Well, well, well, it's that busy time of year again. Here's some of what I'm doing, alongside writing a novel, teaching for the Open University, blogging, tweeting, cluttering up the forums at WriteWords... and occasionally remembering to breathe and feed the family. If you're free and feel like coming along, do come and say hello:



HAVANT LITERARY FESTIVAL

FACT AND FICTION: the role of the historical novelist Thursday 22nd September, 7.30pm, United Reformed Church Hall, Havant

How can history be used to illuminate the present? Why did Shakespeare ruin the reputation of Richard III? These and many other questions will be discussed by Stella Duffy, (Theodora; Empress, Actress, Whore), Emma Darwin, (A Secret Alchemy), and Michael Arnold, (Traitor's Blood). Books will be on sale for signing by the authors at this event.



UNIVERSITY OF GLAMORGAN

THE MOOT COURT READING: Emma Darwin Friday 30th September, 6.30pm, The Moot Court, Ty Crawshay, Treforest Campus, Pontypridd

The first of a new series of public events at the University of Glamorgan. The residential workshops of the MPhil in Writing were the birthplace of Emma's own debut novel, The Mathematics of Love. Emma returns to read

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Dear Jerusha: Can you have an opening chapter in the point-of-view of someone who isn't the MC? [Emma notes: that's main character, not master of ceremonies] I'll try to explain. My opening chapter is in the point-of-view of a doctor. Her patient, James, is a main character, but is unconscious after an overdose of illegal drugs, and the scene is with James's family, in the hospital. The whole scene is from the doctor's point-of-view, but one of the family there, Edward, is also a main character. The reason I did it this way is because I needed a negative view of James, before the novel gets into why he is how he is. But a couple of my writers' group have said that it could be confusing or wrong-footing to have a chapter, especially the first chapter, in the point-of-view of a character who isn't important all through the novel (though she does appear again). And someone else has said that I definitely shouldn't do this, because it's important that the reader empathises with the MC, and to show the MC in a negative light makes that harder.

Writers' Groups, eh? Who needs 'em? [Emma notes: me] I really like the sound of this, if it's handled right; it introduces us to an important group of people, and expresses the dynamics of them, at a really crucial point, all in one. A first chapter - among many other things - is teaching the reader how to read this novel, but if the book uses several points of view, perhaps in separate chapters, then I would argue that there's no reason you can't use the doctor's here. In a narrative in third person there is, by definition, a privileged narrator who can admit the reader to any mind or point of view it chooses. There's also a long history of using a point-of-view character to tell someone else's story: Wuthering Heights, for example, and to some extent The Great Gatsby. And the really cracking story which won Second Prize in the Frome Festival Short Story Comp, "Mr Plumb" by Stanley Walinets, did exactly that. It was very successful, and it made me realise that it's a rather under-used technique. (You can read it and most of the others here, by the way. Highly recommended.)

What I would say is that you'd need to be careful not to get us too involved in the doctor's own life and mind,

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There’s a wonderful book called 29 Gifts. Have you come across it? It’s written by a young American woman called Cami Walker who was diagnosed with MS a month after her wedding. In pain and despair, and barely able to leave her flat, she was given the following ‘recipe’ by an African medicine woman: Give 29 gifts in 29 days. And if you miss a day, go back to the beginning. The gifts included a tissue for a friend in tears; giving away a bouquet of flowers she’d bought for herself, stem by stem, to strangers; giving a shell she’d found on the beach to a little girl. The point of all this was that in giving a gift each day, her energy turned from focusing on pain and difficulty towards the power to make a difference.

What is this to do with writing, I hear you ask?



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As a teenager, I read Steinbeck's 1939 American novel, The Grapes of Wrath , for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, with astonishment. Steinbeck's empathy with an 'underclass' was almost unknown in English novels, where working class characters were used for comic relief or appeared as villains. There were plenty of servants, of course, since most novels were set in middle or upper-class households.

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The weather has changed. Being away, I didn't see it happen here, but I'd imagine it's much the same anywhere you go. I return from holiday to find a cooler, windier, wetter London. Trotting round my neighbourhood the colours have changed, and its not just that the housing estate has been repainted in battleship grey.

In the Eurostar magazine on the way home an article heralded the change in seasons with the suggestion that autumn is the start of the cultural year en France, unlike ever-dynamic, always on London. I'm not so sure we're any different. The Wednesday writing group I go to has been low in numbers all summer, and suddenly in September the attendance has doubled. The deadlines of literary competitions seem to cluster around October and November; perhaps if you're interested in these things, now would be the time to prepare for them. The signs are everywhere.

