Wordarts

Weeping Crocodiles: The Great eBook Debate

2012-01-31T18:27:00.000Z

The backlash against eBooks has been rumbling along, sotto voce, for some time - but recently, there have been a few loud howls of anguish. The end of civilisation is nigh. Franzen was crying 'woe, woe!' This morning, it had even spread to BBC 1, where Ewan Morrison, less angst ridden, but still fairly negative, debated the issue with Louise Voss who has done rather well from indie digital publishing. It reminded me of an edition of a programme called Imagine, shown on BBC TV late last year, which proclaimed the virtues of traditional publishers as honourable gatekeepers, there to nurture, protect and promote writers. Would that they were. Would that they did.

This would all be just a little more believable if the last decade or so hadn't seen conventional publishers presiding over the slow decline and eventual death of the mid-list, that wonderful, huge, fertile, centre ground of publishing, encompassing everything from well written genre fiction to literary novels, with all kinds of fascinating stuff in between. And for a very long time, they have managed to con mid-list writers into thinking that it was all our fault. This centre ground used to be the seed bed from which the occasional (usually unexpected, almost always unpredictable) blockbuster success would spring. Sometimes - if the publisher got lucky - it might be an author's first or second book - but much more frequently it would be their fifth or sixth or seventh book. The others would have reasonable, albeit not massive sales, but would have been growing a staunch readership. And if a book did become a bestseller, some of those profits would be ploughed back into nurturing the other seedlings in the mid-list.

Then, slowly but relentlessly, everything changed. No matter what big publishers may say in their own justification, (and I exempt the small, frequently more caring independents here) the experience of most writers - even those with agents - is that editors are now almost wholly ruled and overruled by their marketing departments, and those marketing departments are looking for instant gratification in the shape of a quick and easy bestseller.

They find those quick and easy bestsellers in ghost written sleb memoirs or autobiographies of sportsmen and television chefs. And cookery books. Lots of those.

It ill behoves them, therefore, to wring their hands and weep crocodile tears over the death of the book, when they have effectively spent a decade or more kicking it in the teeth. Just about every writer of my acquaintance - and I know a lot of them - would tell of deeply frustrating rejection letters all essentially saying the same thing: 'I love this, I think it's wonderful and well written, but in the current climate, we can't publish it. Our marketing department doesn't know how to sell it.'

That being the case, how dare they scream blue murder when writers are empowered by the rise of the eBook and allowed to get the work out there themselves? To suggest 'regulating' this movement is to suggest putting power back into the hands of a set of gatekeepers who have proved themselves to be somewhat less scrupulous than St Peter. Moreover, to suggest that the rise of the eBook will stop people reading, flies in the face of all evidence to the contrary. People are reading more on their Kindles and IPads and Nooks than ever before. And to suggest that indie publishing will somehow limit the ability of writers to make a living from their work, is to display an astonishing ignorance of how most writers - even well published writers - find it almost impossible to scrape any kind of living at all from their craft.

A single example will serve to illustrate the advantages: eBook publishing often involves a 'slow burn' with sales taking off - for a variety of reasons, too complicated to go into here - some time after publication. By contrast, conventional publishing now demands the launch, the immediate and astronomical rise in sales and the ridiculously swift slide towards the remainder pile. Most writers - with a few lucky exceptions - will have been made to feel guilty about their inability to meet the wholly unrealistic targets set by their publishers - and this with well written, well reviewed and popular books - just not instantly popular enough.

So what if there is a lot of dross out there? In a virtual world, shelf space is unlimited and people are already hammering out ways of finding what they want. Besides, your dross might well be my good read, and who is qualified to make those judgements?

Speaking personally, I've had a long career which has involved a frustrating switchback. It's no surprise that many of indie publishing's most enthusiastic proponents are older writers with a good track record (and a big back list) who have encountered obstacle after obstacle - as opposed to youngsters who have not yet had time to become jaded with a decaying system.

Above all, eBook publishing gives writers the power to sell the products of their own talents, themselves. It would be far more helpful to 'beginning writers' to debate grown-up topics, as so many US authors do on their remarkably helpful blogs: the desirability of honing your craft and thinking about your readers, the importance of your cover image, the possibility of engaging professional editorial help in a businesslike way, the need to get your head down and keep writing, rather than resting on your laurels after one book - all these things are useful. Elitist hand-wringing is not.

