This Itch of Writing

The tree of life - and other anecdotes

I've been a tad busy this last few days, so I'm afraid this is a bit of a catch-up post. First, I've actually submitted my PhD! I can't quite believe how happy it's made me, not just because the last stages of a research project are notoriously fiddly and tedious and so I've been dying to get rid of it, but because, finally, I realise that I'm actually really quite proud of it. As well as A Secret Alchemy, which I can enjoy again now that the tooth-pulling process of writing it has faded from my memory, I do think I've found some interesting things to say about historical fiction and how it works. I celebrated with my very long-suffering offspring, who bear the brunt of whatever's happening in my professional life, by opening the last bottle of the fizz which the Hay Festival gives its authors. It seemed appropriate.

And since then I've been in Spain, giving a lecture (twice) on Creative Thinking: the Darwin family in the Arts and Sciences. After the first, in Valencia, the university had organised a dinner cooked from Emma Darwin's recipe book, which was delicious. I was also given the most beautiful edition of The Origin of Species, made by my hosts, biologists Juli Peretó and Andrés Moya, with exquisite illustrations by the scientific illustrator Carles Puche. Carles even drew me an iguana on the title page of my copy: I felt very inferior in only being able to write words in his. Before the second lecture, in Elx, I found myself asked to do a spot of plaque-unveiling, and was very pleased that the image on the plaque wasn't the god-like old man with a beard, but the heart of the matter: Darwin's original sketch of the tree of life. As longstanding readers may know, I still find it odd when the outside world takes me as a representative of the family, but I've got more comfortable with it now: with an actual body of my own work out there, the balance has changed between us. And besides, Elx is now full of people tucking into their signed copies of La aritmética del amor, I'm even more awed by the skill, calm and general niceness of translators both professional and non-professional, and if the journalist from El Pais has his way back at the office, there'll be an interview with yours truly on the back page of one of Spain's national newspapers any day now.

And as I sat in planes and trains and hotel rooms, I started looking back on my PhD. When I first started wondering whether to do one, I was often asked 'Why? You've already got a Masters.' When I signed simultaneously on the dotted line of the Goldsmiths' application form and the dotted line of a two-book publishing contract with Headline Review, the question changed to, 'Are you going to give up the PhD, then, now you've got a deal?' These days, I'm much more likely to be asked what it's like and whether the questioner should be doing one too: Creative Writing PhDs are becoming big business.

I now have lots of answers to Why? Indeed, so many that I've put a page in the new - and as yet small - Resources section of the blog: Creative Writing PhDs: the paradoxical beast. At the moment, Resources has two pieces, the other being on How to get the best out of an editorial service, which you may know. But I'm planning to add to it when I have time and a new topic occurs to me. Next, I hope, will be Show-don't-Tell, or maybe Point-of-View, and I'll be enabling comments, so that I hope others will chip in.

In other news...

I don't usually bother myself, or y'all, with book trade news, but I can't resist this one: I've just heard that A Secret Alchemy is one of The Times's Top 50 Paperbacks of 2009. As The Bookseller describes, the shortlist of twelve will be announced week by week until December.

Whores, dishes and crackly feedback

A while ago a US writer said that if you allow any thought of the market to affect your writing, then you're not a writer, you're a whore (and the comment made me so cross that I'm not going to try to find dates or names). And now I see that my post The Market for Ropes has been picked up as expressing my strong views about writing for the market. Well, I do have strong views about lots of things, but that wasn't quite what I was getting at in that post. What I was trying to express there was that thinking about product, at the wrong moment in your practice, really screws up your writerly horse sense, your intuition, your instincts about what your writing needs and how it works.

