There’s an old saying: A friend is someone who knows the song you sing and who sings it back to you when you’ve forgotten the words.

I’m blessed with amazing writing friends. Some are online, some I meet in the flesh. All understand the slog of writing when it feels like nobody hears you, the frustration of not-getting-there, the longing for acceptance.

A while ago, as I trudged through the ever-familiar Slough of Despond, my friend Derek said: ‘Don’t forget. Things can turn on a sixpence.’ There was something about that phrase which stayed with me, and which gave me hope.


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'Oh no! It'd be like reading a set text at school', was one reaction when I announced at the reading group that I'd found a copy with an introduction and footnotes.

The book was Anthony Trollope's The Warden , written in 1850 and dependent on a reader's knowledge of contemporary political characters and events.



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Have you watched the wonderful TED video of Elizabeth Gilbert talking about her experience of creativity?

I found Elizabeth’s talk deeply inspiring the first time I watched it, and again last night, when I was thinking about what to post on Strictly Writing today. It also links well with Susannah's fascinating post last Friday about proprioceptive writing. What Elizabeth says resonates with my own experience, apart from the bit about writing a best seller.



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Over on Nicola Morgan's blog she has one of her typically common-sensical pieces about if and how an agent was right to reject a manuscript on the grounds that the writer's not so young any more, and limited in how much she can travel. Her conclusion is that the agent has a point, for general reasons to do with how the book trade works, but no, those reasons aren't conclusive. In other words, the general nature of the book trade doesn't translate into a particular - and therefore absolute - rule. And then in the comment trail agent Carole Blake says, "Writers shouldn't be discouraged by generalisations thrown out at random: I believe generalisation is often the enemy of truth."

And so do I. How often on this blog have I found myself saying, "It's not as simple as that"? Most recently I was exploring the value of recognising that, in "The opposite is also true." And then it came to me that, of course, generalising is the enemy of fiction. I'm not alone; in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel Jane Smiley argues that it's the very nature of the form to resist generalisation. It's a form born to tell stories about individuals "as if" they had really existed, including (as drama, for example, can't) depicting their individual, internal consciousness: the place where they are most intractably themselves.

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I spent the last half of last year writing the first draft of a novel which I'd hoped would be taken by a certain publisher. Blimey, it was like pulling teeth. The publisher turned out not to want it after all, and though my agent was still interested in the idea, that really knocked my confidence. I wrote the thing. I sat down to work on it every day (well, not really every day, but most days. Okay, some days) with a Vox Deus sized 'Verily, what you are writing is pants' ringing through my brain

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Yesterday was a bit of a lost cause as far as work goes, not so much for me as for my husband, who had to spend the whole day dealing with it. We were woken by my father-in-law ringing the doorbell, and the noise of a jack-hammer under our balcony. Turns out our neighbour had decided to have our garden wall knocked down because it was in her way.

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Best of all, we lived round the corner from Crystal Palace Park. Apart from something called a 'One O'clock Club', a kind of big shed with toys, where mothers with toddlers gathered on wet afternoon, it had a flamingo pond, a children's zoo and a lake area with monsters.

Nowadays a Sunday visit to Penge usually means lunch at the the Moon and Stars, which used to be a cinema, but on the first sunny Sunday afternoon for weeks a side-visit to the dinosaurs seemed in order.

Installed as an adjunct to the Crystal Palace, home to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the giant lizards were set up in 1854, not very accurate replicas of the prehistoric monsters, but at the time state-of-the-art. A big dinner was held in the bottom part of the biggest one and speeches made by local and national dignitaries before the top half was attached.



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I’m writing some sample chapters for a series fiction packager at the moment. In case you haven't heard about this kind of thing, here's a quick lowdown. There are a small number of companies out there who come up with a story/series concept as a team effort. They develop it very carefully in-house until they have a detailed breakdown of the content, chapter by chapter. A brief is then then put out to a bunch of writers who produce some sample chapters for free. The one whose style and handling of the story is seen as the best fit will be paid to write the whole book, often with a view to writing a series. The packager then sells the whole thing to a publisher. Many of the series you’ll see in the average Waterstones, especially in the younger children’s category, are created in this way and the name on the cover is usually a pseudonym.



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I am currently working on the first draft of a commissioned children’s novel from a book packager. This is the sort where you get given a long plot summary by the editor and you write it up into a novel before it is published under a pseudonym, in effect reversing the creative process. Lots of contemporary children’s books, especially in the 5-8 age bracket, are produced in this way. Children’s authors with books published under their own names are glad to have the extra source of income, and unpublished writers see it as a way into the business.

This is the first time I’ve written such a book, and I thought it might be interesting if I wrote down how this is going for me, personally, in terms of my writing life.

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