Clairefontaine

I wasn't going to post again until after Christmas, being somewhat in the doldrums, but yesterday I went shopping in Brighton and came home with a Clairefontaine notebook - buff faux leather cover, (that's buff as in hue, for Americans who think I think my notebook has a sexy body) stitched pages, ruled ... well, just a thing of beauty, really. All for £3.50.

And suddenly, despite the fact that all around me is literary doom and gloom, and good writers are having their books remaindered, and I don't even have a book to be remaindered, I'm happy again.

All it takes is something nice to write in, and this novelist is back in the saddle, churning out words. Cheap date isn't in it, I'm ludicrously easy to please, it seems.

So, I hope you all find a Clairefontaine notebook in your stocking this year, or whatever is the literary equivalent for putting a smile on your particular face.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

Winter solstice

Should be loads of inspiring things to say today, but in fact I'm just hacked off. Talented friends are being disappointed in their literary careers, (me too), it's been dark since 2pm, and I have a migraine.

Upbeat service will be resumed as soon as possible.

When can we say no?

I've just lost what could have been a friend. I'll never know, because he has gone off in a huff, but I still feel justified in what I did - in fact, I wish I'd been braver than I was. This is what I wish I'd said.

Dear X

No, I won't 'look over' your application letter and cv as a favour. 'Look over' means copy-edit, fact-check and rewrite as necessary - skills I possess and you don't, and you probably think I'm a complete bitch for refusing you. After all, what would it cost me?

It would cost me time and self-esteem. What you're asking me to do is work for you for free. If you really lack confidence in your cv, why not send it to a resumé service? Perhaps because you'd have to pay them? But it's okay to dump on a mate, I assume.

Writing is how I make my living - if I give up writing time for you, then I give up time in which I could be earning money. You are just you, but I probably know 300 people who are going to change their job in the next two years - should I give up some of my precious earning time every couple of days to spend several hours working for them, for free?

I'm not going to reveal what you do for a living, as some people could work out who you are from that, but let's pretend you're an accountant - will you check over my annual accounts for free every year? No, I didn't think so. So why should I do this for you?

Because we're friends?

We were friends. Not any more. You didn't even offer to buy me a coffee, bring me a bunch of flowers or take me out for lunch. Maybe you would have done, after I'd done what you'd asked, but I don't think so. I don't need this kind of friendship.

My skills are worth as much as yours and should be hired on the same basis. It's offensive to assume that because writers can write, they are a free resource to all their acquaintance whenever there's something you want proof-read or edited.

So goodbye, person who might have become a friend. I wish you luck with the job hunt.

Better days ...

My Indian sweets arrived - the pera are wonderful but I haven't opened the others yet so the photo will have to wait, if I dared to unseal all the boxes now I would have stuffed myself stupid by evening, and I have to go out to dinner tonight (pooh! Business, who needs it? Well, I do, actually, so I shall go, even though I don't want to).

This morning Krista Barrett sent me a copy of her Topzone Publishing ebook, which includes the worst rejection letter I ever received - and Virgin Books sent me a $200 cheque for one of Carmel's stories which appeared in their Sex and Shopping anthology. Nice stuff!

The new novel is starting to take shape, and I've happily spent an hour ferreting around the internet for information on old cameras. I have some much deeper research to do on the subject of trick photography but it's shown me the direction I need to head in, and fortunately, Brighton and Hove has a wonderful cinematic archive in Hove Museum, detailing some of the earliest moving films ever made, so I can see some happy days ahead, spent exploring this subject. And Portsmouth Water have proved very helpful in my search for information about Hampshire's rivers and bringing water to rural areas, so that too needs to be fitted into the research programme - some trips down there will be necessary to refresh my memory of the region.

Now if only I didn't have to go out tonight ...

Things I hate:

• Small women in big 4x4s who stop in the middle of narrow streets to hold conversations with friends on the pavement in Lewes
• Newhaven
• Driving in rain
• Non-writing days.

I think that says it all really.

Tomorrow I am going to write all day, pausing only to answer the door to the man who is going to deliver 1.5 kilos of peras, barfis and jelabis.

Indian sweets are the best kept secret in confectionary - I'm addicted to them and would trade all my chocolate for one really good pera or a jelabi dripping syrup. I like laddoos too, and jamuns, but even I can't order more than a kilo and half of sweets in one go.

So tomorrow will be a better day. Normal service will be resumed. Or I'll be so stuffed with peras that I won't notice that I've forgotten to blog. Either way, I'll be happier than I am today. I may even photograph my sweets so you can drool over my luck.

