This Itch of Writing

99% boredom, 1% Barbra Streisand

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

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

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

Looking for the hammer marks

So if there's a difference between scientific truth and artistic truth, I was thinking yesterday, gazing out over an audience which included three Fellows of the Royal Society, is there also a difference between scientific (one might more broadly say 'academic') creativity and artistic creativity? No one who's read any good popular science, or something like Simon Singh's extraordinarily lucid account of the detective story that led to the proving of Fermat's Last Theorem, could doubt that creative thought - inspiration, if you like - is very much part of what makes science happen. (Perspiration too, of course, but then that's equally true of art.) The great moments come when weeks and months and years of observation and analysis suddenly power a spark that jumps a gap. Everything comes together, you 'see' something that you never saw before: a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. That spark is surely the same kind of thing as the spark I feel when I 'see' how my story must end, or 'hear' my opening sentence.

But I think there is a difference, and at the risk of sounding frivolous, it's embodied in the footnotes. (And don't tell me that T S Eliot added footnotes to The Wasteland, though he did. Some of them are deliberately misleading). The purpose of footnotes is to show where everything you're saying came from: the only things you don't footnote - give a reference for - are those things you observed or deduced yourself. Ideally, anyone reading your Variorum edition of the works of John Donne, or a paper on the uses of parasitic flowering plants, should be able to follow every step of your argument, untwisting the rope you've made, determining the origin and strength of every strand, following everything you've used from elsewhere back to its origins. And so however glittering the conclusion, however coherent and complete the shape that's made, if you get up close to an academic work you must always be able to see the hammer-marks, where the silver was beaten out to shape. It's an analytical creativity, if you like: the origins of the spark, and the nature of the spark itself, are always known and measurable.

Which isn't to say that in painting you should never be able to see the brushstrokes, any more than in writing you should never be aware of the words themselves building the story or the poem. But it seems to me that if an audience spends the two hours' traffic of the stage wondering whether the actor playing Romeo has ever actually taken poison, or a reader is more worried about whether I've used the right kind of Latin Mass in A Secret Alchemy than whether it'll all be all right in the end, then the creative event - the joint endeavour of artist and audience - has failed. Which isn't to say that we should never read or look at a picture analytically: there are great riches to be had in doing so. But, ultimately, even those riches have the same, synthesising purpose: that we feel still more the glittering whole without necessarily knowing or caring how it was hammered into shape. Whereas the academic/scientific endeavour is an analytical creativity, art is a synthetic creativity, in the true meaning of the word: the product of synthesis, of a bringing together: where it came from is not the point.

The golden sovereign

I've been delighted by an exasperated quotation from the poet Frances Cornford, describing her family's habit of discussing everything, even personal matters, in 'a thoroughly weighing Darwinian manner' which the family always assumed would, as the artist Gwen Raverat's biographer Frances Spalding puts it, 'inevitably arrive at an authoritative truth.' 'But the truth of art isn't the same kind of truth, as Gwen and Frances knew better than most,' I found myself writing. 'And there's always a risk that one's more a-rational, intuitive, un-logical creative processes are broken on the wheel of rational analysis and ruthlessly reasonable thought.'

And then, my paper for Darwin Day written, I retired to the bath with a TLS that I've somehow overlooked in the chaos of the last couple of weeks. I love the TLS, though I quite see why it infuriates or bores many, and despite the fact that since they integrated the online archive search with the main Times one it's all but useless. I don't read the fiction reviews (I rarely read fiction reviews anywhere) but the rest of the paper is my liberal education. Never mind Rough Guides and Very Short Introductions, admirable though both series are: one of the best ways to be introduced to a subject of which you know nothing is a really good, long review of a learned book by a learned writer. The philosophy reviews are the only ones I often find too technical, but this one was a cracker. In a review of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which I can't post a link to because the damn Search won't find it, Chritopher J. Insole says, 'Telling the story is responsive to truth, but it also creates truth.'

