This Itch of Writing

Dancing with Bach

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

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

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

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

Sorry, Raymond Chandler, I'll be back in a bit

I've got into trouble before now for saying that I don't read fiction when I'm writing. It's true that all good writers were voracious readers first, and it's true that a surprising number of people say they want to write, without seeming to know that reading is a pre-requisite. I've had manuscripts to report on which made me wonder quite seriously if the writer had ever read a book (and no, most recent clients, if you're reading this, it wasn't you...). And it's not just for trainee writers: as I was saying in Alive, kicking and joining in the game, for the whole of a writer's life reading and writing are like the two halves of the human body which that life inhabits. We scoff (quietly, I hope) at the neophyte writer's fear of 'being influenced' - any writer worth their salt should want to be influenced by the greats, and by the contemporary masters/mistresses of their branch of the craft, whether it's Thomas Mann or Marian Keyes.

So when I pause a writing day for lunch and open a history book, am I failing to practising what I preach? It depends what you mean by 'when I'm writing'. The stage when I really can't read fiction is the first-draft stage and given the choice, that's as short as possible. If children didn't need feeding, and accountants and sisters didn't need telephoning, and I didn't occasionally need to take some exercise and go to the supermarket, it would be three or four months till I had 130,000 words on the page. And those words are raw, they're rough, they comes pouring up like lava, slow, burning and inexorable, from some underworld that I don't know my way round or have any maps for. One of the things I don't understand about that underworld is what makes which words appear, for what I want to say next. Voice is one of the things I get most excited about, but it's also one of the most mysterious. I love strongly-flavoured voices in fiction, but just because I love soaking in Ackroyd, James, Chandler, Woolf or Wodehouse doesn't mean I want to write like them. The trouble is, if I've been soaking, I can't help it. Not really like them, of course - I should be so lucky - but with that flavour, like a chopping board that you've sliced the onions on: whatever you do, don't start cutting up peaches on it. So all the other things you absorb from reading fiction are going to have to wait as well. Maybe it comes from a youth mis-spent writing parodies for the title-and-paragraph game, but that sponge-like tendency of my reader-writer's self is a bit of a liability but also one of my most valuable assets: one of my most cherished reviews of The Mathematics of Love said that 'its bilingual dexterity is only one of its several triumphs'.

Of course, non-fiction has a flavour too. In fact I sometimes get annoyed by the way that it's often talked about as if really great writing is only an issue in fiction and poetry, or these day's what's called 'imaginative non-fiction' (travel writing, memoir). Good prose is good prose. We could all learn a lot about the weight and balance of a sentence, about flexible, sophisticated grammar and syntax, about rhythm and sound, from the likes of Trevelyan, Kenneth Clarke, Roy Porter, or Peter Ackroyd in non-fictional mode. Elizabeth David wrote brilliantly (and goes very nicely with lunch), and so does Katharine Whitehorn. And an anthology of good journalism - from the Guardian Women's page, say - or of letters or diaries or speeches, can be a very good way of feeding your inner reader-writer without flavouring the chopping board too highly with a single scent.

Of course, for period voice it's those letters and diaries that are your first stop. Not that you'll write like them, either. I do a mean parody of the Paston Letters, but you couldn't write or read a whole novel like that. The 'authenticity' of our novels - in words or deeds - is only apparent. We write for our own time, and our voice is as much about England in 2008 as in 1471. What it can't be, though, is Los Angeles in 1927. It doesn't go with the armour.

All this, and the black marks on the page

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

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

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

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

Sunday round-up: age-banding, and putting the cart before the horse

In 'Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming' I said that thinking about a piece of writing after you've written it can teach you much more about how writing works than reading a textbook before you start. The more formalised insitutions of academic creative writing seem to divide into two kinds: the departments and degrees which discuss ideas and theories of writing, and then write to explore them, and the places where the writing comes first and the analysis afterwards. A piece in Times Higher Education argues that creative writing is reviving the sort of liberal humanism in English departments that Theory banished, but the piece and the comments didn't rule out the theory-first approach to CW from which I instinctively recoil. So why do I recoil from it? Primarily, you could argue, because I became a writer first, and only a (sort-of) academic second. But I don't think it's simply an accident of my career. I think writing first, analysing second is the nature of writing, and although it's perfectly possible to use writing as a tool to explore theoretical ideas, the writing that results shouldn't be regarded as art, nor those whose only writing is of this kind as creative artists.

