This Itch of Writing

The real sixth sense

Have you ever learnt a dance step, or a musical instrument, or a tennis stroke? Felt how it gradually makes sense, how getting your weight in the right place makes the other arm move sweetly to where it needs to be, over and over again, whether it's a bow or a golf club? How suddenly your dancing body finds its place in the music, so that you're free by virtue of being part of the pattern? Can you imagine now, this minute, riding a bicycle down the road, pedal by pedal, push and turn and swoop? No, not the road beyond the window, that one at your grandmother's: the steep lane with the stony bit all down the middle which was bone-shaking if you strayed onto it, and the sharp bend at the bottom? And how once you didn't take the bend right, but flew off into the gravel and nettles? And got a graze on your chin, of all places, as well as the base of both hands?

One of the more valuable dividends of the Darwin bicentenary, for me, has been encountering the book Sparks of Genius, by Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein. I'd been asked to give a lecture on the family, and while the offer of a trip to Mexico was too tempting to resist, I badly needed to shift the focus away from that 3% of my genome, and towards something which I could actually talk about with some authority. The connecting thread between enough of my ancestors to provide the requested Cook's Tour of the family stories, and what I do, turned out to be creative thinking, and my brother-in-law sent me a copy of the Root-Bernstein's book. It's done up as a self-help book, with a subtitle The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People, but it's much more interesting than that. And one of their thirteen kinds of creative thinking is proprioception: 'our sense of muscle movement, posture, balance and touch'. It's one that the musicians in the family would recognise, and maybe the engineers, too. And as a writer I knew it, and now I have a word for it.

The other word for proprioception is body thinking. The Root-Bernsteins describe how Feynmann imagined himself as a sub-atomic particle, and only then worked out the maths to express what he'd felt. Choreographers make dance by doing it: they think with their bodies to create. But in the normal use of 'think' proprioception isn't thinking, which is logical, conscious, and divorced from physical experience. It seems to me that it's far more of a sixth sense than the phenomena which are usually given that name, because intuition, second sight, ESP or seeing ghosts, are mental. Proprioception is a sense because it's bodily, but it's not simply touch either, or taste or smell or hearing or sight, and yet it is utterly physical and sensory. Many - most? - all? - writing tutors will talk about using all five senses to write, because it's in the particulars of sensory experience, which is actually the only way that we can encounter the world, that we persuade readers that everything else we've invented is authentic too. So, next time you're imagining a scene, don't just think of the smell of the Gauloises or the taste of the coconut milk, the rattan of the café chair under your thighs, let alone the colour of the doves wheeling around the belfry or the feathery rattle of their wings. Here comes the lover, or the enemy: how does your body feel the move forwards, the spring up, the knees straightening and the ground newly hard under your feet as you stand, with your hand still pressed onto the table, to steady your heart.

But the Root-Bernsteins don't stop there, as many neuropsychologists do, with movement real and imagined. They argue that proprioception includes 'how we feel viscerally and emotionally' and I agree with them: all emotions have a bodily aspect beyond (or instead of) facial expression. One of my favourite challenges, in writing, is the problem of conveying how strong emotion feels, in real, physical terms. From the sting in the palms of your hands and feet when you look up from your work and see a figure standing in the doorway, to the - what? - pouring through you when you tell him it's all over, or he tells you that it's not...

One of the oddities of writing as an art form is that, as an object, a book is virtually devoid of sensory content. Even the paper and ink, though it may be nicer or nastier, has very little to do with the words, and the physical existence of the book is largely irrelevant to the text that we write, read, analyse and re-publish. Poetry has prosody - sound and rhythm - it's true, so it shares that with music, but reading a poem is a far more complete experience than reading a score is. By contrast the paint of a painting is part of the viewer's experience, music is all sound, and reading a list of steps is not the same as watching a ballet. You could argue that each art spends much time trying to do what it does least naturally: painters on canvas spend years learning perspective, sculptors do everything to show movement, composers want to make their audience think. Even so do we try to bring about in our readers some kind of mimesis of these quintessentially non-verbal phenomena: hate, shock, love, desire; the spin of a waltz step, the recoil of a gun; the weight of a baby, and the ache in your upper arms when it's gone.

Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt

I'm a sucker for an agony column, and since it's years since I've had a proper job, Jeremy Bullmore's in Saturday's Guardian has the same pleasure for me as gardening programmes do: intellectually and humanly fascinating, without the least necessity to take it (at the moment) to heart. And today's column included a problem which I found myself reading as a perfect analogy for a particular writerly situation. I hope Jeremy won't mind if I don my costume of Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt to the passionate, aspiring author, and paraphrase:

Dear Jerusha; I'm in my late 20s and currently working in a bookshop while trying to get my novels and stories published. I've spent a lot of my career with this aim, reading all the great authors and doing an MA, but now that I'm trying to find a publisher, I'm feeling as if there's no place where I and my writing fit. I have struggled to find an agent who sees fiction as I do, and no matter how much effort I put into revising my work and trying to make it so good they can't resist it, I still often find that my work is misread, or rejected outright. Over the past couple of years I've really stretched my reading and writing, and worked out what to me is important about literature. It has very recently occurred to me that a lot of my professional frustrations thus far may be down to my personal view of what's important in writing, and indeed my strong instincts about what I believe to be good and bad literature.

I have been looking to write for a living and/or do other related literary work in publications and forums which I believe in, but in the meantime it's obviously crucial for me to get that first publishing contract. Although I'm not overtly opinionated in my submission letters and networking in the writing world, I cannot change my literary nature any more than I can change the colour of my skin. Any advice as to how I might get my work to fit better, so as to get that contract, would be greatly appreciated.

From what you say, I'm not convinced that you're right to call your working life to date a 'career'. That word is usually reserved to mean progress within a chose path or profession - and if you're not yet published that's exactly what you're still looking for (I'm sorry if that sounds cruel, but I suspect it's an important point.) You know you've got a writerly nature all your own. You find it instinctively easy to distinguish good literature from bad. And all that's good - but also potentially a stumbling block. Strong and immediate convictions about artistic and aesthetic issues can seem to others like inflexibility and even prejudice. And indeed, they may be.

You say you're not overtly opinionated in your submission letters and networking, but that may just be your own view; others may think that's exactly what you are. So my guess is that you shouldn't consciously be trying to 'fit', as you put it. Rather, you should be trying to practise what's called in the jargon 'a theory of mind'. This not hugely helpful phrase is used to describe an individual's ability to see things through others' eyes.

It's very difficult to imagine things as they seem to others. It's not a facility we're born with; it needs to be consciously practised, and as a writer of fiction you have, I would imagine, have been doing a great deal of practising. But you need to start doing exactly that when it comes to getting your novel into the shape which will mean agents and then publishers think it will sell. In suggesting this, you may well think I want you to soften your writing and compromise your artistic principles. I don't. It's true that an increased understanding of other people's take on writing may well affect your own, but that's the beginning of imagination and empathy, not the end of conviction.

You should learn to listen more carefully to what other people say about your work. Just because you've asked for their opinion doesn't mean you're actually hearing it; you may just be getting ready to explain why the writing is exactly how you want it to be. If some people who might help your career onwards, either by helping you improve your work or giving you opportunities, seem to misunderstand it and you, this could be partially the cause. They may see you as someone who isn't interested in how anyone else, except yourself, hears your work.

It's interesting that you're tempted by other literary work. Successful writers and critics and teachers don't just put forward their own work and opinions with force and conviction. To be a successful writer you need first to understand other kinds of work, and what readers (including agents and publishers) see in them. Only then will you have any chance of writing things which catch their interest, let alone converting them into fans. And it's not just readers who must become fans if you're to get anywhere as a writer: at least one agent and at least one publisher must become fans of yours, if you're ever going to get published at all.

If you make a habit of reading and listening attentively, of trying to see things through other readers' eyes, you'll find it becomes almost instinctive. And when that happens, you'll find that your relationship with the book trade becomes more comfortable and rewarding. Your work will find a place where it fits, because it will start to be something which speaks to those readers in a way that they can hear.

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Just a note to point you towards a new piece in Resources, on psychic distance. Click here, or look over to the sidebar on the right.

