What happens to you when you write?

I’ll tell you what happens to me when I start to write a piece of long fiction (novel/novella/play) as long as you promise not to laugh (or at least, not to laugh where I can hear you).

The first thing is I start to dream as if I were the protagonist of the piece. That is a very strange feeling. I’m not dreaming about them, but as if I had their dreams in my sleep. It’s just begun to happen with a novel that I’ve been thinking about for over a year now.

The second thing is I stop wearing a watch. I don’t know why, but I do, and I don’t start wearing a watch again until the first draft is finished. Weird, yes? But it gets weirder.

The third thing is I develop an obsession completely unrelated to the subject matter I’m about to write. When I wrote about wolves my obsession was with Egyptian Dance. When I wrote about pornography it was with potager gardens. Now, as I prepare to write about autism, I have become obsessed with ….









… bento.

Yes, for some reason, my mind has fixated on Japanese packed lunches! I spend all my free time (okay, all my procrastination time) scouring the internet for recipes or looking at bento boxes on eBay (and the UK ones are all rubbish and overpriced so I can’t even bid for one) or staring at images of beautiful bento.

I don’t know why this happens. It’s a really strange and unsettling way for my mind to birfucate, but at least now I know what it means I can relax, knowing that there’s a novel about to be written.

Bento courtesy of taiyofj

My last post brought such excellent comments that I’m going to revisit it briefly, before moving on. Vanessa raised the question of whether we look at books as readers or writers, when we are asked to review them, and it’s an important, possibly crucial, point. What a reader wants from a book may be very different to what a writer seeks out – and the popularity of sites like Goodreads and Amazon shows that the ‘if you loved that, you’ll also like this’ approach works for most readers.

Writers, on the other hand, are driven to seek out material that exposes them to new techniques, ideas or approaches. They read critically, that is, looking at how things work and where they don’t, and they tend to respond to writing on a craft basis as much as an enjoyment basis.

It’s also very often true that there is snobbery in the writer’s approach to writing. Just as restaurant critics do not review even Pizza Express, let alone KFC, even if more people eat in KFC on a single day than do at The Ivy in an entire year, you don’t get ‘writerly’ reviews of Jonathan Kellerman or Reginald Hill, which is not to say that either of those writers are KFC, because they aren’t, I read them both with great pleasure and recommend them to you!

The point is, we make a judgement about the reviewer, as well as the review: is this person like me (a reader) or like me (a reader and writer)? And we consider the usefulness of the review to us on that basis – writers reviewing writers can get incestuous, and reductionist. We all want readers, and so when we review we should be asking a series of simple questions: was this worth reading - why or why not? was it enjoyable reading - why or why not? That’s what helps both the writer and a potential reader understand how the book works on the most important level – readability. Only then should we move on to the literary questions of voice, themes etc.

And speaking of literary:

Chroma International Queer Writing Competition
An international short story and poetry competition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual writers. Judges: Betsy Warland (poetry), Sarah Waters and Robert Gluck (short story)

Deadline: 1st Sept 2008

Prizes: (in both categories) 1st - £300, 2nd - £150 3rd - £75; publication in Chroma Magazine plus 2 UK winners will appear at proudWORDS Festival, Newcastle. For full details, including the Transfabulous and Velvet Flash Fiction competitions, and rule, visit the Chroma Website

The downside of marketing yourself

Just to prove that I’m being honest about the experience of ‘marketing’, the past week has actually slapped me with a whole messy handful of dilemmas that arise for many writers once they start being ‘known’.

1 – a writer I’ve never met, whose work I’ve never read, asked me to review her new, self-published, novel

2 – T.J. Forrester asked me to review a story for his excellent new project, Five Star Literary Stories

3 – A writer I have met asked me to review her new book.

Um. Oh dear. And likewise … gulp!

In the case of the first, I went to look at an excerpt and decided that while the work is about an important and often poorly-addressed subject and in that sense is an admirable project, the individual words should have been professionally edited before publication (an example: two characters exchange a few sentences of dialogue, a third joins them and then the author says ‘a conversation ensues’ Uh? What was all that dialogue beforehand, if not a conversation?) and that’s what I told her, saying that if she sent me the book, I’d have to make that comment. I’m sure that writer now thinks I’m an awful snob, but I’m not; I’m happy to review anything people send me, but I do have to be honest, or I’m doing myself, and them, a disservice.

