This Itch of Writing

Fiddling, hangovers and The Paris Review

Anyone who's dipped more than a toe in the waters of creative writing knows that much of the craft (and art) of any writing is in re-writing. But even once you've discovered that writing 'The End' is only the beginning, it can be hard to know how to go about that rewriting which we all know is the making of the piece. I know of writers who re-write each page until it's perfect, then never change a comma. I know writers who write scenes from wherever they fancy in book in their head, then stitch it all together at the end, and writers who do the same without knowing even where those scenes come from. I know writers who revise yesterday's work by way of getting back into it, before continuing with today's, and writers who don't re-read a word they've written till the whole first draft is down. A quick dip into a random selection of the Paris Review interviews, either in the anthologies or the absolute goldmine which is the online archive, will show you that, of even the authors who are willing to say how they work, the possibilities are endless.

I know how I work, and why it works for me, and if I'm asked, I'll tell. I've thrashed it out over nineteen years, eight-and-a-half novels, various insights and aphorisms from various writer-teachers, and not a few of the Paris Review kind of interview, and it works for me. So far, anyway: since every new novel springs from a core idea which I don't know if I can pull off, I can't be sure how to set about trying to pull it off, either. So I'd never prescribe to any writer how to go about it, only offer suggestions that I know might help.

But if I were tempted to issue an absolute command to anyone trying to write their first novel, it would be DON'T FIDDLE. Don't keep popping back, changing a word here, a word there, re-reading a little bit after supper and tinkering. Especially after a glass of wine we all love the sound of our own voice on paper (except when we're hating it) and with computers it's too tempting to drop by, read a juicy bit, have second thoughts about a word, a sentence, a character. But it's usually disastrous: you get in a muddle, you don't see through changes you start, you lose track of what you've done because on a screen it always looks perfect, and you lose any sense of the larger structure. You change a metaphor to something better, because you've forgotten that you needed that metaphor much more two pages further on, which is why you changed it here in the first place. You flesh out an encounter in the most fascinating way (maybe because you've just had a similar one yourself?), which screws up the time-scale for the whole second half and two subplots to boot. Even if you don't do anything more radical than correct the odd typo and fiddle with the punctuation, if you keep popping back and reading bits your eye becomes jaded, the text shopworn: it goes dead to you, and you cease to be alive to it.

So, I would say, either leave it alone, or sit down for a solid session (however short) doing a particular job: 'beef up X's character'; 'sort out lost-letter plot'; 'revise Chapter Six'; 'check geography of Manchester chapter'. I would also say, don't forget the advantages of working on hard copy: you can read it sitting somewhere else which helps to bring it up fresh again as does the sight of it on paper; your pen-marks show where you've been and what's old and what's new thinking; you can to-and-fro, but you're less likely to lose track of what you're trying to do at the moment, not to mention the pace and structure; and having sacrificed a twig or two of the planet to print it out, you're more likely to do a thorough job of everything that needs doing, so as not to waste all that paper.

It's also well worth saving up the jobs which don't need full concentration and top-quality brainpower, too. Realistically, there'll be hungover or post-throwing-up-toddler or road-drills-outside mornings. It's maddening to feel that you've got the writing time but not the brain. An hour or two dealing with 'Change McClean to McCrumb' or 'make chapter titles italic' or 'check train times to Lands End' means that morning wasn't wasted after all. And given how bloomin' long novels take to write, don't neglect the stripy-sweater phenomenon. (The friend who taught me to knit told me to get a stripy pattern, because even though it'll take you a year to finish the thing, you can at least say quite often that you've finished a stripe) So, whether the morning's work was indeed changing McClean to McCrumb, or whether it was working out in detail a moment of absolute inspiration about how your novel should end, it's enormously helpful to be able to know that you've ended the morning with something concrete done.

Not that any writing is wasted writing, of course (though that's a whole other blog post). But spending an hour racking your brains for an alternative metaphor - which you know you had nailed a year ago - because the copy-editor points out that you've used the same one twice in two pages, comes as close to wasting writing time as you ever will.

