On WriteWords, Caroline Green has been tackling the dreaded Second Novel, to follow her debut YA Dark Ride, (isn't that a great cover?) and she posted this:

"I've written the big dramatic finale of my WIP and am now facing the bit I always hate. How DO people tidy things up and end a story? I always seem to go for an epilogue set a few months or so down the line but feels a bit lazy. I genuinely don't know how other people do this [and suddenly am unable to remember what happens in a single book that I've ever read]. Would love to know what others think..."

And I found myself saying: "I think less is almost always more. Maybe you just need to stop where you are." I very rarely see a manuscript which ends too soon, and I see a great many which have a lumpy little chapter dangling off the end, covering the next three years and explaining how they did get married and move to America where they were re-united with the long-lost stepson who got a few mentions earlier in the novel. If I ask if the writer wrote that in response to someone saying, "I wanted to know if she..." sometimes they say Yes, and sometimes they say, "I thought readers would want to know if she...", which is the writer's own Inner Reader saying the same.

The need to follow the characters through till everything's resolved is a tribute to how involving they and their predicament have been for the reader.

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This musical version of Erich Segal's 'boy-meets-girl-girl-dies' novel was too slick to be moving. We know the outcome because the story of poor Jenny Cavallieri and rich Oliver Barret IV begins at Jenny's funeral, to the song What do you say about a girl? and is told in flashback.It progresses on much the same level, one event following another, without much variety of tone.

Most people in the audience would have known the 1970 film of the same name, starring Ali Macgraw and Ryan O'Neal. Not having seen the film, I thought the music, delivered from a grand piano and some string players at the back of the stage, was the best part of this show. The lyrics were often tame, sometimes clumsy or cringe-makingly mawkish, apart from a song about varieties of pasta sung in the newlywed's kitchen, where Donizetti was made to rhyme with spaghetti.


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One of the faux-orthodoxies about creative writing most guaranteed to raise my blood pressure is the one parrotted by newbie writers with terrible writing teachers: "omnisicient narrators are Old Fashioned". Both John Gardener in The Art of Fiction and James Wood in How Fiction Works explore all the possibilities and conclude by preferring an omniscient, third-person narrator, able to enter any character's consciousness and to narrate independently of any character. Such a narrator is even able to tell us what a character doesn't understand about his/her own consicousness: it's arguably the most powerful, flexible, fluent and, you might say (as Gardener and Wood say), grown-up, way of telling a story.

But the novel I'm about to start is that kind and, frankly, I'm just a tad worried. It's a first for me, although I've written short fiction thus. I've decided to do it partly because it suits the story, but also because I need a technical difficulty to wrestle with before I can face the long slog of writing the damn thing. But I'm also having what you might call existential angst about it.

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Yesterday I announced why I won’t be publishing Twistery #17 on my blog, instead making it available as a free PDF for anyone who wants it. If you’d like to read it, all you have to do is get in touch via my contact form.

As a further incentive, I’ve decided to offer a prize for those people who do request a copy of the Twistery. Ahead of the launch of the fourth book in my series in May, I’ll give away one signed copy each of the first three books, A GENTLE AXE, A VENGEFUL LONGING and A RAZOR WRAPPED IN SILK.

All you have to do to enter is request the PDF of Twistery #17 and then look out for the simple question I’ll be asking on this blog sometime over the next five days. The answer to that question will be in the Twistery solution you will have received.

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How the critiques you receive depend on the form you are writing and how much of the piece people are able to read.

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I’ve decided not to publish Twistery #17 on my blog, but I will make it available – together with the solution – as a free PDF to anyone who wants it. Just contact me through my contact form.

I’ve got two reasons for doing this. First, as an experiment, just to see if anyone is interested in these Twisteries enough to actively request one. And second, well, the content of this Twistery is perhaps a little sensitive. I may be being a bit paranoid, but the phrase “career suicide” did come to mind!

It is fiction, and the characters in it are not based on any person, living or dead. Any resemblance, as they say, is purely coincidental.

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For four Friday evenings in January I was at the Instituto Cervantes watching 'La Forja de Un Rebelde' (The Forging of a Rebel). It's a very well-made, inspirational Spanish TV series, set for the most part in Madrid from 1900 to 1940. The central character, writer and journalist Arturo Barea, was born into family impoverished by the death of the father. Adopted into the home of a childless aunt and uncle of better means, he was educated at a Catholic school run by priests. Later, disillusioned by hypocrisy and the church's suppression of dissent, he served as an intern bank clerk at a time of high unemployment, but fell foul of his bosses when he became a union organiser. He joined the army and witnessed the embezzling of funds by officers and their incompetence during the occupation of Morocco.



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