. Where are the tensions, the conflicts, that storytelling can't do without? How do you construct David Isaak's crucible? (Part Two is here, and together they show why David's blog is one of my absolute favourites.) A major theme of The Mathematics of Love is transgressive love, but I had to go a long way in the modern strand to find a relationship as transgressive for us as the 1820 relationship of a middle-class unmarried man and woman, both of age and in their right minds, was for their contemporaries. So I think Susan's right that that the great love stories of today are likely to be found in milieux where impediments are still built in: non-Western countries and social groups, gay and lesbian relationships in a straight world, and I would add historical worlds. You can even build in your own impediments if you build your own world, though sci-fi writers, too, have problems convincing the literati that what they do has literary value.

There is also the pernicious but common attitude, which always seems rather adolescent to me, that the grim and ghastly is cooler, more profound, more literary, than the beautiful or the transcendently joyful. (Except beautiful women, who populate literary fiction written by men with unlikely frequency). Tim Lott quotes Richard Curtis, and though I do actually find some of Curtis's work more sentimental than I care for, he has a very good point:

If you write a story about a soldier going awol and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. If you write about people falling in love, which happens a million times a day ... you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.

And I treasure The Times review of The Mathematics of Love so much because Sarah Vine understood what I was trying to do:

there is suffering, violent and disturbing portraits of war and of personal loss; but equally extreme moments of joy and human understanding. At its core are the emotions that most shape us — love and loss... Everyone is, at the core, vulnerable, their happiness bittersweet and fleeting but nevertheless priceless.

So I would never say that you can't write a great love story for present-day western characters: in fact I'd say I agree that we should reclaim the territory. And if writing love must involve writing sex, why is that a problem? The same writerly solutions are available to us for sex as they are for anything else, though the pitfalls are larger and the path between them narrower. For one thing, who says that the apparently prosaic can't be made heroic, romantic, tragic? Fundamentally, if our modern lives, to us, look most of the time like a modern city in broad daylight - all neon signs, ersatz coffee and chewing-gum stuck to the pavement - who says we need to write them like that? Have most of us not not known joy and sorrow and terrible grief, not looked up in awe at the gleam and shadow of a great cathedral or soaring skyscraper at night, not stood on a hill-top and wept or laughed or simply felt our own bodily boundaries thin almost to nothing in this universe?

Not just singing into the wind

In reply to a comment, on the Writer's Workshop blog Toasting Napoleon, Harry Bingham talks about how the financial insecurity of being a writer can make one seem obsessed with money. Having just had a particularly acute cashflow crisis myself, I know exactly what he means. And yet there are thousands of ways of earning a living that are more secure, and usually more lucrative. Clearly we don't do it for the money in the accepted sense, nor do we have the relative security of equally low-paid but enjoyable/interesting employment, so why do we persist? If the poets and UK short story writers want to, they can look away now while we novelists try to unpick what, exactly, is the relationship between what we do and how, if at all, we make our living doing it. Because, from the beginning, it's not straightforward.

On one hand, there's the undeniable fact that the average advance for a first novel, from a major publisher, is about £8,000, gross, for a book that might have taken two or three years to write. Bear in mind that the cheques will appear (minus agent's commission, and before tax) in up to four instalments, from signing the contract to the paperback being published, over perhaps two more years.

On the other hand, there's the famous/notorious six figure advance. Never mind that such a headline figure will divide up, similarly, to anything from the minimum wage to very serious money. (Guess which is more likely?) But people still read it and think that all they need to do is live off their redundancy money for six months while they sit down and scribble. Never mind that such deals are increasingly rare. Never mind that the publicity that a mega-deal generates in the trade may later be negated by the news that the book hasn't come near earning out the advance, an event which may strangle the author's career at birth.