In the second example, I actually had to ask for another story because the first one had grammatical misconstructions that simply turned me off. Now in this case I’m entirely at fault – I am a pedant and I simply can’t bear certain written mistakes that have the same effect on me as fingernails on a blackboard. And that’s not fair to the writer, because where commonplace errors are acceptable, as these are, it would be nitpicky in the extreme for me to be negative about the story, but I couldn’t lie and be positive about something to which I had such a negative visceral reaction. Anyway T.J. sent me another story that I could review without reservation and so that worked out okay. Should you be interested, you can read both story and review here: Five Star Literary Stories. (Bear this in mind dear readers, where a reviewer is paid to review, they may have a gut-deep hatred for something in your work and yet, because they are paid, they are going to go ahead and review you anyway – don’t assume the reviewer is always right, although most of the time they are more likely to be right than you are!)

Case three: this is a toughie. The fault is mine, I think. It’s not that the writing is bad, I just don’t ‘get’ this particular style of writing. I know other people admire it, and on a purely technical level I can understand how the words are put together in a certain way that is effective. But it doesn’t please me, it doesn’t tickle my reading centres, and that is not a question of good writing or bad writing, but a question of personal preference. I like Turkish Delight, I dislike nougat – that’s just the way I am. Other people hate Turkish Delight, that’s the way they are. But send me a nougat book and I’m a bit stumped and not very hungry. I haven’t actually decided what to do about this one yet.

So where does that leave me?

1 – with a writer who probably hates my guts

2 – with a solution found

3 – with a dilemma still unsolved.

And the point of these stories?

When you become a ‘visible’ figure for any reason, you must expect to disappoint and upset a few folk as well as pleasing and entertaining others. The only thing you can do, in the end, is stick to your ethics, however much or little other people seem to understand them, and take your lumps. It’s been a bit lumpy, one way or the other, in the past seven days, and that’s why writers tend to have neuroses!

And so to market …

It seems to me, to strain a metaphor to the point that I can get this picture to illustrate it, that something many writers don’t appreciate is how much of the modern writing life is about marketing. Like the submarine, with seven-tenths below the surface, and barely a ripple above, good marketing is the silent engine that drives a writer’s career.

Nota bene little ones, I am - once again - not talking to the very many who write for joy or love or freedom, I am talking to the few and determined who, like me, need to pay the mortgage every month by selling words.

Marketing is what gets you an audience, but much more than that, it brings opportunity. And marketing is not the simple ugly book-thrusting that people seem to think it is.

1 - Imagine, for example, that you walk past a stall in a market. It sells something you really want to buy (for the sake of argument, cheese) but there’s nobody at the stall and the wares are covered with a cloth. You walk on, don’t you?

2 - Then imagine there’s a little dish of cheese samples left out on the cloth, with some toothpicks and a sign saying ‘Back in five minutes, please try my cheeses in the meantime’ – well you might well try the cheese and hang around for a minute, maybe - if you’re the bold type – peek under the cloth at the lovely wares below, and then wander off, disappointed.

3 - Then imagine the dish, the toothpicks, the sign and some leaflets about cheese production and a little bell tied to a string, tied to the stand. You read the sign, try the cheese, pick up a leaflet and find that on the front it says, ‘If you’re reading this, my stall is unattended. Please ring the bell and I promise by the time you get to the end of the leaflet I will be back to serve you.’ Well, you’d ring the bell and read the leaflet, wouldn’t you?

And the only difference between 2 and 3 is marketing. It’s the same five minute wait, but in one case you’ve been charmed into staying and in the other you were disappointed into leaving.

If you can think of marketing like that it seems less vile and difficult to do, and if you can stretch it further (as my metaphors are stretching to encapsulate both submarines and cheese stalls!) to become a cheese cooperative, it becomes easier still.

