This Itch of Writing

Fiddling, hangovers and The Paris Review

Anyone who's dipped more than a toe in the waters of creative writing knows that much of the craft (and art) of any writing is in re-writing. But even once you've discovered that writing 'The End' is only the beginning, it can be hard to know how to go about that rewriting which we all know is the making of the piece. I know of writers who re-write each page until it's perfect, then never change a comma. I know writers who write scenes from wherever they fancy in book in their head, then stitch it all together at the end, and writers who do the same without knowing even where those scenes come from. I know writers who revise yesterday's work by way of getting back into it, before continuing with today's, and writers who don't re-read a word they've written till the whole first draft is down. A quick dip into a random selection of the Paris Review interviews, either in the anthologies or the absolute goldmine which is the online archive, will show you that, of even the authors who are willing to say how they work, the possibilities are endless.

I know how I work, and why it works for me, and if I'm asked, I'll tell. I've thrashed it out over nineteen years, eight-and-a-half novels, various insights and aphorisms from various writer-teachers, and not a few of the Paris Review kind of interview, and it works for me. So far, anyway: since every new novel springs from a core idea which I don't know if I can pull off, I can't be sure how to set about trying to pull it off, either. So I'd never prescribe to any writer how to go about it, only offer suggestions that I know might help.

But if I were tempted to issue an absolute command to anyone trying to write their first novel, it would be DON'T FIDDLE. Don't keep popping back, changing a word here, a word there, re-reading a little bit after supper and tinkering. Especially after a glass of wine we all love the sound of our own voice on paper (except when we're hating it) and with computers it's too tempting to drop by, read a juicy bit, have second thoughts about a word, a sentence, a character. But it's usually disastrous: you get in a muddle, you don't see through changes you start, you lose track of what you've done because on a screen it always looks perfect, and you lose any sense of the larger structure. You change a metaphor to something better, because you've forgotten that you needed that metaphor much more two pages further on, which is why you changed it here in the first place. You flesh out an encounter in the most fascinating way (maybe because you've just had a similar one yourself?), which screws up the time-scale for the whole second half and two subplots to boot. Even if you don't do anything more radical than correct the odd typo and fiddle with the punctuation, if you keep popping back and reading bits your eye becomes jaded, the text shopworn: it goes dead to you, and you cease to be alive to it.

So, I would say, either leave it alone, or sit down for a solid session (however short) doing a particular job: 'beef up X's character'; 'sort out lost-letter plot'; 'revise Chapter Six'; 'check geography of Manchester chapter'. I would also say, don't forget the advantages of working on hard copy: you can read it sitting somewhere else which helps to bring it up fresh again as does the sight of it on paper; your pen-marks show where you've been and what's old and what's new thinking; you can to-and-fro, but you're less likely to lose track of what you're trying to do at the moment, not to mention the pace and structure; and having sacrificed a twig or two of the planet to print it out, you're more likely to do a thorough job of everything that needs doing, so as not to waste all that paper.

It's also well worth saving up the jobs which don't need full concentration and top-quality brainpower, too. Realistically, there'll be hungover or post-throwing-up-toddler or road-drills-outside mornings. It's maddening to feel that you've got the writing time but not the brain. An hour or two dealing with 'Change McClean to McCrumb' or 'make chapter titles italic' or 'check train times to Lands End' means that morning wasn't wasted after all. And given how bloomin' long novels take to write, don't neglect the stripy-sweater phenomenon. (The friend who taught me to knit told me to get a stripy pattern, because even though it'll take you a year to finish the thing, you can at least say quite often that you've finished a stripe) So, whether the morning's work was indeed changing McClean to McCrumb, or whether it was working out in detail a moment of absolute inspiration about how your novel should end, it's enormously helpful to be able to know that you've ended the morning with something concrete done.

Not that any writing is wasted writing, of course (though that's a whole other blog post). But spending an hour racking your brains for an alternative metaphor - which you know you had nailed a year ago - because the copy-editor points out that you've used the same one twice in two pages, comes as close to wasting writing time as you ever will.

