Hilary Mantel wrote a lovely piece for the Guardian recently where she talked about her passion for stationary. When the new catalogue arrives, she loses herself in it for hours, browsing everything from notebooks, pens and paperclips to ‘biscuits, buckets and bayonet fitting bulbs.’
I too am a stationary addict. The only part of Mantel’s article I couldn’t identfy with, was her view that fixed-spine notebooks like the Moleskine are ‘death to free thought’. She believes you have to be able to shift notes around to create a novel but being rather linear of mind, I rather like Moleskine notebooks. [Maybe this is why she is a brilliant and successful novelist and I’m not]. Anyway, this got me thinking about the tools of the trade and what is absolutely necessary to me to write.


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The back page in 'Living Spain' is named 'Final Call' and this issue has an article called 'A Week on the Camino de Santiago'I decided that space was to be my goal.

I've done my 'how to write magazine articles' homework, analysed the magazine in general and the 'Camino' piece in detail. There's an illustration but I took lots of photos in Zamora so that shouldn't be a problem. The word count is 1200, which could be.Maybe the scope of my piece is too wide.

The structure of the Camino piece more or less does itself - a narrative of the pilgrim's route. There's some dialogue, quite a lot of landscape description:

Almost as soon as we crossed the frontier, the lush greenness of the French Pyrenese gave way to a much rockier and starker countryside and the further we travelled down the valley towards Jaca, the drier and warmer everything became.

Later on;

We also saw all sorts of wildlife, including Griffon vultures, red kites and buzzards



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‘And the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin
His boots are cracking for t' want of blacking
And his old fusty coat is wanting mending
Until they send him to the Dardanelles’

In 1915, when this sang mildly satirical ditty was first heard, Sir Winston Churchill took up painting.


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My name is Susie. And I'm a blocked writer.

I'm even blocked for blogging. Sitting here in front of a square of empty screen, due to post tonight, and no ideas have come. This is scary and disconcerting, and it's the second time it's happened in a month.

The last time I worked on my novel was 18th January. I know, because I have a list of days and word-counts I kept to encourage me to keep going. So what happened?

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A behind-the-scenes look at a top literary agency.

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I've just agreed to write a story for an anthology which is being published by Glasshouse Books in July. It's called 33 because that's how many London boroughs there are, and it's one story for each borough. I'm doing Bexley, and since Londoners are no less parochial (arguably more parochial) than anyone else, even my London-based friends might need explaining that Bexley is fairly south and very east London: specifically, it's lined up along both sides of the bit of the A2 which you hope to whizz through on the way to Rochester and ultimately Dover and then France, and usually find you crawl through because there's an accident at the Danson Interchange and traffic backed up from the roadworks by the new Eurostar station at Ebbsfleet.

No, Bexley is neither the borough of my birth (Kensington & Chelsea) nor where I was at school (Hammersmith & Fulham) nor where I live, nor have lived (Lambeth), though I'm looking forward to reading other writers' take on my past and present stamping grounds. But, believe it or not, there's a Bexley story I've been wanting to write for ages. In researching A Secret Alchemy I spread outwards from Eltham Palace, which is an important setting for both medieval and modern strands, and found all sorts of other things. William Morris's Red House I would have been tempted by, but it, too, was refracted through the fictional prism, into The Chantry, and I haven't yet cycled back round to want to revisit that material. So it's neither of those: what it is would be telling...

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I'm not exactly bereft when it comes to 'How-to-Write' books - but what's this I read in Time Out? Best-selling crime-writer Elmore Leonard's giving out writing tips on TV!

It's a BBC programme called 'Culture', so forget helpful countdown numbers, as in 'The 20 Best Spats from Corrie''. Instead, close ups of the author's gaunt face wreathed in cigarette smoke, intercut with clips of John Travolta and Danny DeVito talking about writing in the 1995 film, 'Get Shorty'

As I'm also eating a pizza, and it's more an edited version of the writer's thoughts than 'tips' I note down only nine. Maybe there were more.


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We’ve all heard this quote many times (it’s actually a slight misquote from Albert Einstein), that creativity is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. For the most part, this feels like a truism to anyone who struggles to finish a poem, story, play, song, or novel. However, what about that one percent?

A question I’ve been asked a lot lately, since I just came out with a debut collection, is what inspires me as a writer? In other words, where does that one per cent arrive from? I never had to think so closely about the process before. In the past, I just waited or looked for inspiration, not giving much thought as to how it happens.

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Two years ago, in order to stimulate my limited reading preferences, I set up a book club. Our group, all friends of mine who would normally have met over dinner, have since fallen into a happy routine of meeting every six weeks to review a book. This gathering doesn’t involve dinner, just a few nibbles and strangely enough, at book club, we don’t over indulge in the wrath of grapes either. Book club has become a real forum for...er, books.

So, over the past twenty four months, I’ve read many different genres that otherwise I wouldn’t have touched with a proverbial bargepole. I’ve escaped the reading rut I was in, that of reading commercial beach fodder only. And though I’m still rather partial to a beach bonk-buster, with nine members of both sexes, the book club choices have forced me and others to reach past our self imposed comfort zones. Most of the times, I’ve liked the book. Some of the times, I’ve loathed the book and quite often, I’ve loved the book to the point of passion. I’ve wanted to shout from the rafters, any rafters, that everyone should read this book! The latest author to come under our scrutiny, Mr Markus Zusack, writer of the magnificent ‘’The Book Thief’ has provoked such emotions in me.



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