Even once they're established and can reasonably hope (it's never a certainty) that they'll be able to sell the next book, it's only a handful of writers in the entire country who can earn a living purely by writing exactly what they chose to write, without teaching/ghosting/journalisming or having some other source of income (spouse? lodgers? smallholding?) which still leaves time to write (well, maybe not the smallholding). Virginia Woolf's £500 a year has inflated, but the need for it hasn't gone away. Poets and short story writers (okay, you might want to come back in, now) will never pay the rent from what they earn, and, actually, most novelists won't either. And still we write.

And after we've written we (or our agents) hustle and bargain for the money that most of us would swear we don't do it for. Are we being hypocritical? I don't think so. When I was offered the deal for The Mathematics of Love and what's turned out to be A Secret Alchemy, my first thought was that - Wow! - a major publisher believed they could sell enough of my book to justify such a deal. And though I was also able to crumple up the Situations Vacant page I was studying when the phone rang, the joy of a deal - of being paid for your writing - isn't really the money in the bank, though that may lift a huge cloud from your life, and be the key to other writing-related work. Fundamentally it's what the money says, not the cash itself: that tens of thousands of people - maybe one day hundreds of thousands of people - will soon hear what you're saying. No longer are you standing on a hill-top singing into the wind. The audience is out there.

Polishing fractals

I heard Richard Sennett talking on Front Row about his book The Craftsman, and rejoiced (even as my feminism was annoyed by the title, though it's hard to think of an alternative). I confess I haven't read it yet, but he was so cogent in the interview that it's now high on my must-read list. The point he's making is that what we think of as 'craft' - an old-fashioned virtue suitable for gnarled old blacksmiths and batty amateurs with time on their hands - should actually be seen as a thoroughly modern skill-set for modern life at work and at home. Not many people reading this blog would disagree that craft is important, but they might be surprised to discover that one of Sennett's prime examples is software developers. And yet it makes sense. Understanding the materials of your trade, using your tools, exercising your skills, are deeply satisfying activities, and seeking that satisfaction is one of the most basic human motivations, whether you're working on a flat screen or a cave wall.

The beginning of good craft, Sennett says, is problem finding: if you find the right problem, and ask the right questions about its nature, including a willingness to think laterally, then the right solution comes about. My own writing is always kicked off by problem finding in the form of a question, or rather two questions, one about characters ('Why is she standing in this house?') and one about technique ('Can I really pull off a three-way parallel narrative?'). But, more generally, for years I've maintained that good writing is all about getting your process right, not about setting out to produce a particular product. In other words, if you explore and establish how to make your writing happen, the words which end up on the page will be the right words. Of course you then revise - hone, polish, trim, re-shape, polish again - but, like a fractal diagram, each of these little craftsmanly actions is, in itself, a mini version of the problem-finding process. I could argue (though I'm not sure I am arguing) that there's no difference, qualitatively, between getting a sentence right and getting a novel right, even though there clearly is a quantitative difference.

I think that's also what marks the divide for writers between feedback which helps and feedback which doesn't, or even hinders: good feedback helps you towards that problem finding ('What were you trying to do?' 'I didn't believe in her doing that.') whereas feedback that's unhelpful imposes external judgements ('Too long for the genre.' 'Parallel narratives don't work'.) and leaves you to work out what the real problem is. Indeed, as well as technique, one of the craftsmanly skills all writers need is to be able to judge feedback, and decide what to do with it.   

Not Valentine's Day

I hate Valentine's Day. I think there are about three years in your life when it's wonderful, and the other eighty-seven are varying kinds of horrid. But it's hard to avoid all the theme-ery that goes on everywhere else, and it's got me thinking about romantic love in fiction. I'd be willing to bet that it powers more novels than any other human emotion. Even LeCarré is always, fundamentally, about love betrayed. But as in so many other novels/movies/songs the actual substance of the emotion is taken for granted: the story is about what love (or lack of it) makes the characters do. For example, I loved Rose Tremain's Music and Silence for a hundred reasons: the extraordinary characters, the wonderfully authentic-seeming setting and voice, her sensitivity to human relationships. The only thing lacking was that the nature of the central love between two nice young people, touching though it was, was in a sense a given. That's what boys and girls do, after all. But as anyone knows who's fallen head-over-heels in love in a situation where they can't just go with the flow, and when they must and can try to understand what that love's made up of, it isn't as simple as that.

