Yesterday I announced why I won’t be publishing Twistery #17 on my blog, instead making it available as a free PDF for anyone who wants it. If you’d like to read it, all you have to do is get in touch via my contact form.

As a further incentive, I’ve decided to offer a prize for those people who do request a copy of the Twistery. Ahead of the launch of the fourth book in my series in May, I’ll give away one signed copy each of the first three books, A GENTLE AXE, A VENGEFUL LONGING and A RAZOR WRAPPED IN SILK.

All you have to do to enter is request the PDF of Twistery #17 and then look out for the simple question I’ll be asking on this blog sometime over the next five days. The answer to that question will be in the Twistery solution you will have received.

Read Full Post

How the critiques you receive depend on the form you are writing and how much of the piece people are able to read.

Read Full Post

I’ve decided not to publish Twistery #17 on my blog, but I will make it available – together with the solution – as a free PDF to anyone who wants it. Just contact me through my contact form.

I’ve got two reasons for doing this. First, as an experiment, just to see if anyone is interested in these Twisteries enough to actively request one. And second, well, the content of this Twistery is perhaps a little sensitive. I may be being a bit paranoid, but the phrase “career suicide” did come to mind!

It is fiction, and the characters in it are not based on any person, living or dead. Any resemblance, as they say, is purely coincidental.

Read Full Post

For four Friday evenings in January I was at the Instituto Cervantes watching 'La Forja de Un Rebelde' (The Forging of a Rebel). It's a very well-made, inspirational Spanish TV series, set for the most part in Madrid from 1900 to 1940. The central character, writer and journalist Arturo Barea, was born into family impoverished by the death of the father. Adopted into the home of a childless aunt and uncle of better means, he was educated at a Catholic school run by priests. Later, disillusioned by hypocrisy and the church's suppression of dissent, he served as an intern bank clerk at a time of high unemployment, but fell foul of his bosses when he became a union organiser. He joined the army and witnessed the embezzling of funds by officers and their incompetence during the occupation of Morocco.



Read Full Post

Do you listen to music while you write? Some people can't concentrate at all with music playing in the background [including my husband who I sometimes have to share an office with....]but I am increasingly finding it essential to help get me in the right frame of mind to write. Susannah Rickards posted recently on ‘writing the mind alive’ and how Bach’s Goldberg Variations was integral to a certain kind of inspired writing, so I know I’m not alone.

My YA novel Dark Ride, to be published in May, was actually semi inspired by the Morrissey song Every Day is Like Sunday [yeah, OK, not quite Bach, but whatever floats your creative boat]. The song is about a grotty seaside town ‘that they forgot to close down’.

Read Full Post

The plot concerns a a middle aged diplomat called Lord Illingworth who has offered a secretarial job to a poor bank clerk, Gerald Arbuthnot. Just before the interval, when the young man's mother, Mrs Arbuthnot, arrives, Gerald is revealed to be Lord Illingworth's illegitimate son. His mother changed her name after being deserted by her dandified seducer. She makes it plain it would be very disloyal of Gerald to take up the job. The second half of the play depicts the various confrontations about what's to be done. Gerald falls in love with a pretty young house guest, the focus of a subplot, which further implicates the vile seducer and underscores the harshness of attitudes to women at the time.


The intimacy of the 80-seater studio allows a proximity that encourages involvement. I restrained myself from joining in the conversations of the first act, but couldn't help giving a sympathetic smile to the fallen woman, played with martyred dignity by Mary Lincoln. After all, at the height of her torment she was only three feet away and looking straight at me!



Read Full Post

It's surprising what you can learn from popular fiction. Apart from containing the first full-frontal sex scenes I ever read (learnt a good deal there), Judith Krantz's Scruples also supplied me with a piece of understanding which is nothing to do with sex but which has stayed with me. Towards the end of the novel the heroine is watching her new movie-director husband edit a movie. I don't have a copy of the book these days but, as I remember, she notices how the most beautiful piece of film or exquisitely acted scene will be be cut, if it spoils the structure or pace of the move as a whole.

I can't really say that I've looked to the S&F novels of the late 70s and early 80s for much in the way of writing advice, though I'm sure the mega-sellers such as Krantz's could teach many of us a thing or two about storytelling. But perhaps sacrificing beauty is a good way to think of this question, and a better one than the often-quoted "murder your darlings", which has strong whiff of the nastiest side of your Inner Calvinist: if you love it, it must be bad, and if it's bad you must kill it.

Read Full Post

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine writing a novel which was trying to set forward a thesis, or prove a point. Indeed, when I told a literary journalist that one of the themes of The Mathematics of Love turned out to be lost children and she asked me what it says about lost children, I floundered: I hadn't had an argument or a thesis, just an emotional centre for the novel.

But the novel I've just finished is the first which has come from an idea. I knew from the first moment that it was going to be about betrayal. So I went what Ishiguro calls "location hunting": I sought out a time and a place, and then people, which would embody all the things I wanted to... I nearly said "say", about betrayal, but that sounds too tidy and conclusive. "Explore"? "Evoke"? "Embody", perhaps, because that's what we do, as novelists, isn't it: we tell stories and poke ideas around by means of particular, fictional human bodies. These bodies are enmeshed as we all are in nets of allegiance and trust, and now they're threatened.

The novel I haven't started writing is the first thing I've ever written which takes the least account of a review of my work; in The Times Sarah Vine said, of The Mathematics of Love, "Everyone is, at the core, vulnerable, their happiness bittersweet and fleeting but nevertheless priceless." And when I happened to remember that (it's the sort of review you do remember) the wisps of story and characters floating around in my mind suddenly made sense, and the novel got its word; this is a story about happiness.

So then I started thinking about whether there was a one-word description for their predecessors.

Read Full Post

Any writer who has ever critiqued another writer’s work will be familiar with that awful sensation when a well-intentioned critique causes offence and results in bad-blood. Such exchanges are inevitable whenever honest opinion is sought or given, especially where the opinion surprises the recipient. However, if you accept the premise that the purpose of critique is to develop a writer’s skills, it is precisely those surprises that are potentially the most valuable...

Read Full Post

What increases your chances of being a successful novelist? Talent, perhaps? Previous writing experience maybe, or early success? If only it were that simple.
When it comes to writing fiction, nothing stymies you like the advantages you set out with.



Read Full Post