This Itch of Writing

A new use for an old Christmas tree

So, at 3.30 on Monday morning I reached the end of the story of my new novel: I finished it. I went to bed on a high, slept till nearly noon, did ten useful things around the house and then pranced off into a shiny afternoon of sun and frost to do some pleasurable shopping. But it isn't finished. In fact, there's a lot to do yet: it needs a bit at the beginning and a bit at the end, a full line-edit, and working through thirty or so pages of what an inspired writing friend has called the snag-list, which includes everything from "change Elinor to Isobel" to "put body in ditch in Ch 4: ?what fallout?" to "find title". The snag-list is what architects and set designers do, finding all the little things in a house which need sorting out. But the roof and walls are on, and I feel like a builder topping out by tying a tree to the chimney. Of course there is several weeks' work still before it'll be heading off to my agent. And then there'll be a week or three more of nail biting before she'll have read it and be able to tell me what more work it needs.

And on Tuesday I was standing in the kitchen when the radio started playing some Rennaissance polyphony of the sort which I had on the CD player for much of the writing of A Secret Alchemy and this new one. And I was swept with a sense of loss. I wasn't expecting it: it's something which hitherto has overcome me much later in the progress of a novel, round about the line-edit stage, when my tears are alternately about boredom and impatience, and about mourning. But, having got to the end, I have lost something, I find. I've lost some kind of sense of possibility. Juliana and Simon's story is told, and to the extent that we're storied creatures, when the story is done, we die. My characters aren't dead, of course: indeed they have the advantage that they never will die, in one sense. And because I'm not yet bored to tears with the book - far from it! - I'm looking forward to making them more real for the reader, more characteristic, more compelling, more convincing. But what they're not doing any more is evolving. I know who they are, now, because I know their story. They're not finished, but they're finite: I know what they're not and what they'll never be.

If that sounds mournful, it shouldn't. For one thing, at the moment I'm absolutely thrilled with this book, partly because compared to A Secret Alchemy it's been pretty straightforward and quick to write (I started it exactly this time last year) and partly because I feel I have indeed achieved my goal of pulling off something which I've never tried before. It's also incredibly energising. If the definition of creative work is making something which is greater than the sum of its parts, then now that the book is finite, though not finished, I can see that it is whole, and it is greater than the sum of its parts. I hope. Whether others think that remains to be seen: my agent will be the first person to read a single word of it. But it exists: the house is built. Now, to give the children a shout to hurry up getting the ornaments off the Christmas tree; I've got an even better use for it.

Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clothes and food and dropping presents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twisting the tale in cold blood

A lot of talking about writing ponders and circles around the mysteries of inspiration: the genie, the zone, the muse, the cloud of unknowing, the necessity for darkness or music, the fetishism about notebooks or mascots, the alcohol, the drugs, the digging in the garden, the long country walks, the endless games of patience (Heyer's preferred method, along with 'a little gin and benzedrine'). Some of the best-selling - and best - how-to books, including Brande's Becoming a Writer and Cameron's The Artist's Way, are all about such things, and the hands-down winner in the Most Often Asked Festival Question stakes is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' It's the great, and therefore fascinating, mystery.

Since it's easy to believe (not helped by the publisher's need/desire for high-concept, elevator-pitch promotions) that all writing a novel takes is a brilliant idea, writers then spend much of the school visit/festival session talking about how hard they work to cut and shape and re-cut and polish the idea. Or they talk about how we let characters walk in and misbehave, or find the ending was quite different from what we expected. (Dodie Smith said this of I Capture the Castle. How I'd love to know what she did expect!) Good writing courses, such as the Open University one I'm teaching, start by exploring how you find the material for your work - freewriting, clustering, keeping a notebook and what to note - and then tackle the cutting and shaping. In other words, even if there's lots of toing and froing between them, everything tends to assume that, fundamentally, inspiration comes first, and technique later.

It's undeniably true, at the fundamental level: you can't shape an idea till you've had it. But, just as I was arguing that you could ask your talent what it wants to work on, rather than expecting it to do its best with whatever you want to write about, maybe we should stand this idea, too, on its head occasionally. Maybe it's not always a matter of inspiration first, then technique.

Well, to be honest, there's no 'maybe' about it, at least not as far as I'm concerned, because I know that I've done things in my writing which began as cold-blooded, technical decisions, but became part of how the cloud of unknowing condensed into a whole world for the reader. For example:

1) One of the comments on The Mathematics of Love which was made, in passing, by one of the Glamorgan tutors was that all the sex in it is good sex, which she felt was a bit unreaslitic. At the time I probably just looked smug, but the comment must have stuck, perhaps even stung, because I was about a third of the way through what wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy when it occurred to me that so far this, too, had only had good sex. Time for not, I hope, a bad sex scene, but rather a scene of bad sex. Sorry, Una, but if you're in love with someone who isn't in love with you, and you're twenty and a virgin and someone else is desperately keen, wouldn't you? And would it be wonderful? Most unlikely. And a couple of readers have said it's one of their favourite scenes.