But it's true that whether you should write for the market is a hardy perennial of most writers' talk. That US novelist, who'd better stay nameless otherwise I'll want to make a wax figure to stick pins into, is talking bunk. Because the market really doesn't have horns and a tail, still less fishnets and a basque: the market is another word for readers. Who else are we writing for? If we were really writing 'for ourselves' then we wouldn't go through the pressures and tediums and panics of getting published: we'd be quite happy sitting at home, scribbling away, and then stashing the notebooks under the bed: it wouldn't even matter if no one could read your writing. Yes, the writing process is actually a constantly revolving writing-reading-writing-reading cycle - we are our own first reader - but storytelling is fundamentally a communicative act. It needs a teller with a story but also an audience, and, to date, the only way to get lots of people to hear your story (and to feed and clothe yourself while you write the next one) is to put your words out into the market, which for better or worse is only the size it is because it can pay people to write, publish, print and sell books as a day job. (And no, sorry, giving away work on the internet is not the answer. What am I supposed to live on while I'm writing?)

What the art Calvinists don't acknowledge is that as soon as you clothe the ideas in your mind in words, and put them on paper so that others can read them, you're actually writing for a market: you're playing by a set of highly sophisticated, extremely evolved conventions about how storytelling works in our culture. In placing so much as a comma, let alone in describing a character, we're taking account of how readers read commas and characters: how they will affect their experience of the story. On the larger scale we use conventions of plot, ideas and prose as a carrier signal for what we're trying to say. And for a carrier signal to work, we have to know what equipment will be receiving it at the other end: who our readers are.

On the other hand, it's perfectly true that we all know the kind of routine rom com or spaceshipiana or plotless, overwritten faux-lit, which has been written to tick exactly the right market boxes, (it seems - you can never be sure of any writer's real intentions, but then neither can the writer) and for no other reason. Usually they're me-too versions of books which did do something new and interesting in either plot, ideas or prose, however dire the other elements - fourth-rank Bridget Jones, fifth-generation Dune, wannabe Roth. So it's no wonder that most of us, who live and breathe the breathtaking ideas, strange new worlds and new-minted words of good fiction, recoil in honest horror (or unappealing but headline-grabbing snobbery) from the notion that we should be ticking boxes. We will write for ourselves, and no one else! Fine, but don't blame me if no one else wants to read it: why should I want to read what you've written, if you've taken no account of me in writing it? All writers are egocentric, by definition, but some are positively narcissistic.

One problem, of course, is that while we writers have 120,000 full-frequency words with which to tell our stories to readers, the feedback from readers to writers is pretty crackly: narrow in dynamic range and full of static. Reviews don't help much and talk of 'the market' is often hugely over-simplified. It's partly so because the book trade is always desperately trying to get some working definitions - aka labels - stuck on who buys what, so that tight budgets and overworked marketing assistants can be best deployed in persuading them to buy more of it. And editors and therefore agents who take this stuff on board too simplistically are not good or fruitful to work with. And it's partly because, actually, there's not a reader in the land who doesn't fit some stereotypes of their age/gender/income/class/domicile, and utterly escape others. Of all the extremely satisfactory number of thousands of people who bought A Secret Alchemy in its bestselling week, I don't suppose a single one had exactly the same reaction as a single other one. There's nowt so queer as folk. So what do we do with anything we know about 'the market', or are told by our agent, or are shocked to find on a forum, or stumble on when guiltly sneaking a peek at The Ropeseller? We don't want to churn out little boxes full of ticky-tacky, but we do want to know what the best carrier signals will be for what we want to say. And we would quite like to sell more books - i.e. have more readers...

I think you just have to treat information about the market with as much open-minded scepticism as anything else which might go into your work. Jessica Ruston nailed it very nicely for me the other day on a forum debate: ideas for your writing come from everywhere, she said, and there's nothing different about one which comes from The Ropeseller. The mistake is when you let the conviction that it's the key to a fortune, or the work of the devil, overrule your ordinary writer's instincts about what this book needs now. A love-triangle from Shakespeare, something your teenager says about girls, the news that readers love books set in India, a profound thought about revenge while you're hanging up the wash, the news that Bridget Jones is now putting the toddler's name down for secondary school... Some of these go into the queue for the pot of the work in progress, others into the bin, some into the Tupperware box in the fridge labelled 'the next novel'. It's your cook's common sense which decides, tastes, chops, fries and transforms. The result will be full of flavours people know and - with luck - love. But it'll be your dish, and no one else's.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

Most writers know the feeling that our fictional characters have lives of their own, but I never thought when I set out to write A Secret Alchemy that one of my characters would turn up on Twitter. A Secret Alchemy was published in April, and in the last couple of weeks Elizabeth Woodville has been tweeting. Philippa Gregory has just published a novel based on her, and has been promoting it by this extremely twenty-first century means.

