This Itch of Writing

A new use for an old Christmas tree

So, at 3.30 on Monday morning I reached the end of the story of my new novel: I finished it. I went to bed on a high, slept till nearly noon, did ten useful things around the house and then pranced off into a shiny afternoon of sun and frost to do some pleasurable shopping. But it isn't finished. In fact, there's a lot to do yet: it needs a bit at the beginning and a bit at the end, a full line-edit, and working through thirty or so pages of what an inspired writing friend has called the snag-list, which includes everything from "change Elinor to Isobel" to "put body in ditch in Ch 4: ?what fallout?" to "find title". The snag-list is what architects and set designers do, finding all the little things in a house which need sorting out. But the roof and walls are on, and I feel like a builder topping out by tying a tree to the chimney. Of course there is several weeks' work still before it'll be heading off to my agent. And then there'll be a week or three more of nail biting before she'll have read it and be able to tell me what more work it needs.

And on Tuesday I was standing in the kitchen when the radio started playing some Rennaissance polyphony of the sort which I had on the CD player for much of the writing of A Secret Alchemy and this new one. And I was swept with a sense of loss. I wasn't expecting it: it's something which hitherto has overcome me much later in the progress of a novel, round about the line-edit stage, when my tears are alternately about boredom and impatience, and about mourning. But, having got to the end, I have lost something, I find. I've lost some kind of sense of possibility. Juliana and Simon's story is told, and to the extent that we're storied creatures, when the story is done, we die. My characters aren't dead, of course: indeed they have the advantage that they never will die, in one sense. And because I'm not yet bored to tears with the book - far from it! - I'm looking forward to making them more real for the reader, more characteristic, more compelling, more convincing. But what they're not doing any more is evolving. I know who they are, now, because I know their story. They're not finished, but they're finite: I know what they're not and what they'll never be.

If that sounds mournful, it shouldn't. For one thing, at the moment I'm absolutely thrilled with this book, partly because compared to A Secret Alchemy it's been pretty straightforward and quick to write (I started it exactly this time last year) and partly because I feel I have indeed achieved my goal of pulling off something which I've never tried before. It's also incredibly energising. If the definition of creative work is making something which is greater than the sum of its parts, then now that the book is finite, though not finished, I can see that it is whole, and it is greater than the sum of its parts. I hope. Whether others think that remains to be seen: my agent will be the first person to read a single word of it. But it exists: the house is built. Now, to give the children a shout to hurry up getting the ornaments off the Christmas tree; I've got an even better use for it.

Under your skin and into your core

The ever-admirable Litlove, of Tales from the Reading Room, asked me this in the comments on the differently fascinating Dirty Sparkle blog:

As a writer you've had a great deal of external validation for your work, more than most writers are fortunate enough to have. How will you feel when you get some really stinking reviews? I mean,I hope it never ever happens, but you're going to have to have some solid core of trust in your own work to withstand that, and it can only be developed (I would think) by committing in the act of writing to doing what pleases you first, and others as a delightful second.

It's certainly true that I've been very lucky with the quantity and quality of external validation, from the wholly commercial, such as Headline Review taking the front and inside front cover of The Bookseller to advertise The Mathematics of Love to the trade, to some terrific print and blog reviews (not excepting Litlove's own for The Mathematics of Love). But I've had some very curate's-eggy ones in print, and some pretty rude reviews on the blogs too, not to mention passing comments: the one-star ones for A Secret Alchemy on Amazon give you the idea. No doubt some day, and probably soon, the print reviewers and the well-respected bloggers will read something of mine which they hate, and make no bones about saying so. After all, there's very little point in publishing a really bad review of a debut novel by an unknown, but once an author's an existing, if tiny, plant in the book world, they're fair game.

So, how do you cope? How do I cope? With the proviso that I may well rescind all this when a respected reviewer explains, in detail, in public, just why a book of mine is so very bad, here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

1) Reviews are fodder for reviewers, and food for readers, and only incidentally feedback for the writer. A reviewer has no obligation to consider your feelings or teach you things, except in keeping the review to the book in their hands, and not taking pot-shots at your or its reputation or prospects. But, equally, the writer has no obligation to read, let alone take on board, the review. Your prime duty to your writing is to protect your writerly self, in order to write better. That doesn't mean stopping your ears to all negative comments, but it does mean taking only what's useful from reviews, as judged not by what pleases others, but by what makes sense to you. In other words, you need to make your own decision about accept, adapt, ignore from a review as with anything else. But do actually read the review, or get someone else to. Inevitably we're hyper-sensitive to what's said about our work, and we react far more strongly than the actual words would suggest to anyone else. If the first sentences of a review sound unpromising, I tend to read the rest with one eye, to protect myself from further hurt. Only of course I miss any nice, later things, and log it as a 'bad review' in my head, when by any normal measure it's nothing of the kind.