It doesn't say anything on the tin

I had lunch the other day with a couple of writer-friends. They both did the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, of which I feel an honorary member since I get to sit in on some of the visiting authors' seminars and workshops, and one way and another you might say we're at the academic end of the writing trade: by definition we're writers who like talking and thinking about writing. But did we talk about the death of the novel, or the joys and sorrows of the writing process, or great writers we admire? Not very much: for the most part we talked about agents. And editors. And publishers. And agents again. Actors are just the same, I assume artists are too, and it's all contrary to what the more starry-eyed reader/audience-member/gallery-goer would like to believe. In between negotiating the minefield of talking honestly about my experience of agents and publishers without sounding infuriatingly lucky, I've been wondering why.

It's true that agents and editors are the gatekeepers: if you want more than half a dozen people to read your novel, you need an agent, to get you an editor, to get your work out there. In this, if in nothing else, novelists have it tougher than poets and short fiction and non-fiction writers. And that's not just about making (a little) money: it's about reaching your audience and being heard at all. But it's also about having trusted readers for before your work's ready to go out: as I was elaborating in What's the fitting room mirror telling you, about having a full-length, well-lit mirror which shows every happy combination of colours and disastrous wrinkle or hanging hem. Good editing (and in this I include the work that your agent may do with you on your book) doesn't tell you what to write, or make you re-do some bits of your book to conform to what they think is good or marketable, though a good editor may well be thinking about such things. Good editing helps you to make your book be as good and marketable as it's in its nature to be.

This often means that editors don't say 'It needs to be written in shorter sentences' or 'More scary monsters please!' or 'The demographics of your market mean she needs to be younger,' but rather 'Could this be better?' or 'This doesn't build up quickly enough,' or 'I didn't believe she'd do this'. How do you tackle such comments? It can be very baffling: you may be determined that this is your book, but sometimes it would be much easier to be given the 'right' answer, and write it down and know that teacher will give you a big tick and you'll get a good exam result. But editors aren't teachers, in that sense. They don't have right answers that we writers are trying to learn and put into practice. Quite often they don't know what they want, only that at the moment they're not getting it. But they'll know it when they see it.

Editors aren't teachers, but neither, you could say, are good teachers. One of the most interesting things I learnt in the HE teacher training course I did recently, was that students were most satisfied and felt they learnt most with course and teaching that were quite clear and structured and did what they said on the tin. But actually, apparently, these don't lead to the best results when it comes to assessment. Things that were more open-ended, which made it less obvious exactly what the right kinds of answer were, built in what they call 'desirable difficulties' and generally meant you didn't know quite what to do with the contents of the tin when you'd taken the lid off, seemed more puzzling and less helpful at the time, but actually led to better results, because the students had had to think more wide-rangingly and creatively, and actually ended up knowing and understanding more about their subject.

You don't need me to tell you how that applies to writing, do you? 'Desirable difficulty' rather sums up the whole writing thing, don't you think?

What's the fitting room mirror telling you?

In Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming I found myself saying that post-hoc understanding of what you've written can be immensely useful, much more so than reading a textbook about how you 'should' do things before you write. The latter is like seeing a new fashion in a magazine and buying the dress to wear without trying it on: who would do that? The former is like trying it on in the shop to see how it looks on your body: as we all know, there are always some current fashions which are just wrong for our particular build. By the time you've written a piece and really revised it, you know it extremely well. If you then try some ideas about how good writing works on it, you're much more likely to decide whether they're the right shape for your work. If those ideas don't seem to fit, you're more likely to have the confidence to discard them. What leads to disaster is to be so sure the rules - like the fashion - must be right and your body must be wrong that you wear something that makes you look dreadful or, worse still, sign up for plastic surgery.