Neither of us is the first, of course. As I've described elsewhere, it was seeing Shakespeare's Henry VI plays which set me thinking about Elizabeth, and my first attempt at her was over a decade ago: it's got easier for all of us since then because two modern biographies have been published. Sitting in the Young Vic I instantly remembered Josephine Tey's 1930s description of her in The Daughter of Time as "the indestructible beauty with the silver-gilt hair" (hope I've quoted that right - I don't have a copy to hand). And I know of at least Sharon Penman's The Sun in Splendour and Rosemary Hawley Jarman's The King's Grey Mare, which focus on Elizabeth, and no doubt there are more: dozens, if you include novels centred on others of her extended family. Follow "Customers who bought this also bought..." and you'll get the idea. I haven't read Gregory's The White Queen, though I've admired the cover, and it's a great title.

The thing is, I'm reading very little fiction at all at the moment, which is my usual practice when I'm in first-draft mode. Certainly I've never 'studied the market' or read books because they're successful (that way lies the writerly suicide of tangling with the market for ropes), but only because I fancy them. And I've been avoiding novels set in that sort of era ever since I first decided to write one. And my writing self moved on from Elizabeth a good eighteen months ago. My author self, doing the Hay or Oxford Festivals, and writing things like this, loves re-visiting Elizabeth and the others because it's always such fun to engage with real readers. Besides, all the narrators have a very special place in my heart. But it is revisiting, revisiting my old home from the somewhere else where I'm now living: a different century, with different voices, religions, manners, gestures and philosophies.

But it's undeniably an odd feeling to know that another creature - another recreation - of Elizabeth is walking the earth or at least readers' minds; that there is different writing on the same white spaces between the facts, a different creature made from the same bones, a different voice made from the same words. Neither of our creatures is the real Elizabeth; not even the Elizabeth in Arlene Okerlund's admirable biography is the real Elizabeth, although her allegiance is to the probable of history-writing, rather than the possible of fiction. So I can claim my creature, as Gregory and Okerlund can claim theirs: each of us has our own project.

Indeed, although Elizabeth was where A Secret Alchemy started, and she has perhaps rather more than a third of the words in the novel, my project was never limited to her. I wanted to write about love unrequited and love fulfilled, sex and marriage and widowhood, about storytelling and pilgrimage, about writing and printing, about restoring houses and restoring - re-creating - the people of the past. And, of course, it's about what's strongest of all in my writer's DNA: the sameness and otherness of 'then' and 'now', of 'there' and here', of history under our feet and above our heads: history as place as well as time.

To do that, I used not one person's story, but three, spanning 'now' as well as 'then': Elizabeth alone couldn't say - embody - know - everything I wanted the novel to be about. Anthony Woodville has his own story to tell, interleaved and interacting with hers, and a creature who really is mine and mine alone - Una Pryor - also speaks and lives. Of all the reviews of A Secret Alchemy, Sally Zigmond's homed unerringly in on what it's all about in detail and Sarah Vine, in The Times, did so in broader terms, so I won't go into it here. Besides, I'm off, back to the 18th century...

The third way

A while ago, in Ask Your Talent, I was thinking about what you do when you've learnt your craft, done your time, are writing really well, and just can't quite get an agent or publisher to take you on. The rejectors like your work so much that they're trying to help, but what they're saying is things like "The ideas and characters are subtle in a literary way, but the writing style is very commercial." Or, alternatively, "It's quite plot-driven and the characters are lively, which doesn't sit well with your sophisticated and allusive style". And the writer howls, "Why can't I have interesting ideas and plain writing?' Or "Why should really good writing mean I can't tell a thumping good story?"