2) More recently, I realised that a character in the work-in-progress, who hardly appears but sets off the whole plot, had dropped out of view. This is not only unlikely in terms of realistic plotting (and if I told you any more about why, I'd have to kill you) but is also a bad practice from the storytelling point of view. Real life may be full of random appearances and disappearances, but storytelling is all about making patterns and connections: there's a basic assumption in the reader that everything in the book will tie up, will make sense as part of a whole. On the other hand, I can't have this character cluttering up my plot, since it's already planned, in a chamber-opera sort of way, for a small number of characters we know very well. So the poor bloke had better turn up dead. Murdered, in fact. No bad thing, either, to crank up the sense of danger, of latent violence, specially in a part of the book which is, perforce, a lot about talking and planning and not so much about action. Now, which chapter is quietest? Which could do with a body in a ditch? Let's have a look at my grand spreadsheet plan...

3) When I started work on The Mathematics of Love I already had the voice for Stephen, my 1819 narrator, as well as his letters and much of his backstory. And so for the parallel, 1976 strand I needed a narrator who would contrast with him as clearly as possible. That was partly because the whole parallel project was to cast light from different angles on the same questions - transgressive sex, lost children, voyeurism and so on - and different angles need different eyes and minds to see them. But it was also because one of the dangers in alternating first-person narratives (or alternating limited third-person narratives, come to that) is that the reader wakes up in the middle of a page and realises that they've no idea where they are. The more different in every way my two narrators were, the less likely that was to happen. So, Stephen was male, old in experience if not in years, melancholic, gentle, horrified by his own latent capacity for violence, compassionate, faithful, and frozen by a lost, ideal love. I needed a female, very young, resentful, stroppy, horrified by others' capacity for victimhood, promiscuous, and doesn't do the children thing, any more than she does the falling-in-love thing. I called her Anna, and off we went. The cold-blooded decision was even at the level of their sentences. Both think in long sentences, because I do, but they're very different: Stephen's are balanced, grammatically sophisticated, syntactically flexible and full of antitheses, while Anna's are looser, simpler, jointed by commas and lollop along with a series of 'ands'.

Of course it goes without saying (or I hope it does), that I wouldn't have stuck with these or half a dozen other cold-blooded decisions I could name (if I could remember them), if they hadn't worked out in practice. The test of a good idea for your work is how well it curls in among all the others. Indeed, perhaps it's because they worked out that I can't remember most of them: the goal of the writer is to melt inspiration and technique together, so that the reader experiences the story as a single whole. The last thing I want is for readers to see the component threads - research, technique, inspiration, borrowing - of my story separate out. And even if a reader chooses to separate them out later (and I won't pretend I don't enjoy seeing my writing heard so thorougly) I hope the threads curl themselves back together into a rope as thick and strong as ever. But which thread was made how and for what reason shouldn't - needn't - doesn't make any difference, once the tale is spun.

The second simplicity of a bowl of cherries

One of the classically irritating things non-writers say to us is "I've always wanted to write a novel, I just need the the time to sit down." Once we're out on bail, most writers still burn to explain that just sitting down isn't all it takes to write a novel. It takes hard work, craft, imagination, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, learning, practising, and more sitting down than most people would believe possible. It's also frequently frustrating: some days/weeks/years the words come about as readily as wisdom teeth pull out, and I'm sure I'm not the only writer who's been known to pummel her forehead when the brain-cogs won't turn properly and shape the sentence or the idea into what I want. And all to make something which may be read with one eye while strap-hanging on the Tube, or get a single, missing-the-point, one-star review on Amazon. Indeed, most of us spend a lot of time, like ballet dancers, practising very difficult things to the point where we make them look easy. Am I alone in disliking books which parade how difficult they were to write? (That's with my reader's head on, of course: my writer's head is most awed by books which pull off things which as a writer I know are very difficult.)

Okay, so writing's not up there with gold-mining in South Africa or looking after dementia sufferers for hard work, but still. Combine the hard work with the fact - also unknown to non-writers, who only see the occasional headline figure - that we are paid so little for what we do that most us need other sources of income, and it's hardly surprising that we all spend a lot of time trying to convince the world that being a writer isn't an easy or soft option. The trouble is, that can lead to a certain macho posturing, either about the craftsmanly agony of writing and re-writing and re-writing, or about staring at the page till your forehead bleeds, or about mining your innermost soul-agonies and exposing them to the world. At the risk of sounding like the Grumpy Old Woman of the writing world, each of these may have a grain of truth in it, but each, when protested about too much, annoys me, in a different way.

On innermost soul-agonies, as some may know, I dislike the non-writer's conviction that the only guarantee of authentic writing is that it's mined from the author's own experience or research. As with cooking, yes, the quality of the ingredients is worth thinking about, but far more interesting, surely, to most of us, is what we make of that raw material. I also know that slush-piles are very full of writing which may be very good therapy, but is certainly very bad reading. On staring at the page till your forehead bleeds, which I think was said by the scriptwriter Gene Fowler, I can only say, have you tried NaNoWriMo? And on craftsmanly agony: well, what did you expect? This is a job, and for most of us metaphorical gold mining still beats the physical kind any day.

