One of the good things about teaching creative writing for the Open University is that I have permanently at my elbow one of the best and most comprehensive writing-courses-in-a-book, Linda Anderson and Derek Neale's Creative Writing, which is the coursebook for A215. But it was a student who mentioned something that the poet W. N. Herbert says, in his chapter on "Theme":

There may be a set of subjects we write about which, on examination, share an underlying theme. Like voice, this is better discovered than imposed, but this does not preclude the search. The attempt to address large issues or grand abstractions often occurs when a writer has little idea of what they write well about.

I've talked before about how we tend to assume that first we get an idea, and then we bring our craft and talent to bear on it, and use them work it out into a story. And I went on to think about how it might be a good idea to think sometimes in reverse: working out what ideas and kinds of stories your particular capacities are most suited to, and writing them. What gets your best writing out of you, in other words? One of the reasons I ended up putting the novel before the WIP in a drawer is that I had deliberately given myself a kind of story which didn't play to my known strengths. I wanted to do it, and it was very good for me: I learnt a huge amount, as you always do when you set yourself a challenge, and one thing I learnt is that the story hadn't allowed me to do some of the things I'm best at. In the long term, by taking more such risks risk I shall learn to write well what that kind of story needs, stretching both my repertoire, and my toolkit. In the short term, I couldn't make the novel work. But it was worth it, for everything I learnt.

So this relationship between what you want to write, and what you write best about, isn't straightforward.

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I love to attend London Fringe Theatre performances in return for writing reviews and I'm especially happy to attend press nights at the Greenwich Playhouse. Over the past 17 years or so I've seen many excellent European classics in the inimate studio setting of the 80-seater theatre above a pub.

The Prince of Orange, as it used to be called, was located next to Greenwich Rail and DLR stations. The Galleon Theatre Company, under partners Alice de Sousa and Bruce Jamieson, who undertook acting roles, directed and translated plays, guaranteed a modestly priced but thoroughly enjoyable night out.

The name of the venue is now Belushi's, no longer pub but a wine bar, with a backpackers hostel accessed to the rear of the bar, through the same door that leads to the upstairs theatre.

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People simply don’t understand how much work goes into being a writer, do they? They fail to comprehend the many and varied activities that fill up our diaries. If only they knew what our schedules looked like, right?

First there’s the internet work: emails, Twitter, Facebook. After all, a writer needs to engage with social networking. Next: GoodReads, writers’ forums, endless blog subscriptions on Google Reader. And of course we’ve got our own blogs to update.


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Back when I was talking about writing sex scenes, I talked about how they can confuse your writerly compass into forgetting a basic rule of writing: "you only need to write as much of the scene, and as much of the detail, as needs to be in there for the larger purposes of the story." Of course "larger purposes" doesn't just mean the bare bones of a plot - the particular details in a detective story which are red herrings or express the character of the victim are just as important as the actual clues and the murderer's motive. But I was surprised, the other day, when a friend who writes good, high-end mum lit said that she always starts narrating a scene where the action starts, and writes it in more-or-less real time through to the end.

I love my friend's books, so my surprise isn't a criticism. And Shakespeare had to do it, because he had to get his actors on and off stage, with no curtains or blackouts to help; it takes a reasonably experienced audience to understand what's going on in, say, Shared Experience's physical, crosscutting of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. But one of the joys of prose fiction is that by integrating everything of life into a single narrative which has no physical, sensory content at all, we're liberated from the awkwardness of physical representation. So there's no necessity to write the whole of a scene in real time.

Most students quickly grasp the idea that you might start narrating a scene in medias res, and only a little later they realise that you might cut it before the end. But it much more rarely occurs to them that you might skim over bits of the middle;

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The Strictly team have invited me along to tell you about how I managed to escape the slushpile and find myself an agent.

You see, it all began with a comment I read on this very blog.


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All last week I was on a demanding immersion course in Spain, so I put the lacklustre nature of the first half of this book down to tiredness. After page 200, though, when the killer's point-of-view was introduced, it suddenly picked up. It was no effort to finish it during the return journey. I was all ready next day, it being the third Saturday of the month, to discuss it at my local crime readers' group.

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Something momentous happened today; I made up my mind...

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There's no doubt about it; even in a mild winter London is dim and dismal. When I see TV images of East Yorkshire, though, usually covered by floodwater or threatened by gales, I count my blessings.This happens when a friend, currently teaching abroad, makes her twice-yearly return to check on the house that her mother left her, in a village near Hull. I wondered what she'd think of David Hockney's portrayal of her home territory, which contradicts the wind-swept greyness I remember from my visits.

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Are you a writer if you're not actively writing?

Deep, man. A friend posed this a little while back, in the rhetorical fashion. As I remember, all of us readily agreed with sentiment; after all, it's about slogging and grafting, not coasting. But I can't help thinking the question has a telling ring of 'if a tree falls in the forest' about it, and much like that old favourite, I think the answer entirely depends on your terms.

I've had a think about it (it takes me a while) and I've come to the conclusion:


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Do you believe in magic?

I do. You may call it different things depending on your outlook – coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity, chance, intuition, ‘the universe’, flow, fate or grace. Whichever, it exists for me just as surely as the material world does

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