Can there be anyone in the world who has missed the hoo-ha surrounding the release of Dan Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol.

Booksellers across the land have been inundated with advance orders and queries about this most awaited of books. Sales are set to outstrip his previous block buster, The Da Vince Code with a first print run of millions.



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Regarded as one of the most important novels of the 20th century, Ulysses by the legendary James Joyce and my fellow countryman describes a day in the life of Leopold Bloom. Bloom's journey runs from the Martello Tower in Sandycove, Dublin, Ireland, back to his home in Eccles Street. And each year many Ulysses fans follow in their footsteps during Bloomsday, an event observed annually on June 16 to commemorate the life of James Joyce.

This brings me on to the topic of Dan Brown and how places featured in a novel can enjoy a huge influx of visitors. Finally, millions of Dan Brown fans are able to open his latest code-filled mystery, The Lost Symbol. The world-renowned author of best-sellers Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, has already enjoyed record-breaking sales figures with his latest release. And with the hype that surrounds the books, the locations featured in the narratives have also been swept up in the adventure, as code-crackers follow Harvard-hero Langdon in his journey.


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Most writers experience years of struggle and rejection. Simon Bent’s play shows the anguish of an aspiring writer whose partner achieves celebrity. Joe Orton wins the Evening Standard Award for best West End Play just before he’s murdered. Halliwell, his former mentor, has by then abandoned his own writing and the aggrieved attack seems a logical,if tragic, outcome.



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I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said to people that I’ve finished the novel. After the first draft, I was beaming. I’d felt I’d reached the top of the ladder. “The end!” I hollered. But I looked up and realised I was still on the bottom rung.

After the third draft, I’d landed on some sort of platform – the editing step. I paused, wobbling. I’m scared of heights; I had to keep going. There were serious flaws that called for a substantial re-write. The re-write took me over a year.

The fifth draft emerged. At last, something I could hold in my hands. Something that resembled a novel! But the first chapter was cracking under the strain of holding up the rest of it, and needed to be built from scratch. And there were inconsistencies in the plot. There was lazy language; there were under-imagined scenes.


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A litttle while ago (well, months probably) I agreed to write a short piece on writing and place for Tania Hershman's excellent blog. I started it many, many times over but couldn't work out what I wanted to say. I knew what I thought about it, and I thought that that thought was a simple one. But just like that last sentence it was far more complicated than I'd anticipated.

Anyway. I'm interviewed today over at Tania's blog, about writing and place. I think it makes sense. It does to me now. I'm interested to know what you think of it.

Click here for the full interview.

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Another school mum took up cross-country biking last term.

‘You should come along,’ she said.

‘Can’t,’ I replied. ‘I promised myself this year I’d spend all free time writing.’

She looked me up and down too slowly and said, ‘You really must do both.’


My husband once heard Margaret Atwood read. During questions at the end, someone asked her advice for aspiring writers. Her answer: ‘Take posture lessons.’ As usual with Atwood there was grit behind the wit. The anecdote came back when I took a rare look in the mirror and saw not myself but a copy of a well-upholstered writer friend who went to the doctor half crippled and was diagnosed with the wonderfully vague but ominous ‘premature decrepitude.’ Writing was sending her to an early grave. There can’t be a more sedentary job. Even office secretaries walk to the station. When I visited my friend some months after the diagnosis, she was lithe and vibrant, no longer a woman whose appeal lay solely in the strength of her mind. She’d attacked the gym and the towpaths.

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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.

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