This Itch of Writing

Showing up for the genie

Has anyone asked about your writing recently in the voice we use for people with illnesses which aren't going to get better? 'How's it going?' they say, consciously radiating willingness to receive a terse 'Fine, thanks,' or a half-hour outburst of gruesome symptoms and existential fears. When you first declared, or mumbled, that you wanted to be a writer, did you get an anxious spiel about how agonising rejections are before you get a deal, and even worse four books down the line when even your agent will drop you? And how lonely it is! And what about the terror... Read more →

Learning to fly

'But,' said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, 'if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it and why has it always been, regarded as something different?' This is from H G Wells's The Time Machine, and a writing acquaintance on WriteWords questioned whether 'staring hard at the coal in the fire' was really necessary, or just padding. I was intrigued, because this sentence is a shape into which much of my dialogue falls (too much, unless I'm concentrating), so it really appealed to me, and I couldn't see what his... Read more →

Real people, even if it doesn't always look like it.

Today's amusement - which I was somewhat in need of while I waited in all through a brilliantly sunny afternoon for DHL to come and collect the proofs of the US edition of A Secret Alchemy - is that apparently several national newspapers have been trying very hard indeed to find out who wrote which of the stories in In Bed With. Emails have been whizzing round, beseeching all 24 of us to keep everything under our hats. I can't say that half Fleet Street's outside my door, but I gather there's been a certain amount of pressure exerted in... Read more →

Conditional validation

A friend asked this, this morning: Just read elsewhere someone say: "Like all 'creative' people, we need other people to validate us." And I wondered about this, and whether publication is the only, or ultimate, validation of a piece of work? And do all creative people need other people's validation? And if so, why? and I've realised it's not as simple a question as you'd think. There's a lot of talk about believing in yourself, at the 'motivational' end of the Creative Writing word (I usually enjoy language change, but isn't 'motivational' a beastly word? Almost as awful as 'inspirational'.... Read more →

A single rope

Two things happened in the last forty-eight hours which, of all the strands of the writing life, came from the two furthest apart threads you can imagine. On Wednesday, just before midday, I put Radio Three on while I trundled through a pile of self-employed administration. I was knee-deep in receipts for coffee at Goldsmiths ("subsistence for professional training"), and packing up copies of A Secret Alchemy for all the members of the Richard III Society who ordered them after my talk ("stationery" "postage"). And then some gorgeous vocal music - brainy and sexy in the way only Baroque music... Read more →

Blood for Breakfast

Settle down now, everyone, settle down. Right, now, as you know, I´m giving two big lectures this week. (What did you say, George? Well, they´re important to me, and there were a lot of people there at the first one. No, not just idiots. Now that´s enough, George, or I´ll send you to sit outside the Head Mistress´s office...) Where was I. Oh, yes? I´m going to have to leave you to be very sensible and quiet while I´m away. And what I´d like you to do is think about the relationship of symbols to reality. (What´s that, Alicia? Yes,... Read more →

Cold Friday morning

So there I was, pootling around in my big desk notebook, (not, of course, procrastinating, no, not a bit), pretending to collect up the bits and pieces of thought about the nameless new novel because it wasn't just the right moment to dig back into my PhD commentary. And I came across this sentence at the bottom of a page: Pain of trying not to be in love with someone. True enough, I thought, absently. Don't think it was to do with the novel. Maybe a story? Can't remember what I meant. Has the milk come yet? I'd kill for... Read more →

The Muse, if you like

I've been hammering away at the commentary of my PhD, and one of the small tiresomeness (as opposed to the large tiresomenesses, of which there are also plenty) which make it slow work is that 'writing' is such an ambiguous term. It can be an almost concrete noun - 'Some of the writing is fluent' - or an abstract noun - 'Writing is a creative practice' - or a verb - 'Writing stops me eating'. So quite often I want another word for the large body of continuous prose, the piece, that I've ended up with in A Secret Alchemy,... Read more →

Witnesses to the spark

I've blogged before about how a novel exists whole in my consciousness long before I write it down. In Bodies crying out I described how my nameless new novel landed in my lap last February and, more recently, in Are you listening? I was wondering aloud if you could think that this whole, complete entity of a story sets about making the writer it will need if it's to be written. But it's always been very clear to me, in the kind of physical, gut-level certainty that tells you, for instance, whether you're going to be able to balance on... Read more →

Dancing with Bach

It's always interesting when artists talk about arts other than their own. Last Sunday I was listening to the poet Rowan Williams (yes, the one whose day job is running the Church of England) talking about favourite music on Private Passions. If you're reading this before next Sunday, it's well worth a Listen Again. At one moment, talking about the rhythm in music and poetry, he points out that, 'We are creatures built on stress and slack: systole and diastole.' Many would realise that rhythm - a pattern of stresses - is innate in us because without a heartbeat we'd... Read more →

Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming

There used to be a terrific series on Radio 3 - Monday afternoons, as I remember - called Stage and Screen. It was always a stand-alone programme about theatre or movie music, from the acutely avant-garde to the blockbustingly popular, and apart from the fact that it was always full of all that gorgeous repertoire, the discussion of the interaction between drama (and so at least by implication, storytelling) and music was consistently illuminating. The Broadway musical seems an impossibly tight form to us novelists, lying back comfortably in the arms of our own baggy monster of a tradition. And... Read more →

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

I was interested to discover that, like Mozart and Bach no less, Vaughan Williams' instrument was the viola. The viola? The instrument that has as many jokes made about it as Skoda cars do? Even though Amadeus may have been an exercise in fascinating historical fiction, no one could accuse Mozart of being uninterested in high-visibility showmanship. Vaughan Williams was not like that, and yet anyone who's heard the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis would be forgiven for knowing that RVW was a string player.But though the viola does make a beautiful sound, it's possibly the most invisible... Read more →