I have a short story in my head. Almost fully formed in my head. It'll probably end up around the 5 or 6 thousand word length by the time I'm finished. I have the characters detailed so well in my head that I swear one of them keeps talking to me during the day.

But I haven't written more than the first 100 words yet.

The reason is simple. I'm scared that I won't be able to do justice to this awesome idea I have.

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The other day I heard a cri de coeur going up in a forum, and it was from Jenn Ashworth. She's one of The Guardian's 12 Best New Novelists, her first novel A Kind of Intimacy was much admired, and her second, Cold Light is due out soon. If you didn't catch her in The Guardian, then maybe you did on BBC2, and she's knee-deep in reviews and interviews and, most important of all, promotion within the book trade. Of course I'd like to forward Jenn's post to Jerusha Cowless, but the last I heard Jerusha was several hundred miles off the Galapagos, and might not be in touch till the trade winds change at the equinox. So I replied to Jenn myself. And what she was saying was this:

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I’ve discovered (yet another) bad habit of mine when it comes to writing. When I say “discovered”, of course, what I actually mean is “finally acknowledged something my husband has been saying for years”.

I over-edit my story ideas.

Like most people, the reason I start writing a particular story is because something about the idea excites me. I barrel in with my newfound enthusiasm and get straight to work on it, until I hit some kind of brick wall.

Usually, what this brick wall means is that there is a specific feature about the story that isn’t working. I trust my instincts, and try to pay attention to them, so I stop and re-think the whole story. Quite often, this involves my brain wandering off at a dozen tangents and deciding that the story would work better in a whole other country. Or time zone. Or universe.

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I knew it had to happen, but today I received my first rejection.

I'm not upset about it - I'd pretty much convinced myself it was going to happen - but I am grateful for it.

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Ever since the National Film Theatre went all shiny and commercial,there's been nowhere for real cinema fans (as distinct from the blockbuster-and-pop-corn throng) to feel at home in London. All that changed for me on Saturday when I stepped into the shabby splendour of the Cinema Museum in Kennington. Housed in the old Lambeth Workhouse, unfunded by public money but stuffed with souvenirs of cinema's heyday, its second season of cinema events has just got started.



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If you try answering these for a favourite book you'll find that you can, from Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice to Heart of Darkness and To The Lighthouse, so why not try it on your own? They're deliberately bald, because there aren't only many different answers, there are different kinds of answer, depending on what your project is with the novel. But answers there should be:

Who is telling this story?

Why are they telling it?

Where do they stand in time and space, relative to the events and settings they're narrating?

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