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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One of the old chestnuts that gets re-roasted every so often, by aspiring writers and those who try to help them, is the one about speech tags: this post is typical. On one side are the writers whose English teachers have told them to vary things by using "he giggled", "she grimaced", "they prevaricated" and so on. I assume it's partly by way of a bit of vocabulary practice, and partly in the cause of elegant variation, to avoid repeating "said". And it's true that once your repeat-alert is set to pick up any particular word, including "said", they'll shout at you. And on the other side are the writers for whom anything except "said" is clangingly over-stated and amateurish. Me? I'll be honest and say that I almost never see "said" in a novel and think it should be something else, and I very, very frequently see a something else and think it should be "said". The problem is, of course, that the argument gets over-simplified. It's obvious enough that "said" is "said", but there are several different kind of Other Speech Tag, and there's no sensible discussion to be had about when and whether to use them till you make those distinctions.

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A Monday hospital admission last month made me reach for something to distract me over the weekend. Nothing on my shelves promised an instant solution, but a Saturday afternoon trawl of Penge charity shops did the trick

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'So what do you want for Christmas?' I asked last year, expecting the usual muttered prevarications.
'A Kindle,' he replied, as quick as you like.
'Are you sure?'
'Yes. I've researched it.'

So there it was. Another dedicated reader opting into the cyber-zone. Only thing is, this was my father doing the opting. And he's eighty-four years old.


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A while ago I blogged about being drunk on words, and why it's a good sign in a beginner. Too many would-be writers think their writing is spare and muscular, when in fact it's just bald and impoverished. But if the writerly teetotallers are guilty of underwriting, then the inebriates are also guilty: of over-writing. "It's over-written" is a very baffling reaction to your work, even though it's a common one. The problem is that overwriting is very easy to feel, but even as a teacher I find it quite hard to analyse. So when a friend asked me to decode a comment about their writing being over-written, I had a think. And these are some of the reasons, I'd suggest, that your writing might seem over-written to others:

1) Too many adjectives and adverbs tacked onto each verb and noun. Concentrate instead on the verbs and nouns themselves, and the sensory, physical reality of the characters-in-action in their setting.

2) Too many fancy verbs bumping into each other: yes, a good verb works better than a dull verb spiced up with an adverb, but do give a strong verb the space to run without tripping up on the verb too close in front of it.

3) To many metaphors/similes/images/figurative language bumping into each other. You may think you wouldn't dream of mixing a metaphor, but you do need to be aware of the metaphorical content of, for example, off-the-peg phrases, or verbs which you're using in a figurative context, which you’re hardly aware are actually metaphorical themselves - a different metaphor.

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