This Itch of Writing

Becoming a walker

I was just racking my brains for something interesting to post last night, when the rain stopped. So I went out for a walk instead. It had been one of those dull days in all senses - hence the lack of bloggy inspiration - much taken up with post offices, photocopiers, supermarkets and misbehaving computers. So even though it was dark by then, and still damp, and there was only time for a quick loop of one of my usual walks where the terrain and the timing are completely familiar, it was good to get out with no more paraphernalia than a house key and a fiver in my pocket.

Sometimes, on such a duty walk, I take with me something to think about, (similarly my father used to take a couple of Times crossword clues in his head to work on) but I had no particular knot to unpick last night. So I was striding along, not deliberately thinking about anything, when I remembered something in Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer, still the classic how-to-write book and to my mind one of the few worth taking to heart. She tells a story from when she was teaching creative writing at night school in New York in the 1930s. One of Brande's students was a single parent with several children and absolutely no money. Her life was incredibly hard, it was terribly difficult for her to find the time and the energy to write, but the class was the one thing she did for herself. And then good fortune came to this woman: she married again and had plenty of time and money. 'But when will I do my thinking,' she said, 'now I've got nothing to scrub?'

Brande's book, if you haven't come across it (or even if you have) isn't about how to shape your plot or character, or pick the right word or the lucrative market, let alone get an agent or a deal. It's about, literally, becoming a writer: how you open the trap doors in yourself that are normally kept locked by years of conditioning or lack of confidence, by a misplaced puritanism or a ferocious Inner Critic. Then, through those trap doors will come... whatever comes. That's frightening stuff, but the moment when you stare at the page and realise you don't know where those words came from is the moment you become a writer.

Rhythm, Brande suggests, is one of the things which unlocks those doors, whether you find it in scrubbing a floor or swimming ten lengths. Walking is one of the most fundamental rhythms of all and one of the easiest to make happen. Trainers, jacket, and you're off. Even before the exercise endorphins kick in my mind is slipping loose from its moorings, floating off, jumping the tracks, going off-piste...

And a last thought: isn't it interesting that the metaphors that occurred to me for that sensation are all about the physical experience of travelling? To go on a journey is often used as a metaphor for inner, emotional and spiritual change, but the word also implies a destination and perhaps a route, even if it's a hazy one. I think I've used the metaphor before on here that most closely describes how writing novels feels to me: like making for a mountain top I can see, but by way of a whole landscape of sunken lanes, crossroads, fords and even villages that I can't. Now, where did I put my walking boots?

That's it, almost certainly

So that's it, almost certainly: I've crawled through the proofs of A Secret Alchemy, finding every last misplaced comma, although it's also gone to a professional proofreader; I've picked up a couple of little anomalies that somehow between us we've all managed to miss; I've seen for the first time how the changes I made at the copy-editing stage integrate when I read it straight through; I've to-ed and fro-ed quadruple-checking the days of the week for one strand, and in another I've realised I've married the Duke of Buckingham to the wrong Woodville sister. The last real job is done, and the beast is face-down on my desk, waiting to go back to Headline, special delivery.

All being well, that's the end of my dealings with the actual words of A Secret Alchemy. From now on I'll be reading them aloud, discussing them, talking to people who've read them, nervously scanning reviews about them, but I won't be involved with them in the way that you are when you're writing. With a whimper (all those toings and froings) and something of a bang (it's a long time since I read it straight through, and d'you know, I really think it works), it has become a separate entity.

I'm glad. There isn't suddenly a book-shaped hole in my life as there is when you finish the real, mad, obsessive writing of a novel, and move onto the editorial stage. Rather, for some months now I've just wanted it to get out there, to be published, to free me to start the new novel. A Secret Alchemy hasn't been the easiest of novels to write - sometimes I wish that the thing that makes me want to write a book wasn't a deep unease about whether I can pull it off or not - and it's time I moved on.

