This Itch of Writing

Not the 'right' book

So, I've got the work-in-progress - let's call it Three - which will absorb me for at least another nine months of revising and editing and contracts and editors and stuff. And Four, which I've told my agent I want to write next (up to and including a half-page pitch and a highly provisional title). Then there's the one which I thought was a short story till I took it for a walk in the park: now it's a novel. So is it Five? Or is it so compelling - so much sparklier and meatier - that it should be Four? And there's the short story which a writer friend gave the once-over before I put it in a competition, and said in passing, 'The mark of a great short story (for me) is that its ten or so pages open up an entire novel in the reader’s mind.' So of course I started thinking round the edges of the story, which is one I've known for ages: could this be Five? And the people in Spain who said 'Would you set a novel here?' and I said, 'I don't think so,' but on the way home found myself thinking, 'Well...'. And I daren't start flipping back through notebooks, because then there'll be more.

I've thought before about writerly adultery, but that's not what I'm thinking about here: I'm not about to cuckold the WIP. But how do you choose what to take seriously next? What will you be living and breathing even when you're nowhere near a notebook or a screen? What - without your trying - will make you suddenly see newspaper cuttings, and comments and pictures and fleeting ideas, as you go about the rest of life? Where, for your serious project, do you go next? 

You could ask your talent. What will give you most opportunity, not merely to play to your strengths, but to use the nature of your soil to grow the best plants? Good gardeners (and I know this only by repute, being someone who can kill a spider plant) exploit the pH of their garden rather than trying to fight it. They regret that they can't honestly grow rhododendrons, but the azaleas are glorious.

You could ask your writing friends - your trusted readers. What worked for them in your writing? But a novel is ''written' by the reader, decoding black marks on the page by an agreed system of signification, as much, perhaps, as it is by the writer. What worked - what resonated, what moved, what bored - is as much about them as it is about you. As writers, our only supremacy is that we get to make the marks in the first place, and without us the readers would have nothing to 'write', so to ask what they want to find - you could argue - won't tell you what you ought to put on the page in order for them to find it.

You could ask The Ropeseller. But anyone who's been around on this blog for a while won't need me to unpick why that may well not be a good place to go for advice.

And don't forget that ideas aren't mutually exclusive. One of the recurring metaphors for writing I find myself using is the stewpot on the back of the fire. Into it goes everything that might be tasty and interesting and add to the overall flavour of the dish. Given that, as fiction writers, our basic mode is 'What if?', why not chuck in various things from different cupboards, and see what happens? If you have to fish them out again in the end, so what? Like a bouquet garni in the cassoulet, you don't want your readers to choke on it, but it will have left a faint perfume which makes all the difference. (Don't believe me? I'd have sworn I'd removed every last whiff of an old plot in The Mathematics of Love, and my editor would agree, but every now and then I meet a blood-hound reader who can still scent it.) So if you're agonising between two ideas, why not throw them in together, and see what happens?

To some extent then, I think, these things select themselves. What do you find yourself thinking about most often? Forget the market (unless something you read about suddenly gets your creative mind whirring), or what you've heard agents are looking for, or what would be easiest to research, or what your partner thinks you should write next. As my sister said once, 'The thing you should be doing is the thing you keep finding yourself doing.' She's a singer, and she also said, 'The only person you can sound like, better than anyone else, is yourself.' There's Buddhist saying, 'When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears'. What this means to me is that, in the context of writing, you may have to accept that you're not entirely in control of what's right for you, but that in recompense, if you let go of the outcome, the right thing will happen.

It's not easy, in our Western way, trained to goals, control, progress and development, to accept that we'll have to choose, not between better and worse, but between two roads that diverge in a yellow wood, without anything as clear as an idea of which is less travelled. Nor is it easy to accept that we might write just as good books if we'd taken the other road, but that we'll never know. Just as, as a writer with sleeves rolled up and first draft in hand, you learn to accept what swims up from your unconscious without necessarily knowing why it should be given its place, maybe we need to let go of the idea that the next book must be the 'right' book, and accept that it will only be the book which seemed right at the time.

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In other news:

My friends at El Pais did get me on the back page here.

The booking for the Festival of Writing, 9th-11th April 2010 in York, has opened, and I'm teaching various sessions there. It's organised by Writer's Workshop and is stuffed full of good things: workshops on everything from point-of-view to foreign rights, one-to-one with agents, publishers and book doctors, a gala dinner, and mini-courses on the Friday. It's focused on book length projects and writers who are looking for publication but, as the poet Sheenagh Pugh said, it's none the worse for that!