As writers, putting different things together and finding something new emerging is what we do; 'What if?' is our basic mode, and 'As if' the defining characteristic of fiction. On the other hand, the industry needs to persuade readers to part with their hard-earned cash, by reassuring them that they'll get something worth paying for, which for the most part means something which does what it says on the tin (or the book cover): a certainty.

And, as is almost inevitable in our Western, dualistic way of thinking (I blame the Greeks), we not only accept the problem as the book trade sees it, that these things are opposites or at the best opposite ends of a spectrum, but we also accept their solution: be one, or be the other. But if my experience of learning in and now teaching workshops, of editing and being edited, has taught me anything, it's that what a trusted reader tells you must be listened to and dealt with, but what they tell you to do about it, is a different matter altogether. As I said in Accept, adapt, ignore, learning to deal with feedback is part of learning to be a writer, and feedback that tells you to "Be one, or be the other," suggests that it's not possible to be both.

For the writer who finds themself in this position, there seems to three possibilities. 1) Push your writing firmly towards one pigeonhole or the other, and with luck the industry will welcome you with open arms. 2) Give up. 3) Do what you're doing, better, until you really do integrate what the book trade considers incompatible aims. 

If 1) makes sense to you, that's great and I hope you'll go for it. And 2) isn't what this blog is about, though I honestly respect anyone who looks at what it would take to get their writing publishable, and decides they've got other lives to lead. Which leaves 3). I can't tell you how to do what you're doing better, because it's not something that can be abstracted: it needs sleeves-rolled-up, down-and-dirty talk about words. It may need talent, which is the elephant in the room. But there's no denying that the history of publishing is full of mega-selling books which took everyone by surprise: they gathered together things which everyone - including industry wisdom - said were incompatible, and readers lapped up the result.

I can't tell you what that third way is, or how to find it: I suspect it needs re-inventing from scratch for each writer, each apparent pair of incompatibles, each book. It would sound a bit like some ghastly self-help book to claim that I found it, once, sort of, for readers of my kind of writing (which sounds cooler and more literary than saying my kind of the market, doesn't it?), and that I'm telling how you, too, can be like that. My editor thinks I found it - 'brainy and sexy', she said - but any writer is only as good as their last book, and that was two books ago. But if writers are built for seeing connections that others don't, then we should also be able to make things which don't work... work.

All sorts of things from all sorts of places

The most difficult chapter of my PhD's critical commentary has been the one on voice. I don't see how you can write about the practice of historical fiction without tackling it, but as I've talked about before, it's both the most crucial and the most un-pin-downable aspect of writing. Its effect is simultaneously micro - a single choice of word - and macro - the thing which creates the world of the novel: the thing which makes the characters live and breathe for the reader. Different voices are central to the way that both The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy work, and are probably the thing which both readers and reviewers most consistently like.

Of course, there's always the option of writing a novel with a historical setting in a completely modern voice. Julian Barnes's postion on Arthur & George, that he's writing a contemporary novel about the past, in a voice to suit, seems perfectly reasonable to me although it's not one I share; I think it misses part of the point of setting fiction in the past. But Barnes's cool, elegant prose hardly shrieks flash-in-the-pan 2009 transience, and there's nothing that feels 'wrong' about Arthur & George. On the other hand, I really don't buy the slightly different argument, that the voice should be built from what's modern colloquial, conversational speech and even slang, as being equivalent for us to 1550s colloquial speech to the characters; it seems to me as daft as putting cars and potatoes and modern sensitivies about race or gender in there: these are not modern people, and they lead not-modern lives. If you think that means that the voices in historical fiction will be awkward, formal, stilted, and generally lacking in flexibility, expressiveness and rude words, just drop into Anthony Burgess's Dead Man in Deptford, and find out how wrong you are.

What's triggered this thought is a blog review of A Secret Alchemy. The blogger didn't specially like the book, which is fair enough, but what fascinated me was his/her comment that "I’m not sure how accurate the language of the historical section was. I’m not an expert, but it just reads differently from other books written about this period."My first reaction was "So I should hope", and not just because I'd hate to be accused of plagiarism. My second reaction was that I've no idea whether it's different or similar, since I've been avoiding novels set in the late 15th Century, ever since I first started wanting to write about Elizabeth Woodville a good decade ago. But actually, of course, the point's more subtle than that. Any conversation about historical fiction always starts off with everyone declaring that of course authenticity is all and facts are sacred, but it's not as simple as that: if you don't believe me, try writing the most accurate reproduction of 15th or 16th or 17th Century prose you can, and then try getting it published...