On forums and blogs over the last couple of days I've been intrigued to watch Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night surfacing again and again, among much more exalted novels, as one of the thinking woman writer's favourite love stories. It's one of mine, too, and and I think it's because the analytical intelligence and ear for emotional nuance that Sayers uses in plotting her detective stories is here also applied to love: Harriet's resistance to Peter and its gradual eroding is explored step-by-step, until not only do we feel the ending is earned, but we actually know what their love is made up of, what it's built from: not only can we see the house, but we can feel the weight and balance of the structure, and touch the very roughness of the bricks.

It's the appeal, too, of the Beatrice-and-Benedict merry war kind of love story. At its best (as seen in Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy or, more exaltedly, Pride and Prejudice) the couple have to fight their way towards an understanding. It's in working out why a car engine or a computer program won't do what you want, that you learn most about it, and in the same way we learn most about those two people and how they fit together as they struggle towards and against that fit. Which isn't to say that no other kind of falling-in-love will do, only that it, too, needs something to show us how it works. Am I the only reader to find that the real emotional strength of Love in the Time of Cholera wasn't in the long-thwarted teenage passion's final consummation, but in the portrait of a marriage, with all its hesitations and reticences and enduring, un-ideal love?

I could go on to describe how the love stories operate in The Mathematics of Love, but I won't, except to say that my original idea for it was two stories where the form and structure of the love that builds in each one are clearly opposites. Unlike many of the ideas which I start a novel with, this one endured.

Looking for the hammer marks

So if there's a difference between scientific truth and artistic truth, I was thinking yesterday, gazing out over an audience which included three Fellows of the Royal Society, is there also a difference between scientific (one might more broadly say 'academic') creativity and artistic creativity? No one who's read any good popular science, or something like Simon Singh's extraordinarily lucid account of the detective story that led to the proving of Fermat's Last Theorem, could doubt that creative thought - inspiration, if you like - is very much part of what makes science happen. (Perspiration too, of course, but then that's equally true of art.) The great moments come when weeks and months and years of observation and analysis suddenly power a spark that jumps a gap. Everything comes together, you 'see' something that you never saw before: a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. That spark is surely the same kind of thing as the spark I feel when I 'see' how my story must end, or 'hear' my opening sentence.

But I think there is a difference, and at the risk of sounding frivolous, it's embodied in the footnotes. (And don't tell me that T S Eliot added footnotes to The Wasteland, though he did. Some of them are deliberately misleading). The purpose of footnotes is to show where everything you're saying came from: the only things you don't footnote - give a reference for - are those things you observed or deduced yourself. Ideally, anyone reading your Variorum edition of the works of John Donne, or a paper on the uses of parasitic flowering plants, should be able to follow every step of your argument, untwisting the rope you've made, determining the origin and strength of every strand, following everything you've used from elsewhere back to its origins. And so however glittering the conclusion, however coherent and complete the shape that's made, if you get up close to an academic work you must always be able to see the hammer-marks, where the silver was beaten out to shape. It's an analytical creativity, if you like: the origins of the spark, and the nature of the spark itself, are always known and measurable.

Which isn't to say that in painting you should never be able to see the brushstrokes, any more than in writing you should never be aware of the words themselves building the story or the poem. But it seems to me that if an audience spends the two hours' traffic of the stage wondering whether the actor playing Romeo has ever actually taken poison, or a reader is more worried about whether I've used the right kind of Latin Mass in A Secret Alchemy than whether it'll all be all right in the end, then the creative event - the joint endeavour of artist and audience - has failed. Which isn't to say that we should never read or look at a picture analytically: there are great riches to be had in doing so. But, ultimately, even those riches have the same, synthesising purpose: that we feel still more the glittering whole without necessarily knowing or caring how it was hammered into shape. Whereas the academic/scientific endeavour is an analytical creativity, art is a synthetic creativity, in the true meaning of the word: the product of synthesis, of a bringing together: where it came from is not the point.

