This Itch of Writing

Where did the week go?

Oh dear, oh dear, time does slip by during half term. What with having family to stay, and an editorial report to write, and a PhD chapter to finish, and vast quanties of reading for that and the new novel, and a big update for my website about A Secret Alchemy - temporary cover, extract, reading-group-questions, how-I-came-to-write-it and all - the poor blog's been going hungry.

A truly superb production of Pygmalion at the Old Vic is one of my better excuses. I know the play pretty well, and it never fails to be good value, but here was a subtlety of thinking and acting I've never seen used on such an old warhorse of a play. Shaw's a wordy writer even at his best - clearly a novelist manqué - but talk about what goes on in the spaces between the words... It was the kind of production where you can see just how important Ibsen was to Shaw, and just what a difference the right acting and directing can make.

Firmly told that it's the play My Fair Lady is based on, but the ending is different, the teenagers settled down with reasonable eagerness, and absolutely loved it, and the granny (who played Freddy Eynsford-Hill as a schoolgirl just after the war and as an English teacher and long-term RSC fan has high theatrical standards) did too. Even a nerdy middle-generation novelist like me was completely gripped. I could only quibble with the pronunciation of Clara, since I refuse to believe that an English girl of that date would have said it like a German, and the angle of Eliza's very gorgeous hat. But then, if they'd put it on as it should be, we wouldn't have been able to see her eyes, and so much would have been lost. In the end it's no good being authentic if it means you're not communicating.

Talking of which, it's nearly midnight. Only my reading for Pipe & Slippers to give a final run through, but maybe I need to go to bed instead. Or maybe a bath, and some thinking about the new novel. I can't do it when I'm in the middle of an editorial report, but that's gone safely off and my mind is free to get back to what it really wants to do. The business that Pygmalion's all about, of people being translated from their background into someone else's, and what then happens when they turn round, and see their route home cut off... that's really interesting... Hmmmm...

Different voices and chocolate cake

So I'm trying to work out what to read at Pipe & Slippers, next Sunday. The slots aren't very long, which makes for a much more varied diet for the audience - and the bill really is varied - but harder decisions for me. And I do want to read from both The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy, though presumably a couple more books down the line I'll have to get over that one.

Do I go for bits at the beginning, which don't need too much explaining? Do I go for high drama, or something quieter which leads up to it and leaves the audience with a cliff-hanger? Do I worry about giving away any of the plot, or only the ending? Dialogue's livelier to read, but considering I used to be a drama student accents are not my forte, so it's usually safer to avoid them, though I can do the police in different voices. Do I go for several short bits, tasters of the many-layered, parallel-strandedness which is what I keep seeming to write, and all in ten or twenty minutes? Or do I go for a whole and single scene, something with a beginning, middle and end, with room for the characters to be liked or hated? After all, I do write novels, not haiku.

Yes, it's odd, trying to choose pieces out of a novel which both stand on their own, and represent the whole. (This is partly why any aspiring writer will tell you that writing the synopsis to go with their submissions to agents and editors often seems more agonising than writing the novel was, and partly why published authors will tell you that blurbs can cause such angst.) Since it took all those words to say what I wanted to say - tell the stories I wanted to tell - in the first place, then I guess I'm just going to have to get over my desire to represent everything: it can't be done.

One thing that works is to describe one of the book's themes, and read, say, two short bits which are both part of it. An alternative is to find a single passage that stands on its own, self-contained: a whole scene, a letter. It's tempting to go for a passage of description, but you'd better be a darned good reader to put that over, especially for the whole of the average twenty-minute slot, and still have people awake at the end.

One little difficulty is that your publisher would like you to read from their edition of the book, but books are designed to be held eighteen inches or so from your nose, with typography to suit. And microphones cause a whole new set of problems. I always prefer not to have one, but if everyone else uses it, then you sound very weedy without. If you hold the book right up - always supposing the damn mic doesn't get in the way, your face is totally invisible and your voice goes straight into the crack between the pages. If you drop the book you give yourself a neck-ache, your face is fairly invisible, and you send your rather squashed voice straight into the floor. Or you can lift your head, send your voice to the back of the room, and be unable to see a word that you're trying to read, let alone the pencil marking-up you laboured over. It's actually easier with an unpublished novel, because you can print it out nice and clear at a sensible size, there's room to mark it up, and you can then hold it one-handed well below eye-level. Or, of course, I've got the proof of A Secret Alchemy, but that's not, as you guys will know, what it'll look like in the end. And at the moment it's pristine: the spine uncreased and the pages dazzlingly clean, and I know it's silly, but I rather like it like that...

Well, I'll have to have decided all these things by Sunday 1st of June. If you're in South East London and fancy an afternoon of prose, poetry, comedy, accoustic music, full bar, coffee and chocolate cake, do drop by. The Ivy House is a gorgeous little Victorian pub theatre - the kind which were the original music halls - and doors open at 3pm, first act 3.30. The link at the top has all the details.