I'm sure real writers don't ever slack in summer, even if real-world writers do. At least we're finally liberated of the fantasy that we might just spend the day lying in the park instead.

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I'd recommend homeswaps to anyone who needs a nudge to keep their own place up to scratch. Another advantage is you get to investigate a range of reading matter that's in situ, so to speak.

My recent homeswap with my nephew and his family in my home town of Preston can roughly be summed up as: 'We got the rain; they got the riots'.

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One of the things that's often recommended to neophyte writers of novels is to have one scene per chapter. And someone then asks "What's a scene?" and someone else "How long should a chapter be?" And they're right that the two things are interrelated, but I don't think one-scene-per-chapter is necessarily the best solution. And the length any chapter "ought" to be is actually determined by what you think a chapter is. So, what's going on?

We all know what a scene is in a play, of course... or do we? English drama packs multiple comings and goings into a single scene, and traditionally a new scene expresses a break in time or space. French drama starts a new scene each time a character enters, which seems odd to us, though I enjoy the way it also smells of M Molière's rehearsal call sheet. But the French tradition says something important too: when a new character comes in, the dynamics of character-in-action are, by definition, changed; a new unit of action, if you like, has started.

Of course, fiction integrates dramatic prose with narrative prose and (thanks to free indirect discourse) blurs the distinction between them. So, unlike visual drama (film, plays), in fiction the distinction between action shown "on stage" in real time, and other ways of telling a story, is elided or even eliminated (and it is to some extent in radio drama, too).

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Just when you think you'll never see a Greek Tragedy again, two come along together.

Last week, I was thrilled at the chance to revisit The Space, the arts centre on the Isle of Dogs, where the aptly-titled Lazarus Theatre Company (they specialise in revivals) is currently staging two adaptations of Greek plays: Electra and Orestes, billed as The Summer of The Greeks

As a rule I like small-scale domestic works , but there's something compelling about Greek drama, with its focus on stupendous events and legendary characters in extreme situations. The chorus and lead players give off waves of intense emotion so strong you feel quite battered by the experience.



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Nah, I'm not going to do one of these 'My Writing Journey' type posts - I'd fall off my stilettos if anyone other than myself or Mr HW gave a stuff about my daily slog of getting the novel out of my head and onto the page.

But I will just have a ponder about what makes people want to put paw to keyboard day after day, usually squeezed in after their nine-to-five occupation. And keep doing it, often for years, with very little external encouragement to sustain them.

I started young, as a lot of people do, I think. 'Ferdinand the Fox' saw the light when I was six or seven (but has thankfully never been spotted since), and in my last year of primary school, I wrote and produced a play set in ancient Egypt, called 'Nefera of the Nile' . I don't remember all the details, but I know it involved dastardly goings-on amongst the pyramids and a priest coming to a sticky end - yup, even then I had a bloodthirsty turn of mind!

I scribbled for a while throughout my teens but then life, boyfriends and all that stuff intervened, and writing got shoved to one side (buried under piles of nappies, sometimes literally). When I started again, a couple of years ago, it felt odd...but also a little like coming back to something I shouldn't have left. I had a cast of characters taking up space in my head, and they wouldn't go away. They kept shoving a cup of popcorn into my hand, forcing me to sit down and watch as the credits rolled and their film premiered in front of me.

That's how it works for me, anyway. The characters have their story, and they want it told. Their way. How am I doing? Watch this space...

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Noel Streatfeild had a "bus test" for whether she'd developed her characters well and deeply enough: if you saw the family on a bus, would you recognise them? (If you're a Streatfeild fan that's a great site, by the way). It's obvious what the central characters - the ones Forster called round characters - in your novel need, even if it's not so obvious how to set about it. But what about flat characters? What if the world you're working with has a huge number of peripheral characters? How do you bring a bit of life to them, make us believe in them, without without sinking the novel?

It's most obvious at the beginning, when a reader is working out how this novel works. There are lots of ways a novel can work, but it won't work at all if the reader isn't shown how to read it. And we hold on to what we know about this character so far if we think it'll matter later. And, roughly, we need our expectations to be fulfilled: the proportion of how much we know should roughly be rewarded by how important they are in the story. Well, never say always: Zadie Smith started White Teeth with a suicide by someone who was fundamentally not important in the novel: what was important was the world that body plummeted through, and what happened next.I do know people for whom that was supremely irritating, and others for whom it was just right for Smith's project in the novel, which is full of the apparent superfluities and redundancies of the modern urban world. You pays your literary money and you takes your choice.

But it's also important to realise that while the amount of detail you spend on a character is one clue for the reader, the amount of depth you give is a different kind of clue, and you need to know what you're doing with each.

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