Winchester Writers' Festival 2016: Meg Rosoff and Magical Fierceness

Meg Rosoff giving the Keynote Speech
at Winchester Writers' Festival 2016

Rather unbelievably, it’s time for my annual follow-up post on the Winchester Writers’ Festival, where I gave a lecture on self-editing and a day course on building character. There was the usual buzz of creativity and connection as writers milled around, attending readings, talks, courses and one-to-ones with agents, editors and writers like myself.

What do writers talk about at events like this? Well, their writing, of course, their hopes and their struggles, their frustrations and their triumphs. All of this against the backdrop of the annual review of the State of Publishing. We listen to those in the know, those in the trade – but also those in the independent sphere. Both schools of publishing practice have learned to co-exist fairly amicably, really. Perfection doesn’t exist on either side: indie authors sometimes haven’t taken on board the need for professionalism in presentation and content. Trad publishers are often way behind the times in their view of the indie world. But, catching up has been done, on both sides.

Every year the Festival officially opens on Saturday with the Keynote Speech. This year featured Meg Rosoff, with a quirky Powerpoint sequence behind her, discussing the nature of ‘voice’. This it turns out, is your ‘DNA’ as a writer. It’s your individual personality in words. It takes some finding and developing. When found, it creates that state we all seek and sometimes achieve:  the zone, ‘writers’ magic’, the state where you tap into your true self and meaning, where inspiration and expression fuse.

The Stripe Auditorium

In case this all sounds a bit airy-fairy, let me assure you that Meg was sharp as a tack, cynical, acerbic and total fun. She introduced us to the wonderful German word Durchlässigkeit, which means ‘throughness’, for that sense of a perfect flow of energy between conscious and unconscious mind. The term comes from dressage, referring to the harmonius co-operation of rider and horse. She said that a wall exists between the conscious and the unconscious and it’s up to us to establish and encourage connections: ‘If there’s a wall, you won’t get resonance.’

Meg went on to stress that we need to access the ‘dreamy state’ by such practices as morning writing, when ‘the brain hasn’t closed the bridge’. She herself waits for her books to come to her and tell her what their meanings are, what their resonance is. This is a process you can encourage but not force: ‘Sometimes you need to wait for the brain to be ready.’ If you want to home in on what is important to you, storywise, she recommends you to consider the turning points of your life and what they meant to you.

Throughout her speech the audience responded with laughter and murmurs of agreement: she really spoke to us, part-reassuringly, part bracingly. It was clear that writing – which she came to at the age of 46 after a rocky career in advertising – was as frustrating and rewarding to her as it is to the rest of us. She described the months when the book won’t come, the glorious breakthroughs of meaning, the buzz of inspired productivity. She spoke to an audience resonating to her message.

I came away struck in particular by one thing she’d mentioned: early in her career she’d written a pony book, which was no good, she claimed, but which got her an agent. Her agent said, ‘There are no rules. Write as fiercely as you can and I’ll find someone who will read it.’ I loved the idea of fierce writing – and the idea of a champion who would fight for that writing to be read.

During my one-to-one appointments

A couple of hours later I was meeting writers for one-to-ones in a room full of agents and editors, all listening to pitches, all responding to dreams and aspirations in a world that is commercially hard-headed and has always had to be. Yet I know that in that room, a writer or two will have fired up an agent or an editor with enthusiasm and months down the line we’ll hear of the book deal and the dream fulfilled.

Keep crossing that bridge into your inner life and self. Keep writing fiercely. Keep trusting that out there is the agent or editor or reader who will look at your work and ‘get’ it and champion it.

Finally - shout outs to my lovely friends at Winchester: Judith Heneghan, Sara Gangai, Barbara Large, Adrienne Dines, David Simpkin, Judy Waite, Nik Charrett, David Evans - and also to Imogen Cooper, Beverley Birch, Jenny Savill, Eden Sharp and Andrew Weale for fascinating conversations.

After the Festival Dinner

Conference Director Judith Heneghan at the Festival Dinner

With Adrienne Dines

Latest Quote of Note

I've just posted a quotation by Terry Pratchett and my thoughts on it on the Quotes of Notes page in the Writing Inspiration section of my website so head on over there! Remember also that my Early Bird Booking offer for my spring fictionfire courses runs until the end of this month - full details also on the site.

New Year, New Beginnings

Well, that's Christmas over with - and it was a very good one down our neck of the woods. We're now standing on the threshold of the new year in a month named after the two-faced god of doorways. We look back - with some degree of nostalgia perhaps, although many of us seem to be glad to be putting 2010 behind us (my sister especially, who's had a bad year, health-wise) - and we look forward, perhaps with excitement at the prospect of a fresh start, perhaps with trepidation because the future is uncertain.

I wanted to share with you these brilliant lines from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding, which Daisy Hickman posted on Facebook:

'For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice ...
And to make an end is to make a beginning.'

Many of us are reviewing what we did, what we read, what we learned, what we lost - and what we wrote, during the year that's gone. If you're writing, take the time to think about how much progress you made, look at what went well, what didn't go so well, the rejections you perhaps had to assimilate - do all that. Taking stock is important. And feeling proud of what you created - whether it was a whole novel or a four line poem - that too is important. But then ... move on. It's a new year: new beginnings come out of old experience. New words await for your brain to mint them.

I wish you all imaginable riches.

Get your metaphors in a twist!

Metaphors are incredibly powerful tools, when you get them right - but writers can give too free a rein to their imagination, letting the horse of figurative language have its head (see what I'm doing here?) and they can fall at the Becher's Brook of comprehensibility.

Only Shakespeare can get away with this sort of frantic coinage of the mind: famously, Hamlet talks of taking arms against a sea of troubles, for instance, and Bill makes it work precisely because of the Canute-like absurdity of military action against the ocean.

My favourite mixed metaphors are 'I smell a rat! Shall I nip it in the bud?' and one which one of my students heard in a meeting: 'The road-map is on track to take off.'

And here today is another corporate-speak nonsense: one of Bloomsbury's sales and marketing people, when interviewed about their new deal with Google e-books, describes the advantages (apparently. Hmnn...) to authors and indie booksellers: 'Anyone that has any platform with any legs moving forward is on cloud.'

I leave that vision with you.

Post-NaNo Post: How to Keep Writing!

