Readers

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At the university where I teach, we have lovely gardens. In fact, we have listed, conserved gardens. This September, after the lovely summer, they looked absolutely spectacular. ‘Wow,’ I said to one of the gardeners, ‘it looks amazing.’

She sighed and leaned on her spade. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I wish we didn’t have to have to students back.’

I just smiled and kept walking (I frequently hit the gardening staff up for cuttings), but inside i was thinking, ‘You wouldn’t be here without the students. The place might not have survived without the students. The students are the whole point.’ 

And it’s the same with readers. I’ve just had an email from an undergraduate student. Her novel is turning out experimental. She’s horrified that her tutor wants her to think about readership. I hope I can straighten her out on Friday…convince her that the two are not mutually exclusive. 

Some writers never think about their readers, ‘I write what I want to read,’ they say. ‘If I like it, I know they will.’ And that, of course, works…if there are enough people a lot like you. If you are plugged into the zeitgeist in a personal, fundamental way. But it doesn’t work for all of us. It especially doesn’t work if your reader is ten. Or fourteen. Or two. 

Readers aren’t just there to react to your genius. Readers make up half of the book. You don’t write the story world…you write signs that point to it. The reader makes up the rest in his or her mind. You say someone, ‘has a beard, baggy corduroy trousers and a vacant expression’ and they add the rest to make a whole person.

Take a moment to read that description again: What do you see? Is your person’s hair thinning? Do they stoop a little? Do they wear half-moon glasses down on their nose? Mine does. Yours might not. And that shouldn’t matter. 

A good relationship with your readers means that you are both making up much the same book. That you aren’t ruining the book they are making up as they read and they aren’t ruining the book you are making up as you write.

Good agents and editors understand readers so well, that they can often guess where readers might have problems with a writer’s manuscript. They help the writer build little bridges of meaning across the soggy bits. 

I’m going to talk to the Editor O’ My Dreams about my manuscript at the end of the week. I’m going to talk to my agent tomorrow…and I’ve just sent her two new manuscripts. I’m getting several people to read my Adventure Story With Dog – people with Army backgrounds to see if I’ve hit the right note. Lots of new readers, reading lots of new things. 

It’s pretty scary, sometimes. 

But it’s also very satisfying. Because the story doesn’t happen without the reader, the words on the page are not the story. The story only becomes real when the person reading it makes up their own corduroy-clad character, maybe one with bushy hair and a lop-sided bowtie. That’s when it lives, when it stops being ‘your book’ and becomes ‘their book’. 

Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of marks you’ve put on the page. It might be pretty. It might be just like you liked it. But there’s nobody smelling your roses. 

 

On Hiding

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It’s not quite eight am and I’m already at work. My hair is still wet because I spent too much time writing to dry it. I think I might be about to deliver two manuscripts to my agent this week. One she’s seen and I’ve rewritten to her notes. The other is something brand new. 

For years, I’ve hardly given her anything. And now it’s all boom-boom-boom. 

The fact, is, as I finally realised last week, I’ve been hiding.

The writing life can be painful. Writers have lots and lots and lots of ways to hide. My way, for the past few years, has been not finishing anything. If I don’t finish anything, then nobody can publish anything and I don’t have to go through any more publishing pain. That’s been my (totally unacknowledged) strategy. 

My first hiding strategy as a writer was to write texts so entirely unreadable that they defied analysis. They twisted and turned with dizzying complexity. I was showing off, of course. But I was also hiding. 

I see this in my MA students all the time. The most common way to hide is cramming in any number of unnecessary opacities in character and story…usually because the writer is hiding what they fear is an inadequate plot. Then there’s hiding behind characters or a strange point-of-view. Then there is the failure-to-commit-to-one-manuscript. The ‘I won’t write an ending, I’ll let the reader decide what happened,’ is perhaps my least favourite of the many ways writers hide, but it’s hard to say. The ways we hide are endless.

Writing reveals the limitations of your intellect. It reveals what we used to be comfortable with calling ‘your soul’. It reveals how you think and feel. If you do it properly, there’s really no hiding place. 

That’s what critics mean when they say a narrative is ‘honest’. It’s not that it’s non-fiction. It’s honest because the writer is not trying to hide.