But as all one's novels are, this one was written in - I could even say written by - a particular stage of my life. What's ended up in the book, and what was in there but got cut in revising, is nothing that anyone else would recognise as autobiographical, but how it is on the page is how I once was. That's the oddity: it's as if we co-existed for a while, but soon our existences will separate. And so, in stuffing a few hundred photocopied pages into a jiffy bag and going down to the post office, I'm saying goodbye to a part of my life. As grown-up, photographer Anna puts it at the beginning of The Mathematics of Love:

It was then - that moment - that the shutter opened, and snatched a scatter of the light and dark, throwing it on to this piece of glass, fixing the sun and shadow of those few seconds for ever. And then the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and to other times.

Another, different voice

You may remember a while ago that I posted a piece, Messes, Clones and Plots like a W, about why I think it's so important to understand technical things about how writing works, to work hard on how you understand them and how you put them into practice, but not to allow them to become rules to be 'kept' or 'broken'. In writing there are no rules, except possibly the one about starting at the top left-hand corner of the page, but only different ways to write different things, some of which work better than others. To refuse the concept of rules doesn't mean abandoning all judgement or discussion of good and bad writing, just making it much more nuanced, and so much more useful.

When she's not writing novels about politics (More Than Love Letters) and campuses (Hearts and Minds), with a warm heart and a satirical pen, Rosy Thornton is a law lecturer. She posted this in the private members' section of WriteWords, and I think it's the most interesting thing I've read in ages about the whole thorny question of 'the rules', and why they seem so alien to some, and so comfortable to others. You have to start by understanding something that she posted later in the discussion:

The anti-essentialist argument [that not all women - or men - are the same] is a very handy one for ignoring the female perspective (or the black perspective or any other perspective outside the domiannt discourse). Well, the point is not that all men think like x or all women think like y. But that - statistically and observably and demonstrably, according to psychologists and anthropologists and others who have studied it - women as a group think differently from men."

Having cleared that up, here's Rosy's piece:

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"If I were blogging, I would head it: ARE THE CW RULES GENDERED?

Time and again I find myself balking at the CW ‘rules’ – both the individual rules themselves and also, possibly, the very notion of there being any rules. But I haven’t ever really thought about why that might be. But here’s a possible theory. It begins with a diversion, so please bear with me.

In the rest of my life I spend a lot of time dealing with rules, because I teach Law, and Law is essentially a set of rules. I also teach Women and Law, in which students are encouraged to challenge the rules from a gender perspective: both the content of the specific rules, which have historically operated to the disadvantage of women in many respects, and the very idea of the rules themselves, in the way they are currently conceptualised. The common law works from the premise that situations (real life, complex, messy situations) can be distilled down into simple, sharp-edged paradigms, from which lawyers can reason and according to which future cases can be decided, and rules can evolve. Feminists have rejected this mode of reasoning – epitomised by legal rules but found throughout the social sciences – as ‘male’.

American psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote a book in the 1980s called In a Different Voice. Her thesis is that the two genders think in wholly different ways – something I have to say that rings true with all my own lived experience. Gilligan interviewed children in the schoolyard. She asked them all the question, ‘Would it be justified to steal bread if your children were starving?’ Of the boys, some said yes and some said no. But the majority of the girls said neither. Instead, they worked their way round the question. They said, ‘Surely there must be another way’ and ‘what if you were to explain to the baker about the starving children…?’ In other words they refused to accept such a simplified, black-and-white scenario as being true to life – the exact kind of scenario which is the daily tool of legal reasoning and the basis of all legal rules. Rather, they viewed things as contingent, as muddy, as nuanced, as negotiable.

So, if women think and reason differently from men, do they also speak and write differently? Do they have, quite literally, ‘a different voice’? And if so, what impact does that have on how women write – or how anyone writes if they are trying to get inside a female character and to explore the female experience?

This brings me to the point: the so-called CW rules. Let’s think about some of them. We are told, for example, that modal constructions are to be avoided. Don’t say ‘she could see the mountains, say ‘she saw the mountains. It is stronger writing, we are told – more direct, more pacy, more powerful – ‘better’ writing. Similarly we are told, don’t use lots of subordinate clauses, especially those beginning with a present participle – ‘ing’ clauses are weak and therefore bad. Stick as often as possible to the finite verb. Not ‘gazing out of the window, she saw the mountains’ but ‘she gazed from the window; she saw the mountains.’ But what if rather than strength and directness what you want to achieve is something softer – dare I say, more ‘feminine’? Maybe if I’m writing in a female voice (female character, and first person or close-in third) then my writing patterns should mirror the way a women thinks, the way she experiences the world – which is often (in my experience) packed full of contingency and uncertainty and tentativity and conditionality.