In search of odd, crunchy details

I realised sadly a few weeks ago that I was going to have to go to France to research the new novel. This is, of course, the worst possible aspect of the writing life: that we can travel to beautiful or at least interesting places, and set off the whole lot, from the first cup of coffee at the airport, by way of hotel bills, entry tickets and photo printing costs, to the last steak-frites, against tax. I remember saying to my father that it seemed odd that Ian Fleming had suddenly upped and set a whole James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, in Japan. 'I expect he fancied a tax-free holiday there,' said my father. These days I know enough about Fleming (though some things I rather wish I didn't) to know that it wasn't quite as simple as that, but the point stands.

So I don't expect anyone to sympathise when I say that this kind of research isn't without its difficulties. For one thing you can only go when real life permits, which means it may not be the best time from the point of view of your work on the novel. I find that research comes in three kinds, all of which have their optimum moment: the rock-bottom basics which you can't start a novel without, the set-dressing, and the stuff you didn't know you'd need.

The rock-bottom basics are anything which affects the big architecture of the novel: rough travel times and distances, whether your characters can have the jobs you want them too, the basic mores of the world in which they live. These are the foundations of plot and structure, and changing the structure of a novel is like trying to turn an oil tanker round, so it's as well to check how long a broken leg takes to mend before you plot the damn thing. (I learnt that one the hard way, and one of my first tax-deductible purchases was an immense nursing textbook, to make sure it never happened again.) So getting these right at the beginning, is really, really worth it, but they're not, mostly, things that depend on getting your feet on the ground.

Calling the second kind set-dressing doesn't do it justice, because the textures of food and the sounds of cloth and the games your characters play when they're drunk on - what? - are more than incidental: they're the warp and weft of your novel's fabric, the things which will make its world come alive. They're also the things which will carry much of the non-narrative ideas, and the springboard for much of your figurative language (and if your figurative language isn't part of such non-narrative structures, then maybe it should be). I've built up a fair library of histories of transport, marriage, sex, food, costume, churches, medicine, castles, debutantes, sailors, housewives and saints, and there's always the net, for that quick grab for some necessary facts. But for the curves and crags of the landscape and the smell of the backstreets there's no substitute for going there. If you leave going there late, you'll know what you want, but it may be too late for what you find to inform - shape, illuminate, transform - your original conception of the novel. If you go too early you may not be looking for the right things, because your knowledge of the novel is still theoretical, based on paper plans, not an actual entity.

And this is even more true of the stuff you didn't know you'd need: the stuff you only see when you get there. Could I have known, till I was wandering the streets of Bilbao, that on that Atlantic coast those tall, typically southern European buildings would have their typical balconies glassed in? How perfect for a novel that was all about windows, reflections, light and above all voyeurism! But of course the earlier you are in the process of writing the novel, the more you have to accept that you may miss things that you could have used: so much is still misty, un-formed, undeveloped. And again, if you go later, you may find things which contradict or shake your confidence in what you've written: must you go back and cut or re-write even good things? 

And then there's remembering that a novel is not a travel book. While generalising and vagueness (because you don't know the odd, crunchy detail of it) is death to good writing, it can be a drawback to be too wedded to the facts of a place, as of a time. For one thing, haven't we all read books which canter along nicely, then trip and fall flat on a slab of prose that might be straight out of the Rough Guide? And for another, it can be particularly hard to judge a piece of writing coolly when it cost you a lot in time or money, or when you just loved the place, and have succumbed to the most basic writerly desire of all: to get down on paper what has moved or excited or fascinated you. Those are the darlings we're exhorted to murder, so maybe while I'm away, along with the postcards and the wine, I should pick up a nice big Sabatier knife in that delightful market, just for the purpose. (I'm going by train, so it won't be a problem to bring home.)

But who knows what will happen? There's never a single, right time for research, and certainly not when you have to combine so many different kinds of research in one place, at one time. You can't step in the same river twice, and that's part of the nature of creativity: we struggle to create something whole and satisfying, permanent and written in bronze, while recognising that even a change in the direction of the breeze might have resulted in a different book altogether.

