‘How-to-write’ guides advise readers to analyse books they admire. I find the ones I don’t like are a more useful challenge. Some of the choices in my crime reading group are so hard to get into they drive me to scribbling names and events on post-it notes.


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My name is Steve, I'm 42, I'm a man and I'm almost divorced. I live on my own in Reading, work for a major software company and I drive a Ford Fiesta.

Anybody reading that sentence is almost certain to form preconceived notions about me. Some of the words or phrases that probably come to mind are: middle aged, geek, not affluent, bad at relationships, urban dweller, unimaginative, not romantic. And you'd be wrong about more than half of those.

But that's part of the power of words. The way you write also how you control the picture that you build up in people's minds. So writing is far more than just creating a grammatically correct sentence. It's more than just conveying action or description. It is fundamentally about painting a picture with words. The words you choose, the order in which you put them, have to create an image in the reader's mind just as vivid as if you showed them a photograph. And that's the challenge for me. Writing is easy. Telling a story is much, much harder.

So try again.

My name is Steve. I'm 42 and a refuge from the USA where I spent eight and a half years working as a senior engineer for the largest software company on the planet. And during those eight an a half years, we lived the American dream. We bought into credit, we filled the house with all manners of expensive goods, I drove a sports car and we ate out at the best restaurants in the city. For a long time, American Express regarded us as one of their top clients. And at work, I was flying high and scooping stock awards and bonuses every single year.

Then it all came crashing down.

Looking back, it isn't too hard to see where the fracture began. Microsoft builds and tears down product groups consistently, and after six years I found myself in a group that was torn apart and everybody scattered off to other divisions. I had a choice though. My general manager invited me over to his new group and managed to segue me into a role without all the interminable interviews needed.

But the new group was politically unstable. All manners of poor management and bad communication lead to our goals shifting one way and then the next, with no clear idea of what we were being brought together to create. And in the middle of all this, I became disillusioned. With myself. With everything around me. So I escaped it by spending more time in Europe on business trips. And while I was over there, I got to visit England again, and old friends and old families. I went traveling down to places where I used to live, and stood outside old homes where memories came flooding back. And, stripped bare, I suddenly realised that I lost sight of what I was. I wasn't really American. I wasn't really a high flyer. I had just gone along for the ride, fuelled by the high octane of illusionary easy credit. It works as long as you keep flying. But pause, slow down or stop and it all comes crashing down.

After two years trying to make the best of what was a truly bad job, I saw my marriage crumble and my attachment to the USA wither away in the cold winter of an increasingly oppressive social climate.

Then one day I saw an advert for an engineering job in the Reading arm of Microsoft. It was like a lifeline. I applied for the job, endured about 11 interviews total and came out of them feeling as if I was the dumbest person in the world. But to my surprise, the hiring manager called me back and offered me a job. And my old manager, who was already in despair at ever getting anything useful out of me, readily acquiesced to let me go.

And my wife, who saw little future for me in the USA, did the same.

I won't say it was easy parting. We were professional. We divided up, made lists and drew up schedules. Boxes appeared, were filled up, and were carted off. At night we slept uneasily. For a month the little pantomime went on and then we went to the airport together, hugged and I was on my way back.

Back in England, in a new job, a new apartment and a new life, the first thing I needed to do was rebuild the shattered pieces of my own confidence. It took two long years before I could feel as if I could look in shop windows at my own reflection. My apartment is basic, stripped of materialism and filled with space. That was my rebellion against the clutter and compact of my American lifestyle. I have no need of a sports car. Instead, I drive a simple, compact, car that gets me to where I need to be. Because it isn't how you get there that matters any more. It's just that you get there in the end.

So, start again.

I'm Steve. I'm 42 and I've had 42 amazing years on this earth and I hope to have 42 more of them. I'm still a senior engineer at the largest software company on the planet. I dress smartly and I look at my reflection in shop windows with approval and perhaps a little bit of conceit. I have a wide swathe of great friends around me, and I have the luxury of time. Perhaps I'm still romantic. And now I'm a writer. And although I live in Reading, close enough that I don't waste precious hours of my day commuting to and from work, I'm a country lad at heart. My dream is to retire to some little beach villa on the coast where I'll write, swim, sail in boats and play chess with an old fisherman who probably cheats when I'm not looking.

Hula!

I hesitated to start a writing blog because I'm already running two - there's the one about the U3A group I'm tutoring, as well as the Freedom Pass one I mentioned. Can I keep all three going?

I almost decided to start a new blog for the two months I spent in Spain before Christmas, but then I thought better not; it would be too short-lived.


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While we native speakers and writers delight in the many near-synonyms in the English language, it's a cause for confusion and mistakes for second language learners.

How much simpler it seems at first to discover that Chinese doesn't have all these variations. Instead of 'see', 'watch', 'glance', 'view' 'scrutinise', etc, etc, the single word in Chinese is 'kan'.

Exactly what kind of seeing is taking place is indicated by an additional word, e.g. kan shi=watching TV, kan shu=reading a book, kan haizi=looking after a child. You add the nuances yourself; after all, everybody knows watching over a child is not the same as reading a book.