More fundamentally, what about the ‘rule’ that says we should pare down, write sparely, make sure that every word is necessary, every word is doing a job. Why? Research shows that over the course of a day women speak many, many more words, on average, than men. Surely ‘not wasting words’ is a very male ideal? I know that I talk nineteen to the dozen for large parts of the day. I know, for example, that when teaching, sometimes if I say the same thing three times over in different ways, it gives people more chance to grasp what I mean. Effective communication can be effusive, it can be sprawling, it can be full of doubt and wondering and even contradiction, and out of the morass emerges understanding - and perhaps it might even be a more nuanced understanding, a warmer and more humane one, than the one which emerges from a fewer, and superficially clearer, set of words.

That’s what I reckon, anyway. Basically: we women are wafflers, so waffling reflects our lives and our voice.

Er, that was it, really."
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William & Mary will have to wait

This morning I got up earlier than I consider altogether decent for a Saturday morning, in order to drive to Hampton Court to do some research. It was cold and grey, with dull light and a nasty east wind, and there was scarcely anyone about except for security people with their coats buttoned up to their chins and an air of bracing themselves for the day as much as the weather. I found my way through arches and past gates as instructed, collected my pass, and trudged past the backs of low buildings - storehouses, offices, goods yards and so on - and through the gardens. Under not-yet-leafed trees what must have been spectacular carpets of daffodils are brown and shrivelled now: between them a few bluebells are showing. Seemingly miles away, and far above our heads, the roof of the Tudor hall and the chimneys and pinnacles of the great gateways are elaborate and remote: an untidy accumulation of Wolsey's blood-coloured grandeur, staring down everyone who approaches. I could smell the woodsmoke where they were lighting the fires in Henry VIII's kitchens. It began to rain.

Through a door in a wall, and round a corner and a couple of centuries, the long, long William & Mary front stretches away. The cream-coloured pillars and windows and even the clipped baytrees are as regular as a regiment, eyes fixed on the prospect across the formal garden. It must often have been as cold and grey for them on ordinary days: not rich or sunlit or exciting, just working days. I turned under a portico, beyond which in a courtyard a fountain was being thrown about by the wind, so that the noise echoed around among the pillars while I looked for the right door. It was tucked in a corner and I knocked, bare knuckles on old, hard wood. Of course: how else could I summon the inhabitants of a place like this?

Hampton Court has two faces, their backs joined but their gaze in opposite directions. I love the place, but today this doubleness of aspect and character was confusing. The glamour and violence of Elysabeth and Antony's world in A Secret Alchemy is not distant in time or nature from Henry's, and that's where I should be, that's the world I've lived in for so long. But the clean, clear rhythm of Wren's palace speaks to me of the world I want to enter: the ordering of science, the balance and elegance of form, the confidence of reason. It's not as simple as that, of course. The late fifteenth century saw the beginnings of humanism, of scientific enquiry, of classical scholarship and modern economics: you can read their words, and understand. The late seventeenth century was still a land of witch-hunts, starvation, heresy and violence, and they're so often still blind to what we can see so clearly. But each world for me has its own particular texture of smell and colour and sound: music, too, and a certain feeling on the skin.

But I can't live in two places at once. Treading along the thick, shifting gravel of the paths I felt unsteady, unreal, as you do on a long journey, suspended between two places which hold two separate meanings. No, I can't work if I have to gaze in two opposite directions. Much of me wants to: in many ways I've cast off from Here - A Secret Alchemy - and want to get There and settle down. But there's a lot to do still, Here, and I want to do it properly, because I've lived here too long to ride off without a backward glance. William and Mary will have to wait.

