I probably ought to mention that I have a book launch today! It isn't a conventionally published book - it is a YA novel commissioned by the Stratford Upon Avon Literary Festival. It's called The World Turned Upside Down.

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Circus as metaphor for John Webster's anarchic world has a lot going for it. Intrigue and deceit generate mental acrobatics on all sides. With five corpses piled onstage at the end and a lot of gruesome surprises on the way, the overheated tragedy is replete with spectacle. The Italian setting invites comparisons with Comedia del'Arte and designer J William Davis' set and costumes were convincing. Sadly, they detracted from the overall impact of the play.

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Yesterday I was lucky enough to spend time with a good friend of mine, a great writer who's worked in Hollywood, among other places. I've always found his company inspirational and yesterday was no exception. We talked about Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe reading Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the Scottish tradition of pedantic prose, and the 'sharpening pencils' stage of writing. 'There's no such thing as writer's block,' my friend said. 'There's just bad ideas.'


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One of the hardy perennial frets among aspiring writers is that they hear from various sources that something in their novel will get their submission rejected immediately. They mustn't put too much backstory in the early pages of their novel, or indeed anywhere; they mustn't start with (or use) a minor point-of-view; they mustn't keep the body back till page fifty or start with their main character waking up with a hangover. And then they pick up a favourite novelist's work, and discover any or all of those going on, and more lavishly than they'd ever dare.

Some aspect of this are relatively simple. First, don't believe everything you read online, specially if it's seventy-fifth hand, or springs from a different form and industry. Second, these are things which are often done well for good reasons, but even more often done badly for bad ones. (Or even for no reason at all. Prologues seem to be de rigeur in aspiring fiction these days, but there's usually a better way to do the same job. I saw so many at York that I'm beginning to think that writers feel a book isn't dressed without one.) It's not fair, because maybe you're doing it brilliantly for the best reasons, but the weary slushpile reader sees so many done badly, that the presence of backstory/minor PoV/prologue or whatever becomes for them a marker of something which is unlikely to be any good: your submission is starting off on the back foot. This too, I think, is the source of many of the comments from agents and editors about what puts them off and what they like, which get writers so confused: it's a rare agent who doesn't have several authors who do exactly what they've just said they don't like.

But there's something more complicated going on too.

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This April sees the publication of my latest crime novel. By a singular coincidence, it also sees the production of an excerpt of an opera I’ve written the libretto for (at the Linbury Theatre in the Royal Opera House, April 14 and 16). I never consciously set out to be either a crime writer or a librettist, so it’s strange, all of a sudden, to find myself both.

It’s easy enough to retrace the steps that led me to becoming a crime writer. I had a crate full of unpublished manuscripts under my bed – so many in fact that the bed was starting to rise off the floor. My agent told me, more or less, that we were reaching the end of the road. I decided to risk one more throw of the dice on possibly the most ambitious idea for a novel I had yet had...

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Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the BBC made grown-up television dramas that used a scheduling formula which allowed, roughly, an hour per episode. This was because the BBC, unlike all other UK television channels, did not carry advertising.

Now the BBC has long been in the business of selling its dramas overseas, with mixed success. A few years ago, this policy became more aggressive; they got better at it, started making serious money from the sales of rights or - more usually - the formulas for shows like Life on Mars.

Serious money. So much of it that now the BBC appears to be deploying a scheduling formula which specifically accommodates the advert breaks preferred in countries like the USA, where TV dramas live or die by their ability to attract and retain advertising.

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"A perfect character is not engaging. Character transformation can be one of the most powerful effects in any story." Donald Maass


I’ve never written about perfect characters. I'm not sure anyone would want to read about them. But I have written about one who thought she was perfect, for her to discover en route she definitely wasn't. For me as a reader, the draw of the genre I write in (Commercial Women’s Fiction) is the character transformation that unfolds in the telling of an engaging story. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, I’ve tried it twice and though novel two has not bitten the dust – far from it – I’m about to start writing novel three and felt it was time for a change in ‘how’ I approached it.


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My review of this latest collection from Alice Munro is up at Critical Literature Review today. Please, if you've read the collection, shed light on the notes at the end of Wenlock's Edge for me. I'd be very grateful.

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Over the subterranean sea the three men speed, on their raft made of fossilised wood, as St. Elmo’s fire crackles around their masts and an ichthyosaurus battles with a plesiosaurus below. As they finish off the gin, they’re carried on a bed of lava up the chimney of an erupting volcano, to be spat out in a vast geological hiccup, into fame and fortune. What am I on about? Well, there are only two ways of being topical this week, and the men on the raft are – unfortunately - not Clegg, Brown and Cameron.

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