I'm reading a fascinating book, The Art & The Ego: the art and strategy of fiction writing explored, which is a collection of essays by all sorts of writers from Robertson Davies to Marina Warner, by way of the Johns Mortimer and Banville, and Sara Paretsky. It's edited by Clare Boylan, and it's out of print; I got it from the library, but it's so brilliant that I've just bought a copy secondhand, partly so I can read it in the bath with a clear conscience, and take a pencil to it too, but also because I know I'm going to keep going back to it, beyond the limits of even the London Library's patience.

What sent me to find this book was a forum conversation about my statement that I never write worse than when I've got a textbook, or a history book, or a guidebook, in my other hand. A friend quoted this, from Rose Tremain's essay (my italics):

...all the research done for a novel - all the studying and reading, all the social fieldwork, all the location visiting, all the garnering of what is or what has been - must be reimagined before it can find a place in the text. It must rise into the orbit of the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind before it can acquire its own truth for the work in question...

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Mea Culpa. It was my turn to post on Strictly today and I've somehow managed to miss this fact. However, my colleagues have suggested posting this video on the subject of rejection - which is actually very funny and a little bit empowering.



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I've asked before whether you've ever thought about the order in which you put the elements in your sentence. And my post on the joys of the long sentence is relevant too, because of course a longer sentence, in our lovely, bendy, syntactical English, gives you more opportunities: you can play with rhythm and sound, with subtleties of meaning, with front-loading the sentence or keeping the grenade for the end. You can fine-tune for the period or the voice, for the character or their state of mind.

So when, the other day, I found myself writing the first version of what follows, I decided to do a writerly five-finger exercise with it. How many ways could I recast the sentence while retaining the exact sense by not changing the logic of the relationship between the five main elements: He, Surprise, Fierce, His-Need and Find-Out. And I'm sure there are more permutations I haven't thought of. I'm going to leave you to do the Maths about what works, what doesn't, why, and when you might use which. Yes, one or two of them do sound like off-cuts from the Star Wars script. But then you never know when you might need just that, do you?

* He was surprised by how fiercely he needed to find out.
* He was surprised how fiercely he needed to find out.
* He was surprised [by] how fierce was his need to find out.
* He was surprised [by] how fierce his need was to find out.
* He was surprised [by] how fierce his need to find out was.
* He was surprised by the fierceness of his need to find out.

* He was surprised that in him the need to find out was so fierce.

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As if trekking to Hammersmith last Friday evening on the Tube–my least favourite mode of transportation in the entire world–was not challenging enough, I got lost when I got there.

Don’t laugh. You would have too had you emerged from a distressing underground situation to an equally distressing above ground reality, of construction. Feeling scattered, I considered turning around and going home.

But I was scheduled to meet Paul to see a play, albeit one I had never heard of, and he was already on route by car. Over the phone, he insisted all I had to do was follow signs to the Apollo (what signs?), go under the underpass (don’t see it either), turn right on the first road, then take a sharp left and another left and I’d be at Riverside Studios.

I don’t think so. By the time Paul found me, or shall I say, I found him parked out front of the Apollo, I was shell shocked, having crossed one of the busiest roads in London with traffic coming full speed on.

And then when we got to Riverside Studios one minute until the hour, my dear husband insisted that I go ahead, get the tickets and secure our seats before curtain call while he parked the car. To make a long story short, I didn’t make it.

Thus, we stood outside of the relevant studio’s doors with three other late comers for twenty minutes before they would let us in. Once inside, however, it didn’t take long to know it was well worth the hassle and the wait.

A Round-Heeled Woman, starring Sharon Gless, is awesome! Thank goodness. Otherwise, Paul and I might not be speaking today. But as fate would have it we both so loved everything about the performance of the former Cagney and Lacey star, we can’t stop raving about it.

As talented as ever, the spirited Sharon Gless has no trouble keeping her audience entertained for the full one hour and forty minute running time without so much as a small break.

Based on Jane Tuska’s book of the same name, which tells a true story by the way, the play follows what happened after Jane placed the following ad in The New York Review of Books:

“Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Trollope is the ultimate tip off here for what this play is about; more than a middle aged woman’s desires to have sex. It’s about coming to terms with the past and the present before finding happiness in the future. It also looks at how urgent this might become as one ages.

Writer and director Jane Prowse parallels the lives of Jane, 66, and the eponymous Miss Mackenzie, 35, of Anthony Trollope’s 1865 novel to tell a brilliant story within a story.