So, 1st December, eh? All you weary NaNoers can down tools - and to those of you who reached the 50,000 word target I send my heartiest congratulations.

Last week, I posted about my NaNo with a Twist exercise, telling you that I'd deliberately set my target at 35,000 words. I'm happy to report that I passed that target two days ago and my grand total is 36,228 words, which is the largest  total I've ever reached in a single month!

On the 1st November, it really didn't look as if that would happen: I felt utterly dismal, to be honest, and didn't see how I could achieve a tenth of the output I'd promised myself. So, what turned things around for me? Well, first of all, lowering my sights to a more realistic target. Second, choosing the right project to work on, which for me was memoir.

Third, was the mind game. Mind games are hugely useful to writers: we wriggle and dodge and make excuses for ourselves all the time. (Remember, my nickname is Queen of Displacement Activity.) I had the right desk, the right project, time enough in which to be productive - but still I struggled. Then I came across this article by novelist Drew Smith, which began, utterly engagingly, with this statement: 'The easiest thng about being a writer is not writing. It's also the hardest thing about being a writer.' Absolutely spot on. He went on to advise would-be writers to find a buddy (and, on a larger scale, Nano has been just that, for so many thousands of people.) A buddy cheers you on from the sidelines - but a buddy is somebody who will make sure you toe the line. You need support and encouragement, you need somebody to show tough love if necessary. (I have, by the way, the most wonderful friend who's been reading and cheering all month long!)

Secondly, he referred to Jerry Seinfeld's practice of hanging a huge calendar on the wall and putting a big red cross on every day where he meets his writing target. What happens is that you see a lovely line of red crosses stretching out - a visual reminder of all you have achieved. You become unwilling to 'break the chain'.

Bingo! I got out a calendar, wrote 1700 words on 2nd November, used a fat red marker pen to mark the cross and propped it up beside my desk. Amazingly, given that it's such a simple ploy, it did the trick! I'm now looking at a whole page of crosses - for even last night, after passing my target on the 29th, I still wrote, because I wanted the pleasure of seeing every box on that calendar page sporting its red cross (apart from the box for the 1st, alone and palely loitering ...).

Now, I do know that if I return to fiction after finishing the memoir, things will be tougher because the memoir is like lowering a bucket into a well and seeing what is drawn up - whereas a novel is a piece of architecture and I'm in charge of constructing all the elements in such a way that the edifice doesn't collapse. I can find the words - it's finding the plot that's the challenge.

That's as may be. I'll worry about that later. Now it's December 1st and time to turn to a new page on the calendar. If I put a red cross in the box later today I know I'll have to keep doing it!

So, many thanks, Drew and Jerry!

Now try it for yourself. Here's your mantra: don't break the chain!

NaNo with a Twist

Everybody in the literary blogosphere seems to be aware that November is NaNoWriMo month - and many are slogging and swearing and cursing and despairing and celebrating as they write their daily quotas, heading for the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. That's 1667 per day, for those of you not in the know.

I blogged about it recently and encouraged you to take part. What about me? Well, on the last day of October, pretty much at the last minute, I had a rush of blood to the head and signed myself up as a NaNoWriMoer.

The first of November, therefore, was hellish. What had I done? What was I thinking of? How could I write so much in so short a time when my life is so busy and my mental energy so low?

As the day headed towards midnight, with nary a word scratched on the vellum, the biggest conundrum I faced was this: what was I going to write? For quite a while now, I've found myself unable to make proper progress on projects because I cannot choose one in particular, onto which and into which I can settle. I have a butterfly mind. I am subject to fierce enthusiasms and sudden burn-outs. So all of that Monday was spent in an agony of indecision blended with a complete lack of faith in my ability to rise to the challenge.

Tuesday morning. NaNoWriMo wordcount a big fat 0. All day Tuesday the pain went on - and my only comfort was that I hadn't really told anybody that I'd signed up (although you're supposed to, as the moral support of others and the Shame Factor of letting them and yourself down are powerful triggers to composition). Nobody knew that I had Failed. Nobody could jeer at my humiliation.

Nobody, that is, but me.

Dear reader, I expect you're hoping there was some sort of breakthrough, some sort of revelation, to turn around the sorry direction this account is heading in. Reader, there was not one revelation, but two.

First, late on the night of Tuesday 2nd November, I chose my project. I chose it because I remembered one of my favourite couplets, from Philip Sidney's sonnet about inspiration: where his Muse rather irritably says to the struggling poet who is 'biting' his 'truant pen, beating [himself] for spite', 'Fool, ... look in thy heart and write.' In my heart and mind, for many years, has been the plan to write a memoir.  I've put it off time and again, always thinking there would be a 'later' better suited to its composition. I knew that to tackle it would be difficult, that to engage with certain memories might be traumatic, to find a structure for it a challenge. But I also knew that if I never do this, I will have failed in a much more significant way than in not writing 50,000 words in a certain month in 2010.

Without thinking too much about where it would lead or what the structure would be, I opened a new document and started typing. And it's been a revelation, in many ways. I start each session with the panicky thought that I'm not up to the job, that my mind's a blank, that I don't know how to write the first sentence - but then I do write that first sentence and I'm away. A flood of memory surges through me and is channelled onto the page - some of it will be moved or excised later but that doesn't matter just now. Now is about release and momentum. I had no idea it could be this easy or this fulfilling. NaNo's philosophy is that you should just write, without the internal editor switched on, and this is what I try to follow. What is also liberating is that this is a project for me, without the draining second-guessing of what the 'market' wants - the checking of agent requirements and of book-deals recently done - I am in a bubble of spontaneous creation, ignoring the idea of mainstream publication.

I'm not saying that the thought of publication doesn't cross my mind (what is a writer without a reader?), but what I am saying is that by not making it the be-all and end-all, my writing has been able to stretch its limbs, untrammelled.

The second revelation is to do with productivity. 50,000 words is all very well and good and there are many writers out there who can produce several thousand words a day without, it seems, breaking sweat. That's not me. When I write, I write in a short, fast burst - but if I stop, I lose momentum and the fire cools. So I've come to an accommodation here: I choose not to write 50,000 words. I would have ground out sheer nonsense or clunky uninspired pedestrian prose, in service of that goal. There's a balance to be struck between writing spontaneously and non-judgementally and sweating under the burden of an unachievable word-count. I chose a target of 35,000 words: this seemed to me to be challenge enough and a satisfying quantity to have achieved by the end of the month. Each day, I set my quota as 1,000 words - knowing that once I get going, I'm likely to go over it, and the going over it makes me feel delightfully smug. I do my little running sums: in the first stage of the quota, things are often agonised. Tap tap tap goes the calculator: 361 words. Oh God! How am I going to get to 1,000? Tap, tap, tap. 749 - nearly three-quarters ... then, in the final stage, 'flow' tends to kick in, and I lose all sense of time, of effort, of wordcount. I draw breath at the end to discover I've written 1100, 1200, 1300 ... Bliss!