What we think of as 'historical' voices come from a mixture of the documents we have from the time, and other writers' historical fiction. By definition, the latter is not accurate to historical voices - it's the novelist's take on them: Charles Dickens's Revolutionary Parisians talk very, very differently from Hilary Mantel's, and Jeneatte Winterson's differently again. And, again by definition, historical documents can't present us with a usable fictional voice, because before the 18th century documents - even plays - don't include the realistic reproduction of conversational prose that fiction attempts.

And just when I regretfully had to cut the bit in my PhD about using modern colloquialisms because I haven't been able to find an actual quotable, referenceable writer saying so*, I came across something much better. By way of David Lodge's The Art of Fiction, and some vigorous Googling, I found the Russian critic Bakhtin, talking about how, while lyric poetry is 'monologic' - the voice of the poet, using their own words as suits them best - prose fiction is of its very nature, 'dialogic'. What Bakhtin actually says is this (my emphasis):T

...the possibility of employing on the plane of a single work discourses of various types, with all their expressive capacities intact, without reducing them to a single common denominator – this is one of the most fundamental characteristics of prose. Herein lies the profound distinction between prose style and poetic style... For the prose artist the world is full of other people’s words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear. He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed. He works with a very rich verbal palette.

So in fact my amusement at the blogger's comment, and my wariness of Barnes's view, stem from the same idea, which Bakhtin makes more generally, that the excitement of fiction lies in the intersection of fact and fiction, of other voices (past and present, then and now, here and there) and one's own voice.  So (when the writer's got it right) the voice isn't either modern or historical, either accurate or readable, either mine or someone else's, it's both those things and all those things... Fiction is about both-and, not either-or, because writing is a process of synthesis, of taking all sorts of things from all sorts of places, and creating a whole which didn't exist before.

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* If anyone knows of where I could find a writer arguing this, could they say in the comments, or email me at the address on the right?

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A friend, the novelist Rosy Thornton, went to hear Sebastian Faulks talking, and reports thus:*

He said that the advice ‘write what you know’ is the worst advice given to anyone, ever. He says that when he talks to young writers he says, DON’T write about what you know. He tells them, write about the past, the future, other words, a Bohemian desert, the south pole - but absolutely not about what you know.

Now, I often get asked about 'Write what you know' at readings, because it's so very obvious that I don't. And as I've said before here, I see why it's said but I agree with Faulks (though for different reasons) that it's frequently un-fruitful advice. 'Write what you know' is good advice in that you can write tastes, textures, emotions, authentically: it develops your documentary capacity, as it were, and without the pressure to invent, you can concentrate on the accuracy and vividness of the writing. To that extent, it's the gold standard for good prose. It's bad advice in that most of us lead dull lives. Staying within the boundaries of a ploddingly literal definition of 'what you know' isn't going to help you grown and change as a writer, and certainly not to enlarge your imaginative capacity. As I'm finding with drawing, documentary and imagination are quite separate talents. But the other thing in Faulks's talk which Rosy questioned, I would question too:

he talked about Saul Bellow (as an example) and said that if you are a Jewish American with a family background in eastern Europe, then you somehow trail with you the scent of holocaust and Ellis Island and generations of struggle, so that you can write about an ordinary glove-maker from Newark and it has ‘grandeur’, as Faulks put it. But that if he himself tried to write in the same way about, say, a schoolteacher from Leicester, it wouldn’t have this same ‘grandeur’, the same resonance.