The tree of life - and other anecdotes

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

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

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

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

The Inner Critic's dressing-up box

Your Inner Critic's real nature is the anti-writing demon: personify him/her as you will (mine is short and plump, with blue and green scales and a tail: he's well-intentioned, and his intention is to protect me from failure, shame, embarrassment and danger, by stopping me writing). In a coda to Making the Skeleton Dance I was suggesting that anything which stops you writing can also be a costume hung in your Inner Critic's wardrobe, because most of the time the demon's in disguise.

For the avoidance of doubt, I should define my terms: there's all the difference in the world between the Inner Critic, hard-wired by parents and teachers and the world in general, and what I call the Inner Editor. The Inner Editor engages when there's there's a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter or a novel on the page to edit: s/he reads the words, and from that reading decides what needs to be changed. None of us would write anything worth reading without an Inner Reader-Editor. The Inner Critic, on the other hand, spends most of his/her life in costume, pretending to be something entirely useful. This is particularly true when you've learnt to ignore her/his obvious "you're no good" "you'll never succeed" schtick. Then s/he opens the wardrobe, and with fiendish (s/he is a demon, after all) cunning, picks out the costume of whichever adult in your life you're most attuned to, and begins to talk:

Inner Editor: “You don't know how this new bit should go, better to fiddle with Chapter One till you do.”
Inner Writing Tutor: “There's no point in moving on till you've got the first bit right.”
Inner Headmistress: “You can't write it till you've done all the research you might possibly need, or you might Get Something Wrong.”
Inner Mentor: “No, you absolutely must finish this and revise it to the last inch: it's your Inner Critic who's insisting that the new idea is more promising.”
Inner Parent: “The children are little for such a short time, you must make the most of every minute.”
Inner Domestic God/dess: “You do want a beautiful house/fresco/cake, don't you?”
Inner Nosey Neighbour: “I don't know how you can write with the bathroom/kitchen/front lawn looking like that.”
Inner Gardener: “It'll get away from you if you don't get out there this morning.”
Inner Trainer: “Writer's bum, writer's bum, writer's bum.”
Inner Spouse: “I'm paying most of the bills, the least you can do is iron my shirts.”
Inner Sex God/dess: “Saying 'no' because you're finishing a chapter is the thin end of the wedge.”
Inner Granny: “Do get out while the sun's shining, darling.”
Inner Counsellor: “Your husband/best friend/barmaid will be hurt if you don't go down to the pub.”
Inner Psychotherapist: “You're not a writer, you're just using writing to avoid acknowledging your neediness.”
Inner Socialite: “Everyone will forget who you are and not invite you to their parties.”
Inner Agent: “It's awfully like the last one of yours/McEwan's/Keyes's”
Inner Agent's Assistant: “It's nothing like the last one so they won't want it.”
Inner Reviewer: “Who cares about vulgar commercial fiction?”
Inner Supermarket: “Who reads poncey literary fiction?”
Inner Publisher: “Crossover fiction doesn't sell.”
Inner Literary Critic: “You can't be original: it's all been done before. And better.”
Inner Realist: “No one remembers the shortlist.”
Inner Bestseller: “This'll never deserve a launch like your last one.”

Make no mistake, there are times when the voice speaking is the real Mentor/Spouse/Agent. But the Inner Critic is a brilliant mimic, as well as a master of disguise. So, what are your Inner Critic's favourite costumes?

The second simplicity of a bowl of cherries

One of the classically irritating things non-writers say to us is "I've always wanted to write a novel, I just need the the time to sit down." Once we're out on bail, most writers still burn to explain that just sitting down isn't all it takes to write a novel. It takes hard work, craft, imagination, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, learning, practising, and more sitting down than most people would believe possible. It's also frequently frustrating: some days/weeks/years the words come about as readily as wisdom teeth pull out, and I'm sure I'm not the only writer who's been known to pummel her forehead when the brain-cogs won't turn properly and shape the sentence or the idea into what I want. And all to make something which may be read with one eye while strap-hanging on the Tube, or get a single, missing-the-point, one-star review on Amazon. Indeed, most of us spend a lot of time, like ballet dancers, practising very difficult things to the point where we make them look easy. Am I alone in disliking books which parade how difficult they were to write? (That's with my reader's head on, of course: my writer's head is most awed by books which pull off things which as a writer I know are very difficult.)

Okay, so writing's not up there with gold-mining in South Africa or looking after dementia sufferers for hard work, but still. Combine the hard work with the fact - also unknown to non-writers, who only see the occasional headline figure - that we are paid so little for what we do that most us need other sources of income, and it's hardly surprising that we all spend a lot of time trying to convince the world that being a writer isn't an easy or soft option. The trouble is, that can lead to a certain macho posturing, either about the craftsmanly agony of writing and re-writing and re-writing, or about staring at the page till your forehead bleeds, or about mining your innermost soul-agonies and exposing them to the world. At the risk of sounding like the Grumpy Old Woman of the writing world, each of these may have a grain of truth in it, but each, when protested about too much, annoys me, in a different way.

