A while ago, on a forum, the question came up of the mood-swings that most writers suffer about their writing: sometimes it seems as if the shift is always towards the negative, from the satisfaction of having written something which says what you want to say, means what you want it to mean, towards the realisation that it doesn't, really, do either of those things very well. And what's more it's clichéd, badly punctuated, unsaleably odd and drearily conformist...

These days we're less inclined to tear up manuscripts in a rage - tearing up laptops comes expensive - but the impulse may be there: the finger hovers over "confirm delete", so you don't have to go on having your "failure" sitting, leering at you from your hard drive. But when someone asked if I didn't suffer from today's good work becoming tomorrow's garbage, I had to say no. Or rather, "No, but Yes," swiftly and inevitably followed by "The thing is, it's not as simple as that."

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Laugh-out-loud writing about quinoa from Sue Perkins - well, I think so, anyway. You may beg to differ!

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An intriguing, fairly low key start seems promising: two young men in shorts lie on beds, their faces covered in cream and sliced cucumbers. Their history as brothers and fellow-sufferers in an Australian setting is established. As part of an annual ceremony they concoct a weird 'punch' with ingredients that include a bottle of household cleaner and a pot of paint.

With the arrival of Lyle's feisty girlfriend Pru, played at full throttle by Lisa Dillon, to announce that she can no longer tolerate the situation, the play goes into chaos mode. The script comprises convoluted monologues delivered loud and fast.


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SEEMING AND THINKING

On my last long project, Ctrl+F showed me that seems cropped up every 600 words. Swarms of seems created moments of ludicrous uncertainty: 'It seemed to be a piece of white paper' - what was it really? A flat seagull? (In Spencer’s Fairy Queen seems means someone's in disguise or lying - Sober he seemde - a likely story.) I followed Hamlet's advice (‘Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.') and chopped 4/5ths (some replaced by looked, felt, sounded, appeared).

Why so many?

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Playing the waiting game after submitting work...and loving small independent publishers.

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When I first started dreaming Elizabeth Woodville, fifteen years ago, it seemed to me that the centre of her story was her marriage to Edward IV. But what was that marriage made of? And since writing a novel is "like remembering something that never happened", as the novelist Siri Hustvedt says, how could I write Elysabeth as I could remember her, so that readers, too, would feel she was someone they knew?

If you want to read how I remembered her in full, you can buy or download A Secret Alchemy at the Independent Bookseller's site The Hive, or on Amazon. If you're interested in what I did to bring her alive, read on:

To me, Elysabeth Wydvil isn't so much a White Queen, as a Silver Queen: silver as one half of the alchemical marriage. That idea of alchemy was so important in how the late medieval world felt and saw itself - and it's how Edward IV spoke of his kingship, weaving magic to make his usurped throne secure. Gold and Silver, Light and Dark, White and Red ... In A Secret Alchemy, all the marriages which work, in the medieval and the modern strands of the novel, are light/dark pairs. And it seemed to me, too, that Elysabeth having been married before might explain something else: why Edward never got bored with her. Unlike the usual kind of queen - a virgin, foreign princess who'd never met her husband - Elysabeth knew what she was about, when it came to her second wedding night.

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Manuscript submission fatigue? Yes, it happens to us all. We could take a lesson from Keats...

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Sending work off to prospective publishers? Oh, it's just a case of popping the manuscript in an envelope. Isn't it?

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Swimming activates the brain in the same way as walking but you don't have to worry about the weather or where you put your feet. I can just think about the story I'm writing or work out a new plot as I go back and forth. Afterwards I sit in the café for a while and study some magazines. On my first visit to the new pool I bought food and drink but now I take my own sandwich, as I used to at the Ladywell baths.

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So...when rewriting, how do you know when to stop? Answers on a postcard. Or read my blog.

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