I struggle to sell myself and my work (I can hear people scoffing from Rosneath to the Rialto as I type this, but it’s true) and I’ve never, ever, ever, ever believed that people would want to come and hear me read – but I do read in public, at least twice a year, because it’s simple for me to think of a list of folk I’d love to hear read, to contact them and suggest a joint reading, and then get my backside in gear to organise it. In exactly the same way, I have no problem telling you (dear reader) about good writing that I think you’d hate to miss (Sally Hinchcliffe’s Out of a Clear Sky), or alerting you (d.r.) to books that you personally might not read but that would make ideal presents for your loved ones (Lisa McMann’s Wake).

And that makes my blog more interesting, which means more d.r.’s come to visit it and that (I hope), multiplies the chances of more of them buying my novel when I finally get one on the shelves.

Easy, innit?

Talking to Sally Hinchcliffe

Today is a rare experience – I’ve interviewed an author whom I actually have met! Sally Hinchliffe, who used to work at Kew Botanic Gardens(one of my favourite places) turned up at a reading – not to see me particularly, but we got to talking, found we had much in common, and so when her novel came out, I was delighted to read it.

The novel, Out of a Clear Sky, is … clever. And I say that in full knowledge of what the word ‘clever’ means to most readers, and that it’s a turn-off. But this is the other kind of clever; the kind that leaves a little hole of worry or doubt or expectation in your head as you read and then knits up that gap with perfect timing and economy so that you, the reader, feel satisfied (a) that you were clever enough to spot the thing in the first place and (b) that the writer was only playing with you and knew exactly where and when to answer the question that you’d been asking yourself. As an example (and not to play with spoilers here) my heart did sink the tiniest bit when I found the protagonist was called Manda and her sister Zannah – such outlandish names, I thought, and wondered why. And then I found out why, and the solution was so clever, and so apposite to plot development, that I grinned to myself as I read on.

And I’m not a big birder, as some of you know. The truth is that I have a negative thing about migratory birds which comes from having been on a couple of ringing programmes in my formative years – there’s nothing like having a screaming bird defecate on you as you try to place a band round its scaly little leg to give you shivers as first swallows arrive. But Sally did reconcile me to the forgotten joy of waiting and watching, and Manda’s observations of native species are so perfectly slotted into the main storyline that even a non-birder like me will learn and enjoy. More than that though, the way the birding experiences foreshadow or amplify the human narrative is excellently handled. As I say, clever, in all the best senses of the word.

So, over to Sally:

1.It’s never a good idea to read too much autobiography into fiction, but are you a twitcher?

Never a twitcher! Technically, twitchers are the ones that go chasing off after rarities, the birds that get blown off course during a migration, and it can be a bit of a derogatory term. But yes, I did draw on my own love and experience of birdwatching for the setting of the book


2. More seriously, this novel weaves together a real love of nature and understanding of ecology generally, with a fast-moving and disturbing plot – why did you take that approach and did the idea of the linkages between the theme of birdwatching and the plot emerge naturally or did you have to sit down and work out how to do it?

The original hook of the novel - 'the watcher watched' - obviously sprang directly out of the birdwatching theme and that was how I conceived the novel from the outset. But as I wrote it some of the lesser themes emerged - particularly the idea of identity and identification, who people (or birds) really are, which of course is a key part of bird watching. And I found that the different birds used in the different chapter headings brought their own resonances; birds like the cuckoo and the raven and the owl all crop up over and over in myth and folklore and I was able to draw on that.


3.Did you ‘road test’ your twitcher credibility on test readers? If not, how do you go about making sure your book fits with that section of your audience that will probably be highly expert in this area ?

I didn't - I probably should have, but I was too nervous! Some of the big birding sites have had copies for review, so it will be interesting to see what they make of it. I have tried very hard to be accurate about the birds themselves, and I did do a fair bit of research to make sure I've got my facts right. And I had to fit the needs and pacing of the plot with what the birds themselves would be doing - which sometimes entailed a fair bit of juggling round, but I didn't want to have migrating swifts appearing too early, or birds nesting when they wouldn't be. Most of the sightings of birds that Manda describes are based on my own observations, so they are as accurate as I can make them. In fact episodes in the book might actually be triggered by something I've seen: the wren facing off the magpie, for instance. And I hope I got right what it's like to go birdwatching - the frustration, the excitement (yes, it is exciting), the way people behave, but that's a very personal thing, and other people may have had different experiences.


