I have just written 600 words, and it's 11.27 am. For me, that's huge! A good day. And I am thinking about ritual, because on my last day here at Anam Cara I realised that I sort of set up a ritual: breakfast, walk down to the river, sit for a while thinking about what I might write, or thinking about something else and waiting for it to come, it arriving, and going back to my room to write it - and writing it while also playing at least one game of online Scrabble (Wordscraper on Facebook) which helps me not get stuck. (I did this except the day it rained so heavily I couldn't see the garden at all.)

Sounds easy, no? It made me realise that I haven't had a ritual until now. Since we are moving countries in August and I don't know where we will be living, can I come up with one that isn't place-specific? What are your rituals? I'd love to hear what other people do.

And rules, do you have any? Apparently, Rick Moody has 14 of them, as he detailed in a recent interview in Night Train:


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If you've ever played the Chad Valley game Whoosit, you'll know it's very good training for developing the skills of young detectives. Each player conceals the identity of a mystery person from the other player, who has to use deductive reasoning to eliminate characters from their playing board. You must have played it. the players take it in turns to ask questions, usually based on the physical attributes of the characters, such as hair colour, sex, or whether or not the person wears glasses or earrings.

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Are they? I only ask because I’m sure I once killed one. You’ve heard of fratricide and patricide. This was a case of ficticide.

I didn’t mean to. I meant to nurture it until the day it would fly from the nest and bring back a lovely plump book deal wriggling in its beak.
Instead, it suffered the equivalent of being eaten by a neighbourhood cat. And it was all my fault.

Here’s how I did it.

Exhibit number one:
This is just a hunch, but I think the fact that I didn’t do any writing had something to do with the story’s failure to thrive. What I did instead was endless planning. This was an attempt to distance myself from the way I wrote its predecessor. My first attempt at a novel was put together in a state of wild abandon and unplannedness [yes reader, I was a panter of the highest order]. The result was a plot that had, shall we say, a loose and relaxed structure. In other words, it was rubbish. So this time I intended to plan my story to within an inch of its life.


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I had hoped to be able to announce some lovely news here but it isn't public yet so will have to rein myself in! The good news is that my week here at the Anam Cara writing retreat, which draws to a close tomorrow, has helped enormously, as I hoped it would. Not in terms of writing reams of words, but in turning what I had seen as a strange mess of vaguely connected bits and pieces about my character, into a much more coherent whole. I have around 10,000 words and can see some kind of sense developing across them, an arc, which, not a novel, I think I will call a "story", which may be book-length, slim or slightly wider. Clear? Yes, I thought so. Anyhow, structure has fallen into place, interestingly non-linear, and some themes are emerging which are signposting me onwards. So: direction. What more can a writer want?.......


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I've been teaching myself to draw. It seemed a nice way to spend my convalescence (nothing scary, don't worry), sitting in bed with the sun and the birdsong coming in through the open window and Quentin Blake and John Cassidy's Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered on my duveted lap. The book's very funny, very encouraging, very clever about how it gives you rock-bottom basic technique, and gets to the heart of the matter. And it's also being extremely salutary, because for the first time in a long time I'm trying to do something at which I'm a total beginner. Indeed, by almost all the measures you care to apply, I am Very Bad at drawing. I don't lack visual skills in the broader sense (my proudest qualification is my A Grade in A Level Photography, and I also have one in Art History), and I'm a good observer, and a better one since I started wanting to write what I see in my mind's or my bodily eye so that others can see it too. So why am I completely incapable of putting non-verbal marks on a page so they do the same? What neural channels are so blocked that my ducks don't just look wonky, they look like scribbles? Why does eye-mind-hand work about as well in me as I contemplate a teacup or imagine a tree, as it does in my two-year-old nephew?

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Anyway, for the last two or three years I've been commuting twice a week to Soho, climbing stairs to the top floor of a ramshackle stack of classrooms opposite Ronnie Scott's, between a stagedoor and a tattoo parlour.



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Like Alien vs Predator (though with slightly less gore and rather more swearing), the saga of Emma vs Technology continues.

I may have mentioned this before but, in the present circumstances, I feel it bears repeating: Technology Hates Me. It truly does. From the computer I still think of as 'new' that now insists on blue-screening with increasing regularity, to the mobile broadband that only lives up to half of its name (Mobile? Well, yes. Broadband? Not so much), the technological trappings of the modern world seem to be conspiring against me.

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Yesterday on Strictly Writing, Fionnuala Kearney uploaded a hilarious video called Crimes Against Fiction. She made it using Xtranormal, an incredibly clever website which I’d never heard of before but I’ve been having great fun trying it out. It’s free to have a basic account, or $40 a year for a premium account, which gives you more settings and choices of characters. This is my first attempt at a video!

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When we write, we create pictures in our heads. Which of us has not felt that a character’s face is as familiar to us as that of one of our own family, or “seen” a particularly dramatic scene as if it were unfolding inches away from us? This kind of creative visualisation is key to what we do – in a sense we’re not simply writers, but painters too, and without even having to pick up a brush. These mental pictures may be vivid to us, but they are also very personal. No matter how skilfully we describe a scene, or seek to capture the exact colour of a character’s hair in words, the chances are that we will never truly replicate what we see in our mind’s eye. Readers have their own pictures, and what they see in our writing may be a world away from what we ourselves believe to be truly there.

Of course, most of the time, the very privacy of these pictures in our heads prevents them from becoming an issue. What does it matter if one reader sees our MC as slight and brunette, another as curvy and blonde? – the chances are that we will never know. But there is one exception - one occasion when imaginary images become concrete – the moment when a book is given a cover. Cover designers have a daunting (and considering that most writers have strong views on their own work, an unenviable) task. They must effectively sum up a book in a single image. They must find the perfect picture to symbolise the conflicts, passions, themes and nuances that make up the complex tapestry of a novel. And because they have not written the book, they must interpret it through impartial eyes.


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This week I'd been thinking of writing a story which involved a woolly mammoth. I wrote it today (hurrah) and while I was doing my research I happened upon this, which, I reckon, is very, very cool so I thought I'd share.

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