When Jessica Chastaine is working on a part, she says, she makes two lists: "One: everything my character says about herself, and Two: everything everyone else says about her."

It's a good technique, and I'm sure she's not unique in using it: it sounds like a classic Drama School exercise. And, as so often, listening to how actors work is illuminating for writers. If our first draft is like the kind of improvising that goes on when actors and a playwright are devising a piece, and our obsession with finding the right verb is almost indistiguishable from Stanislavski's, then Chastaine's trick isn't even a parallel to what we could do: it's a genuine tool for us in working with characters too.

But what I particularly like about this tool (as opposed to the more usual idea of lists of likes and dislikes, dreams, cars, or, heaven save us, star signs) is that it embodies some fundamentals about fiction.

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Who are we? Imagine a painter, photographer, novelist, and poet all running willy-nilly and meeting full-speed. That collision is Postcard Poems and Prose . We want you to find prose, poems, and art all in a 4×6 postcard format. We want you to be able to stand and look at that revolving wire rack that’s in every tourist trap on earth. We want you see it from your laptop or handheld device. Just like the postcards of yesteryear we want you to be able to share that experience with friends. We want it to be quirky and personal. And we want it to be great.

Our inaugural issue released privately back in September and has since undergone format experimentation and beta testing. We are now calling for submissions. Postcard Poems and Prose will be published online beginning February of 2013 with 9-12 pieces being accepted monthly.


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I'm contemplating going back to an earlier project. Not, heaven forbid, re-working the text, but writing a new text built on the same ideas and situations. And one of the advantages of doing things this way is that the researched material has mulched down nicely in the back of my head, in the sense I was discussing here. The stuff you found out needs to become stuff you just know, so that there's no longer any difference between them: all compost. But is there anything you do to hurry the process of mulching down? Are there compost accelerators?

I think there probably are, although as a killer of spider-plants I'm not the best person to pursue horticultural analogies. But I do know that making compost is a mixture of turning it over, and leaving it be, and maybe that's true of writerly compost to. So what might you do, to leave things be?

Ignore the project, and wait for it to claim your attention again. Not-thinking, if you like. The character, the situation, the period which won't go away, is almost always one worth having another go at (as I was saying in The Value of Forgetting). But to be sure it is that kind of character, you need to walk away from it. When you do let it reclaim you, you'll have picked up all sorts of other things which change and enrich the possibilities.

Write something else. This is the quicker way to push a project out of the forefront of your mind,

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’m currently researching my next novel, the third in the Silas Quinn series. In fact, I’m reaching the stage where I’m thinking about putting the history books to one side and doing some actual writing.

The first thing I will have to do is turn the rather loose outline I submitted to my publisher into something I can actually work from. A detailed, chapter by chapter synopsis.

Usually, it’s my favourite part of the process. Fleshing out the bones of the plot, tying myself in knots and then teasing out the strands. But this time I’m experiencing a strange sense of resistance. In fact, I read the first line of my outline and winced. What kind of sick bastard came up with that idea? I thought. Oh, it was me.

I remembered my editor’s response to the outline when I sent it to her. “Seriously, I worry about your imagination!!!” Still, she commissioned the book – without asking me to tone down any of the gruesome elements. And whenever I’ve met her she’s struck me as a perfectly respectable individual.

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It's not often I feel sorry for the actors in a play; in this case a fine cast and a talented creative team were let down by the lead. There's no disguising unsuitability when the perpetrator appears in almost every scene. Not that I blame Autumn Ellis, making her professional debut. Even allowing for press night jitters, whoever cast her has a lot to answer for.

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In How Would You Describe It? I was talking about this thing called Description, which seems to get so many beginner-writers worried, and how you can get better at it. But I don't myself have a mental category of writing called Description at all; I just think in terms of Dialogue, and Everything Else - or, more grown-uply, Narration.

That's not because evoking places and things isn't important. The places and spaces we live in, and the things we live with, are profoundly important - but notice that they're important because we live in and with them: it's how we interact with them that matters. You don't get a lot of description in fairy tales, or in Jane Austen: story is king. What furniture is in a room matters because who sits so you can't see their expression matters, and how full the room is at the wake does, and how close together the illicit lovers can stand does. What a landscape looks like doesn't matter: how it makes a character move or think or dread does.