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One of my favourite talks when I do school visits is the one I call “Teen Fiction Myths”. And one of my favourite myths is that teen fiction is a New Thing. I hear adults well under the age of 60 mentioning this all the time. “The kids of today are lucky,” they say. “We didn’t have any books aimed at teenagers in my day.”
“Really?” I always want to say. “You didn’t have fiction with teenaged protagonists, exploring coming-of-age issues and relationships from a teen point of view? Are you SURE?”
I don’t usually say that, though. If the person is lucky, I nod and smile and move on. But the unlucky few get me climbing on my soap box and saying the following, only in a lot more words and animated hand gestures, causing a lot more watch-checking and sudden-bus-arrival in my ‘listener’...


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Until recently I'd never heard of a writer editing, unless their day job happened to be with a publisher. As I've always used the words, editing is done by editors, and what I do, after I've got the first draft down on paper, is revising. But now I keep hearing aspiring writers say, "I'm editing at the moment." (Just to clarify, I tend to think of re-writing as what I'm doing when I leave behind a story which hasn't worked, and start again with some of the same ideas and characters, and approximately the same purpose, and polishing as the last pass to pick up minor slips and idiocies.)

But surely the important point is that anyone trying to write recognises that getting the first set of words down on paper is just the beginning. Does it matter what we call the next stage? I didn't think so, until I started hearing a scary number of aspiring writers saying "I've written the novel, now I've only got the editing to do and I'll be sending it out." From the talk on such threads it's clear that they see editing as a close-up process: excising unneeded words, bringing out a character more clearly, tightening up sentences. Of course, that's terribly important, and can make a huge difference to how well your story comes over; I often liken it to cleaning the windows on the Orient Express: if they're grubby enough you'll be able to tell mountains from deserts and night from day, but not much more, and who'd buy a ticket if that was all they were going to see? But it seems as if many beginner writers think this close-up attention is all that's needed once the story is basically told.

"Okay, but when did the revising happen?" I want to ask. When did you stand back and look at the whole novel? When did you really examing the structure of the bridge, counting the piers, measuring the spans, testing their structural integrity? When did you prod each character to see if they're really alive, and throw them at each other to check they really would behave as the plot requires? Now that you know what the story's really about, did you ask yourself if you've told it through the right pairs of eyes? In the right tense? Started and finished it in the right place? When did you open your ears and ask yourself if the voices are voices that a reader is willing to listen to, and for a whole novel?

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I've never skied in my life. Quite frankly, the weather here is rubbish, and once September arrives, I count down the days until mid to late March when we are promised at least a little bit of sunshine and warmth. I have an extreme dislike of cold weather, but watching the winter Olympics in Vancouver, coupled with enjoying the gorgeous scenery in Sky HD, has inspired me to want to be the next British skeleton champion. The speed, the exhilaration, the excitement, and even the wait as you take your place on the starting line at the sliding centre is just like writing a novel. Our experiences are not much different - both the athlete and the author have desires to be the best at their game and nothing stops them in the quest for that number one position.

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When I received an email over a year ago from You Write On saying they wanted to publish The Chronicles of Joya via a grant from The Art’s Council, my husband jumped around the room. I held back. I’d allowed myself to get excited over such things before and landed with a thud on Reality Earth that had left bruises the size of plates on my behind.
When Bloomsbury had read the first five pages of the book and asked to see the first three chapters, I didn’t sleep for a week. When an agent told me on the phone that her daughter loved my book and read it in a day, I let out a yelp. She popped the air out of my balloon when she continued with 'but your book doesn’t fit with my catalogue'. Even though she thought it was great and that I should definitely pursue other agents, it hurt. I’d so wanted her.


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Oh, how I love a good writing course.
They’re an opportunity to learn about the craft, to pick up tips from people in the know and to mix with like-minded folk. They’re also, if I’m brutally honest, a nice break from the everyday business of kids, work and walking the dog. As for the residential ones – they're even better. I’ve never been on a week long Arvon course [family, dog and job would not make the space for that quite yet] but I’ve been on two short courses through Cornerstones, which were worth every penny. I’ve also done a couple of evening classes through the London arts based body Spread the Word, run by the wonderful writer [and teacher] Maggie Gee.


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The other day, at the end of a class, we were talking about what writing each of us had on the go at the moment, and one member said that he had a couple of really compelling ideas - the sort of idea which is a cluster of an images, resonances and sounds - but they didn't seem to lead anywhere. He couldn't see what they were the beginning of, or how to develop them: he'd tried all sorts of techniques and ideas, and they led nowhere. And in a rare moment of inspiration, I suggested that maybe they weren't the beginning of a story, they were the end. Or maybe the middle, I said tentatively, as he looked struck all of a heap. But no, he said, at least one was definitely an end: his writing-cogs were already beginning to turn fast enough to tell him that.

This isn't a student who's new to the whole thing, but one who's been writing for some time, and done high-level courses. The basic creative writing dynamic of starting with a kernel and growing it makes a lot of sense, but where does the assumption come from, that one's always developing forwards?

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