The first impulse that makes people take to pen and paper is, you could say, like the kind of moment in a musical that I was discussing in 'Wanting, needing'... when the characters just have to burst into song: they have something to say - something they feel, think, believe - which can't be contained any longer. Of course what bursts out of you may be an idea, not a desire to retell Puss-in-Boots, but it's the desire that comes first. Even at the micro level of single sentences, the sentence comes first, and the analysis of whether it's the right sentence, and what to do if it's not, comes second. And at a slightly more macro level, all writing teachers know that the first thing you have to teach learner-writers is that though the outburst comes naturally, and first, so much of writing as art and craft is actually in the revising. So it seems to me that for the academy to theorise first and write second is putting the cart before the horse, even if it is easier to examine and sits more comfortably with the established processes of academic enquiry. Not only will it result in a lot of writing which has no value beyond being a demonstration of theory (which you could argue doesn't matter, if the purpose of a degree or a research project is academic enquiry) but in perverting the natural writing process such courses and academics are actually losing sight of what they purport to study. Creative writing as a discipline is process, and if it's not allowed to be itself, then it's not creative writing, but something else entirely.

And finally, the row about age-banding children's books rumbles on. I think the attempt by publishers to guide parents in choosing the right books for their children is well-meaning, since parents who have least confidence in choosing are probably the ones who are least used to decoding covers and blurbs and getting a feel for a book with a quick dip. Having heard the story from the horse's mouth of the teenage boy who tentatively asked if he'd be allowed into Waterstones if he was wearing trainers, I have some sympathy with this view. And with 20% of books being sold through Tesco's alone, most people are not buying books in places where a well-informed bookseller is there to help. But the initiative is back-firing. Some very heavyweight authors indeed, and the keen and opinionated booky readers of the blogosphere, argue that a single mark of 7+ or 13+ will put off more children than it will help, and that unifying the very different issues of reading-difficulty and content under a single mark is not only impossible, but a betrayal of everything that literature should be: wide-ranging and free-thinking. It's not actually a new question: does anyone else remember the guidance in the Puffin books of my youth. 'This book will appeal to girls of 10-12, and sensitive boys,' was typical, as I remember. But it was tucked away at the bottom of the blurb, infinitely less pre- and pro-scriptive in style than the proposed gaudy film-certificate symbols. The anti age-banding camp are here, and mega-selling Darren Shan makes his views known on Vulpes Libris, just above an interview with the very wonderful Barrington Stoke, who in their mission to make good books suitable for dyslexics and reluctant readers have grappled for a decade with these issues of content versus reading age. Meanwhile The Bookseller's account of events is here.

And now, back to today's other job, which is putting up yet another bookshelf. I'll swear they breed, those darned books...

Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming

There used to be a terrific series on Radio 3 - Monday afternoons, as I remember - called Stage and Screen. It was always a stand-alone programme about theatre or movie music, from the acutely avant-garde to the blockbustingly popular, and apart from the fact that it was always full of all that gorgeous repertoire, the discussion of the interaction between drama (and so at least by implication, storytelling) and music was consistently illuminating. The Broadway musical seems an impossibly tight form to us novelists, lying back comfortably in the arms of our own baggy monster of a tradition. And composing music, complete with beginning, middle and end, for a three-minute-forty-seven-second cue which has already been shot, is also something to make even those of us who are turned on by technical and formal challenges feel a bit weak.