So, I've broken the rules. I'm writing memoir - and NaNo is about writing novels (although I see other NaNO rebels do too). I'm writing something that even my nearest and dearest may never see. I'm writing 15,000 fewer words than I should - but, at the same time, 35,000 words more than I might have done.

If you're a fellow NaNo-er, good luck! We're on the home straight now! I know I won't get my completion certificate, but, with just over 5,000 words to go, what I have is intense satisfaction and a renewal of faith in my ability to string one damned word after another, page after page, to build something that didn't exist before, to express something which only I can express in this particular way, to leave something, not just of myself but of those I've loved and have lost.

You've written it, now sell it!

'Stop thinking abut your book as a creative masterpiece and start thinking about it as a product.' (Andrew Therkelson)

Check out my Quotes of Notes page on the fictionfire website to read my thoughts on this and many other inspiring quotations for writers.



The gorgeous Sutro Room at Trinity College

 Oh, and you only have three and a half days in which to book fictionfire's day course Shape Up and Make Your Pitch! Learn how to self-edit and pitch your work in the beautiful surroundings of Trinity College, Oxford. Full details are on my Course Dates and Details page on the website. Bookings must be received by 1 pm Friday 15th October!

Post-Winchester Post

Phew! It was, as it always is, a hectic weekend, made all the more exhausting by the humidity and heat. It was definitely the hottest Winchester Writers' Conference I've attended!

On Friday I taught a mini-course on Point of View in a room where, thankfully, the sun didn't strike directly until late afternoon. The group was a delight - faces old and new, all contributing opinions and questions, and writing beautiful and interesting pieces (I'm only sorry we didn't have time for more writing exercises, as there was so much to get through!).

After the opening dinner, I thought I'd get an early night, but ended up waking up at 5 a.m. and not being able to sleep properly after that. If it weren't for the need to get some sleep for the sake of brain-alertness, I wouldn't complain at all. The hall of residence I was in was up above the main campus (those of you who know the University of Winchester will know its steep topography!), which meant a beautiful view across the valley to the wooded ridge beyond, trees all around and a light refreshing breeze. The morning light was just exquisite. Wish I'd remembered to bring my camera.

The plenary speaker on Saturday was Sir Terry Pratchett. There was great anticipation that he would deliver a witty, fun, yet trenchant speech - and we were not disappointed, except by his tendency to drift away from the microphone. The collective will of the members of the audience urged him to stay where his voice could sound out properly, but no-o-o-o-o-o-o

He was introduced as a speaker with a tower of books sold that would measure a mile high - he told us that his mother told stories to him as a child but that he was initially a poor reader, until he read 'The Wind in the Willows' and then never looked back. He associated school 'with being smacked' and left at the age of seventeen, to become a journalist. His path to publication was an easy one and it all seems to have come naturally to him - he applies this philosophy to his books. He devours history books and came out with extraordinary facts (including the hilarious description of a 19th century financier called Preserved Fish! - an orphan adopted by devout religious people who called him Preserved-by-the-Lord because he'd survived a shipwreck). He said 'I write serendipitously. I've never yet plotted a book.' He navigates his way through 'a valley of clouds' and knows that 'there is a story there in the way that a prospector knows that there is oil under the ground.' His focus is on instinct, on the theme or central idea of the book rather than on a rigid outlining of plot. This dilemma - do I plot ahead, do I fly by the seat of my pants - faces all of us as writers. Usually we reach an accommodation between the two extremes (unless we're screenwriters where a rigid plot structure is crucial) - too much freedom can result in flabby, directionless, self-indulgent storytelling - but too much plotting ahead can result in a tale which is airless and overworked, where you're too tied to structures to take a risk or go where the story is leading you.

As with so many good writer-speakers, Terry knew how to manage an audience. His tone and timing were spot on. The audience not only evinced collective will (get back to the microphone, Tel!) but collective concern. Nobody can be unaware of Terry Pratchett's condition - we were braced for any evidence of the encroachment of his dementia and we all drew in our breaths whenever he paused to search for a word. There were moments when that search stretched out slightly longer than was comfortable - but then who of us does not blank out on occasion, when a perfectly familiar name or reference eludes us? It was just that with Sir Terry we were looking for it, expecting it, reading perhaps too much into those moments. It was striking that he gave the whole speech himself, whereas when he gave the Dimbleby lecture on TV he opted for someone else to deliver most of it. Also, to his credit, he did not mention his condition at all. I'm sure he knows how much sympathy and support there is for him. He chose to deliver a speech as a writer to other writers - although its title was a prickly 'Why are You Listening to Me when you Should Be at Home Writing?' (ah, but Terry, you know full well that we writers are Devotees of Displacement, acolytes in the Cult of Procrastination!)

Because I had one-to-one appointments with writers and a lecture to give, the only other talk I managed to attend was Carol Ann Duffy's reading of some of her poetry, both past (from 'The World's Wife') and current, including a very moving poem about the death of her mother, where, as she did in her poem about the soldiers of the First World War, she imagined time reversed. The poem traced events from the moment of her mother's last breath, which sat cooling in her palm 'like an egg', back through hospitalisation, to arrival with wheelchair and so on. Partly because I thought it was an excellent poem, partly because of the recent death through cancer of my aunt in Scotland, partly because of memories of the death of my mother-in-law, also through cancer, I had tears in my eyes.

I gave a lecture on 'Sensory Perceptions' - the power of imagery - at 5 p.m. A gratifyingly large number of people turned out for this, in spite of heat, exhaustion, and quite possibly heat-exhaustion - thank you all of you for being such a great audience!

The celebratory dinner that evening was great fun. The conference is all about networking and friendship, about learning new things and making new contacts. Every year there is disappointment, every year there is success. People meet people who know people. People meet agents. Agents take people on. And yes, on occasion, eventually publishers take people on!

