This Itch of Writing

Sorry, Raymond Chandler, I'll be back in a bit

I've got into trouble before now for saying that I don't read fiction when I'm writing. It's true that all good writers were voracious readers first, and it's true that a surprising number of people say they want to write, without seeming to know that reading is a pre-requisite. I've had manuscripts to report on which made me wonder quite seriously if the writer had ever read a book (and no, most recent clients, if you're reading this, it wasn't you...). And it's not just for trainee writers: as I was saying in Alive, kicking and joining in the game, for the whole of a writer's life reading and writing are like the two halves of the human body which that life inhabits. We scoff (quietly, I hope) at the neophyte writer's fear of 'being influenced' - any writer worth their salt should want to be influenced by the greats, and by the contemporary masters/mistresses of their branch of the craft, whether it's Thomas Mann or Marian Keyes.

So when I pause a writing day for lunch and open a history book, am I failing to practising what I preach? It depends what you mean by 'when I'm writing'. The stage when I really can't read fiction is the first-draft stage and given the choice, that's as short as possible. If children didn't need feeding, and accountants and sisters didn't need telephoning, and I didn't occasionally need to take some exercise and go to the supermarket, it would be three or four months till I had 130,000 words on the page. And those words are raw, they're rough, they comes pouring up like lava, slow, burning and inexorable, from some underworld that I don't know my way round or have any maps for. One of the things I don't understand about that underworld is what makes which words appear, for what I want to say next. Voice is one of the things I get most excited about, but it's also one of the most mysterious. I love strongly-flavoured voices in fiction, but just because I love soaking in Ackroyd, James, Chandler, Woolf or Wodehouse doesn't mean I want to write like them. The trouble is, if I've been soaking, I can't help it. Not really like them, of course - I should be so lucky - but with that flavour, like a chopping board that you've sliced the onions on: whatever you do, don't start cutting up peaches on it. So all the other things you absorb from reading fiction are going to have to wait as well. Maybe it comes from a youth mis-spent writing parodies for the title-and-paragraph game, but that sponge-like tendency of my reader-writer's self is a bit of a liability but also one of my most valuable assets: one of my most cherished reviews of The Mathematics of Love said that 'its bilingual dexterity is only one of its several triumphs'.

Of course, non-fiction has a flavour too. In fact I sometimes get annoyed by the way that it's often talked about as if really great writing is only an issue in fiction and poetry, or these day's what's called 'imaginative non-fiction' (travel writing, memoir). Good prose is good prose. We could all learn a lot about the weight and balance of a sentence, about flexible, sophisticated grammar and syntax, about rhythm and sound, from the likes of Trevelyan, Kenneth Clarke, Roy Porter, or Peter Ackroyd in non-fictional mode. Elizabeth David wrote brilliantly (and goes very nicely with lunch), and so does Katharine Whitehorn. And an anthology of good journalism - from the Guardian Women's page, say - or of letters or diaries or speeches, can be a very good way of feeding your inner reader-writer without flavouring the chopping board too highly with a single scent.

Of course, for period voice it's those letters and diaries that are your first stop. Not that you'll write like them, either. I do a mean parody of the Paston Letters, but you couldn't write or read a whole novel like that. The 'authenticity' of our novels - in words or deeds - is only apparent. We write for our own time, and our voice is as much about England in 2008 as in 1471. What it can't be, though, is Los Angeles in 1927. It doesn't go with the armour.

Sharing despair with Neil Gaiman

Answering a cris de cœur - in a forum of mainly published writers - of 'I hate Book Two!', someone posted this, which came originally from Neil Gaiman. I hope he won't mind me borrowing it: as you can imagine from this piece, (which I gather was originally written for NaNoWriMo) he has one of the best writing blogs on the net, which is well worth dropping by.

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The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm---or even arguing with me---she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, "Oh, you're at that part of the book, are you?"

I was shocked. "You mean I've done this before?"

"You don't remember?"

