This Itch of Writing

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?

What's the fitting room mirror telling you?

In Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming I found myself saying that post-hoc understanding of what you've written can be immensely useful, much more so than reading a textbook about how you 'should' do things before you write. The latter is like seeing a new fashion in a magazine and buying the dress to wear without trying it on: who would do that? The former is like trying it on in the shop to see how it looks on your body: as we all know, there are always some current fashions which are just wrong for our particular build. By the time you've written a piece and really revised it, you know it extremely well. If you then try some ideas about how good writing works on it, you're much more likely to decide whether they're the right shape for your work. If those ideas don't seem to fit, you're more likely to have the confidence to discard them. What leads to disaster is to be so sure the rules - like the fashion - must be right and your body must be wrong that you wear something that makes you look dreadful or, worse still, sign up for plastic surgery.

Not that writing to fulfil technical brief - as an exercise - doesn't have its uses. At the most basic level it is just that - good exercise - to get your brain rootling out words for reasons different from your usual ones. And more widely it can be liberating to give up on the sometimes paralysing demand to write a great story, and concentrate instead on something easier to pin down and less daunting. One of my most successful stories ever began as no more than an exercise in shifting point-of-view. And as I was talking about in Rhyme and un-reason, technical constraints can actually lead to your mind working more creatively. Perhaps it's not just form that can make a sieve to catch certain kinds of material, it's any kind of technical structure.

Fundamentally, the reason we learn best from post-hoc understanding is because that mirrors the actual process of writing: we write, then we see what we've written, and it's the technical/editorial half of our writerly self who has a long, hard stare at the image in the fitting room mirror. That understanding is all about the fit between the structure of the clothes that fashion is offering us at the moment, and our real, actual bodies. And to all the people who'd say that beginner writers need rules before they write, and should only be allowed to discard them once they've grown up, I'd say, Nonsense. What beginner writers need is help: they need ways to circumvent self-consciousness and un-confidence and allow their writing to emerge, and then they need someone else standing at their shoulder and talking about what the fitting room mirror's showing them both. What they don't need is someone telling them before they even get into the shop that green will never be their colour, or that they can't wear long skirts because they're too difficult to wear. The human body - like the writer's mind - is never that simple.

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...

Subjective, objective, and Soviet toothbrushes

Over at Vulpes Libris I've been talking about something I've talked about here more than once: what I think it is that defines literary fiction. It's been an interesting exercise, not least because I wanted to set up a general discussion about how literary fiction works: some terms, some ways of thinking about it, and why it's worth bothering with. What I didn't want to do is say 'X is literary and Y isn't literary,'  because people will always argue about that: what's 'difficult', what's 'worth it', is always going to be a very muddly mixture of objective and subjective reactions. It seems to me much more interesting to unpick the question, and let people try mapping it onto their own reading, and see if they agree.

In fact, it seems to me that most of the blood that's shed when people start discussing and classifying books is because it's so hard to separate out what a book evokes in you from what it is of itself. Literary criticism, at least in the twentieth century, got round this first by urging perfect (and impossible) objectivity: close reading that ignored both the author's intention and the particular reader's response. An objective and accurate grand theory of how texts work was the aim: a definition of what they were of themselves. It's no accident that such a project emerged in the 1920s and 30s, just when Soviet apparachiks were trying to arrive at an objective and accurate grand theory of how many colours of toothbrush the population of the USSR needed. And we all know how well that kind of thing worked. Equally, though understanding the ways that words fit together is essential training for the writer, it does leave out of account the fact that a book can't help but exist within the stuff that different readers bring to it.

And then, when that project proved impossible, because sometimes authors pipe up and say what they were trying to do, as even Eco allows, and because different readers, inconveniently, will laugh, or cry, at the same thing, literary criticism decided that, actually, every text is recreated every time it's read. The author is dead in the sense that what meaning they were trying to get readers to find, is irrelevant. A novel is part of an ever-revolving and shifting set of references, and what it means is embedded in how those references interrelate. Sometimes the reader's response was allowed for. But sometimes the only value of a book seemed to be its role as a missile in the battles of symbols and signs: its ballistic possibilities were the point, not how well it worked as something readers wanted to read.