Not exactly simple

The proofs of A Secret Alchemy have arrived but, come hell or high water, Thursday is PhD day so I haven't looked at them properly yet. It will be interesting to go through them, because it must be a couple of months since I've looked at the actual text, which is probably the longest gap since I started writing it. For the commentary on it that I'm writing for my PhD, I'm in the odd position of noticing things as a student of literature that I never noticed when I was writing it. But for proof checking I need a completely different mindset: a cold, uninvolved eye that notices typos (increasingly rare thanks to spell-checkers), but also a mind making slightly more sense of it all, so that I see literals (not rare at all because spell-checkers are blind to homophones and textual idiocies) and slips of typography - the italics that bleed on even when the quoted letter is done, the missing squiggle between two voices - that only I will recognise. Now that teaching and marking at Goldsmiths is done with, it's all less panic-stricken, but I still found myself noticing with slightly wary interest just how many different elements make up a week of the writing life:

• sandwich lunch tomorrow to advise aspiring-writer-friend of acquaintance
• giving back essays with appropriate helpful (if also admonitory) comments
• Phd commentary - another 2,000 words today about parallel narrative in A Secret Alchemy
• checking proofs of A Secret Alchemy - a day's work at least
• reading the current research book for the new, nameless novel - not much more to read
• a flurry of emails about the design of the cover for A Secret Alchemy, including me digging out and sending some links to images Headline and the designer (the same as for The Mathematics of Love - hooray!) might not have already
• reading fiction for the Phd commentary: at the moment According to Queenie by Beryl Bainbridge, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes and The Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth
• researching lit. crit. books for the issues I want to discuss in the PhD commentary. Anyone know if there's any discussion of parallel narrative as a form, or shall I have to plough my way through thousands of irrelevant papers about books which happen to have parallel narratives, in search of the odd paragraph or sentence?
• ditto historical fiction which includes real historical characters
• returning some shockingly overdue books which were research for the new novel to the Goldsmiths library and paying the fine
• going to the London Library to borrow the same and some others because they don't charge fines and have a far bigger collection
• resisting the super-tempting next research book for the new novel
• thinking hard about whether to apply for the vacancy the Open University has announced for online lecturers in creative writing: would it be valuable experience and money, or The Last Straw?
• find scissors to cut a non-fiction review out of the TLS which is relevant to the new novel and put cutting in that folder
• obsessive checking of email to see if the final cover's for A Secret Alchemy has come through
• obsessive checking of email to see if my US editor has sent the notes she's working on
• obsessive checking of email to see if Radio Four producer has sent list of topics we discussed for short programme
• fossicking with PayPal because they've demanded half a dozen kinds of authentication to comply (they say) with money laundering regulations. I only set the darned thing up because it seemed the best way of dealing with payments for editorial reports. I wish I hadn't bothered but stuck to cheques instead
• suppressing ideas (prompted by fellow writer's agonies over Second Novel Syndrome) about the book on creative writing which I want to write
• ditto the book on historical fiction I want to write
• ditto the panic that after the new novel, I might never have another novel to write again. I know perfectly well that as soon as I enter the doldrums of that one - about half-way into the first draft - something new and sparkly and much more fun will begin to clamour. But at the moment it's a blank
• writing another blog post

And that's before I've done the laundry, cooked the supper, gone to the supermarket, checked if it's true that the car needs to have its MOT done, acknowledged the children's existence, and ignored the fact that the house has subsidence and the lawn needs mowing.

No, I'm not complaining. It was much less fun being unpublished. But it's not exactly simple either.

Feedback loops are fine, as long as I still have a corkscrew

Last night I had dinner with my American editor, who's over for the London Book Fair. In the last two years or more we've spoken on the phone and done lots of emailing, but I've never actually met her in person before. We had a really meaty conversation about A Secret Alchemy and all sorts of other writing things, as well as life and the world in general. I only hope I'm that compos mentis when I'm that jetlagged. And then today a friend said that their agent had suggested they meet up for a drink to discuss the new novel, although it's a bit of a trek for her to get to the agency offices. Was it worth it, my friend was wondering; could it not be sorted out by email or on the phone?

It's true that if what's being exchanged is notes for revision or a list of copy-editorial points, email is great: you can print it off and work through it methodically. And if there are certain, fairly self-contained things that need discussing, then the phone is fine, though satellite delay doesn't help and nor do time differences: my US editor's brisk mid-afternoon is my nearly-bedtime. But when you meet face-to-face there's something more going on, and I think it's related to another conversation I had recently, about how characters evolve.