I get grumpy when it seems that the nearly as tight principles of screenwriting are being applied to fiction without any acknowledgement that the two art forms are in many ways fundamentally different, and that happens a lot, not least in books about creative writing which ought to know better. But there's no denying that the basic simplicity of the novel-like elements of a musical (the time-frame of the experience so relatively short, the music/set/choreography doing much of the work that the novelist has to do for themself) can mean that the big bones of the storytelling can be seen and discussed amazingly clearly.

So I wish I could remember more of some of the programmes that were about narrative in musicals. It was school-run time, so I couldn't easily make notes, and in those pre-DAB, pre-podcast days it was hard to catch up later. Sometimes I think I might try to track down some splendidly vulgar Write your Musical and Make a Million book, just to see whether what it says chimes with what I remember: that in a good musical the big songs are the seemingly natural culmination of a build-up of plot and emotion, an outburst of feeling and action too strong to be contained in mere prose speech. And this idea, mutatis mutandis, is something that fiction writers could do well to think about.

One of the things that most often isn't working in novels that I do editorial reports on is what's sometimes called One-Damn-Thing-After-Another syndrome: when the plot just seems like a series of things that happen. The writer has usually thought quite hard about what the characters are trying to get, what need they're trying to fulfil, and then either written a series of scenes to explain it, or tossed a series of obstacles in their path. If these two kinds of scene are alternated, it can give the illusion that the novel has a plot. But if the reader's not to get bored with each damn thing trotting along about as excitingly as junctions on the M1, fiction needs to be all about change: narrative drive isn't about bomb-blasts or sex scenes or crying on the best friend's shoulder, it's fundamentally about how those moments change the characters' needs and desires, and therefore their actions. In practical, how-I-suggest-you-revise-your-novel terms, what that means is that the writer needs to pinpoint the crucial moment of change in their head, make it clear in the scene (however subtly, however buried in the subtext) and then re-write what comes before so that the change is convincing, and re-write what comes after so we see the effect on them, the other characters, and what they all do next.

I can remember two examples that were discussed in Stage and Screen of the natural place for a big song in a traditional musical - the place where feeling's to strong to be contained. The first is the classic opening 'I want' number, where the hero/heroine bursts out with what will, fundamentally, be the driving reason for the whole story. Eliza Doolittle's 'All I want is a room somewhere' is a classic of this kind, while Belle's first number in the Disney Beauty and the Beast is another example, though I can't remember its title. The village is narrow and boring, they all think she's weird because she yearns for something grander and more exciting, but her main suitor - her perceived future - is stupid and vain. The number is shaped as her progress through the village, which is clever too, because it means that within the song itself there's movement. It isn't just a single statement, it embodies change in itself, a literal and figurative feeling that we're in a different place at the end from where we started. All in about three minutes: a page and a half of a novel read aloud.

A second big moment of change was first pin-pointed, apparently, by Rodgers and Hammerstein in Carousel, and it's the kind of product of fundamentals and practicalities that I love. One of the drawbacks of forming a muscial (most musicals?) around a love story (even a sad, going-wrong one like Carousel) is that the biggest moment of change of all - when the hero and heroine declare their love - should be the biggest song, the highest point, but it can't happen too early, because the plot's based on the business of getting them together. So how do you get a high enough point into the first act? If you don't, after all, the audience might not bother to come back after the interval. To overcome this inherent drawback of (if you believe Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots) the most fundamental story of all  Rodgers and Hammerstein invented what's since become know as the conditional love song. 'If I loved you,' in Carousel is the original of 'I'll know when my love comes along,' in Guys and Dolls, 'On the street where you live,' in My Fair Lady, and a dozen others. If the 'I love you' song is about fulfilment, which always risks being the end of the story, the conditional love song is all about desire in the true sense: wanting, dreaming, yearning, needing. Which, of course, is the mainspring of fiction.

I hate it when I hear of aspiring writers meekly trying to force the words and ideas that are tumbling out of them into some prescriptive mould that will - the how-to book swears - mean that their book will sell. But when I look back on things I've written, and books I've read, I can see many moments which you could call either the 'I want' moment, or the conditional love song, or, no doubt, the other big moments a musical has. In fact, I think this post-hoc understanding - the commentary on A Secret Alchemy which is part of my PhD, if you like - can be far more fruitful, in learning your trade, than any studying of a textbook before you start. But that's for another post...