Clothes and food and dropping presents

One of the Chapter Titles - one of the Big Issues - in the how-to-write books and courses and seminars is Characterisation, and I'm putting capitals all over the place because that's how it feels that aspiring writers talk about it. Whereas when agents and editors and experienced writers talk about it, they just say, 'I love the characters.' And having written that first sentence as a run-in to what I really want to say, I'm realising that it's the abstraction of the idea of characterisation which is daunting for beginner writers, not the process. After all, thinking about how different humans tick is what we all do most of the time, as soon as we enter a room or a world which has other humans in it. Non-writers may not be aware that we've been speaking prose all our lives, or that we emplot our existence as a way of understanding and finding meaning in it, but we all know that we spend an awful lot of time trying to work other people out: what they are, why they're like that, whether they're telling the truth, what they'll do next, what they'll do if we do X.

Indeed, working out how things work is the fundamental nature of childhood, and it's not an accident that so much of the best and/or most popular children's fiction involves the protagonist landing in a strange world, without parents who can or will help, where they have to work out the rules in order to survive: boarding school, space, time travel, shipwreck, being orphaned, evacuation, or anywhere with magic or science which operates differently from the known world. The experience of working it out, and eventually understanding if not altogether mastering that world, embodies a child's experience of the real world. And not just children, either: I write as one who's just started reading Robinson Crusoe.

So I don't think it goes without saying that the best way to develop your characters and write your novel is to work them out in detail beforehand, but you wouldn't think that to read some of the how-to books. I even know of a writing teacher who hands out questionnaires to all her students: what does the main character wear/drink/drive, what do they think/feel/see/understand about all sorts of things? What's their middle name, their taste in garden ornaments, their star sign? (I'm trying not to snort derisorily here, though of course one of your characters might believe in astrology.) Some of the students probably find this useful, if only as something to cling to in a sea of possibilities, but I know don't. I tried it dutifully for an early novel, and no doubt the pages are gathering dust somewhere, along with the Christmas Present Five Year Diaries (with lock and key) which are filled in for the first two weeks. To me - and I'd never say this is how you should see it - it all reads like a pop psychology piece in a glossy magazine: "My father always said that... so I grew up being very... but then... and eventually..." To me, it's unhelpful because drama is essentially character-in-action, and this is all character and no action. A story based on it is likely to be all analysis and reflection, with illustrative moments as a substitute for real drama.

Having said that, of course, one driving force for the imagination in shaping a novel - may even be the origin of the novel - is the "What if?" which goes, for example, "What if you were that kind of person and had that sort of marriage, and then she died?" Of course, then you start thinking about how that kind of marriage, and that kind of person, would result in what kind of widowerhood? Character does form action, so of course we need to know what the character is like. A story with all action and no character, with no sense of the action's roots in human nature and desires, is no real drama either.

Simply put, I think you can develop characters from the inside out, or the outside in. Neither is the only right way, and mostly I suspect we all do a mix of both. The two are essentially different, though. If the fundamental nature of drama is character in action, then one starts with the character, and the other with the action.

From the inside out, from the general to the particular, uses your understanding of how people tick to work out what your character would act:

Childhood with very judgemental parents; what does that make her like? She feels judged all the time; what emotions does that rouse? It makes her tense and nervous; how does that show physically? Makes her constantly fiddle with her fingers; what does that make her do? She keeps dropping things: what does she drop this time? She drops the present the new boyfriend gave her. Which is both likely, and symbolic of the fact that she can't even accept a present without thinking that it's in some way a judgement of her, which she doesn't want.

From the outside in, from the particular to the general, discovers the character as we do with real people in real life, moving from how they act towards working out how they tick:

The present was from the new girlfriend: what happened? He dropped it: why? Because he keeps dropping things: why? Because he's always fidgeting: why? Because he's tense and nervous: why? Because he feels the present is a judgement of him: why? Because he had very judgemental parents. Which is both likely and, when he drops it, symbolic of how he doesn't want the judgement that he can't help accepting.

There's an assymetry, of course, in that a novel is built of the particular, and it's the convincingness of the particular which persuades the reader to forget to disbelieve that none of this actually ever happened. So if you're working from the general inside to the particular outside, you need to do a fair bit of working outwards before you start. Whereas outside-to-inside can work itself out as, pen in hand, you ask yourself the particular, "What would she do next?" which will embody this moment's manifestation of the general nature of the character.