It was wonderful, as it always is, to meet up with old friends like Sally Spedding and Mike Greenhough, with newer friends like Adrienne Dines and Crysse Morrison, to meet new faces and see students I've taught previously - so hello and thanks to Denise, to Janina (keep belting them out girl!), to Susie, to Paul and Mary, to Ali Hale and Carole Westron, to Teri Terry (good luck with the Greenhouse Agency!) and to everybody else I met and chatted with and who added their names to my website mailing list.

What next? Well, I let myself have the day off yesterday. I need to update my website now and get ready for the summer school I teach in a couple of weeks' time. If any of you were at Winchester and have special memories or anecdotes, do add a comment!

Dreams and DIY publishing

You'll notice, regular readers of mine, that I've been fiddling about with my colour scheme - as if I've nothing better to do! Queen of Displacement Activity, remember! I'm not sure I like what I've done so may revert to the template - let me know what you think.

The good news today is that my fictionfire communications problems are, I think, solved. Site support was there, to a degree, but responses came at the speed of a snail. You can always deluge me with messages at info@fictionfire.co.uk to test it out!

You know how there are certain phases in your year when you know you just cannot afford to let your guard down and relax (apart from fiddling with blog colour-schemes, that is!) - that's where I am now. I'm juggling nagging of A level son and A level students, doing a large amount of editing and report-writing, and getting ready for the May fictionfire courses. I look out at the sunshine and hope this weather holds so that my students can enjoy an Oxford college at its absolute best. Trinity has a gorgeous garden with long open lawns and will be well worth strolling around.

I looked out the window yesterday to see a funny white streak in the sky - oh, a vapour-trail! Planes flying once more, but the London Book Fair was seriously affected by the inability of cohorts of foreign agents and editors to attend. The advantage may have been that some proposals for books got more of a chance to shine, being not so swamped by the volume of meetings and deals there would normally be. I am crossing my fingers really really hard for a couple of friends whose agents intended promoting their books there.

A couple of weeks ago I read an article by Cosmo Landesman about the writer Stephen Benatar, who is about to break through to a wider readership after thirty years in the literary desert. He's a resourceful, bloody-but-unbowed chap, who accosts people, asking them if they would 'care to look' at his book, hand-selling it on an individual basis. Landesman succumbs to what he first thinks is a 'pity purchase' but then realises that Benatar who 'is not one of the deluded; he is one of the talented' - and the world is waking up to that, with a British edition of one of his books, 'Wish her Safe at Home' coming out. Why has Benatar single-mindedly gone on printing and selling his books in the face of indiffference? Not because he wants to be famous: 'he wants to be read.' 'All over Britain there are Benatars - hopeful men and women who, despite critical indifference and commercial failure, keep writing novels.' Landesman recites the gloomy statistics with which we are all familiar: the near-impossibility of being published, of earning a living, of maintaining a toehold in the literary world. He tells us of eleven novels Benatar tried to gain mainstream publishing for, to be rejected by the well-worn phrase, 'Not one for us.' We hear how Benatar married, had children, taught English to survive, eventually was selected from the slush pile in 1982- only to see that temporary success wither away - and still he kept on writing. He got John Carey, a prestigious name, to write a foreword to a reisssue of 'Wish Her Safe at Home'. No publisher would touch it. So he set up his own imprint and went on to sell 4,000 copies himself. He uses charm, a polite relentlessness, a direct engagement with potential customers who feel they've had personal attention: it works. Finally, by chance, he pushed (or rather ushered - 'pushed' is too pushy a word) a copy of 'Wish Her Safe at Home' into the hands of  a man who happened to be an editor with The New York Review of Books, who loved it. Now he's getting attention, his now-ex wife says 'I admit there were times when I thought he was wasting his time. He had the talent but not the luck. And now he's been vindicated.'

This is a story of commitment and determination, of incredible resilience in the face of knock-backs. But more than any of that, it's a story of faith. Stephen Benatar believes and has always believed in the worth of what he writes. It's a quiet, prolonged self-belief, quite detached, it seems, from the influence of the opinions of others. He does not care about the success of other writers. He does not care about being 'recognised in the streets.' He does it because he has something to say and he wants people to hear it: he does not want to go into that good night where all are silenced without a fight: 'My greatest fear is that my life's work will just vanish.'

This is a story about modern publishing, about self-publishing and marketing, about happenstance and fate. It's about how writers want to leave their footprints in the sand. It tells us it's never too late, if we are true to the contract with ourselves. As Landesman says at the end of the article, 'don't let your dream die. One day it might just come true.'

Let's all hang onto that thought.

One Just Asks the Servants to Do It

I'm sorry I've not posted for a couple of weeks but my new enterprise has been taking up all my time and energy. I'm very excited about it and I hope to post about it in the next few days.

In the meantime, this caught my eye in The Author yesterday - somebody had written in to say that in an interview with The Metro , Katie Price, a literary artist of wide renown and huge sales, when asked about how she goes about writing (and we're always fascinated, aren't we, by how other writers do it) answered that her ghostwriter 'sits down and writes it all. I don't have time, I'm far too busy and wouldn't be able to do it. But I come up with the storyline and then she puts the rest of it together.'

Shock revelation!

I'm reminded of Edith Wharton - now, she really was a literary artist and her books are brilliant - but her way of composing was to sit up in bed and cast the pages as she filled them to the ground, whereupon a minion would gather them up for transcription.

Where are the decent servants (aka ghosts/amanuenses/gofers/dogsbodies/spouses-with-no-rival-ambitions) to be had when one wants them? No wonder I struggle with my Art!

Inspiration, mainly

First of all, many congratulations to Carol Ann Duffy on becoming the new Poet Laureate. If you haven't read her work before, check out 'The World's Wife' where the poems are written from the perspective of the consorts of famous characters from history and mythology. Try 'Mrs Icarus', 'Mrs Darwin', 'Mrs Aesop', 'Euridice', 'The Kray Sisters'. And the choice of Carol Ann for Laureate is one in the eye for Mrs Schofield, who, you may remember, complained about the inclusion of 'Education for Leisure' on the GSCE English syllabus, whereupon the craven exam board removed it. (See my post on this at http://literascribe.blogspot.com/2008/09/aqas-unkindest-cut.html )Whereupon Ms Duffy replied with a poem called 'Mrs Schofield's GCSE': Google it and have a chortle.