Both heroines are on a profound journey–Jane to find love, or at least feel love under the name of sex, and Miss Mackenzie to find love in the name of marriage, though neither of them have particularly promising prospects. Enough said. I don’t want to spoil this must see play for anyone. It’ll be at Riverside Studios until November 20.

Gless and her co-star Beth Cordingly are not the only attractions either. The entire cast is amazing, all of them taking on at least two roles each, which means remarkable versatility and unbelievable agility.

But don’t go getting the idea that this play is distasteful–quite the opposite. While it is not without grit, A Round-Heeled Woman, leaves much to the imagination and is tastefully done. In spite of the difficult beginning, it was a happy ending indeed!

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From the first poem you show a friend or a teacher, to five-page editorial letter from an agent who might take you on if you get the novel right, to a TLS review of your twentieth book, as a writer you never stop getting feedback on your writing. I've talked before about the basic decision about accept-adapt-ignore. But sometimes even that isn't enough to stop you agonising about whether you should change something in your writing because of what someone's said. And I would suggest that who that Someone is, is part of the decision.

These days it would be very un-PC not to say that everyone's opinion of your writing is valid, and in one sense that's true. But the flipside of that is that no one's opinion is valid in any meaningful sense, unless you choose to accept its validity. It's not arrogant to decide that you don't need someone's opinion of your writing: it's part of being a writer. I've seen so many aspiring writers have their confidence - and therefore their writing - wrecked, sometimes permanently, by being in the wrong environment (and not just that one particular, cultishly vicious online group). Even in good groups I've seen writers ruin a piece by trying to write by writers'-circle-committee, or by believing the all-too-many critiquers who critique by the rule book. Some of that is lack of confidence in a critiquer who doesn't know good writing when they see it, so they look for boxes ticked. Some is lack of confidence or experience in the writer, who can't hear their own instincts, or doesn't trust them.

Having said that, here are some questions to ask yourself about that Someone, when you're trying to decide if you should accept what they say.

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Over on her excellent blog, The Elephant in the Writing Room, Sally Zigmond's been talking about Showing and Telling. And as well as flattering the Itch by linking to my own post about it, she makes a very good point that trying to Show often leads writers into endless, endless details about missing the alarm-clock switch, and scrambling out of bed and tripping over the dog and dropping things and running out of breath and tumbling onto the train and feeling sweaty when shaking the MD's hand.... and all to Show what could be told: John arrived at the office late, hot and flustered.

Undoubtedly, lots of beginner writers do this - and lots of more experienced writers find that in revision they have done it too, and cut a lot of it. So it's obvious that this kind of too-much-stuff comes naturally to many of us. But I have heard aspiring writers say "showing takes longer", and I don't think it's necessarily true, as the examples in my post about Showing and Telling prove. In other words, I'm not sure that it's fair to blame Showing, in itself, for the problem of Too Much Stuff. I think it comes from various, very natural, aspects of the process.

Writing to find out what you're really trying to say. If you're a Cutter, as a writer, then it's by putting words on the page that you find out which are the words you really need, and which you don't. You just have to remember, when revising, that you need to dust down each sentence to see which ones are really earning their keep.

Leaving in the scaffolding. This is a slightly different matter

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Of course, this week’s post is inspired by the whole NaNoWriMo phenomenon – God, as though we haven’t got enough reasons to hate November already!

For anyone who hasn’t come across this yet, the link is here:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/about/whatisnano

Billed as a ‘fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing’, the idea is that you start writing on 1st November, with the aim of writing a 50,000 word novel (or I suppose 50,000 worth of a longer one) and finish by midnight on 30th November...

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Once upon a time there was a Tortoise. Her name was Ms Plotter (Beatrix, if you were on first name terms with her, but that took a loooong while) and she lived in a carefully constructed box at the bottom of the garden. Ms Plotter had many fine qualities: she was steady as a rock, methodical and tenacious. Somewhat shy and retiring, but hey, who's perfect? Ms Plotter minded her own business, which happened to be the Writing of a Novel entitled Slow. Every few years she would add another chapter to her oeuvre. This chapter perfectly echoed the stepsheet made of colour-co-ordinated index cards that she had created before writing a single word. She would then spend several months refining and editing said chapter until it was perfect. All this made her very happy.



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Why I never want to hear back from the agent who has my novel.

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‘Right,’ said my editor, ‘This time round, how about planning a fairly detailed skeleton of the book before you start writing? That way,’ she added sweetly, ‘we can avoid any complications or snags with the plot right at the start.’


She made it sound so reasonable. ‘Okay,’ I replied in a strangled voice, ‘I’ll certainly give it a go.’ And then I rhythmically banged my head on the wall for several minutes, keening a little at the same time.

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