I'm really not sure about this, though it wouldn't be fair to dissect a conversational remark too ruthlessly. I'd defend the capacity of a really good writer to find grandeur in an ordinary life. It's not easy to do: it's probably much harder than finding grandeur in an extraordinary one, but surely the right eye, mind and pen can plant seeds of ordinary Leicester lives in the earth of fiction, and grow transcendance, courage, passion, love and beauty from it. (Actually, of course, you rarely meet the most ordinary person, at any length, without it turning out that there are some extraordinary things in their background: hence the fascination of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are series.) It's true that perhaps it's easier to find grandeur when the scruffy fiddliness of our common lives is stripped out by time (hist fic) or space (spec fic, foreign settings), or obscured by darkness, and the literalness of colour can be escaped by working in monochrome. It's also true that dramatic action needs obstacles, and great drama needs great obstacles: easy divorce, the end of the Iron Curtain and the rise of the mobile phone have forced many a novelist to scurry into new corners of the world and the human psyche.

The other thing which worries me - which I'm worrying away at - are two implications of Faulks's example. First, that some subjects are automatically grand. I was deeply moved, for example, by the wonderful film of Fugitive Pieces (and promptly put the book on the top of the TBR pile), but I do wonder if it's all too easy to use the Holocaust, say, or child abuse, or death, for a bit of instant gravitas; and most competition judges would agree with me. And second, that it's Bellow's own background which trails this grandeur through his fiction. Are those of us without that background not allowed to imagine our way into it? I don't think Faulks is arguing that no imaginative use of someone else's history is permissible (how could he be?), but this seems to me to run counter to his previous advice to write what you don't know. Indeed, it gives ammunition to the literal-minded philistines who can't cope with verisimilitude, but need to prove that fiction is 'real', before they can accord it any value. To me, the value of fiction is the exact opposite: that it's not real, that it's not a weaker, because less 'accurate', form of documentary, but rather an imaginative (re-)creation of possibilities. As Una in A Secret Alchemy discovers, fiction is 'An opium dream of the heart.' In Xanadu, in other words, did Kubla Khan...

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*Rosy's an academic lawyer, by way of a day job, so we're both anxious to point out that this is her memory of a small part of Faulk's very interesting talk, not a verbatim account.

Note number 24

Whether the how-to-write books are warning you about how agonising but necessary these days it is to be a performing author, or whether they're (more rarely) warning you of the risks of becoming a performaholic, what they don't say is how much time, beyond the edges of the event, each one takes. I had the most delicious time at the Daphne du Maurier festival, down in Fowey in Cornwall: a lovely audience, great questions, a wonderful walk, but the domestic fallout is considerable, and the writerly fallout is not negligible either, not least because there are one or two things going on which I can't blog about yet.

So, meanwhile, here's what had me doing the Happy Author Dance round the kitchen, despite the kind of weariness only seven hours of even well-behaved trains (blame Dr Beeching and his predecessors) can make you feel. It was sent by a kind friend because I missed it. Note no. 24...

The Jung of Pooh and Piglet

So I've spend a fair few days celebrating the fact that, in the week of 20th April, A Secret Alchemy was the fourteenth bestselling paperback fiction in the UK. Serious celebration, it's been, to top off the pleasure of seeing stacks of it next to The Times it in every W H Smith in the country. Even my agent, who has seen just about every variety of success and disaster the book trade can create, is very, very pleased. And all for that 'difficult' second novel, which has also just had its first advance review for the American incarnation, in Publishers' Weekly:

Historical sections, filled with allusion and mythology, make breathtaking drama ... Darwin's at her most powerful exploring Anthony's faith or Elizabeth's understanding of women, love and marriage in her time... a satisfying end ties the threads together.

And then today I had a bit of a revelation about the absolutely opposite end of the peculiar spectrum of experience we call being a writer. Anyone who's been hanging around this blog long enough will know that one of the recurring themes is about the difference, and interaction, between process and product. I'm a contrary soul so, because so much of talk about how-to-write, let alone what-editors-want, is in terms of product - what you want to have at the end - I spend a lot of time banging on about how process must come first, and then the product may not be what you set out to produce, but will work, be right, have integrity.

