This Itch of Writing

Where did the week go?

Oh dear, oh dear, time does slip by during half term. What with having family to stay, and an editorial report to write, and a PhD chapter to finish, and vast quanties of reading for that and the new novel, and a big update for my website about A Secret Alchemy - temporary cover, extract, reading-group-questions, how-I-came-to-write-it and all - the poor blog's been going hungry.

A truly superb production of Pygmalion at the Old Vic is one of my better excuses. I know the play pretty well, and it never fails to be good value, but here was a subtlety of thinking and acting I've never seen used on such an old warhorse of a play. Shaw's a wordy writer even at his best - clearly a novelist manqué - but talk about what goes on in the spaces between the words... It was the kind of production where you can see just how important Ibsen was to Shaw, and just what a difference the right acting and directing can make.

Firmly told that it's the play My Fair Lady is based on, but the ending is different, the teenagers settled down with reasonable eagerness, and absolutely loved it, and the granny (who played Freddy Eynsford-Hill as a schoolgirl just after the war and as an English teacher and long-term RSC fan has high theatrical standards) did too. Even a nerdy middle-generation novelist like me was completely gripped. I could only quibble with the pronunciation of Clara, since I refuse to believe that an English girl of that date would have said it like a German, and the angle of Eliza's very gorgeous hat. But then, if they'd put it on as it should be, we wouldn't have been able to see her eyes, and so much would have been lost. In the end it's no good being authentic if it means you're not communicating.

Talking of which, it's nearly midnight. Only my reading for Pipe & Slippers to give a final run through, but maybe I need to go to bed instead. Or maybe a bath, and some thinking about the new novel. I can't do it when I'm in the middle of an editorial report, but that's gone safely off and my mind is free to get back to what it really wants to do. The business that Pygmalion's all about, of people being translated from their background into someone else's, and what then happens when they turn round, and see their route home cut off... that's really interesting... Hmmmm...

The spaces between

Apparently someone once said to Artur Rubinstein that he was a great pianist. He replied that, actually, he didn't play the notes any better than anyone else: what he played better than anyone was the spaces between the notes.

It's sort-of obvious that a very plain, bare narrative - what one might loosely and irritatingly call Hemingway-style - apparently using as few words as possible, works as much by what's not said, as by what is. From that realisation it's not so far to realise that much of such a story's power is in what the reader finds in - or puts into? - the spaces between the words. We may not even be aware we're finding anything, and what we're lured into putting there may not be the details of how people feel or places look, a sophisticated structure of ideas or series of events. It might be nothing more than a sense of import, a hyper-sensitivity, a skinned-ness that's beyond words or even thought.

It's less obvious that rich, baroque, lavish writing also operates in the spaces. Why look for spaces, for what's not there, when the words are piled high, the scents and sights and sounds lap round us, the ideas tumble over themselves and each other? But what happens between these kinds of notes is important too. Perhaps it helps to think of 'between' in the other sense, as we talk of a love scene played between two people: 'between' meaning 'shared', 'joint', the friction between things that makes sparks or flames or new gloss, or irreversible damage.

Of course what goes on between the words is conditioned by the words that surround them as well as by who's doing the reading, but that's not just a statement of the bleedin' obvious: it pinpoints the separate but mutually dependent nature of the two: word-and-silence operate as a pair just as writer-and-reader do. Anyone who doesn't believe me should listen to three or four different performances of, say, the same Chopin nocturne. I think this is something that novelists who are also poets, with their hyper-sensitivity to all the other things that words do beyond conveying information, often understand better than the rest of us writers. I've been reading the poet Tobias Hill's novel The Love of Stones and I'm still trying to work out where the wonderful richness of the worlds he creates comes from, because when you look at the individual words and sentences they're as simple and precise as a needle.

So can I, as a writer, shape the spaces between the words? Of course: they're my words and my spaces. What I can't shape is what you find in them, but that's all right. It's what each finds for him or herself that makes a text come alive and become a story, because in the end it's only our own experience which is truly alive to us, and it's that we invest in what we read. As a writer, I offer you the spaces as well as the words, and ask you to make them breathe.

