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?

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...

A Secret Alchemy

So here it is. A great moment...

I should say that this isn't the final cover, which has been delayed, but rather than delay the proofs going out Headline have given it this very elegant temporary dress. But nonetheless, as all authors know, the real excitement is that It Looks Like A Real Book! It's sitting plumply on my desk, being patted every now and again. I might resist the temptation to take it to bed with me, but then again I might not...I didn't resist with The Mathematics of Love, after all!

Any spiders interested?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soho, or Skye?

Another fascinating point that Linda Grant made in her Guardian piece, which I mentioned in Rogues and Vagabonds, is that

The writer sits alone in a room, writing. The reader sits alone in a room, reading. Neither is ever likely to meet the other. Literature is an act of solitude and privacy. Never mind if it's about me; is it about you? [my italics]

And though I know in the abstract that a novel is as much something that a reader puts together, from black marks on a page, as it is something a writer has made by setting black marks on a different page, I've never thought of it quite like that. A writing acquaintance with a totally harmless and nicely-written commercial-women's-fiction novel about pregnancy and small children was deeply hurt by a truly, elaborately, baroquely virulent review on Amazon from a reader, even though the other reviews were full of praise, and it hit the best-seller lists that week. However much everyone else said soothingly, 'It's just some idiot with their own problems.'  - which was manifestly true - it couldn't help but hurt. At a less painful level I know that reviewers - however hard they try, even if they think they should try - can't escape the subjective question, 'Does this book do it for me?' even when they try to answer the objective question 'Is this a Good Book?' At what makes a book do it for them is always going to be as much about them, as about the book.

So is reading and judging a book actually, at least partly, a subset of the process of projection so beloved of psychologists? It was years before I understood the basic mechanism of this process, and saw how fundamental it is to so much of our human interaction. If an author's happy with the sales of their novel they assume the people walking into the shop are looking for cards, or sci-fi, or children's. If the author's anxious about how good their book is, they watch anxiously for proof or denial that No One Wants to Buy My Book, and, there being however many thousands of books in your average bookshop, the probability is that they'll get the proof they'd say they don't want: they project their own conviction that the book's no good onto total strangers.

So maybe there's something in those silly online quizzes about whether Heathcliff or Darcy is the man for you. So much of our pleasure in a book is about what gets us in the gut (and real intellectual pleasure is an emotional excitement, don't forget), or even lower down. It's no more - though no less - subjective than what makes one person love Soho and another Skye, or Beethoven versus Bach, or Monet versus Mantegna. It's a part of our psyche as old and intractable as our selves. A writer, or reader, who maintains otherwise is fooling themselves.

Get over it?

In Sailing ships and heavy gold I was thinking about why we bother to research facts that no one will notice, and in Carracks, kerseymere and other last straws I was thinking about how you deploy and write those facts so that they're at once new and interesting, and not so baffling that the reader trips up or, worse still, gives up. But in many ways the facts of shoes and ships and sealing way - and even cabbages and kings - are the easy bit. What's much harder is pinning down how people think, and how that makes them act.

Fiction of the time helps if you're setting a novel when contemporary narratives portrayed life naturalistically. But of course it's not that simple, because so much of what we know must have been going on wasn't written about. We intuit or research that many sixteenth-century women, for example, did go beyond our vague, erroneous, post-Victorian idea of their confinement to home and hearth, but who and how far and in what way is hard to pin down. Even if we discover the medieval church's writing of women not as the weakly angel on the hearth but as a frighteningly powerful source of evil, again it's hard to know how that plays out in real life: real men and real women did fall in love, after all, and it's hard to believe that all men thought of their sisters and mothers like that. So how did they think of them, and treat them?

Not long ago Harry Bingham of Writers' Workshop asked me for a little piece on writing historical fiction, for their 'Free Advice' section of the website. Harry writes hist. fic. himself, and I found his piece very interesting:

...you do need to be careful about the attitudes of your characters. A bloke born in the nineteenth century would almost certainly have been a racist, misogynist, homophobic bigot by our own 21st century standards. In maintaining the empathy of contemporary readers, you will need to finesse these issues.

This is very true. Harry's talking about commercial fiction, but I was aware, for instance, that in The Mathematics of Love only some of Stephen's attitudes would sit comfortably with ours. For example, so hyper-sensitive are we to anti-Semitism that I couldn't have given him even the least uncomfortable aspects of the average contemporary attitude to Jews. I sacrificed this interesting bit of historical insight because for modern readers I simply couldn't have it and know they'd still read Stephen as the decent, trying-his-best officer, squire and husband-to-be that he needed to be for my plot to work, and for readers to care about him. I made up for this by giving him a less challenging prejudice: the automatic anti-Catholicism which pervaded English society well into the 19th or even 20th centuries.