And yet I can't be the only writer who knows that, on a good day, writing is easy. Yes. Easy. If I've found the voice and know what needs to happen in this scene, I'm off and away. It's bliss, like flying or galloping (Joyce Grenfell's term for those rare performances which just take off, was 'horses'), it's a walk in the park, it's a bowl of cherries. Probably, as a writer, there has always been one thing which came easily for you: an ear for a good sentence, a mind for a good joke, an instinct for brilliant plotting, or a deft hand with a character.

It's true, too, that if you're anything of a writer you learn and get better so that, like reading and spelling, things which were once hard to do become easier, and eventually you're hardly even aware you're doing them. But this, too, can lead to many experienced writers saying things which frustrate the apprentices: "Just write, it's easy, just get on with it. Cut away everything that isn't a duck." "No it isn't easy!" the aspirers cry. "The words/knife don't do what I want them to! How can I make them? How do I find my voice, tell a story, make it funny, make my duck look like a duck? " And others of us say, "But that makes it sound facile, that makes it sound as if anyone can do it. And they can't: it took me years to learn to make my ducks look like ducks, and beautiful/scary/comical ducks at that. And how do we hold our own in the industry, with the funding bodies, with our peers, if everyone thinks it's easy?"

It seems to me that the heart of this is a muddle of the Protestant work ethic, 21st century-style, a misunderstanding of the nature of craftsmanship, and the ambiguities of the term "hard". "No pain, no gain!", "You just have to want it enough!" are good ways of encouraging people to keep going when the going gets tough. But "hard work" in the sense of keeping going, putting in the hours - which all writers do - is not the same as work being "hard" in the sense of difficult: which writing is at some times, and not at others. Moreover, our sense of whether a piece of art is worthy, and therefore worth making and buying and admiring, is messily bound up with what we judge of its merits as hard work in the Protestant sense (hence some of the ire directed at contemporary art which seems to have been flung together, and even more ire if some of it was done by assistants). Does it "deserve" our gaze: has the artist "earned" our admiration and his fee? And if the Protestant work ethic sounds old-fashioned, you can substitute the relativism of the modern variant which, like any good parent or teacher, very properly values the intentions and effort of the maker and the process, not just (and sometimes instead of) the objective quality of the outcome and the product.

Maybe it comes down, not just to the fact that "easy reading is hard writing", but to the fact that, like all craftspeople, some of what we do came naturally, but we also get better at it. And the better we get, the easier it feels to us as well as looking easier to others. Most of us compensate for that by constantly trying new things which we're not sure we can do: on our way back from the Guildford Book Festival Elizabeth Buchan and I were agreeing that one always begins a new novel not at all sure whether one can pull it off. The process of writing a novel is a hard-work process of working out the problem we've set ourselves... with varying degrees of success. But long-term, surely, what we're trying for is what the musicologist Alfred Einstein called the "second simplicity... a fullness in brevity": the absolute mastery born of such a complete synthesis of the craftsman's tool-kit with the artist's vision that there is no real distinction between art and craft. As Grayson Perry puts it, "I am the tip of the knife." Faced with a masterwork, all the reader/listener/viewer sees is the vision, and even the brushstrokes, the thumb-prints, the crack in the voice or the echoes of other words, are just the traces of genius, or maybe of the genie.

How to get the best out of an editorial service

More and more writers are using editorial services - hardly surprising when in any one year there are apparently one million manuscripts trying to find a publisher in the UK and two million in the US - but a full editorial report is very expensive, and I'm always anxious that writers should know what they're getting, and get what they need. So here are some thoughts, garnered from my own and other editors' experience, and from the many friends and students who've told me about the reports they've had.

First, it's never, ever essential to get one of these reports. All that's essential for you to write a publishable novel is you and a stack of paper and a pen. And I'd always suggest that you take your work as far as you can on your own, and only seek feedback when you're stuck. I do understand the desire for an early 'Is this worth pursuing?' kind of feedback, but if you're still unsure what kind of a beast it is yourself, then you're not in such a good position to decide what to do with the feedback you get.

And no, an editorial report can't get you published. But then nothing can, except writing a book which a commercial publishing company thinks will earn enough money to make it worth it, and then finding an agent who thinks that and knows which publishers will too. Editorial reports are one way to help you write that book, while talent, hard work, perseverance and luck have even more to do with it.

SOME GENERAL THINGS TO THINK ABOUT, when you're considering a particular editorial agency. If you can't find the information on the website, then ring them up.

