Writer's shock not writer's block

This is going to surprise those who know me in real life. I'm taking a week's holiday next month!

Yup. No internet, no editing, no blogging ... I can't say no writing, as I'm packing my moleskines and writing pens, but nothing with a keyboard. I'm going back to the South of France, very near to where we used to live seventeen years ago. We've rented a cottage (no internet) in a village (no shop) not very near a town (great cassoulet).

When did I last take a holiday? ... um ... er ... hmmm. I don't know, is the honest answer.

What I am packing, along with the writing notebooks, is reading material. I can read a book a day easily (that's a working day, so what about days off? Well I can't remember when I last took a whole day off, but I can read two slim books easily on a Sunday, between working on the allotment, walking dogs, baking for the week ahead and writing and editing.)

So what novels would you recommend?

I've got Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before which I've been saving up, and Hilary Mantell's A Place of Greater Safety (that's a re-read: it's one of my annual pilgrimages to the books that have changed my literary life, Hilary's a rare soul: two of my life-changing books were written by her, an honour bestowed on no other writer) and Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of the Stepmother (The Storyteller is the Llosa on my pilgrimage list) but what else? Give me suggestions, enticements, harangues and hints!


The picture shows summer solstice bento ... eaten on the beach!

What advice would you give to writers?

That’s what somebody asked me on Sunday, and I’ve been thinking about it since then.

1. Don’t listen to advice – that’s the first thing I’d say. If I’d been given any advice before I launched into what people now call my writing ‘career’ (which makes me laugh: career, moi?) then it would have been ‘stick to the day job’ and ‘don’t expect to make a living from writing fiction’ and ‘writers are prone to mental illness you know, surely you don’t want to do something so risky/ill paid/rejection filled?’ Fortunately nobody knew what I was doing so nobody offered their wisdom. Five years on, making a living and no more prone to mental illness than I was before, I know I was very lucky to start writing without the benefit of other peoples’ opinions.

2. Write every day – that’s the only way I know to be a writer. Don’t worry about good writing or bad writing or when you’re going to finish or what you’re going to do with ‘it’ when you do. Just write, every day.

3. The third piece of advice is one that nobody ever follows. It’s the thing I tell everybody who asks me what really makes the difference between good writing and bad, and yet when I say it, I can see people refusing to accept what I say. It’s very simple. Put every finished piece of work in a drawer for ninety days before revising. That’s the one thing that really works for me. It means that if you follow my second piece of advice (a) you write ninety days more ‘stuff’ before you go back to revise the drawer piece, and that means you’re ninety days better a writer and (b) it means your words strike you freshly, as though somebody else had written them and (c) it means you are no longer in love with what you wrote and you can revise it with the sinewy power of disinterest, rather than the floppy fingertips of somebody who’s still enthralled with the power of their creation. Yes it requires immense willpower, although not so much if you do 2., and yes it means that you have to be committed to writing seriously and keeping track of what you’re working on . But if you do it, you discover something amazing – you can edit your own work as if it wasn’t yours, and that’s the thing that really makes a writer: not the writing, but the editing.

The photo is bagel dough, just to prove I'm still baking, as well as writing!

Wet Ink and Green and Black's

Saturday’s post brought two gems – the first a copy of Wet Ink containing my story ‘On the Cusp of Style and Failure’ and the second a Green and Black’s Organic Cereal Bar. I will freely admit I didn’t know which one to tear the wrapper off first! But the magazine won.

So I had the pleasure of spending Saturday morning munching on some of the best chocolate in the world (and telling myself it counted as a healthy breakfast, with all those cereal grains and fruits and nuts) and browsing a magazine new to me.

Let me be honest again. The Green and Black’s made a better initial impression than the magazine. I was not thrilled to bits by the cover, and I’m still not, although it has grown on me, but as I read through, I became more engrossed and impressed. Wet Ink is an Australian publication – it pays its writers well, from my experience treats them well, and publishes an eclectic but well-balanced mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and reviews. It has opinions and expresses them and has a clear sense of itself and its place in the literary and wider world.

All in all, it was a good weekend …

Novel review - Living with the Truth

There’s a terrible problem that strikes any writer who tries to convey their reality to others, it’s the dilemma of qualia, or – to be less philosophical about it – the ‘thingness’ of things. Can I tell what you taste when you eat buttered toast? No. Can I adequately depict to you the colour of the Atlantic in a force five wind? No. Not to the level that I can be sure what you taste or you can be certain what I see.