But of course, that would mean treating the writer as an aspiring or seasoned professional, rather than a humble supplicant. All of which helps to explain why, for so many of us, the publishing industry has lost all credibility as the keeper of culture it still fondly imagines itself to be.

www.wordarts.co.uk

Five Pieces of (Possibly) Useful Advice for Writers

2012-01-28T12:21:00.002Z

A trio of ghost stories, now on Kindle

I'm increasingly reluctant to hand out any writing advice at all these days - mainly because there is just TOO MUCH of it out there, and so much of what there is, is completely contradictory. And - moreover - being handed out by people who don't know enough to know how little they know. In fact I've realised that although I still love to do talks and readings, and although I'm happy to answer questions to the best of my ability, I don't even like to do 'workshops' any more. There you are with a group of people of wildly differing abilities, all with completely different aspirations, trying to squeeze your own experience into some inadequate one-size-fits-all box- ticking activity. But all the same - it IS possible to give some general advice and I've realised that all my years of experience can be boiled down into about five principles - things that, if I had known, really known about and absorbed and tried to remember, way back then - my writing life might have been made a little easier. Only a little though. When I was starting out, an older, wiser (and very successful) writer said to me 'The only way to learn to write, is to get your head down and do it.' He was right. There are no shortcuts. But for what they are worth, I'm happy to share these five little pieces of advice in the hope that some of them may prove helpful.

1 Play About

This is especially relevant in these days of formal creative writing courses where students seem to feel (however misplaced that feeling may be) that they have to 'get it right' with an assignment in much the same way as they would have to get a factual essay or dissertation right. Unfortunately, this is never the way most creative writers work. You start with an idea of some kind and then you play about with it until you find out what it wants or needs to be. Play is absolutely essential to the creative process.

2 Allow Yourself to Fail

A brave attempt which fails is better than no attempt at all. And once again, the more we formalise the process, the more the prospect of failure becomes the big bogeyman, to be avoided at all costs. I think it's one of the reasons why I find Creative Scotland's current emphasis on the word 'investment' so worrying. I know they don't intend it to mean that investment is invariably financial and always demands a financial return - but investment and support are two different things, and even if you take the idea of monetary investment or grant support right out of the equation, you are still left with the sense that investment always assumes a return of some sort, whereas support allows for the possibility of trying and failing. The doing is more important than any end product. It's more important to travel hopefully than to arrive. As a writer, you will start out on far more projects than you will ever finish, and this is as it should be. Trying and failing means that you are learning something along the way.

3 Make It Real

People are often told to write what they know about, but my qualification to that is that you know more than you think, and if you don't know, you can always find out. Making it real, though, involves more than just research and it's almost impossible to show people how to do it. (If I could, I would be richer than I am right now!) You can be writing the most wild, off-the-wall fantasy and still make it so real that your reader believes everything, implicitly. Think of Ray Bradbury. He could write about a woman who played the rain on her harp and I still believed in it. Hell, I could see and hear it! Conversely, you can be writing the most everyday domestic story and discover that your readers don't believe a word of it. Beginning writers will often say 'but it really happened like that' to which the only possible, albeit a little rude, answer is 'so what?' You're the writer, and you must be in charge of your own material. Give yourself permission to shape it. Get inside your characters' heads. Above all, inspire your reader with confidence. The answer always lies with you, the writer. If you have created a fictional world which seems as real to you as the world outside (and sometimes even more real than that), then your readers will believe in that world as well. But the only way to achieve that is... well, you could start by paying attention to 1 and 2 above!

Being curious about everything helps!