Who are their editors? One of the agencies only uses published writers, and all their names are up on the website. Others are coy about who they use. Good publishers' editors are wonderful, but busy: 'a publishing professional' may be an editorial assistant (though maybe a star editor-in-the-making), a literary agent's assistant, or from the marketing department. And the focus may be different: there are lots of things which agents and publishers say about a book which are perfectly true, and perfectly unhelpful to the writer, because publishing is about product. But, as all published and unpublished writers know, writing is all about process: what you're looking for is help with the process of making it a better book.

How long will the report be? Roughly how much about the book and how much about the market for the book? How long will it take? A few weeks is reasonable, several months is not.

Can you talk to the agency about what you need and whether they can supply it? Can they do that, or do they have a one-size-fits-all approach? If they're not helpful and friendly, as well as sensible and professional, then you don't want to give them your money, let alone your writing.

What is being offered? Is it possible to follow up on a report, either with a query, or with a proper conversation by email, or better still by phone? An editor makes their best estimate from the manuscript of, for example, how much technical vocabulary to use, but it can only be a guess (I've had people who needed show/tell explained in detail, I've had people who didn't need 'prolepsis' defined...) so there will always be things in the report which you could do with asking about, as well as some things which you'd like to discuss in more detail, or an idea of a solution to a problem which you'd like to fly by the editor.

Do they have relationships with literary agencies, if they think your book might be ready for that? 99.99% of manuscripts any editorial agency sees are nowhere near ready, but you never know. An editorial agency's reputation is on the line when they send a book on, so they only send on the ones which they're confident are fantastic. That means that a literary agent will really read it properly.

And if you're really feeling cheeky, ask how much of what you pay goes to the editor - though they may well not tell you. With many agencies, the editor only gets 1/3rd of what you pay, with others it's 2/3rds. We really want to help, but we do also have to eat: we juggle this work with all the other bits and pieces we do to pay the mortgage, since, as Hilary Mantel said at the Booker the other night, writing novels alone certainly doesn't. What you're paying for is the editor's time and experience, and to some degree you'll get what you pay for.

WHEN YOU'VE DECIDED TO USE AN AGENCY

Decide what you want the report to focus on, and make that clear in a covering letter (not just the 'here it is' email, which may not get forwarded to the editor). It's true that in some ways you want to know how the novel strikes the editor without, as it were, anticipating that. But it's hugely helpful to us to have a bit of a steer. Do you want to know how to make this book its own best self, or do you want to know how to make it fit the market? The two are very different goals. Do you want to know if you should give up on this book, or keep going? Do you want to know if your linked short stories work as something that would sell as a unit, or not? And so on.

Having said that, there's not very much point in an editor giving detailed tweaks to fit the genre demands of a very particular market, if the whole novel is nowhere near good enough to get the time of day from an agent: a good editor will discuss your concerns, but will also be very upfront about what they think the novel needs. We've all had the experience of a writer who is dreadfully worried about some aspect (characterisation, say) which is in fact absolutely fine: the characters are great, but the structure means there's a huge sag in the middle, and the prose really isn't up to scratch.

WHEN YOU GET THE REPORT

It hurts. It always does, even if they say lots of positive things. I don't know about you but, deep down, secretly, when I get feedback on my work I'm hoping that my agent or editor will tell me that it's completely wonderful and I don't need to change a word. Only it never happens, does it? And, actually, how much use would a report be if it did? So be aware that your first reaction may be furious resistance, especially if the editor has, sensibly, spent much of the report on what isn't working yet. I would suggest that you leave the report on your desk, and go to the pub. At least, that's what I do.

When you come back to it, bear in mind that, yes, it's one person's opinion. But it is an educated, informed opinion from someone (hopefully) with a knowledge of the craft of writing as well as how the book trade works. And you've paid for it. So try to read the report with an open mind. There are usually some 'Aha!' bits, as in 'Aha, they're right, though I hadn't seen it clearly.' And there are some bits which you just disagree with. You may well be right, but bear in mind that it could be the resistance talking. If you really feel that from top to bottom the editor has mistaken what kind of book it is, and based the whole report on that wrong assumption, then talk to the agency.

Equally, don't be so humbly grateful to have your work read and heard - and it IS a thrill to have several thousand words of professional attention directed at your work - that you meekly do everything it suggests even though part of you is screaming that it's killing the book.

If you do use an agency which offers follow-up contact by phone, have a think, before you talk, about what you want to ask. Even email a few outline questions first, perhaps? We engage deeply with your work, but if it's a few weeks since we wrote the report, your work will have had other books piled on top of it in our memories, and it takes a few minutes to bring yours back up to the top. And though it's tremendously important to digest the report and think it through first, if you're going to get the most out of such a conversation, don't leave it too long before you ask for that contact, because the longer you leave it, the less helpful an editor will be able to be.

