One of the old chestnuts that gets re-roasted every so often, by aspiring writers and those who try to help them, is the one about speech tags: this post is typical. On one side are the writers whose English teachers have told them to vary things by using "he giggled", "she grimaced", "they prevaricated" and so on. I assume it's partly by way of a bit of vocabulary practice, and partly in the cause of elegant variation, to avoid repeating "said". And it's true that once your repeat-alert is set to pick up any particular word, including "said", they'll shout at you. And on the other side are the writers for whom anything except "said" is clangingly over-stated and amateurish. Me? I'll be honest and say that I almost never see "said" in a novel and think it should be something else, and I very, very frequently see a something else and think it should be "said". The problem is, of course, that the argument gets over-simplified. It's obvious enough that "said" is "said", but there are several different kind of Other Speech Tag, and there's no sensible discussion to be had about when and whether to use them till you make those distinctions.

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A Monday hospital admission last month made me reach for something to distract me over the weekend. Nothing on my shelves promised an instant solution, but a Saturday afternoon trawl of Penge charity shops did the trick

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'So what do you want for Christmas?' I asked last year, expecting the usual muttered prevarications.
'A Kindle,' he replied, as quick as you like.
'Are you sure?'
'Yes. I've researched it.'

So there it was. Another dedicated reader opting into the cyber-zone. Only thing is, this was my father doing the opting. And he's eighty-four years old.


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A while ago I blogged about being drunk on words, and why it's a good sign in a beginner. Too many would-be writers think their writing is spare and muscular, when in fact it's just bald and impoverished. But if the writerly teetotallers are guilty of underwriting, then the inebriates are also guilty: of over-writing. "It's over-written" is a very baffling reaction to your work, even though it's a common one. The problem is that overwriting is very easy to feel, but even as a teacher I find it quite hard to analyse. So when a friend asked me to decode a comment about their writing being over-written, I had a think. And these are some of the reasons, I'd suggest, that your writing might seem over-written to others:

1) Too many adjectives and adverbs tacked onto each verb and noun. Concentrate instead on the verbs and nouns themselves, and the sensory, physical reality of the characters-in-action in their setting.

2) Too many fancy verbs bumping into each other: yes, a good verb works better than a dull verb spiced up with an adverb, but do give a strong verb the space to run without tripping up on the verb too close in front of it.

3) To many metaphors/similes/images/figurative language bumping into each other. You may think you wouldn't dream of mixing a metaphor, but you do need to be aware of the metaphorical content of, for example, off-the-peg phrases, or verbs which you're using in a figurative context, which you’re hardly aware are actually metaphorical themselves - a different metaphor.

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It's strange how a particular venue or a gimmicky detail can foreground certain aspects of a classic play. This was ilustrated by two local productions I attended recently, within weeks of each other.

On April 7th I saw Shakespeare's Scottish play at the Greenwich Playhouse, the cosy studio space over a pub near Greenwich station and the DLR. An all-black cast were brilliant in a production that drew parallels between an ancient African kingdom and the belief systems of medieval England.

More recently I went to a performance at Charlton House. A Jacobean manor house must be the perfect venue, I thought, for a performance of this darkest of Shakespearean tragedies. Best of all, it was on the bus route between Lewisham and Belmarsh

Strangely enough, the venue had as many drawbacks as it had benefits. Or perhaps it wasn't so strange after all that a a purpose-built theatre is always going to score over a stately home, even one with a wrap-round minstrel's gallery.


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A book.

To me, it’s a very special book. It’s not because of the cover, lovely though it is. But no one else will feel the need to coo and stroke the gold embossed bits as I have today. It has a delicious new smell but then, don’t all new books have that?

It joins the millions of other novels that are on sale. It could end up on a remainder pile or it could do really well. Who knows? It has to take its chances, along with all the rest.

But whatever happens, opening the package that contained it today was a moment pretty much up there with saying ‘I do’ and hearing ‘It’s a boy!’ for the first time. Because it’s my book.



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On the Online Self-Editing Course which I'm running jointly with Debi Alper, my tutorial was talking about characterisation, and I said that at the self-editing stage you need to ask yourself whether your characters are too off-the-peg. "Off-the-peg" is a term I owe to Susannah Rickards, originally for the kind of language which does the basic job perfectly well (and its "rightness" can seduce new writers into feeling it's really right) but is never really fresh. It sits somewhere between the fictioneers' "second-hand" and the poets' "received language", as a way of describing something which we've read or encountered many times before, although it hasn't yet degenerated into a confirmed cliché.

Are your bus drivers men, your nurses women, your teenagers sulky, your middle-aged mothers kindly? Do your Frenchwomen dress exquisitely and your Germans have no sense of humour and your elderly men wear cardigans? Of course we all fit some stereotypes of our age, gender, class, nationality and so on, but we all run counter to others. Off-the-peg characters, like off-the-peg language and off-the-peg plots, are the easiest for the reader to take on board, because the meaning is ready-made. The reader's mind slides straight over and moves on, because there's nothing new or different or surprising about the ideas, no individuality about characters who fit all our preconceptions, nothing about the arrangement of words which makes them come alive, no desirable difficulty to mean readers make the story their own.

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Last week I woke in hospital from a supposedly routine procedure to hear an apologetic surgeon telling me things had not gone quite to plan .

Eight days later and off the medication at last, I thought of my favourite comedy: Woody Allen's 1973 release, Sleeper. Allen plays a New York health-food shop owner who wakes in hospital to be told that 200 years have passd since he went in. His body has been frozen after a surgical slip-up .

'I knew it was too good to be true to when I got a parking spot near the hospital', he says, but the full awfulness of his situation hits him when he realises all his friends are dead, and the rent on his apartment is 200 years overdue

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You'll have noticed, by now, that as soon as you tease out an aspect of creative writing - a thread from the rope of the story - and discuss it, it has a way of twisting itself back up with everything else. Discussion of character turns out to be about structure; psychic distance leads on to narrators. And when, as has just happened to me, you encounter something like this, which gives all your ideas about narrators a good old shake-down and re-arrange, you find that it rearranges something, about everything, that you're doing. Which explains why, more and more, I find myself talking not about "your novel" or "your story" or "what you're trying to say", but about "your project".

Your Project, as I'm finding myself using it, isn't a euphemism for the grimmest kind of social housing, Detroit-style, nor is it the model of a mosque, or a medieval village, all wonkily glued, that you struggled with all through the last night of half term till your parent finally pushed your tearful body off to bed with promises to finish it for you. At the York Festival of Writing I found myself using the term all the time, particularly in connection with voice.

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It turned out to be the best musical I've seen for years. I expect I was influenced by the northern wartime setting, contemporary relevance and Alan Bennett's very funny script. Top quality directing by Richard Eyre, the magic of a state-of-the-art West End theatre and Sarah Lancahire leading a great cast. This is a hugely entertaining show.

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