In practice, of course, it's not as tidy as all this: we all do both, often not even aware of the change of direction, so well-trained are we by life to move between the two. And there's a lot of other stuff you do need to find out, if not in a questionnaire. But I think the key is to think about them in whatever ways keep character and action both in play. If you do want to think, say, about how characters dress or eat or vote, then think about them in contrast to each other. One person's clothes (or car, or food) say something about them and how they fit themselves into the world. But two people's clothes (or cars or cooking) for the same occasion not only tells the reader that, but also sets up (inter)action between them. Do they see the occasion differently? Do they see the occasion in the same way, but dress/cook for it so differently that the other misreads them? Does each see their own relationship to the occasion differently from what the other sees? It doesn't need to be about politics to  bring out the conflict - implicit or explicit - in the situation. It's not that they have to launch into a battle over superiority, only that everything they do in the scene will be coloured by the place they think they have in it, and whether they feel that place is acknowledged, or challenged. So never mind character questionnaires, now the scene's really getting going, and without a word of pop psychology: just clothes, and food, and dropping presents...

Under your skin and into your core

The ever-admirable Litlove, of Tales from the Reading Room, asked me this in the comments on the differently fascinating Dirty Sparkle blog:

As a writer you've had a great deal of external validation for your work, more than most writers are fortunate enough to have. How will you feel when you get some really stinking reviews? I mean,I hope it never ever happens, but you're going to have to have some solid core of trust in your own work to withstand that, and it can only be developed (I would think) by committing in the act of writing to doing what pleases you first, and others as a delightful second.

It's certainly true that I've been very lucky with the quantity and quality of external validation, from the wholly commercial, such as Headline Review taking the front and inside front cover of The Bookseller to advertise The Mathematics of Love to the trade, to some terrific print and blog reviews (not excepting Litlove's own for The Mathematics of Love). But I've had some very curate's-eggy ones in print, and some pretty rude reviews on the blogs too, not to mention passing comments: the one-star ones for A Secret Alchemy on Amazon give you the idea. No doubt some day, and probably soon, the print reviewers and the well-respected bloggers will read something of mine which they hate, and make no bones about saying so. After all, there's very little point in publishing a really bad review of a debut novel by an unknown, but once an author's an existing, if tiny, plant in the book world, they're fair game.

So, how do you cope? How do I cope? With the proviso that I may well rescind all this when a respected reviewer explains, in detail, in public, just why a book of mine is so very bad, here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

1) Reviews are fodder for reviewers, and food for readers, and only incidentally feedback for the writer. A reviewer has no obligation to consider your feelings or teach you things, except in keeping the review to the book in their hands, and not taking pot-shots at your or its reputation or prospects. But, equally, the writer has no obligation to read, let alone take on board, the review. Your prime duty to your writing is to protect your writerly self, in order to write better. That doesn't mean stopping your ears to all negative comments, but it does mean taking only what's useful from reviews, as judged not by what pleases others, but by what makes sense to you. In other words, you need to make your own decision about accept, adapt, ignore from a review as with anything else. But do actually read the review, or get someone else to. Inevitably we're hyper-sensitive to what's said about our work, and we react far more strongly than the actual words would suggest to anyone else. If the first sentences of a review sound unpromising, I tend to read the rest with one eye, to protect myself from further hurt. Only of course I miss any nice, later things, and log it as a 'bad review' in my head, when by any normal measure it's nothing of the kind.

2) A central part of your writerly self is exactly that "solid core of trust" that Litlove talks about. It is essential - though it's inevitable that the outer edges of your core are more solid some days than others, I think. But how you acquire/grow/solidify that core I'm not sure. Saying that self-belief is vital, though it is, doesn't actually get you much further, for reasons I explored in Learning to be Bad: any self-belief worth having is the product of understanding your craft, and knowing that you understand it. That  includes knowing just how much you don't yet know, so self-belief is not a replacement for that understanding. The core is partly formed by what I think of as conditional validation: the detailed, thoughtful assessment by someone whose judgement you respect, that your work has objective merits. That's where doing the right course or class, or even getting an editorial report, at the right moment in your development, can be incredibly valuable: even where friends and writing buddies are knowledgeable, and willing to tell you the negative things, they may simply be too close to you and your own work for you to be able to mark their approval up in the "Am-I-any-good?" ledger in your mind.

