I work in the loft. For the past few days the skylights have been covered in snow making it a gloomy, sun-deprived place. I look up, expecting to see the sky, and am confronted by the underside of a layer of snow of who knows what depth. It could be a snowdrift as high as a bus, for all I know. I feel like Mole in Wind in the Willows, snowed in for the winter. The truth is I can just wander down stairs and walk out of the front door. But there’s something viscerally affecting about looking up at the blocked out window. It makes me want to hunker down. I imagine myself working my way through a pantry’s worth of preserves. Snow brings out the hermit in me.

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One of the pleasures of blogging is meeting people who I might not have met otherwise, and such a person is Barbara Baig, a hugely experienced writer and teacher of writing in the US. Her new book How to be a Writer is a fascinating how-to book which can guide anyone to become a better and more interesting writer than they are, and therefore also an exploration of the practice of writing, in all senses of the word: the kind of thing which I think of as yoga for writers. So when Barbara told me about the research which suggests that expertise - craftsmanship - comes about not from innate talent but from practice, I asked her to do a guest blog explaining what, on the face of it, is the exact opposite of what most of us believe. Over to Barbara.

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What makes certain people really good writers? Most of us are sure we know the answer to that question: innate talent. Some people have it; others don’t. If we have it, writing will be always be easy for us, and success will naturally come our way. If we don’t have it—even if we love to write—we will struggle; we will feel we don’t know what we are doing as writers; success will probably elude us; we are doomed to spend our lives envying those fortunate ones, gifted at birth with writing talent.

This view of talent in writing—or in any other field—is part of our world-view, reinforced by Hollywood movies about great artists, the content of literature courses (only “great writers” need apply), and Aunt Ermyntrude, who never fails to remind us that, if we were really talented as writers, we would know it by now, so why don’t we give up this writing nonsense and settle down to something sensible?

This view of talent is so prevalent, it’s no wonder most of us take it to heart.

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Fear and Loving is a novel about possibilities. About love. About hope. About belief. It’s set predominantly in the 1990s, but it could be set at any time. Indeed, the very concept of time as a linear progression is challenged as the plot unfolds. This blog is an introduction to some of the characters found within its pages. They’ll tell us, in their own words, their thoughts, their memories, their stories. How what happens in the novel affected them and how they feel about it now as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century. At least, as we enter it in our world. In this world.

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Helen Grant was born in London. She read Classics at St.Hugh’s College, Oxford, and then worked in marketing for ten years in order to fund her love of travelling. In 2001 she and her family moved to Bad Münstereifel in Germany. While exploring the legends of this beautiful town she was inspired to write her first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, which was shortlisted for both the Booktrust Teenage Prize and the Carnegie Medal. She now lives in Brussels with her husband, her two children and her two cats. Her second novel, The Glass Demon, was published in 2010 and she has just completed a third book, Wish Me Dead, which will appear in 2011.

Which 3 writers, living or dead, would you invite to dinner?

Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and Montague Rhodes James (the English ghost story writer). I wouldn’t invite them all at once, in case they argued. I’d invite Dickens for his wit, Trollope so that I could tell him how much I admire him, and M.R.James so that I could ask him questions. I’ve written many articles speculating about aspects of James’ work and I could settle the questions once and for all.



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As you'll know by now, as soon as anyone tells me a "rule" of writing, I start thinking of times when any good writer would "break" it. Whether it's Elmore Leonard's Ten or George Orwell's Six Rules that are being quoted, the fact that I admire their writing and agree with much that they say doesn't make me more inclined to keep their rules as rules. Indeed, Elmore Leonard never meant his to be taken all that seriousoy, and Orwell acknowledges that they're not really rules in his own Rule Six: "Break any these rules sponer than say anything outright barbarous."

And it remains the truest rule of all - although the least helpful - that you can do anything you like, as long as you make it work. But as I go on blogging and teaching and writing, I do find that the same old questions and issues keep coming up. I also find that it's far more useful and therefore fruitful to talk about process - how you set things up so that good writing will happen - than about product - what good writing should be like. So, in a light-hearted, pre-Christmas spirit, I offer you my Twelve Tools of Writing. You'll notice that they're almost all about process, not product. Here goes.

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That road ahead can seem to go on forever. This one actually does, as it was taken in North Dakota (check out the squashed bug on the windscreen) and no-one has ever driven all the way across North Dakota.*

So it is with writing a novel, and this is where we come to the idea of 'Shitty First drafts'. The term is in inverted commas because a) my mum reads this and I used a Bad Word, and b) because it is a much-cited quotation taken from from Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

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In my last post, I was wondering how my third Porfiry novel A Razor Wrapped in Silk came to be translated into the French as Les Enfants Perdus de l’Empire (The Lost Children of the Empire). I’m indebted to my good friend Nick Primmer for sending me the explanation. His solution is similar to those brainteasers whereby one word is gradually morphed into another over a number of steps:

A Razor Wrapped In Silk – a detective novel set in St. Petersburg



The Lost Razor Wrapped In Silk – a mystery novel set in a barber shop franchise within a haberdashery.

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Though notionally in London, and only half an hour from Waterloo, places like Claygate have a faux village atmosphere that resembles a war-time film set or a real-life recreation of Ambridge.You almost expect the village pub to be called The Bull, not The Foley Arms.

However, some chances are too rare to pass up, and knowing I'd be safely back in Lewisham by nightfall, I attended a couple of two-hour work-shops at in the Claygate & Esher Writing Festival. It was organised by Susannah Rickards, who also tutors a local writing group. The pub where it took place was only five minutes walk from the station.


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