2) A central part of your writerly self is exactly that "solid core of trust" that Litlove talks about. It is essential - though it's inevitable that the outer edges of your core are more solid some days than others, I think. But how you acquire/grow/solidify that core I'm not sure. Saying that self-belief is vital, though it is, doesn't actually get you much further, for reasons I explored in Learning to be Bad: any self-belief worth having is the product of understanding your craft, and knowing that you understand it. That  includes knowing just how much you don't yet know, so self-belief is not a replacement for that understanding. The core is partly formed by what I think of as conditional validation: the detailed, thoughtful assessment by someone whose judgement you respect, that your work has objective merits. That's where doing the right course or class, or even getting an editorial report, at the right moment in your development, can be incredibly valuable: even where friends and writing buddies are knowledgeable, and willing to tell you the negative things, they may simply be too close to you and your own work for you to be able to mark their approval up in the "Am-I-any-good?" ledger in your mind.

3) I think Litlove's right, too, that the rest of the solid core comes, not from external validation, but from a certain integrity in what you do. I don't mean that you should only write morally impeccable, socially engaged, haut-lit tragedies about Real Life, or that you should never wonder what readers are buying at the moment. But I do think that you need to feel that what you write is worth writing, not just as self-expression for you but as a story worth telling to others, and that you're writing it as well as you can. Yes, the more of your heart and soul you put in (which may not be Tolstoy's, but rather the heart of Victoria Wood and the soul of P G Wodehouse, and none the worse for it), the more painful the knock-backs, from rejections from agents to hatchet-job reviews. But knowing that you've created something from nothing which deserves its existence as a creative work, means that judgements from outside can't entirely destroy its value: it was worth doing. As long as you believe that you won't look back on a piece of your work in five years time and think 'I wish I hadn't bothered', then your core is beginning to solidify.

4) Remember that there are lots of different ways in which a review can be negative which you can ignore. As Updike says (do read his rules for reviewers) a reviewer should "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and... not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt". If the blame your book attracts is for the latter, then you can safely ignore it. You can safely ignore a reviewer who gets the plot badly wrong too (unless several do, in which case maybe you really didn't make it clear!): reviewers are pretty badly paid and would usually rather be writing their own stuff, so sometimes they're operating on a pretty sketchy read. And some reviewers just don't get it. Most of the one-star reviews that A Secret Alchemy got on Amazon are by readers who read historical fiction as history lite, and didn't like what they read as my version of history. The central point of the book - that fiction-telling is at once less true and more true than history-telling - eluded them. And both ASA and The Mathematics of Love picked up blog comments from readers who don't get parallel narrative and aren't equipped or don't want to look for reasons why these two stories are in the same book. Okay, they don't have to, but I don't have to write to please them, either. Since I take no pleasure in excluding readers, not least but not only because I want to sell books, I felt bad about that for ages: in our consciously inclusive age we're uneasy about excluding anyone. Then something much more robust suddenly grew inside me, and I found myself thinking, "Well, I can't help it if you don't know how to read." No doubt there's a more politically correct way of putting it, but that, too, has become part of my core: there will always be people who don't get it, but as long as I get it, and some people get it, that's okay.

5) The impulse to resist, given reviews which get it wrong, is answering back. Yes, it's incredibly frustrating to know that there are potential readers who will get a completely wrong idea of the book and your writing. But it's never, ever a good idea. The only time I'd be tempted would be if the whole review, in a major newspaper or blog, was founded on a mistake. If a hatchet job was firmly based on my writing of a character or battle which isn't actually in the book, say, a calm letter correcting the error of fact, with absolutely no opinions or emotions attached, might - just might - be all right.

5) But there will always be reviews which do review the actual book, which have no beef with the kind of book you're writing, which understand what happens and what you're trying to do, and... don't think you did it well at all. Those are the ones which really hurt and, to a degree, so they should: you're writing for an audience - or why are you writing? - and an intelligent, responsible member of that audience has booed. Anaesthetics help for a while: I'd never say that a bottle of wine, a bar of chocolate and a well-exercised credit card don't cheer one up. But a review like this hurts your core and in the end you can only mend that hurt by attending to it. It will take time; it may mean you wince away from certain topics or forms or ways of writing - or any writing at all - for a while; it may mean that your writing process is hamstrung by self-consciousness. It's counter-intuitive, but only in really knowing and feeling what's going on with you and your work, including the damage and its consequences, can you get your core's strength back for the long term.

Twisting the tale in cold blood

A lot of talking about writing ponders and circles around the mysteries of inspiration: the genie, the zone, the muse, the cloud of unknowing, the necessity for darkness or music, the fetishism about notebooks or mascots, the alcohol, the drugs, the digging in the garden, the long country walks, the endless games of patience (Heyer's preferred method, along with 'a little gin and benzedrine'). Some of the best-selling - and best - how-to books, including Brande's Becoming a Writer and Cameron's The Artist's Way, are all about such things, and the hands-down winner in the Most Often Asked Festival Question stakes is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' It's the great, and therefore fascinating, mystery.