But actually, of course, if you want to produce a coherent story, what's really going on is a constant interaction between product and process. At some point you have to decide that you're writing a novel (product). Then you have to decide how (process) to work the material in your head/notebook/gut into something which will be... whatever a novel is (the harder you try, the harder it is to define. A protean form indeed). Then as you work it you're constantly checking to and fro between what you're trying for (product) and what it seems (process) to be becoming (product, but a different product). Your Inner Writer is all about process: it has to keep its ears pricked for surprises, keeping the faith that if your unconscious brings something up from the depths and into the pot of the novel it may well be for a good reason, while not giving up if it turns out to be useless. Your Inner Reader is all about product: it has to keep tasting the stew with a clear idea of what a good stew tastes like and what might make this one good, while being willing to go with the fact that casserole seems to be becoming cassoulet, even if it does mean days of hunting the net and the libraries for new ingredients.

This then mapped itself onto a conversation I'd been having about maleness and femaleness in writing. Bypassing gender-political arguments about the Orange Prize (because we're not talking about actual men and women, but the characteristics which are generally held to live in the baskets labelled 'masculine' and 'feminine') we came to the not very startling conclusion that, actually, the best writing and best writers are both. Let's loosely call 'masculine' such things as goals, problem-solving, linear thought, left-brain, analysis, lack of affect, objectivity, uni-tasking, compartmentalising, status, logic and reason: animus. And shall we call the opposites 'feminine'?: process, problem-finding, simultaneous thought, right-brain, synthesis, awareness of affect, subjectivity, multi-tasking, combining, levelling, a-logic (not illogic) and intuition: anima.

It's bleedin' obvious, isn't it, where this is going. If you're going to be any good as a writer, you have to be both, and they have to work together. Anyone who reads unpublished manuscripts knows the ones which are nothing but facts and events, and even if the characters do feel anything, it's left to the reader to deduce what. And there's the opposite kind, where the emotional state (journey, in the better ones) of the main characters is evoked for pages at a time, and almost nothing outside their head and heart actually happens at all. Even in good, published work one can often say that one or other aspect - anima or animus - dominates, and I write that as a fan of Virginia Woolf and Dick Francis. In ourselves, too, one or other probably dominates, though even in two people with the same percentage split, the effect will vary.* But the writers themselves must be using both aspects.

So if we're trying to bring the two into equality, not so much in balance as working together like top sawyer and bottom sawyer, we have to realise that Inner Writer and Inner Reader each work on their own aspects of process and product. The Reader has to be intuitively open to whatever the story is, as well as deciding what's making the plot machinery creak so loudly just here. And the Writer has to pull a sentence apart ruthlessly and logically to get it to do its job, as well as being open to whatever images or ideas or sudden, unnameable sensations flash across its consciousness. Atwood talks of the ordinary person and the slippery double, Jung of animus and anima. Then there's yin and yang, sun and moon, silver and gold, Sherlock and Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde... Or Pooh and Piglet, of course. 

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*Struggling to resolve hard-wired feminism with a child of each gender plus their friends, I decided that most of the boys, as it were, took say 60-80% of their characteristics from the basket marked 'boy', and the girls the same from the 'girl' basket. But which 70% they picked varied, so that the net result in an individual child challenges any gender stereotypes you might be wanting to indulge, and grants no quarter to sexism in parents or anyone else.

Accept, adapt, ignore

Well, I'd like to pretend that the reason I haven't posted here for so long is something large and amazing - a burst of literary inspiration, a passionate affair, a killing on the stock market - but of course it isn't, it's the usual accumulation of dull but urgent stuff which domestic and freelance life attracts as a drain attracts dead leaves. Most of those leaves are terribly boring (did you think that if the oven door you were trying to mend slipped one inch to touch the floor, it would shatter? No, neither did I, but now a new oven door is one more thing on the To Do List). But a few are interesting:

On Sunday 5th April I'm doing a session at the Oxford Literary Festival, in tandem with Martin Brasier, author of Darwin's Lost World. 10am in Festival Room 2. I've been reading Martin's book and to anyone interested in narrative and creative thinking across the arts and sciences, as I am, it's fascinating stuff. And I've realised that the fun of festivals, as opposed to other events, is that since they're so often held in beautiful places that take forever to get to (yes, even Oxford, if you live in South East London), you always end up spending a night there, and then you can go to other sessions. It doesn't get much better than Simon Schama introducing his film on John Donne, which is on Saturday night. And after my own session, I just might hang around for two novelists discussing truth in historical fiction, about which I hold strong views... 

