Although presenting a jovial face to his neighbours and to his visiting son Chris (Stephen Campbell Moore) Joe has a shameful secret. He caused the deaths of young men by allowing a batch of defective aircraft parts to leave the factory. Although he was responsible for the decision his partner was blamed and imprisoned.

The play highlights the cost when individual profit is proritised over the common good. Joe's excuse is that it was done 'for his family'; a recall would have meant ruin. The resulting deaths, which may have included that of his own son, remain on his conscience. His deluded wife Kate has carried the secret less well and is treated warily by her family.

Unlike Willie Loman, the common-man hero of 'Death of Salesman', Joe is not a passive victim and dupe of the American system. He is active collaborator signalled by his name. It needs only one letter of the name to be changed to reveal his true nature.


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A recent and very fascinating thread on WriteWords has been unpicking the opening of Eleanor Catton's story "Two Tides", which was published in a recent issue of Granta (the Summer 2009 New Fiction Special, if you want to track the story down). I won't précis the discussion here, because the whole thread's worth reading and ranges over a good deal of ground, (the story's well worth reading too) but even a single sentence (or rather, half sentence) illuminates all sorts of interesting things in miniature. Catton's story opens thus:

The harbour at Mana was a converted mudflat

The point at issue was convert; one reader had stumbled on that verb used in that context, and questioned whether making the reader stumble so soon in a piece was a wise move. Clearly at the physical level it doesn't take a lot to make a mudflat into a harbour, any more than it takes a lot to make a field into a carpark, so convert makes perfectly good basic sense. But that's only at the level of basic meaning: what the word denotes.

Converted didn't make me stumble in what it denoted, but I also really like it, and when you're talking about effective language, you're usually talking about connotation: what else that particular word brings to the sentence. As the nearest thing art can get to a control experiment, I set out to understand what's going on by means of a favourite trick: think about what the writer might have done instead.

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Not so long ago, I wrote what I thought one of my better stories. I decided to enter it for a competition and I read it out to my terrestrial writing group to see if they could suggest any tweaks. The tension in the room was tangible before the end of the second paragraph and they were silent for some time after I finished reading. Sometimes, silence is a good thing as your audience has been moved by what they’ve heard and need a moment to compose their thoughts.

It wasn’t that kind of silence...

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No, I haven't moved to the moon. I have been working in DC, beating the traffic by leaving at 6am and returning twelve hours later, or more if armed gunmen strapped with bombs have been taking hostages in the Discovery Building. (America!) Anyway, several dollars later my temporary contract has come to an end and I have been reunited with my keyboard, my teacups and my lie-ins, even as late as 7.30, hungry cats allowing.

Here's me in the rather gorgeous Issue 3 of Eclectic Flash, available in Real Paper Format or on the Online. It is a story called 'Sweet Pastry', which is tiny at only 150 words, but I quite like it. It was a challenge for me to write something so short.

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I heard Nick Hornby, an author I’ve long admired, in conversation with his editor on the Penguin Books Podcast recently. He was talking about his latest adult novel, ‘Juliet, Naked’. The editor commented that Hornby handled his characters with a particular fondness, and almost never painted them as all bad'. Hornby’s response was a bit sheepish. He admitted that deep down, he couldn’t shake the feeling that if he treated them badly, one of his characters might one day knock on his front door and remonstrate with him. He admitted it sounded a bit bonkers, but felt that on some level the people he created on a page existed somewhere as flesh and blood.

I loved hearing this.



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Some time ago, I lent This Itch of Writing to Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt, so that she could reply to an aspiring writer. Since then Jerusha has been travelling the world from New Zealand to Harmondsworth, in search of new ways to understand our peculiar art and craft. But every now and again another cry of writerly anguish reaches her by pigeon post, and she stuffs her reply into a bottle and tosses it into the sea to reach me. As she did with this one.

I've published four novels with (and had four more novels rejected by) a major, very commercial publisher, in four years, but I seem to have written myself into a brick wall: not a sniff of my books in the shops; a rejection from them for my next book which my agent doubts he can sell elsewhere; one false start abandoned on his advice; another 2/3rds written which he also doubts he can sell. I think this might be where I hang up my metaphorical pen (as Ian Hocking has) and get my life back from the treadmill which is trying to write novels as well as have a job and a family. I did read Nicola Morgan's post on Selling Out, and with great interest. But I suspect that going more pared down and grabby is not where my strengths lie. It's not that I want to remain pure, it's that I'm not sure I could do it. The WIP contains almost none of the stuff which is commercially off-putting about my work and it even has a high concept. But it is still too 'gentle' and understated because that basically is my voice.

I suspect what I need to do is learn to pack a greater emotional punch within that understated style. I do wonder if I will regret it if some time I don't have a bash at writing a different sort of book - more 'literary', if you like, though I shrink from all labels. Maybe I should let go of the thing I fear may have been limiting me, which is the drive to ensure that everyone in my books is engaging - fundamentally nice and good and decent, even the baddies! But then, would a book which didn't ultimately assert the values of community and mutual support, and trying to do right thing in adversity, really be 'me'? Perhaps I have been dashing into new projects, because I am terrible at sitting back and giving myself thinking time - I usually do my thinking by doing and wrestling and engaging, not letting things quietly mull over.

This seems to me one of those difficult situations where brute commercial reality, craft, and creative capacities are all embroiled in a muddle.

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I commented on Nick Cross’s blog a few days ago, saying that possibly people give up writing because, while they’re prepared for it to be difficult at first, they’re not prepared for it to go on being difficult.

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So it’s back again. That show which cheekily took its name from the Strictly blog. With a new set, a new format, and a cull of several of the most popular pro dancers.

But some things never change: Brucie’s back – albeit only for the Saturday show – and Tess towers over him as ever, resplendent in aqua. The four judges -Bruno ‘Hyper’ Tonioli, Len ‘The Charm’ Goodman, Alesha ‘Extensions’ Dixon and Craig ‘Char-char-char, dahling’ Revel Horwood - are ready with sharp eyes, tongues and nails, poised to pounce on any mistakes (rather as the sadly-missed Arlene Phillips used to pounce on the hunky male dancers).

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The signs to have your formal graduation portrait taken were at least as large as those for the graduands' check-in and for collecting robes, and more colourful. I had an hour to go till the ceremony and you don't have to pay unless you order one. The people in front of me were being slotted one after another into six units of the franchised formula, first alone, then with family, then "next please". Standard lighting setup, friendly and efficient ladies, camera with leads to lights and laptop, a slap-it-down rubber circle where you stand, complete with extra white line at an angle for the posture which ballet-dancers call épaulement. Since you don't have your certificate there's a dummy one to hold: as a friend said, it's nice of them to give you a fajita in case you're hungry. And since, failing a man's shirt and tie, your hood has by then slipped backwards to strangle you, on the back of the fajita is a neat little plastic hook to hold everything together at your breast: the 'right' image is obtained by all sorts of tricks and subterfuges. And I suddenly thought, if ever there's a place for decoding the semiotics of the graduation portrait, it's Goldsmiths.

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