4 Story Is King

I resisted this for years. But over Christmas, I heard Andrew Lloyd Webber saying it and although I have a few reservations about the ALW bandwagon, I found myself in agreement with him. I wish somebody had said this to me years ago. Forget about the formal intricacies of plotting, forget all those prescriptive pieces of advice about structure. Just tell the story as engagingly as you can. If you get that right, whether you are writing in a particular genre or experimenting wildly, everything else will fall into place. William Trevor's short stories are truly wonderful not only because they tell us so much about what it is to be a human being - which they certainly do - but because they are always very fine stories as well! Make it live, shape it, craft the raw material of reality into something better. Every truly enthralling novel, film and stage play I've ever seen, literary or popular, difficult or easy, has an enthralling story. Kids know all about story. Even when publishers in droves were telling writers that fantasy was dead in the water and sending polite rejection letters to JKR among others, kids were still demanding a magical story. When Harry Potter was first published it was kids who spread the word about it being an enthralling read. They know a good story when they read one and there's no fooling them. (Yet still so many of our critics seem to think that writing for children is a soft option! Nothing could be further from the truth. And I don't write for children. But I certainly admire those who do.)

5 Once You're An Experienced Professional - Behave Like One.

This is possibly my most contentious piece of advice. We writers are notoriously bad at treating ourselves as professionals, even when we are seasoned and experienced, with an excellent track record. I've just been reading a piece about teachers which posed the following questions:

'In what other profession is the desire for competitive salary viewed as proof of indifference towards the job? In what other profession are the professionals considered the least knowledgeable about the job?'

The answer to that would also be writers.

People who wouldn't get out of bed without payment often expect writers to work for nothing. I'm not talking about the freebies we all do from time to time where nobody gets paid, or where you work for a profit share. I'm talking about those gigs you're sometimes invited to do for large commercial organisations where everyone else is on a fair (and sometimes a very fat) salary but where you're told there is 'no money in the budget to pay the writer.' And when you're feeling nervous, watch this and take heart.

If you're going to work for free, do it for yourself, work at something you love, or for whatever worthy cause you subscribe to. For the rest, be aware that a whole industry has grown up which is happy to cast the 'talent' in the role of humble supplicant, grateful for any crumbs of recognition. But only you can do something to remedy that.

Oh - and I've one last piece of advice, which is to treat all advice with healthy scepticism. Even this blog! But do feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments section!

Catherine Czerkawska

www.wordarts.co.uk

List Mania

2012-01-16T00:02:00.000Z

I don't know about you, but I'm a great maker of lists. In fact I have a folder on my PC titled Catherine's Lists. It contains documents such as a To Do List (work) a To Do List (other) an ongoing Shopping List and a Gardening List. Before Christmas these were joined by Gift and Card lists. After Christmas, these were replaced by lists of all the little things I hadn't done over the holidays, but now needed to tackle. And now that most of these are out of the way, I'm about to embark on a massive promotion list for my eBooks. And then, of course, there's a publishing schedule to consider as well. Arguably, the most important of the lot.

There's even - I kid you not - a Mega List, which is a sort of list of lists.

And while I'm in confessional mode, I have to admit that I have been known to ADD things to my lists that I have already done, just for the pleasure of being able to cross them off!

My sister-in-law told me last year that she never ever makes lists and never has done. In fact it was plain that she couldn't understand why I would need to. Which makes me wonder - is the world divided into list makers and - the others. And how on earth do they manage?

There have been times when I've decided to go cold turkey and do without the torture and tyranny of my To Do lists. On average, I've lasted about two days. The only time I really do without them is when we go away on holiday. This doesn't work if we're going abroad, because the week before departure is spent in such a frenzy of list making and checking that I need a few days to recover. And before I know it, I'm making a list of all the things I'll need to do when I get home again. But if we're having a few days' blissful break here in the UK, I can manage to be relatively list free, and the relief is exquisite. Unfortunately, by the time we're through the door the lists are crowding my head again.

Yoga helps. Still your mind, our teacher says, and I find that I can and do. And I once bought a book on Time Management which was so list obsessive that even I baulked at dividing my day into ten minute segments and listing what needed to be done in grids. So maybe I'm not that bad after all.

I did consider making a New Year's Resolution to cut down on my list-making, but by the time I had added a few more ideas, I actually had a list of resolutions, top of which was not making too many lists.

So do they help, all these lists?

