If you're a writer, then you're never really happy just to experience something in its moment: there's always a restlessness, a frustration-in-waiting, until you can get it out of your self and onto paper. And you know the phenomenon I was talking about in Opening the Doors, where you've been reading or listening to something and it seems to skin you - or tenderise you, as Alan Bennet's Queen has it? For a while you're extra-alive to the world round you: all six sense, words, images, things strangers say, ideas for stories, and bits of your own memory, and it's wonderful, in a strange sort of way. I'm not one for illegal substances, but when I read The Doors of Perception I recognised something of that intensity of experience.

But when those two, simple writer-readerly experiences come together, it can be almost overwhelming.

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I’ve been memed. Barry Forshaw, critic, author and editor of the CrimeTime website, has named me in the Next Big Thing. Ten questions in ten minutes is the idea.

So here goes:
1) What is the working title of your next book?

The book is called The Mannequin House. It started life as a novella called The Monkey and The Mannequin. Or was it the Mannequin and the Monkey? Something like that. I suppose that was the working title.
2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

The book’s set in a department store in 1914. I love the idea of those early department stores and have long wanted to write a novel set in one – ever since reading The Ladies’ Paradise by Zola. The store in my book is loosely based on Whiteleys. I discovered that William Whiteley was shot and killed in his own store. So that fed into my story.

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I invited people to ask me questions about my new book, The Mannequin House, or about my writing in general. I got so many great questions that I decided to split the answers into three videos.

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A friend - let's call her Peta - who writes successfully at the lighter end of women's fiction, including short stories for the womags, has just had one of the more baffling rejections: that her characters lack emotional depth. Her natural writing voice is light and lively, as she is herself, and she doesn't write or read heavily-charged emotional novels. But, as she says

The irony is, I am a very emotional, sensitive person in real life! But yes, I do have a very jokey, lightweight side which is what most people who meet me see, and which comes across mostly in my writing voice. ... When I try to make a story emotional, it does seem to work in terms of sales, but it all feels very clinical. You know, I put in a few meaningful looks, or sighs, or cracked voices...

On the other hand, she doesn't have a problem in writing about things closer to her heart and engaging her more sensitive, emotional side: and she's had success in more literary milieux with this kind of story. But for her womag stories, and the novel her agent is trying to sell, the problem of "lack of emotional depth" does keep on cropping up.

Just in case you're about to stop reading this and go back to the chapter of your own novel where distraught parents are forced to shovel their own babies into the maw of your best flesh-eating monster yet, I should say straight away that this really isn't a problem which afflicts only those who are actively trying to sell into a market that doesn't want too much angst.

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A friend of mine had her novel picked up by an agent at a writing festival, and the agent sold it to a major publisher as the first of a two-book deal. The book was published a few months ago, it's doing well, and everything's wonderful ... except that now she has to write that second novel. She has to write it for someone who's already bought it, while coping with the first novel being out there, to sell to people who'll be expecting something in the same mould only different... and to a deadline. And my friend - let's call her Sally - is a self-confessed slow writer not least because she's an obssessive re-writer-as-she-goes, refusing to move on from a paragraph or a page until it's absolutely right.

So when I bumped into her at a launch the other day, I said carefully, "Shall I ask how it's going, or would you rather I didn't?" But she was very cheerful, and said that because of the deadline she's had to work out a new process, and it's working really well.

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This is the book of verse for Christians, written by yours truly, that I have teased the last couple months. Just before Thanksgiving the FedEx folks backed their truck up and unloaded. (They were super-nice about it. I didn’t even have to use my stock sore back excuse.) The Psalter for the 21st Century is all new. The poems were all rewritten and revised, often many times. There are also...Read More Here...

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I was so impressed by the Chinese attitude to education that I've studied Mandarin ever since. No wonder I was keen to attend a book talk at Asia House about the founder of Singapore. His statue graces a harbour setting, next to what seems to be a theatre, going by my photo. I remember it as an art gallery. Raffles Girls and Raffles Boys were the most prestigious secondary schools on the island; our visitors always enjoyed sitting in the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel drinking Singapore slings. Quite a change from South London pubs.


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One of the perennial questions is "What's the difference between plot, and story?", and I've just come across the best definition I've ever heard. It's by Paul Ashton, who's the Development Producer at the BBC's Writers Room:

Plot is the route you take; story is the journey you make.

What that means to me is that if the reader starts the book asking, "What will this all be about?", then story is the reader's experience of reaching the real answer. And that's just as true when the story is about whether Private Ryan will be saved, as when the story is about whether a young man will change his manners and a young woman change her mind, as the introduction to my Penguin Pride and Prejudice puts it.

Plot, then, is the engineering that makes "What It's About"5 actually happen, stage by stage. "A causally related chain of events" is the dictionary definition of narrative, and plotting is the business of setting up those events and the causal relations that chain them together.

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So here I am all alone with a rifle, a fiddle, a mandolin, a laptop, an ipod, broadband, and not a drop of alcohol in the place. My, hasn’t deer camp revelry changed in the 21st century? But life is...Read More Here...

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A survey a couple of years ago found that the job most people wanted to have was being a writer, presumably because we all know it only takes a bit of sitting down and a good idea or two, don't we? And yet at the York Festival of Writing this year, a panel of agents was asked whether they'd like to be a writer, and with a horrified intake of breath every agent said, "No, not at all." I laughed because I knew exactly what they meant - in fact, I was surprised to see a forum comment later that heard that horror as condescending. It's not scorn for the writerly trade that makes most agents and writers know they couldn't and don't want to be writers, it's having more knowledge than most of what being a writer is like. If they're occasionally exasperated and frequently baffled by us, then it's hardly surprising: it's a rare writer who isn't exasperated and baffled by their own self, after all.

There are agents who are writers - poets, novelists, non-fictioneers - just as there are editors who are; I'd never say that it's not possible, and I can say from personal experience that having a novelist for your editor means you get, among other things, the most fantastic blurbs. But agents are the nearest professional thing a writer has to a best friend, and they know that earning a living by writing is hard, insecure and lonely ...

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