I’ve been thinking about the extraordinarily random luck involved in getting published. I subbed my children’s novel to a good many agents and had a strong strike rate, with seven agents calling in the full thing. But each heart-breaking, heart-stopping time, the ultimate answer was no.


The reasons varied, but very often I would hear the words ‘just such a difficult market’ and ‘just so hard to convince editors these days.’ I decided my book was simply too ‘quiet’ to make its way in these difficult times and set about writing something in-yer-face and full-on High Concept with sci-fi bells and whistles. But before I did that, I sent my book to one of the few publishers who take direct submissions, the independent children’s publisher Piccadilly Press. And then forgot about it. Well, sort of. I never really believed anything would come of it anyway and had mentally moved on.

But, incredibly, something has come of it.


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The first pass revisions of my story for Radio 4 were the usual ones. First, once I had the story down on the page, it was about adjustments to the structure and spacing of the piers of the bridge: this is where being able to spread the pages of a short story out is wonderful. In such a short story, and one to be read aloud, there isn't space for anything structurally complex, but it's an oldish man remembering his youth: was the frame the right width (length?); did the sense of the speaker's 'now' fade in and out at the right moments and in the right way? And as so often, the run-in to the story was a little long. Sometimes it's because you're finding out where the story really starts - thinking/writing your way into the situation and character, and you can cut it later. But this time it was about not knowing how much space I could allow the how-we-got-here bit, which, given the fixed wordcount, meant waiting till it was finished to judge the proportions. Then it wasn't about cutting out material from the beginning, but about condensing it: saying exactly the same things, as expressively but more economically, making every word work harder for its place.

I checked things like Google StreetView and scraps of Brighton history. At some point, I realised that title was 'Calling', and later I read it aloud. The voice came across, though I straightened out a few sentences which worked fine for the eye and mind, but not for tongue, teeth and ears.

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It sounds a bit obvious, but I realised that knowing my radio story would be spoken aloud and heard, not written and read, did change things. I write in first person most of the time, because it's so much easier to find the right, particular, different voice and the plotting problems it leads to are usually surmountable. If I want more than one viewpoint I'll have more than one first-person narrator. But I'd been flirting with the idea of writing this story in third person with a shifting or even omniscient point of view, since it's a while since I did that, and because I'm rather more seriously flirting with the idea of doing it for the next novel. The reader, in such a story, would be the storyteller. But when I started to imagine an actual person saying words aloud, it clearly was saying 'I', so that was that.

I also knew, by the time I was talking to Cecilia the producer, that it would be an old man, remembering something in his youth. This double, past-and-present narrative, too, seems to be a form that I'm drawn to - all three narratives in A Secret Alchemy are built on versions of it - and I think it's for various reason.

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In my ‘other’ life as an artist, I make collages. I cut words and images from magazines and arrange them into tiny worlds on a card backing. Many have an inherent narrative, and each has its own atmosphere. An Olympic swimmer balances on the back of a skeleton horse, serenaded by a fat man blowing a giant horn. A child gazes out from her nest of open-tongued lilies, while black hounds bark 'This Is Now'.

When I first began making them, I’d work diligently within the card frame. But gradually, it became important to allow images to ‘break out’ of the frame. In one of this week’s collages, a pair of turtles swim outwards, their flippers sweeping air; a swallow hovers above and a sheaf of wheat grows through the frame and out. For me, these are messages from my creative self: it's time to return to the wild.


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Talking to the Richard III Society today, I was reminded of the moment when I got the answer to the problem of how to write A Secret Alchemy. In a TLS review of two books on the Dark Ages, the reviewer R I Moore said this:

"Historians have to live with Heisenbergian uncertainty: they cannot simultaneously plot position and trajectory, without distortion. The forces that make for change are always more important for the future, and therefore in retrospect, than they seem at the time…"

At the time, the blinding light that it shone showed me why I didn't want to write the novel as bio-pic: you can't really express the trajectory of a life until it's over, and for my two narrators their lives weren't over. So the answer was to plot a series of Elysabeth and Antony's positions: the individual moments in as much vividness as they could be known: the stations of the Cross, as it were, the stages of the pilgrimage. This was the point I was making in my talk.

As the train lolloped through the Suffolk countryside of The Mathematics of Love on the way to Norwich, and I was looking through my notes, the second part of that quotation came into focus.

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Have had to remove all the poems from my blog - if anyone ever looked at them - sorry.

The prince and the frog-maiden rode along the ancient track.

“Ah-ha! You’re trapped, traitors!” A soldier leapt out in front of them. But with a snap of her fingers, the frog-maiden turned herself and her companion invisible. They spurred the horses past the baffled soldier.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” said the prince, once they were visible again.

“Useful, huh?” croaked the frog-maiden.

No sooner had she spoken when they heard a terrible screeching above their heads.

“Oh no! Witch birds! If they see us, we’re done for! Quick, hide!” The frog-maiden spurred her horse towards cover, and the prince followed her. But they weren’t fast enough. The birds grabbed them and carried them into the sky…

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The availablity of textiles in the nineteenth century meant women could showcase artistic and practical skills, virtues valued but restricted. They also signalled aspirations. A quote from George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) illustrates this, when Maggie Tulliver's father reminds her to 'Go on with your patchwork like a little lady'.

Quilts displayed patriotism in an age of political turmoil and jingoism, proked by fears of revolution, such as was happening in France.


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Arthur Miller's play, inspired by Massachusetts witch-hunts in 1697,felt surprisingly at home. At an 8pm start, birdsong and a balmy June evening made a pleasant backdrop to the rural setting. By the end, huge trees, visible only in inky silhouette, helped create a mood of claustrophobic menace.

Miller found parallels between this story and the purges of the American entertainment industry in the late 1940s/early 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) interrogated writers and directors. Fuelled by a frenzy of anti-Communist sentiment and the fear of conspiracy, investigators threatened suspected left-wing sympathisers with imprisonment or blacklisting. Immunity could be achieved by implicating others.

The play's theme of personal integrity versus a dogmatic regime is seen to be of universal relevance, which makes it popular. Despite the supposed recognition in places like post-Mao China, it has always seemed to me a particularly American play.



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