The golden sovereign

I've been delighted by an exasperated quotation from the poet Frances Cornford, describing her family's habit of discussing everything, even personal matters, in 'a thoroughly weighing Darwinian manner' which the family always assumed would, as the artist Gwen Raverat's biographer Frances Spalding puts it, 'inevitably arrive at an authoritative truth.' 'But the truth of art isn't the same kind of truth, as Gwen and Frances knew better than most,' I found myself writing. 'And there's always a risk that one's more a-rational, intuitive, un-logical creative processes are broken on the wheel of rational analysis and ruthlessly reasonable thought.'

And then, my paper for Darwin Day written, I retired to the bath with a TLS that I've somehow overlooked in the chaos of the last couple of weeks. I love the TLS, though I quite see why it infuriates or bores many, and despite the fact that since they integrated the online archive search with the main Times one it's all but useless. I don't read the fiction reviews (I rarely read fiction reviews anywhere) but the rest of the paper is my liberal education. Never mind Rough Guides and Very Short Introductions, admirable though both series are: one of the best ways to be introduced to a subject of which you know nothing is a really good, long review of a learned book by a learned writer. The philosophy reviews are the only ones I often find too technical, but this one was a cracker. In a review of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which I can't post a link to because the damn Search won't find it, Chritopher J. Insole says, 'Telling the story is responsive to truth, but it also creates truth.'

He's talking about our human understanding of human consciousness, but he might just as well be talking about art. Yes, I think there is such a thing as 'artistic truth', though it may be different from factual truth, and not even measurable by the same criteria. It's an argument that can slide into woolly-minded soppiness, too, just as the most mechanical rationalism can slide into an equally unthinking inhumanity. But what he's also saying is that the two things - the truth that already exists, and the truth that human consciousness makes of it - are two sides of the same coin. If you believe, as I do, that art is the ultimate expression of human consciousness, then 'artistic truth' - our response to truth that then creates truth - isn't just an irritatingly imprecise term of approval, it's the sovereign, the golden sovereign, of our human existence.

Jumping the gap

I was startled, and slightly dismayed, to see that my normal 'Hm, must be about time for another blog post' reflex hasn't kicked in on time: it's been a longer gap since my last than I meant. Normally another idea starts to knock on the door quite soon, sparked by something that happens, someone else's blog, some conversation I've had. Maybe it was partly absorbed by putting some thoughts together on internet reviewing for Vulpes Libris. Maybe it was the fact that Wednesday evening, when it was already rather overdue, was very nicely taken up with a writing friend and a bottle of wine instead.

And now I'm here, I can't think of anything to post. I was about to write maybe it's because I've just come back from a dance class and I'd rather be in a hot bath, and now I've suddenly thought, yes, it is to do with the dance class.

You see, I've been thinking in words all day: finishing dealing with the copy-edit of A Secret Alchemy, writing my talk for Darwin Day and half a dozen other jobs. All of those generated little sparks, little ideas and grumbles and insights about writing, but no chance to develop them. And then a bite to eat, and off to dance. But dancing, I find, like horseriding, just isn't a word business at all. It's partly that it's all-absorbingly physical: by comparison writing must be the least physical art, just as the physical nature of a book is unimportant compared to the physical nature of a painting or a symphony. And the more directly I'm connecting the music and the space when I'm dancing - the more simultaneously I experience them both - the less my sequential, language-brain gets involved. When the class ended I had no words in me, and was grateful to get back in the car and go home without saying much to anyone.

It's good for us to be reminded that there are some things words don't do. Were I to try to convey what that hour and a half felt like, I could, of course: that's what writers do. But it would be a process of translation, finding verbal equivalents for what happened, and the reader would have to translate those words onwards, into their own body-memory of rhythm and movement in time, in space. And yet words on the page, which have so little body themselves, so little sensory existence, can carry that memory from my body to someone else's, jumping the un-measured and un-measurable gap between us like an electric charge, or a magic spell.