It doesn't say anything on the tin

I had lunch the other day with a couple of writer-friends. They both did the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, of which I feel an honorary member since I get to sit in on some of the visiting authors' seminars and workshops, and one way and another you might say we're at the academic end of the writing trade: by definition we're writers who like talking and thinking about writing. But did we talk about the death of the novel, or the joys and sorrows of the writing process, or great writers we admire? Not very much: for the most part we talked about agents. And editors. And publishers. And agents again. Actors are just the same, I assume artists are too, and it's all contrary to what the more starry-eyed reader/audience-member/gallery-goer would like to believe. In between negotiating the minefield of talking honestly about my experience of agents and publishers without sounding infuriatingly lucky, I've been wondering why.

It's true that agents and editors are the gatekeepers: if you want more than half a dozen people to read your novel, you need an agent, to get you an editor, to get your work out there. In this, if in nothing else, novelists have it tougher than poets and short fiction and non-fiction writers. And that's not just about making (a little) money: it's about reaching your audience and being heard at all. But it's also about having trusted readers for before your work's ready to go out: as I was elaborating in What's the fitting room mirror telling you, about having a full-length, well-lit mirror which shows every happy combination of colours and disastrous wrinkle or hanging hem. Good editing (and in this I include the work that your agent may do with you on your book) doesn't tell you what to write, or make you re-do some bits of your book to conform to what they think is good or marketable, though a good editor may well be thinking about such things. Good editing helps you to make your book be as good and marketable as it's in its nature to be.

This often means that editors don't say 'It needs to be written in shorter sentences' or 'More scary monsters please!' or 'The demographics of your market mean she needs to be younger,' but rather 'Could this be better?' or 'This doesn't build up quickly enough,' or 'I didn't believe she'd do this'. How do you tackle such comments? It can be very baffling: you may be determined that this is your book, but sometimes it would be much easier to be given the 'right' answer, and write it down and know that teacher will give you a big tick and you'll get a good exam result. But editors aren't teachers, in that sense. They don't have right answers that we writers are trying to learn and put into practice. Quite often they don't know what they want, only that at the moment they're not getting it. But they'll know it when they see it.

Editors aren't teachers, but neither, you could say, are good teachers. One of the most interesting things I learnt in the HE teacher training course I did recently, was that students were most satisfied and felt they learnt most with course and teaching that were quite clear and structured and did what they said on the tin. But actually, apparently, these don't lead to the best results when it comes to assessment. Things that were more open-ended, which made it less obvious exactly what the right kinds of answer were, built in what they call 'desirable difficulties' and generally meant you didn't know quite what to do with the contents of the tin when you'd taken the lid off, seemed more puzzling and less helpful at the time, but actually led to better results, because the students had had to think more wide-rangingly and creatively, and actually ended up knowing and understanding more about their subject.

You don't need me to tell you how that applies to writing, do you? 'Desirable difficulty' rather sums up the whole writing thing, don't you think?

Dancing with Bach

It's always interesting when artists talk about arts other than their own. Last Sunday I was listening to the poet Rowan Williams (yes, the one whose day job is running the Church of England) talking about favourite music on Private Passions. If you're reading this before next Sunday, it's well worth a Listen Again. At one moment, talking about the rhythm in music and poetry, he points out that, 'We are creatures built on stress and slack: systole and diastole.' Many would realise that rhythm - a pattern of stresses - is innate in us because without a heartbeat we'd be dead. Not for nothing is the standard slow-dance track set at seventy beats per minute, as are our resting hearts. But Williams isn't saying just that: he's saying that we are created by and for a two-beat rhythm. Our hearts actually go stress slack, stress slack, stress slack, and so does our breathing, and the whole of our body's pulse, and the more I thought, the more I saw how much of the nature of storytelling and its written forms, too, grows from that fundamental characteristic of homo sapiens.

First, it reminded me of one of the most persuasive parts of Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots, in which he anatomises what he calls the constriction-and-release structure of just about any basic human story-plot you care to examine. I remember specifically him unpicking stories like that of Odysseus, or possibly Jason, as a series of encounters which constrict the hero often physically, always metaphorically, until there's no option but to struggle till he reaches freedom. Eventually, after a series of these experiences - the narrowing of danger then widening of freedom - the hero reaches (earns?) his reward of a kingdom, a wife, and a safe and powerful place in the world. Booker draws the analogy with the classic James Bond adventure plots, but I don't think it's stretching a point to add in the Bridget Jones type plot, which, while ostensibly being romantic comedy (Booker's fascinating about comedy, a subject that's much more rarely anatomised) also has this pattern.