"Not really."

"Oh yes," she said. "You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients."

I didn't even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

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About ten other writers on that forum piled in to agree, and we all agreed that it's not just second book syndrome, it's a seemingly inevitable part of the cycle of writing novels. Looking back, I remember when a certain book called Shadows in the Glass - otherwise known as The Mathematics of Love - was driving me to tears of exasperation. Did I really have to plod on, when I had this brilliant new idea of how I could, after all, write Anthony and Elizabeth Woodville? It's hard to remember that time now, and Book Two - otherwise known as A Secret Alchemy - had more than its share of 'I hate!' stages, and I'm remembering why I wanted to write it, and enjoying the way it's come out. And ever since that I hate stage I've been steadily more excited about Book Three - otherwise known as Book Three - and now I would cheerfully kill to get everything out of the way and all the preliminary research done so I could start it. But I must remember, I tell myself, that in a few months I'll be crying 'I hate Book Three!' because sparkling at me in the mists of my mind will be Book Four. I must remember...

But just in case, I think I'll just go and print out that Neil Gaiman story, and pin it up on the wall, directly above the monitor.

Sunday round-up: age-banding, and putting the cart before the horse

In 'Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming' I said that thinking about a piece of writing after you've written it can teach you much more about how writing works than reading a textbook before you start. The more formalised insitutions of academic creative writing seem to divide into two kinds: the departments and degrees which discuss ideas and theories of writing, and then write to explore them, and the places where the writing comes first and the analysis afterwards. A piece in Times Higher Education argues that creative writing is reviving the sort of liberal humanism in English departments that Theory banished, but the piece and the comments didn't rule out the theory-first approach to CW from which I instinctively recoil. So why do I recoil from it? Primarily, you could argue, because I became a writer first, and only a (sort-of) academic second. But I don't think it's simply an accident of my career. I think writing first, analysing second is the nature of writing, and although it's perfectly possible to use writing as a tool to explore theoretical ideas, the writing that results shouldn't be regarded as art, nor those whose only writing is of this kind as creative artists.

The first impulse that makes people take to pen and paper is, you could say, like the kind of moment in a musical that I was discussing in 'Wanting, needing'... when the characters just have to burst into song: they have something to say - something they feel, think, believe - which can't be contained any longer. Of course what bursts out of you may be an idea, not a desire to retell Puss-in-Boots, but it's the desire that comes first. Even at the micro level of single sentences, the sentence comes first, and the analysis of whether it's the right sentence, and what to do if it's not, comes second. And at a slightly more macro level, all writing teachers know that the first thing you have to teach learner-writers is that though the outburst comes naturally, and first, so much of writing as art and craft is actually in the revising. So it seems to me that for the academy to theorise first and write second is putting the cart before the horse, even if it is easier to examine and sits more comfortably with the established processes of academic enquiry. Not only will it result in a lot of writing which has no value beyond being a demonstration of theory (which you could argue doesn't matter, if the purpose of a degree or a research project is academic enquiry) but in perverting the natural writing process such courses and academics are actually losing sight of what they purport to study. Creative writing as a discipline is process, and if it's not allowed to be itself, then it's not creative writing, but something else entirely.

And finally, the row about age-banding children's books rumbles on. I think the attempt by publishers to guide parents in choosing the right books for their children is well-meaning, since parents who have least confidence in choosing are probably the ones who are least used to decoding covers and blurbs and getting a feel for a book with a quick dip. Having heard the story from the horse's mouth of the teenage boy who tentatively asked if he'd be allowed into Waterstones if he was wearing trainers, I have some sympathy with this view. And with 20% of books being sold through Tesco's alone, most people are not buying books in places where a well-informed bookseller is there to help. But the initiative is back-firing. Some very heavyweight authors indeed, and the keen and opinionated booky readers of the blogosphere, argue that a single mark of 7+ or 13+ will put off more children than it will help, and that unifying the very different issues of reading-difficulty and content under a single mark is not only impossible, but a betrayal of everything that literature should be: wide-ranging and free-thinking. It's not actually a new question: does anyone else remember the guidance in the Puffin books of my youth. 'This book will appeal to girls of 10-12, and sensitive boys,' was typical, as I remember. But it was tucked away at the bottom of the blurb, infinitely less pre- and pro-scriptive in style than the proposed gaudy film-certificate symbols. The anti age-banding camp are here, and mega-selling Darren Shan makes his views known on Vulpes Libris, just above an interview with the very wonderful Barrington Stoke, who in their mission to make good books suitable for dyslexics and reluctant readers have grappled for a decade with these issues of content versus reading age. Meanwhile The Bookseller's account of events is here.

