Well I hope I have made a positive move in making my "creative scribbles" in to something with more meaning by joining this site. It will take me a while to find my way around but so far it has been very useful, helpful and thought provoking. Got to be a good start!

'Are these lockers safe?' an American woman asked me. 'They used to have guards'.

I directed her to the counter-service where you hand over your bags and coats, as in a museum. Using the locker room means you don't have to queue at the desk and you can access the locker easily all day.

'Yes, but are the guards to be trusted?'

I supposed it's marginally safer to hand in bags at the counter, although thieves would have to be very nifty to jemmy one of the lockers open, given the constant traffic. Since free Wifi and chair-desks in the public areas were installed it's very busy.

The forecast of high temperatures this week was my cue to spend a couple of days in the British Library.

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Whenever an editor or agent is lured into listing the things which put them off a manuscript, it seems that well up the list is a novel which starts with someone waking up. And top of the list is the subset of these which start with the protagonist waking up with a hangover or a head wound. "But - but - but -" thousands of aspiring writers cry, and they have a point. What about The Metamorphosis, just for a start? Indeed, the unrevised version of my new novel began with someone being woken up, and if that narrator hadn't been axed in revisions it still would: the opening wasn't the problem.

As so often, when agents and editors start talking, they're talking about what they see - the many waking-up openings that don't work - and they blame the waking up for it, not the not-working. That doesn't mean it's not worth knowing these things about agently reactions; if you're doing something agents know from experience is usually done badly (prologues are another example) then your mss is starting off on the back foot, and you'd better make extra-sure that it works in every other way. But, fundamentally, when a waking-up opening fails it isn't because it's a scene involving a duvet and pillows (or a stained horseblanket and heap of straw), or that the next paragraph starts with drawing back curtains or hacking down the stable door.

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I’ve been thinking about the extraordinarily random luck involved in getting published. I subbed my children’s novel to a good many agents and had a strong strike rate, with seven agents calling in the full thing. But each heart-breaking, heart-stopping time, the ultimate answer was no.


The reasons varied, but very often I would hear the words ‘just such a difficult market’ and ‘just so hard to convince editors these days.’ I decided my book was simply too ‘quiet’ to make its way in these difficult times and set about writing something in-yer-face and full-on High Concept with sci-fi bells and whistles. But before I did that, I sent my book to one of the few publishers who take direct submissions, the independent children’s publisher Piccadilly Press. And then forgot about it. Well, sort of. I never really believed anything would come of it anyway and had mentally moved on.

But, incredibly, something has come of it.


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The first pass revisions of my story for Radio 4 were the usual ones. First, once I had the story down on the page, it was about adjustments to the structure and spacing of the piers of the bridge: this is where being able to spread the pages of a short story out is wonderful. In such a short story, and one to be read aloud, there isn't space for anything structurally complex, but it's an oldish man remembering his youth: was the frame the right width (length?); did the sense of the speaker's 'now' fade in and out at the right moments and in the right way? And as so often, the run-in to the story was a little long. Sometimes it's because you're finding out where the story really starts - thinking/writing your way into the situation and character, and you can cut it later. But this time it was about not knowing how much space I could allow the how-we-got-here bit, which, given the fixed wordcount, meant waiting till it was finished to judge the proportions. Then it wasn't about cutting out material from the beginning, but about condensing it: saying exactly the same things, as expressively but more economically, making every word work harder for its place.

I checked things like Google StreetView and scraps of Brighton history. At some point, I realised that title was 'Calling', and later I read it aloud. The voice came across, though I straightened out a few sentences which worked fine for the eye and mind, but not for tongue, teeth and ears.

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It sounds a bit obvious, but I realised that knowing my radio story would be spoken aloud and heard, not written and read, did change things. I write in first person most of the time, because it's so much easier to find the right, particular, different voice and the plotting problems it leads to are usually surmountable. If I want more than one viewpoint I'll have more than one first-person narrator. But I'd been flirting with the idea of writing this story in third person with a shifting or even omniscient point of view, since it's a while since I did that, and because I'm rather more seriously flirting with the idea of doing it for the next novel. The reader, in such a story, would be the storyteller. But when I started to imagine an actual person saying words aloud, it clearly was saying 'I', so that was that.

I also knew, by the time I was talking to Cecilia the producer, that it would be an old man, remembering something in his youth. This double, past-and-present narrative, too, seems to be a form that I'm drawn to - all three narratives in A Secret Alchemy are built on versions of it - and I think it's for various reason.

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In my ‘other’ life as an artist, I make collages. I cut words and images from magazines and arrange them into tiny worlds on a card backing. Many have an inherent narrative, and each has its own atmosphere. An Olympic swimmer balances on the back of a skeleton horse, serenaded by a fat man blowing a giant horn. A child gazes out from her nest of open-tongued lilies, while black hounds bark 'This Is Now'.

When I first began making them, I’d work diligently within the card frame. But gradually, it became important to allow images to ‘break out’ of the frame. In one of this week’s collages, a pair of turtles swim outwards, their flippers sweeping air; a swallow hovers above and a sheaf of wheat grows through the frame and out. For me, these are messages from my creative self: it's time to return to the wild.


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Talking to the Richard III Society today, I was reminded of the moment when I got the answer to the problem of how to write A Secret Alchemy. In a TLS review of two books on the Dark Ages, the reviewer R I Moore said this:

"Historians have to live with Heisenbergian uncertainty: they cannot simultaneously plot position and trajectory, without distortion. The forces that make for change are always more important for the future, and therefore in retrospect, than they seem at the time…"

At the time, the blinding light that it shone showed me why I didn't want to write the novel as bio-pic: you can't really express the trajectory of a life until it's over, and for my two narrators their lives weren't over. So the answer was to plot a series of Elysabeth and Antony's positions: the individual moments in as much vividness as they could be known: the stations of the Cross, as it were, the stages of the pilgrimage. This was the point I was making in my talk.

As the train lolloped through the Suffolk countryside of The Mathematics of Love on the way to Norwich, and I was looking through my notes, the second part of that quotation came into focus.

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Have had to remove all the poems from my blog - if anyone ever looked at them - sorry.