I am writing or, more to the point, doing this before I write. I have laid the foundations and now I’m building the trellises and the supports around which the plants of my story will grow. (image found here) I still agree with John Fowles when he says that writing is an organic process. He … Read More
MATs
When is a MAT harder than writing? …
… when it results in this: Describe your five strengths as a writer I found the challenge HERE and because I was busy MATing (reading readers’ and writers’ blogs to avoid writing) I told myself that I would do it, that stumbling across it served me right for avoiding writing, and that I’d get back … Read More
A new relationship with my writing …
… is what I need. I realised over the weekend, while thinking about other relationships in my life, that the relationship I have with my writing is one of dread fuelled by the certainty that it will be a struggle: that I always expect to discover that what I thought was a story isn’t, that … Read More
When is writing also a MAT?
When it’s another piece of writing. I managed to stop writing the short story (the one that was a novel, you remember) this week so that I could resurrect the idea for a children’s novel from a horrible first draft written one thousand (well, ten) years ago. And the reason for stopping? To send three … Read More
Emily Young’s Wounded Angel
sculpture copyright Emily Young, photograph copyright Angelo Plantamura You can see this beautiful angel (called Wounded Angel I) in Kew Gardens, in London, or you can see a photograph of him in Tacit Hill’s A Light Touch and a Long View which was published in June and is full full full of colour plates of … Read More
Editing, MATs and piles of paper
Most writers, in fact surely all of us except those with humungous sales, earn their living by doing something else (obviously not by MATing). I earn mine by editing other people’s non-fiction, and/or proofreading it. I have just quoted for a piece of editing work and while I am waiting for the editor at the … Read More
Orchids for Simon
I am overwhelmed. This orchid is for Simon at Stuck in a Book for his overwhelming review of Speaking of Love. See The word on … at the top on the right. Orchids, according to Clare Florists’ flower meanings are flowers of magnificence and, although I’m not at all sure what the thanking-for-a-blog-book-review etiquette is, … Read More
Writing, MATs and ticker-tape turn ups
On Friday morning, in the bath, before I started work (a bath can be a MAT, but only if I’m still in it after the practical stuff is over), the sentence, ‘On the whole we resist falling in love’ turned up in my head. This isn’t unusual (not that sentence, but sentences in general, or … Read More
Making the language sing
So … I spent yesterday rewriting the first seven pages of the short-story-that-was-a-novel. Or, as I prefer to call it, making the language sing. Now that’s not a full-scale opera you understand, just one short under-rehearsed aria, but I hate clunky language. I’m a huge fan of the less-is-more-poetic school of writing, but when I’m … Read More
First novels and short stories
The thing about writing your first novel is that as well as doing it you’re finding out how to do it. So, you would have thought that I’d have discovered at least the fundamentals of the how by now. But it seems that I haven’t, or hadn’t. My second novel, which I had the idea … Read More
Man Booker Longlist, MATs and Natalie Goldberg
So … the Booker Longlist is out and it includes four first novels which can only be good news for those of us with books which have cleared the finding-a-publisher-for-the-first-novel hurdle. I looked in vain for Speaking of Love, knowing that it wouldn’t be there but hoping, fantastically against the odds, that it would be. … Read More
Thomas Keneally and the fear that haunts all writers
Did you hear Thomas Keneally this morning on Desert Island Discs? He was magnificent. He didn’t mention MATs (multiple avoidance – of writing – techniques), but he talked about the most stultifying thing for a writer: FEAR. He said, I can’t quote him exactly because you can’t listen again to Desert Island Discs, but here’s … Read More
Life in my writing room
The walls are covered with quotations, this is one of my favourites: ‘A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ Thomas Mann. My head is always full of words but, this afternoon, they seem to be mixing with each other and making a grey sludge, rather than … Read More