Someone reading my post In Praise of the Long Sentence recently took issue with one of my examples, taken from un(der)educated, 15-year-old Anna's narrative in The Mathematics of Love:

They were tiny of course like all the other negs I'd looked at, but different because I was looking at them in one curling strip and all still wet: clear lavender-coloured shadows and dark skies, trees and pillars and windows and faces caught click after click, coiling and springing down the film one after the other so that all the distance and time between them was pressed into plain, pale bands of almost nothing.

Would an uneducated fifteen year old really talk like this, they asked; would she be this articulate, and in a sentence this long? I had gone very carefully about the business of finding a voice for Anna which was convincing (loose grammar, no metaphors but only similes, unsophisticated ways of saying things) but could also be as vivid and evocative of both things and ideas, as I needed it to be. But this question got me thinking, because of course Anna doesn't talk like this: this is not how she would say the same thought aloud. So how can her narrative voice - as opposed to her dialogue voice - be like this, if this isn't something she would say?

It's clear enough that if a narrative is in third person, then there's some kind of implied, external narrator, and that narrator by definition has a voice - a particular way of saying things - which may or may not be the writer's natural way of saying things. How much and when that voice takes on the colour of one or more characters' voices is the whole game with free indirect style, and that flexibility is one of the great advantages of a narrative in third person. But I would argue that even in a narrative in first person, it can be very useful to think of character-narrator James, say, as a subtly different entity from the James who inhabits the same novel-world as Jilly and Jonathan.

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I've had this book hanging about for a while, as the dog-eared state of the pages testifies. I'm surprised to discover it was published as recently as 2004.

'A perfect DIY guide' says a Sunday Times critic, and that about sums it up for me, too. It seems to be a 'does what it says on the tin' kind of book. I hope so, anyway.

I think it's the common-sense style as much as the topic coverage that makes me decide to read it in tandem with my 'construction ' book, Karen Wiesner's 30 Days to a Full Draft. I should say at this point that it seems to me that must be 30 days writing at top speed 18 hours a day. My lifestyle doesn't lend itself to that kind of pace or commitment. That said, I'm plodding along nicely, although I sometimes have to read the complicated instructions several times over.



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In honour of National Short Story Week, I’ve collated all the twisteries written so far. A round dozen:
Twistery #1.

The locked room was empty apart from the smell of decomposition. They ripped up the boards to find a corpse clutching a strong magnet.

Solution here.

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I was on a course yesterday. Not the most inspiring of days, since the tutors spent half the time going over the various parts of the assignment we have to hand in on 17th February. Can’t wait. It’s not all bad news, though. According to one of the tutors – who gave feedback on the first part – my case study is “really lovely” (what?). I had been planning on totally rewriting it, so that’s something I’ve wriggled out of.

From my course (which finished at 2.30 – only three and a half hours earlier than I usually leave work), it was but a short trip to the wonders of Lakeside, our nearest out-of-town shopping centre. Much as I desperately wanted to go home and get on with the staff panto, I felt it was only polite to spend the next five hours wandering aimlessly around TK Maxx. Rude not to.

How long can it take one person to choose a woolly hat for her youngest son? Over an hour, I’m here to tell you. I was at Lakeside, ostensibly, to buy Christmas pressies for the masses. I managed three (small) pressies, and spent the rest of the time gathering up armfuls and trolleyloads of things I’d never realised – until that moment – I needed.



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I’ve started something new. A diary of my research experiments as a crime writer. As is the way with all things twittery, it may get a little interrupted as I am distracted by other people’s tweets. But hopefully enough of a thread will show through.

I’ve only just started, so you haven’t missed much. So far I’ve talked about the problems of having a corpse stashed under the floor boards. To begin with it was the smell, which didn’t go down too well with the rest of the family. Now, it’s the swarms of flies that are getting us down, me included if I’m honest.

Ah well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and you can’t write a crime book without doing the research.

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Welcome to my blog!

I am the original wriggling writer… Forever trying to wriggle out of actually parking my bum on a seat and putting words on paper… Don’t know why – I love writing with a passion – but sometimes it all just feels like too… much… effort…

The excuses I come up with range from the reasonable – kids, teaching, housework (yeah, right) – to the ridiculous. Here are some of my latest get-out clauses:

I absolutely had to play SSX, Banjo-Tooie, and… um… Singstar. Had to. Life or death, don’t you know?
It was imperative that I watch House, Bones, Fringe and just about every other one-word-title American series on Sky. Had to be done (really – the planner was nearly full. Disaster loomed).
I urgently needed to read other people’s blogs and books… ABOUT WRITING.
Guess I could have called this blog OWN WORST ENEMY dot com.

Does anyone have any even more pathetic reasons for avoiding writing? I’d love to hear them… I’m always up for a new angle on avoidance tactics ;~)

Tonight I’m not avoiding writing the WIP. I’ve been asked to write the staff panto (roll of drums…).

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Why I thought driving to Preston and back could be done over five days staying in Travelodges I don't know. By the time we'd packed and unpacked, found places to eat, lost our way and tried to check in at the wrong ones it added hours to the total journey time.

Thank goodness I thought to go to the library and borrow a couple of audiobooks. It made the driving, especially the long two hours between Birmingham and London, almost pleasurable.

I've learned a bit about which tapes to choose. A long drive to Edinburgh last year was aptly enlivened by Ian Rankin's Exit Music. The latest one we tried was Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, and what with the careful build-up of characters and descriptions of landscape, it was all too leisurely. A drive to Worthing and back didn't allow sufficient time. We came back to London with one of the six tapes still to go, but lacked the will to finish when we were no longer a captive audience.



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When the police recovered 100 incomplete packs of playing cards from his house, they knew they had their man.


DCI Stafford liked to reminisce about the old days. The days before DNA tests and psychological profiling. The days when PC was just a rank in the police and nothing to do with minding your Ps and Qs with the birds.

He called them “the bad old days”, but there was a catch in his voice that suggested he regretted their passing. But maybe that was more to do with getting old than any true longing for a return to that particular time. Your past was the only past you had. As your future shrank, it was natural to look back on days gone by with a certain wistful wonder, no matter how awful those days had been to live through. And then, of course, there were the friends lost along the way.

“We might not have always got it right in the bad old days, but we didn’t always get it wrong either,” he had the habit of telling DS Ringer.

Nine times out of ten, Ringer would roll his eyes and zone out. But every tenth time, Stafford would say something that would make his younger colleague sit up and listen.

Like the time he said: “Take the Birmingham Six.”

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