3) I think Litlove's right, too, that the rest of the solid core comes, not from external validation, but from a certain integrity in what you do. I don't mean that you should only write morally impeccable, socially engaged, haut-lit tragedies about Real Life, or that you should never wonder what readers are buying at the moment. But I do think that you need to feel that what you write is worth writing, not just as self-expression for you but as a story worth telling to others, and that you're writing it as well as you can. Yes, the more of your heart and soul you put in (which may not be Tolstoy's, but rather the heart of Victoria Wood and the soul of P G Wodehouse, and none the worse for it), the more painful the knock-backs, from rejections from agents to hatchet-job reviews. But knowing that you've created something from nothing which deserves its existence as a creative work, means that judgements from outside can't entirely destroy its value: it was worth doing. As long as you believe that you won't look back on a piece of your work in five years time and think 'I wish I hadn't bothered', then your core is beginning to solidify.

4) Remember that there are lots of different ways in which a review can be negative which you can ignore. As Updike says (do read his rules for reviewers) a reviewer should "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and... not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt". If the blame your book attracts is for the latter, then you can safely ignore it. You can safely ignore a reviewer who gets the plot badly wrong too (unless several do, in which case maybe you really didn't make it clear!): reviewers are pretty badly paid and would usually rather be writing their own stuff, so sometimes they're operating on a pretty sketchy read. And some reviewers just don't get it. Most of the one-star reviews that A Secret Alchemy got on Amazon are by readers who read historical fiction as history lite, and didn't like what they read as my version of history. The central point of the book - that fiction-telling is at once less true and more true than history-telling - eluded them. And both ASA and The Mathematics of Love picked up blog comments from readers who don't get parallel narrative and aren't equipped or don't want to look for reasons why these two stories are in the same book. Okay, they don't have to, but I don't have to write to please them, either. Since I take no pleasure in excluding readers, not least but not only because I want to sell books, I felt bad about that for ages: in our consciously inclusive age we're uneasy about excluding anyone. Then something much more robust suddenly grew inside me, and I found myself thinking, "Well, I can't help it if you don't know how to read." No doubt there's a more politically correct way of putting it, but that, too, has become part of my core: there will always be people who don't get it, but as long as I get it, and some people get it, that's okay.

5) The impulse to resist, given reviews which get it wrong, is answering back. Yes, it's incredibly frustrating to know that there are potential readers who will get a completely wrong idea of the book and your writing. But it's never, ever a good idea. The only time I'd be tempted would be if the whole review, in a major newspaper or blog, was founded on a mistake. If a hatchet job was firmly based on my writing of a character or battle which isn't actually in the book, say, a calm letter correcting the error of fact, with absolutely no opinions or emotions attached, might - just might - be all right.

5) But there will always be reviews which do review the actual book, which have no beef with the kind of book you're writing, which understand what happens and what you're trying to do, and... don't think you did it well at all. Those are the ones which really hurt and, to a degree, so they should: you're writing for an audience - or why are you writing? - and an intelligent, responsible member of that audience has booed. Anaesthetics help for a while: I'd never say that a bottle of wine, a bar of chocolate and a well-exercised credit card don't cheer one up. But a review like this hurts your core and in the end you can only mend that hurt by attending to it. It will take time; it may mean you wince away from certain topics or forms or ways of writing - or any writing at all - for a while; it may mean that your writing process is hamstrung by self-consciousness. It's counter-intuitive, but only in really knowing and feeling what's going on with you and your work, including the damage and its consequences, can you get your core's strength back for the long term.

The pause that isn't a pause

Trust a drummer to know about silence. Over on Radio 3's Private Passions last Sunday, Stewart Copeland, late of The Police and more recently not unknown to opera houses, was talking to his fellow composer Michael Berkeley. I'm saving his comment, about how the beauty went out of modern music when it became an algorithm rather than a sentiment, for my official rant about what might happen to academic creative writing as it finally follows music into universities. But he said so much else which made sense to me as a writer.

