When Wolf Hall was published, I was up to my neck (and frequently out of my depth) in writing a novel. I love Hilary Mantel's writing, but I didn't dare go near it. A novel about high politics and low violence set only fifty years after A Secret Alchemy, and built round real historical characters? Might it just make me throw in the towel forever? Well, yes: the book is astonishingly, magnificently good, in everything from the big ideas to the small words. When I put it down yesterday I was about half-way through, and it took two hours and three mugs of builder's tea to get myself back to being present in this world, not that one. Yes, I wanted to throw in that towel.

And then again: no, I didn't. Today the day job (teaching, mostly, but also tax-returning/feeding-the-blog/emailing) has to happen, but even as I'm typing this I can hear the cadence and pattern of Mantel's prose like an earworm. It's utterly compelling, but I do have my own voice, and my relationship to it is much the same as my relationship with my body: sometimes I hate it, sometimes I'm very happy with it, it certainly won't win me a Booker let alone two, but it's always me and I'm always stuck with it. As singers know, the only voice I can do better than anyone else can is my own voice, so I might as well go on with it.

So if I'm not trying to write like Mantel what, exactly, is going on when we say to new writers: read, read, read? What's going on when I'm asked about how-to-write books, and prescribe how-to-read ones? And what's going on when I'm not noticing technique as I read, because I'm far too deep in the world to haul myself out and notice how she does it?

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Work in the shop has been proceeding slow, but steady. I hope to have it done by the end of next week. Then I will be off to hunting camp for a month. Daily walking, writing, sauna, and playing mandolin doesn’t sound like much of a hunting schedule but I assure you that I go to bed tired every night. I even shoot some game occasionally. I look forward to

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One of the writers in the Taming Your Novel workshop I gave at York has - to my delight - picked up in her blog on something that I've recently come to believe: that the division that we often talk about, between Planners and Pantsers, is not necessarily a helpful distinction. And yet it comes up time and again, in everything from writers' forums to festival panel sessions: are you a planner or a pantser? As I described it here, which kind of writer you are is driven by your fears as much as your understanding. "Pantser" describes

... "flying by the seat of your pants": the kind of writer who dives straight into the first draft, and sees what happens. And the opposite seem to be the planners: the ones who don't start until they know a good deal about where they're going. The planners are afraid of getting lost or stalling or going wrong if they don't have at least some kind of map in their hand; the pansters are afraid of being shackled or bored or going wrong if they do. And yes, both can go wrong, and I've seen the results: the planned novel where everything fits together as neatly as a jigsaw, and is just about as interesting and believable an evocation of real life; the pantsed novel whose open-ended exploration of characters' lives and experience seems... well, endless.

But since I wrote that, it's become clearer to me that this distinction is unhelpfully rigid and binary. As I first realised in Dreaming the Map, you may be putting down a zero draft, or a radically different third draft, or a mind-map of how your characters feel about each other, or a family tree, or a sketch-map of the farm; you may even draw your characters' faces, if you're a much better draughtswoman than me ... but all you're ever really doing is imagining on paper.

And what that means is that it's not a given that "planning" has to come before "drafting".

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Lazarus Theatre Company specialise in re-interpreting classics in a non-realistic style, incorporating dance and mime, that suits Greek Tragedy. Last year I saw them perform two adapted dramas, 'Electra, Her Life' and 'Orestes, His Fall' at The Space theatre on the Isle of Dogs.

National dramas reflect national character, and Greece has been much in the news lately. So this dramatised debate about personal sacrifice versus the public good strikes a topical note.

Meant to be performed in an ampitheatre, how would this monumental prologue to the Trojan wars fare in the tiny black box of the Jack Studio?

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Right, let's start with this blog's theme song. All together now:

They're tools, not rules!

Okay. And having let off a bit of steam and told the world where we stand on this issue, I'd like to remind you about the rule that a sentence should have a full stop at the end. And the one that says you should have started that sentence with a capital letter. And please remember to keep the rule that you should start writing at the top, left-hand corner of the page and write horizontally. Shall we agree that those are as close as you can get in writing to laws that should not be broken, because they're basic to us reading anything fluently?

Then there are what you might call the second-order rules, which are about being understood. High on the list of those are things like dangling participles, the agreement of pronouns and separating lists with commas, which work to transmit the writer's meaning, via the black marks on the page, to the reader's understanding. If you break the rules of how our grammar, syntax and punctuation work then at best our fictional dream will be blurred or broken, and at worst we'll get the giggles at what you've actually said. These are the nearly-rules of how language is used. You may hold to the formal, or informal, conventions, but they should be kept because meaning is always paramount.

In non-fiction, that's all you need to worry about. But in fiction and creative non-fiction we're always working partly with human voice, and in speech humans bend and break the rules of written language all the time.

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You don't need to have been reading the Itch for very long to know that when we're talking about prose, I'm usually going to talk about specificity - particularity of experience - precision. It's an aspect of Showing, as opposed to Telling, and a way of making even your Telling Showy. As I put it in that post, "Crudely, They met at the big tree isn't as Showy, because it isn't as particularised, as They kissed under the rotting willow, or They fought beneath the sapling oak". And so much of the power of the paragraph I was anatomising in "An Education in Writing" is created by the exquisite precision of Bowen's choices of mostly, in themselves, quite ordinary words.

But, of course, there's the other side of the business, which as I remember (my copy's taken a walk) John Fairfax and John Moat (founders of the Arvon Foundation) discuss in their brief but excellent The Way To Write. Sometimes, describing things specifically closes the world off for the reader: it leaves them no space in which to imagine. Sometimes you do want to write The man came over the hill, or They met at the big tree.

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Take heed of the title when you congratulate me and pat me on the back. The wonderful folks at Every Day Poets have published another one of my poems. This one is titled Luck Ration and may be found here. The poem fits in with...Read More Here...

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You may know that I'm a great fan of working on hard copy; it means you can get away from the computer; with biro on print the original and the amendments go on looking separate and you can see your changes of mind and second thoughts; and you're less likely to get lured into endless, muddly fiddling. Besides, brains are analogue and so is handwriting: and the former can control the latter much more intimately and directly than any process that has to go through a digitising interface, such as letters typed by your digits on a keyboard to appear on screen

So, call me stupid, but it's only now, something like six years after I first encountered Track Changes (as I remember, when the US copy-edit of The Mathematics of Love came through), and three after I started having to use them (grumpily) to mark my Open University students' assignments, that I've suddenly realised its potential for certain, particular stages in my own writing.

If you don't know what I'm on about, have a dig in your word-processing programme. Track Changes, essentially, shows everything you've done, without getting rid of what was there before.

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The last couple of nights I have had the trap out in front of the camp. These willing crayfish volunteers became our dinner. How you ask? Boil in water and Old Bay Seasoning for one minute. Quickly drain and cool in water. Then the fun begins. Remove the...Read More Here...

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After three days of non-stop rain and sleet I am starting to get stir crazy. This is my favorite time of year to be in the woods and on the water…until now. When it rains this long it is easy to be sad, even morose. Sure, it’s easy to get after those ‘rainy day’ projects we all put off but after the first 48 hours they are either completed or frustrating. I am beginning to understand why there are so many fine poets in the United Kingdom.

I have, not by chance, been writing all morning. Mostly...Read More Here...

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