Secondly, two of my fellow bloggers, Karen at http://writewritingwritten.blogspot.com and Denise at http:writinghumbug.blogspot.com, have been talking about setting themselves wordcounts in order to get novels well underway or completed as soon as possible. This is a technique that's worked well for me in the past, especially, I find, if you set yourself a daily or weekly target which is just a bit below what you can reasonably achieve. If you set the target too high and fall short, demoralisation kicks in, just as if you start a really rigid diet, two fingers of Kit-Kat make you jack the whole thing in and binge on a whole box of Lindors (I'm speaking hypothetically, of course. Ahem.) If you set the target at, say 500 words, and find you've written 732, then high glee results and you start to believe in yourself as a proper writer. Then you find yourself wanting to break that barrier every time you write, so you might raise the stakes to 750 words and blow me if you don't come close to 1,000! Try this out: if you're new or lacking in confidence, start with 200 or so - you may surprise yourself.

Finally, here are the two sides of the coin, composition-wise. So many of us exist in a love-hate relationship with our writing. You feel pressurised, dissatisfied, you want to break it off because it's not perfect - but you can't. There's the constant presence of your writing self at your shoulder, in your brain, your heart, your gut. You dream stories, you practise phrases, you think think think like a writer all the time. It's a burden. It's a source of despair. It's also a joy, a revelation, a triumph. Here are two examples of the Janus-headed nature of writing as a calling: a few weeks ago Colm Toibin, in The Guardian, talked of the wretchedness of his craft: see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/02/colm-toibin-writing-pleasure I tell you, it makes grim reading. He says writing is 'never fun or anything' and that what he likes best is 'The money'. 'I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it.'

Now, God knows, writing can be a complete bugger sometimes: plots need to be wrestled with, descriptions morph into cliche, self-belief is elusive, publishing deals even more so - but his is just such a cheerless, humourless, Eeyorish view! Writing can be rewarding in far more than the financial sense (just as well, eh?): it can make you feel proud and fulfilled, it can lead to friendships, it challenges and frustrates and delights. There's so much to be said for coming across a passage you wrote some time ago and feeling a glow of pride in knowing you wrote that, in that way, at that time, and it worked! In answer to Colm Toibin, A.L. Kennedy said 'The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you're in the mood or not. ... Then again, making something out of nothing, overturning the laws of time and space, building something for strangers just because you think they might like it and hours of absence from self - that's fantastic.' Hari Kunzru and John Banville both point out that as a writer you can never, except fleetingly, get it totally right. All you can do is, as Beckett says, 'Fail better'.

In the midst of the angst and the daily struggle and the words that won't come out right, remember this: there will be occasions when, miraculously, it all does come together. Where you're in the flow, in the zone, when your pen can't keep up with your brain, where there's sureness and confidence, utter joy in the words you produce, a rhythm and flow to the sequences of thought, when you - for a few minutes or half an hour - totally believe in yourself as a writer. You revel. You're inspired. You even believe you can come back to the desk the next day and recapture that fine rapture. Probably you won't: but keep coming back to the desk and one morning or one midnight, you'll be inspired again. It's moments like those that make it all worthwhile.

One of my favourite passages about the process of writing - and it even makes it successfully and movingly to the silver screen - is the episode in 'Doctor Zhivago' where Yury writes his poems to Lara, poems which will be famous. He writes them in the severe stillness of a Russian winter and the process is a holy one to him. Under political threat, with wolves congregating out on the midnight snow, he seizes preciousness and encapsulates it: 'his work took possession of him and he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind which he is trying to express, but with language, his instrument of expression. Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by the force of its own laws, rhyme and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, still more important and until now undiscovered, unconsidered and unnamed. At such moments Yury felt that the main part of his work was not being done by him but by something which was above him and controlling him: the thought and the poetry of the world as it was at that moment and as it would be in the future. ... This feeling relieved him for a time of self-reproach, of dissatisfaction with himself, of the sense of his own nothingness.'

When Yury pauses, the wolves have gathered on the edge of the snowfield. Lara, soon to be lost forever, sleeps. Worries encroach: he 'was no longer in the mood to write.'

The moment of grace is gone. But it was there and it cannot be lost. He reached out and seized it. So can you.

The Queryfail Debate

I was going to blog about something else today but this morning came across a debate going on on Twitter in America, where agents are sharing their experiences of 'Queryfail' - i.e. the worst approaches would-be clients have made to them. If you've completed your work and are thinking of submitting your book to an agent, the debate is both informative and horrifying. It's so easy to trip over it's a wonder any of us ever find the nerve to approach these 'gatekeepers' to the publishing industry. For a brilliant summing-up of all that's emerging on the Queryfail front, go to http://taralazar.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/queryfail/ - you'll laugh (it's very witty). Very possibly you'll cry. Hopefully you can plead innocent to some of the ploys to which desperate writers have resorted.

I can feel sympathy with agents who have to deal with the arrogant ('Easily the boldest novel so far written in this fresh century of ours'), the hopeless ('The book isn't written yet, and I can't write it') and the plain barking ('My name is Maya and I'm an elf') - but at the same time it's another reminder of how harsh the industry is, how prescriptive and proscriptive it is. It needs to be, as a functioning business - but books are not beans. They're people's aspirations and dreams and needs given verbal form, whether competently or incompetently. The writer identifies self with work - we all of us find it hard to accept criticism, even when well-meant, or rejection, because it strikes at the foundations of who we are. Louis XIV said 'L'etat, c'est moi.' The writer says 'L'oeuvre, c'est moi.' And W.B. Yeats said 'Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.'

Another useful link in connection with this is: http://dianapeterfreund.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/perseverance/. This is a lucid, sympathetic analysis of when is the best time to submit your manuscript. Of course the answer is this: when it's ready. And that means, first of all, when it's written. This is scary. I think we'd love to be able to contact an agent and say 'I'm thinking of writing this, what do you think?' or 'Which of these ideas is most worth pursuing?'. It doesn't work that way: you have to invest a truly scary amount of time and energy writing a novel, in the hope it will be liked and bought. If not, well, tough. You just wasted a year or two. Or did you? You have to try to cling to the notion that it was time well spent. You were learning and refining your craft. You will have to move on now, with lessons learned, and tackle something new. You can, I suppose, hope that one day you'll make it big and that that overlooked book can be sent out, blinking, into the now-welcoming sunlight of editorial approval. You can hope.