The thing about drummers (I've a feeling he'd refuse to be called a percussionist) is that although all music exists in time, percussion has no sustaining pedal, no lungful of air, no length of a bow, to hold the note. Neither, of course, do words: once a word is said or read, it's over. Poets get closest, because they can assume that we'll hear the sounds as well as the sense, and with both we'll try to do the overlapping, the chords, the echoes, the harmony and the counterpoint, for ourselves, if only by re-reading the poem. But  we prose writers have to assume that our readers' experience is nothing else but reading one word after another to the end: we have to earn our re-reading.

And so, Copeland said, just as visual artists work with negative space, the arts which work by putting one beat/word/foot in front of the other work also work with silence and stillness. In music, his examples were reggae, and the Arabic music of his diplobrat childhood in Beirut, (but I also thought of the Scotch Snap in a strathspey, and the inimitable way that Viennese musicians push the second beat of a waltz in the opposite direction). There, in the lift just before the next beat strikes is "That little hole that sucks you in, that absence that creates impact when there's a presence... It's a very potent force." And then there's the silence between movements, and though I dislike the snobbery of those who scorn the applauders, I do prefer it when there's room to breathe - and think, and feel - where the composer intended. I wonder if Copeland ever regrets the way that the beginning and end of a rock song, played live, is always swamped with noise?

You can see where this thought's going, can't you? Poets play with enjambment, because simultaneously ending a line and refusing to let it end has a different effect from an end-stopped line where sense and sound coincide. And so, of course, can novelists. That pause that isn't a pause, at the end of a paragraph or a scene or a chapter, is fraught (in the proper sense of 'freighted') with energy. But how much can you control what the reader will find when they're sucked into in "that little hole": a space which contains... what? John Cage's 4'33" takes the question to its logical conclusion, by being nothing but space, but in fact he has the presence of the concert hall, audience, soloist, surrounding the absence of the music.

It's made more interesting and complicated for writers and readers, though, because, while music takes as long as it takes, in fiction we're running several kinds of time at once. There's the infinitely expandable and compressible way we can tell a story, entirely independent of the time those events it took for the characters. In fiction you can live a year in a sentence or a minute in three pages, so what's in the sentence that would be there, if you hadn't put a double-line-space instead? And what's in the three minutes after the chapter ends? Then there's the time it takes to read, and that we really can't control: some readers take two (chapters) daily at bedtime for weeks, others don't sleep till they've finished the book as the sun rises. Does an ordinary day between chapters work as an echo-chamber for what's in the spaces, or is total immersion the only way to hear what's in them? You can't control how readers read.

And then there's how writers read. I'm not sure I'd agree with the writerly equivalent of Copeland's assertion that "musicians have terrible taste in music", but I do think he's got a point. As he says, sometimes we and they "listen to the wrong things; they're listening for either the dreaded competition or... they're stealing ideas... but never for the right reason, which is just to emotionally respond... This applies to your own music... You start to go for things that are clever, and that stimulate you intellectually, and you're ready to move on from the elemental, visceral things." As I was thinking about in Leaving Eden, I think it's not wrong for a writer to read with their intellect, but rather a necessary and natural aspect of training for their craft. I also think that intellectual excitement can itself be elemental and visceral. The brain, after all, is an erogenous zone: in Brainy and Sexy I was exploring whether it's possible to write novels which really succeed in conjuring emotional and intellectual responses. What's a mistake, whether you're trying to write a crossover novel that a publisher will buy, or trying to use Gamelan instruments ("which aren't in tune with the next village, let alone a symphony orchestra") in a classical concerto, is to lose the truly elemental, visceral things. And many of those won't be in the words at all: they'll be in the black holes between them.

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.

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...