4. Your protagonist is not a happy person – in fact there was something about Manda that made me think of Aurelio Zen, the late Michael Dibdin’s creation in his Roman/Venetian detective series. Did you deliberately set out to create a female character who has something tormented about her? If not, how did Manda's personality emerge during the writing

That's a tricky one. I didn't set out to create any sort of character, really, mostly as you say her character emerged in the course of the writing. Given her childhood and the things that happen in the course of the book, she was always going to be a bit tormented, and I didn't want to sugar-coat her character. What I hope comes across is that she's tough and determined and self-reliant, and also that there's a vein of black humour there that hasn't quite been eroded away.


5. What’s the one mistake you made, when starting out as a writer, that still haunts you?

Not starting out! Or not starting out soon enough. I've wanted to write since I was seven; I still have somewhere the red & black notebook with my first attempts at a book in it. But I let the real world take over and the writing took a back seat for far too long. I took it for granted that I would write properly someday, and I wish someone had told me how long the whole process takes and how much you have to write before you become a writer.



6. How long did it take you to write Out Of A Clear Sky and what input have your agent and publisher given you that you can share with us?

From start to finish, three and a half years. Not all of that was continuous, because I'd have to put it aside for a few months at a time before going back to it and rewriting. I probably did three drafts on my own, then one rewrite in consultation with my agent, and then the final edit with Maria Rejt at Macmillan. Mostly the input was to do with the plot and pacing and overall shape of the novel - where to cut, where to expand, moving scenes around - rather than fine tuning the writing itself. I can't over-emphasise enough the benefit of having a really good editor - I see too many books that have been badly edited, or perhaps where the author hasn't been willing to take editorial direction, and a good story or fine writing is just lost because the book itself doesn't work as a whole. As writers, we can be too close to our own work, and of course we don't want to cut so much as a comma of our precious prose. Having a brilliant editor like Maria has been tremendous; she just brought the whole book into focus, and I've learned a huge amount in the process.


7. What’s your next writing project going to be?

I'm working on my second book, but it's too early to say much more than that. It won't be another bird one though.



8. If you were abandoned on a desert island, with just one book for company, what would it be?

I know it's a hypothetical question, but I find the whole idea of being stuck on a desert island with just one book absolutely terrifying. I can't go more than a day without having something to read. So whatever book is the longest would be the answer - it doesn't matter what it is.


Out of a Clear Sky was published by Macmillan this very month, and is available everywhere - ISBN-13: 9780230531505 or 10: 0230531504. You can also hear Sally read from her novel on Monday 12 May, 6.30-8.15 pm at the RADA Foyer Bar, Malet Street, London WC1E 7JN, along with fellow Birkbeck Alumni Niki Aguirre and Matthew Loukes. Admission is free of charge, but with a suggested donation to Oxfam of £3.50. To reserve places in advance, email writloud@aol.co.uk.

Tag, tag, tag …

First, and most interestingly, the excellent Sandra Scoppettone tagged me with this exercise, which is to promote books of recent publication that might be sliding from the public eye. It was the brainchild of Patti Abbot and I think it’s a great idea.

My choice is a novel by Jill Dawson, a writer I admire intensely and with whom I even exchanged few emails once. The novel is Fred and Edie which was an Orange Broadband Award for Fiction nominee in 2001. It’s a narrative that does a whole slew of things that I would normally claim to hate: it deals with fact – the infamous Thompson and Bywaters murder case, it’s written partly in the form of unsent letters (a device that’s usually ghastly to read) and it constantly references a poem released in the year the book deals with (TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, 1922) which can be an annoyance, like novelists referencing song lyrics to remind us which decade we’re in.