Different voices and chocolate cake

So I'm trying to work out what to read at Pipe & Slippers, next Sunday. The slots aren't very long, which makes for a much more varied diet for the audience - and the bill really is varied - but harder decisions for me. And I do want to read from both The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy, though presumably a couple more books down the line I'll have to get over that one.

Do I go for bits at the beginning, which don't need too much explaining? Do I go for high drama, or something quieter which leads up to it and leaves the audience with a cliff-hanger? Do I worry about giving away any of the plot, or only the ending? Dialogue's livelier to read, but considering I used to be a drama student accents are not my forte, so it's usually safer to avoid them, though I can do the police in different voices. Do I go for several short bits, tasters of the many-layered, parallel-strandedness which is what I keep seeming to write, and all in ten or twenty minutes? Or do I go for a whole and single scene, something with a beginning, middle and end, with room for the characters to be liked or hated? After all, I do write novels, not haiku.

Yes, it's odd, trying to choose pieces out of a novel which both stand on their own, and represent the whole. (This is partly why any aspiring writer will tell you that writing the synopsis to go with their submissions to agents and editors often seems more agonising than writing the novel was, and partly why published authors will tell you that blurbs can cause such angst.) Since it took all those words to say what I wanted to say - tell the stories I wanted to tell - in the first place, then I guess I'm just going to have to get over my desire to represent everything: it can't be done.

One thing that works is to describe one of the book's themes, and read, say, two short bits which are both part of it. An alternative is to find a single passage that stands on its own, self-contained: a whole scene, a letter. It's tempting to go for a passage of description, but you'd better be a darned good reader to put that over, especially for the whole of the average twenty-minute slot, and still have people awake at the end.

One little difficulty is that your publisher would like you to read from their edition of the book, but books are designed to be held eighteen inches or so from your nose, with typography to suit. And microphones cause a whole new set of problems. I always prefer not to have one, but if everyone else uses it, then you sound very weedy without. If you hold the book right up - always supposing the damn mic doesn't get in the way, your face is totally invisible and your voice goes straight into the crack between the pages. If you drop the book you give yourself a neck-ache, your face is fairly invisible, and you send your rather squashed voice straight into the floor. Or you can lift your head, send your voice to the back of the room, and be unable to see a word that you're trying to read, let alone the pencil marking-up you laboured over. It's actually easier with an unpublished novel, because you can print it out nice and clear at a sensible size, there's room to mark it up, and you can then hold it one-handed well below eye-level. Or, of course, I've got the proof of A Secret Alchemy, but that's not, as you guys will know, what it'll look like in the end. And at the moment it's pristine: the spine uncreased and the pages dazzlingly clean, and I know it's silly, but I rather like it like that...

Well, I'll have to have decided all these things by Sunday 1st of June. If you're in South East London and fancy an afternoon of prose, poetry, comedy, accoustic music, full bar, coffee and chocolate cake, do drop by. The Ivy House is a gorgeous little Victorian pub theatre - the kind which were the original music halls - and doors open at 3pm, first act 3.30. The link at the top has all the details.

Alive, kicking, and joining in the game

I've been trying to work out what to do about the fact that much of study of literature assumes that I'm dead, when I really do feel quite alive. The thing is, I've finally discovered some hard-core literary theory - narratology, apparently a branch of structuralism - which is absolutely fascinating not just in itself, but because it maps very exactly onto my own experience of writing. Where necessary it gives new, more precise words to the things that I and most writers think and worry and decide about, but reading it's a bit like having walked all over a town, and then, literally, being handed a map which shows where all the places I've walked fit together. I can even use it on others' accounts of their walks, and understand where they went.

And yet all these critics do their talking and thinking and analysing on the basis that what the author 'meant', what I was trying to say, is not the point: that the only thing you can talk about is the text on the page, and how the reader interprets it. Fine. That's the rules of their game, and their game is interesting. In fact, it's so interesting that it's been bothering me a lot that I don't seem to be allowed to play, simply because I am the author: my authorial intention isn't allowed to be a playing piece, or a space on the board, or even a dummy hand. And yet I watch their game, and it's full of moves I know, decisions I've taken, ladders I've climbed and snakes I've slid down. But I think I've worked it out. My PhD is full of things I first thought out here, on the blog, and now the favour's being returned. This is what I wrote yesterday:

But although in the process of storytelling the teller/writer is distinct from the audience/reader, all writers were readers first, and part of the process of becoming a writer is integrating one’s readerly responses into one’s writerly practice to the point where they constantly inform each other. It is a kind of call-and-response system, a feedback loop, that operates so smoothly that one is hardly aware that it involves two different processes. In other words, the writer is at once writer and reader: the habit of most writers to set aside apparently finished work for a while, and then return to it with a ‘fresh’ eye, is really an attempt to externalise their inner reader, and read the work as others would read it. To my mind the writer who claims not to think about their audience but only to write for themselves has simply internalised their inner reader until they do not recognise it as such, while refusing to consider (and by implication perhaps have to modify) how they communicate to readers other than themselves. Even the declaration that the author is dead does not disqualify the theoreticians who make it from being potentially useful to the writer discussing his or her practice, since such a declaration is presumably made in ignorance of the true, siamese-twin-like nature of the writer-reader. If the novel is, to quote Eco again, ‘a machine for generating interpretations,’ then the first reader who generates any interpretations is the writer’s own inner reader.

And my inner reader is very much alive, thank you. Do you think they'll let me join in, now? You never know, they might even learn something.

Taking your novel for a dance

I've spent the weekend working to Chopin, courtesy of Radio 3. I came late to him, and all to the core nineteenth century composers: at school my instrument was the flute, and there is no music written for it between early Beethoven and Debussy, though Bach and Handel and Telemann are in my bones. It was only when I made a writing friend with precisely opposite tastes in music to write to that my horizons expanded. He was astounded that the backbone of my writing-music collection is the big baroque choral works, whereas it had never occurred to me that piano music could do the same job. Thanks to him - haven't seen him for years - much of the contemporary strand of A Secret Alchemy was written to Chopin, and more recently Schumann. It's about atmosphere as much as period, you see: I find that a little 15th century music does go quite a long way, but Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary was absolutely perfect for... But that would be giving things away.

And then on Sunday afternoon, just as I was trying to hammer my narratological thoughts about Tobias Hill's The Love of Stones into something coherent, the tonkly sound of an electronic piano caught my ear. After two days of sounds from Chopin's own Pleyel to the great Steinways of today it was like finding yourself chewing on a bit of plastic wrapping in the middle of a three-Michelin-daisy meal. But there was as reason for Radio 3's lapse. Chopin's well known for taking dance forms - waltzes, mazurkas, polonaises - and turning them into art, so his is a particularly good example of what they were discussing. (I'm not really writing this, I'm still hammering, so I hope you'll forgive me if I go and find the link and the credits later). Above and beyond the one-two-three of a waltz, or a couple of bars of theme, is the larger architecture: the tune that comes back, the circling and cycling of counterpoint, the texture of the underlying harmonies, the sequence of key-changes, the patterning of sun and shadow.

The conversation began with an analogy with painting: since the eye only has a small field of really sharp vision, you can only see a small patch of a painting, clearly and in full detail, at a time. If you draw back, that small patch is a larger piece of canvas, but the detail is gone. This is called your fovial (sp?) vision, and what's really happening when you look closely at a whole painting is that although vision itself is instant, the eye has to rove over the image, assembling all the details into a composite mental image. Music, like writing/reading, can only exist in time, and since we can only experience short lengths of music as single entities, it's not easy to hear the larger architecture: it's like trying to see the sequence of arches when your nose is two inches from the bricks. What the electronic piano can do is the equivalent of stepping back from the canvas or the building: it can speed up without distorting. To stick with Chopin's dance-forms, in speeding up a piece of music the individual steps of the dance blur, and the shape that's traced on the floor of the ballroom is clear: the arcs and reaches of movement fill the space.

Apparently Adrian Boult used to recommend playing a piece as fast as humanly possible, as a way of finding that larger architecture, and he's by no means alone. Of course, these days that speed isn't dependent on human fingers or squealing tapes, just on an electronic piano. Hearing the same piece in a series of speedings-up was exactly like a camera pulling away in stages from, say, a shot of the Parthenon. First you can hear the flutes on an individual column, then the stately dance of columns along one long side of the temple; then suddenly there's the whole front, the same rhythms at an angle and the same angle at the crown of the pediment; then you can see the whole thing rooted to its marble ground even as it floats against the sky; and finally it's a glimmering jewel-box against the dark hills beyond the city.