Not that writing to fulfil technical brief - as an exercise - doesn't have its uses. At the most basic level it is just that - good exercise - to get your brain rootling out words for reasons different from your usual ones. And more widely it can be liberating to give up on the sometimes paralysing demand to write a great story, and concentrate instead on something easier to pin down and less daunting. One of my most successful stories ever began as no more than an exercise in shifting point-of-view. And as I was talking about in Rhyme and un-reason, technical constraints can actually lead to your mind working more creatively. Perhaps it's not just form that can make a sieve to catch certain kinds of material, it's any kind of technical structure.

Fundamentally, the reason we learn best from post-hoc understanding is because that mirrors the actual process of writing: we write, then we see what we've written, and it's the technical/editorial half of our writerly self who has a long, hard stare at the image in the fitting room mirror. That understanding is all about the fit between the structure of the clothes that fashion is offering us at the moment, and our real, actual bodies. And to all the people who'd say that beginner writers need rules before they write, and should only be allowed to discard them once they've grown up, I'd say, Nonsense. What beginner writers need is help: they need ways to circumvent self-consciousness and un-confidence and allow their writing to emerge, and then they need someone else standing at their shoulder and talking about what the fitting room mirror's showing them both. What they don't need is someone telling them before they even get into the shop that green will never be their colour, or that they can't wear long skirts because they're too difficult to wear. The human body - like the writer's mind - is never that simple.

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.

Taking your novel for a dance

I've spent the weekend working to Chopin, courtesy of Radio 3. I came late to him, and all to the core nineteenth century composers: at school my instrument was the flute, and there is no music written for it between early Beethoven and Debussy, though Bach and Handel and Telemann are in my bones. It was only when I made a writing friend with precisely opposite tastes in music to write to that my horizons expanded. He was astounded that the backbone of my writing-music collection is the big baroque choral works, whereas it had never occurred to me that piano music could do the same job. Thanks to him - haven't seen him for years - much of the contemporary strand of A Secret Alchemy was written to Chopin, and more recently Schumann. It's about atmosphere as much as period, you see: I find that a little 15th century music does go quite a long way, but Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary was absolutely perfect for... But that would be giving things away.

And then on Sunday afternoon, just as I was trying to hammer my narratological thoughts about Tobias Hill's The Love of Stones into something coherent, the tonkly sound of an electronic piano caught my ear. After two days of sounds from Chopin's own Pleyel to the great Steinways of today it was like finding yourself chewing on a bit of plastic wrapping in the middle of a three-Michelin-daisy meal. But there was as reason for Radio 3's lapse. Chopin's well known for taking dance forms - waltzes, mazurkas, polonaises - and turning them into art, so his is a particularly good example of what they were discussing. (I'm not really writing this, I'm still hammering, so I hope you'll forgive me if I go and find the link and the credits later). Above and beyond the one-two-three of a waltz, or a couple of bars of theme, is the larger architecture: the tune that comes back, the circling and cycling of counterpoint, the texture of the underlying harmonies, the sequence of key-changes, the patterning of sun and shadow.

The conversation began with an analogy with painting: since the eye only has a small field of really sharp vision, you can only see a small patch of a painting, clearly and in full detail, at a time. If you draw back, that small patch is a larger piece of canvas, but the detail is gone. This is called your fovial (sp?) vision, and what's really happening when you look closely at a whole painting is that although vision itself is instant, the eye has to rove over the image, assembling all the details into a composite mental image. Music, like writing/reading, can only exist in time, and since we can only experience short lengths of music as single entities, it's not easy to hear the larger architecture: it's like trying to see the sequence of arches when your nose is two inches from the bricks. What the electronic piano can do is the equivalent of stepping back from the canvas or the building: it can speed up without distorting. To stick with Chopin's dance-forms, in speeding up a piece of music the individual steps of the dance blur, and the shape that's traced on the floor of the ballroom is clear: the arcs and reaches of movement fill the space.

