I spent the last half of last year writing the first draft of a novel which I'd hoped would be taken by a certain publisher. Blimey, it was like pulling teeth. The publisher turned out not to want it after all, and though my agent was still interested in the idea, that really knocked my confidence. I wrote the thing. I sat down to work on it every day (well, not really every day, but most days. Okay, some days) with a Vox Deus sized 'Verily, what you are writing is pants' ringing through my brain

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Yesterday was a bit of a lost cause as far as work goes, not so much for me as for my husband, who had to spend the whole day dealing with it. We were woken by my father-in-law ringing the doorbell, and the noise of a jack-hammer under our balcony. Turns out our neighbour had decided to have our garden wall knocked down because it was in her way.

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Best of all, we lived round the corner from Crystal Palace Park. Apart from something called a 'One O'clock Club', a kind of big shed with toys, where mothers with toddlers gathered on wet afternoon, it had a flamingo pond, a children's zoo and a lake area with monsters.

Nowadays a Sunday visit to Penge usually means lunch at the the Moon and Stars, which used to be a cinema, but on the first sunny Sunday afternoon for weeks a side-visit to the dinosaurs seemed in order.

Installed as an adjunct to the Crystal Palace, home to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the giant lizards were set up in 1854, not very accurate replicas of the prehistoric monsters, but at the time state-of-the-art. A big dinner was held in the bottom part of the biggest one and speeches made by local and national dignitaries before the top half was attached.



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I’m writing some sample chapters for a series fiction packager at the moment. In case you haven't heard about this kind of thing, here's a quick lowdown. There are a small number of companies out there who come up with a story/series concept as a team effort. They develop it very carefully in-house until they have a detailed breakdown of the content, chapter by chapter. A brief is then then put out to a bunch of writers who produce some sample chapters for free. The one whose style and handling of the story is seen as the best fit will be paid to write the whole book, often with a view to writing a series. The packager then sells the whole thing to a publisher. Many of the series you’ll see in the average Waterstones, especially in the younger children’s category, are created in this way and the name on the cover is usually a pseudonym.



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I am currently working on the first draft of a commissioned children’s novel from a book packager. This is the sort where you get given a long plot summary by the editor and you write it up into a novel before it is published under a pseudonym, in effect reversing the creative process. Lots of contemporary children’s books, especially in the 5-8 age bracket, are produced in this way. Children’s authors with books published under their own names are glad to have the extra source of income, and unpublished writers see it as a way into the business.

This is the first time I’ve written such a book, and I thought it might be interesting if I wrote down how this is going for me, personally, in terms of my writing life.

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Last year I went to an induction day at the Open University for new Associate Lecturers in Creative Writing. And the moment which raised the biggest laugh was when someone said, "How do we get the students to say anything more about each others' work than 'This flows really well'?" Not only did we laugh, but it became the running joke of the day, because we'd all seen and heard it so often.

Okay, perhaps that's a less than warm and empathetic attitude towards neophyte writers but, dammit, if we're going to engage with them and their writing warmly and empathetically in class - which we must, to do our job properly - we have to let off steam somewhere. Good doctors don't make jokes to patients, they save their gallows humour for the canteen, and good teachers save it for the staffroom. And "It flows" really doesn't tell you a lot, does it? Specially since they usually go on to suggest a few moved commas, spot a typo, say that they really like the characters and want to read more, and that's that.

Of course, anyone who's ever been on a training course for trainers will be familiar with the 'praise sandwich' principle, although it's always more effective if even the first slice of bread has a bit more substance than "it flows". But even in places which are avowedly (and sometimes expensively) set up to make your writing better, beginner writers seem to find it very difficult to talk detail about either good or bad stuff, and I'm sure what can come over as a culture of bland niceness is really just blandness.

