This year's York Festival of Writing is two months away, on 23rd-25th March, and I'll be there, along with dozens of other authors, plus agents, workshop leaders, publishers, editors and several hundred writers at varying stages of their aspiration. I'm leading a workshop on The Writer's Voices as well as a mini-course with my companion-in-crime, Debi Alper, on Finding Your Voice. I'm also doing Book Doctor slots, though they're filling up fast, I see. Last year was huge fun, in a head-spinning sort of way, and afterwards I blogged about it all in Ducks, Dreams and Cross-channel Ferries. But what about the expectations of it before the event?

For some it's the chance to hear writers they admire talk, or to get to grips with particular aspects of writing - point-of-view, internet marketing, thrillers, establishing character - in the company of an expert. The chance to have coffee with a book trade professional or buy them a drink is the lure for others, and many want to meet other writers in the same boat as themselves. Writing is a painfully isolated business at the best of times, and oh! the joy of meeting others who know exactly what you're talking about, how it feels, and who might even have a good idea about how to get your Chapter Ten out of the doldrums. There's a bookstall throughout the festival, with all the authors' books on sale, so a signed copy is a nice souvenir, too.

And for many, of course, the glittering prize would be to be Taken On By An Agent or even A Publisher. It's very understandable: York is all about getting your work publishable. But what would be a shame - a folly, though an understandable one - would be to pin all your hopes, and all your reasons for coming to York, on that one outcome.

Read Full Post

Medea the anorexic supermodel tested all her food on her Chihuahua. Still Jason the jealous designer found a way to poison her.



London Fashion Week had never seen anything like it. Jason Zantini’s collection – Blood Mummy – was his most personal yet. Some argued that it was not Fashion, it was Art. Others preferred to say that it wasn’t Art, it was a Bloody Mess.

Zantini’s troubled relationship with his own mother was well documented. A domineering alcoholic who had at one time resorted to prostitution, Dolores Zantini had killed herself six months earlier in a final act of vindictive passive aggression. Naturally, she blamed Jason in the note she left. And it was Jason who found her in the bathtub, the wounds in her wrists gaping like mouths open in accusation, the tepid water dark with her blood.

Safe to say that Jason Zantini was not in a happy place when he designed the Blood Mummy collection.

It was hard enough having his mother’s suicide to contend with. No doubt it made him a difficult person to be around. In the words of his girlfriend, supermodel Medea Medici, he was no fun anymore. He never wanted to go out, he wouldn’t answer the phone, wouldn’t see anyone – he’d even stopped taking a shower. Could he really blame her if she turned to others for company and amusement, in particular noted fashion photographer Kris Dufoy, on whose arm she was seen at several premičres and industry galas?

To the emotional cocktail of guilt, grief and rage brought about by his mother’s death was added a generous splash of jealousy, with a top-up of rage for good measure.

Read Full Post

Oh, how I do love a thoroughly counter-intuitive discovery! Apparently, the plainer and cleaner the typeface, the less a reader will learn and remember of the detail of the text. A typeface which slows the reader means they learn and understand more of what's being said. Not just the denotation, but the connotations, the friction between them, the prosody which affects the tone and 'feel' of the piece... they all have time to grow and flower, and create a full meaning, rather than only a basic meaning, in the reader's mind.

This sounds to me like something fairly fundamental in human consciousness. In Rembrandt's painting The Jewish Bride, for example, the huge, thickly embroidered sleeve of the man is the most extraordinary assemblage of paint. Rembrandt used the skin from paint left out overnight to create the the white highlights, and even as you sense the richness of the cloth and the pride of the man you can see the wrinkles and bumps of it; your eye-movements catch on the physical nature of the art, the extreme paint-ishness, of the medium, in a way which makes the mimetic nature of art – the evocation of the garment – even more vivid. And I don't think you have to know anything about painting technique, let alone be thinking about it, for that effect to work on you; it's built into what the artist has done to the canvas.

Journalists are taught to work with received phrases so that readers can understand them with minimum puzzlement and maximum speed, and move on. Whereas one important characteristic of literary fiction is almost always that the words on the page are more unusual for that subject, or more unusually put together.

Read Full Post

As night follows day, a new novel has entered the works, just as the final draft of the novel I think of as my Betrayal novel, has left them, going from my desk to my agent's and onwards. Not that it's new in the obvious sense; it first appeared, untimely, almost exactly two years ago. Since then I've been... not exactly ignoring it, but making no effort to do more with it than I couldn't avoid. I've bought the occasional book that caught my eye, clipped articles out of the TLS, gone to exhibitions that were relevant, collected postcards and leaflets, made a note of something I heard on the radio... but I've never allowed myself to sit down and Think.

And then a week ago, I did. In among lots of other, duller work, I was able to allow myself some treats: hours I could spend on this delicious stage of creating a novel.

Read Full Post

There’s an old saying: A friend is someone who knows the song you sing and who sings it back to you when you’ve forgotten the words.

I’m blessed with amazing writing friends. Some are online, some I meet in the flesh. All understand the slog of writing when it feels like nobody hears you, the frustration of not-getting-there, the longing for acceptance.

A while ago, as I trudged through the ever-familiar Slough of Despond, my friend Derek said: ‘Don’t forget. Things can turn on a sixpence.’ There was something about that phrase which stayed with me, and which gave me hope.


Read Full Post

'Oh no! It'd be like reading a set text at school', was one reaction when I announced at the reading group that I'd found a copy with an introduction and footnotes.

The book was Anthony Trollope's The Warden , written in 1850 and dependent on a reader's knowledge of contemporary political characters and events.



Read Full Post

Have you watched the wonderful TED video of Elizabeth Gilbert talking about her experience of creativity?

I found Elizabeth’s talk deeply inspiring the first time I watched it, and again last night, when I was thinking about what to post on Strictly Writing today. It also links well with Susannah's fascinating post last Friday about proprioceptive writing. What Elizabeth says resonates with my own experience, apart from the bit about writing a best seller.



Read Full Post

Over on Nicola Morgan's blog she has one of her typically common-sensical pieces about if and how an agent was right to reject a manuscript on the grounds that the writer's not so young any more, and limited in how much she can travel. Her conclusion is that the agent has a point, for general reasons to do with how the book trade works, but no, those reasons aren't conclusive. In other words, the general nature of the book trade doesn't translate into a particular - and therefore absolute - rule. And then in the comment trail agent Carole Blake says, "Writers shouldn't be discouraged by generalisations thrown out at random: I believe generalisation is often the enemy of truth."

And so do I. How often on this blog have I found myself saying, "It's not as simple as that"? Most recently I was exploring the value of recognising that, in "The opposite is also true." And then it came to me that, of course, generalising is the enemy of fiction. I'm not alone; in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel Jane Smiley argues that it's the very nature of the form to resist generalisation. It's a form born to tell stories about individuals "as if" they had really existed, including (as drama, for example, can't) depicting their individual, internal consciousness: the place where they are most intractably themselves.

Read Full Post