But readers go on reading things, and liking them, and not liking them, and writers go on trying to decide what to write and how to write it. It is possible, and essential, to talk about what works and what doesn't in a book. With variations, what works - what we'd loosely say is 'good' about a book - is likely to be true-ish for many of the readers within a given bookish tradition: say, those who grew up in late-20th century England (Wales, Scotland and Ireland having their own literary cultures). What works for you - in the sense of making the hairs rise on the back of your particular neck - is a different though related criterion. But in the general cultural terms I'm talking about one book is not as good as another, in any of the senses in which I defined 'good' a while back. But we have to acknowledge that it's still personal: it still involves your response. What alerts you to something being extra-good or extra-bad? It's an instinct, a gut feeling. Only then, if you're in critical mode, do you think 'Why am I gripped? What am I loving? Why am I bored? What don't I like?'. So the original alert, if you like, is a-reasonable and entirely personal and subjectiv, and the reasoning is post-hoc, logical, apparently objective. Even if it kicks in so quickly you're hardly aware that it's triggered by something not in the least objective and logical, the two are separate things.

It's the same process, if you like, as writing: the words occur to me, and then I decide if they work. It's a split second (though it might also be six months) between the two processes, but, again, they are different. Maybe that's the way in which, not only are writers readers, but readers are in a different way writers: even if you don't sign up to the idea that it's readers, not writers, who construct the book, their process of feel-think reproduces the writer's same feel-think pattern. Good reviewers like the Book Foxes over at Vulpes Libris know that.

Alive, kicking, and joining in the game

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

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

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

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

Any spiders interested?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not so much a bloggy week as a giggy one

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

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

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

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

Seized with desire

Over at Vulpes Libris there's an excellent interview with Susan Barrett, author of Fixing Shadows and The Inconstant Husband and, incidentally, a stablemate of mine at Headline Review. At one point she steps away from the questions and says, 'What fun writing this - it is a nice opportunity to post-rationalise, a bit of literary onanism.' Which made me laugh, but also got me thinking.

I guess whether we should pursue that precise analogy does depend on what you think of onanism as a form of pleasure, but post-rationalising is an interesting business. Yes, it's fun, though there are people who might say that writing 30,000 words of PhD commentary has to be the ultimate - um - well, you know what I mean. There's certainly a strong argument that, as Umberto Eco says in his essay 'Reflections on The Name of the Rose', 'The author must not interpret': that is, must not tell readers what to think of the book. And I do believe that to write a book in order to have interesting PhD-ish or even Vulpes-Libris-ish things to say about it would be a betrayal of what art is for, and comes perilously close to the recent Booker-winner who apparently half-admitted that s/he had written that book in order to win prizes. I also doubt if it would end up being a very good book.

But Eco goes on to say that even if the author must not interpret 'he [sic] may tell why and how he wrote his book'. If there is a whiff of self-admiration, of self-absorption in such telling, it's only really the self-consciousness of anyone who is asked to answer a question: the admiration and absorption is originally the questioner's. Deciding to write a novel is partly a matter of setting yourself a series of questions at different levels, from how did they get here and what happens next, to who's telling this story and is it past or present to them. The solution to these problems is the novel. Think of it that way, and talking about why and how you wrote it is merely another level of questions and answers.

If you can lay hands on a copy, I highly recommend Eco's brief account of writing his first, mega-selling novel. It's a while, I realised, since I read The Name of the Rose itself, but Eco's stylishly written and thought-provoking little essay has brought it all back. So I looked for the novel on my shelves, and realised, eventually, that I've never actually owned a copy: I must have borrowed my father's, which means I read it at least twenty-two years ago. It feels like eighteen months at the most: now that's a tribute to how much it gripped me at the time. Eco's account of it is delightful partly because, although his cultural, literary and theoretical erudition leaves the rest of us gasping, he still has to deal with the practicalities of his first novel as we all do: he bumps into the same problems, finds the same solutions, is constrained inconveniently as we are by the historical record, realises too late how last minute additions are being interpreted by others. All in all, there's something very delightful about the fact that even a professor of semiotics will admit to being seized with the desire to write a novel, 'Because I felt like poisoning a monk.'

