Dear Jerusha; I have interest in my novel from an agent who has sent me very comprehensive editing notes. One of her broader comments was that the novel would appeal to female readers, who would expect a more romantic approach to my main protagonists' relationship. She wants me to show the sexual tension and electricity, flirting etc. that accompanies a new love. I agree that it will improve the novel and make the way everything goes wrong towards the end more heartbreaking, but I'm not a romantic soul and am long past my sell-by date. I had carefully avoided the romantic scenarios, hence my plea for guidance. If you can go one step further and advise me how to portray sex scenes, which are even harder, if you'll excuse the pun, than romance, then that would also be a huge help.

One of the sexiest - in a romantic way - passages in all literature, as far as I'm concerned, is the moment in Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night when Harriet, who is busy not-knowing that she's fallen in love with Peter, watches him as he's reading. It's the most beautifully written physical observation of the side of his face and, without there being a single adjective or abstract noun about how she feels or what she's thinking or what she guesses he's thinking, you absolutely know all those things. And then he looks up, she's "instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water", and he looks down again, attention riveted on the manuscript, "but he breathed as if he had been running". And she thinks, "So, it has happened. But it happened long ago... But does he know it? He has very little excuse, after this, for not knowing it", and she, and he, and so the whole relationship, have all changed. [Emma notes: Jerusha may not be quoting quite correctly, as she's in the Antarctic without a copy of the novel; I received this answer by paw of an obliging polar bear, on the way home from a holiday there.]

Everything that powers the next stage of the emotional plot is here, conveyed not explicitly - the word 'love' is never mentioned - but in the way that each character sees and reacts to the other one.

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Well-meaning Dr Jekyll, a scientist in Darwinian mode, is convinced he can separate good from evil in human nature so the bad part can be eliminated. The exposition of the plot and and songs was very clear, from Jekyll's initial appeal to a hospital board to allow him a human guinea-pig, to his eventual downfall. Upper-crust gatherings alternate with backstreet slums and and taverns until Jekyll's nature is overcome by his alter-ego Hyde and he keeps to his laboratory, venturing out only to murder enemies of society and abuse the prostitute girlfriend he picked up in a tavern. His behaviour comes to mirror that of the society he rails against.

Robert Louis Stevenson's story reminds us of our debt to Victorian writers for the creation of so many atmospheric works. Dr Jekyll synthesises a youthful Sherlock Holmes, a driven Doctor Frankenstein and a Charles Dickens charged with reformist zeal. On the darker side, Edinburgh-born Stevenson touches on Burke and Hare's gruesome activities, while the ghost of Jack The Ripper seems to hover over the stage.



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It’s the strangest thing, but I seem to be thinking about my mum all the time lately. She died quite suddenly more than two decades ago and although of course, she is always there in the back of my mind, it'd been a while since a memory pierced my heart and took my breath away, in a way that happened all the time in the early years.

Anyone who has suffered loss of any kind will I’m sure recognise that description.

But lately the oddest things have brought her into my mind and I’ve had to brace myself against waves of sadness that she’s no longer here.



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'm having singing lessons, purely for fun. And I've made a decision: I'm not, ever, going to apologise for not having practised. Never. These are my lessons, I'm paying for them, how much progress I make is up to me (until my teacher wants to give up on me) and I don't have a parent breathing down my neck*. But it's surprisingly hard to keep my resolution, and not just in my hobby, either. I'm writing a story at the moment to send in for a short fiction workshop with Ali Smith, and I'm already constructing the apologies in my head: I didn't have long; I know the prescribed title doesn't really fit my story; I'm terribly busy; I've had an awful cold... and they're all true. They're just not the point.

For a competition the only thing which matters is how you perform on the day, and I know of teachers of acting and singing who say the same: "You can't say that at an audition, so don't say it here." Of course a writing workshop is a different thing: it's about process, not just product; it's about what you're trying to do as much as what you've done. But when I'm running a workshop, I always say that we'll take it as read that what you're presenting is work in progress: if you didn't know it could be better, you wouldn't have brought it. Besides, apologies use time more usefully spent on that better-getting. And to that end, I say firmly, I will cut short any apologies or explanations of why this piece is rough/not very good/unsatisfactory.