Hiding is a pointless exercise. It’s like a big neon sign showing the way to your imperfections…and you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to do the best you can. If that was good enough for Homer and Milton and Austen and Byatt (who are all imperfect, too) it’s also good enough for you. 

And me.

Afore Ye Go

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At railway stations, there used to be large signs advertising Bells Whisky. ‘Afore Ye Go’ was their slogan – in WWI, they gave away drams of whisky to disembarking troops.

The last time I wrote this blog, I thought I might be about to die. I’m not.

I also wrote about considering giving up writing. I’m not doing that, either.

But to be honest, I’ve considered giving up writing for years now. It’s been a hard time for me. I’ve had some rotten luck with publishers; good editors leaving or being forcibly retired and then me and my books pushed onto editors who didn’t want or like them, a publicity director getting sacked just when one of my books came out – so no review copies sent out – and then being pulled into a meeting for poor sales… I know I shouldn’t moan, but it does get to you, eventually.

I’ve done extraordinary things in order to write. I was engaged to a man who left me because I ‘spent too much time writing’. I used to wake up at four a.m. to write before cycling into Oxford Circus from Stoke Newington and working a ten hour day. I cycled because it was quicker and I could write longer. When we lived with my in-laws and I was trying to rewrite my first novel, I’d get up at five and get a lift with my father-in-law to a condemned house, which had been owned by friends. I had a small paraffin heater, and I’d take a flask of tea. Toilet facilities were a bit grim.

I used to be passionate about my writing. But I’d taken so many punches (at work and in publishing) that all the passion had been punched out of me.  I kept on writing in fits and starts, but I had no confidence, so I had no passion. It certainly didn’t seem more important than, say, the laundry, or a pile of marking. Nobody seemed to value it, so I didn’t either.

When I thought I might be about to die, I really had to ask myself: do you want to keep doing this? If you only have a few years left, do you want to spend any of it alone in a room, typing?

Something extraordinary has happened as a result. I’ve rediscovered my passion. I’m saying, ‘No, I can’t make breakfast, sweetie, I have to write.’ I’m saying, ‘I can’t finish this marking in the time I’ve got because I can’t work ten hours a day unpaid.’ I’m saying, ‘Mummy loves you very much, darling. Now go and do something else for another hour.’

And I’m writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, and writing.

Afore I go.

So Little Time

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I’m sorry not to write lately. I haven’t wanted to write much of anything. 

I’ve evidently got a heart condition – who knew? I’ve felt breathless most of my life, but I’ve been a bit extra breathless lately. Then I phoned my doctor to say I had some chest pain and the next thing I knew I was in the back of an ambulance. I have angina…and on Monday I’ll find out if it’s take-a-few-tablets angina or open-heart-surgery angina or something in between. They told me the finding out procedure kills one in 1000 people who have it. It starts heart attacks in 20 more. And in some, it causes strokes. 

I’m waiting for this procedure. I’m also waiting to find out if Editor O’ My Dreams likes my latest manuscript. 

I hate waiting.  I’ve already died once, in a car accident when I was fourteen. I constantly feel time ticking away. And Monday seems to be rushing towards me. 

So I started wondering – do I really want to spend the time in between writing?

And then I wondered: Do I really want to spend the rest of my life writing at all? My writing life isolates me. To fund it, I work in a stressful environment (doing what I love, teaching other writers, but in the increasingly competitive academy). To really succeed at the combination of them both, it’s not enough to write well enough to be published. I must try and write world-class, award-winning fiction. The whole thing really is quite stressful – I haven’t had that big break-through book and might never have it. It means my place in the academy and in publishing is always uncertain. The whole thing can’t be good for me or my heart. 

After all, I don’t just live for me – I have an eleven-year old child and a husband and an elderly mother. It might be actually selfish to keep writing. 

Since I had time to think, I’ve thought. I’ve thought about the great relief it would be just to live – to go to work and come home and make dinner. To see my friends lots and keep my house nice and have parties…to GO to parties. And then I thought the parties I really want to go to are usually other writers’ book launches. And that I’ll still be reading. And that I doubt very much if I could actually stop writing altogether. 