On innermost soul-agonies, as some may know, I dislike the non-writer's conviction that the only guarantee of authentic writing is that it's mined from the author's own experience or research. As with cooking, yes, the quality of the ingredients is worth thinking about, but far more interesting, surely, to most of us, is what we make of that raw material. I also know that slush-piles are very full of writing which may be very good therapy, but is certainly very bad reading. On staring at the page till your forehead bleeds, which I think was said by the scriptwriter Gene Fowler, I can only say, have you tried NaNoWriMo? And on craftsmanly agony: well, what did you expect? This is a job, and for most of us metaphorical gold mining still beats the physical kind any day.

And yet I can't be the only writer who knows that, on a good day, writing is easy. Yes. Easy. If I've found the voice and know what needs to happen in this scene, I'm off and away. It's bliss, like flying or galloping (Joyce Grenfell's term for those rare performances which just take off, was 'horses'), it's a walk in the park, it's a bowl of cherries. Probably, as a writer, there has always been one thing which came easily for you: an ear for a good sentence, a mind for a good joke, an instinct for brilliant plotting, or a deft hand with a character.

It's true, too, that if you're anything of a writer you learn and get better so that, like reading and spelling, things which were once hard to do become easier, and eventually you're hardly even aware you're doing them. But this, too, can lead to many experienced writers saying things which frustrate the apprentices: "Just write, it's easy, just get on with it. Cut away everything that isn't a duck." "No it isn't easy!" the aspirers cry. "The words/knife don't do what I want them to! How can I make them? How do I find my voice, tell a story, make it funny, make my duck look like a duck? " And others of us say, "But that makes it sound facile, that makes it sound as if anyone can do it. And they can't: it took me years to learn to make my ducks look like ducks, and beautiful/scary/comical ducks at that. And how do we hold our own in the industry, with the funding bodies, with our peers, if everyone thinks it's easy?"

It seems to me that the heart of this is a muddle of the Protestant work ethic, 21st century-style, a misunderstanding of the nature of craftsmanship, and the ambiguities of the term "hard". "No pain, no gain!", "You just have to want it enough!" are good ways of encouraging people to keep going when the going gets tough. But "hard work" in the sense of keeping going, putting in the hours - which all writers do - is not the same as work being "hard" in the sense of difficult: which writing is at some times, and not at others. Moreover, our sense of whether a piece of art is worthy, and therefore worth making and buying and admiring, is messily bound up with what we judge of its merits as hard work in the Protestant sense (hence some of the ire directed at contemporary art which seems to have been flung together, and even more ire if some of it was done by assistants). Does it "deserve" our gaze: has the artist "earned" our admiration and his fee? And if the Protestant work ethic sounds old-fashioned, you can substitute the relativism of the modern variant which, like any good parent or teacher, very properly values the intentions and effort of the maker and the process, not just (and sometimes instead of) the objective quality of the outcome and the product.

Maybe it comes down, not just to the fact that "easy reading is hard writing", but to the fact that, like all craftspeople, some of what we do came naturally, but we also get better at it. And the better we get, the easier it feels to us as well as looking easier to others. Most of us compensate for that by constantly trying new things which we're not sure we can do: on our way back from the Guildford Book Festival Elizabeth Buchan and I were agreeing that one always begins a new novel not at all sure whether one can pull it off. The process of writing a novel is a hard-work process of working out the problem we've set ourselves... with varying degrees of success. But long-term, surely, what we're trying for is what the musicologist Alfred Einstein called the "second simplicity... a fullness in brevity": the absolute mastery born of such a complete synthesis of the craftsman's tool-kit with the artist's vision that there is no real distinction between art and craft. As Grayson Perry puts it, "I am the tip of the knife." Faced with a masterwork, all the reader/listener/viewer sees is the vision, and even the brushstrokes, the thumb-prints, the crack in the voice or the echoes of other words, are just the traces of genius, or maybe of the genie.

Making the skeleton dance

A friend is suffering from something which I think we all are at risk of: a passionate desire to write something, and a poisonous sense that everything they might write - every kind of character, situation, theme or plot - has been done before. And better. And worse. And in corsets and in spaceships and in Brixton. So why bother? What's the point? How can any of us, ever, say anything new? Anything worth writing, let alone worth reading? Let alone get it published? And I found myself replying like this:

There's a bird's-eye map you have in your head, a big but un-detailed map of the whole bookish terrain. You can see an awful lot of books, but only their most obvious features. And in those obvious features, they have a lot - too much - in common. Yes, there are only seven basic plots, and if you reduce a book to it barest bones - the blurb, the elevator pitch, the synopsis - it'll look like one of those seven (which is why we hate constructing those so much).