Well, I get a lot done. I feel organised. And when I'm in the middle of a writing project, a book or a play, it seems quite important to make some kind of schedule and try to stick to it - otherwise it's all too easy to let other things get in the way. You have to learn to prioritise when you're a writer and making lists is definitely one way of working out what's essential and what's not. Although I have to say that when you're on a roll, deeply absorbed in writing or revising, all the lists go by the board, and you do almost nothing else but write, eat, drink and sleep!

Meanwhile, it's rather nice to find yourself on other people's lists sometimes, like this one, by Brendan Gisby on Amazon, and this one as well ! Thank-you Brendan!

Writing Resolutions for 2012: Just Do It!

2012-01-02T19:37:00.002Z

First of all, let me wish a very happy and productive 2012 to anyone reading this blog - and I know that includes a number of writers of all ages and stages. (Don't you just hate the term 'budding writer'?) so let's hope at least some of that productivity relates to writing and publication, indie as well as conventional.

I finally published my new novel Bird of Passage to Amazon Kindle, between Christmas and New Year. I'd fully anticipated getting it 'out there' in time for Christmas, but in the event, a string of minor edits, and then the Kindle formatting, meant that it proved even more time consuming that I had anticipated. But then, where writing is concerned, just about everything does!

I was amused to see somebody on a book forum the other day, blithely pointing out that since it should be 'easy' to write a thousand words a day, it should be equally easy to finish a novel within three months. Well, it's possible, and some people manage to do it. They tend to be experienced writers who are very sure of the genre in which they are writing - and sure of their own skills in that genre. (Or complete beginners, who are too inexperienced to know how little they know!) But when it's the former, the results can be very good indeed. However some novels take years to write and those results can be very good indeed too. As usual with writing, there are no right or wrong answers and the only certainty in this business is that anyone who tells you that there are, is certainly wrong.

Still, at this time of year, it's worth pondering the value of writing something every day, or almost every day, even if it's not a thousand words. The truth is that sometimes it will be much less or nothing and sometimes it will be much more - three or four thousand words if you're on a roll - but the one thing that you can be pretty sure of is that if you want to 'be' a writer, you have to - er - you know - write something. I know this sounds daft, and I'm pretty sure that none of the followers of this blog will be culprits, but I have - over a long writing career - met a surprising number of people who are forever claiming that they 'want to write' but when push comes to shove, they don't actually do it. I don't mean writing well. I mean the act of putting one word next to another on paper or on a screen.

They will have many excuses, but lack of time is always number one. I know this because it's an excuse professional writers use all the time - I do it myself. 'I didn't finish this or that project because I didn't have time.' It's not true. It usually means that I wasn't committed enough to the project in question, or got bored with it, or realised it wasn't going anywhere. If you really want to write (and you have to want to write something, whether it's poems, stories, novels, plays, or a blog,) then you will beg, borrow or steal the time from somewhere. I have friends who have worked full time at the 'day job', brought up children, looked after sick relatives and still managed to grab a few hours each day to devote to their writing, sometimes in the early hours of the morning, sometimes very late at night, sometimes by just pulling the occasional all-nighter and soldiering on through next day's fatigue.

Many years ago, when I was 'budding' myself (yeuch!) a distinguished writer replied to one of my fan letters that 'the only way to write is to write.' He was right, of course. The only way in which you can call yourself a writer, whether in bud, or in bright green leaf, is to DO it. It's only by doing it that you can actually find out what you want to write, what form you want to write it in, and whether you actually have anything interesting to say. You may start by 'wanting to write' poems, so you do it, and find that actually, your poems are more like short stories. So then you write short stories. You may try your hand at writing short stories and find them full of visual images and dialogue, and wonder if you could write plays as well. The truth is that most writers play about with different forms, seeing where they want to go.

But in order to come to any realisation about the form that might suit you, as a writer, you have to give it a go in some shape or form. I think for many people, though, there's an element of fear involved and I suspect that the internet, which is crammed with opinionated people (like me, so sorry!) has hindered rather than helped. Being judged for something so personal is scary. Being told what you ought to be doing by screeds of people is singularly unhelpful. Our first ventures into writing are generally quite tender little seedlings and it's all too easy for them to be trampled under foot.

