Mslexia magazine runs a regular feature called 100 Ways to Write a Book. It takes a a given author then sets out exactly how they work. This includes stuff like how they plan out their novels, where they write them, and where and when the best ideas tend to strike.

The sub-heading is The Hilary Mantel Method, or The Ali Smith Method or whoever is featured. You get the picture. Now much as I love to read this stuff, all this talk about ‘method’ makes me feel as though I’m looking at the Grown Up Table.



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The most I've ever laughed at a book is at the weekly Anger Management group sessions attended by the cast of Wuthering Heights, in Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots. And if one of your favourite literary love stories is that of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, then knowing your Donne makes it even better. Only, of course, there'll be readers who don't get the reference, so don't get the joke, and can't be swept away by the love scenes. Equally, you're not going to baffle many readers if you make someone say "Bonjour", but what if they're talking Greek? What if your reader is in a country where French isn't a standard school subject? How does a reference which meant nothing to you make you feel? Did you feel frustrated that a brick in the novel's meaning was missing for you? Did you feel excluded from the club of people who'd understand? Were you annoyed with the author for snobbery or did you feel it was your failure or ignorance? And then this question cropped up on a forum:

I make a reference in my book to a couple who are dating being "as chaste as Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe" because they haven't yet kissed. Is this a common enough reference point that people will get it? The target audience is probably female 25-45.

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I was watching a starfish extrude its gut when I realised.

“It should be in first person!”

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In "Denotation and Connotation: enjoy!", I was exploring the connotations of a word in Eleanor Catton's story "Two Tides", where what it denoted was straightforward. But clearly, if you get stuck on the basic meaning of a word, you're less likely to also pick up the connotations of it. That whole first sentence goes like this:

The harbour at Mana was a converted mudflat, tightly elbowed and unlovely at any tide but high.

Some readers stuck on what, in physical terms, was denoted by the word "elbowed", used as an adjective: they couldn't picture the scene. Whereas for me, although I couldn't either, it was the first word that rang the little silver bell half-way down my spine which says, "She can write". "Elbowed" isn't normally an adjective, and it's confused or possibly enriched by the connotation of "being elbowed" in the ribs by someone. So as I read on, I realised, my brain set that phrase on the clipboard, as it were, waiting to see if it would be explained or enlarged on. And it was. The first paragraph continues with close up description, for example, "Low water showed the scabbed height of the yellow mooring posts...". The second paragraph opens thus:

The marina was tucked into the crook of the elbow, facing back towards the shore.

So "elbowed" is resolved, it's off my mental clipboard, I can see the scene and we're off. But some readers' engines had already stalled.

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You'd expect a book set in a nondescript South East London suburb in 1947 to be a bit lacklustre. And it was. A first chapter titillates when the cast attends the local Empire music hall which features an act called 'Nudes of the World', a series of thinly-draped tableaux. But the chapter, like the show, is a tease. It's all downhill after that

I imagine the book was chosen for the Manor House Libary reading group because it had a local context. The determindly lower-middle class mores of the characters scotch any hopes for noble aims or romantic notions, not that I'm a great fan of either, done to excess. Even the youthful Jack Hollard seems short of backbone or even personality.


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Although presenting a jovial face to his neighbours and to his visiting son Chris (Stephen Campbell Moore) Joe has a shameful secret. He caused the deaths of young men by allowing a batch of defective aircraft parts to leave the factory. Although he was responsible for the decision his partner was blamed and imprisoned.

The play highlights the cost when individual profit is proritised over the common good. Joe's excuse is that it was done 'for his family'; a recall would have meant ruin. The resulting deaths, which may have included that of his own son, remain on his conscience. His deluded wife Kate has carried the secret less well and is treated warily by her family.

Unlike Willie Loman, the common-man hero of 'Death of Salesman', Joe is not a passive victim and dupe of the American system. He is active collaborator signalled by his name. It needs only one letter of the name to be changed to reveal his true nature.


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A recent and very fascinating thread on WriteWords has been unpicking the opening of Eleanor Catton's story "Two Tides", which was published in a recent issue of Granta (the Summer 2009 New Fiction Special, if you want to track the story down). I won't précis the discussion here, because the whole thread's worth reading and ranges over a good deal of ground, (the story's well worth reading too) but even a single sentence (or rather, half sentence) illuminates all sorts of interesting things in miniature. Catton's story opens thus:

The harbour at Mana was a converted mudflat

The point at issue was convert; one reader had stumbled on that verb used in that context, and questioned whether making the reader stumble so soon in a piece was a wise move. Clearly at the physical level it doesn't take a lot to make a mudflat into a harbour, any more than it takes a lot to make a field into a carpark, so convert makes perfectly good basic sense. But that's only at the level of basic meaning: what the word denotes.

Converted didn't make me stumble in what it denoted, but I also really like it, and when you're talking about effective language, you're usually talking about connotation: what else that particular word brings to the sentence. As the nearest thing art can get to a control experiment, I set out to understand what's going on by means of a favourite trick: think about what the writer might have done instead.

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No, I haven't moved to the moon. I have been working in DC, beating the traffic by leaving at 6am and returning twelve hours later, or more if armed gunmen strapped with bombs have been taking hostages in the Discovery Building. (America!) Anyway, several dollars later my temporary contract has come to an end and I have been reunited with my keyboard, my teacups and my lie-ins, even as late as 7.30, hungry cats allowing.

Here's me in the rather gorgeous Issue 3 of Eclectic Flash, available in Real Paper Format or on the Online. It is a story called 'Sweet Pastry', which is tiny at only 150 words, but I quite like it. It was a challenge for me to write something so short.

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I heard Nick Hornby, an author I’ve long admired, in conversation with his editor on the Penguin Books Podcast recently. He was talking about his latest adult novel, ‘Juliet, Naked’. The editor commented that Hornby handled his characters with a particular fondness, and almost never painted them as all bad'. Hornby’s response was a bit sheepish. He admitted that deep down, he couldn’t shake the feeling that if he treated them badly, one of his characters might one day knock on his front door and remonstrate with him. He admitted it sounded a bit bonkers, but felt that on some level the people he created on a page existed somewhere as flesh and blood.

I loved hearing this.



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