And so it is that when I tried to express the way Jim Murdoch’s novel, Living with the Truth, struck me, I had an immediate ‘quale’ or thingness and an equally immediate sense that my thingness wasn’t going to be universal enough to convey its essential nature to everybody else. And yet it is still the best way I’ve found to pin down the nature of this novel and it is this: cross a novel by Barbara Pym with one by Tom Robbins (preferably Jitterbug Perfume) and that’s the essential nature of ‘Living with the Truth’ … and so, as a reviewer, I probably fail totally.

Let me try and unpick it a little. What I’m trying to convey is that this is a comedy of manners, but with a surrealist bent. It explores the innate nature of the Western European male (a bit more melancholy in Scandinavia, a bit more boisterous in Italy, but generally that same mixture of bemusement at the female of the species, disappointment with life in general and a low-key adaptability that conceals the misery of a stale life) in a highly introspective domestic fashion (a la Pym) but with the interlocutor who provokes the introspection turning out to be the literal embodiment of The Truth (a la Robbins). Thus the elegant phrase ‘No one was smoking, but the smell of stale tobacco hung in the air like a tactless comment at a dinner party’ which could have come straight from the mistress of domestic observation, prefaces a lecture, from Truth, on the limitations of humanity in having only five senses and four dimensions.

One issue I had with the early part of the novel was that I sometimes struggled to work out which ‘he’ was being referred to, the protagonist, Jonathan Payne or his antagonist, the ineffable, and frequently insufferable, Truth, and that did lead to a bit of to-ing and fro-ing while I worked out who was saying (or doing) what to whom. It wasn’t bad enough to become tedious though, and once Jonathan and Truth get out and about (which they do in a very Pymian or Pymesque domestic fashion) it became easier to keep track of them.

In all, this is one of those novels that bookshops must hate: not ‘hard’ enough to be spec fic, not ‘weird’ enough to be fantasy, too realistic for the humour section and yet too humorous to shelve easily with the lit fic. And that, I suspect is going to prove to be its charm; for those who do read it, it’s a singular take on the world, and it will either resonate with you or leave you cold. Qualia again, you see. But I can recommend that you try it – if you like distinctive fiction that rings no bells and blows no whistles but creeps up on you with its absurdities, this book will satisfy you, as it did me.

I asked Jim to explain how inspiration struck and what it was like to be a poet writing a novel ...



1. Living with the Truth is a novel in itself, but has a sequel too. What made you decide to write two linked novels rather than one large novel and how long did it take for the structure of the work to become clear to you?

I didn't intend to write one novel let alone two. I was a poet. What business did I have footering around with novels? But in 1991 I hit a dry spell and I didn't write a word for two years. I'm not sure if it was desperation or what but I sat down one day to try and write a something, an anything, just to enjoy the pleasure of putting down words on a page. There was no plan, only an idea. A few weeks later I had a 34,000 word draft. The responses to it were far more encouraging than I had any right to expect and it was obvious with a bit of time and effort I might have a decent novel on my hands.

Living with the Truth was complete in my mind. Frankly I was surprised I had one book in me. But those who saw my early drafts had questions, questions that I personally didn't think needed answering but they started me thinking. So, in exactly the same way as I approached the first book – i.e. put a guy in a situation, watch him squirm and take notes – I thought about how I could answer their questions without sacrificing the integrity of the first book.

2. It’s been a long journey to novel publication for you – can you give us some details of this particular experience?

That's a good question. Basically I wrote the drafts of both novels over a six month period at the tail-end of 1993 but it took me another five years to tweak and polish them. I made a half-hearted attempt to find an agent then but I had begun a new and very demanding job and it devoured chunks of my life. After a few years I moved to what I hoped would be a quieter job but it turned out to be worse than the first one. Time marched on. I kept scribbling away in dribs and drabs. The next thing I knew "ten years had gone behind [me]" to misquote Pink Floyd and I realised if I wasn't going to grasp the thistle now then when? I had an open offer from Fandango Virtual and so I took Carrie up on it.

3. Poets who write novels seem to have more of a tooth-pulling, vein-opening, angst-inducing experience than other writers, and I’m not quite sure whether that’s because the structure of a novel (piling words on words to make mountains of narrative) is particularly daunting for those who spend most of their time choosing each word to fit perfectly in its place, or because poets, by nature, find writing painful anyway. How do the two forms of writing affect you?