Like so many discussions about writing it started start with a binary question: do you plan your characters, or do you let them happen?  Most of us were trying to pin down how you start a character (or a theme, or a plot) and then you realise there's something emerging you hadn't planned for: the character dodges being honest, a series of lost children emerges, you realise it won't work for them to drive straight from A to Q. So you start working with the lies, the orphans, the stop at F. In revision you go back to the beginning and find some inklings of these and make more of them, and do some research, and spot something...

That's why there's never a simple answer to so many of the 'Do you do X or Y?' kind of question about writing. Plot or go with the flow? Research before or after? Let your characters choose or make them behave? Even 'Tea or Coffee?' will depend on how I'm feeling about the book, and then it's just possible that how much caffeine there is in my system will affect how I write the next scene. Fundamentally these things aren't binary in the way the questions suggest. Yes, you have to start somewhere, but that somewhere is a sometimes arbitrary point on what's essentially a feedback loop: a dynamic system where any change changes other things, and they then change the original again.

So, too, with talking to editors. What's missing when you're not face-to-face is the full dynamics of that feedback loop. There is more information to-ing and fro-ing when you meet in person: what they say is conditioned by what your face shows; you say things in the pauses while the menus arrive which you'd never say on the phone because there are no natural pauses on the phone; what examples they pick and what you covertly think of them is affected by which books they have in their office that day; your long-term future as a team may be as much by controlled by what else you chat about when the editorial conversation's done but you're only half-way through the main course.

This is quite frightening. Driven as we are by the idea that somewhere out there or in our heads is the right word, the way it needs to be, the best book, it's challenging to think that on another day or another year we might write this same book a different way, to the point where it's a different book. But that's just fine, because we're humans and human existence is a dynamic system, so how could it be otherwise? As with Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, maybe somewhere in the ether is a parallel universe where all those books we didn't quite write exist. Maybe. Meanwhile, there are of course binary questions which are absolutely vital. Red or White?

Worth doing badly

One of the stranger things about the photography course I did recently is that we were working in landscapes that our tutors know intimately, and have been photographing for years. That's a huge advantage to us: with only two days, they could take us to places that they knew would prove fruitful to us amateurs in the time available, and then when the weather changed and the light with it, they could turn round and take us somewhere else.

But it did mean that I was always aware that whatever elements I was trying to make into a photograph, they'd seen and known and made a better photograph with already. So what? We weren't trying to be Ansel Adams or Joe Cornish (which was just as well), but trying to learn in the only way you can learn: by doing, and looking, and doing again. If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly, as my schoolmaster grandfather used to say. So, though I know - because I've seen them - that much better photographs exist of this rock and this view - I'm posting it anyway. It may be badly, but I did it, and on the far side of having done it, my eyes and hands and mind know a few things, just a little, that they didn't before. No one reading this blog needs to be reminded that I am, of course, also talking about writing.

Soho, or Skye?

Another fascinating point that Linda Grant made in her Guardian piece, which I mentioned in Rogues and Vagabonds, is that

The writer sits alone in a room, writing. The reader sits alone in a room, reading. Neither is ever likely to meet the other. Literature is an act of solitude and privacy. Never mind if it's about me; is it about you? [my italics]

And though I know in the abstract that a novel is as much something that a reader puts together, from black marks on a page, as it is something a writer has made by setting black marks on a different page, I've never thought of it quite like that. A writing acquaintance with a totally harmless and nicely-written commercial-women's-fiction novel about pregnancy and small children was deeply hurt by a truly, elaborately, baroquely virulent review on Amazon from a reader, even though the other reviews were full of praise, and it hit the best-seller lists that week. However much everyone else said soothingly, 'It's just some idiot with their own problems.'  - which was manifestly true - it couldn't help but hurt. At a less painful level I know that reviewers - however hard they try, even if they think they should try - can't escape the subjective question, 'Does this book do it for me?' even when they try to answer the objective question 'Is this a Good Book?' At what makes a book do it for them is always going to be as much about them, as about the book.

