Dear Jerusha: I can't seem to read my novel from start to finish – perhaps in one sitting, perhaps over a few days – without changing things. I’m not a fan of directionless editing, but I’ve never read my book without spying at least a hundred words that need cutting – or maybe a couple of grammar catastrophes. I can’t just sit, read, relish. In fact, I think this type of editing – when all you want is to read and assess the flow – massacres the enjoyment: it’s disruptive and dispiriting, constantly illuminates the flaws, poses questions such as, ‘What else needs tightening?’ or ‘Where else have I used double dashes when commas would be better?’ Obviously, no aspiring writer should ever ignore these questions – but has anyone found a way to just let go and enjoy the ride?

I'd just swatted away a six-foot iguana, and was re-reading your question so as to start answering it, when your phrases "relish" and "enjoy the ride" made me pause for a moment. Without wanting to be a Calvinist about it, I'd suggest that relish isn't necessarily the most useful reason for a writer to re-read their work. We all love the sound of our own writing voice - except when we're hating it - and reading immersively, for pleasure, is essentially uncritical: witness how we turn our writerly geiger-counter right down when we're reading an entertaining but badly-written book. If you winced at every second-hand phrase and stereotyped character, you'd never discover who dunnit. But I'm assuming that the core of your question is about reading which is highly purposeful - part of your writing process - but which doesn't get bogged down in editing.

The whole point of reading through your novel is to try to read it as a reader does...

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Your synopsis is not the thing which will make or break your novel's future. It’s the voice, above all, and the characters and storytelling in the sample chapters, which will do that. A synopsis is for showing the big bones of your story: that the main characters' problem is urgent and compelling; that the stakes are raised steadily through the novel; that the plot-engineering of cause-and-effect works; that the end is satisfying. And that's where writing a synopsis can be salutary. Your novel may quiet and literary, or fitted to a known commercial genre, but it must still have its own, powerful narrative drive. If you can't make the synopsis show the big chain of cause and effect and what pit of disaster is yawning before the characters if they don't get what they need... then maybe those things aren't actually there. In other words, try not to resent the need to write a synopsis; instead, use the opportunity to think really hard about the big engineering of your novel.

But reducing your novel to a page is like catching a waterfall in a cup

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X-Men: First Class is here...can it get the franchise back on track? And how do you cram forty years of comics into a movie anyway?

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In the film of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Leonard asks how Virginia work's going, and she says (as I remember) "I think I've got the first line". A reviewer was scornful: how typical of Hollywood to have one banal speech standing in for the creative complexities of writing anything, let alone Mrs Dalloway. It is notoriously difficult to make drama out of writing (hence the clichés of the scrumpled pages and the clacking typewriter), but the reviewer was revealing how little he or she knows about writing fiction. I and lots of other writers know that's exactly how it is. A first line embodies so much of your project that when you realise you have that body it's a huge step forward.

On one hand, at least with a novel, you're unlikely to know what the first line must be until you know a lot about your project. On the other hand, at least in short fiction, my moleskine is full of first lines which arrived from nowhere, while I was doing something else. Each seemed to have some resonance, some intriguingness, about it that hints at story and emotion beyond its own compass, and I'll write the story to find out what it's all about. Those two hands can both be true because most of the following will be built - implicitly, and sometimes explicitly - into any first line:

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I really liked David O. Russell's film The Fighter, starring Mark Wahlberg. And the release of the film on DVD seems a good opportunity to revisit this blog I wrote about this excellently written movie...

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It’s been a month since my YA book, Dark Ride, launched. And it’s almost a year since this story started, when the best email of my life pinged into my inbox. It was from my publisher, Piccadilly Press, and I can still remember that it began with,’ I am delighted to be able to make you an offer as follows....’




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Because terror of the blank page and the "wrong" words hamstrings so many writers, I spend a lot of time saying, "Just write. Nothing's set in stone. You can change anything, once you've got words on the page to change". But in the long-gone days of silver halides I learnt that although you can do amazing things in the darkroom with both light and chemistry, you can't print what isn't in the negative. The pattern of dark and light across the film - what was there when you saw and took the photograph, that seemed to say what you wanted to say - is all you have to work with, and will always set the outer limits of the picture you can make.

Similarly, the key to learning to write short fiction - or long fiction or poetry, come to that - is learning to recognise the right size and shape of idea. And I know that there's a limit to what I can teach a student about writing if we only talk about their work in progress. In other words, your idea - your project - will always have its outer limits; there will always be things it can't be or do. I've come up hard against this fundamental fact of creative work in the novel I've spent the last couple of years writing.

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Today we announce the winner of The Strictly Writing Award

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Have you heard the one about "was" being a word you should cut out of your writing? No, really, it's genuine; I've seen it bandied about among aspiring writers, and even some teachers. Where did it come from? What is it about the past tense form of the most basic verb of all - to be - which makes semi-illiterate ignoramuses put it in the Index Prohibitorum? Seeing a student miserably pulling some perfectly decent sentences around to get rid of was made me so cross that I came over here to work out when you might use was, and why you might not.

* As a main verb: was is the simple past, singular of the verb to be: "Are you happy?" she asked. I was. I said so.
* As a main verb with a complement: I was a fireman [noun]. The box was hers [pronoun]. A school was the obvious answer [noun phrase]. Hamlet was lonely [adjective]. Medea was implacably murderous [adjective phrase].
* As an auxiliary verb in a verb phrase in continuous past tense, in active voice: I was walking. He was rejoicing in the baby. She was playing with the guitar.
* As an auxiliary verb in a verb phrase in simple past tense, in passive voice: He was assaulted. She was bored by the movie. I was distracted from his lecture.
* As an auxiliary verb in a verb phrase in continuous past tense, in passive voice: She was being assaulted by the baby. He was being decorated in the Town Hall. I was being interviewed.

And as far as I can see, after a whizz through Seeley's Oxford Everyday Grammar, that's it. And as far as I can see, it would be very difficult to do without was. These, I'd suggest, are some of the real reasons for those weaknesses:

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My new novel, The Cleansing Flames, is published on Thursday. It’s the fourth (and final!) instalment in my series featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate I’ve taken from Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment.

To celebrate the publication, I’ve decided to give away a copy FIVE SIGNED COPIES of The Cleansing Flames in a little competition. I’m looking for the answer to one simple question:

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