I have never stopped writing poetry and I still regard myself as a poet who has branched out; everything I do is rooted in poetry. That said I'm no Elizabeth Smart. When I started working on that first novel it was purely an exercise, something to get the creative juices flowing. What I tapped into was a different aspect of writing. I had been a sprinter up until then – I produced short bursts of poetry – and the next thing I knew I was running a marathon and it was different but it was still putting words on a page. Later on, when I was stuck half-way through my third novel, I got an idea for a bunch of thematically-linked short stories (a form I hadn't touched since I was at school), and voilà I had discovered middle distance running and another voice. My poems are nothing like my stories and my stories are nothing like my novels. When I get an idea these days I know immediately what form it will take. Thankfully I've not had an idea for a musical yet.

4. On your blog you talk about autobiography and fiction in great depth and make the distinction that in exploring the life and nature of your protagonist, Jonathan Payne, you are not investigating ‘your’ life but ‘a’ life which is influenced and coloured by your own experiences and interests. The ‘write what you know’ dictum is one that depresses me profoundly because it seems to deny the imaginative leap that you have made (and made very well, in my view) in moving from Jonathan’s daily life to an event of such profound strangeness. This event, heralded by a knock on the door, is the appearance of Truth itself (or himself) and the way that the embodiment of Truth affects Jonathan is the meat of the rest of the novel. How long did it take you to decide to use such a bold jumping off point to explore the nature of a life barely lived and the illusions it contains?

I'm a great believer in the 'write what you think you know' and 'write what you want to know' schools of thought. Writing for me is all about discovery. I suspect this is why I've never been able to plot a book except in the vaguest of terms. I knew where Milligan and Murphy had to end up before I'd finished the first chapter of that book and so I wrote the last chapter and all I had to do was get them there.

There are moments in all our lives where we have to take stock, to face up to the truth about ourselves. I have strained to remember where the idea of Truth came from and I haven't a clue, not the foggiest. What I can tell you is that I had tried to read Patrick Süskind's novella The Pigeon and never got past the scene early on in the book where his protagonist, also named Jonathan, is transfixed by a pigeon in the hall outside his flat. He is terrified of the thing but not because he's ornithophobic or anything that obvious; the bird is clearly symbolic, a physical representation of something that Süskind's Jonathan couldn't face. Turning a pigeon into the personification of Truth isn't that much of a leap once you've gotten that far.

5. Tell us a bit about FV and how it came to publish your novel …

FV is Fandango Virtual (emphasis on the 'al'). It began life fourteen years ago as an on-line poetry magazine that developed a small but faithful following. Eventually the on-line journal slipped seamlessly into the real world, first with one magazine Gator Springs Gazette and then a second Bonfire. Unfortunately the publisher's health took a turn for the worse and she had to abandon both ventures. She had always intended to move into book publication and now she has.

Print-on-demand technology has been a double-edged sword. It has enabled a lot of people to see their work in print but it has also resulted in a marked decline in the quality of new books flooding the marketplace because so few have any quality editorial attention. Fandango Virtual uses an established printer who utilises offset and print-on-demand technology allowing it to keep to small print runs. This keeps costs down and makes being an independent publisher a practical consideration and not simply a hobby.

The publishing world is also changing and, apart from the lucky few, even an acceptance from a big publisher guarantees nothing; so much of the burden for promoting the product falls on the author's shoulders. I've even heard it suggested that it's an act of vanity to hang out for a 'real' publisher. Fandango Virtual, while maintaining high editorial standards, gave me a high degree of control over how the book was presented, right down to the cover. That, I liked.

6. I was very struck by something you mentioned on your blog in relation to poetry: All the poet hands over are words, no notes, no hand signals. It is the reader who works with those words and makes something of them. Every poem comes that way, no user's manual and batteries not included. One of the poems that will appear in the print edition is 'Your Statutory Rights are not Affected' during which the reader is asked to insert 'a moment of meaningful silence' into the poem. In other words, they need to contribute to the poem for it to work properly. Does the same seem true to you for novels? My gut feeling is that novelists do provide more notes, and in fact, the thing that stops many first-time novelists completing a novel is that they can never get past the notes to the narrative!

Absolutely. I think having spent years writing the kind of compact poems that I've become good at I've learned not to waffle on about things. I'm a great admirer of writers like Beckett, especially Beckett the playwright, who provide their audiences with just enough tools for them to work with and allows them to use their imaginations. I don't think it's a bad thing to finish a book without all the answers as long as the reader has enough of them.


Living With The Truth by Jim Murdoch is available from Fandango Virtual

P.S. If, like me, you buy books by covers (why not? It widens my reading) then this cover is one of the best and most beautiful I've seen this year, but you have to buy the book to find out why ...

We interrupt our normal schedule ...

To tell you that 41 people turned up for the creative writing group in Hove Library today. 41! Forty-one! FORTY-ONE!