How writing works

The majority of literary criticism doesn't seem to me to be any use to a writer at all, and in my grumpier moments I even think that writers shouldn't read it, for fear of their fiction becoming an exploration of literary theory, which really is putting the cart before the horse. I certainly know several people who, being determined to become writers, read English at University, and were then too daunted to put creative pen to paper for a decade. Equally, at the other end of the spectrum, I find many how-to-write books too prescriptive of a single way to write, and a single kind of good writing to aim at. But in between are what I call the how-to-read books. There are really rather few of them, but they're more useful, I'd suggest, than a whole library full of the others. By talking about how novels actually work for an attentive general reader, they offer the best possible pair of glasses for a writer, for a writer is always, actually, a writer-reader: we are our own first reader, and it's our readerly response to our words which trains and refines our writerly process. And the other important thing about these books is that, although ostensibly works of criticism, they're all written by practising novelists.

The granddaddy of them all is E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel. As he says, you could take six novels which everyone agrees to be really good, and yet find they have almost nothing in common: therefore no conclusions can be drawn or rules promulgated about what makes a 'good' novel. What we can do is talk about how good novels work. When I went back to the book recently, though, I was surprised to find how slight it is: as I recall, it was one of the first books of this kind which I read, so it pinpointed some things which seemed to me a revelation at the time, but are commonplace to me now. Or maybe that's a measure of how completely I absorbed what it says.

The next one I came across was David Lodge's The Art of Fiction. There seems to be something about this genre which means it's often spawned in non-traditional breeding grounds; Lodge's book (like Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem) began as a newspaper column. It still has something of that serendipitousness about it, hopping between 'Teenage Skaz', 'Lists' and 'Narrative Structure', using a single novel to illustrate each one as Padel uses a single poem. But in fact it covers a lot of ground in a highly readable way. I also like the way that the serendipitousness seems like a refusal to offer a comprehensive how-to guide: no prescription for the way to read here, or the journey one should take. It's more like being handed a torch with a brilliant beam, for whatever journey you choose to take.

Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer is very interesting, because she thinks in terms of units of writing, so the first chapter headings are 'Words', 'Sentences', 'Paragraphs', 'Narration', and we're halfway through the book before we get to 'Character' and 'Dialogue', which to non-writers might seem to be where you'd start. So, compared to the Lodge, it has a stronger sense of how all the parts of the machine fit together. And if you've ever wondered why some of us are so passionate about Chekov, her last chapter is the best explanation I've ever read of why.

John Mullan's How Novels Work was also born in a newspaper column, though they were book-by-book, and extracting the general issues from that format has left a good few repetitions. But it is very interesting, and perhaps maps best onto how we conventionally think of novels: different options for voices, structures, character, style and so on. And I'll love the book forever, first for coining the concept of the 'inadequate' narrator, and then for stating so clearly what I've long believed, that the more that fiction tries to assert its factual respectability with bibliographies and historical notes and academic apparatus, the more it actually casts itself as something less than non-fiction, a pale imitation of dubious legitimacy, instead of the triumph of imagination which it should be claiming.

I'm sure there are other books of this kind, and if anyone wants to mention them in the comments, I'll be really grateful. But I confess that I held out for a long time against James Woods's How Fiction Works, purely on the grounds of what I felt was a very annoying, de haut en bas article in (I think) The London Review of Books. I didn't think I'd care for his take on writing, plus he's more of literary critic than a novelist, though he has written a novel. So when my PhD supervisor lent me her proof copy of the book, I took it with faith in her judgement that it was what I needed, but also a certain bristling.

How wrong I was. Indeed, I've now gone out and bought my own copy so that I can pencil notes in it with a clear conscience. It's nothing like as comprehensive as most of the others, being more a series of observations - this of all of them, might be best titled 'Aspects of the novel' - in fact it's a decidedly slim vol, although everything he says is worth reading. But what I've chiefly taken from it is a masterly exposition of free indirect style: how it works, why it works, and why it offers some of the greatest possibilities in narrative. The writer/reader who recoils from being told what to think by an authorial voice is missing the point, Woods argues. Once we've stopped being so childish, then we're open to the irony inherent in any narrative form which slips and slides between the narrator's and the character's point-of-view, voice and sensibility. Of all the narrative arts, this is the possibility which is unique to fiction: that we can be at once both inside and outside a character's consciousness. If you think that the greatest works of art are those in which form and content - medium and message - interact most inextricably, then surely free indirect style is the very embodiment of that inextricability.