Another, different voice

You may remember a while ago that I posted a piece, Messes, Clones and Plots like a W, about why I think it's so important to understand technical things about how writing works, to work hard on how you understand them and how you put them into practice, but not to allow them to become rules to be 'kept' or 'broken'. In writing there are no rules, except possibly the one about starting at the top left-hand corner of the page, but only different ways to write different things, some of which work better than others. To refuse the concept of rules doesn't mean abandoning all judgement or discussion of good and bad writing, just making it much more nuanced, and so much more useful.

When she's not writing novels about politics (More Than Love Letters) and campuses (Hearts and Minds), with a warm heart and a satirical pen, Rosy Thornton is a law lecturer. She posted this in the private members' section of WriteWords, and I think it's the most interesting thing I've read in ages about the whole thorny question of 'the rules', and why they seem so alien to some, and so comfortable to others. You have to start by understanding something that she posted later in the discussion:

The anti-essentialist argument [that not all women - or men - are the same] is a very handy one for ignoring the female perspective (or the black perspective or any other perspective outside the domiannt discourse). Well, the point is not that all men think like x or all women think like y. But that - statistically and observably and demonstrably, according to psychologists and anthropologists and others who have studied it - women as a group think differently from men."

Having cleared that up, here's Rosy's piece:

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"If I were blogging, I would head it: ARE THE CW RULES GENDERED?

Time and again I find myself balking at the CW ‘rules’ – both the individual rules themselves and also, possibly, the very notion of there being any rules. But I haven’t ever really thought about why that might be. But here’s a possible theory. It begins with a diversion, so please bear with me.

In the rest of my life I spend a lot of time dealing with rules, because I teach Law, and Law is essentially a set of rules. I also teach Women and Law, in which students are encouraged to challenge the rules from a gender perspective: both the content of the specific rules, which have historically operated to the disadvantage of women in many respects, and the very idea of the rules themselves, in the way they are currently conceptualised. The common law works from the premise that situations (real life, complex, messy situations) can be distilled down into simple, sharp-edged paradigms, from which lawyers can reason and according to which future cases can be decided, and rules can evolve. Feminists have rejected this mode of reasoning – epitomised by legal rules but found throughout the social sciences – as ‘male’.

American psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote a book in the 1980s called In a Different Voice. Her thesis is that the two genders think in wholly different ways – something I have to say that rings true with all my own lived experience. Gilligan interviewed children in the schoolyard. She asked them all the question, ‘Would it be justified to steal bread if your children were starving?’ Of the boys, some said yes and some said no. But the majority of the girls said neither. Instead, they worked their way round the question. They said, ‘Surely there must be another way’ and ‘what if you were to explain to the baker about the starving children…?’ In other words they refused to accept such a simplified, black-and-white scenario as being true to life – the exact kind of scenario which is the daily tool of legal reasoning and the basis of all legal rules. Rather, they viewed things as contingent, as muddy, as nuanced, as negotiable.

So, if women think and reason differently from men, do they also speak and write differently? Do they have, quite literally, ‘a different voice’? And if so, what impact does that have on how women write – or how anyone writes if they are trying to get inside a female character and to explore the female experience?

This brings me to the point: the so-called CW rules. Let’s think about some of them. We are told, for example, that modal constructions are to be avoided. Don’t say ‘she could see the mountains, say ‘she saw the mountains. It is stronger writing, we are told – more direct, more pacy, more powerful – ‘better’ writing. Similarly we are told, don’t use lots of subordinate clauses, especially those beginning with a present participle – ‘ing’ clauses are weak and therefore bad. Stick as often as possible to the finite verb. Not ‘gazing out of the window, she saw the mountains’ but ‘she gazed from the window; she saw the mountains.’ But what if rather than strength and directness what you want to achieve is something softer – dare I say, more ‘feminine’? Maybe if I’m writing in a female voice (female character, and first person or close-in third) then my writing patterns should mirror the way a women thinks, the way she experiences the world – which is often (in my experience) packed full of contingency and uncertainty and tentativity and conditionality.