But Dawson surmounts these potential and self-imposed handicaps to produce an account of subtle humour, scorching sensuality and increasing awareness, on Edie’s part, that there is no way out for her – she is going to pay the price for daring to be an assertive, sexually self-aware woman, and that price is a terrible one. It’s written with spareness and lyricism, so every word carries more than its usual weight, and Edie’s covert rejections of the conventions of the 1920s are expressed with great subtlety, allowing us to put ourselves in her place and understand her actions with sympathy. Above all though, it’s a novel of beauty: whether that beauty is Edie appreciating the hats she handles as a milliner or the beauty of her young and illicit lover, or the beauty of hyacinths blooming in spring – and Dawson makes us feel her appetite for beauty, even as we realise that the appetite is going to lead her to something awful. Read Fred and Edie, you won’t regret it.

I’m going to tag Sara Crowley because she is extremely well read and will come up with a corker!

Second - Charles Lambert tagged me with two memes – here we go on the first which involves six random facts about me and then tagging six bloggers who must list six random facts about themselves and tag six bloggers who must ... (etc):

1. Kay is not my real name

2. I have a system for tying shoelaces that nobody else can do and I can’t explain

3. I was engaged eight times before I got married (to a man I was never engaged to)

4. If I live to be 75 I’m going to start smoking again (assuming it hasn’t been outlawed by then)

5. I can’t ride a motorbike

6. I read a book a day from the ages of six to twenty-one

And I’m tagging:

1. Bunny Goodjohn
2. Carol Reid
3. Lisa McMann
4. Jai Clare
5. Donna George Storey
6. Steve Kane

Then there's the other meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The nearest books is A L Kennedy’s Day – lovely book, can’t recommend it too highly. The sixth, seventh and eighth sentences on page 123 are:

My friend.
My crew.
My girl.
(And yes, they are italicised).

So I’m going to tag:

1. Craig Terlson
2. Ahmed (who’s just published a Ren Holton story in his anthology SF waxes Philosophical)
3. Fiona (because her nearest book will probably be a cookery book and I love her recipes!)
4. Xujun Eberlein
5. Steve Augarde

Lisa McMann spills the beans


I’ve ‘known’ Lisa McMann for about four years I suppose. We ‘met’, as I’ve ‘met’ so many writers, at the Zoetrope Virtual Studio and one of the first things I noticed about her was her positive nature.

Writing tends to attract people who are either vulnerable or overly sensitive, in somewhat larger numbers than other areas of interest – and Lisa was notable for being well-balanced, hard-working and generous. And a good writer. Never forget, if you’re aiming to make a career from writing, that it’s tough to be friends with people who are bad writers. I say that very sincerely – if you don’t fall out with them about their writing, they will fall out with you because they envy your success. Pick your friends with care, and your writer friends with neurotic precision. I’ve been lucky with most of my choices, because believe me, when they ask you to read something and you think it’s sub-par, there’s no easy way of saying it.

I’ve never read anything sub-par by Lisa, and in fact, her YA novel, WAKE, available through every good bookstore and via Amazon, of course, is currently on the NYT children’s bestseller list. And I read it at a sitting: it rip-roars, it really does. Faintly spooky, wise-cracking, fast-paced and funny, this is a book that my own teen is actually reading from choice, and he hasn’t done that since he was eleven!

So I asked Lisa some writerly questions:

1. How did you get into writing Young Adult novels?

It was by accident, though I look back now and think it should have been obvious to me all along. The first novel I wrote (practice novel #1, I like to call it now) was an historical novel and the main characters were teenagers. But because of the subject matter (the Holocaust) and that these teens were sort of thrust into adult-hood, it seemed to me like a book for adults. When others read it, though, they said “this is a great YA!” And I was like, “YA? It’s for adults.” Now I look back and shake my head – I didn’t see it. And I remember all the books I loved to read when I was a bookseller. YA novels held a special place in my heart and they still do. It’s no wonder the niche is right for me.

2. What’s the best thing about targeting this readership, for you?

Well, it seems to me that YA actually has two readerships – teens, and adults-who-love-YA. The teens I love because they are so brutally honest. And so willing to try a new book (and then email the author to tell her how she SHOULD HAVE written it, heehee). I love targeting the adults who read YA because of the challenge – they tend to know what they like and it takes a bit more to convince them to try a mild paranormal like WAKE when they really only read realistic YA, for instance. I like the challenge. It’s especially rewarding when I hear from someone who says, “I wouldn’t normally have picked up something like this, but I loved it.”