Is this cowardly? Certainly there's plenty of historical fiction in the bookshops where the manners and morals are so relentlessly modern that you wonder why the writer's bothered with corsets and carriages: no finessing there at all. But if you make them too unsympathetic, however heroically uncompromising you may feel you're being as a writer, you have to realise that many readers will simply switch off, and in tossing the book aside miss all the other things you're trying to say. The opposite problem is that you're also dealing with the reader's idea - however wrong - of How Things Were. Not every reader was convinced by Lucy's independence in TMoL, but you can actually find everything she does somewhere in the historical record. The post-Victorian point is important: we still have a Tennysonian image of medieval noblewomen locked in their towers, embroidering the Bayeux tapestry and waiting for their lord to come home. Never mind that they actually ran estates, businesses and workshops, or that Eleanor of Acquitaine crossed the Pyrenees and then the Alps, in the winter, at the age of sixty-seven.

And never mind that my beloved Anthony Woodville in A Secret Alchemy - clever, thoughtful, humane, a man even whose enemies admitted was both honest and honourable - could be propelled by his intense faith to undertake what at that date was simply one kind of holy pilgrimage: murdering Moors in Portugal. He did, though, and any readers who are shocked are just going to have to get over it.

99% boredom, 1% Barbra Streisand

I got home yesterday evening, after a day spent doing things other than writing, and switched on the computer. When at last it was ready to chunter off and pick up the day's email, one that came in was from my publisher. Now they don't bombard me with stuff, and I'm not expecting anything this week, so was this big news or small, good news or bad? Either way, it and a whole lot of other online stuff would need dealing with, so I had an excuse for not sitting down at the computer straight away.

I changed out of my funeral-going outfit, got the supper out of the freezer, went to the loo, made a cup of tea, opened the post, tickled the top of my maths-homework-doing daughter's head, went upstairs to the study, drew the curtains, adjusted the lights, sat down and tackled the spam, approved the blog comments, checked the stats... But of course I couldn't help wondering all the time what Headline was emailing about. Since my chief professional skill is to take a small piece of reality and imagine outwards as far as it will go, I'm quite capable of imagining just about anything, though at first I kept within the bounds of likelihood. The proofs on their way? A big step forwards towards publication but dealing with them is a real chore. The cover? A bit early, and very, very nerve-racking, but also very, very exciting. Cover copy? Earlier still, and (some might be surprised to know) a slightly lower pitch of nerves. Some problem with the copy-edit or the proofs which would be work and/or worry? A new assistant introducing herself? Always nice to meet someone new. A hugely delayed publication date for A Secret Alchemy? My editor leaving? (Help! Oh, please, no!) The Prince Maurice Prize has been cancelled? Surely not, but my imagination's really out of hand now, and since writing my new novel's proscribed I can't stop myself getting fictional here instead: all the other long-listees have scratched and The Mathematics of Love has won now by default (would that be better, or worse, than winning - eventually - by competition?). It was all a mistake and TMOL's not on the list at all? Some creationist has planted a bomb which they'll detonate if Headline don't strike this particular spawn of the anti-Christ off their list. Barbra Streisand has offered hundreds of thousands for the movie rights to TMOL, but only if she can write the songs and star...

Sometimes I think that being an author, too, is ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent... not terror, exactly, but certainly stomach-churning emotions of one sort or another, from stage-fright to the pre-mouse-click shakes. Fortunately once I'd cast Yentl as Lucy from TMOL, or worse still Anna, I got the giggles, and clicked on the email from Headline without even really noticing I'd decided to. Just as well. Could I confirm, again, it said, that I'd checked A Secret Alchemy, and there were no outstanding copyright or libel issues. Copy of Headline's advice sheet attached, for my further information. Maybe the one percent is anti-climax.

Saving sanity and ignoring Caliban

Anyone who frequents writers' online forums know that the way they work varies widely, from relaxed gossip, rigorous critiquing, swapping information, answering cries for help on 12th century journey times and 21st century divorce laws, celebrating success and supporting disappointments, to sophisticated arguments about voice, structure, narrative technique, characterisation or the possibilities of second-person narrative.

One member - let's call her Calliope - of a big site which encompasses all these elements, received a private mail from the resident nasty piece of work - let's call him Caliban - bemoaning the fact that the site was no longer sufficiently 'serious', as witness a thread I'd started in the forum specifically dedicated to things not to do with writing. Calliope wasn't a good person to try this particular divisive effort on, as she's one of the most serious members, with a contract for a book critiqued on the site under her belt, an excellent agent and a bright-looking future. And since a really big booktrade prize win had been recently announced, and at least three members were in the process of being taken on by big agents, it would have been hard to persuade anyone that the site was descending into trivia. Nor was I exactly the best target for an accusation of lack of seriousness, perhaps. There wasn't so much as a ripple on the site: I think Caliban is losing his touch. Once upon a time he was much better at picking a correspondent who would be flattered at the confidence, a subject with some truth in it, and a target more likely to be upset.