As with so many things in life, a great many people prefer to say 'I could have been a contender' rather than having a go at something, and - possibly - failing. But I've news for you. Nobody who attempts any form of creative endeavour, ever believes he or she is good enough. Every single writer, including highly successful professionals, goes through agonies of self doubt. And we've all failed. Often. It doesn't make us stop writing though. We write because it's a kind of compulsion. An addiction. We can't help ourselves.

But if you make any New Year resolution about your writing, let it be not to put yourself down before you've even started. Ignore your own doubts. Get yourself a nice notebook and doodle in it: poems, ideas, words, phrases. Or set up a blog (here on Blogger - it's free and easy!) and resolve to write something, anything, once a week.

Above all, just do it. You know you want to. As Mrs Doyle would say, 'Go on go on go on go on go on!'

New Website - and a very Happy Christmas!

2011-12-22T13:47:00.000Z

Just launched my nice new website, here, designed and built by Ayrshire company, Paligap I'm delighted with it, although it has certainly taken me long enough to get around to commissioning it! And I'm well aware that an out-of-date website is worse than no website at all.

Paligap built my first site many years ago, when they too were just starting out - I remember visiting them, two pleasant and enthusiastic young men, in premises tucked away down a little back street in the town of Ayr. I was very happy with that first website, but as time passed, my work changed. I thought about changing the site too, but I couldn't justify the expense to myself, in view of the fact that I wasn't at all sure any longer what I wanted it to say! So I concentrated on blogging, while I thought about it, and wrote, and then thought about it all some more.

Paligap, meanwhile, expanded and grew. They moved to nice new premises, and then - more recently - to even nicer premises in an old but very distinguished part of the town. And they gained some very distinguished customers in the meantime. (They are still a very pleasant, friendly company to work with though!)

And I went through a succession of changes in my working life, what I wrote, what I wanted to do with it, where I wanted to go with it. The single biggest change, though, was signalled by two things - the collapse of the mid-list as far as conventional publishing was concerned - and the advent of 'indie publishing' - the possibility of publishing work directly onto Kindle and other platforms, avoiding the increasingly complicated strings of gatekeepers which had interposed themselves between the writer and his or her readership. Suddenly, there was a very definite possibility of getting the work out there instead of spending years and years rewriting it to the demands of an increasingly prescriptive industry - and that came like a wonderful breath of fresh air.

I've written about that change more fully elsewhere, especially in the Scottish Review, here - where you can read a longish essay about the concept of the mid-list - what it is and what has happened to the writers who belonged there. Just as I was assembling ideas for my new website, I read a wonderful little book called How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months (I know, I know, we should all be so lucky!) - but it's a lovely, entertaining, useful book, full of bright ideas. And the biggest, brightest idea of all, the best piece of advice - although there's a lot more, you should buy it - is that the writer should spend time thinking about/focusing on/building a relationship with his or her readers.

It was a moment of enlightenment. I don't know why, because it's kind of obvious when you think about it - but over the past few years, writers have been concentrating so hard on the long and difficult hunt for an agent, and then the equally long and difficult hunt for a publisher - that they/we seem to have neglected the person who really matters - the reader.

Fortunately, enlightenment came just in time for me to make a few changes to my new website (thank-you John Locke!) and it's now aimed fairly and squarely at readers, or potential readers. Which is just as it should be.

Meanwhile, this will be my last post before Christmas - so let me wish all of you a very happy and joyful holiday season - and a very successful 2012.

The Physic Garden - Just An Old Man's Story

2011-12-11T17:00:00.000Z

There have been some very interesting blog posts and Facebook comments recently about the problems facing older writers when they try to sell novels which are not about the dilemmas of twenty somethings - especially this excellent and heartfelt post by Linda Gillard on the Do Authors Dream of Electric Books blog. I found myself identifying with this very strongly, and not just from a female point of view.

