It's strange how a particular venue or a gimmicky detail can foreground certain aspects of a classic play. This was ilustrated by two local productions I attended recently, within weeks of each other.

On April 7th I saw Shakespeare's Scottish play at the Greenwich Playhouse, the cosy studio space over a pub near Greenwich station and the DLR. An all-black cast were brilliant in a production that drew parallels between an ancient African kingdom and the belief systems of medieval England.

More recently I went to a performance at Charlton House. A Jacobean manor house must be the perfect venue, I thought, for a performance of this darkest of Shakespearean tragedies. Best of all, it was on the bus route between Lewisham and Belmarsh

Strangely enough, the venue had as many drawbacks as it had benefits. Or perhaps it wasn't so strange after all that a a purpose-built theatre is always going to score over a stately home, even one with a wrap-round minstrel's gallery.


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A book.

To me, it’s a very special book. It’s not because of the cover, lovely though it is. But no one else will feel the need to coo and stroke the gold embossed bits as I have today. It has a delicious new smell but then, don’t all new books have that?

It joins the millions of other novels that are on sale. It could end up on a remainder pile or it could do really well. Who knows? It has to take its chances, along with all the rest.

But whatever happens, opening the package that contained it today was a moment pretty much up there with saying ‘I do’ and hearing ‘It’s a boy!’ for the first time. Because it’s my book.



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On the Online Self-Editing Course which I'm running jointly with Debi Alper, my tutorial was talking about characterisation, and I said that at the self-editing stage you need to ask yourself whether your characters are too off-the-peg. "Off-the-peg" is a term I owe to Susannah Rickards, originally for the kind of language which does the basic job perfectly well (and its "rightness" can seduce new writers into feeling it's really right) but is never really fresh. It sits somewhere between the fictioneers' "second-hand" and the poets' "received language", as a way of describing something which we've read or encountered many times before, although it hasn't yet degenerated into a confirmed cliché.

Are your bus drivers men, your nurses women, your teenagers sulky, your middle-aged mothers kindly? Do your Frenchwomen dress exquisitely and your Germans have no sense of humour and your elderly men wear cardigans? Of course we all fit some stereotypes of our age, gender, class, nationality and so on, but we all run counter to others. Off-the-peg characters, like off-the-peg language and off-the-peg plots, are the easiest for the reader to take on board, because the meaning is ready-made. The reader's mind slides straight over and moves on, because there's nothing new or different or surprising about the ideas, no individuality about characters who fit all our preconceptions, nothing about the arrangement of words which makes them come alive, no desirable difficulty to mean readers make the story their own.

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Last week I woke in hospital from a supposedly routine procedure to hear an apologetic surgeon telling me things had not gone quite to plan .

Eight days later and off the medication at last, I thought of my favourite comedy: Woody Allen's 1973 release, Sleeper. Allen plays a New York health-food shop owner who wakes in hospital to be told that 200 years have passd since he went in. His body has been frozen after a surgical slip-up .

'I knew it was too good to be true to when I got a parking spot near the hospital', he says, but the full awfulness of his situation hits him when he realises all his friends are dead, and the rent on his apartment is 200 years overdue

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You'll have noticed, by now, that as soon as you tease out an aspect of creative writing - a thread from the rope of the story - and discuss it, it has a way of twisting itself back up with everything else. Discussion of character turns out to be about structure; psychic distance leads on to narrators. And when, as has just happened to me, you encounter something like this, which gives all your ideas about narrators a good old shake-down and re-arrange, you find that it rearranges something, about everything, that you're doing. Which explains why, more and more, I find myself talking not about "your novel" or "your story" or "what you're trying to say", but about "your project".

Your Project, as I'm finding myself using it, isn't a euphemism for the grimmest kind of social housing, Detroit-style, nor is it the model of a mosque, or a medieval village, all wonkily glued, that you struggled with all through the last night of half term till your parent finally pushed your tearful body off to bed with promises to finish it for you. At the York Festival of Writing I found myself using the term all the time, particularly in connection with voice.

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It turned out to be the best musical I've seen for years. I expect I was influenced by the northern wartime setting, contemporary relevance and Alan Bennett's very funny script. Top quality directing by Richard Eyre, the magic of a state-of-the-art West End theatre and Sarah Lancahire leading a great cast. This is a hugely entertaining show.

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On a forum the other day, on one of those threads which starts off with a post about the kind of small technical thing that we all go blind to sometimes, and ends up (all too often) as a general letting off steam about Annoying Things Ignorant People Write, someone said that "I thought to myself" is a tautology, and must be avoided. But of course my contrarian reflex made me start thinking about whether that's really true.

Jane thought Ian was nice is clearly the basic statement about Jane's view of and/or feelings about Ian (and grammatically Jane thought Ian nice is legitimate though not so common these days.) Jane thought that Ian was nice is an option, but the extra stuff in Jane thought to herself that Ian was nice seems to say nothing more. Whereas "Jane said to herself" is different from "Jane said to Anne" thoughts are by default, "to oneself". Indeed, if we're firmly in Jane's point of view and working with free indirect style so that Jane's voice and thoughts are allowed infect the narrative, you could argue that we don't need "Jane thought" at all: "Ian was nice" is enough, because we read it as Jane's thought reported. But with the short version there's nothing (lacking the context, obviously) to make it clear the status of Jane's perception about Ian. Are we to believe it?

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At 1.45 this morning I made a decision with regard to the future of The Monochrome Landscape. In order to finish it I've decided to take part in a NaNo-like challenge which starts on 1st May and lasts for eighty days, and the goal is to write 80000 words - 1000 words per day should be do-able, even if I have to kick myself frequently to keep going with the story.

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Writers need words. Obviously.

And sometimes pictures are useful too.

I'd like to sing the praises of the collage as a handy tool for writers - and everyone else.

The collage above measures just four inches by two. I've recently completed one that's more like two feet square. Size doesn't matter. Intention does.

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You’re cold. You’re scared. You’re lost. You’re just where the killer wants you.

When I first picked up this book I thought that it was going to be a bit of a horror. A group of friends are stranded in the frozen wintery conditions, their car is stuck in a snowy ditch miles from anywhere populated. As luck would have it they stumble upon a small deserted village with only a handful of basic houses, the snowbound village of Kingdom Come, Wyoming. As things get more and more desperate Maura Isles gets completely removed from her life as a pathologist and her survival is constantly in question. She is continual threatened by the weather, the severe conditions and the unwelcome visitors that for mysterious reasons don’t want her to find her way home. Meanwhile her colleague and friend Detective Jane Rizzoli is desperately trying to find out what happened to Maura and why things aren’t quite what they seem with some of the local people.

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