He's talking about our human understanding of human consciousness, but he might just as well be talking about art. Yes, I think there is such a thing as 'artistic truth', though it may be different from factual truth, and not even measurable by the same criteria. It's an argument that can slide into woolly-minded soppiness, too, just as the most mechanical rationalism can slide into an equally unthinking inhumanity. But what he's also saying is that the two things - the truth that already exists, and the truth that human consciousness makes of it - are two sides of the same coin. If you believe, as I do, that art is the ultimate expression of human consciousness, then 'artistic truth' - our response to truth that then creates truth - isn't just an irritatingly imprecise term of approval, it's the sovereign, the golden sovereign, of our human existence.

Jumping the gap

I was startled, and slightly dismayed, to see that my normal 'Hm, must be about time for another blog post' reflex hasn't kicked in on time: it's been a longer gap since my last than I meant. Normally another idea starts to knock on the door quite soon, sparked by something that happens, someone else's blog, some conversation I've had. Maybe it was partly absorbed by putting some thoughts together on internet reviewing for Vulpes Libris. Maybe it was the fact that Wednesday evening, when it was already rather overdue, was very nicely taken up with a writing friend and a bottle of wine instead.

And now I'm here, I can't think of anything to post. I was about to write maybe it's because I've just come back from a dance class and I'd rather be in a hot bath, and now I've suddenly thought, yes, it is to do with the dance class.

You see, I've been thinking in words all day: finishing dealing with the copy-edit of A Secret Alchemy, writing my talk for Darwin Day and half a dozen other jobs. All of those generated little sparks, little ideas and grumbles and insights about writing, but no chance to develop them. And then a bite to eat, and off to dance. But dancing, I find, like horseriding, just isn't a word business at all. It's partly that it's all-absorbingly physical: by comparison writing must be the least physical art, just as the physical nature of a book is unimportant compared to the physical nature of a painting or a symphony. And the more directly I'm connecting the music and the space when I'm dancing - the more simultaneously I experience them both - the less my sequential, language-brain gets involved. When the class ended I had no words in me, and was grateful to get back in the car and go home without saying much to anyone.

It's good for us to be reminded that there are some things words don't do. Were I to try to convey what that hour and a half felt like, I could, of course: that's what writers do. But it would be a process of translation, finding verbal equivalents for what happened, and the reader would have to translate those words onwards, into their own body-memory of rhythm and movement in time, in space. And yet words on the page, which have so little body themselves, so little sensory existence, can carry that memory from my body to someone else's, jumping the un-measured and un-measurable gap between us like an electric charge, or a magic spell. 

Sometimes you have to stop

A couple of days ago I stopped working for lunch. My head was still full of the plans I'd been making for the last stage of my PhD. With A Secret Alchemy finished, I now have to hold onto the whole of it, mentally speaking, and write 'a commentary on its structure, its use of narrative technique, its relation to other literary works and an exposition of the aims and concerns that lay behind its composition.' When you learn that according to the university regulations I must also make it clear that I am 'well acquainted with the history and contemporary developments of the genre... and the critical field associated with it' and am 'able independently to analyse, interpret and evaluate the debates and theoretical positions associated with it,' you'll understand why writing a commentary on my novel feels a bit like trying to map a mountain after I'd climbed it in a mist.

But at the moment every which way I turn there's work. So on my way down to the kitchen I took with me what you might call work lite: the latest edition of Writing in Education, the journal of the NAWE. It's a special edition on writing in Higher Education, and full of interesting stuff that I've not really articulated to myself before. Maybe it's not everyone's idea of a rip-roaring read, though in the nature of things most of it's extremely well written. But it's full of lots of ideas. I found myself arguing, agreeing, discussing, and smiling, all in the empty silence of my own kitchen, all inside my own head. Only there wasn't room for it all among my ideas for my PhD, and as I read I started to feel weirdly feverish: I wanted to grab at ideas that slipped aside to make room for the next one, write everything down, underline all the good things on each page so that none of them would be lost, grab someone's sleeve, if only in an online way, and pour it all into their ears... It felt as if it was either that, or explode.