Hopes and dreams, knock-backs and bounce-backs - that's what this writing business is. Keep writing, keep dreaming, keep coming back for more - but maximise your chances with a well-turned pitch and a polished, completed manuscript - and never, never, in your wet-behind-the-ears, puppyish, needy enthusiasm, fall into the trap of premature submission.

Report from the House of Lurg

Once again I've missed a week, partly because there's been illness here (it's half-term week, whaddya expect?), partly because I wanted to leave Lisa Ratcliffe's name up at the top of my posts for a while. It's remarkable how many other writer-bloggers posted about her - and most of them had not met her. Somehow, because her voice was so vibrant, they felt as if they had. This blogging world can feel like a hothouse of friendship (companionship like forced rhubarb?!) - it's extraordinary how supported and understood one can feel when exchanging news and views with people you've never met. There are several writers out there that I would hope to meet in person one day.

Last week I saw the second of Terry Pratchett's programmes on Alzheimer's - which my regular readers know is one of the topics I bang the drum about, especially as my aunt died from it, almost a year ago now. I missed the first Terry Pratchett programme because I was in London, but made sure I saw last week's. It was - well, you can hardly say 'enjoyable', can you, given the subject matter? Yes, you can, actually, because TP is so feisty and articulate - he's a joy to listen to. The programme itself saw him go to America in search of any hope of potential cure for the 'embuggerance' as he calls it. Lots of flashy hospitals, flashy equipment, doctors with unnervingly flashy smiles. Lots of chat. A horrible sequence where a vacant-eyed ancient Admiral was injected in the back of the neck with what I can only describe as a snake-oil remedy by a doctor I wouldn't trust to stick the stamp on an envelope for me, so oleaginous was he. The wretched Admiral was tilted back in a swing-chair for the drug to rush to what was left of his brain, then tilted back, still smiling bewilderedly. Everyone in the room nodded brightly, claiming there was a visible difference - not to me, there wasn't. The lights hadn't gone on in the Admiral's head-piece, as far as I could see. Back in Britain, in Aberdeen, Terry had a very hi-tech brain-scan done. So what? In glorious technicolour, it highlighted those parts that were damaged. One of the doctors he spoke to was brave and honest enough to admit that TP's form of dementia, which is kind enough at present to only be damaging aspects of visual perception and co-ordination, WILL, in the end, progress to full-blown Alzheimer's. TP came away from the whole experience determined to make every day count. He maintained a relentless upbeat chippiness in the face of what confronts him. His assistant expressed more devastation and pessimism than he did. TP is clearly a hero. The media is now full, thanks to him, of reports about the rise in the rate of this disease and the shocking, disgraceful lack of resources devoted to it. When will this Government stop shoring up banks and funding pointless foreign wars and get its priorities in order?

Right, rant over. Till the next time.

Let's have something cheering: one of the nominees for this year's Waterstone's Children's Book Prize is Rob Stephens. His story is uplifting because he's managed to combine being an airline pilot with writing his children's book, 'The Mapmaker's Monsters'. Good on him. Even in these days of economic attrition, now really biting the publishing industry, good writing can still make it through. My joy at his success is not unalloyed, however (can any writer honestly feel unalloyed pleasure at somebody else's success? Remember what Gore Vidal said: 'Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.') What is daunting is to hear that Rob Stevens managed to write his book 'On trains, in the back of taxis and in hotel rooms in Stockholm, Oslow, Istanbul and Paris' - wow, glamour AND commitment - how sickening is that? He wasn't 'a great reader as a child' but now says 'Reading is not just a necessary life skill: there is nothing better in the world than being lost in a good book. When I look at my son Dylan's imagination, it's so ripe. If children aren't given the encouragement to use that readiness to absorb things it's a real waste.' See more about him at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4699275

At the end of next month, the Oxford Literary Festival takes place. Once again the brochure is slow to appear but the details are up on their website. I've already booked for several events, mainly with a historical fiction bent. Top of the list is C.J. Sansom - regular Literascribees know he's one of my favourites. I'm really looking forward to this.

Now, it's nearly the end of half-term week and I have to go back to nag-mode: loads of homework/coursework needs to be confronted ...

In Memoriam

George Johnston Fergusson
Elizabeth Hay Fergusson

21.01.72

'What can we do with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?' (Hilary Mantel)

Angel and Devil!

Today I'm going to nag you and tempt you, like those little angel/demon figures in old Tom and Jerry cartoons: 'No you mustn't!' ... 'Aw, go on! You know you want to!'

First, the virtuous bit. At the end of October, I posted about NaNoWriMo, where people sign up to write 50,000 words in a month. I've been keeping an eye on some of you and the ups and downs you're experiencing - around this time quite a few are at the 35,000 word mark. This is brilliant! I decided not to participate, but there are times when I wish I had. I just couldn't choose which project to pursue and am not feeling the love just now with all things compositional. If you, like me, are not a participant, I would still recommend a look at the NaNoWriMo site: http://www.nanowrimo.org (And can somebody please tell me why when I type a link like this it doesn't automatically get a little line under it anymore to make it function as a link?)

If you go to the Breaking News page or the Fun Stuff page, either should lead you eventually to the pep talks page and this is useful and inspiring. They've asked various famous writers to give advice and encouragement, the latest being Philip Pullman. I recommend looking at his advice, and that of Naomi Novik, Jonathan Stroud, Sue Grafton and Neil Gaiman. If you read through them all you'll find common ground - they all say that a novel begins as a 'burst of enthusiasm' (Grafton). After the 'honeymoon period' (Stroud) the pain and disillusionment set in. It may be at Chapter 2 or at page 70 (Pullman) or much further in - but it will happen. You will run out of steam, run out of self-belief, feel no joy anymore. Ah yes, you're nodding your heads, aren't you? We've all been there. The only answer is to plug on - which these writers advise in wise and witty ways. Sue Grafton says: 'Focus on the job at hand. Ignore the urge to second-guess yourself. This is not the time for introspection; it's a time for charging on. Believe in yourself.' Naomi Novik says: 'Remove distractions. The internet ... is [a] phenomenal tool for procrastination and wasting time. Unplug your connection' - she's right, you know. You can do that after you've finished reading this blog - only after that, understand? Jonathan Stroud says a deadline is a great idea, forcing you to break the task down into manageable chunks: so many words a day, so many pages per month. That's the 'real writing', after the honeymoon and the 'phony war' where 'Scenes start promisingly but peter into nothing. Main characters turn out to have all the zest of a cardboard box abandoned in the rain.' (Careful - all that nodding is going to give you neck-strain.) Neil Gaiman reinforces this: 'You write. That's the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die.' Philip Pullman concurs, saying you mustn't lose momentum: 'One of the hardest things to do with a novel is to stop writing it for a while, do something else, fulfill this engagement or that commitment or whatever, and pick it up exactly where you left it and carry on as if nothing had happened.' Given his level of fame he must be speaking from the heart: he is working on 'The Book of Dust' after the massive success of the His Dark Materials trilogy and he must have to keep his phone off the hook permanently. He adds: 'once you've established a daily rhythm of work, you'll find it energising and sustaining in itself. Even when it's not going well. This is a strange thing, but I've noticed it many times: a bad day's work is a lot better than no day's work at all.'

