Michael Gambon is a perfect choice for this play, which has long stretches of stage 'business' while Krapp shambles about the stage eating bananas, absent at intervals when liquid being poured into a glass sounds offstage, opening and shutting drawers and messing about with spools of tape. Gambon's slow gestures and immobile face, the mouth almost permanently agape in a surprised O, his wild hair sticking out above raddled cheeks, presents a touching portrait of disillusioned old age. The sudden rages which scatter boxes and tapes are all the more striking because Gambon is a big man.



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Have you ever been on the end of a cringeworthy chat up line? You know the type: "Get your coat love, you've pulled" or the one that I married, "Dance with me. I'm avoiding the girl behind you." Well, they say first impressions count...


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It's amazingly hard, before you're published, to think beyond that glorious moment. But one thing that many aspiring writers know about and are horrified by is how "these days" (Dickens of course, being "these days") authors must do all sorts of events, appearances and readings. Since writing has an unsurprising habit of attracting people who are very happy to spend large amounts of time on their own, and who find themselves more eloquent on the page than in person, many of them are terrified.

Performance nerves are entirely natural: it's a mild case of fight-or-flight. Actors, musicians and dancers feel it, and so do teachers, barristers, best men and captains briefing the platoon. It sharpens your reactions, narrows your focus and makes you want to pee. It uses up blood sugar (which was why doughnuts were so welcome in Mexico) to give you extra energy, and the day you don't feel keyed-up and a little nervous before a gig is the day you'll stop performing well. If you can trust that the slight flutter in your stomach won't lead you to say anything daft, or dry up (it won't), then you can safely settle in for the show.

I feel keyed-up and alert before events, but I don't (so far) get nervous. But I do know what the true, paralysing, brain-fudgifying, hand-shaking, sick-making, tongue-tying stagefright is like, because it was a large part of why I wasn't as good an actor even as I might have been. On the other hand, I have several writing friends who used to be actors and felt no more than respectable stagefright when playing a part, but for whom reading their own work and talking about it is pure horror. And I was just brooding on this when an aspiring writer confessed that she was terribly nervous before taking part in the Getting Published day, even though she's someone who "doesn't get nervous". The thought of discussing her work with a book doctor (who wasn't me, but could have been) was terrifying.

That disabling terror is different.

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Four years ago, I started writing my first novel. (I’m not counting the one before that, back in my twenties, which I never finished). Anyway, this one’s told from the points of view of three characters, two women and a man. Third person, present tense. Its theme is change – indeed, originally it was called The Change (please, no sniggering). And change has certainly been the theme of its journey towards the novel it’s now becoming.

In those four years, I’ve revised and revised. I’ve altered the structure. I've dropped the adverbs. I’ve killed the darlings. I’ve changed the title. I’ve copy-edited countless times. The usual stuff. Then, for a variety of reasons, I stopped. Began the next one. Got a third of the way through the first draft of it. And stopped again.

Argh.


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Mslexia magazine runs a regular feature called 100 Ways to Write a Book. It takes a a given author then sets out exactly how they work. This includes stuff like how they plan out their novels, where they write them, and where and when the best ideas tend to strike.

The sub-heading is The Hilary Mantel Method, or The Ali Smith Method or whoever is featured. You get the picture. Now much as I love to read this stuff, all this talk about ‘method’ makes me feel as though I’m looking at the Grown Up Table.



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The most I've ever laughed at a book is at the weekly Anger Management group sessions attended by the cast of Wuthering Heights, in Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots. And if one of your favourite literary love stories is that of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, then knowing your Donne makes it even better. Only, of course, there'll be readers who don't get the reference, so don't get the joke, and can't be swept away by the love scenes. Equally, you're not going to baffle many readers if you make someone say "Bonjour", but what if they're talking Greek? What if your reader is in a country where French isn't a standard school subject? How does a reference which meant nothing to you make you feel? Did you feel frustrated that a brick in the novel's meaning was missing for you? Did you feel excluded from the club of people who'd understand? Were you annoyed with the author for snobbery or did you feel it was your failure or ignorance? And then this question cropped up on a forum:

I make a reference in my book to a couple who are dating being "as chaste as Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe" because they haven't yet kissed. Is this a common enough reference point that people will get it? The target audience is probably female 25-45.

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I was watching a starfish extrude its gut when I realised.

“It should be in first person!”

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In "Denotation and Connotation: enjoy!", I was exploring the connotations of a word in Eleanor Catton's story "Two Tides", where what it denoted was straightforward. But clearly, if you get stuck on the basic meaning of a word, you're less likely to also pick up the connotations of it. That whole first sentence goes like this:

The harbour at Mana was a converted mudflat, tightly elbowed and unlovely at any tide but high.

Some readers stuck on what, in physical terms, was denoted by the word "elbowed", used as an adjective: they couldn't picture the scene. Whereas for me, although I couldn't either, it was the first word that rang the little silver bell half-way down my spine which says, "She can write". "Elbowed" isn't normally an adjective, and it's confused or possibly enriched by the connotation of "being elbowed" in the ribs by someone. So as I read on, I realised, my brain set that phrase on the clipboard, as it were, waiting to see if it would be explained or enlarged on. And it was. The first paragraph continues with close up description, for example, "Low water showed the scabbed height of the yellow mooring posts...". The second paragraph opens thus:

The marina was tucked into the crook of the elbow, facing back towards the shore.

So "elbowed" is resolved, it's off my mental clipboard, I can see the scene and we're off. But some readers' engines had already stalled.

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You'd expect a book set in a nondescript South East London suburb in 1947 to be a bit lacklustre. And it was. A first chapter titillates when the cast attends the local Empire music hall which features an act called 'Nudes of the World', a series of thinly-draped tableaux. But the chapter, like the show, is a tease. It's all downhill after that

I imagine the book was chosen for the Manor House Libary reading group because it had a local context. The determindly lower-middle class mores of the characters scotch any hopes for noble aims or romantic notions, not that I'm a great fan of either, done to excess. Even the youthful Jack Hollard seems short of backbone or even personality.


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