Since it's easy to believe (not helped by the publisher's need/desire for high-concept, elevator-pitch promotions) that all writing a novel takes is a brilliant idea, writers then spend much of the school visit/festival session talking about how hard they work to cut and shape and re-cut and polish the idea. Or they talk about how we let characters walk in and misbehave, or find the ending was quite different from what we expected. (Dodie Smith said this of I Capture the Castle. How I'd love to know what she did expect!) Good writing courses, such as the Open University one I'm teaching, start by exploring how you find the material for your work - freewriting, clustering, keeping a notebook and what to note - and then tackle the cutting and shaping. In other words, even if there's lots of toing and froing between them, everything tends to assume that, fundamentally, inspiration comes first, and technique later.

It's undeniably true, at the fundamental level: you can't shape an idea till you've had it. But, just as I was arguing that you could ask your talent what it wants to work on, rather than expecting it to do its best with whatever you want to write about, maybe we should stand this idea, too, on its head occasionally. Maybe it's not always a matter of inspiration first, then technique.

Well, to be honest, there's no 'maybe' about it, at least not as far as I'm concerned, because I know that I've done things in my writing which began as cold-blooded, technical decisions, but became part of how the cloud of unknowing condensed into a whole world for the reader. For example:

1) One of the comments on The Mathematics of Love which was made, in passing, by one of the Glamorgan tutors was that all the sex in it is good sex, which she felt was a bit unreaslitic. At the time I probably just looked smug, but the comment must have stuck, perhaps even stung, because I was about a third of the way through what wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy when it occurred to me that so far this, too, had only had good sex. Time for not, I hope, a bad sex scene, but rather a scene of bad sex. Sorry, Una, but if you're in love with someone who isn't in love with you, and you're twenty and a virgin and someone else is desperately keen, wouldn't you? And would it be wonderful? Most unlikely. And a couple of readers have said it's one of their favourite scenes.

2) More recently, I realised that a character in the work-in-progress, who hardly appears but sets off the whole plot, had dropped out of view. This is not only unlikely in terms of realistic plotting (and if I told you any more about why, I'd have to kill you) but is also a bad practice from the storytelling point of view. Real life may be full of random appearances and disappearances, but storytelling is all about making patterns and connections: there's a basic assumption in the reader that everything in the book will tie up, will make sense as part of a whole. On the other hand, I can't have this character cluttering up my plot, since it's already planned, in a chamber-opera sort of way, for a small number of characters we know very well. So the poor bloke had better turn up dead. Murdered, in fact. No bad thing, either, to crank up the sense of danger, of latent violence, specially in a part of the book which is, perforce, a lot about talking and planning and not so much about action. Now, which chapter is quietest? Which could do with a body in a ditch? Let's have a look at my grand spreadsheet plan...

3) When I started work on The Mathematics of Love I already had the voice for Stephen, my 1819 narrator, as well as his letters and much of his backstory. And so for the parallel, 1976 strand I needed a narrator who would contrast with him as clearly as possible. That was partly because the whole parallel project was to cast light from different angles on the same questions - transgressive sex, lost children, voyeurism and so on - and different angles need different eyes and minds to see them. But it was also because one of the dangers in alternating first-person narratives (or alternating limited third-person narratives, come to that) is that the reader wakes up in the middle of a page and realises that they've no idea where they are. The more different in every way my two narrators were, the less likely that was to happen. So, Stephen was male, old in experience if not in years, melancholic, gentle, horrified by his own latent capacity for violence, compassionate, faithful, and frozen by a lost, ideal love. I needed a female, very young, resentful, stroppy, horrified by others' capacity for victimhood, promiscuous, and doesn't do the children thing, any more than she does the falling-in-love thing. I called her Anna, and off we went. The cold-blooded decision was even at the level of their sentences. Both think in long sentences, because I do, but they're very different: Stephen's are balanced, grammatically sophisticated, syntactically flexible and full of antitheses, while Anna's are looser, simpler, jointed by commas and lollop along with a series of 'ands'.

Of course it goes without saying (or I hope it does), that I wouldn't have stuck with these or half a dozen other cold-blooded decisions I could name (if I could remember them), if they hadn't worked out in practice. The test of a good idea for your work is how well it curls in among all the others. Indeed, perhaps it's because they worked out that I can't remember most of them: the goal of the writer is to melt inspiration and technique together, so that the reader experiences the story as a single whole. The last thing I want is for readers to see the component threads - research, technique, inspiration, borrowing - of my story separate out. And even if a reader chooses to separate them out later (and I won't pretend I don't enjoy seeing my writing heard so thorougly) I hope the threads curl themselves back together into a rope as thick and strong as ever. But which thread was made how and for what reason shouldn't - needn't - doesn't make any difference, once the tale is spun.

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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* 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...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*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.