And now, back to today's other job, which is putting up yet another bookshelf. I'll swear they breed, those darned books...

Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming

There used to be a terrific series on Radio 3 - Monday afternoons, as I remember - called Stage and Screen. It was always a stand-alone programme about theatre or movie music, from the acutely avant-garde to the blockbustingly popular, and apart from the fact that it was always full of all that gorgeous repertoire, the discussion of the interaction between drama (and so at least by implication, storytelling) and music was consistently illuminating. The Broadway musical seems an impossibly tight form to us novelists, lying back comfortably in the arms of our own baggy monster of a tradition. And composing music, complete with beginning, middle and end, for a three-minute-forty-seven-second cue which has already been shot, is also something to make even those of us who are turned on by technical and formal challenges feel a bit weak.

I get grumpy when it seems that the nearly as tight principles of screenwriting are being applied to fiction without any acknowledgement that the two art forms are in many ways fundamentally different, and that happens a lot, not least in books about creative writing which ought to know better. But there's no denying that the basic simplicity of the novel-like elements of a musical (the time-frame of the experience so relatively short, the music/set/choreography doing much of the work that the novelist has to do for themself) can mean that the big bones of the storytelling can be seen and discussed amazingly clearly.

So I wish I could remember more of some of the programmes that were about narrative in musicals. It was school-run time, so I couldn't easily make notes, and in those pre-DAB, pre-podcast days it was hard to catch up later. Sometimes I think I might try to track down some splendidly vulgar Write your Musical and Make a Million book, just to see whether what it says chimes with what I remember: that in a good musical the big songs are the seemingly natural culmination of a build-up of plot and emotion, an outburst of feeling and action too strong to be contained in mere prose speech. And this idea, mutatis mutandis, is something that fiction writers could do well to think about.

One of the things that most often isn't working in novels that I do editorial reports on is what's sometimes called One-Damn-Thing-After-Another syndrome: when the plot just seems like a series of things that happen. The writer has usually thought quite hard about what the characters are trying to get, what need they're trying to fulfil, and then either written a series of scenes to explain it, or tossed a series of obstacles in their path. If these two kinds of scene are alternated, it can give the illusion that the novel has a plot. But if the reader's not to get bored with each damn thing trotting along about as excitingly as junctions on the M1, fiction needs to be all about change: narrative drive isn't about bomb-blasts or sex scenes or crying on the best friend's shoulder, it's fundamentally about how those moments change the characters' needs and desires, and therefore their actions. In practical, how-I-suggest-you-revise-your-novel terms, what that means is that the writer needs to pinpoint the crucial moment of change in their head, make it clear in the scene (however subtly, however buried in the subtext) and then re-write what comes before so that the change is convincing, and re-write what comes after so we see the effect on them, the other characters, and what they all do next.