Realising that, I thought of the classic plot-and-character-building interrogation that creative writing teachers use: "What does your character want/need? What does s/he do to get it? What gets in the way? What happens then?" What happens then, of course, is that whether or not the character got what they wanted, their situation has changed; a pause for breath, and a new need becomes clear. Baby pianists are soon taught that if there are two beats in a bar, the first one is stronger, and you could say this is a four-four version of the same rhythm.

Then there are the rhythms of prose which writers must learn to exploit, to make the most of the physical, non-logical experience that the words can induce in the reader: slow and fast, long and short, mono- and polysyllables, staccato and lyrical. And if we're talking about rhythm at that level, what could be more fundamental than the iamb? Williams talks about how we forget the 'absolute physicality' of poetry and music at our peril - the tense and release - and the iamb is the human pulse: stress and resolve, rise and fall. Even though a three-beat rhythm - the waltz and its cousins - will get some very inhibited feet moving, because we bipedal creatures can't ever resolve it, the most irresistible rhythm of all, I would argue, is its dancing child, six-eight: two pairs of three.  Each dancing three is one half, then the other, of the human pulse. It's no coincidence that the key to hearing just a little of the greatest musical mind of all, is to play Bach as a dance.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

All this, and the black marks on the page

So I'm drinking prosecco and admiring the cover of Karen Macleod's Betty Trask-winning novel In Search of the Missing Eyelash at one of my local independent bookshops, the small but perfectly formed and this evening packed-out Review, and thinking that I'd never been to a book launch until shortly before The Mathematics of Love came out. Karen gives good reading - she's a performance artist in another life, when she's not being long-haul cabin crew for British Airways - and I'm now I'm looking forward to getting into the book. I've even (almost) forgiven her for being young enough to be eligible for the Betty Trask in the first place. (I've never understood age limits on writing competitions. It's not the young who need encouraging with prizes, a bit of starving-in-a-garret never did them any harm. It's the older ones with dependents and commitments who need help to make the brave, frightening jump.)

It's not just book launches, either, that are new to me. I'd never been to a reading till I fell among the poets at the University of Glamorgan, never taken any notice of literary prizes, and I'd never been to a literary festival till Headline sent me as far as possible round the world - to Christchurch, NZ, and then Brisbane - to be an author at one. Mind you, I still don't read fiction reviews, so no change there, at least. But, fundamentally I'm not sure I really knew these worlds existed, and it never occurred to me to try to enter them: the worlds I entered were the ones on the page. And the public side of being in that world as an author was disconcerting, not least because I'd never taken much notice of other authors being public in these ways. There had never been anyone I didn't know personally who was yet aware of my existence, still less goodness knows how many thousands of people round the world who now have a right to say whatever they think of my writing. I didn't have anything to say on a blog, nothing I thought publicly interesting enough to post on a website. And now this is... well, not my whole world, because there's a whole other world which involves nametapes and homework and telling people it's bedtime. But it's part of it: part of what I do and even who I am. When did that happen?

I suppose it crept up on me, and I suspect it creeps up on many writers. No doubt there are ambitious young things who set their sights from the beginning on joining the odd mixture of art and commerce which is the literary trade, and who (try to) write the books that will get them there. Most of us read and read and read and one day sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote, and one day long after that had their agent ringing up to say, 'We've had an offer,' and about nine months later, 'Would you like me to explain how a trade dinner works?'

Which bits of that world are art, and which bits are commerce, isn't as straightforward as you'd think, either. Doing readings and talking to readers about your work is an extension - even an amplification - of the chance you've been given to say what you want to say, and hear that it's heard; art and craft in action, in other words. But readings sell books and tickets, or bookshops and venues wouldn't do them, and who's asked to read and what they read reflects that brute reality. While in the opposite corner, designing the cover is all about even more brutal questions of marketing, positioning, demographics and sales. But a book and its cover are also aesthetic objects in their own right, deeply entwined with the art that's made in the reader's head, from the black marks on the page. The two functions of a book - to speak, and to sell - are not indistinguishable, but they are inextricable.

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...

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...