That's amazing. It also meant that five people got turned away, because we couldn't physically fit anybody else in the room, not even standing up. And all 41 of them stayed the course, sitting or standing through two hours of me blathering on or making them do snippety little writing exercises.

I'd like to say it was my magnetic personality and superb facilitation skills that kept them there, but in fact I think it was their own commitment to writing, and to finding or building a group that would support that commitment, rather than anything about me.

The downside, for me, is that I didn't get to speak to everybody properly, and I hope that I'll be able to rectify that next month when we have smaller groups and more time to spend learning about each other's needs and skills and dreams.

Meantime, and in no particular order: respect to the four volunteer coordinators who are going to be taking on the two groups (which we christened The Hatchery and Comedy of Errors) after my facilitation role is over, namely: Debbie, Eileen, Jan and Sarah. Shout-outs to: Tony for keeping score of the voting, and Andy, Marina, Micha, the other Kay, Annie the new blogger, Tori the even newer blogger, Gill, Russell, Binnie, Gina and Lisa for questions, comments, ideas and suggestions - sorry I didn't get to use each and every one, but I'm saving some (particularly the NLP idea) to use next month. Thanks to Russell for already emailing me, so good to see enthusiasm in action! Admiration to Ziggi for having the best name and Cameron for having the best hat, and apologies to the five writers who were turned away because the room was too full.

Hoping to see all of you next month and I will, as promised, communicate with all of you on revised session times.

(See my bento and die from food envy: mini omelette with chive tie, mini sausages, card suit couscous, carved card suit Babybel cheese, lemon drizzle cupcake, sweets and peanuts, home-made peanut brittle (lid snack) and kiwi and apple salad ...)


When rejection creeps up on you and when you reject …



I’m going to share with you a story I’ve never told before. There was a boy I went to school with who was a heart-throb. I had never spoken to him, but, like almost every other girl, worshipped him from afar. He had a long sensitive face, grey-blue eyes and ash-blond hair and probably went on to look a bit like Ian McKellen (but straighter, one suspects, on the evidence) – and one day his best friend ran down the main drive of the school and said, a bit breathlessly, ‘Simon wants to go out with you.’

Did I swoon? Did I blush? No, I laughed in his face and walked by, and walked by Simon too, in his donkey jacket (very fashionable that year) standing in the middle of the assembly hall looking somewhat bewildered. In fact I never spoke to Simon.

Why did I act like such a heartless, witless, bitch? Well because I was at that age when I believed that anybody who might find me interesting or attractive must have some terrible deficiency in their intellect or some ghastly hidden secret that made them feel I was a kindred spirit. Like Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t join a club that would have me as a member, and my feelings for anybody who seemed to like me underwent an creeping change until I loathed that person and their puerile inability to see how loathsome I was.

Why am I troubling you with this particular bit of adolescent guff? Well because I notice that some writers still have it (I’ve outgrown mine, thank God, and now know that most people loathe something about themselves, it’s what makes them human, but it shouldn’t be allowed to dominate life) in relation to publication.
It manifests like this. ‘X has just said they’ll publish my short story about snails,’ says a writer.
‘Congratulations,’ I reply (sometimes through gritted teeth and envious tongue).
‘Hmmm.’
‘Well, that’s great, isn’t it? You’ve been trying to get into X for years,’ I continue.
‘Yes … but …’ and the writer sighs.

And there it is – X is suddenly not a good place to be published, precisely because X has accepted work from that writer.

Outright rejection is something writers have to learn to deal with fairly robustly if they are to have a reasonable quality of life. Insidious rejection is something else – the kind of rejection that creeps up on you because you don’t value yourself enough to trust other people’s estimation of you is one of the most dangerous creativity sappers because it leads to the leaping over hurdles to strain at skyscrapers syndrome where the only answer to the burgeoning self-hate would be publication in The New Yorker with a story that is then optioned by Steven Spielberg and also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But even then, the self-loathing writer will find a way to undermine their success.

What’s the answer, dear reader?

Two things:

--Know that perfection is unattainable. Any creation is flawed. You can do better next time – so move on and don’t fret about what is past. If you are disappointed or uncertain, use that energy to create new work, not fiddle with what has already found a home.
--Don’t let writing be the whole of your life. Find a non-competitive hobby, an absorbing interest or a demanding sport and ensure that you cultivate it – spreading your spirit across activities deprives writing of the change to sap your vitality.

I wish I’d gone out with Simon (he was, by all accounts, a great kisser) but I’m glad I learned the lesson then, and that my bread-making, yoga practice, gardening and new hobby (bento!) feed my creative impulses so that writing, whether accepted or not, is just one thing in a life that I try to live pretty fully.