More fundamentally, what about the ‘rule’ that says we should pare down, write sparely, make sure that every word is necessary, every word is doing a job. Why? Research shows that over the course of a day women speak many, many more words, on average, than men. Surely ‘not wasting words’ is a very male ideal? I know that I talk nineteen to the dozen for large parts of the day. I know, for example, that when teaching, sometimes if I say the same thing three times over in different ways, it gives people more chance to grasp what I mean. Effective communication can be effusive, it can be sprawling, it can be full of doubt and wondering and even contradiction, and out of the morass emerges understanding - and perhaps it might even be a more nuanced understanding, a warmer and more humane one, than the one which emerges from a fewer, and superficially clearer, set of words.

That’s what I reckon, anyway. Basically: we women are wafflers, so waffling reflects our lives and our voice.

Er, that was it, really."
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Not exactly simple

The proofs of A Secret Alchemy have arrived but, come hell or high water, Thursday is PhD day so I haven't looked at them properly yet. It will be interesting to go through them, because it must be a couple of months since I've looked at the actual text, which is probably the longest gap since I started writing it. For the commentary on it that I'm writing for my PhD, I'm in the odd position of noticing things as a student of literature that I never noticed when I was writing it. But for proof checking I need a completely different mindset: a cold, uninvolved eye that notices typos (increasingly rare thanks to spell-checkers), but also a mind making slightly more sense of it all, so that I see literals (not rare at all because spell-checkers are blind to homophones and textual idiocies) and slips of typography - the italics that bleed on even when the quoted letter is done, the missing squiggle between two voices - that only I will recognise. Now that teaching and marking at Goldsmiths is done with, it's all less panic-stricken, but I still found myself noticing with slightly wary interest just how many different elements make up a week of the writing life:

• sandwich lunch tomorrow to advise aspiring-writer-friend of acquaintance
• giving back essays with appropriate helpful (if also admonitory) comments
• Phd commentary - another 2,000 words today about parallel narrative in A Secret Alchemy
• checking proofs of A Secret Alchemy - a day's work at least
• reading the current research book for the new, nameless novel - not much more to read
• a flurry of emails about the design of the cover for A Secret Alchemy, including me digging out and sending some links to images Headline and the designer (the same as for The Mathematics of Love - hooray!) might not have already
• reading fiction for the Phd commentary: at the moment According to Queenie by Beryl Bainbridge, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes and The Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth
• researching lit. crit. books for the issues I want to discuss in the PhD commentary. Anyone know if there's any discussion of parallel narrative as a form, or shall I have to plough my way through thousands of irrelevant papers about books which happen to have parallel narratives, in search of the odd paragraph or sentence?
• ditto historical fiction which includes real historical characters
• returning some shockingly overdue books which were research for the new novel to the Goldsmiths library and paying the fine
• going to the London Library to borrow the same and some others because they don't charge fines and have a far bigger collection
• resisting the super-tempting next research book for the new novel
• thinking hard about whether to apply for the vacancy the Open University has announced for online lecturers in creative writing: would it be valuable experience and money, or The Last Straw?
• find scissors to cut a non-fiction review out of the TLS which is relevant to the new novel and put cutting in that folder
• obsessive checking of email to see if the final cover's for A Secret Alchemy has come through
• obsessive checking of email to see if my US editor has sent the notes she's working on
• obsessive checking of email to see if Radio Four producer has sent list of topics we discussed for short programme
• fossicking with PayPal because they've demanded half a dozen kinds of authentication to comply (they say) with money laundering regulations. I only set the darned thing up because it seemed the best way of dealing with payments for editorial reports. I wish I hadn't bothered but stuck to cheques instead
• suppressing ideas (prompted by fellow writer's agonies over Second Novel Syndrome) about the book on creative writing which I want to write
• ditto the book on historical fiction I want to write
• ditto the panic that after the new novel, I might never have another novel to write again. I know perfectly well that as soon as I enter the doldrums of that one - about half-way into the first draft - something new and sparkly and much more fun will begin to clamour. But at the moment it's a blank
• writing another blog post

And that's before I've done the laundry, cooked the supper, gone to the supermarket, checked if it's true that the car needs to have its MOT done, acknowledged the children's existence, and ignored the fact that the house has subsidence and the lawn needs mowing.

No, I'm not complaining. It was much less fun being unpublished. But it's not exactly simple either.