Subjective, objective, and Soviet toothbrushes

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

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

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

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

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

How many viola parts does it take to make a novel?

I was interested to discover that, like Mozart, Vaughan Williams' instrument was the viola. The viola? The instrument that has as many jokes made about it as Skoda cars do? Even though Amadeus may have been an exercise in fascinating historical fiction, no one could accuse Mozart of being uninterested in high-visibility showmanship. Anyone who's heard the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis would be forgiven for assuming that RVW was a string player. And yet, though it does make a beautiful sound, it's possibly the most invisible in the orchestra, because its timbre blends with the violins and the cellos, and by definition it's almost always playing the inner parts. Rarely does the viola get a tune you could sing, nor is it the underpinning bass that defines the harmonies: the joke about what you call a violist at the bottom of the sea ('a start') is only one which other musicians tell about how dispensible it is.

So why did it appeal to at least two great composers? (I've been watching RVW rising back up the approval ratings in the wake of the 50th anniversary of his death). I think it must be to do with it being one of the most important elements in what musicians call the inner parts: alto and tenor lines, clarinet and bassoon parts. If you like, a tune is like a story: the thing we first want music to give us, the sine qua non, the thing we whistle so that others can recognise what we're talking about. But as the art develops, what happens to a tune - how that plain statement is supported, given texture, qualified, changed, synocopated, undermined, shifted into the minor, the dominant, the unexpected - becomes an ever more interesting business. In modernism, for instance, the original element of storytelling/tune is taken as - literally - read, in that the reader/listener is given everything except a coherent version of that original element, which they must put together from all the other elements, including the inner parts.

Which doesn't mean that a wonderful tune isn't still one of the best small things that can happen to a human being. Nor that both Mozart and RVW wrote some of the most exquisite tunes that have ever existed. But maybe that's why the question 'What's your book about?' is so hard for novelists to answer. Because there are so many answers, so many textures, rhythms, harmonies and counterpoints to talk about, and 'the Princes in the Tower' is only one of them.

The spaces between

Apparently someone once said to Artur Rubinstein that he was a great pianist. He replied that, actually, he didn't play the notes any better than anyone else: what he played better than anyone was the spaces between the notes.

It's sort-of obvious that a very plain, bare narrative - what one might loosely and irritatingly call Hemingway-style - apparently using as few words as possible, works as much by what's not said, as by what is. From that realisation it's not so far to realise that much of such a story's power is in what the reader finds in - or puts into? - the spaces between the words. We may not even be aware we're finding anything, and what we're lured into putting there may not be the details of how people feel or places look, a sophisticated structure of ideas or series of events. It might be nothing more than a sense of import, a hyper-sensitivity, a skinned-ness that's beyond words or even thought.

It's less obvious that rich, baroque, lavish writing also operates in the spaces. Why look for spaces, for what's not there, when the words are piled high, the scents and sights and sounds lap round us, the ideas tumble over themselves and each other? But what happens between these kinds of notes is important too. Perhaps it helps to think of 'between' in the other sense, as we talk of a love scene played between two people: 'between' meaning 'shared', 'joint', the friction between things that makes sparks or flames or new gloss, or irreversible damage.

Of course what goes on between the words is conditioned by the words that surround them as well as by who's doing the reading, but that's not just a statement of the bleedin' obvious: it pinpoints the separate but mutually dependent nature of the two: word-and-silence operate as a pair just as writer-and-reader do. Anyone who doesn't believe me should listen to three or four different performances of, say, the same Chopin nocturne. I think this is something that novelists who are also poets, with their hyper-sensitivity to all the other things that words do beyond conveying information, often understand better than the rest of us writers. I've been reading the poet Tobias Hill's novel The Love of Stones and I'm still trying to work out where the wonderful richness of the worlds he creates comes from, because when you look at the individual words and sentences they're as simple and precise as a needle.