It's right that much of the focus of writing-teaching is close reading and close writing, because choosing the right word for the right job is, in the end, what we're all doing. It's probably also expedient, because classes are short and novels are long. But there are larger (in every sense) issues too, as any short-story writer realises when they start a novel: it's like trying to see a whole mountain through the magnifying glass which till now has been your principle tool. And that's why I and many other writers write our first drafts as fast as possible, not stopping or fiddling or jumping back. And it's also why there are several stages later when we print the beast off, sit somewhere else, and as far as possible read the novel as quickly as Beryl Bainbridge says she does and assumes her readers do (if she likes a novel, she goes back and reads it again slowly). It's about speeding up, about not seeing every curl of stone, about drawing back so that our fovial vision encompasses the pillars, the angles, the view against the hillside. It's about swirling across the floor of the ballroom, not just mastering the steps.

A Secret Alchemy

So here it is. A great moment...

I should say that this isn't the final cover, which has been delayed, but rather than delay the proofs going out Headline have given it this very elegant temporary dress. But nonetheless, as all authors know, the real excitement is that It Looks Like A Real Book! It's sitting plumply on my desk, being patted every now and again. I might resist the temptation to take it to bed with me, but then again I might not...I didn't resist with The Mathematics of Love, after all!

Any spiders interested?

In Slipstreaming Eagleton and selling your soul I and some of the commenters were grumbling about the way that our non-fictional selves often seem more important to the book trade and to readers than what we write, which is ostensibly the raison d'être of the whole industry. (I'm reminded of the vast edifice of health clubs and Away strips and Chelsea-Football-Club-branded wine, which surrounds a postage stamp of centrally-heated grass in the middle of the stadium at Stamford Bridge.) Then Rosy Thornton had an excellent rant on Vulpes Libris about the way that book trade categories, and most particularly book covers, are 'the insidious perpetrator of stereotypical assumptions' about fiction, literature and their readers. And I was fascinated to hear how many publishers' publicists are astonished that Zoë Fairbairns, in journalist mode, insists on receiving a copy of an author's book before she'll do an interview with them, and if the book doesn't arrive in time for her to read it properly, she cancels the interview.*

It's partly, I think, that as writers we've spent a year, or two or three or ten, making sure that every word and scene and character is necessary to our novel, and it's then very difficult for us to bear the inevitable reductiveness involved in any kind of summary or sample. Even chosing what to put in a reading can be agonising, because of everything that we have to not read. All aspiring writers know that the worst thing (apart from the actual rejections, if any) about the whole process of trying to get published is writing the synopsis that must accompany your first-three-chapters. All published writers know that the worst rows writers ever have with their editors are over covers: even worse than the ones they have over the blurb, so I'm told. The cover, after all, is a single image, not even a few sentences, and it's the first thing a potential buyer sees, so its message must be absolutely direct and easily decoded.

In my PhD work I've been looking at how authors try to create the reader that their book needs, from Umberto Eco defending the first hundred pages of The Name of the Rose to Thomas Keneally 'Author's Note' to Schindler's Ark, asserting that he 'attempted to avoid all fiction, because fiction would debase the record.' At my editor's suggestion I made a late and very important change to the beginning of A Secret Alchemy, to make sure readers pick up straight away on the kind of book it is: to help them to tune in to the nature of my storytelling.

And it's occurred to me that, actually, everything about a book that's outside the main text is part of this business of tuning the reader in, creating the reader the book needs. How many Amazon reviews say things like, 'The blurb doesn't do this book justice,' or 'This wasn't what I was expecting'? In Knowledge of Angels, in an opposite proposition to Keneally's, Jill Paton Walsh's 'Author's Note' states that the novel 'is set on an island somewhat like Mallorca, but not Mallorca, at a time somewhat like 1450, but not 1450. A fiction is always, however obliquely, about the time and place in which it was written.' This isn't to save her the trouble or constraints of getting her history 'right' for this wonderful book, but to explain to the reader how to read the book. Even acknowledgements (which I grumbled about a while ago in No place for the muffins) make a difference to how a book is read, though the effect is different depending on whether they're at the beginning or the end of the book.