In the end it's your book: as with any feedback, from anyone from your best mate to a copy-editor when the novel's in production, you have the choice: accept, adapt, ignore. Accept means 'Yes, they're right, I'll change it as they suggest.' Ignore means, 'Okay, but I think even a gently-bred Victorian lass would, actually, hit him. So the punch stays in.' Adapt is the interesting one. If someone you trust says something doesn't work, then you have to listen. For them, as a representative reader, it doesn't work: they're right, by definition, for them. But the solution they suggest may be completely wrong: they may suggest cutting it, when actually you need to do it better (go back and make the character's buried anger more apparent, so it's believable when she hits him). They may suggest a big family row when actually your character would drag his sole enemy to a lonely moor. One important thing about learning to be a writer is to learn to hear feedback fully and open-mindedly, judge the quality of the feedback not by whether it feels good but by whether it's useful and who's giving it, and learn to grow your own solutions.

A MORAL TALE

Sometimes I see a previous report on a novel that's come to me, and it can be stunning how much the writer has brought the book on with that feedback. But one report I did was the second of three by three different editors on the same book. There was a lot right with it, and a lot wrong: it had huge potential and huge flaws. I saw the other reports, and each one said the same things as the last. That writer had spent the best part of £1500 - half the cost of a Masters - and changed almost nothing each time. And s/he already had an MA in writing, so it wasn't lack of experience of how to deal with feedback. I can only assume that at some level s/he was deeply resisting the changes that s/he ostensibly wanted to make, so that each time s/he got back into it, a little voice was saying, 'But that's okay' and 'Well, it's got to be like that, hasn't it...' and s/he ended up waxing its legs, instead of doing major surgery. It was very frustrating, because it was one of the very rare books which was the beginnings of something which I could absolutely see on a bookshop table...

Making the skeleton dance

A friend is suffering from something which I think we all are at risk of: a passionate desire to write something, and a poisonous sense that everything they might write - every kind of character, situation, theme or plot - has been done before. And better. And worse. And in corsets and in spaceships and in Brixton. So why bother? What's the point? How can any of us, ever, say anything new? Anything worth writing, let alone worth reading? Let alone get it published? And I found myself replying like this:

There's a bird's-eye map you have in your head, a big but un-detailed map of the whole bookish terrain. You can see an awful lot of books, but only their most obvious features. And in those obvious features, they have a lot - too much - in common. Yes, there are only seven basic plots, and if you reduce a book to it barest bones - the blurb, the elevator pitch, the synopsis - it'll look like one of those seven (which is why we hate constructing those so much).

One reasons stories like fairy tales and myths seem so archetypal - are the archetypes of all our stories - is that they don't have particular, individual detail. Stepmothers are bad, princes are good, trees are trees (only oaks in Victorian dressings-up of them), cats are magical. There are very few individual motivations or peculiarities - it's all generic, in the true sense of the word - because we're dealing with the basics of human interaction (see Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment for Freud, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots for Jung). Which is why we have such fun with re-tellings and modern fairy tales and things: they play with the bare bones of our archetypal stories like a skeleton dancing at the Day of the Dead, and dress them up in silly clothes so that we re-see them. Of course fiction isn't like that: we have a couple of millenia of drama and now novels dedicated to bringing alive the individual human consciousness, from Oedipus to Hamlet to Hedda Gabler.

So, "It's not the subject, it's all in how you do it!" we cry, and it's true that what makes a book itself, rather than something else, is how those basic bones are fleshed and clothed and made to dance. That can sound trite, but only if you think of "how it's done" as a matter of window-dressing, of style over substance. But, actually, "how it's done" is about substance, because it's substance that the reader reads. They experience that world as substantial: full of texture, solidity, things and people, bricks and mortar, ravens and writing desks, which you build and make convincing, as Gardner says, by making everything particular: individual, peculiar to itself, a little surprising, a little bit new, not what we knew exactly, or so exactly what we knew that Granny's writing desk (or raven) lives again.

This is one reason (in fact the main reason) that I don't read fiction reviews, or booky blogs, or Amazon stuff or other chitter-chatter about books. And I don't browse the fiction in a shop as a pleasant way of killing time or staying out of the rain. The only books I really know anything about, if you see what I mean, are books I actually decide to buy, and then read. All those other ways of knowing about books - picking up the minimal details of lots and lots of books - just stretches that bird's-eye map even further, like the kind of computer game which draws more of the island as you move. It shows me the terrain, which I might otherwise explore for myself, entirely in terms of other writers' footmarks. Then I only have the choice of walking in one set of footmarks or another. Whereas if I haven't seen it thus, with the paths trodden and the snaps posted, it's all there for me to explore. And since I'm a different person - because everyone is - and so a different writer, my portrait (not map) of my journey over the terrain and what I write about it, will be different.

This is also why I have rather mixed feelings about the frequent injunction to "study the market", which is said so often by editors (and therefore agents) who need to sell books which do what they say on the tin, to readers who know what tin they're looking for (which is most books for most readers). Of course you should read well and widely of the kinds of book you're trying to write, but I think that understanding of the kinds of bones that your story's going to need (mixed metaphor alert!) is best acquired not by mapping the terrain from a helicopter, but intuitively, by prowling through the jungle. You want to be entering the room - or rather the jungle - with an electric torch, as Virginia Woolf puts it, not judging it as an artillery commander.

