David Thorpe just wrote a really interesting post on Dragontongue, the blog for children's authors in Wales, wondering if we have to remember what it's like to be a child, to write for children.

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Like most people I go swaddled against the weather, but there's always a smattering of debs in sandals with swains and picnic baskets. I don't expect to see anyone I know. It's not so much the fairy lights swathing the bar area as the natural setting that gives a sense of occasion - the way the trees sway and birds swoop across the stage or call from the foliage at inappropriate moments. Watching the audience climb giddy heights and improvise sun hats or snuggle into blankets is half the point.


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I've decided to call the last twenty one days my Ëœweird weeks". Picasso had a blue phase so I think I'm allowed a weird one. Three weeks ago, I was happily sitting in the family home we've been in for sixteen years and now we're selling it. All because I drove up a road and saw a ËœFor Sale" sign. All because my husband, whom I regularly show ËœFor Sale" signs to, didn't give me a derisory grunt this time, but instead said "Let's do it. Let's move!"

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Okay, so in a loose, anecdotal, bloggy sort of way we've tackled how unpicking what you're doing in terms of grammar and syntax might help you to say what you're trying to say better, and also the different effects of past and present tense, and the value of learning to handle long sentences. Today's thinking aloud is about how a minute query about punctuation opens up an exploration of what you're trying to say. Here's a sentence from my work in progress:

And yet even the most self-hating Papist wife or joylessly Puritan husband knows that it is not so: that the nature of a man and a woman's coupling depends utterly on the nature of that man and that woman, each with his uncertainties, vanities, pride justified and pride false.

The simple question is: should there also be a possessive apostrophe on the first "man"?

Technically, as they're separate nouns, each of them should have their own possessive 's: the nature of a man's and a woman's coupling depends... because the coupling is 'of' each of them, even though "coupling" is singular.

Most people, including me (I know because I've tried it out in the WriteWords forum), feel that it's more euphonious as I originally had it, without the second 's:

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I'm not sure why the post here, about how to make your Moleskine into a more efficient planner, gave me the giggles, but it's also set me thinking again about notebooks again. My basic notebooks small (bag/pocket) and big (desk/holidays) are not organised in any way, except that I start at the beginning, and fill it from left to right, till it's full. I did once decide to collect my PhD thoughts at the back, but kept forgetting to put them there: now everything gets bunged in together.

In life, I like things sorted and organised by function and logic. I'd rather keep books on the floor and papers on the desk until I've time to put them away in the right place, than have muddle in the shelves and files. I use diaries and to-do lists and shopping lists: even the icons on my desktop are arranged by kind-of-programme. So why am I happy to throw everything into my Moleskine however it falls? (Though I do, it's true, get much more organised once a writing project is up and running.)

Imagination and the storytelling impulse came long before the documentary impulse in me: the first thing I wrote as an adult was Chapter One of a novel. So the only notebook I needed, I thought, was for notes for the novel. Then I realised that documentary writing can be fuel for the imagination; it needn't be an end in itself. But - but - what? Just put everything in? As it occurs to me? An idea for the novel, a line on a tree/smell/shop, research notes from a museum, some words which seem to be part of a poem I haven't written yet, a brilliant story title ditto, an eavesdropped conversation, an expensive book I want... But how do you keep the same kind of thing together and different things apart?

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I’ve always been interested in spirituality and personal development, but there are a couple of things that rile me:

1. Reference to The Universe as in ‘The Universe will provide...'
2. Any mention of The Secret: I hated this film, particularly the angelic chords which accompanied each speaker’s pronouncement, and the way they portrayed The Law of Attraction by showing a girl yearning for a gold necklace in a jeweller’s window, and - having presumably discovered The Secret and applied it - the said necklace being placed around her neck by a tall, dark, handsome man.
3. Being told by people to Just Let Go.

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Over on this thread on WriteWords, children's author Leila Rasheed asked us all

"do people go back to their draft and change the plot of specific scenes while keeping the function of the scene. I think the difference between the function and the plot of a scene is an important one.... it reminds me of the story about the hammer: a man has a hammer; it's the same hammer that belonged to his great-great-great grandfather. In those years, the head of the hammer has been changed many times, and so has the handle, as they wear out. Is it still the same hammer? Is my story still the same story, even though scenes have been replaced?"

I know what she means: for a complex set of practical, storytelling reasons, I'm about to pick up three scenes in the WIP, which take place in the same private house on two different days, jam them all together in a single morning with a chorus of different minor characters, and set them in a building site. And it is about the function of the scene in the story, so it shouldn't matter where it's set or what happens in superficial terms of action, as long as both make this turn of the plot-engine believable (which was Leila's original problem). And yet because setting and action, in the broad sense of "computer-hacking-in-Afghanistan" or "women-winning-in-Silicon-Valley", are two of the primary ways in which we experience a novel, to change the setting or action of a scene can mean that it feels as if the novel has changed.

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