Authors' notes, typography, acknowledgments, covers, bindings, blurbs, puffs, reviews, authors' photographs, historical notes, even the price and the 'three-for-two' or 'signed by the author' sticker, make a difference to how we read a book: create a particular reader for it. There's a PhD in there somewhere: not mine, thank you, one's quite enough, but a Goldsmiths-type PhD nonetheless, spider-like and anti-reductive, with a foot in literature and another in design, a third in cultural analysis and several still spare for psychology, semiotics, reader-response theory, creative writing and going to the pub. I'd read it.

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*I know myself that it's much easier to do interviews with a journalist who hasn't read the book. If they've read it they ask questions I have to think about, and my newly-thought-out answer may not come out clearly, or may not be the right 'angle', or may give away more than, later, I wish I had. Whereas if they haven't they all ask exactly the same questions, to which I have well-polished answers of appropriate lengths, rather as the child star Margaret O'Brien, asked to cry for the scene, apparently asked a director if he wanted the tears in her eyes, half-way down her cheeks, or running all the way.

Not so much a bloggy week as a giggy one

Considering I'd assumed I was in something of a lull between books, I'm actually slightly busy on the author-in-public front, which is why I've been neglecting the blog. Despite my grumbling about the business (and I do mean business) of selling one's authorly personality and experience, as opposed to selling my books, I really enjoy the readings-and-signings side of it, because that (and the comments here) is when I actually meet people who've read my work: that's when you really feel that what you've been saying is being heard.

On Saturday I went to a conference at the University of Bedford on postgraduate creative writing: What is it? Is it inherently a paradox to try to create art in the academy? And lots of conversations about what-does-your-PhD-involve-then? The answers to the last question were interesting not just by way of swapping traveller's tales, but becausethe ideas - and regulations - of what constitutes a CW PhD are very varied, and so what we have to do is very varied too. Some fine arguments broke out over the coffee and sandwiches, which is just as it should be.

Then this evening I was at writLOUD, combining the launch of the Birkbeck MA's first published graduates, and a celebration of five years of writLOUD, which as well as showcasing Birkbeck and friends also supports Oxfam. There was great work read by Sally Hinchcliffe, Niki Aguirre and Matthew Loukes (can't find a link, I'm afraid) in the bar of RADA, which is a very nice and rather glamorous space compared to the hallowed but worn 1930s look that I remember from auditioning there, many years ago. For once, too, it had an excellent sound system: trust a theatre to do that properly! As is the way, I went with Debi Alper from Bloggers With Book Deals, joined up by pre-arrangement with another writing friend, and promptly bumped into a fourth BWBDer, (Sally's one too), Sarah Salway, someone I met on Saturday, and several other people I know. The writing world's a small one.

That was, if you like, past and present. As far as future's concerned, next is the quarterly Pipe and Slippers, a delightful Sunday afternoon of poetry, prose, acoustic music, chocolate cake and full bar, all in a Victorian pub in Nunhead in South East London. The next one is on Sunday 1st June, doors open at 3pm, and among a varied bill, I'll be reading from The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy. So if you fancy dropping by (all the details of how to get there are on their website) do come and say hello.

Slipstreaming Eagleton and selling your soul

To Goldsmiths yesterday evening, for a lecture by the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton. Apart from knowing his name in connection with swathes of literary theory, combatively expressed, which I haven't read (I haven't read much of anyone else's literary theory, it has to be said) I didn't really know what to expect. In the event it was the kind of talk you wish you could have recorded, to go over more than once, spreading out the densely-argued points, gathering together arguments that ranged over an astonishingly wide area, and seeing whether it really is as persuasive as it seemed at the time. I suspect much of it would be, and it was also funny.

I still find that most literary criticism, however interesting it is in and of itself, and be it Formalist, or New, or Structuralist, or whatever, says very little to me about what I, as a novelist, spend my time thinking about. But one thing Eagleton said really rang a bell. He was talking about how literary criticism as anyone over forty remembers it - "the minute dissection of discourse" - is dying on its feet. Other, cultural concerns about gender, or sex, or colonialism - fascinating and legitimate in themselves - have taken over as the focus of literary study. He linked this with Walter Benjamin's analysis that in late capitalist societies like ours, when markets have evolved for everything else we can make or do or own, including art, finally human experience itself is commoditised: made into something that can be bought or sold or destroyed or controlled. For this to happen, said Benjamin writing (and dying) as a Jew under Nazism, will be the death of memory and mourning, and therefore of our authentic, subjective, individual human nature and experience.