One reasons stories like fairy tales and myths seem so archetypal - are the archetypes of all our stories - is that they don't have particular, individual detail. Stepmothers are bad, princes are good, trees are trees (only oaks in Victorian dressings-up of them), cats are magical. There are very few individual motivations or peculiarities - it's all generic, in the true sense of the word - because we're dealing with the basics of human interaction (see Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment for Freud, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots for Jung). Which is why we have such fun with re-tellings and modern fairy tales and things: they play with the bare bones of our archetypal stories like a skeleton dancing at the Day of the Dead, and dress them up in silly clothes so that we re-see them. Of course fiction isn't like that: we have a couple of millenia of drama and now novels dedicated to bringing alive the individual human consciousness, from Oedipus to Hamlet to Hedda Gabler.

So, "It's not the subject, it's all in how you do it!" we cry, and it's true that what makes a book itself, rather than something else, is how those basic bones are fleshed and clothed and made to dance. That can sound trite, but only if you think of "how it's done" as a matter of window-dressing, of style over substance. But, actually, "how it's done" is about substance, because it's substance that the reader reads. They experience that world as substantial: full of texture, solidity, things and people, bricks and mortar, ravens and writing desks, which you build and make convincing, as Gardner says, by making everything particular: individual, peculiar to itself, a little surprising, a little bit new, not what we knew exactly, or so exactly what we knew that Granny's writing desk (or raven) lives again.

This is one reason (in fact the main reason) that I don't read fiction reviews, or booky blogs, or Amazon stuff or other chitter-chatter about books. And I don't browse the fiction in a shop as a pleasant way of killing time or staying out of the rain. The only books I really know anything about, if you see what I mean, are books I actually decide to buy, and then read. All those other ways of knowing about books - picking up the minimal details of lots and lots of books - just stretches that bird's-eye map even further, like the kind of computer game which draws more of the island as you move. It shows me the terrain, which I might otherwise explore for myself, entirely in terms of other writers' footmarks. Then I only have the choice of walking in one set of footmarks or another. Whereas if I haven't seen it thus, with the paths trodden and the snaps posted, it's all there for me to explore. And since I'm a different person - because everyone is - and so a different writer, my portrait (not map) of my journey over the terrain and what I write about it, will be different.

This is also why I have rather mixed feelings about the frequent injunction to "study the market", which is said so often by editors (and therefore agents) who need to sell books which do what they say on the tin, to readers who know what tin they're looking for (which is most books for most readers). Of course you should read well and widely of the kinds of book you're trying to write, but I think that understanding of the kinds of bones that your story's going to need (mixed metaphor alert!) is best acquired not by mapping the terrain from a helicopter, but intuitively, by prowling through the jungle. You want to be entering the room - or rather the jungle - with an electric torch, as Virginia Woolf puts it, not judging it as an artillery commander.

Fundamentally, saying "it's all been done" is a bit like saying "But I've done sex". Yes, you have, and yes, it was with your gender of choice - there are only two, after all - and yes, unless you're into something really weird, the possible permutations and actions are actually quite limited. And yet each combination of you, the moment, and the partner of the time is different, whether it's one of the gourmet weekends of your student life or a friendly quickie with your spouse of twenty years.

Thinking of which, I got very stuck recently, because the classic situation (yes, it was that kind of situation) I'd spent half a novel setting up suddenly looked like not a trope but a cliché. And if it was a cliché, who was going to care about it? I certainly didn't. I got stuck for the rest of the day. It was only when I went back and re-read quite a bit (which is something I almost never do in first draft) that I re-discovered these characters' particularity, and that of their situation. And then I could realise and write that scene as it would have been to them. Our characters, after all, don't know that they're clichés, they're just humans in human situations. They're real people to themselves, and so we should be able to make them real to us.

So that was my main idea. But it has a tailpiece - a coda - because anything which can stop you in your writing tracks is a costume hung on a peg in the wardrobe of your Inner Critic (Do read that link: it's really interesting). I said:

On a completely other tack, could it be your Inner Critic? The anti-writing demon? The part of you which is in charge of protecting you from writing? The Inner Critic is a master of disguise, and can put the right costume on for the situation you're in at the moment. Saying "it's all been done" is a very good disguise for the Inner Critic, because it works powerfully on the well and widely read. It hasn't managed to persuade you that you shouldn't be writing because you're no good, nor because you should be saving the world or schmoozing the boss or baking for the PTA cake sale, so it tries something else: "It's all been done".

No, it hasn't all been done, because YOU haven't done it yet.

In other news...

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

Whores, dishes and crackly feedback

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

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

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

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

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

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

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

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

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

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

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

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

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

The third way

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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