I would say, with all the smugness of someone making a hard-to-top bid in Pop-Psychology Whist, that I have a particularly complicated relationship with my name, except that... I don't know anyone who doesn't. At a workshop run by Diane Samuels, she started by asking each of us to say one of our names, and something about it. And I promise you, no-one had nothing to say, from the ones who hated and feared the grandmother whose name they bear, to the ones who changed their name when they emigrated from Australia because... And yet a surprising number of aspiring writers say that they want to publish under a pseudonym, and it's not always because they're writing a roman-a-clé about high-level corruption in their local council. Often it springs, as far as I can see, from not wanting their grandmother to read the GBH scene, or their husband not wanting his mates to think he's the bloke in the sex scenes. (Which was was the ostensible reason for the stories in In Bed With... being written under our "porn star" names: we would feel less inhibited. The real reason was to get the media to start a guessing game, and the media duly obliged with several weeks of the Name Game...)

Unless you really musn't be recognised, or you have a deep-laid plan to switch to your "real" writing after learning your trade in category fiction, say, I confess that I don't really understand the desire to hide behind a pseudonym. But it is true that in putting our name on a book, and getting that book on a bookshop table, we are in some way claiming space for what we've said: what we've written is worth listening to; we are worth listening to. And we're saying that it's the best we're capable of: we can do no more. That's a very big and loud claim, and writers are often inward, private people: maybe it's easier to make that great claim, if you pretend to be someone else.

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I’ve got a very comfortable office at home. It’s a bit of a mess, admittedly, but I’ve long adapted to just averting my eyes from certain corners, like the one filled with a tottering pile of used padded envelopes [damn, I just looked directly at it]. But despite that, I have a good desk, a comfortable chair and a fairly decent computer. There’s the brilliant Spotify to satisfy all my musical needs and it takes just five minutes to pop downstairs for a cup of Earl Grey and a chocolate biscuit or five. If I get stuck for inspiration, I can take a walk in the beautiful park my house backs onto. Perfect, right? Hell, who wouldn’t get a whole ton of work done somewhere like that?!

Um, me...?



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Well. Maybe I've gone off the snow now, to a certain extent. Mainly due to the fact that I took the kids down the local social club, after posting my last blog post, and had an accident in the snow.

I was coming out of the back door of the club, when my legs suddenly shot out in front of me. . There was nothing to save myself on, and somehow I went down flat and cracked the back of my head on the doorstep of the club. It was the first thing that hit the floor.

Not only did it scare me (I was expecting blood to come oozing out of my ears at any moment), not only did it hurt, but worse than anything else, I felt a proper 'nana.

Nothing hurts more than your pride, does it?!

Anyway, everyone was really lovely to me - thanks all! - and got the kids and I all home safe and sound - but I've not felt up to much since then. Two days on, not only do I still ache all over - my stomach muscles are shredded, oddly - but I've also come down with some ghastly virus. I'm supposed to be going out with the girls tonight, but I can't see it happening.

Which brings me onto the point of today's post...

I have two "Why is it...?" questions that keep running around in my head.



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So my agent was sitting on a delayed bus into work, and I was walking along a long and snowy road in lieu of spending half an hour digging my car out, and we were on the phone discussing the latest version of my new novel. Basically she loves it, and thinks it's very nearly ready to fly: she awarded the ending three hankies and we've settled on a great title. She even spontaneously suggested something for the ending which I'd wanted to do all along but hadn't dared. Her only reservations were about some of the new material. I've totally re-written the first chapter and written an epilogue from scratch, so these are things which have had enough passes to be okay of themselves and to apparently do the job that needed doing. But when she pointed out the ways in which they're not really working, I felt, "Doh! Of course!"

Make no mistake, these aren't technical or high-level slips: they're common mistakes in storytelling that I see all the time in the work of aspiring writers. You'd think I would have pounced on them in my own, or even not committed them in the first place. But, since I was feeling cheerful by then, instead of beating myself up I started wondering why I hadn't seen them. And the clue, I think, is in "common mistakes"; these are things which are a very natural outcome of how most of us set about writing a story.

For example,

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Over on Help! I Need a Publisher, Nicola Morgan has a characteristically sensible post about if and when it's sense to invest money in your writing. One thing, especially, that she says isn't said often enough: "I would spend far more time practising what I'd been taught than I'd spent on receiving the teaching". I've had my say about the pros and cons of writing courses in general here, but I'd suggest that what Nicola's getting at is something I touched on in that post: the possibility that you are, or could become, a writing course junkie.

I'm not talking about people who do writing courses because they love writing and want to get their work heard, but honestly admit that it takes a course to make them do any. I love photography but the day job sucks up my time not just for taking photographs but also for getting them seen. So every year or so I do a photography course, and love every minute of it, and I'm a better writer for the way that a camera makes me really look at things, and feel them... and that's as far as I go. No, I'm talking about people who are working to get published, and never seem to stop doing courses, classes and so on.

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Someone reading my post In Praise of the Long Sentence recently took issue with one of my examples, taken from un(der)educated, 15-year-old Anna's narrative in The Mathematics of Love:

They were tiny of course like all the other negs I'd looked at, but different because I was looking at them in one curling strip and all still wet: clear lavender-coloured shadows and dark skies, trees and pillars and windows and faces caught click after click, coiling and springing down the film one after the other so that all the distance and time between them was pressed into plain, pale bands of almost nothing.

Would an uneducated fifteen year old really talk like this, they asked; would she be this articulate, and in a sentence this long? I had gone very carefully about the business of finding a voice for Anna which was convincing (loose grammar, no metaphors but only similes, unsophisticated ways of saying things) but could also be as vivid and evocative of both things and ideas, as I needed it to be. But this question got me thinking, because of course Anna doesn't talk like this: this is not how she would say the same thought aloud. So how can her narrative voice - as opposed to her dialogue voice - be like this, if this isn't something she would say?

It's clear enough that if a narrative is in third person, then there's some kind of implied, external narrator, and that narrator by definition has a voice - a particular way of saying things - which may or may not be the writer's natural way of saying things. How much and when that voice takes on the colour of one or more characters' voices is the whole game with free indirect style, and that flexibility is one of the great advantages of a narrative in third person. But I would argue that even in a narrative in first person, it can be very useful to think of character-narrator James, say, as a subtly different entity from the James who inhabits the same novel-world as Jilly and Jonathan.

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I've had this book hanging about for a while, as the dog-eared state of the pages testifies. I'm surprised to discover it was published as recently as 2004.

'A perfect DIY guide' says a Sunday Times critic, and that about sums it up for me, too. It seems to be a 'does what it says on the tin' kind of book. I hope so, anyway.

I think it's the common-sense style as much as the topic coverage that makes me decide to read it in tandem with my 'construction ' book, Karen Wiesner's 30 Days to a Full Draft. I should say at this point that it seems to me that must be 30 days writing at top speed 18 hours a day. My lifestyle doesn't lend itself to that kind of pace or commitment. That said, I'm plodding along nicely, although I sometimes have to read the complicated instructions several times over.



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In honour of National Short Story Week, I’ve collated all the twisteries written so far. A round dozen:
Twistery #1.

The locked room was empty apart from the smell of decomposition. They ripped up the boards to find a corpse clutching a strong magnet.

Solution here.

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