As you'll know by now, as soon as anyone tells me a "rule" of writing, I start thinking of times when any good writer would "break" it. Whether it's Elmore Leonard's Ten or George Orwell's Six Rules that are being quoted, the fact that I admire their writing and agree with much that they say doesn't make me more inclined to keep their rules as rules. Indeed, Elmore Leonard never meant his to be taken all that seriousoy, and Orwell acknowledges that they're not really rules in his own Rule Six: "Break any these rules sponer than say anything outright barbarous."

And it remains the truest rule of all - although the least helpful - that you can do anything you like, as long as you make it work. But as I go on blogging and teaching and writing, I do find that the same old questions and issues keep coming up. I also find that it's far more useful and therefore fruitful to talk about process - how you set things up so that good writing will happen - than about product - what good writing should be like. So, in a light-hearted, pre-Christmas spirit, I offer you my Twelve Tools of Writing. You'll notice that they're almost all about process, not product. Here goes.

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That road ahead can seem to go on forever. This one actually does, as it was taken in North Dakota (check out the squashed bug on the windscreen) and no-one has ever driven all the way across North Dakota.*

So it is with writing a novel, and this is where we come to the idea of 'Shitty First drafts'. The term is in inverted commas because a) my mum reads this and I used a Bad Word, and b) because it is a much-cited quotation taken from from Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

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In my last post, I was wondering how my third Porfiry novel A Razor Wrapped in Silk came to be translated into the French as Les Enfants Perdus de l’Empire (The Lost Children of the Empire). I’m indebted to my good friend Nick Primmer for sending me the explanation. His solution is similar to those brainteasers whereby one word is gradually morphed into another over a number of steps:

A Razor Wrapped In Silk – a detective novel set in St. Petersburg



The Lost Razor Wrapped In Silk – a mystery novel set in a barber shop franchise within a haberdashery.

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Though notionally in London, and only half an hour from Waterloo, places like Claygate have a faux village atmosphere that resembles a war-time film set or a real-life recreation of Ambridge.You almost expect the village pub to be called The Bull, not The Foley Arms.

However, some chances are too rare to pass up, and knowing I'd be safely back in Lewisham by nightfall, I attended a couple of two-hour work-shops at in the Claygate & Esher Writing Festival. It was organised by Susannah Rickards, who also tutors a local writing group. The pub where it took place was only five minutes walk from the station.


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I would say, with all the smugness of someone making a hard-to-top bid in Pop-Psychology Whist, that I have a particularly complicated relationship with my name, except that... I don't know anyone who doesn't. At a workshop run by Diane Samuels, she started by asking each of us to say one of our names, and something about it. And I promise you, no-one had nothing to say, from the ones who hated and feared the grandmother whose name they bear, to the ones who changed their name when they emigrated from Australia because... And yet a surprising number of aspiring writers say that they want to publish under a pseudonym, and it's not always because they're writing a roman-a-clé about high-level corruption in their local council. Often it springs, as far as I can see, from not wanting their grandmother to read the GBH scene, or their husband not wanting his mates to think he's the bloke in the sex scenes. (Which was was the ostensible reason for the stories in In Bed With... being written under our "porn star" names: we would feel less inhibited. The real reason was to get the media to start a guessing game, and the media duly obliged with several weeks of the Name Game...)

Unless you really musn't be recognised, or you have a deep-laid plan to switch to your "real" writing after learning your trade in category fiction, say, I confess that I don't really understand the desire to hide behind a pseudonym. But it is true that in putting our name on a book, and getting that book on a bookshop table, we are in some way claiming space for what we've said: what we've written is worth listening to; we are worth listening to. And we're saying that it's the best we're capable of: we can do no more. That's a very big and loud claim, and writers are often inward, private people: maybe it's easier to make that great claim, if you pretend to be someone else.

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I’ve got a very comfortable office at home. It’s a bit of a mess, admittedly, but I’ve long adapted to just averting my eyes from certain corners, like the one filled with a tottering pile of used padded envelopes [damn, I just looked directly at it]. But despite that, I have a good desk, a comfortable chair and a fairly decent computer. There’s the brilliant Spotify to satisfy all my musical needs and it takes just five minutes to pop downstairs for a cup of Earl Grey and a chocolate biscuit or five. If I get stuck for inspiration, I can take a walk in the beautiful park my house backs onto. Perfect, right? Hell, who wouldn’t get a whole ton of work done somewhere like that?!

Um, me...?



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Well. Maybe I've gone off the snow now, to a certain extent. Mainly due to the fact that I took the kids down the local social club, after posting my last blog post, and had an accident in the snow.

I was coming out of the back door of the club, when my legs suddenly shot out in front of me. . There was nothing to save myself on, and somehow I went down flat and cracked the back of my head on the doorstep of the club. It was the first thing that hit the floor.

Not only did it scare me (I was expecting blood to come oozing out of my ears at any moment), not only did it hurt, but worse than anything else, I felt a proper 'nana.

Nothing hurts more than your pride, does it?!

Anyway, everyone was really lovely to me - thanks all! - and got the kids and I all home safe and sound - but I've not felt up to much since then. Two days on, not only do I still ache all over - my stomach muscles are shredded, oddly - but I've also come down with some ghastly virus. I'm supposed to be going out with the girls tonight, but I can't see it happening.

Which brings me onto the point of today's post...

I have two "Why is it...?" questions that keep running around in my head.



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So my agent was sitting on a delayed bus into work, and I was walking along a long and snowy road in lieu of spending half an hour digging my car out, and we were on the phone discussing the latest version of my new novel. Basically she loves it, and thinks it's very nearly ready to fly: she awarded the ending three hankies and we've settled on a great title. She even spontaneously suggested something for the ending which I'd wanted to do all along but hadn't dared. Her only reservations were about some of the new material. I've totally re-written the first chapter and written an epilogue from scratch, so these are things which have had enough passes to be okay of themselves and to apparently do the job that needed doing. But when she pointed out the ways in which they're not really working, I felt, "Doh! Of course!"

Make no mistake, these aren't technical or high-level slips: they're common mistakes in storytelling that I see all the time in the work of aspiring writers. You'd think I would have pounced on them in my own, or even not committed them in the first place. But, since I was feeling cheerful by then, instead of beating myself up I started wondering why I hadn't seen them. And the clue, I think, is in "common mistakes"; these are things which are a very natural outcome of how most of us set about writing a story.

For example,

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Over on Help! I Need a Publisher, Nicola Morgan has a characteristically sensible post about if and when it's sense to invest money in your writing. One thing, especially, that she says isn't said often enough: "I would spend far more time practising what I'd been taught than I'd spent on receiving the teaching". I've had my say about the pros and cons of writing courses in general here, but I'd suggest that what Nicola's getting at is something I touched on in that post: the possibility that you are, or could become, a writing course junkie.

I'm not talking about people who do writing courses because they love writing and want to get their work heard, but honestly admit that it takes a course to make them do any. I love photography but the day job sucks up my time not just for taking photographs but also for getting them seen. So every year or so I do a photography course, and love every minute of it, and I'm a better writer for the way that a camera makes me really look at things, and feel them... and that's as far as I go. No, I'm talking about people who are working to get published, and never seem to stop doing courses, classes and so on.

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