You're so right, Philip, we all say, nodding like crazy. Fired up, we turn the computer on, bring the document up - we last wrote a bit five months ago. We scrabble around for plot notes scribbled at the time. If we find them, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic cryptic directions: 'John gs X time to rply then Z ftttts'. We click onto Tools: Word count. Disappointing. Sigh. Type a few words. Erase said words. Type again. Tools: Word Count. Sigh. Need cup of tea. Type again. Decide 1000 words a day far too ambitious. Type a few more words. Hate them. Word count. Wail. Adjust daily word count ambition by incremental steps down to 500, 350, 200. Give up two hours later having written 163. Still, it's 163 closer to the goal than yesterday - or five months back. Mary Wesley was about 80 years old before she was published, wasn't she? That's OK, then.

Here's another suggestion: I'm not sure whether it's angelic or demonic. Angelic in intention, I suppose, demonic in execution. Go to http://lab.drwicked.com/writeordie.html - where there's a widget called 'Write or Die'. Dr Wicked the inventor of this instrument of torture says: 'The idea is to instill in the would-be writer a fear of not writing.' If you are writing, the Write or Die gizmo will penalise you if those keys stop clicking busily. In Gentle Mode 'a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing', in Normal Mode, 'If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.' And in Kamikaze Mode, 'Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself!' Aarrgghh!!! If anybody out there has tried this fiendish widget, let me know whether it worked for you!

Finally, wearing my demon's horns, let me tempt you, my Literascribees - betake yourself to www.timespellingbee.co.uk - I have my friend Muvva to thank for this one. I had no idea it existed until she mentioned it in her blog A Propos of Nothing in Particular (see side panel blog roll) - and I tried it out late last night. More than an hour vanished like magic as I racked my score higher and higher. If you are NaNoWriMoers, for God's sake, don't go there! Don't! (Aw, go on ...!)

Sink or Swim

Here's a quote to go with the John Donne one I posted recently: Doris Lessing, who has her 'royal flush' of literary awards and who at the age of 88 complains that all she does 'now is give interviews and spend time being photographed', says that her new book about her parents, 'Arthur and Emily' will probably be her last. She says, 'I have no time to write. I also don't have the energy any more. This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, "Don't imagine you will have it for ever. Use it while you've got it. Because it will go. It's sliding away like water down a plughole."'

Not that I want to put pressure on any of you, you understand.

Have You Done It Yet?

I've added a link to another blog (and let's hope the Curse of Literascribe - see previous post - doesn't strike!) - it's Karen's blog Get On With It, at http://writewritingwritten.blogspot.com It's a delight - and there's so much there, wryly expressed, that we can all identify with. God, though, I feel the panic in my throat - yet another blog to keep up with! There'll come a time when 23.5 hours of my day will be spent just catching up with what other people are saying!

I've also added - very belatedly - another Quotation to my Quotes of Note at the foot of the page. It's a brilliant one - I came across it a few months ago and the damn thing has haunted me ever since. So it might as well haunt you lot too. It's by John Donne, one of my favourites, a man whose wit, ego, cruelty, tenderness, spirituality, and wisdom are always expressed in verses and sentences whose precision, rhythms and rhetorical structures are of awe-inspiring rightness. You read a phrase, are pierced by an image - and you have to put the book down and go away for a little think, a sigh as the words sink in, a shake of the head because you will never never never in all your life acquire such a facility for the sharpest thoughts in the clearest verbal expression. Damn the man. Have you ever played the game of fantasy literary dinner party - where you decide who you would invite as your guests? He'd definitely be one of mine.

Anyway, here's the quote, a short phrase, but starkly effective and oh so relevant to all us dilatory writers: 'To will, implies delay, therefore now do.'

So go on. Do it.

Dear Diary

I like this quotation from Isabel Allende in the current issue of Waterstone's Books Quarterly, where she discusses, on publication of a memoir about her family 'The Sum of Our Days', the problems of writing about your loved ones: 'What I don't write, I forget and then it is as if it never happened: by writing about my life I can live twice.'

This struck a chord with me and it may well do with you. So often, especially when it's not going well, we ask ourselves why we write. There are many answers to that question and they are not mutually exclusive. Therapy, the joy of wordpower, an addiction to hooking the reader with a damn good yarn, fame, money ....

Allende is drawing attention to one of these reasons: when you write, you write for others, certainly, but you write for yourself. You write for the pride you feel, weeks, months, years later when you look at the words you put down on paper - those words, that order - and you realise that no one, not even yourself, could have written that passage that way, the way you did on that particular occasion. You write for attention: look at me, I'm a clever girl! You write because you have a message or you have a grievance or a memory you want to take charge of.

You write because you 'fix' yourself on the page. 'Fix' can mean, in the American way, 'heal'. It can also mean 'preserve'. You recreate and define and make sense, through storytelling, of the messy business of experience, and you say, not just to the world, but to your future self - 'This is how it was. This is how it felt, how it struck me.'