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Dear Jerusha: I read Emma's blog Too Much Meringue and wondered if you could help me with a different facet of coping with the media? I hate all this stuff anyway, so would much rather refuse to do it all, though I have got used to it. But my new novel is set in the rather unusual milieu in which I grew up, although the story and the characters aren't like anyone real at all. And of course everyone wants me to say that it's all about me really, and write about my own parents and my own children. A national paper asked me to pitch memoir pieces, but turned down everything I sent because they want something more personal; another clamouring is a paper I wouldn't write for if it was the last one on earth. Please tell me I'm not single-handedly ruining my career.

A: Darling, no, you're not single-handedly ruining your career. Will that do?

All right, since it's a while till the next porpoise-school passes and I can give them my reply, let's unpick it a bit more. Emma realised what's going on with this kind of thing some years ago, the first time a journalist asked her, in an interview about the novel, whether she believes that religion and science are compatible. And later, she was offered one of those routine slots in one of the national papers about "My House Move". After a bit of conversation with the journalist Emma decided she wasn't willing to do it but, instead of saying so, her Inner Nice Girl made her reach for the nearest true excuse and say, "Sorry, haven't got time, because I'm actually going into hospital soon". At which point the journo said, "Oh, I've got a My Operation column. Could I use you for that?" I laughed so much when Emma told me that story I nearly fell out of my palm tree. It was either that, or cry.

But it's horribly easy to get sucked into feeling that we all have to do everything to create publicity, just because we see others doing it, and because the battle for visibility - and the consequent sales of this book and the consequent improved chance of the next contract - always seems to be tooth-and-nail.

I think it helps to understand that the tension is built into the system.

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I’ve got some good news and bad news. The bad news is, while you’re reading this, factual errors are festering a few clicks away in your manuscript. I’m not talking about internal inconsistencies, like Sean Stevens’ surname becoming Stephens on three occasions on page 167 because you changed the spelling during the second draft, thought you’d spotted all the alterations but missed a thicket of Stephenses. Yes, there are probably a few errors like that in your novel, too, but those are not my subject here today. I’m talking about the fact that, though you’ve populated an imaginary world with fictional characters, that fictional world intersects with the real world, and you’ve mentioned real things, such as places, people, brands, film titles, song lyrics, events, and so on, and some of that stuff you’ve got anywhere from slightly wrong to utterly and totally incorrect . . . (Click on the link to see the rest of the blog post.)

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I get asked this amazingly often, considering that no one ever asks if you can teach the doing of other arts, but, just as I took ages to get on to that other old chestnut, "What is literary fiction?" and my own personal Ancestral Elephant, it's taken me till now to sort out what I think clearly enough to answer the question. My answer, mind you, depends on how long I've got, but it comes from someone who wrote for fifteen years before being taught, but now teaches, and knows hundreds of writers who have been taught, and only slightly fewer who teach:

1) Yes.

2) Yes, you can teach it, just as you can teach painting or sculpture, or choreography or writing music. Writing's no different.

3) Yes, you can teach within the limits of what that person has in the way of potential, but it's impossible to know what a student's potential is until you have been teaching them for a bit. What I'm really saying here is that all "teaching" should really be called "helping students to learn".

The next question is often about whether it's unethical or unkind to take money off people, 99.9% of whom won't ever be published. I do understand the anger that snake-oil salesmen induce in the rest of us, and scriptwriter Jon Spira has written about this (and draws a fascinating contrast between the scriptwriting-teaching industry he knows, and the atmosphere at the York Festival). But the fact that some sellers of courses and how-to books are deluded or dishonest doesn't mean the rest of us should refuse to teach something that people want to learn. Here's why:

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Self-editing advice from the front line of fiction editing

I've started a blog series designed to help fiction writers during the process of self-editing their novels. If you're polishing your novel ahead of getting it to an agent or publisher, or self-publishing, you might find it useful. Each week I look at a particular issue that I see coming up again and again when I'm copy-editing novels for publication.

In this week's instalment I discuss how to style what we can call 'direct thought', the interior-world equivalent of direct speech.

If there's something you'd like me to cover in a future post, please drop me a line.

Cheers!

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