So is reading and judging a book actually, at least partly, a subset of the process of projection so beloved of psychologists? It was years before I understood the basic mechanism of this process, and saw how fundamental it is to so much of our human interaction. If an author's happy with the sales of their novel they assume the people walking into the shop are looking for cards, or sci-fi, or children's. If the author's anxious about how good their book is, they watch anxiously for proof or denial that No One Wants to Buy My Book, and, there being however many thousands of books in your average bookshop, the probability is that they'll get the proof they'd say they don't want: they project their own conviction that the book's no good onto total strangers.

So maybe there's something in those silly online quizzes about whether Heathcliff or Darcy is the man for you. So much of our pleasure in a book is about what gets us in the gut (and real intellectual pleasure is an emotional excitement, don't forget), or even lower down. It's no more - though no less - subjective than what makes one person love Soho and another Skye, or Beethoven versus Bach, or Monet versus Mantegna. It's a part of our psyche as old and intractable as our selves. A writer, or reader, who maintains otherwise is fooling themselves.

Rogues and vagabonds

Over at The Guardian Linda Grant and Melissa Benn have both been... I nearly said 'ruminating', but that's too gentle and contemplative a word: both pieces have a distinctly acerbic tone, and I'm not surprised. Anyway, they're both talking about the obsession readers and journalists have with the autobiographical origins of a writer's fiction.

At my most charitable, I can understand - even regard it as flattering - that people are interested in where our fiction comes from, and of course that may include (must include, at one level) our own lives. Indeed, I would rather people turned up to listen to me and others on a festival panel than didn't, even if it does mean my being asked every darned time whether I'll ever write about The Ancestor. And I'm relatively safe, writing mainly historically, compared to Melissa Benn, setting her novel in a modern political family (no, as she says, the father in the book isn't her father Tony, etc....) I shan't be using this blog to announce that actually I'm a male veteran of Waterloo or the mother of the Princes in the Tower. To fiction writers it's what we make up that's the exciting bit: the challenge that gets us going is to write what, by definition, we don't know with seeming authenticity. By contrast our own lives are too familiar to be interesting. And yet readers and journalists insist on thinking the latter is the important thing.

No wonder that a writing acquaintance of mine has as her e-mail signature: 'I make things up'. It's significant that the rise and rise of the misery memoir is based on the reader believing that these tales of horrors redeemed actually happened; witness the outrage when every now and again a story turns out to be not 'true' by whatever tacitly operating standards readers apply. I'm always asked about research, but bugger research, as Graham Swift says (he who got into huge trouble for not being a born and bred Fenlander when, by imagining Waterland so well, he had 'made' readers believe he must be). It's as if the only explanation readers and journalists can accept for a story that grips the reader, that seems 'real' while they're reading, is that the writer experienced it themselves. But all art operates at the mimetic, not actual, level of human experience: by definition it isn't real. Even the Tate's scandalous Bricks ceased to be 'real' in the actual sense, once imported into a gallery: they're no longer doing what bricks are designed do, they're a mimesis of brickiness.

Anybody would think that most of the reading world has never got over discovering that Goldilocks didn't actually like porridge, or that the two actors so heartbreakingly in love on stage aren't in love off it, because he's an egomaniac and she's gay. Neither the evidence nor my impeccably liberal upbringing will allow me to consider the possibility that most of the reading world is very stupid, and I find it hard to believe that human nature after several millenia has suddenly abandoned the pleasures of storytelling: not many people think that Middle Earth exists, but that hasn't done Tolkein's sales any harm.

So why does it make me so cross to have it assumed that fiction writers are really writing fact lightly disguised, even as I trot out for yet another journalist how my sister gave me the air fare to San Sebastian so I could write the Spanish parts of The Mathematics of Love better? I think it's because it devalues the part of my writing self which is most precious, most intangible, and most central to what I do: my imagination. Yes, what I imagine must have some roots in reality, but that Spanish trip was in service of imagination, so I could write what I imagined better, not a substitute for it. Back home, endless tea and innumerable reference books are in service of my imagination in much the same way. The world is quite enough inclined to assume that writing a novel only takes a bit of sitting down. It really does devalue what we do to suggest that all it then takes is a little self-examination and we can start signing six-figure deals.

