I have a short story in my head. Almost fully formed in my head. It'll probably end up around the 5 or 6 thousand word length by the time I'm finished. I have the characters detailed so well in my head that I swear one of them keeps talking to me during the day.

But I haven't written more than the first 100 words yet.

The reason is simple. I'm scared that I won't be able to do justice to this awesome idea I have.

Read Full Post

The other day I heard a cri de coeur going up in a forum, and it was from Jenn Ashworth. She's one of The Guardian's 12 Best New Novelists, her first novel A Kind of Intimacy was much admired, and her second, Cold Light is due out soon. If you didn't catch her in The Guardian, then maybe you did on BBC2, and she's knee-deep in reviews and interviews and, most important of all, promotion within the book trade. Of course I'd like to forward Jenn's post to Jerusha Cowless, but the last I heard Jerusha was several hundred miles off the Galapagos, and might not be in touch till the trade winds change at the equinox. So I replied to Jenn myself. And what she was saying was this:

Read Full Post

I’ve discovered (yet another) bad habit of mine when it comes to writing. When I say “discovered”, of course, what I actually mean is “finally acknowledged something my husband has been saying for years”.

I over-edit my story ideas.

Like most people, the reason I start writing a particular story is because something about the idea excites me. I barrel in with my newfound enthusiasm and get straight to work on it, until I hit some kind of brick wall.

Usually, what this brick wall means is that there is a specific feature about the story that isn’t working. I trust my instincts, and try to pay attention to them, so I stop and re-think the whole story. Quite often, this involves my brain wandering off at a dozen tangents and deciding that the story would work better in a whole other country. Or time zone. Or universe.

Read Full Post

I knew it had to happen, but today I received my first rejection.

I'm not upset about it - I'd pretty much convinced myself it was going to happen - but I am grateful for it.

Read Full Post

Ever since the National Film Theatre went all shiny and commercial,there's been nowhere for real cinema fans (as distinct from the blockbuster-and-pop-corn throng) to feel at home in London. All that changed for me on Saturday when I stepped into the shabby splendour of the Cinema Museum in Kennington. Housed in the old Lambeth Workhouse, unfunded by public money but stuffed with souvenirs of cinema's heyday, its second season of cinema events has just got started.



Read Full Post

If you try answering these for a favourite book you'll find that you can, from Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice to Heart of Darkness and To The Lighthouse, so why not try it on your own? They're deliberately bald, because there aren't only many different answers, there are different kinds of answer, depending on what your project is with the novel. But answers there should be:

Who is telling this story?

Why are they telling it?

Where do they stand in time and space, relative to the events and settings they're narrating?

Read Full Post

Dear Jerusha; I have interest in my novel from an agent who has sent me very comprehensive editing notes. One of her broader comments was that the novel would appeal to female readers, who would expect a more romantic approach to my main protagonists' relationship. She wants me to show the sexual tension and electricity, flirting etc. that accompanies a new love. I agree that it will improve the novel and make the way everything goes wrong towards the end more heartbreaking, but I'm not a romantic soul and am long past my sell-by date. I had carefully avoided the romantic scenarios, hence my plea for guidance. If you can go one step further and advise me how to portray sex scenes, which are even harder, if you'll excuse the pun, than romance, then that would also be a huge help.

One of the sexiest - in a romantic way - passages in all literature, as far as I'm concerned, is the moment in Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night when Harriet, who is busy not-knowing that she's fallen in love with Peter, watches him as he's reading. It's the most beautifully written physical observation of the side of his face and, without there being a single adjective or abstract noun about how she feels or what she's thinking or what she guesses he's thinking, you absolutely know all those things. And then he looks up, she's "instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water", and he looks down again, attention riveted on the manuscript, "but he breathed as if he had been running". And she thinks, "So, it has happened. But it happened long ago... But does he know it? He has very little excuse, after this, for not knowing it", and she, and he, and so the whole relationship, have all changed. [Emma notes: Jerusha may not be quoting quite correctly, as she's in the Antarctic without a copy of the novel; I received this answer by paw of an obliging polar bear, on the way home from a holiday there.]

Everything that powers the next stage of the emotional plot is here, conveyed not explicitly - the word 'love' is never mentioned - but in the way that each character sees and reacts to the other one.

Read Full Post

Well-meaning Dr Jekyll, a scientist in Darwinian mode, is convinced he can separate good from evil in human nature so the bad part can be eliminated. The exposition of the plot and and songs was very clear, from Jekyll's initial appeal to a hospital board to allow him a human guinea-pig, to his eventual downfall. Upper-crust gatherings alternate with backstreet slums and and taverns until Jekyll's nature is overcome by his alter-ego Hyde and he keeps to his laboratory, venturing out only to murder enemies of society and abuse the prostitute girlfriend he picked up in a tavern. His behaviour comes to mirror that of the society he rails against.

Robert Louis Stevenson's story reminds us of our debt to Victorian writers for the creation of so many atmospheric works. Dr Jekyll synthesises a youthful Sherlock Holmes, a driven Doctor Frankenstein and a Charles Dickens charged with reformist zeal. On the darker side, Edinburgh-born Stevenson touches on Burke and Hare's gruesome activities, while the ghost of Jack The Ripper seems to hover over the stage.



Read Full Post

It’s the strangest thing, but I seem to be thinking about my mum all the time lately. She died quite suddenly more than two decades ago and although of course, she is always there in the back of my mind, it'd been a while since a memory pierced my heart and took my breath away, in a way that happened all the time in the early years.

Anyone who has suffered loss of any kind will I’m sure recognise that description.

But lately the oddest things have brought her into my mind and I’ve had to brace myself against waves of sadness that she’s no longer here.



Read Full Post

'm having singing lessons, purely for fun. And I've made a decision: I'm not, ever, going to apologise for not having practised. Never. These are my lessons, I'm paying for them, how much progress I make is up to me (until my teacher wants to give up on me) and I don't have a parent breathing down my neck*. But it's surprisingly hard to keep my resolution, and not just in my hobby, either. I'm writing a story at the moment to send in for a short fiction workshop with Ali Smith, and I'm already constructing the apologies in my head: I didn't have long; I know the prescribed title doesn't really fit my story; I'm terribly busy; I've had an awful cold... and they're all true. They're just not the point.

For a competition the only thing which matters is how you perform on the day, and I know of teachers of acting and singing who say the same: "You can't say that at an audition, so don't say it here." Of course a writing workshop is a different thing: it's about process, not just product; it's about what you're trying to do as much as what you've done. But when I'm running a workshop, I always say that we'll take it as read that what you're presenting is work in progress: if you didn't know it could be better, you wouldn't have brought it. Besides, apologies use time more usefully spent on that better-getting. And to that end, I say firmly, I will cut short any apologies or explanations of why this piece is rough/not very good/unsatisfactory.

Read Full Post