Then I went to breakfast with a friend who talked about one of my books with such fondness that it made me cry. And I read a few fan letters. And I read this article from Science. And I thought some more, about why I really write and how if it helps just one person, just a little bit, it will all have been worth it.

My life will all have been worth it. 

So I started writing again. 

 

 

Don’t Listen To Anybody – For David and Susan

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Writers make millions of decisions. Some are easy…should I use double quotation marks or single?… but some are tough. One of the toughest is about listening to advice.

Advice on the single or double quotation mark question might be very useful, especially if your publisher has a house style. Advice on whether or not anyone is picking up on a subtle plot hint is useful, too.  And if everyone who sees your book hates the main character or the narrative voice or the way you’ve used third person, it’s time to rethink.

But when someone tells you what to write or what not to write, you really shouldn’t listen.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say, ‘Oh, don’t write X. Nobody wants to read X anymore,’ to an emerging writer. Sometimes it’s an agent or a publisher, who really believes that the X form is dead. Sometimes it’s a next door neighbour, who heard someone say it on Radio Four. Sometimes it’s someone who couldn’t sell their own X project.

It doesn’t matter. What’s nearly guaranteed is that sometime in the next five years, someone will have a big hit with X. And if that poor writer actually listened, they’ll be gnashing their teeth in the wilderness, looking at their abandoned manuscript and moaning that it could have been them.

We have to write what’s in our hearts and write it the best we can. The next big thing might be X or Y or even Z. Nobody really knows.

But we do know it will be really good. It will have meant everything to the person who wrote it. He or she will have been unable to stop themselves from telling that particular story. And it’s absolutely certain that someone, sometime, somewhere, will have told the next big writer not to bother, that nobody wanted that kind of book, that they should write something else.

But they won’t have listened.

Money, Money, Money

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Most writers can’t just write. The last number I saw was 43…that’s the estimate of how many writers can make a living from just writing fiction. ‘A living’ is a semi-detached house with three bedrooms, two cars and school fees for two children, plus one foreign holiday a year.  ‘Ha!’ we say, and ‘ha!’ again.

Most of the writers I know do something else, too. Lots of us do more than one something else. We might teach in universities or colleges, go into schools for day or week-long workshops, go into residencies, write journalism, give public workshops, review or do public speaking. Many of us do combinations of several of these.

It gets complicated. In any one week, I might be doing two or three of those things AND writing. And then, I have to remember to claim the money I’m owed for the first one while doing the other one or two. Sometimes, I forget. For weeks, even months.

Then there’s the nature of fiction publishing in general. You get a whack of money (and smaller and smaller whacks, these days) up front and then nothing for quite a long time.

It makes for a very confusing and irregular income. You often ‘lose’ money as an author, after expenses, for years. That means you rather forget about your tax bill when a good year comes along and then, boom! That’s how I ended up driving such a horrible little car. I had to sell mine to pay my tax bill…

If you are a very organised person with good budgeting skills, you can do quite well from your fiction. You can do three or four events a week, booked well in advance, do some teaching where you carefully monitor hours given and hours paid, save for your taxes and invest your advances and end up coining the stuff.

But if you are a very organised kind of person, you probably won’ t be a writer.

So you’ll be like me, at the end of a carefully budgeted summer, having forgotten to claim the income I was going to buy food with in September.

Beans on toast, anyone?

‘It’s Dogged As Does It’

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‘Tell ‘ee what, Master Crawley;–and yer reverence mustn’t think as I means to be preaching; there ain’t nowt a man can’t bear if he’ll only be dogged. You to whome, Master Crawley, and think o’ that, and maybe it’ll do ye a good yet. It’s dogged as does it. It ain’t thinking about it.’ Then Giles Hoggett withdrew his hand from the clergyman’s, and walked away towards his home at Hoggle End. Mr Crawley also turned away homewards, and as he made his way through the lanes, he repeated to himself Giles Hoggett’s words. ‘It’s dogged as does it. It’s not thinking about it.’

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Anthony Trollope could swing a pen. I’ve re-read his Barsetshire series at least five times in my life and this exchange, between a beleaguered, principled cleric and a farm hand has stayed with me for 36 years.