Studies of the cultural discourse in literature can't alone recapture that subjective individuality, said Eagleton, can't pin down the affective process of reading, can't explain how reading makes us feel what we feel when we read. Only recapturing the detailed processes of language - tone, metaphor, pitch, syntax, rhythm and so on - can enable us to understand and hold onto the mechanisms of transmitting true experience. So, here was the once-upon-a-time enfant terrible of Structuralism - that bogey-man of everyone who still wants to discuss whether Jane should have married Rochester -  saying two things that go straight to the heart of me as a writer.

One: that close reading still matters, because all creative writing is close writing. What we do, word by word, how we chose, discard, speak aloud or brood over individual sentences and paragraphs, is how we transmit the experience we're trying to evoke, whether it's running for a bus or flying a spaceship or giving birth. It's no good trying to write grand ideas and meta-narratives, tragedy or comedy or simply the recognisable textures of everyday life, if they can't be transmitted; if the signals, as it were, are anything less than exquisitely clear.

And Two: that the obsession with the un-invented roots of fiction, the 'real' authenticity, about which I've grumbled in Rogues and Vagabonds  and No Place for the Muffins is, indeed, not a simple matter of 'I need the publicity', or 'Why shouldn't I thank everyone who's helped?', understandable though both those motivations are. You could argue (but I probably only do in my own most combative moments) that talking publicly about which of your 'real' experiences went into the novel, or acknowledging all the incredibly helpful neighbours/family/guinea pigs who went into the making of this book, is actually taking part in the commoditising of experience. By offering your 'real' experience to back up the infinitely more detailed and true evocation of human experience that you've spent a year or more inventing, you're playing the market, offering your personal humanness for sale, instead of your art. The stage we've reached so far is the celebrity culture, the reality TV show, and the misery memoir, which are clearly three commodities in the 'real experience' market. It seems that fiction writers are expected to join in. But what will we do, once we've sold our personal, subjective experience? No matter that once that's happened no one will read our fiction for what fiction does best: creating an authentic, detailed discourse of the human experience that no mere autobiography can hope to match. It'll be too late then to find that we've commoditised our souls.

Drilling deep

But if I was arguing in Trust me, I'm telling stories for being allowed to play fast and loose with historical (or, indeed, any other) facts, I do see that there's not a lot of point in fiction that doesn't grapple with the realities of human existence in some way. It doesn't need Bruno Bettelheim to tell us that even fairy stories say important things to us: that enchantment has its uses. A fairy story may also be - pace Freud - a growing-up myth; many an opera - pace Jung - is an integration of animus and anima; and a well-crafted modern comedy makes us laugh at our uneasily comfortable modern lives which we never thought to laugh about. And that's not to exclude the science fiction and fantasy branches of the fiction tree either: it's simply that they play by different set of rules about what's defined as 'believable' - dragons, for instance.

So even though the definition of a novelist's trade could be that We Make Things Up, any novel needs a bedrock of human existence - human truth, if not historical or geographical fact - because without it fiction is pointless. The difficulty is that every reader has a very slightly different frame of reference for testing such truth, based on a slightly different experience of the world. Write about what you can make me believe you know is my slogan for aspiring writers, but what I'll believe as a reader is as much about me as it is about you. I never did discover what it was about Anna, in The Mathematics of Love, that meant a fellow-workshopper didn't believe she'd been brought up on a council estate, but since the others in the workshop did believe she had, I didn't feel obliged to re-write Anna, or her childhood.

That ought to mean that the further away the world of a novel is from the world of its readers, the faster and looser I can play with mere facts, without shaking my readers' faith in that bedrock of human truth, because who can tell me I'm 'wrong'? But, lacking the believability so easily established (in theory) by the novelist of modern life with an Ordnance Survey map and a bit of eavesdropping on buses, you can argue that those of us who set our fiction in other worlds - the past, the future, different continents or different galaxies - have to drill even deeper into human bedrock before we can start to build our story.