A notably relaxed Christmas must be making my mind even flakier and easily knocked off-course than usual: when I turned on the radio and heard about crisis talks in Northern Ireland that awful, sick fear came over me as it does over anyone over a certain age: "Oh God! What now?" So when it turned out that the crisis was an acute water shortage, I started to laugh. Yes, it's clearly no joke at all for those suffering from it, but hey! not so long ago a headline like that would have heradled some new horror in what we once thought the most intractably, murderously divided society in Europe. My default fear was understandable, but unfounded.

Then I found Susannah Rickard's splendid post over on Strictly Writing, where she's thinking laterally about the Christmas story as an example of ruthlessly effective plot building. Whatever your individual beliefs it's not often that we step back and read such stories as narrative, but it's not just fun: it gets you thinking about how any story can - must - be built to keep us reading.

And today here's Saul Bellow, quoted in the TLS. From the little of him I know, Bellow tickles all my prejudices about a certain kind of writer, but oh, I do so agree with this, especially the bit I've emboldened:

Are most novels poor today? Undoubtedly. But that is like saying mutilation exists, a broken world exists. More mutilated and broken than before? That's perhaps the world's own secret. Really, things are now what they always were and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow. We may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it! To identify oneself with a better past! No, no!

At last I have proper words for the angry boredom I feel as pubs, forum threads and letters-to-the-editor chunter that It's All Getting Worse, and The Barbarians are At The Gate.

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The three men in my life were playing football and I was walking the dog through one of north London’s loveliest parks, enjoying the crump crump of my boots through the brittle snow. I’m usually either plugged into my iPod or refeering some random violence and bloodshed between my children, so it was a nice change just to walk and think...

And I decided to think about the books I’ve enjoyed the most in 2010.
If you can indulge me, I wanted to share this list with you, dear Strictly readers. I’d love to know if any of you agree... or even better, hotly disagree. The list is divided into five adult books and five children’s/YA. Here goes:



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Ryan Molloy as Frankie received an Olivier nomination for Best Actor and won the 'What's on Stage' People's Choice Award for Best Actor in a Musical. So good are the supports, it's a wonder he's not overshadowed. Bob Gaudio as the composer bowled over by Frankie's voice brings a quiet confidence to the role of a man who has found the perfect medium to deliver his talent.Jon Boydon as Tommy de Vito impresses as a swaggering quick-decision man-in-charge. My personal favourite is Nick Massi, the oddball fall-guy of group, played by Eugene McCoy in a performance that reminded me of 'Trigger' in Only Fools and Horses. A welcome comic cameo, deferential among the divas, was provided by Jye Frasca as Joe Pesci, the man responsible for introducing the early group to Bob Claudio.

I'd recommend this if, like me, you'll recognise the musical background to your teenage years or if you want to learn more about a time and place that produced such an amazing amount of musical talent. Or if you just enjoy a good musical.

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I went away to not-write. One of the things they don't tell you at Hogwriter's College is that once a large part of your mental and financial self is involved with writing, no writing you do can quite escape a price tag of its likely value in terms of time, career, craft-training or hard cash. And so the pressure to keeping going with your writerly work can be as relentless as the pressure once was to put it away, and go to office parties or wipe toddlers' noses.

But for the first time in a very long time, I had neither a novel of my own to plan or write or re-write, nor a novel of someone else's to report on. My Open University students had done some lovely pieces, but the tutorial was drawing to a close. There's a short story I want to write even though I suspect it's really a novel, but it's a big, structurally complex beast that can perfectly well wait. I'm not even riding on that great WriteWords institution, the Lifeboar, who was once a Lifeboat: the place where everyone with work out on submission huddles together for warmth, and waits for signals from beyond the horizon.

So I emailed the wonderful Deborah Dooley, a journalist who also runs Retreats for You in her home in the indecently pretty North Devon village of Sheepwash; and I just got there before the snow cut them off again from Exeter.

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I work in the loft. For the past few days the skylights have been covered in snow making it a gloomy, sun-deprived place. I look up, expecting to see the sky, and am confronted by the underside of a layer of snow of who knows what depth. It could be a snowdrift as high as a bus, for all I know. I feel like Mole in Wind in the Willows, snowed in for the winter. The truth is I can just wander down stairs and walk out of the front door. But there’s something viscerally affecting about looking up at the blocked out window. It makes me want to hunker down. I imagine myself working my way through a pantry’s worth of preserves. Snow brings out the hermit in me.

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One of the pleasures of blogging is meeting people who I might not have met otherwise, and such a person is Barbara Baig, a hugely experienced writer and teacher of writing in the US. Her new book How to be a Writer is a fascinating how-to book which can guide anyone to become a better and more interesting writer than they are, and therefore also an exploration of the practice of writing, in all senses of the word: the kind of thing which I think of as yoga for writers. So when Barbara told me about the research which suggests that expertise - craftsmanship - comes about not from innate talent but from practice, I asked her to do a guest blog explaining what, on the face of it, is the exact opposite of what most of us believe. Over to Barbara.

* * *

What makes certain people really good writers? Most of us are sure we know the answer to that question: innate talent. Some people have it; others don’t. If we have it, writing will be always be easy for us, and success will naturally come our way. If we don’t have it—even if we love to write—we will struggle; we will feel we don’t know what we are doing as writers; success will probably elude us; we are doomed to spend our lives envying those fortunate ones, gifted at birth with writing talent.

This view of talent in writing—or in any other field—is part of our world-view, reinforced by Hollywood movies about great artists, the content of literature courses (only “great writers” need apply), and Aunt Ermyntrude, who never fails to remind us that, if we were really talented as writers, we would know it by now, so why don’t we give up this writing nonsense and settle down to something sensible?

This view of talent is so prevalent, it’s no wonder most of us take it to heart.

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Fear and Loving is a novel about possibilities. About love. About hope. About belief. It’s set predominantly in the 1990s, but it could be set at any time. Indeed, the very concept of time as a linear progression is challenged as the plot unfolds. This blog is an introduction to some of the characters found within its pages. They’ll tell us, in their own words, their thoughts, their memories, their stories. How what happens in the novel affected them and how they feel about it now as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century. At least, as we enter it in our world. In this world.

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Helen Grant was born in London. She read Classics at St.Hugh’s College, Oxford, and then worked in marketing for ten years in order to fund her love of travelling. In 2001 she and her family moved to Bad Münstereifel in Germany. While exploring the legends of this beautiful town she was inspired to write her first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, which was shortlisted for both the Booktrust Teenage Prize and the Carnegie Medal. She now lives in Brussels with her husband, her two children and her two cats. Her second novel, The Glass Demon, was published in 2010 and she has just completed a third book, Wish Me Dead, which will appear in 2011.

Which 3 writers, living or dead, would you invite to dinner?

Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and Montague Rhodes James (the English ghost story writer). I wouldn’t invite them all at once, in case they argued. I’d invite Dickens for his wit, Trollope so that I could tell him how much I admire him, and M.R.James so that I could ask him questions. I’ve written many articles speculating about aspects of James’ work and I could settle the questions once and for all.



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