But there's something deeper even than this. Is there perhaps a covert puritanism operating, too, in this insistence that what so grips readers must be 'true' in the dully factual sense? One reason that actors were suspect for so many centuries is because they're not what they seem: when social order is based on people having a set place in the hierarchy, it's threatened by commoners who can appear to be gentlemen, whores who seem to be heroines. The novel, too, was highly suspect to a Protestant world for whom authentic feeling should be dedicated to one's relationship with God, and the highest virtues were hard work and honest plainness. To such a world fiction encouraged feeling - excitement, emotion, passion - by trickery, and the illusions of a made-up story were dangerously seductive. Like the misogynist who pursues women while hating them for his own desire, the world wants what we can give them - they want to laugh and cry, wonder and rage, feel pity and terror, beyond what their own lives can provide - but they fear us for being able to move them so. Nowadays, they don't bury us in unconsecrated ground, like Molière. They just tell us, loud and clear and endlessly, that we didn't make it up, not really.

It could be worse

Nobody ever said that writing novels was easy. It takes too long, for a start, and it's bad for your health. It's lonely, and badly paid, and while a slight kink in the psyche is probably what made you a writer in the first place, you also have to be slightly nuts to persevere to the point where you can earn your living by writing-related work. But having spent the beginning of the week in the company of professional landscape photographers, courtesy of the Peak District Photography Centre, I'm beginning to think I'll have to stop moaning.

It's all in a dawn's work for Karen, Fran, Mike or Alex to get up at four, climb a fell in the dark (did you remember your head-torch, as well as making the right decision about which bits of kit were worth lugging up several hundred feet with you?) and sit there for an hour to catch sunrise on a distant peak. The forecast was good, but though forecasters can tell you that clear weather's coming, they can't always tell you just when. Not to within an hour either way of sunrise, anyway. Still, on the way down you see, in the flat, grey, damp light that's trickling through the clouds, how the celandines are glowing in a way that the sun would dim. An hour ago you were shivering on a wind-torn ridge; now you're lying flat on your front in the mud. They're like gold among the crumpled brown of last year's leaves. Only later do you start to think which magazine, if any, might buy the shot. If they do, perhaps you can buy a camp stove for the van. That would make sitting out a rainstorm in a car park, waiting for that elusive shaft of sunlight, rather more comfortable. Dawn's not the only light that picks out forms and colours, so once the hard, overhead light of the middle of the day has passed, you start all over again, and only get home after dark.

A landscape photographer might return over and over again for weeks to a set of rocks or a mountain stream, hoping for the right light on it to coincide with the right light on the distant valley, and then the season changes, the leaves come out, or fall, and the chance has gone till next year. A sudden frost will fringe winter trees with diamonds and you have drop everything to get there; a sudden flood of rain when you're on your way to the supermarket might flood the muddy ruts of an industrial site, so they reflect brick chimneys and abandoned towers as shimmering ghosts of their old strength. Use your craft to get it right in the camera - light, colour, structure, composition, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, white balance, ISO, exposure compensation and sharpness (those winds...) - and you won't have to spend too much time indoors at the computer tomorrow. Because you wouldn't do it if you didn't want to live outside: usually too cold or too hot or rain-soaked or sun-burnt, while every day  - every year - is chancy, contingent, unstable. You're always planning for a goal, but must always be willing to change your plans, or abandon them altogether, when something you see sends that little electric charge across your skin. It's that prickling skin that tells you that here, suddenly, your craft can make art.

So I'm going to stop complaining. But I'm also going to recognise that, apart from the sun-burn, the contingency is something I do know from writing. It might seem that, unlike photography, writing novels could be planned down to the last inch. We don't depend on the state of the sun or our batteries: we don't even have people peering over our shoulders and asking what we're doing. But actually, even at our desks, we don't know where we're going either: we plan the next turn, but we don't know what's beyond it. When we get there, it might be quite different, and need quite different writing. Here's our craft as writers: that we plan for what we hope we can do, but when everything changes it's our craft that can make the unexpected into art.