As you know, of late, I have mentioned the fear of Alzheimer's. Pretty much all of my adult life, I've kept a diary. It unnerves my husband, and I don't blame him. It unnerves me. I often wonder what I should do about the ever-increasing piles of books full of my experiences and angsts and attitudes, because the me that's in those pages is rarely a me I particularly like or admire. This is because a diary is a cistern in which to deposit the thoughts and emotions you maybe feel it's necessary to keep from the world. If you can't be honest in a diary, where can you be? I'm talking of course of a diary you truly write for yourself, not one where you keep a weather eye open for an audience. Last night we watched a repeated programme about Kenneth Williams, who was enormously talented and articulate and whose diaries, now in the public arena, were brimful of the vitriol and bitterness that churned within him, of symptoms of physical malaise and the anxiety that created and of an ever-deepening utter hopelessness. Did he leave instructions that, post-mortem, these diaries should be published? What do you do with these daily records of self-castigation, repressed anger, self-pity, petty diurnal routines, references that nobody but yourself will ever 'get' - what do you do with the slow verbal accumulation of a life lived? I don't know - I truly don't. Much of what I've written I would never want anyone to read. Much of what I've written does not reflect who I am now. I remember when I first read Vera Brittain's 'Testament of Youth' how impressed I was that she would quote her own juvenilia, her poems, her diaries, in all their youthful self-importance - this was so honest. In truth, we'd all really like to edit our own lives, so that people can see us in the best light - and, as I've said, a true diary shouldn't edit as it goes: it should record who you are at each transient stage.

I'm also, it has to be said, proud of my diaries. Even when trivial, they mark an achievement - that every day I sit down and put into words how I feel and what has happened. All those words. When my creative writing is struggling, there is always my diary - I have always written something, even if it's only for myself, even though it's such a solipsistic activity. Also, I feel proud when I've managed to describe an event well - just as I would when I write a good scene in a novel. I'm proud, even when I cringe, when I look at something I wrote months or years ago and it is well expressed and it brings back to me an episode or a perception I've since forgotten. Which brings me back to Isabel Allende: writing preserves your life. Writing saves your life. So often these days, when I spend my time in what Jane Austen calls 'a kind of slow bustle', I quite simply forget. I forget what I went upstairs for. I forget if I took two paracetamol or just one. I forget what we did at the weekend, I forget - oh, so much. The diary is my safety net. I need it to reassure me about what and when and how. It gives me discipline and a purpose. And all those volumes may, one day, make such a big bonfire that they'll need carbon offsetting.

Or ...

Algernon: Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I?
Cecily: Oh no! You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Lurgies, Male Writers and Readaholics

This will be a brief one, because I've been ill all week: a throat/chest lurgy struck me down after my return from Scotland - I believe I caught it on the plane down. Had to do some teaching this week and had scarcely a voice with which to do it and I'm having real trouble shaking off the coughing and sniffing and wheezing. Could understudy for Gollum, my Precious.

The Oxford Literary Festival is on this week, and offers a colossal selection of events (see my posts this time last year for the talks I attended then) but so far I've only attended one event, which was a question and answer session with Fay Weldon, to which one of my ex-creative writing students kindly invited me. It was enjoyable, and Ms Weldon was good value with her witty answers, but the shop (Blackwell's) was incredibly overheated so physically it was uncomfortable. The majority of the audience women, like myself, of a certain age, all of us boiling: it was like a collective hot flush - perhaps a good noun for a gathering of menopausal women.

I've just finished reading Claire Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy, the Time-Torn Man. Very readable and interesting, but God, you wouldn't want to have been married to him! (Cf Messrs Alfred Tennyson and John Milton). It's a damn shame that a woman has to die in an attic after years of estranged living in the same gloomy house to get her husband's attention back again! And then it's pretty tough on wife number two to listen to his endless bleatings about the lost regretted past!

Before that I read Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. I started out by liking it very much - and ironic novels about the self-destructiveness of writers are bound to appeal to self-destructive, self-questioning writers. I recommend John Colapinto's About the Author, for instance, which is an excellent black comedy and has lots of satire about agents, publishers and the vanity of writers, as does Terence Blacker's Kill Your Darlings. Wonder Boys, I'm afraid, palled for me, as I found the hero, Grady Tripp, more and more annoying. He was a child and he needed a good slap. His bumbling and fumbling and copping-out of any situations that demanded a modicum of responsibility and moral maturity were meant, I suppose, to be comic and endearing, but really - he needed several slaps. And I couldn't believe that a sequence of women would have found him irrestible. The story tottered from farcical scenario to comic misunderstanding, with Grady leaving a trail of dead animals in his wake. I couldn't have cared less. The style was flashy and clever, and there are lots of good apercus about the creative process, the ageing process and the quest for who we are - and I did finish it, because I thought I ought to and also because I'd liked the other Michael Chabon novel I'd read, The Final Solution, which I do recommend.

However, here's a good description in Wonder Boys of the crucial nature of reading to those of us who are addicts: 'Sara would read anything you handed her - Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet - at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly's for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house - reading, to her was a kind of pyromania - and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon th spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C.P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine.' Recognise that? Oh, yes. See also Anne Fadiman's book Ex Libris for further description of the reader-as-addict.

And here I was thinking this would be a short post ...

Just time to say happy birthday to this little blog, which I started in the middle of March last year. Many thanks to those of you who are regular readers: it means a lot to me.

It's a sickness

I hope you've been over to Tess Gerritsen's blog and taken a look. How many blogs do you regularly read? I'm finding I have to ration myself to catching up with the main ones I read just once or twice a week - otherwise hours and hours can go by. It's one of the many forms of Writer's Self-Deception Syndrome, an insidious, and all-pervasive sickness to which creative artists are particularly vulnerable, also known as Displacementophilia, closely related to Procrastinitis. Social networking, blogs, websites and so on add to the many ways of distracting ourselves that we writers resort to: the particular danger of these ailments is that not only are they addictive, sap energy and stimulate unhealthy levels of bile, envy and contempt, but that we sufferers actually convince ourselves we're 'working' and that being sucked into these things is a form of 'research', 'knowing the market', 'being creative'.

Ha.

Then again, electronic communication is also an immense boon, an immense comfort. There are people out there who know things, useful things. There are people out there who feel as you do - and it's a consolation to know that successful writers such as Tess share the doubts, frustrations, fears and hopes all writers experience. Here's a quote from her blog post of December 23rd: 'I'm beginning to think that being a writer is a mental illness that deserves its own DSM classification, perhaps a sub-category under Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: "Symptoms include anxiety dreams, inability to relax, intermittent feelings of inadequacy alternating with delusions of grandeur, hypersensitivity to criticism, and an abnormal preoccupation with people who don't even exist."'

Oh yes. Oh yes.