The emphasis was on the relationship between author and reader. With rapid developments in communication and publication technologies, traditional borders between writers and readers have been blurred, creating a new relationship within a new, often interactive, space. The question raised was 'What does technology mean for the future of the author?'

Appropriately for an event in the London School of Economics, a burning issue was how to make a living from writing. With desk-top publishing so cheap, publishers so unaccommodating to new writers and books available to download for pennies onto a Kindle, it looks as if future authors will require a private income. Plus ça change, I thought.



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Today I’ve eaten:

3 chocolate biscuits
1 Magnum Classic
1 cream egg
and a handful of licorice

...between lunch and tea-time. Oh, and a bag of cheese and onion crisps.

This is not good.


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I got asked the other day about the difference between Voice and Style in fiction, and I got a bit stuck because I don't really know. I never use the word "style" in the context of writing because it's unhelpful, I said, whereas "voice" comes up often. Clearly I do think something, so in the time-honoured tradition of finding out what I think by seeing what I say, and aware that I'm giving two workshops at the York Festival of Writing, one on Find your Voice, and one on The Writer's Voices, so I'd better have worked it out by then, here goes.

OED's most relevant definitions of "style" include: "the characteristic manner of literary expression of a particular writer, school, period etc. ... a particular or characteristic way, form or technique of making or producing a thing... a manner of performance", which is all very well as far as it goes. But then there's "stylish", which is at once admiring (when it's about hats) and also reductive (when it's about painting or poetry), because "style" has come to mean how something's done, not what it is, and by extension it implies too much concern with How, and not enough with What. Even the judgement that a certain writer is a stylist can, unfairly, suggest that vital things about storytelling are sacrificed to the desire for a good-looking performance.

There's also the unattractive label "prose style" for the nuts and bolts of doing a decent writing job using your command (or lack of it) of vocabulary, syntax, grammar and prosody.

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One of the perennial questions asked of writers - and among writers - is, "Are you a planner or a pantser?" Pantser as in "flying by the seat of your pants": the kind of writer who dives straight into the first draft, and sees what happens. And the opposite seems to be the planner: the ones who don't start until they know a good deal about where they're going. The planners are afraid of getting lost or stalling or going wrong if they don't have at least some kind of map in their hand; the pansters are afraid of being shackled or bored or going wrong if they do. And yes, both can go wrong, and I've seen the results: the planned novel where everything fits together as neatly as a jigsaw, and is just about as interesting and believable an evocation of real life; the pantsed novel whose open-ended exploration of characters' lives and experience seems... well, endless.

And then a friend, let's call her Nicola, who's just done her first writing course, said that she had a story she wanted to write: first person, and very much the story of that single character. "But I don't know the other characters well enough yet," she said. "I'm going to have to write it from their point of view, too. I don't want to, but I know that I need to." I asked why she didn't want to.

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The first three items were quartets of a very non-musical kind. They required a great deal of effort from the musicians to get the weirdest noises from their instruments. The viola player broke two strings and the violins and cello took a battering too. Even the composition with words, left until the end, seemed designed with the same intention to disturb. The meaning of the words was obscure, and conjured varying moods from sadness to frenzy, instead of making a narrative.

The first piece was the worst -like the sound track to a horror film, combining screeches in the attic, scrabbling in the cellars and a lot of rumbles and crunches as of wheels on gravel. I couldn't see how the sounds were produced, although we were on the second row, slightly to one side. My friend is French and elderly, so I was apologetic - but said she liked it, and that it reminded her not so much of someone strangling cats as the back-yard feline concerts remembered from her youth. 'They don't happen any more because they are all neutered!' She liked all natural sounds, she said.



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It's often quoted as "Show, don't tell" because, on the whole, beginner writers do too much telling when they should be showing. But of course it's not nearly as simple as that. Both have their value; the key is to understand their respective strengths, and use each to your story's best advantage. Mind you, like everything in writing, it isn't even binary, but a spectrum, from the telliest tell, to the showiest show.

SHOWING is for making the reader feel they're in there: feel as in smell, touch, see, hear, believe the actual experience of the characters. As John Gardner says, it's by being convincing in the reality and detail of how we evoke our imagined world, that we persuade the reader to read the story we're telling as if it really happened, even though we all know it didn't. That means working with the immediate physical and emotional experience of the characters and their actions.

TELLING is for covering the ground, when you need to, as a narrator (whether the narrator is a character, or an implied, external narrator in a third person narrative). It's the storyteller saying "Once upon a time", or "The mountains were covered in fine, volcanic ash". So it's a little more removed from the immediate experience of the moment.

Telling: They stood close and wrapped their arms round each other in a passionate embrace, so that she became aware that he had been riding, and then that he was as nervous as she was.

Showing: They gripped each other and the tweed of his jacket was rough under her cheek. His hand came up to stroke her hair; she smelled leather and horses on the skin of his wrist. He was trembling. [Note that though showing is often a bit longer than telling the same thing, it isn't here, and it needn't be.]

Telling: He was tall and attractive to women, being so charming to them that they fell for him immediately and never guessed how little he cared for them.

Showing: Show us how he stands at the bar, how Anna looks up into his face and sees love in his smile, and then show us what he says, in the gents, about making sure this girl - what's her name? - Anna, doesn't discover his address.

It can help a lot to think in terms of psychic distance, which I've also blogged about here. For now...

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Being between houses is proving to be an enlightening experience. Did you watch Mary Portas on estate agents the other night?
Prospective Purchaser: 'Which direction does the house face?'
Indifferent Estate Agent with Provocatively Spiked Hair: 'West. Of course, West is the new South.'
Like 50 is the the new 30. Grey is the new Black. Going out is the new Staying In. Rejection is the new Acceptance...?
It's no coincidence, I think, that estate agents are the keyholders to prospective houses, just as literary agents are the gatekeepers for publishing houses.


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I'm in what's for me a rare state: I'm not writing a novel. But the other day I needed something to take to my writer's circle, the Clink Street Writers, for the likes of Sarah Salway, Pam Johnson, Ros Asquith and Michelle Lovric to sink their teeth into. So I did something else which is rare for me: dug out a short story which I wrote about five years ago, and which I never really got right but still think could be got right.

It's a story that started as an exercise in a third thing which is rare for me: a third person narrative, with a moving point of view and therefore a neutral but implied omniscient narrator. I'd had an interesting time doing this with my two viewpoint characters my story Russian Tea so I decided to try working with three. Point of view becomes a much more interesting affair if each viewpoint character has reasons to feel strongly about the others, so I set up a newly-married couple, and sent the man's best friend to visit them. And since it was set around 1830, I wanted a narrative voice which had a feel of the period.

But in reading it after so long a gap, I found it curiously distanced. I can't remember if that's what I felt didn't work before, but it certainly is now.

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