Apparently Adrian Boult used to recommend playing a piece as fast as humanly possible, as a way of finding that larger architecture, and he's by no means alone. Of course, these days that speed isn't dependent on human fingers or squealing tapes, just on an electronic piano. Hearing the same piece in a series of speedings-up was exactly like a camera pulling away in stages from, say, a shot of the Parthenon. First you can hear the flutes on an individual column, then the stately dance of columns along one long side of the temple; then suddenly there's the whole front, the same rhythms at an angle and the same angle at the crown of the pediment; then you can see the whole thing rooted to its marble ground even as it floats against the sky; and finally it's a glimmering jewel-box against the dark hills beyond the city.

It's right that much of the focus of writing-teaching is close reading and close writing, because choosing the right word for the right job is, in the end, what we're all doing. It's probably also expedient, because classes are short and novels are long. But there are larger (in every sense) issues too, as any short-story writer realises when they start a novel: it's like trying to see a whole mountain through the magnifying glass which till now has been your principle tool. And that's why I and many other writers write our first drafts as fast as possible, not stopping or fiddling or jumping back. And it's also why there are several stages later when we print the beast off, sit somewhere else, and as far as possible read the novel as quickly as Beryl Bainbridge says she does and assumes her readers do (if she likes a novel, she goes back and reads it again slowly). It's about speeding up, about not seeing every curl of stone, about drawing back so that our fovial vision encompasses the pillars, the angles, the view against the hillside. It's about swirling across the floor of the ballroom, not just mastering the steps.

Another, different voice

You may remember a while ago that I posted a piece, Messes, Clones and Plots like a W, about why I think it's so important to understand technical things about how writing works, to work hard on how you understand them and how you put them into practice, but not to allow them to become rules to be 'kept' or 'broken'. In writing there are no rules, except possibly the one about starting at the top left-hand corner of the page, but only different ways to write different things, some of which work better than others. To refuse the concept of rules doesn't mean abandoning all judgement or discussion of good and bad writing, just making it much more nuanced, and so much more useful.

When she's not writing novels about politics (More Than Love Letters) and campuses (Hearts and Minds), with a warm heart and a satirical pen, Rosy Thornton is a law lecturer. She posted this in the private members' section of WriteWords, and I think it's the most interesting thing I've read in ages about the whole thorny question of 'the rules', and why they seem so alien to some, and so comfortable to others. You have to start by understanding something that she posted later in the discussion:

The anti-essentialist argument [that not all women - or men - are the same] is a very handy one for ignoring the female perspective (or the black perspective or any other perspective outside the domiannt discourse). Well, the point is not that all men think like x or all women think like y. But that - statistically and observably and demonstrably, according to psychologists and anthropologists and others who have studied it - women as a group think differently from men."

Having cleared that up, here's Rosy's piece:

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"If I were blogging, I would head it: ARE THE CW RULES GENDERED?

Time and again I find myself balking at the CW ‘rules’ – both the individual rules themselves and also, possibly, the very notion of there being any rules. But I haven’t ever really thought about why that might be. But here’s a possible theory. It begins with a diversion, so please bear with me.

In the rest of my life I spend a lot of time dealing with rules, because I teach Law, and Law is essentially a set of rules. I also teach Women and Law, in which students are encouraged to challenge the rules from a gender perspective: both the content of the specific rules, which have historically operated to the disadvantage of women in many respects, and the very idea of the rules themselves, in the way they are currently conceptualised. The common law works from the premise that situations (real life, complex, messy situations) can be distilled down into simple, sharp-edged paradigms, from which lawyers can reason and according to which future cases can be decided, and rules can evolve. Feminists have rejected this mode of reasoning – epitomised by legal rules but found throughout the social sciences – as ‘male’.

American psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote a book in the 1980s called In a Different Voice. Her thesis is that the two genders think in wholly different ways – something I have to say that rings true with all my own lived experience. Gilligan interviewed children in the schoolyard. She asked them all the question, ‘Would it be justified to steal bread if your children were starving?’ Of the boys, some said yes and some said no. But the majority of the girls said neither. Instead, they worked their way round the question. They said, ‘Surely there must be another way’ and ‘what if you were to explain to the baker about the starving children…?’ In other words they refused to accept such a simplified, black-and-white scenario as being true to life – the exact kind of scenario which is the daily tool of legal reasoning and the basis of all legal rules. Rather, they viewed things as contingent, as muddy, as nuanced, as negotiable.