The UK paperback of A Secret Alchemy is published on 16th April, and there's been a flurry of activity, not just to fit the hardback reviews onto the cover, but also on the marketing front. And it's borne fruit: for the week of the 20th April, if you buy a copy of The Times in W H Smith, you can buy a copy of A Secret Alchemy for less than half the cover price. So if you realise a week late that you've forgotten to get an Easter present for a not very favourite great aunt, it'll be nicely in time to persuade her to write you back into her will. I promise I won't tell her that it only cost you £2.99.

And a few more festival dates, just briefly: on Friday 8th May I'm at the Daphne du Maurier Festival in Fowey, Cornwall; on Monday 11th May I'm at the Swindon Literary Festival; and on Tuesday 26th May I'll be appearing at the Hay Festival together with my cousin the poet Ruth Padel, whose new collection is Darwin: a Life in Poems. And I'll also be appearing in October at the Wimbledon Book Festival, but that's so far ahead I don't think we need worry about it just yet, do we?

So, I admit, I've been short of time to grapple properly with a decent-sized thought. But the Starting Your Novel session Debi Alper and I ran on Saturday for Writer's Workshop got me thinking. 17 aspiring writers in a room at the top of Waterstone's Picadilly, some new to the whole workshop thing, some old hands, and a lot to cover in the day. It's been a while since I've been in a workshop setting, and I found myself thinking about the whole business of feedback. We've all spent so much of our lives in education that I think we don't always think about what's going on when someone says something about our writing. Learning to deal with feedback is a central part of becoming a writer: a particular process all on its own, a meta-process operating above the process of learning to write better. I've seen writers angrily refuse to change a word, I've seen writers in tears, I've seen writers meekly cut a terrific character which one single person doesn't like, I've seen writers paralysed with self-consciousness for weeks. And I've been most of those writers at one time or another. It's complicated by the issue of the standing of the person making the comment: how does a friend rank against a stranger, a published writer against a really good teacher, a fan of the genre against someone who's never read any of that genre before; an experienced reviewer with an excess of bile against a fan who says you've shown them that contemporary fiction need not after all be a closed book to them? (and yes, both of those two last have happened to me too.)

What it comes down to, I realised recently, is that when you're given feedback, you have three possibilites: accept, adapt, or ignore. Accept is obvious: all along you knew that it didn't really work, you just hoped no one else would notice, but they have, so get to work. Adapt is the most interesting, because what it means is that you accept that there's something wrong, but you don't agree about what exactly, or why, or what to do about it. You're going to have to think laterally, talk/draw/sing, or go back to the roots of why that bit's there. Could you get the same effect, or a different effect with as much symbolic or thematic weight, by another means? Ignore is when they're just plain wrong: they didn't get it, they haven't read the whole thing, it's not their genre, they're not calibrated for thumping good stories, or baroque literary excess. Ignore is not for those times when you realise that there's something wrong but it's a regrettable necessity given all sorts of other things. If it's wrong, it's wrong, and you're going to have to think round it till you find a solution. (What do you mean, but the solution's re-writing the whole novel? Okay, re-write it then!)

Which you do will have something to do with how you weigh the feeder-back's opinions, and that highlights an important truth about working in the arts. They're not a democracy or an equal opportunities environment: not all opinions are equal to you when you're working. You're utterly entitled to make your own decision as to what's worth listening to. If it's an experienced editor of novels like your own, you'd be completely barking not to listen to every word and weigh it extremely carefully, but it has been known. If it's someone who only reads Michael Chrichton commenting on your highly experimental literary fiction, you're not morally or creatively obliged to do more than say thank you. If it's someone who only reads highly experimental literary fiction commenting on your heart-warming romance-with-a-twist, ditto. Accept, adapt, ignore: it's your choice.