Thoughts about things I’ve written or read or heard or seen. An attempt to stay positive in a turbulent world.
Recent Articles
Dying Matters
It’s Dying Matters Awareness Week and, as Iris Murdoch said (she’s quoted on the Awareness Week page): Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved. I think – although everything changes in the writing of a novel – but at the moment I think my third novel will be narrated by a beneficent angel because,...Continue reading→
Jacob Ross (and TLC)’s three-part master class, and campanology
Jacob Ross is running a three-part master class in writing the short story, the novel and genre fiction for the wonderful TLC (without whose wise criticism I doubt Speaking of Love would ever have found a publisher). The short story part was on 23 March, but the others are still to come and, should writing fiction...Continue reading→
Breaking writing rules, and an extraordinary National Trust house
On Tuesday, at the last CCWC Advanced Writing Course of the spring term (where, by the way, is spring?) we broke the rules and found that, in breaking them, a freedom and spontaneous playfulness broke into our writing. If, for instance, you change point of view in the middle of a scene, you’ll very likely...Continue reading→
Love, from the hert, for Valentine’s day
Charles Duc d’Orleans (1394-1465) wrote this love poem for his wife, in 1415, after his capture at the Battle of Agincourt: Go forth, my hert, with my lady; Loke that we spare no business To serve her with such lowliness, That ye get her grace and mercy. Pray her of times prively That she keep...Continue reading→
The making of character
Sometime last week I heard part of an interview with John le Carre about the making of character. This is what he said: You can’t actually make up a character out of other people, you simply can’t. You grab the bits that are appealing to you, that touch you or alienate you, but in the...Continue reading→
Free indirect style, and the CCWC
I’ve struggled to understand free indirect style, let alone how to use it in fiction. But in James Wood’s brilliant How Fiction Works all is made wondrously clear through his lucid prose. As he writes, on page 11: Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the...Continue reading→
Modern Etiquette …
… at the turn of the century before last. Published by Frederick Warne & Co., (also publishers of Beatrix Potter’s work) in 1870 and reprinted many times since, Modern Etiquette is invaluable for a glimpse of the codes of behaviour people were advised to follow in the late 19th-century. In the Introduction it states: Society has...Continue reading→
Second novels
Stephen Fry wrote (I found it here, thank you Lydia Netzer, although I couldn’t find it directly from him): The problem with a second novel is that it takes almost no time to write compared with a first novel. If I write my first novel in a month at the age of 23, and my second...Continue reading→
Searching for the Secret River
I’ve just finished reading Kate Grenville‘s Searching for the Secret River: it’s brilliant, and a must-read for anyone who writes historical fiction (my second, about-to-be-redrafted, novel is one of those). Searching for the Secret River is a kind and wise book about writing and the process, the stumbling blocks and the breakthroughs. It’s about the gradual...Continue reading→
Personal best
It’s the stories behind the gold medals at London 2012 that have intrigued and heartened me because they apply not only to sport, but to anything we each choose to do or to be or to become. In writing, it is in the rewriting (which often means many many drafts) that the real work begins:...Continue reading→
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