So, if women think and reason differently from men, do they also speak and write differently? Do they have, quite literally, ‘a different voice’? And if so, what impact does that have on how women write – or how anyone writes if they are trying to get inside a female character and to explore the female experience?

This brings me to the point: the so-called CW rules. Let’s think about some of them. We are told, for example, that modal constructions are to be avoided. Don’t say ‘she could see the mountains, say ‘she saw the mountains. It is stronger writing, we are told – more direct, more pacy, more powerful – ‘better’ writing. Similarly we are told, don’t use lots of subordinate clauses, especially those beginning with a present participle – ‘ing’ clauses are weak and therefore bad. Stick as often as possible to the finite verb. Not ‘gazing out of the window, she saw the mountains’ but ‘she gazed from the window; she saw the mountains.’ But what if rather than strength and directness what you want to achieve is something softer – dare I say, more ‘feminine’? Maybe if I’m writing in a female voice (female character, and first person or close-in third) then my writing patterns should mirror the way a women thinks, the way she experiences the world – which is often (in my experience) packed full of contingency and uncertainty and tentativity and conditionality.

More fundamentally, what about the ‘rule’ that says we should pare down, write sparely, make sure that every word is necessary, every word is doing a job. Why? Research shows that over the course of a day women speak many, many more words, on average, than men. Surely ‘not wasting words’ is a very male ideal? I know that I talk nineteen to the dozen for large parts of the day. I know, for example, that when teaching, sometimes if I say the same thing three times over in different ways, it gives people more chance to grasp what I mean. Effective communication can be effusive, it can be sprawling, it can be full of doubt and wondering and even contradiction, and out of the morass emerges understanding - and perhaps it might even be a more nuanced understanding, a warmer and more humane one, than the one which emerges from a fewer, and superficially clearer, set of words.

That’s what I reckon, anyway. Basically: we women are wafflers, so waffling reflects our lives and our voice.

Er, that was it, really."
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Cheap profundities and tramp steamers

When I'm commenting on someone's writing, one of the most common things I find myself saying is, 'I think you need either more of this, or less of it.' It might be some character who's characterised in such detail that they seem to be taking up an immoderate amount of space: readers expect the time they spend understanding and living alongside a character to be proportionate to their role in the plot, and can spend the whole book wondering when the person who took up the whole first chapter is actually going to return and blow up the bus. Which is fine, if they actually do... It might be a scene which goes on too long each side of the important moment: is its importance not written out fully enough, or is it actually not all that important and could go, its necessary elements distributed among other scenes? It might be some really painful, serious thing which just pops in for a bit: the death of a child, or holocaust survival, say, can seem crude, even callous, to have as a side-issue: a bit of instant angst, a plot device. Again it's a question of proportion: such things loom too large in us all to be used as a small piece of plot, and if such a big issue isn't given its due, at least subconsciously readers feel they're being manipulated by such a cheap effort at profundity.

When I say things like, 'Either more, or less,' I don't know which will turn out be right: the writer must decide for themselves. In fact I very rarely have the answer to what I think isn't working in someone's novel. What I have (I hope) is a good eye for what's not working and (I hope even more) a clear way of unpicking it to the point of pinning down the cause of the failure of tension/language/character or whatever. Another frequent phrase in my reports is, 'You've given yourself a built-in difficulty, here...'. When we're discussing it, the writer will say, 'What I was trying to do was...' That's usually the breakthrough point. Because then they can start seeing what to write and how to write it instead, to make what they were trying to do actually happen for the reader.