But since I know of forums on other more volatile sites which have been nearly brought down by such tactics, it's made me realise that the writerly world would be much the poorer without the good ones. Yes, they get cliquey, yes, some are sadly lacking in discrimination and others in compassion. No, they won't get you a book deal, and no, they won't make you into a good or successful - let alone great - writer if you aren't built to be one anyway. But writing seriously - especially before you are published - not only demands isolation, but is in itself very isolating. Such sites are everything from a sanity-saver to a writing tutor to an agent-attractor. I remember someone starting a thread on WriteWords which asked members who in their normal lives understood their writing. The number of members who said 'no one' was frightening. From the friends who said you must hate them because you were finishing revisions instead of going down the pub, to the parents who told you you were wasting your time, so many members had stories not just of lack of understanding but of downright (if hidden) hostility. I know serious writing is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder which not everyone suffers from, but the only reason I can see for some such reactions is that many social groups find it deeply threatening when one of their number chooses do something - passionately, committedly - beyond their own narrow horizons. Perhaps Caliban, too, feels threatened by others' commitment and success.

There were touching stories too: partners who never read your fiction or anyone else's, but willingly supported you financially so you could write, and someone whose published book was the first book of any kind her father had read in twenty years. But there are some things - many things - that only writers want to talk about. Like what do you do if the only agent who wants to sign you after dozens of rejections thinks your book is chick lit when you though you were writing a searing indictment of modern urban society (or the other way round). Or whether the third round of revisions to your novel has made all the difference. Or the fact that true-born short fiction writers aren't just practising for the novel and won't be publishing 'a real book' any time soon. The publishing trade, which takes little account of how writers reach the point where their work is publishable, let alone published, scarcely knows most of these sites exist either. But they do. And they're very necessary: without them, there'd be less good writing to publish.

Not just singing into the wind

In reply to a comment, on the Writer's Workshop blog Toasting Napoleon, Harry Bingham talks about how the financial insecurity of being a writer can make one seem obsessed with money. Having just had a particularly acute cashflow crisis myself, I know exactly what he means. And yet there are thousands of ways of earning a living that are more secure, and usually more lucrative. Clearly we don't do it for the money in the accepted sense, nor do we have the relative security of equally low-paid but enjoyable/interesting employment, so why do we persist? If the poets and UK short story writers want to, they can look away now while we novelists try to unpick what, exactly, is the relationship between what we do and how, if at all, we make our living doing it. Because, from the beginning, it's not straightforward.

On one hand, there's the undeniable fact that the average advance for a first novel, from a major publisher, is about £8,000, gross, for a book that might have taken two or three years to write. Bear in mind that the cheques will appear (minus agent's commission, and before tax) in up to four instalments, from signing the contract to the paperback being published, over perhaps two more years.

On the other hand, there's the famous/notorious six figure advance. Never mind that such a headline figure will divide up, similarly, to anything from the minimum wage to very serious money. (Guess which is more likely?) But people still read it and think that all they need to do is live off their redundancy money for six months while they sit down and scribble. Never mind that such deals are increasingly rare. Never mind that the publicity that a mega-deal generates in the trade may later be negated by the news that the book hasn't come near earning out the advance, an event which may strangle the author's career at birth.

Even once they're established and can reasonably hope (it's never a certainty) that they'll be able to sell the next book, it's only a handful of writers in the entire country who can earn a living purely by writing exactly what they chose to write, without teaching/ghosting/journalisming or having some other source of income (spouse? lodgers? smallholding?) which still leaves time to write (well, maybe not the smallholding). Virginia Woolf's £500 a year has inflated, but the need for it hasn't gone away. Poets and short story writers (okay, you might want to come back in, now) will never pay the rent from what they earn, and, actually, most novelists won't either. And still we write.

And after we've written we (or our agents) hustle and bargain for the money that most of us would swear we don't do it for. Are we being hypocritical? I don't think so. When I was offered the deal for The Mathematics of Love and what's turned out to be A Secret Alchemy, my first thought was that - Wow! - a major publisher believed they could sell enough of my book to justify such a deal. And though I was also able to crumple up the Situations Vacant page I was studying when the phone rang, the joy of a deal - of being paid for your writing - isn't really the money in the bank, though that may lift a huge cloud from your life, and be the key to other writing-related work. Fundamentally it's what the money says, not the cash itself: that tens of thousands of people - maybe one day hundreds of thousands of people - will soon hear what you're saying. No longer are you standing on a hill-top singing into the wind. The audience is out there.