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Today is the festival of the Befana, when by tradition the Befana, who is a good witch, is supposed to come to all children and leave them sweets if they are good and coal (really a hard candy coloured black) if they are not. There are various legends about the origins of the Befana, generally attached to the story of the birth of Christ: she is supposed to have missed giving him gifts along with the Wise Men and now searches all over for him, leaving gifts as she goes, like a sort of a cross between the Wandering Jew and Father Christmas (who is Babbo Natale in Italian!). In another legend she was a mother who was driven mad by the death of her child and went to see the newborn Jesus in the belief that he was her child, she gave him presents and Jesus promised that as a reward she should be the mother of every child in the world (the cynical might call this a mixed blessing).

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Mayhem on this scale requires skilled direction and spit-second timing, here marvellously achieved by Richard Eyres and his team. It was a disappointment that Tom Hollander was unwell on the night we attended, but Greg Baldock was convincing in the demanding roles of Chandebise and Poche. As in Shakepeare's identical twins comedies, much of the humour not only depends on mistaken identity but in this case one character following almost on the heels of the other. Over-the-top playing by beautifully coordinated Freddie Fox made the most of the thankless role of a young man with a speech impediment and William Findley was funny as the fiery pistol-waving Spaniard, although comic foreigners and disability as comedy date the play to some extent.

The costumes were well-designed considering the number of quick changes and rapid movements required. The brothel entrance hall and stairway was a masterpiece of mock Art-Nouveau, all elongated trunks and tendrils, suggestive of a gilded swamp. The programme was excellent, including a history of the Belle Epoque era and a pocket biography of Feydeau and farce as well as an article on sorely-missed John Mortimer, whose translation of the play was presented in the National Theatre in 1966.


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Isn't it always the way that suddenly, when you're least expecting it, an idea will strike you - almost knock you dead - and bring to life that other, older idea that has been festering away at the back of the dark closet of your mind for months, if not years?

That's just what happened to me this morning. I don't even know what I was thinking of at the time. But suddenly the closet door creaked open, and out came that earlier concept, shaking off the mothballs, blinking against the light and... Wham!... It caught sight of the new idea. Fireworks... Champagne corks... The perfect union was formed (if there is such a thing!).

This is how inspiration takes me. I always find that, to get a novel or script idea to take off, there has to be a second idea to ignite the first. It was the same with my film script. I had one idea, but it took a chance discovery when renovating an old house to really provide the skeleton on which to hang the flesh.

That time, I knew where the idea came from, and they were two pretty disparate concepts that just seemed to sing together.


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I did laugh when Michael Caine recently agreed in a radio interview that he's "an instinctive actor", and promptly went into a HIGHLY technical description of how if you're talking to another actor in a scene, you should look into their left eye with your right eye, which gives you the perfect angle for the camera to pick up your expression, without it appearing that you're looking at the camera at all. No other combination of gazes will do... Oh, and don't blink, not ever, unless you want to show weakness... Instinctive? I don't think so. Caine's art, it seems to me, is the sort which conceals art, which is perhaps what makes the "instinctive" tag seem right even though he puts enormous thought and technical control into what he does.

It's a funny old business this, isn't it: the assumption is that there's a binary opposition of conscious technical understanding, versus instinctive creativity; actors talk about having technique "to fall back on", and "technical" is so often used as a synonym for dry and dehumanised. And then on a WriteWords thread crime writer Helen Black talked in detail about how she builds the opening of her novels, and then said,

I've never done this consciously, however. But that's something I often notice here on WriteWords. Someone far more knowledgeable than me will explain in a writerly way why certain things in writing work well. These things often, it transpires, even have a proper name. And I often sit here thinking, 'I do that', though I couldn't tell you how or why I do it.

Helen is a writer who wrote a novel for fun and got it published, and she's worked out her very demanding genre from first principles: she's followed her own instinctive decisions about "Like this? No, like that. And a bit of The Other. Only the other way round..." to the point where she has clear principles of storytelling without ever having been near a course or a textbook. Is she very technical, or very intuitive? The answer is, of course, is that she's turned her intuition into technique, even if she has no technical terms.

There are so many ways to discuss the same piece of writing.

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