What a writer needs for Christmas - indomitability


Charlie Williams and I might not be expected to have a lot in common, but on two things we agree. Browsing his blog, which is a bit like drinking snakebite in the saloon bar of an East End pub while a grudge euchre match is being played, he crystallised something for me about what makes the difference between sucessful and unsuccessful writers. His post on archeology showed what a writer has to do to get their work in good shape. But it was his post on Desert Orchid that made the idea real.

http://charliewilliams.blogspot.com/

What that exceptional and beautiful animal possessed was indomitability - it wasn't that he EXPECTED to be a winner, but that he refused to be beaten. Behind him was a whole raft of trainers, riders, nutritionists etc who gave him the skills he needed, but the final magic ingredient was his own belief that he hadn't lost until somebody else crossed the line first. Watch the video and see a beaten horse win. Then reflect on yourself. Do you do everything to be fit for your contest? Does each rejection send you back to see if there's something you can do to be in a better position next time? And when you think you're beaten, do you give up?

Desert Orchid was a force of nature, and like Charlie, I found his spirit so astonishing that I mourned when he died. He was a horse, a great horse, but only a horse. Given our talents, our skills, our wider understanding and our many ways to improve ourselves - can we do less than that amazing creature? Shouldn't we be indomitable whenever we're given the chance to compete?

Of course we should.

But indomitability also means being flexible, learning from mistakes, getting it more right every time - it's not about ego, but about constant efforts to improve.

So I'm asking for indomitability for Christmas, and Desert Orchid will be my icon - not a bad image to hold in front of me as the rejections keep arriving ...

Bling writing

I've rejected a couple of examples of this recently, as an editor, and I think it's both a growing trend and a sign of immaturity in the writer's psyche.

I'd define bling writing as the process of throwing brilliant effects at a story until it scintillates like a disco ball. Some writers are very, very good at it.

The problem for me, as an editor, is the story rarely stands up to a second reading. Once I've gasped at the devices: stream of consciousness, jump cut writing, artful running metaphors, it generally becomes clear to me that what the story lacks is a story. Characters tend to exist only to hold down the dizzying narrative constructions or to mouth dailogue that is full of word play. Events are secondary to scenes, which are linked not by narrative necessity but by flimsy underwriting like tacking stitches on a half made suit. Development is non-existent, the characters neither learn nor change and the story world is no different once the story is over. And that means the whole thing is like eating candyfloss - succulent at each bite, but cloying and unsatisfying when all you are left with is the empty stick.

Even in this party season I can't stomach much bling.

By comparison, the plain prose of writers like George Orwell has precisely the opposite effect. At first it seems almost bland, but the flavour emerges more strongly the more one reads, and every subsequent reading brings out new subtlety and power, like a good port that lingers on the palate.

Thirty minutes, mark the page

I once knew a journalist who taught me the one thing that has been the most value to me in my writing career. He didn't know he was instructing a future writer - at the time I was a barmaid and he drank every day in the pub I worked in. He would lean on the bar and survey his junior colleagues and apostrophise them with every bad name he could think of. He wasn't a popular or well-respected man, in fact he was a horrible example of cynical journalism, and nobody could understand how he kept his job.

He told me his secret and it was very simple. This was back when reporters typed copy on typewriters, and his only advantage over all the other journalists was that he'd trained himself to write his copy fast. This is what he did, and what I still do now. He marked the paper, set a timer for thirty minutes and banged away at the keys. At the end of thirty minutes he took ten minutes to check what he'd done, and then marked the paper again, set the timer and typed for another thirty minutes.

Why does this work?

Because most of us spend our 'writing' time doing almost anything other than writing - correcting previous work, organising our desk, making calls, daydreaming ... but when you look back at the page after thirty minutes and find you've only typed three lines, you know that you probably only worked for two of those thirty minutes. The rest of the time you wasted.

His work rate was phenomenal - he could turn out two or three times the stories his colleagues managed, and often ending up writing leaders that were last minute, just because he could be trusted to hit a deadline.

Over twenty years later, when I began to write, I remembered what he'd told me. I put an asterisk at the top of my page and typed for thirty minutes by the clock, ending with an asterisk. That first day, the results shocked me stupid. In one thirty minute session, I produced eighty-four words - that's all.

Nowadays I reckon to write five hundred words in half an hour, which means that when I've revised away the 40% that is rubbish in almost any first draft, I have around 300 words of reasonable text. In a day that's between 1,200 and 2,400 words. Not all of them good but all of them down as a first draft to be improved.