For a month, I’ve been insisting on a regular writing time. as if I didn’t have a job, a child, a house to renovate, another house to clear and sell, a dog, a cat, fish, money worries and parish responsibilities.  Just as I did when I first became a published author.

To be honest, I thought I might not be able to write any more. I’d had such a disappointment with how my last publishing deal worked out…and some slights at work that were probably nothing, but that I magnified and dwelt upon… And then I tried to write something enormously difficult and complicated and…well…I failed. I couldn’t find the right voice for it.

When my memoir (about dying in a car wreck as a teenager and my subsequent recovery) wasn’t being accepted easily, I wondered, sometimes, if it would be a good idea to stop trying to write.

Then I was asked to fictionalise the memoir and then I had a rather tight deadline and started to work daily and…I found out that I can still write. Rather well, I think. I just turned the first 30K into my agent today. We’ll see what she thinks.

But that’s not the reason I’m writing this blog. The reason I’m writing this blog is that today, just walking the dog, I suddenly had an idea for what I need to do to my enormously difficult and complicated novel. I suddenly saw how the voice needed to work. I’m not ready to write it yet, but it’s starting to work for me.

It wasn’t thinking about it that got me there. It was writing, the actual practice of writing.

Hoggett, as I’ve found many times over the years, was absolutely right. It’s not thinking about it. It’s dogged as does it.

The Work

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Photo on 2013-08-02 at 12.10 #2

From time to time in this blog, I’ve talked about how laying-in-bed-reading-novels is part of my work. I’ve talked about how going-to-the-cinema is my work. I’ve talked about how standing-in-the-middle-of-a-river-and-watching-waterbugs is my work.

But so is the writing bit. And when I’m working on something, the writing bit keeps on going. Our friends who are vacationing/on holiday in the same place are also self-employed. They run a B&B. They get a locum manager in for three weeks, so that they can have a break. My husband is not selling wine (though he’s certainly researching a fair few bottles). Out of everyone we know at our holiday spot, I’m the only one still working every day. I always do.

My work is fun, but it never really stops.

So, since we are staying in a little beach chalet (me, Daughter, Husband, Elderly Mother, Dog and Daughter’s Best Mate) I’ve been writing at a local fast food establishment. Every morning, I drink three or four Diet Cokes and type away. It’s busy enough that, like a train, the noise is generalised and not particular, so it’s easy to drown out with my thoughts. I’m not distracted by any beauty (terrible for me…give me a nice view and I can look at it for hours with much detriment to the word count). It’s not expensive. The staff have been really kind and supportive.

The first day, I tried to find someplace lovely in the local medieval village, but the parking takes so long and is so unreliable that I’d spend all my time doing that and no time writing.

So, I’ve been here, with the smell of the fryer and the shouting kids, writing what seem to be 1000 or more very good words every day.  it’s not terribly glamorous, but it is literary. And it is, actually, work.

The Fear

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It doesn’t take a long time to write. I’m writing at least 1000 words a day right now, and can often do quite good work in just a couple of hours. 

No, it doesn’t take ages to write. But God, it takes a lot of courage. 

Whatever you write will reveal everything about you; about your ethics, about your class, about your prejudices, about your education. 

And even more terrifying is that it will also reveal how well you can write. 

This is The Fear. The Fear is what takes the time away from writers. We read other people obsessively, because we love writing, yes, but also because we are always asking, ‘is s/he better than me”? The Fear makes us go to our computer and play on Moshi Monsters during our precious, carefully guarded writing time. The Fear can stop us from writing altogether, for days, weeks, months, years…even a lifetime. 

And don’t think you’ll escape it. No matter how stupid you are, how ill-informed and instinctive of a writer you have managed to allow yourself to remain, you will still contract The Fear at some point. And the better you are; the better read, the more celebrated, the more published and reviewed, the more likely you are to get it. 

I was at a weekend retreat with a very well-known novelist (as I’ve said before, sometimes I really do have a glamourous literary life). The novelist said that they (I’m not going to reveal gender) were terrified at that point in their writing career. They had this horrible thought that they might not be ‘any good’. 