Fundamentally, saying "it's all been done" is a bit like saying "But I've done sex". Yes, you have, and yes, it was with your gender of choice - there are only two, after all - and yes, unless you're into something really weird, the possible permutations and actions are actually quite limited. And yet each combination of you, the moment, and the partner of the time is different, whether it's one of the gourmet weekends of your student life or a friendly quickie with your spouse of twenty years.

Thinking of which, I got very stuck recently, because the classic situation (yes, it was that kind of situation) I'd spent half a novel setting up suddenly looked like not a trope but a cliché. And if it was a cliché, who was going to care about it? I certainly didn't. I got stuck for the rest of the day. It was only when I went back and re-read quite a bit (which is something I almost never do in first draft) that I re-discovered these characters' particularity, and that of their situation. And then I could realise and write that scene as it would have been to them. Our characters, after all, don't know that they're clichés, they're just humans in human situations. They're real people to themselves, and so we should be able to make them real to us.

So that was my main idea. But it has a tailpiece - a coda - because anything which can stop you in your writing tracks is a costume hung on a peg in the wardrobe of your Inner Critic (Do read that link: it's really interesting). I said:

On a completely other tack, could it be your Inner Critic? The anti-writing demon? The part of you which is in charge of protecting you from writing? The Inner Critic is a master of disguise, and can put the right costume on for the situation you're in at the moment. Saying "it's all been done" is a very good disguise for the Inner Critic, because it works powerfully on the well and widely read. It hasn't managed to persuade you that you shouldn't be writing because you're no good, nor because you should be saving the world or schmoozing the boss or baking for the PTA cake sale, so it tries something else: "It's all been done".

No, it hasn't all been done, because YOU haven't done it yet.

The scent of a snuffed candle

A cracking post on the always-reliable and delightfully crabbit Nicola Morgan's blog nails some of the reasons why so many aspiring writers overwrite. Not that I worry much when students' work is rather over-written, because it does usually come from a very honourable state of being drunk on words. As Peter Wimsey says in Gaudy Night, he finds it so easy to get drunk on words 'that to tell the truth I am seldom perfectly sober'. But as anyone knows who's ever tried to revise a piece of work when they're two glasses down, sobriety is also necessary to the writing process, and Nicola's post is very good at explaining how to spot over-writing and what to do about it. It's nowhere near as simple as too many adjectives or lots of fancy words, nor a matter of too much description and not enough action: it's a matter of knowing what you're trying to say and what's clouding the message, and also knowing the context, because what's over-written for one character or voice might be perfect for another.

Because over-writing is perhaps the natural tendency of the majority of aspiring writers, and because having a ruthless eye for superfluous words is the only way for any writer to keep their writing profluent - flowing forwards - much writing advice is to cut-cut-cut, murder darlings, take out one word in ten (literally, decimate), and so on. It's true: it almost always makes it better. Many - perhaps most - writers therefore, as an integral part of their process, reckon to over-write, since only once they have worked the story out into prose will they know what needs to stay and what must go.

But in my experience a minority of writers, but a significant minority, aren't cutters, but adders. And it's my experience because I am one. It's not that my agent or editor has never told me that something isn't earning its keep, is said twice, is over-stated or goes on too long. Particularly if I'm unconfident about a scene, either for internal reasons (perhaps the situation and voice makes it at risk of cliché), or for external reasons (a sniffy blog review has made me self-conscious), my lack of confidence makes me lose my writerly compass. Sometimes it's just that the documentary desire to evoke a place I've actually witnessed or researched makes me do the same.

But my editor's comments are more often that I haven't written something out fully enough: that we need a little more about why she said X, or why he felt Y, or what the ship smelled like, or what they saw that frightened them. If I'm driving a scene towards a climax (and why would the scene be there if I wasn't?) then in the typing up I may realise that I haven't put anything except dialogue and the essential relationship of the bodies: the leap to the feet, the gaze, the touch of a hand. And yet the scene is very likely to need something which you could say is surplus to requirements in crude storytelling terms: things which in other forms would be supplied by the scenery, the cameraman, the light on a cheekbone or the atmosphere of the score. It might be a remembered phrase from years before, a metaphor which holds all the terrors in a word or three, a single burst of eloquence from a normally taciturn character in extremis. It doesn't take much, and the advantage of adding, if it's your natural tendency, is that you've got the balance and rhythm of the sentences and scene already formed: it's easier to see what's the right amount and what's too much. But the scent of a snuffed candle, the cold wood of the floor under your feet, the street lights sprawling across the ceiling... these things make the world of your novel live and breathe.

(The right words in) the right order

Have you ever actually thought about the order in which you put the words - and sense - in a sentence? In In Praise of the Long Sentence I was thinking about how long sentences flow forwards - provide profluence, aka narrative micro-drive - in a way which short sentences can't. But there's also a flexibility about the structure of a long sentence which means you can control the order in which the reader experiences its elements. Narrative takes place in time even more unavoidably than music does, since we don't even have the equivalent of chords, so it's as well to learn to make the most of it. I'm no philologist, but I suspect that English, being virtually uninflected and depending for much of its grammar on auxiliary elements, rather than endings to words, has great advantages when it comes to this. Not for us, for example, the necessity to put the verb at the end.

