Do you listen to music while you write? Some people can't concentrate at all with music playing in the background [including my husband who I sometimes have to share an office with....]but I am increasingly finding it essential to help get me in the right frame of mind to write. Susannah Rickards posted recently on ‘writing the mind alive’ and how Bach’s Goldberg Variations was integral to a certain kind of inspired writing, so I know I’m not alone.

My YA novel Dark Ride, to be published in May, was actually semi inspired by the Morrissey song Every Day is Like Sunday [yeah, OK, not quite Bach, but whatever floats your creative boat]. The song is about a grotty seaside town ‘that they forgot to close down’.

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The plot concerns a a middle aged diplomat called Lord Illingworth who has offered a secretarial job to a poor bank clerk, Gerald Arbuthnot. Just before the interval, when the young man's mother, Mrs Arbuthnot, arrives, Gerald is revealed to be Lord Illingworth's illegitimate son. His mother changed her name after being deserted by her dandified seducer. She makes it plain it would be very disloyal of Gerald to take up the job. The second half of the play depicts the various confrontations about what's to be done. Gerald falls in love with a pretty young house guest, the focus of a subplot, which further implicates the vile seducer and underscores the harshness of attitudes to women at the time.


The intimacy of the 80-seater studio allows a proximity that encourages involvement. I restrained myself from joining in the conversations of the first act, but couldn't help giving a sympathetic smile to the fallen woman, played with martyred dignity by Mary Lincoln. After all, at the height of her torment she was only three feet away and looking straight at me!



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It's surprising what you can learn from popular fiction. Apart from containing the first full-frontal sex scenes I ever read (learnt a good deal there), Judith Krantz's Scruples also supplied me with a piece of understanding which is nothing to do with sex but which has stayed with me. Towards the end of the novel the heroine is watching her new movie-director husband edit a movie. I don't have a copy of the book these days but, as I remember, she notices how the most beautiful piece of film or exquisitely acted scene will be be cut, if it spoils the structure or pace of the move as a whole.

I can't really say that I've looked to the S&F novels of the late 70s and early 80s for much in the way of writing advice, though I'm sure the mega-sellers such as Krantz's could teach many of us a thing or two about storytelling. But perhaps sacrificing beauty is a good way to think of this question, and a better one than the often-quoted "murder your darlings", which has strong whiff of the nastiest side of your Inner Calvinist: if you love it, it must be bad, and if it's bad you must kill it.

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I don't know about you, but I can't imagine writing a novel which was trying to set forward a thesis, or prove a point. Indeed, when I told a literary journalist that one of the themes of The Mathematics of Love turned out to be lost children and she asked me what it says about lost children, I floundered: I hadn't had an argument or a thesis, just an emotional centre for the novel.

But the novel I've just finished is the first which has come from an idea. I knew from the first moment that it was going to be about betrayal. So I went what Ishiguro calls "location hunting": I sought out a time and a place, and then people, which would embody all the things I wanted to... I nearly said "say", about betrayal, but that sounds too tidy and conclusive. "Explore"? "Evoke"? "Embody", perhaps, because that's what we do, as novelists, isn't it: we tell stories and poke ideas around by means of particular, fictional human bodies. These bodies are enmeshed as we all are in nets of allegiance and trust, and now they're threatened.

The novel I haven't started writing is the first thing I've ever written which takes the least account of a review of my work; in The Times Sarah Vine said, of The Mathematics of Love, "Everyone is, at the core, vulnerable, their happiness bittersweet and fleeting but nevertheless priceless." And when I happened to remember that (it's the sort of review you do remember) the wisps of story and characters floating around in my mind suddenly made sense, and the novel got its word; this is a story about happiness.

So then I started thinking about whether there was a one-word description for their predecessors.

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What increases your chances of being a successful novelist? Talent, perhaps? Previous writing experience maybe, or early success? If only it were that simple.
When it comes to writing fiction, nothing stymies you like the advantages you set out with.



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This year's York Festival of Writing is two months away, on 23rd-25th March, and I'll be there, along with dozens of other authors, plus agents, workshop leaders, publishers, editors and several hundred writers at varying stages of their aspiration. I'm leading a workshop on The Writer's Voices as well as a mini-course with my companion-in-crime, Debi Alper, on Finding Your Voice. I'm also doing Book Doctor slots, though they're filling up fast, I see. Last year was huge fun, in a head-spinning sort of way, and afterwards I blogged about it all in Ducks, Dreams and Cross-channel Ferries. But what about the expectations of it before the event?

