Paying to have your book reviewed? Is it just me being naive or is that what authors do? Or have to do...

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A good actor reveals a great deal about the character they are portraying even before they open their mouths to speak. It's not just down to clothes and make-up, but how they inhabit their bodies, how and how much they move. A writer faces a similar challenge in embodying her characters but, being cerebral creatures, we might pay more attention to imagining ourselves
into another mind living through another situation than writing from the appropriate physical perspective.

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If fear's good enough for Roald Dahl, then it's certainly good enough for me!

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Free Indirect Discourse is the original term, being a direct translation from the French discours indirect libre, but that doesn't get you much further. And least helpful of all is Free Indirect Speech, because most of the time we don't use the term for stuff which was said aloud. (Does it make more sense in French, given that they don't routinely use speech marks in fiction? A question for another day.) But we're stuck with the name, and it's not really as vague and alarming as it suggests: quite likely you've been doing it all along - you just didn't know it has a name. But in case it's all new to you, let's start at the beginning.

Think of speaking: if you want to convey the actual words that someone said, without quoting them directly, then you use what's called reported speech:

If you have an external, knowledgeable narrator, then the shift of tense and person is obvious: John said, "I don't believe you," becomes John said he didn't believe her.

If you have an internal, character-narrator, it works just the same: "You can't leave me like this, alone on Rockall!" I yelled becomes I yelled that she couldn't leave me like that, alone on Rockall! The shift of tense and person is just the same: in the dialogue can't becomes couldn't, and you becomes she.

What Jane Austen realised, for which we should all be profoundly grateful and put her on the �10 note, was that you can do the same with thoughts: reported thought rather than directly quoted thought, if you like. Just as with speech, the clue is that the tenses fit with the normal narrative tense, but the voice is the character's. So, if your straightforward narrative with directly-quoted thoughts and speech was this:

Titles are so very important to me, both as a writer and as a purchaser of books.

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Citizens, readers and writers, gather round, for I bring you an important update! Alone or with friends and family, in your offices, at your kitchen tables, on the commute to work: boot up your computers, flip open your laptops, wake up your smartphones and focus your attention on The Great Annecdotal Book Review!


If you're going to be traumatised by a novel, it must be a good one. If you're going to go to bed, anxious at what monsters your dreams will churn up, let it be on account of a story worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. After nearly 600 pages in the Democratic Republic of North Korea, at least you you can go back to your own life when it's over. Such a pity the same can't be said of the novel's protagonist, the orphan, Jun Do. Or should that be Commander Ga?

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Writing can be such a solitary existence. Could occasional collaboration be the answer to stop me from going stir-crazy?

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Tastes differ, that's what makes us human, yet it sometimes feels as if the book world thinks we're all clones of some zombified Stepford-wife reader, drooling over the latest ghost-written celeb novel.


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As the actors took their bows, my companion said the show was �delightfully silly� and I more or less agreed, until I read the director�s programme notes:

�the Major, a conman, is a caricature of Britain�s decadent and ineffectual ruling class, One-Round is representative of the used, brutalised masses, Harry is the worthless younger generation, Louis the dangerously unassimilated foreigner, and Marcus embodies the collapse of moral and intellectual leadership.�

Given the widely diffused irony and social comment in British films of the era � continued in TV series like �Dad�s Army� � it�s a shame the stage play didn�t bring this out.


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While I appreciated last month�s heat wave, especially after the long, drawn-out British winter, as a gardener with empty water butts, I was relieved when the weather broke. I was saying as much to the woman on the supermarket checkout, who asked if I were self-sufficient in vegetables. Not quite, I said, as I loaded a packet of tomatoes into my backpack, but I can always dream.

I left the shop cheered at having made an authentic connection, however banal, accompanied by that slight tinge of defensiveness I recognise from when I tell someone I�m a writer and they wonder why they haven�t seen my books in Waterstones� window display. The perceived requirement to be at the top of my game before I dare pick up my bat/spade/pen comes from both inside and out. Didn�t I tell you writing was like gardening?

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