Thinking aloud, how about this: a not outrageously long sentence with four basic elements, putting forward a fairly simple scenario:

1) I walked into the room and saw that Jim had sat down in the purple armchair, the better to blow his tea cool and talk to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.

2) Walking into the room I saw that Arabella, with an expression of resigned amusement on her face, was being talked to by Jim, who had sat down in the purple armchair the better to blow his tea cool.

3) Arabella had an expression of resigned amusement on her face, as I saw when I walked into the room, and was talking to Jim, who was blowing his tea cool as he sat in the purple armchair.

4) Jim was sitting down in the purple armchair and talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face while she watched him blowing his tea cool, as I saw when I walked into the room. 

5) The resigned amusement on Arabella's face, as I saw when I walked into the room, was caused by watching Jim sitting in the purple armchair blowing his tea cool and talking to her.

6) Talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face as I saw when I walked into the room, and blowing his tea cool, was Jim, who was sitting in the purple armchair.

7) Sitting in the purple armchair and talking to Arabella was Jim, blowing his tea cool, and I saw when I walked into the room that she had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.

8) Blowing his tea cool as he sat in the purple armchair was Jim, and I saw as I walked into the room that he was talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.

Now, of course they vary enormously in how clear and/or euphonious they are, and not only because I've just knocked them out in five minutes. Some even mean subtly different things. I'm fairly confident there aren't any actually grammar or syntactical incorrectnesses in there, though there may be slight ambiguities in the less felicitous ones, while if James and Arabella were the same gender, there'd be scope for pronoun trouble. And then of course there's the real horror which crops up astonishingly often in the work of bad and beginner writers straining for elegant variation; the inevitable result of straining is that they suffer a dangling participle first, and then several other medico-literary ailments:

9) Sitting in the purple armchair I saw Jim, who was blowing his tea cool, and the resigned amusement on Arabella's face as he talked to her which I saw when I walked into the room.

So, once you've done enough of this kind of five-finger-exercise to feel confident and begin to think about the possibilities, how do you choose? Well, a good basic principle is to stick with the order in which your view-point-character perceives things, which is likely to be 1) in this example. 4) is an example of what I call 'zig-zagging', which starts a little way in and then jumps back to the beginning. It's usually an attempt to put the most striking bit first, and then fill in the backstory: it's easy to do, and easy to do badly, and it can be the death of profluence, killing narrative drive just as having to go back home to get the picnic can kill a day at Kew Gardens. Zigzags often happen because the writer is thinking in that order: picnic first, then - oops - we need to supply the goods to make it happen, so it's very understandable, and exactly the kind of thing which revising is for.

Of course your viewpoint may be that of a knowledgeable narrator, not a character, but it's not really different: you're still seeking to control the order in which the reader perceives the elements of the scene. It might be 2) if you've just had a run of sentences with a simple subject--main-verb--object structure - elegant variation is not always a bad thing, because a run of the same rhythm can make your prose sound, well, plodding. I have a characteristic sentence structure, into which I fall when I'm tired or have a cold, and I'm sure you do too. Fortunately reading aloud picks it up with embarrasing clarity, even if you have got a cold.

Then there's the matter of how easy it is to understand. It's hard, when you play with sentences for a living, to read things as if you don't. I know that some readers found the balanced, formal, often antithetical structures of Stephen's voice in The Mathematics of Love hard to get into, while others absolutely loved it. It was central to the distinction between his voice and Anna's, but I paid the penalty in blog reviews. So be it. I absolutely love sentences which, if you like, are syntactically complex in separating auxiliaries from their main words and nesting phrases inside other phrases, but yet on inspection turn out to be grammatically quite simple, and one reason is that the rhythm's often so much better. Mind you, this taste does mean that on a bad-cold day I'm liable to commit 6).

There's also a question of voice: the shape and rhythm of the sentence should be suitable to the character (in both senses) of the narrative, but so should the thinking, the sequence of ideas or observation. Would your narrator take more notice of Jim or Arabella? Would s/he observe their emotion along with their action, as in 5), or only after a general survey of the room, as in 1)? This may be about context, being rooted in this moment in the plot, or may be about character.

I suppose it would put a lot of aspiring writers off to start a course and be issued with five-finger exercises. But The Art of Fiction has plenty, and maybe we could all do with more of them. No, it's probably not essential, especially if you read widely and attentively, and are blessed with a writing mind like blotting paper. But there's a limit to what techniques you can learn while writing creatively, just as there's a limit to how well you can refine your backhand if you only ever play matches. And the more you do refine each stroke, the more likely it is that just the right strokes will happen, just when you need it, in just the right order.