For some it's the chance to hear writers they admire talk, or to get to grips with particular aspects of writing - point-of-view, internet marketing, thrillers, establishing character - in the company of an expert. The chance to have coffee with a book trade professional or buy them a drink is the lure for others, and many want to meet other writers in the same boat as themselves. Writing is a painfully isolated business at the best of times, and oh! the joy of meeting others who know exactly what you're talking about, how it feels, and who might even have a good idea about how to get your Chapter Ten out of the doldrums. There's a bookstall throughout the festival, with all the authors' books on sale, so a signed copy is a nice souvenir, too.

And for many, of course, the glittering prize would be to be Taken On By An Agent or even A Publisher. It's very understandable: York is all about getting your work publishable. But what would be a shame - a folly, though an understandable one - would be to pin all your hopes, and all your reasons for coming to York, on that one outcome.

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Medea the anorexic supermodel tested all her food on her Chihuahua. Still Jason the jealous designer found a way to poison her.



London Fashion Week had never seen anything like it. Jason Zantini’s collection – Blood Mummy – was his most personal yet. Some argued that it was not Fashion, it was Art. Others preferred to say that it wasn’t Art, it was a Bloody Mess.

Zantini’s troubled relationship with his own mother was well documented. A domineering alcoholic who had at one time resorted to prostitution, Dolores Zantini had killed herself six months earlier in a final act of vindictive passive aggression. Naturally, she blamed Jason in the note she left. And it was Jason who found her in the bathtub, the wounds in her wrists gaping like mouths open in accusation, the tepid water dark with her blood.

Safe to say that Jason Zantini was not in a happy place when he designed the Blood Mummy collection.

It was hard enough having his mother’s suicide to contend with. No doubt it made him a difficult person to be around. In the words of his girlfriend, supermodel Medea Medici, he was no fun anymore. He never wanted to go out, he wouldn’t answer the phone, wouldn’t see anyone – he’d even stopped taking a shower. Could he really blame her if she turned to others for company and amusement, in particular noted fashion photographer Kris Dufoy, on whose arm she was seen at several premières and industry galas?

To the emotional cocktail of guilt, grief and rage brought about by his mother’s death was added a generous splash of jealousy, with a top-up of rage for good measure.

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Oh, how I do love a thoroughly counter-intuitive discovery! Apparently, the plainer and cleaner the typeface, the less a reader will learn and remember of the detail of the text. A typeface which slows the reader means they learn and understand more of what's being said. Not just the denotation, but the connotations, the friction between them, the prosody which affects the tone and 'feel' of the piece... they all have time to grow and flower, and create a full meaning, rather than only a basic meaning, in the reader's mind.

This sounds to me like something fairly fundamental in human consciousness. In Rembrandt's painting The Jewish Bride, for example, the huge, thickly embroidered sleeve of the man is the most extraordinary assemblage of paint. Rembrandt used the skin from paint left out overnight to create the the white highlights, and even as you sense the richness of the cloth and the pride of the man you can see the wrinkles and bumps of it; your eye-movements catch on the physical nature of the art, the extreme paint-ishness, of the medium, in a way which makes the mimetic nature of art – the evocation of the garment – even more vivid. And I don't think you have to know anything about painting technique, let alone be thinking about it, for that effect to work on you; it's built into what the artist has done to the canvas.

Journalists are taught to work with received phrases so that readers can understand them with minimum puzzlement and maximum speed, and move on. Whereas one important characteristic of literary fiction is almost always that the words on the page are more unusual for that subject, or more unusually put together.

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As night follows day, a new novel has entered the works, just as the final draft of the novel I think of as my Betrayal novel, has left them, going from my desk to my agent's and onwards. Not that it's new in the obvious sense; it first appeared, untimely, almost exactly two years ago. Since then I've been... not exactly ignoring it, but making no effort to do more with it than I couldn't avoid. I've bought the occasional book that caught my eye, clipped articles out of the TLS, gone to exhibitions that were relevant, collected postcards and leaflets, made a note of something I heard on the radio... but I've never allowed myself to sit down and Think.

And then a week ago, I did. In among lots of other, duller work, I was able to allow myself some treats: hours I could spend on this delicious stage of creating a novel.

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