3. Do you ‘road test’ your YA credibility on test readers? If not, how do you go about making sure your book fits with a young adult culture which moves so fast?

I have a few teens that read for me. My son (14) is really helpful with this WAKE series – he keeps me up on the lingo, and my daughter (11) has read some of my other work that’s aimed at younger audiences (yet unpublished). I also really value the opinions of other YA authors and non-writer friends who love to read.

Also, when I speak at high schools, I ask the students what their favourite “Urban Dictionary” words are. Sometimes when I travel I pick up regional colloquialisms as well.

4. You’ve had fantastic success in reaching out to your target audience: do you think this is something that writers need to think more about, or is ‘the book’ still the only thing that matters?

‘The book’ matters, but if it’s not picked up as a lead title for the publisher, and if the author doesn’t have a built-in platform or existing fan base, the fate of that book (in my humble opinion) rests in the author’s hands. The more an author can do to reach out to that target audience, the more books he’ll sell. And yeah, sometimes the tedium of selling one book/reaching one fan at a time doesn’t seem worthwhile...I’m proof that it is. I started my Myspace page about ten months before WAKE came out, and I went out and found new friends that seemed like they’d like my book. And when WAKE came out, I can say that hundreds of these Myspace friends have bought the book. Some people might say, big whoop – a few hundred copies. But it’s the word of mouth that comes from those few hundred readers that sells books. It’s very important to look at the big picture and realize what you do now to get the word out will affect your sales down the road.

5. What’s the one mistake you made, when starting out as a writer, that still haunts you?

Probably thinking that literary writing was “better” than commercial writing. I admit I was a snob. That’s what I learned in creative writing classes – that, and about twenty gazillion rules that I had to unlearn before I could become a better writer. I think that’s really a shame. Too many writers wear a cloak of rules so heavy it makes their writing stilted. We get caught up in the tiny things and forget to let ourselves off the hook and just write.

I’m glad I pulled my head out of my arse (well, in this area, anyway) and realized that good writing can be commercial. And let’s face it – it’s hella easier to sell commercial work than it is to sell literary work. The audience is tremendously larger. Writing well and writing commercially are not mutually exclusive. Also, having a breakneck plot with well-rounded characters is achievable and ENJOYABLE. One doesn’t have to be a starving writer in order to feel fulfilled in this profession. So, to answer your question, it doesn’t exactly haunt me, but I do regret that I once had such a view. Some folks have a term for people like me -- a sell-out. I don’t mind if they think that. All I care about is that I love what I do.

6. What advice would you give somebody who is thinking of becoming a YA novelist?

Read YA novels. At least, like, fifty of them. The variety is amazing, and since YA age group is categorized anywhere from ages 11 – 25, think about your target age group, because the space between ages 12 and 15 is about as big as the Grand Canyon. Also, please stop making up rules for “what is okay for YA.” Anything goes, and if you don’t know that, you haven’t read enough YA. Author Scott Westerfeld* says something like, Anything goes in YA except bestiality and boring. And if you have to have one, make it bestiality.

7. Is there a different approach to writing for each of the different fields you’ve succeeded in – for example, how does Lisa McMann approach writing a YA thriller compared to writing the winning Templeton Prize story?

Definitely a different approach. I spent a very long time agonizing over each word of the “Day of the Shoes” story – something that’s necessary with short stories and flash. And while words are very important in novels as well, each word holds less power individually. So yes, the approach is different but more because of the length of the work rather than the subject matter. Too, the short story cried out for a melodious flow of words, and WAKE is very different from that in style. WAKE is much quicker, more abrupt and mysterious. Faster paced. I like that variety. Keeps things interesting.

8. If you were abandoned on a desert island, with just one book for company, what would it be?

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Or the full set of Harry Potters (that should count as one book, I think).





*(Lisa says, ‘apologies to Scott if I’ve mis-quoted – my Google safe-search didn’t like that word, apparently, so I couldn’t locate the exact quote and am going from memory. And yes, that was me Google-searching your name along with bestiality, but only in a good way, I swear...’)