Whores, dishes and crackly feedback

A while ago a US writer said that if you allow any thought of the market to affect your writing, then you're not a writer, you're a whore (and the comment made me so cross that I'm not going to try to find dates or names). And now I see that my post The Market for Ropes has been picked up as expressing my strong views about writing for the market. Well, I do have strong views about lots of things, but that wasn't quite what I was getting at in that post. What I was trying to express there was that thinking about product, at the wrong moment in your practice, really screws up your writerly horse sense, your intuition, your instincts about what your writing needs and how it works.

But it's true that whether you should write for the market is a hardy perennial of most writers' talk. That US novelist, who'd better stay nameless otherwise I'll want to make a wax figure to stick pins into, is talking bunk. Because the market really doesn't have horns and a tail, still less fishnets and a basque: the market is another word for readers. Who else are we writing for? If we were really writing 'for ourselves' then we wouldn't go through the pressures and tediums and panics of getting published: we'd be quite happy sitting at home, scribbling away, and then stashing the notebooks under the bed: it wouldn't even matter if no one could read your writing. Yes, the writing process is actually a constantly revolving writing-reading-writing-reading cycle - we are our own first reader - but storytelling is fundamentally a communicative act. It needs a teller with a story but also an audience, and, to date, the only way to get lots of people to hear your story (and to feed and clothe yourself while you write the next one) is to put your words out into the market, which for better or worse is only the size it is because it can pay people to write, publish, print and sell books as a day job. (And no, sorry, giving away work on the internet is not the answer. What am I supposed to live on while I'm writing?)

What the art Calvinists don't acknowledge is that as soon as you clothe the ideas in your mind in words, and put them on paper so that others can read them, you're actually writing for a market: you're playing by a set of highly sophisticated, extremely evolved conventions about how storytelling works in our culture. In placing so much as a comma, let alone in describing a character, we're taking account of how readers read commas and characters: how they will affect their experience of the story. On the larger scale we use conventions of plot, ideas and prose as a carrier signal for what we're trying to say. And for a carrier signal to work, we have to know what equipment will be receiving it at the other end: who our readers are.

On the other hand, it's perfectly true that we all know the kind of routine rom com or spaceshipiana or plotless, overwritten faux-lit, which has been written to tick exactly the right market boxes, (it seems - you can never be sure of any writer's real intentions, but then neither can the writer) and for no other reason. Usually they're me-too versions of books which did do something new and interesting in either plot, ideas or prose, however dire the other elements - fourth-rank Bridget Jones, fifth-generation Dune, wannabe Roth. So it's no wonder that most of us, who live and breathe the breathtaking ideas, strange new worlds and new-minted words of good fiction, recoil in honest horror (or unappealing but headline-grabbing snobbery) from the notion that we should be ticking boxes. We will write for ourselves, and no one else! Fine, but don't blame me if no one else wants to read it: why should I want to read what you've written, if you've taken no account of me in writing it? All writers are egocentric, by definition, but some are positively narcissistic.

One problem, of course, is that while we writers have 120,000 full-frequency words with which to tell our stories to readers, the feedback from readers to writers is pretty crackly: narrow in dynamic range and full of static. Reviews don't help much and talk of 'the market' is often hugely over-simplified. It's partly so because the book trade is always desperately trying to get some working definitions - aka labels - stuck on who buys what, so that tight budgets and overworked marketing assistants can be best deployed in persuading them to buy more of it. And editors and therefore agents who take this stuff on board too simplistically are not good or fruitful to work with. And it's partly because, actually, there's not a reader in the land who doesn't fit some stereotypes of their age/gender/income/class/domicile, and utterly escape others. Of all the extremely satisfactory number of thousands of people who bought A Secret Alchemy in its bestselling week, I don't suppose a single one had exactly the same reaction as a single other one. There's nowt so queer as folk. So what do we do with anything we know about 'the market', or are told by our agent, or are shocked to find on a forum, or stumble on when guiltly sneaking a peek at The Ropeseller? We don't want to churn out little boxes full of ticky-tacky, but we do want to know what the best carrier signals will be for what we want to say. And we would quite like to sell more books - i.e. have more readers...

I think you just have to treat information about the market with as much open-minded scepticism as anything else which might go into your work. Jessica Ruston nailed it very nicely for me the other day on a forum debate: ideas for your writing come from everywhere, she said, and there's nothing different about one which comes from The Ropeseller. The mistake is when you let the conviction that it's the key to a fortune, or the work of the devil, overrule your ordinary writer's instincts about what this book needs now. A love-triangle from Shakespeare, something your teenager says about girls, the news that readers love books set in India, a profound thought about revenge while you're hanging up the wash, the news that Bridget Jones is now putting the toddler's name down for secondary school... Some of these go into the queue for the pot of the work in progress, others into the bin, some into the Tupperware box in the fridge labelled 'the next novel'. It's your cook's common sense which decides, tastes, chops, fries and transforms. The result will be full of flavours people know and - with luck - love. But it'll be your dish, and no one else's.