If somebody calls I ignore the phone, they can leave a message and I'll call back when my writing time is up, I can wait thirty minutes to go to the loo, and that chocolate biscuit I'm craving will still be in the kitchen when the timer goes. By giving my writing priority, I prevent myself daydreaming I'm a writer and spend my time actually proving I am one. And every thirty minutes I get a ten minute reward for my hard work.

What do you wear to write?

After yesterday's deluge of responses - and boy, aren't we all different - I wanted to explore another subject. I know writers who say their main work-related pleasure is that they can schlep around in a dressing gown all day. I can't.

To write, I have to be properly dressed. Okay I don't put on a business suit and crisp white blouse or anything like that (as those who've met me will testify, I'm most often to be found in hiking boots and my gardening jacket!) but I do have to be fully dressed and businesslike to produce good prose.

I had a student once who nearly gave up writing when his wife gave away his 'writing' shirt. He claimed it was lucky and that without it, he couldn't feel inspired. Funnily enough, I used to have an old grey sweatshirt that I wore most days to write in. On seeing his angst over losing his writing prop, I put that sweatshirt in the bin because I didn't want to become superstitious about my writing apparel.

What do you wear to write, or doesn't it matter to you at all? Didn't William Burroughs claim to write naked? Be warned - nude writers might be asked to supply photographs as evidence!

A Room without a View

Where do you write?

My PC monitor faces a blank corner of the room, not a single picture or postcard alleviates this boring view and to see out of the window I have to turn through nearly 360 degrees.

I'm not one of those writers who can cope with distraction - if I can see the clouds moving or the washing on the line, I'll happily gaze at it instead of writing.

I don't listen to music either, as that has far too much power to draw me out of what I'm working on, instead I listen to talk radio, for two reasons

1. it helps me with dialogue - I pick up rhythms of speech and accents that I can incorporate into my work
2. it reminds me of things, or piques mY interest in subjects - over the weekend, for example, as I was editing a piece for a website, I heard the announcer mention 'that peculiar jazzman John 'Jack' Purvis'.

Now I've written about Coltrane and Beiderbecke, and I'm still working on an Art Blakey story I started over eighteen months ago, but I'd forgotten the notorious Purvis, robber, fraudster, old lag and possible faker of his own death, as well as trumpet and trombone player with some of the world's best jazz ensembles. I scribbled down his name and have an idea already for a story.

So what helps or hinders your writing - do you know and have you done anything to make yourself more productive?

What am I doing again?

One of the biggest problems for any fiction writer is getting their head above the daily issues of making a living to fix on their long term ambitions.

Most of us want to get a novel published. That desire has three concrete steps.

1. Write novel
2. Edit novel
3. Send novel to agents/publishers

Sounds easy, doesn't it? But I genuinely believe that 50% of the writers I know AREN'T writing a novel, and of the remaining 50%, around 20% either AREN'T editing an already written novel or AREN'T sending it out to agents or publishers.

Why?

Sometimes it's fear, often it's disillusion. Most often though, it's just the daily grind of what is beautifully called 'scut work' - the disagreeable tasks we have to do to pay the bills. I try to avoid this trap, but I'm no better than the average. I looked at my files today and discovered I haven't sent my novel out for two weeks. Okay, I have excuses: NaNoWriMo takes a lot of my time in November, the serial whose deadline was 11 December had to be revised before going to the publisher, my greenhouse articles took some researching ... but excuses are purely that. If I want to be a published novelist, the novel should come first, not last.

I have two techniques that work for me.

The first is that I am part of a workshop where, every week, we all say how many submissions, rejections and acceptances we've had in the past seven days. If it gets to Friday and I've done nothing about sending work out, I feel so guilty that I can usually find at least one piece of fiction and one venue to put together as a submission.

The second is that I've told everybody that the novel is finished and I'm sending it out to agents. This means I get asked, quite often, how the agent search is going - especially by people who haven't seen me for a while. It only took a couple of occasions where I had to say 'Oh, I haven't done anything about it since I last saw you' for me to learn the lesson of shame. Now I can always say how many times I've sent it out (and how many times it's come back!) since the last time they asked me.

So today, to make up for the past two weeks, I sent the novel out to three agents. And next week I will send it out again ...

Reading as an editor

One of the toughest things I have to do with students is tell them that, had I been reading as an editor, I wouldn't have got past the third paragraph of their story.