I often know what I would do, in my book, if I'd landed myself in such a problem. Occasionally I'll throw out some suggestions, though always as an illustration of my point more than a prescription. It's not my book, it's theirs, and their solution will be different. If the grand confrontational scene between Him and Her isn't working, I might shut them in a car together so they can't escape till they either fall in love or or drive over a cliff, Writer B might set it all in the middle of a hideous family dinner for twenty with uncles and cousins chipping in to make things worse and the turkey going up in flames, while Writer C might make Him (or Her) run out of the house and take the first tramp steamer for Buenos Aires.

What it comes down to is that even a cold, hard 3,000 word report is as much about process as it is about product, about problem-finding more than problem-solving, about why it's come out, not-quite-working, as it has. Compared to that, a few lines about whether agents and editors are likely to fall in love with this book, is the least of it. Once the writer understands why what they wanted to happen in the book isn't quite happening, they can see how to make it happen, and make it work. That's the book that agents and editors will fall in love with.

Polishing fractals

I heard Richard Sennett talking on Front Row about his book The Craftsman, and rejoiced (even as my feminism was annoyed by the title, though it's hard to think of an alternative). I confess I haven't read it yet, but he was so cogent in the interview that it's now high on my must-read list. The point he's making is that what we think of as 'craft' - an old-fashioned virtue suitable for gnarled old blacksmiths and batty amateurs with time on their hands - should actually be seen as a thoroughly modern skill-set for modern life at work and at home. Not many people reading this blog would disagree that craft is important, but they might be surprised to discover that one of Sennett's prime examples is software developers. And yet it makes sense. Understanding the materials of your trade, using your tools, exercising your skills, are deeply satisfying activities, and seeking that satisfaction is one of the most basic human motivations, whether you're working on a flat screen or a cave wall.

The beginning of good craft, Sennett says, is problem finding: if you find the right problem, and ask the right questions about its nature, including a willingness to think laterally, then the right solution comes about. My own writing is always kicked off by problem finding in the form of a question, or rather two questions, one about characters ('Why is she standing in this house?') and one about technique ('Can I really pull off a three-way parallel narrative?'). But, more generally, for years I've maintained that good writing is all about getting your process right, not about setting out to produce a particular product. In other words, if you explore and establish how to make your writing happen, the words which end up on the page will be the right words. Of course you then revise - hone, polish, trim, re-shape, polish again - but, like a fractal diagram, each of these little craftsmanly actions is, in itself, a mini version of the problem-finding process. I could argue (though I'm not sure I am arguing) that there's no difference, qualitatively, between getting a sentence right and getting a novel right, even though there clearly is a quantitative difference.

I think that's also what marks the divide for writers between feedback which helps and feedback which doesn't, or even hinders: good feedback helps you towards that problem finding ('What were you trying to do?' 'I didn't believe in her doing that.') whereas feedback that's unhelpful imposes external judgements ('Too long for the genre.' 'Parallel narratives don't work'.) and leaves you to work out what the real problem is. Indeed, as well as technique, one of the craftsmanly skills all writers need is to be able to judge feedback, and decide what to do with it.   

The ugly duckling and the life-raft

In the comment trail of Demandingly ‘wrong’-headed, David Isaak describes a writers’ group reacting to his explaining why ‘don’t use adverbs’ is not a good - or even practicable - rule. Their reaction, he says, was along the lines of ‘It makes us really angry when someone tries to dilute a perfectly good and understandable rule by getting technical.’ That's the thing, isn’t it: people feel very insecure when something they thought they’d grasped, turns out not to be nearly so easy to hold on to. In the short term they feel themselves falling back into the almost overwhelming sea of possibilities that they first encountered when they started to think about writing.