I laughed, and said that I’d heard Salman Rushdie say the same thing on Radio Four on my way to the retreat. I said,  to this celebrated and award-winning novelist, ”I don’t think that worry ever really goes away. Don’t let it get to you. If Rushdie feels that way…’ 

The novelist clutched my arm. ‘But, Mimi,’ they said. ‘Rushie’s right. He really isn’t any good!’ Shaking, the novelist went off and poured themselves a hefty glass of wine, the neck of the bottle rattling against the glass. I was laughing too hard to help.

And I couldn’t have helped anyway. The Fear is something we have to face by ourselves. 

I’d been dealing with it for weeks recently, when I heard something that helped me out of it. I was at Mass at my Catholic church when the priest had us pray that we all used our talents, whatever they were, as well as we could, for the glory of God and the help of us all. 

The next day, I wrote 2000 words. Is it any good? It’s the best I can do. I hope it’s good. But I’ll never really know – unless my religion is right and we will retain our consciousness after death. If we do, there’s a whole bunch of failed farmers, ignored spinsters, suicidal young wives, and a certain local government official (who had a wild young life in the theatre) up in whatever ‘Heaven’ might be, laughing their celestial heads off. 

For the glory of God, the help of us all or for another cause…we have to sit down and get naked. We can’t let The Fear stop us. We can’t let it win, even if we, in the end, don’t win, either. 

 

Other People

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Yesterday, my daughter felt ill and stayed home. ‘I’ll need to write,’ I said. ‘I’ll sleep late,’ she promised. At 7:45 am she arrived downstairs, despondent and wanting my company. That was my writing over for the day – we ended up going junk shopping and getting things to finish off her new room. Last night, I went out to dinner with some colleagues. It was absolutely lovely, but I didn’t get an early start this morning. At lunctime, I’m off to see Robbie Williams at Wembley, with my dear mate, who loves Robbie’s songs. My husband won the tickets at work. If I get an hour in on the ms. today, I’ll be lucky, and I can’t carry my laptop into Wembley (to get good seats, we’re going there straight off the train), so I won’t be writing tomorrow morning, either.

Other people are hell in a writer’s life. But what can you do? Being interested in people, being curious about them, is often what gets you writing fiction in the first place. And people who wrote really amazing characters – your Mark Twains and Jane Austens and Charles Dickenses – were intensely social people. They wrote so well about people because they knew them.

I know lots of writers, so I know lots of different kinds of people who write. Some are the kind of writer I grew up thinking I would be; aloof, self-sufficient, rather austere. One has a very bright, brittle intellect. She writes very bright, brittle novels where everyone is either bright and brittle or very stupid and socially clumsy. (I’m sure if I were one of her characters, I would fall into the latter group.) I think this often happens to the austere ones…they end up writing everyone as themselves, because that’s the only person they really know. 

Sometimes (though of course not in a writers I know) characterisation is very thin. Men who don’t think about sex and women who have no demands on their time from friends and family, people who only think about work when they’re at work, people who have no wishes or dreads, whole populations of people who are prepared to listen to long speeches from the main character…

It’s a lot easier to write that way. You get your plot. You get your main character. And you move the latter through the former. Job done. But it’s not good fiction and it’s not a believable world. 

People always have their own hopes and dreams. People always want something and are trying to get it. People have complex lives and motivations. Even the security guard who is taping the crime scene at the mini-mart is thinking about something. When the police officer arrives, and says, ‘We’ll take over, now. You’ll be wanted for interview,’ he can reply, ‘Yes, Ma’am.’ Or he can reply,  ‘At least somebody wants me,’ or, ‘Can I go pick up my daughter first?’ or, ‘I knew it. I’ll never get to go on my fishing trip,’ and become a real person. The police office can then react, deepening the characterisation of the protagonist as well. ‘You’ll need to call someone else to get her, I’m afraid,’ she can say. Or she can give the security guard a long look and just say, ‘Wait over there.’ It doesn’t take up much space or slow down the pace, but it enriches the story by making the world deeper and more real. 

Which is exactly what my daughter, my husband, my colleagues and my mates do for me. I can’t write a real world without living in it…living in it with real live people with their own hopes and dreams…some of which include me. But then again, if I never have time to write about it all…

I’m going back to work, now.