It's a horrible thing to say, isn't it? But without knowing how an editor works and thinks, too many writers don't make the small improvements in their work that could mean the difference between success and failure. And actually, as an editor, I read everything to the bitter end - even if it's dire -that's what I'm paid for, after all.

But if I'm reading online, I insert an asterisk where, if I'd been reading for pleasure, I would have flipped to another site, and if I'm reading on paper, I draw a red line across the page where I would have put down the manuscript and gone off to do something more interesting. Then, if they are a student, I tell them where I would have given up if I'd had the choice.

Yes, it's harsh. But unlike editors and tutors, readers are not compelled to read to the end. They flip. They wander off. And an editor's job is to choose and polish work that stops them doing that.

Here are some ways to make sure your editor reads past the first three paragraphs:

1. Most first paragraphs can be removed from most stories - I'm as guilty of this as anybody else, and my critiquers in workshops often point out what I should have known for myself; that my opening para is just padding.
2. Weather is a turn off, and starting a story with weather suggests the writer lacks confidence, dramatic ability or both.
3. Events don't start (usually) when people wake up, so nor should stories, unless they are erotica and the characters are about to get erotic.

Of course there are exceptions to all these rules. But you have to be a damn fine writer to be an exception, and if you are, I'd probably not have stopped reading in the first place, so the point is moot.

Good news

Elastic Press, one of Britain's most imaginative small publishers, has picked some winners in the past, as far as I'm concerned. Brian Howell's collection The Sound of White Ants, and David Swann's collection The Last Days of Johnny North are both on my bookshelf.

Now they have listed Jai Clare's The Cusp of Something, a short story collection to be published in November 2007. Jai has one of the most distinctive voices in modern British literature and I'm delighted that her work will be available from such an exciting venue.

Bookplates

It's a truism that a writer does not get to choose his or her publisher. The publisher chooses the author, of course. But if I could choose, right now, I would choose William Morrow in the USA.

Why?

Because they have just sent my good friend Ellen Meister a stack of bookplates to give out with SECRET CONFESSIONS OF THE APPLEWOOD PTA which is available as a hardback, or very mellow audio-book, read by Lisa Kudrow no less, from Amazon both US and UK.

I have one such in front of me, on which Ellen has written nice things that I'm too shy to share, but more even than the kind words, the beatiful gold-edged bookplate, with the publisher's details at the bottom and the legend 'Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them at all' - THOREAU at the top, has made me fall completely in love with William Morrow.

I wish they'd fall in love with me!

Pushcart Nominations

The Pushcart Prize confuses me. Here's what they say about it:

'Little magazine and small book press editors may make up to six nominations from their year’s publications by our December 1 deadline. The nominations may be any combination of poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot. Editors may nominate self-contained portions of books — for instance, a chapter from a novel. We welcome translations, reprints and both traditional and experimental writing. One copy of each selection should be sent. No nominations can be returned. There is no entry fee. We also accept nominations from our staff of permanent, distinguished Contributing Editors.'

Which makes perfect sense, but I've never managed to understand the timeline of the nomination process and so when I get nominated I just forget about it. Presumably somebody tells the lucky folk who make the cut.

This year, Moondance have nominated my essay Oyster-Colored Satin for a Pushcart. I'm very honoured and will promptly not think about it again until the publication date comes round in about fourteen months!

It's all over ...

... bar the party. National Novel Writing Month has finished for another year, and for me this is a key year as I'm stepping down as Municipal Liaison for Brighton (and Hove actually). I've done the job for three years and reckon it's time to give somebody else a chance to wear the luminous T-shirt and crack the whip!

It's been a joy. I know some people are sniffy about the event, saying it's not real literature - but so what? Thousands of people run the London Marathon every year, not because they think they can win the race, but for the pleasure of taking part. We can't all be Paula Radcliffe but we can all stumble to the finish - several hours behind her - and know what it feels like to be her.

I feel excited every year, when people begin to feel the thrill of writing a long work of fiction and start to engage with the novelist's life that I live every day. So what if they only get a snapshot of what it feels like to write fiction for a living? A snapshot is worth more than no picture at all.

And every year I meet great writers with brilliant ideas who hammer out 50,000 words or more in thirty days, who share the highs and lows of novelling and who learn - as I have learned - just how addictive it is to create your own world.

So tonight we party - I have surprises for many of my participants, drinks to buy, stories to share and novel excerpts to read. And then I shall hang up the T-shirt and go back to being just another hack, churning it out for money. Until next November ...

NaNo final word count - 59128 words. Friends made - many. Fun had - loads.