Not so much a bloggy week as a giggy one

Considering I'd assumed I was in something of a lull between books, I'm actually slightly busy on the author-in-public front, which is why I've been neglecting the blog. Despite my grumbling about the business (and I do mean business) of selling one's authorly personality and experience, as opposed to selling my books, I really enjoy the readings-and-signings side of it, because that (and the comments here) is when I actually meet people who've read my work: that's when you really feel that what you've been saying is being heard.

On Saturday I went to a conference at the University of Bedford on postgraduate creative writing: What is it? Is it inherently a paradox to try to create art in the academy? And lots of conversations about what-does-your-PhD-involve-then? The answers to the last question were interesting not just by way of swapping traveller's tales, but becausethe ideas - and regulations - of what constitutes a CW PhD are very varied, and so what we have to do is very varied too. Some fine arguments broke out over the coffee and sandwiches, which is just as it should be.

Then this evening I was at writLOUD, combining the launch of the Birkbeck MA's first published graduates, and a celebration of five years of writLOUD, which as well as showcasing Birkbeck and friends also supports Oxfam. There was great work read by Sally Hinchcliffe, Niki Aguirre and Matthew Loukes (can't find a link, I'm afraid) in the bar of RADA, which is a very nice and rather glamorous space compared to the hallowed but worn 1930s look that I remember from auditioning there, many years ago. For once, too, it had an excellent sound system: trust a theatre to do that properly! As is the way, I went with Debi Alper from Bloggers With Book Deals, joined up by pre-arrangement with another writing friend, and promptly bumped into a fourth BWBDer, (Sally's one too), Sarah Salway, someone I met on Saturday, and several other people I know. The writing world's a small one.

That was, if you like, past and present. As far as future's concerned, next is the quarterly Pipe and Slippers, a delightful Sunday afternoon of poetry, prose, acoustic music, chocolate cake and full bar, all in a Victorian pub in Nunhead in South East London. The next one is on Sunday 1st June, doors open at 3pm, and among a varied bill, I'll be reading from The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy. So if you fancy dropping by (all the details of how to get there are on their website) do come and say hello.

Better than Googling, any day

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you are, in a tiny sense, a public entity. This might sound ridiculous in a culture which has replaced gossiping about the neighbours - because we don't know them any more - with gossiping about Big Brother. And no time soon are you going to be mobbed by paparazzi, or have your bins rifled by the gutter press for receipts for things the government shouldn't have paid for, or know that every bullet the Taliban own will be aimed at your platoon now the world knows you're in Helmand.

Plenty of people have some kind of public existence, of course, if only enough to get them worried that a prospective employer might Google them and find not only the conferences they've addressed and the public bodies they sit on, but also their wickedly scurrilous blogging alter ego and the pictures of the children dressing the family dog up as Julian Clary. Maybe it's simply a measure of how very un-public indeed you can become when, thanks to the cost of childcare and the obsessive compulsive disorder known as being a writer, it's years since you had a proper job. For whatever reason, though, until 2006 the only people who had opinions about me were people I had actually met, and in return I had opinions about them: it was a two-way relationship.

So it's a small but recurring shock to be confronted with the fact that I and my work are out there, and not only is anyone in the world free to have an opinion of us, but I haven't the faintest idea who they are. Suddenly being known only goes one way: they in a sense 'know' me, without my having any communication with them. Sometimes it's nice, of course: I've had some wonderful emails through my website from people whom The Mathematics of Love spoke to in some particular way, and some old friends who wouldn't have got back in touch if they hadn't stumbled across me online. (There have been some oddities, too: why on earth should I sign someone's copy of The Origin of Species?). In fact, apart from the occasional nasty comment about my work deep in the blogosphere, I do realise that so far I've got no cause to object. It's simply that it's like standing out in the High Street after years of being ensconced invisibly under the duvet back home.

This thought's been prompted by the approaching date of the first reading that I've given in a while. (Monday 10th March, 8pm at The Stoke Newington Bookshop, London N16, if you're interested. How to get there is here. I'll be reading from The Mathematics of Love, and also giving A Secret Alchemy its first public outing.) I can see what I've said above sounds as if I hate doing readings but actually I love them: some wonderful writers find them terrifying, but for me it's definitely the good side of the public world. I like bookshops, for a start, and booky people: anyone who makes, buys, sells, reads, writes, edits, curates or librarians them is okay by me. And the Drama graduate in me is interested in the technical as well as the creative side of performing. But in the end it's that the communication travels both ways, instantly, that's the real pleasure. Normally writers don't see their words being heard, just know (you hope) that they are from the sales figures, the PLR returns, the LibraryThing listings, the Amazon rankings. (Well, what else do you think we do when we're procrastinating?). Again, it's a one-way thing: this is where readers leave their traces, but in the human sense they're a dead end.

So to stand up there and say what I think and project what I wrote and feel it in that instant reach an audience, know in that instant it's heard, is a joy. I hope you can come: it would be lovely to see you.