People simply don’t understand how much work goes into being a writer, do they? They fail to comprehend the many and varied activities that fill up our diaries. If only they knew what our schedules looked like, right?

First there’s the internet work: emails, Twitter, Facebook. After all, a writer needs to engage with social networking. Next: GoodReads, writers’ forums, endless blog subscriptions on Google Reader. And of course we’ve got our own blogs to update.


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Back when I was talking about writing sex scenes, I talked about how they can confuse your writerly compass into forgetting a basic rule of writing: "you only need to write as much of the scene, and as much of the detail, as needs to be in there for the larger purposes of the story." Of course "larger purposes" doesn't just mean the bare bones of a plot - the particular details in a detective story which are red herrings or express the character of the victim are just as important as the actual clues and the murderer's motive. But I was surprised, the other day, when a friend who writes good, high-end mum lit said that she always starts narrating a scene where the action starts, and writes it in more-or-less real time through to the end.

I love my friend's books, so my surprise isn't a criticism. And Shakespeare had to do it, because he had to get his actors on and off stage, with no curtains or blackouts to help; it takes a reasonably experienced audience to understand what's going on in, say, Shared Experience's physical, crosscutting of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. But one of the joys of prose fiction is that by integrating everything of life into a single narrative which has no physical, sensory content at all, we're liberated from the awkwardness of physical representation. So there's no necessity to write the whole of a scene in real time.

Most students quickly grasp the idea that you might start narrating a scene in medias res, and only a little later they realise that you might cut it before the end. But it much more rarely occurs to them that you might skim over bits of the middle;

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The Strictly team have invited me along to tell you about how I managed to escape the slushpile and find myself an agent.

You see, it all began with a comment I read on this very blog.


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All last week I was on a demanding immersion course in Spain, so I put the lacklustre nature of the first half of this book down to tiredness. After page 200, though, when the killer's point-of-view was introduced, it suddenly picked up. It was no effort to finish it during the return journey. I was all ready next day, it being the third Saturday of the month, to discuss it at my local crime readers' group.

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There's no doubt about it; even in a mild winter London is dim and dismal. When I see TV images of East Yorkshire, though, usually covered by floodwater or threatened by gales, I count my blessings.This happens when a friend, currently teaching abroad, makes her twice-yearly return to check on the house that her mother left her, in a village near Hull. I wondered what she'd think of David Hockney's portrayal of her home territory, which contradicts the wind-swept greyness I remember from my visits.

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Are you a writer if you're not actively writing?

Deep, man. A friend posed this a little while back, in the rhetorical fashion. As I remember, all of us readily agreed with sentiment; after all, it's about slogging and grafting, not coasting. But I can't help thinking the question has a telling ring of 'if a tree falls in the forest' about it, and much like that old favourite, I think the answer entirely depends on your terms.

I've had a think about it (it takes me a while) and I've come to the conclusion:


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Do you believe in magic?

I do. You may call it different things depending on your outlook – coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity, chance, intuition, ‘the universe’, flow, fate or grace. Whichever, it exists for me just as surely as the material world does

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Dear Jerusha; I am scared. I have written two books of a series, and the first is out with a couple of agents, but I know that I'm likely to get a standard rejection, which won't tell me anything except that today, that agent thinks they can't sell that novel. But I am working on other novels - I have loads of ideas from children's books, to YA, to adult. Time is lacking. Eventually, when my daughter goes to school I would love to devote my time to writing novels.

The thing is that I started writing to escape and found I loved it. I never set out to become published. Now, after devoting two years to the series and seeing how much I love to write I wonder if I have what it takes. If I don't it doesn't really matter, in a way: I do just love writing, and I'd go on. But now I'm thinking about getting an editorial report because in some ways I really want to know. On the other hand, if I find out I don't have what it takes, it might take my enjoyment out of my writing. I'll constantly think it's rubbish, whereas now I think - well, I like it! I also don't want to spend £500 unless it is worth it. I can afford it; we are fortunate. It's just - is it worth it?

I think it's very insightful of you to realise that you might rather leave your enjoyment undisturbed. There's no denying that it can be quite hard to cope with detailed analysis of what's not working yet in your writing; in some ways it's harder to take than a bland "Not for us, sorry." And it's horribly easy to read all the gory details of "What's not working yet" as piles of "What I did wrong because I'm rubbish". And it's very natural to be scared of getting an even semi-authoritative assessment and judgment of your work: Emma doesn't have the least desire to be a professional cook, but she'd still be nervous if Nigel or Nigella came to tea. I do think it's horribly easy, too, to get locked into the general assumption among aspiring writers, and also the rest of the world, that publication is what we're all aiming for, and anything else is second best. It's not nearly as simple as that.

I assume, though, that you would like to improve your writing, just for the pleasure of being able to fulfil better your drive to tell stories: to say what you want to say more effectively, to get the idea and dreams in your head onto the page more satisfyingly.

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It's been a while since my last blog, but by no means does it mean that I've been idle.

The last few weeks have produced both lows and highs. My lowest point came when I experienced my first rejection of the full Delve manuscript. That I'd got to the point of being asked for the full validated my believe in Delve and when the response came it wasn't the one that I'd pinned my hopes on. The agent in question gave mea some really good feedback saying that the manuscript was too long at 126,000 words, slowing the pace, and that for a first time YA author I should be aiming at 65,000 to 75,000 words. The good news was that the story, the characters weren't the issue, so I knew that I'd got the formula right, but needed to kill my darlings to make it pacier. I bounced back the next day and began to work on the re-edit of Delve to cut the length, and up the pace.

And in amongst it all, I heard from a fellow Writewords member that there was a conference about to take place arranged by the Verulam's Writers Circle where attendees would get a chance to pitch there novels to agents and editors in the business. Well I couldn't miss such an opportunity. I had two completed manuscripts - Delve, my urban fantasy, young adult paranormal novel, and x3 (previously titled The Curse), a chilling adult supernatural horror. I decided to pitch both, and spent the weeks running up to the conference making sure that I had samples for both (consisting of a synopsis plus first three chapters). With the re-edit on Delve, my first three chapters needed pace, and x3 needed to be dragged from first draft to a standard worthy of submission.

The Get Writing 2012 conference took place yesterday, 11th February 2012, at Hatfield University. There were the usual talks and seminars, all very well organised, but it was the afternoon that made it for me, having the chance to try and pitch my work. That and meeting fellow writeworders, Sharley, Astrea, Petal, Helen Black, as well as Judy, Nurgs and other writers. A short gaggle of witches was how Sharley's husband described us I believe, any my fellow coven members were all so lovely and down to earth.


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So once again, I ally myself with the hordes by talking about things I know bobbins about.

Am I a charlatan for not quite getting Hamlet? It seems more celebrated for its contribution to the English language than for whatever it is actually about. T.S. Eliot baldly declared the play an artistic failure, taking apart the play in an essay Hamlet and his Problems. In this essay he argued that the the play failed to show the emotions and ideas expressed by the the character Hamlet:


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