My half hour was up, my plate empty. Normally I take some coffee back upstairs with me, to counteract the after-lunch doziness, but I was far too wired to need it. Of all the things that needed doing, what would be the best use of the time? Preparing the next day's seminar was most urgent. Making sure I've got the tax I owe lined up and ready to be sent is horribly important and horribly depressing, but needn't be done today. (I've been saying that for weeks...) The talk I'm doing for Darwin Day is slightly less urgent and considerably more intriguing, but needs work and, worse still, telephoning aunts. The academic paper I'm planning, about writing across gender, is going to be fascinating, and even the abstract doesn't have to be there till the end of March, but if it's earlier, will that improve my chances of getting a slot at the conference? There's a novel to write a report on for Writers Workshop, which is a long, concentrated but predictably-shaped job, and hard, much-needed cash when I deliver. Or can I go where my heart really wants to go: the next stage of the story I started over New Year? It has no deadline, but those are the things which so easily never get done, and I want to know what's going to happen next...

For once I made the right decision: in a state somewhere between panic and intellectual elation I put on a jacket and went out for a walk. It's easy to forget, when you work for yourself, at home, at something which grabs your mind and your spirit in such a grip that your heart starts to race, that sometimes you just have to stop.

The Ancestral Elephant

Writing of the elephant in the room, in my last post, reminded me of something I've been dodging ever since I started this blog. Down our way he's called The Ancestor (though isn't that also a character in Moomintroll?). Yes, him, Charles Darwin. Okay, there, I said it. I guess most readers of this blog aren't surprised, but it's what many people think but don't ask when they meet me and my name, while others do ask immediately. (If you're wondering, he's my grandfather's grandfather, and I'm named after his cousin and wife, Emma Wedgwood)

The thing is, I've been invited to speak at Birmingham University's Darwin Day 2008 on 12th February next (I nearly said 'this') year. I don't normally do being a Representative Darwin, having dozens of cousins who are keener and know more about it all than I do, but a) Birmingham is my own old university and b) the theme of the day is the wider influence of Darwin on literature and the arts: the chief speaker is Dame Gillian Beer. I've decided that I do have something to say about how that plays out within the family, and I shall enjoy the trip and the company: I haven't been back since I graduated.

As you can tell, my feelings about it all are mixed, because, really, my ancestry is nothing to do with what I do. I write fiction, and my fiction is neither better nor worse because of some bits of DNA which would be even more diluted than they are, were it not for a family tendency to marry our cousins. And though this is my particular issue, I suspect my experience is similar to that of many writers for whom the best publicity angle is nothing to do with their book.

There you are, having that first, nervous lunch with your publicist, and she's making notes about ways to catch the fact-swamped, story-jaded attention of journalists in all media. 'Are you willing to talk about X?' she says, and of course you say  'yes', because you know its value, and you also know that it will be difficult to dodge questions about it consistently if you say 'no'. And before you know it, X becomes your defining characteristic. Hundreds of wonderful debut novels are published, here's why this one is interesting is the subtext, or even the main text, of the press release. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised when X takes up most of a Forthcoming Books listing, or the little local news stories, or the radio interview, and much more than anything about the book itself.

It's even quite hard to whinge about it because, as polished up by a skilled publicist, this small fact about yourself begins to seem like an unfair advantage in the tooth-and-claw battle of the book pages and the bookshops' front tables. Complaining can sound a bit like someone complaining about how huge their tax bill is this year. But, actually, there's quite a serious point in among my unease, and the unease I'm assuming any novelist with something unrelated but newsworthy in their background feels. It's not just that we don't want our work to be upstaged by an accident of our history. It's not even that we resent any words in a review that don't talk about the book. It's that, ultimately, where a novel comes from is not the point. It's what it does for the reader as they read that matters. That's what I'm trying to do when I write - affect the reader - and anything which makes them, instead, start thinking about me and why and how I wrote it, diverts their thought and feeling from the proper course. 'But then,' no doubt someone reading this will think, 'she would say that, wouldn't she.' Like I said: tooth-and-claw.