So can I, as a writer, shape the spaces between the words? Of course: they're my words and my spaces. What I can't shape is what you find in them, but that's all right. It's what each finds for him or herself that makes a text come alive and become a story, because in the end it's only our own experience which is truly alive to us, and it's that we invest in what we read. As a writer, I offer you the spaces as well as the words, and ask you to make them breathe.

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.

Slipstreaming Eagleton and selling your soul

To Goldsmiths yesterday evening, for a lecture by the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton. Apart from knowing his name in connection with swathes of literary theory, combatively expressed, which I haven't read (I haven't read much of anyone else's literary theory, it has to be said) I didn't really know what to expect. In the event it was the kind of talk you wish you could have recorded, to go over more than once, spreading out the densely-argued points, gathering together arguments that ranged over an astonishingly wide area, and seeing whether it really is as persuasive as it seemed at the time. I suspect much of it would be, and it was also funny.

I still find that most literary criticism, however interesting it is in and of itself, and be it Formalist, or New, or Structuralist, or whatever, says very little to me about what I, as a novelist, spend my time thinking about. But one thing Eagleton said really rang a bell. He was talking about how literary criticism as anyone over forty remembers it - "the minute dissection of discourse" - is dying on its feet. Other, cultural concerns about gender, or sex, or colonialism - fascinating and legitimate in themselves - have taken over as the focus of literary study. He linked this with Walter Benjamin's analysis that in late capitalist societies like ours, when markets have evolved for everything else we can make or do or own, including art, finally human experience itself is commoditised: made into something that can be bought or sold or destroyed or controlled. For this to happen, said Benjamin writing (and dying) as a Jew under Nazism, will be the death of memory and mourning, and therefore of our authentic, subjective, individual human nature and experience.

Studies of the cultural discourse in literature can't alone recapture that subjective individuality, said Eagleton, can't pin down the affective process of reading, can't explain how reading makes us feel what we feel when we read. Only recapturing the detailed processes of language - tone, metaphor, pitch, syntax, rhythm and so on - can enable us to understand and hold onto the mechanisms of transmitting true experience. So, here was the once-upon-a-time enfant terrible of Structuralism - that bogey-man of everyone who still wants to discuss whether Jane should have married Rochester -  saying two things that go straight to the heart of me as a writer.

One: that close reading still matters, because all creative writing is close writing. What we do, word by word, how we chose, discard, speak aloud or brood over individual sentences and paragraphs, is how we transmit the experience we're trying to evoke, whether it's running for a bus or flying a spaceship or giving birth. It's no good trying to write grand ideas and meta-narratives, tragedy or comedy or simply the recognisable textures of everyday life, if they can't be transmitted; if the signals, as it were, are anything less than exquisitely clear.

And Two: that the obsession with the un-invented roots of fiction, the 'real' authenticity, about which I've grumbled in Rogues and Vagabonds  and No Place for the Muffins is, indeed, not a simple matter of 'I need the publicity', or 'Why shouldn't I thank everyone who's helped?', understandable though both those motivations are. You could argue (but I probably only do in my own most combative moments) that talking publicly about which of your 'real' experiences went into the novel, or acknowledging all the incredibly helpful neighbours/family/guinea pigs who went into the making of this book, is actually taking part in the commoditising of experience. By offering your 'real' experience to back up the infinitely more detailed and true evocation of human experience that you've spent a year or more inventing, you're playing the market, offering your personal humanness for sale, instead of your art. The stage we've reached so far is the celebrity culture, the reality TV show, and the misery memoir, which are clearly three commodities in the 'real experience' market. It seems that fiction writers are expected to join in. But what will we do, once we've sold our personal, subjective experience? No matter that once that's happened no one will read our fiction for what fiction does best: creating an authentic, detailed discourse of the human experience that no mere autobiography can hope to match. It'll be too late then to find that we've commoditised our souls.