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The emphasis was on the relationship between author and reader. With rapid developments in communication and publication technologies, traditional borders between writers and readers have been blurred, creating a new relationship within a new, often interactive, space. The question raised was 'What does technology mean for the future of the author?'

Appropriately for an event in the London School of Economics, a burning issue was how to make a living from writing. With desk-top publishing so cheap, publishers so unaccommodating to new writers and books available to download for pennies onto a Kindle, it looks as if future authors will require a private income. Plus ça change, I thought.



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Today I’ve eaten:

3 chocolate biscuits
1 Magnum Classic
1 cream egg
and a handful of licorice

...between lunch and tea-time. Oh, and a bag of cheese and onion crisps.

This is not good.


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I got asked the other day about the difference between Voice and Style in fiction, and I got a bit stuck because I don't really know. I never use the word "style" in the context of writing because it's unhelpful, I said, whereas "voice" comes up often. Clearly I do think something, so in the time-honoured tradition of finding out what I think by seeing what I say, and aware that I'm giving two workshops at the York Festival of Writing, one on Find your Voice, and one on The Writer's Voices, so I'd better have worked it out by then, here goes.

OED's most relevant definitions of "style" include: "the characteristic manner of literary expression of a particular writer, school, period etc. ... a particular or characteristic way, form or technique of making or producing a thing... a manner of performance", which is all very well as far as it goes. But then there's "stylish", which is at once admiring (when it's about hats) and also reductive (when it's about painting or poetry), because "style" has come to mean how something's done, not what it is, and by extension it implies too much concern with How, and not enough with What. Even the judgement that a certain writer is a stylist can, unfairly, suggest that vital things about storytelling are sacrificed to the desire for a good-looking performance.

There's also the unattractive label "prose style" for the nuts and bolts of doing a decent writing job using your command (or lack of it) of vocabulary, syntax, grammar and prosody.

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One of the perennial questions asked of writers - and among writers - is, "Are you a planner or a pantser?" Pantser as in "flying by the seat of your pants": the kind of writer who dives straight into the first draft, and sees what happens. And the opposite seems to be the planner: the ones who don't start until they know a good deal about where they're going. The planners are afraid of getting lost or stalling or going wrong if they don't have at least some kind of map in their hand; the pansters are afraid of being shackled or bored or going wrong if they do. And yes, both can go wrong, and I've seen the results: the planned novel where everything fits together as neatly as a jigsaw, and is just about as interesting and believable an evocation of real life; the pantsed novel whose open-ended exploration of characters' lives and experience seems... well, endless.

And then a friend, let's call her Nicola, who's just done her first writing course, said that she had a story she wanted to write: first person, and very much the story of that single character. "But I don't know the other characters well enough yet," she said. "I'm going to have to write it from their point of view, too. I don't want to, but I know that I need to." I asked why she didn't want to.

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The first three items were quartets of a very non-musical kind. They required a great deal of effort from the musicians to get the weirdest noises from their instruments. The viola player broke two strings and the violins and cello took a battering too. Even the composition with words, left until the end, seemed designed with the same intention to disturb. The meaning of the words was obscure, and conjured varying moods from sadness to frenzy, instead of making a narrative.

The first piece was the worst -like the sound track to a horror film, combining screeches in the attic, scrabbling in the cellars and a lot of rumbles and crunches as of wheels on gravel. I couldn't see how the sounds were produced, although we were on the second row, slightly to one side. My friend is French and elderly, so I was apologetic - but said she liked it, and that it reminded her not so much of someone strangling cats as the back-yard feline concerts remembered from her youth. 'They don't happen any more because they are all neutered!' She liked all natural sounds, she said.



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