The prince and the frog-maiden rode along the ancient track.

“Ah-ha! You’re trapped, traitors!” A soldier leapt out in front of them. But with a snap of her fingers, the frog-maiden turned herself and her companion invisible. They spurred the horses past the baffled soldier.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” said the prince, once they were visible again.

“Useful, huh?” croaked the frog-maiden.

No sooner had she spoken when they heard a terrible screeching above their heads.

“Oh no! Witch birds! If they see us, we’re done for! Quick, hide!” The frog-maiden spurred her horse towards cover, and the prince followed her. But they weren’t fast enough. The birds grabbed them and carried them into the sky…

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The availablity of textiles in the nineteenth century meant women could showcase artistic and practical skills, virtues valued but restricted. They also signalled aspirations. A quote from George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) illustrates this, when Maggie Tulliver's father reminds her to 'Go on with your patchwork like a little lady'.

Quilts displayed patriotism in an age of political turmoil and jingoism, proked by fears of revolution, such as was happening in France.


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Arthur Miller's play, inspired by Massachusetts witch-hunts in 1697,felt surprisingly at home. At an 8pm start, birdsong and a balmy June evening made a pleasant backdrop to the rural setting. By the end, huge trees, visible only in inky silhouette, helped create a mood of claustrophobic menace.

Miller found parallels between this story and the purges of the American entertainment industry in the late 1940s/early 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) interrogated writers and directors. Fuelled by a frenzy of anti-Communist sentiment and the fear of conspiracy, investigators threatened suspected left-wing sympathisers with imprisonment or blacklisting. Immunity could be achieved by implicating others.

The play's theme of personal integrity versus a dogmatic regime is seen to be of universal relevance, which makes it popular. Despite the supposed recognition in places like post-Mao China, it has always seemed to me a particularly American play.



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n among radio stories and marking OU assessments, a wodge of editorial reports, and assorted domestic stuff, I still have to find time to revise the current novel. This is not a mere editorial hop-and-a-skip through, sorting out typos, but heavy engineering. The novel's a single story, quite heavily plotted and almost thriller-ish, told by alternating first-person narrators, and I've decided to change the narrator for one of them. So I don't want to change the plot if I can possibly help it, and this is where my novel-planning grid comes into its own: I filled one column for the narrator who's staying - let's call her J - and then sorted out the new narrative told by M alongside it.

So far so good: up to now most scenes have involved M and S, so it's only been a practical matter of turning the scene inside out. Of course there's a subtler, trickier matter of not just subtracting S's voice and sensibility but bringing M's alive, so that the narrative reads as if it had sprung from her. It helped a lot once I'd worked out why she would be telling her story, because that affects what she tells and how she tells it. And, so far, everything I've lost in cutting S has been balanced by a greater gain. I now have confidence that the book isn't just better in the sense of working better, but is actually richer for this work. But now I've reached Day Six of the plot, and therefore Chapter Six.

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I walked down the hill in the sunshine to meet the producer of my story for Radio 4 - let's call her Rosamund - trying to assemble my thoughts about what and how I write, in the hope that I'd be ready to hitch that onto what she wanted. With any new piece of work, but particularly one which is being written to contract, there's always a finely-balanced decision about how much to play to your strengths, knowing that it's a safe(ish) bet that you'll get an okay story, and how much to challenge yourself in the hope of getting something new and extra-good, but the fear of ending up with something bad.

It had been hard to decide what stories to send her in the hope of bagging this commission; I can't help thinking about how radio stories work as stories, because I left Eden many years ago, but I'd never thought about how they work as radio. I also just don't have very many stories: I love writing them, but my writing mind spends the majority of its time processing the novel-in-progress (there always is one). It's always tempting to send 'Maura's Arm', but it's uncharacteristic in various ways: what if she commissioned me to write something based on those un-characteristics? On the other hand I also wanted to show range, not least because I hadn't the faintest idea of what's suitable for radio. So after much thought I sent an unpublished story, 'Closing Time', which was longlisted for Bridport the year after 'Maura's Arm' came third, and which I revised last year under the eye of Susannah Rickards. (Yes, I know I said I never re-visit stories, but there was a competition I wanted to enter...) And because I didn't know what Rosamund would be looking for, I sent 'Russian Tea', one of my most successful stories, but one which is unusual for me in being written in third person and with a limited, moving point-of-view.

Rosamund made coffee and told me that she loved both stories: that they were moving and beautifully written, evocative of time and place. This is always a good start. And then I told her about the story I wanted to write for her.

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Recently, I was trying to find a pressie for a writer friend of mine which prompted the idea for this post. There are SO many fabulous things out there; some practical, some shiny, some useful, some useless but funny (UBF) but all are worth having! Prices range from cheap as chips to pricey - there's something for every pocket. Alas, I haven't been able to post pictures of them but please do follow the links...So, here are a few of my favourite writerly things:


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Well despite working a twelve hour shift today, I managed to get quite a bit of writing done: 3 haikus (short, I know!), an ode and a piece of flash fiction (wrote in the staff room on my lunch break). Might take a notebook to bed and try to do something else later on, too. Am feeling very motivated, which is normal, I guess, as it's only the first day... I think what I want to achieve out of this challenge is

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So, halfway back up the A23 to London from my research trip to Brighton, I had what I was fairly sure was a viable idea for my first ever story for radio. Pier Productions' brief for this trio of stories, 'Lost in the Lanes', gave me my central problem, and I had 2000 words to solve it in. Next had to come Who? and Why? And in beginning to think those out (dream them up? But it felt more like 'discover them'...) I realised I absolutely knew where the story ended both physically and emotionally, because it's bedded in the physical and emotional shape of Brighton. It's not uncommon for me to know where the story must end before I know much else and, as I was exploring in How Are You Going to Get There, it can be hugely helpful: if a short story embodies a single moment of change, then if you know where you're going to end up, it becomes fairly easy to think backwards over the hump of the assymetric hill, to where the story must begin. After that, it's only (only! hah!) a matter of writing your way from one to the other. (In looking for that link, I find that it, too, sprang from thinking while I was driving. Interesting. Driving, being a right-brained activity, means that your dominant left brain switches off, and your creative, free-wheeling right brain, for once, can take control)

But just as the cloud of unknowing in my head became big and thick enough to seem inevitable, I suddenly remember that the producer might not like this idea.

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