But I do wonder if people are particularly upset, therefore defensive, therefore attacking, because of the way most of us learn how to write. First we write instinctively, with the joy of expressing ourselves. We write more, we want to be heard (or why are we writing?), we sense that something’s getting in the way of our expressing ourselves more fully, we tell ourselves we want to improve. So we ask teachers or how-to books or other writers what they think. And someone gently or roughly starts to point out how we could do it better, where it doesn't work, where it’s ‘wrong’. Generally speaking, that hurts, a little or a lot. We were proud of our writing, it had our heart stapled to the pages, and someone with experience or even authority has told us it’s lacking. Slowly we see what they mean, and try to put it into practice, with false starts and more hurts, and awkward ugly-duckling phases where our aims outstrip our technique. But if, instead of this unpredictable feedback spiral of learning, grubby brown feathers and all, we're taught neat ideas of what will help - rules of thumb, clever little tips, tick-box revising techniques - ‘success’ comes more quickly. We're doing things right, we're good at it, everyone approves.

So to be told that what healed you, what made you a ‘better’ writer, what perhaps even won you prizes and certainly approval, is fundamentally flawed, is pretty hard to take. If you’ve got as far as making something of a writing life - teaching, reviewing, or any milieu where your opinion carries some weight - it's even more threatening. To have it explained in unarguable detail why the way you've judged your own and others' work for so long is inadequate is almost impossible to handle.

So no wonder people lash out, particularly if they hit the water just as a swan is passing. They've been cast adrift from the life-raft of 'the rules', but because they've always had it, they never even learnt to swim.

Singing the story

The other day I was commenting on someone's work, and found myself saying, ‘Women may be unreadable to men, but as a writer you have to convey that they could be read.’ Leaving aside the truth or falsity of the first half of that sentence, it still raises an interesting question about how you imply what you don't say outright. Poets assume that readers will unpack their poems (although I'm never sure if that's a safe assumption of the listeners who have to be such a large part of a poet's concern these days). But those of us who write prose fiction - most of all novels - have to assume that our words may only get one pass, as it were, from a reader.

The question's most acute when you have a narrator who's also a character in the novel. Even if they aren't technically unreliable they are, inevitably, subjective, with a partial (in both senses) view of the events they take part in. But even with a third-person narrative which could potentially be both objective and omniscient, the fun starts here. One of the things I keep finding myself saying to writers who've nailed the basics of the right word for the right place is that, ideally, every word should be doing not just the right job, but two right jobs. One is probably just naming a thing, joining a sentence, describing an action. With apologies for raising the bar just as they've cleared it, I say that that the second job is where the real writing starts.

Sarah ran for the bus and jumped on, is the the basic job done. But how do I write it? Even at the simple sensory and metaphorical level, there are so many possibilities. If I write that cold fingers of air seem to catch at Sarah’s arms and drag her backwards, it says something different – makes the reader feel Sarah’s experience differently – from if I write that the sea of pedestrians parts as she races along. If I describe how the red bus ahead of her flowers and flames against the grey towerblocks it’s different from if I write of the grubby, warm breath of the open doors into which she dives.

And that's before I've thought about the meaning of the action in the wider context of the novel. If I wanted to be satirical or comic I could describe Sarah’s run to set up a pratfall, or make charicatures of the lookers-on. If I wanted to be magical or poetic I could cast my mind loose and dream up a montage in heightened language of the fantastical characters past which she runs. If I wanted to be psychological I might make Sarah feel that she’s running away, and hear the doors crash shut behind her, cutting her off from her lover. If I wanted to be philosophical I might write it as part of a series of events exploring the idea of running away from things, as against standing your ground or fighting back or being seduced, and I'd use metaphors to match. And all of those could be seen and felt by Sarah, or I could write them so that there's a counterpoint between how she sees it, and how the reader does.

No, there are no rules, and much of what I seem to blog about is letting go of outcomes, circumventing your Inner Critic, allowing the intuitive to come forward, speak, make your work true to its self, and the best it can be. But what I've been talking about here is technique, pure and simple. It didn't take me long to come up with all those variations on a theme of Sarah getting on the bus. It's just practice, like practising scales and arpeggios till you can do them in all keys and at all speeds without even having to think about it. Then when it comes to the opera it'll be the story that you'll be singing, not the notes.