I can remember two examples that were discussed in Stage and Screen of the natural place for a big song in a traditional musical - the place where feeling's to strong to be contained. The first is the classic opening 'I want' number, where the hero/heroine bursts out with what will, fundamentally, be the driving reason for the whole story. Eliza Doolittle's 'All I want is a room somewhere' is a classic of this kind, while Belle's first number in the Disney Beauty and the Beast is another example, though I can't remember its title. The village is narrow and boring, they all think she's weird because she yearns for something grander and more exciting, but her main suitor - her perceived future - is stupid and vain. The number is shaped as her progress through the village, which is clever too, because it means that within the song itself there's movement. It isn't just a single statement, it embodies change in itself, a literal and figurative feeling that we're in a different place at the end from where we started. All in about three minutes: a page and a half of a novel read aloud.

A second big moment of change was first pin-pointed, apparently, by Rodgers and Hammerstein in Carousel, and it's the kind of product of fundamentals and practicalities that I love. One of the drawbacks of forming a muscial (most musicals?) around a love story (even a sad, going-wrong one like Carousel) is that the biggest moment of change of all - when the hero and heroine declare their love - should be the biggest song, the highest point, but it can't happen too early, because the plot's based on the business of getting them together. So how do you get a high enough point into the first act? If you don't, after all, the audience might not bother to come back after the interval. To overcome this inherent drawback of (if you believe Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots) the most fundamental story of all  Rodgers and Hammerstein invented what's since become know as the conditional love song. 'If I loved you,' in Carousel is the original of 'I'll know when my love comes along,' in Guys and Dolls, 'On the street where you live,' in My Fair Lady, and a dozen others. If the 'I love you' song is about fulfilment, which always risks being the end of the story, the conditional love song is all about desire in the true sense: wanting, dreaming, yearning, needing. Which, of course, is the mainspring of fiction.

I hate it when I hear of aspiring writers meekly trying to force the words and ideas that are tumbling out of them into some prescriptive mould that will - the how-to book swears - mean that their book will sell. But when I look back on things I've written, and books I've read, I can see many moments which you could call either the 'I want' moment, or the conditional love song, or, no doubt, the other big moments a musical has. In fact, I think this post-hoc understanding - the commentary on A Secret Alchemy which is part of my PhD, if you like - can be far more fruitful, in learning your trade, than any studying of a textbook before you start. But that's for another post...

How many viola parts does it take to make a novel?

I was interested to discover that, like Mozart, Vaughan Williams' instrument was the viola. The viola? The instrument that has as many jokes made about it as Skoda cars do? Even though Amadeus may have been an exercise in fascinating historical fiction, no one could accuse Mozart of being uninterested in high-visibility showmanship. Anyone who's heard the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis would be forgiven for assuming that RVW was a string player. And yet, though it does make a beautiful sound, it's possibly the most invisible in the orchestra, because its timbre blends with the violins and the cellos, and by definition it's almost always playing the inner parts. Rarely does the viola get a tune you could sing, nor is it the underpinning bass that defines the harmonies: the joke about what you call a violist at the bottom of the sea ('a start') is only one which other musicians tell about how dispensible it is.

So why did it appeal to at least two great composers? (I've been watching RVW rising back up the approval ratings in the wake of the 50th anniversary of his death). I think it must be to do with it being one of the most important elements in what musicians call the inner parts: alto and tenor lines, clarinet and bassoon parts. If you like, a tune is like a story: the thing we first want music to give us, the sine qua non, the thing we whistle so that others can recognise what we're talking about. But as the art develops, what happens to a tune - how that plain statement is supported, given texture, qualified, changed, synocopated, undermined, shifted into the minor, the dominant, the unexpected - becomes an ever more interesting business. In modernism, for instance, the original element of storytelling/tune is taken as - literally - read, in that the reader/listener is given everything except a coherent version of that original element, which they must put together from all the other elements, including the inner parts.

Which doesn't mean that a wonderful tune isn't still one of the best small things that can happen to a human being. Nor that both Mozart and RVW wrote some of the most exquisite tunes that have ever existed. But maybe that's why the question 'What's your book about?' is so hard for novelists to answer. Because there are so many answers, so many textures, rhythms, harmonies and counterpoints to talk about, and 'the Princes in the Tower' is only one of them.

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...

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.

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.