A few years ago, when I had finished a draft of a new novel called The Physic Garden, I sent it to my agent who sent it out to a young 'reader'. The book - I'm planning to finish rewrites and publish it to Kindle some time in 2012 - is a historical novel, related in the mid 1800s, in the 'voice' of an old man called William Lang, who was once, many years before, employed as gardener in the physic garden of the old college of Glasgow University. The book is essentially about his relationship with one of the young professors, and is a tale of male friendship, class differences and extreme betrayal. I love this period, and I fell in love with my story - sometimes it seemed as though I was channelling William, rather than inventing - an uncanny experience, since there was a real William Lang, who was indeed a college gardener. I found out some things about him, but made most of it up. It could have happened that way.

But when my then agent, a young woman herself, gave the book to one of the agency's readers, another young woman, the only response was that it was 'just an old man's story' and a marked lack of enthusiasm. At the time, it hit home. And here, I find myself wondering all over again, just why even experienced writers such as myself, are so thoroughly lacking in confidence in our own abilities. Anyway, when I changed agents, soon afterwards, I also started trying to change The Physic Garden into a third person narrative, so that I could get away from that 'old man's voice.'

I was an idiot, and it was a complete nightmare. I would lie awake, fretting about it. And in several months, I managed to change only a tiny bit of the book. It was like wading through treacle. William simply demanded to be heard and he wasn't having any of the changes. He was outraged by them.

Eventually, of course, I woke up to the folly of it. The novel is William's story and although there are plenty of other characters, and I do need to do rewrites so that they become more intensely themselves - still, the narrator is William and we are seeing things from his perspective, even if we, as readers, may not always agree with his judgement. But I'm left with the uneasy feeling that the real hurdle here was that very young reader's perception that nobody would ever be interested in anyone over the age of about twenty five. Linda is all too right when she asks 'What is this obsession with youth?'

Some Thoughts About Literary Agents

2011-12-07T22:42:00.000Z

Having parted company with my agent a few weeks ago, amicably enough, I've been pondering the topic a bit. I don't intend to look for another one. I'm going indie in all possible ways, although that's not to say that I wouldn't be prepared to pay for some help in the future. Just that I might be looking for dedicated editing or IP expertise instead. However, the excellent Passive Guy reposted an extract from this piece by US author Dean Wesley Smith, on his wonderfully informative blog recently, and it gave me one of those Road to Damascus moments, from which there is no turning back.

Essentially, the piece is a reflection on the changing role of the literary agent, and since I've lived through those changes, (the UK is not so very dissimilar from the US in this respect) and know a bit about them but had never quite clarified it all in my own mind, the whole piece gave me serious food for thought.

When you're asked to give talks and workshops these days, the most frequently asked question is usually 'how do I find a literary agent?'

With extreme difficulty, is the answer, but that doesn't deter writers, because received wisdom is that no publisher will look at a submission unless it comes via a literary agent. This is generally true. But what most agents won't tell you is that many if not most submissions will now be rejected out of hand, even with the backing of a literary agent.

What strikes me most forcefully, though, is how afraid we writers are. We are afraid of not getting an agent and we are afraid of not finding a publisher, or losing the agent and publisher we have, no matter how badly we have been treated in the past. We are afraid of saying 'no' to requests to work for commercial organisations for no money, lest we should be thought troublesome when anyone else in this position would be thought businesslike. But most of all, we are afraid of being without an agent in what seem like (and frequently are) shark infested waters. We are afraid that if we send multiple submissions to agencies, we will upset potential agents - and this is true. Some agents can get remarkably (and ridiculously) huffy about this. So we spend (waste) years submitting one application at a time, and waiting and waiting and waiting. If we are lucky enough to secure the services of an agent, we become remarkably humble, are terrified of rocking the boat with even mild complaints about lack of communication or lack of progress, or suggestions as to how we might want our career as a writer to develop. I know all this because I've been there, done that and got several tee-shirts in the art of supplication.

Let's pause for a moment, and think about it. As I write this, I'm waiting for our accountant to come and finalise our annual accounts - myself and my husband are both freelances. To be honest, we probably don't earn enough to pay an accountant, but our books are complicated by the fact that we do so many different things, and we've been with this small company for years. We pay a reasonable sum monthly, up front and he is efficient and friendly. Would I ever, in a million years, be afraid of upsetting him by making a suggestion about the way our business might go in the future? Why should I? We're both acknowledged professionals and he has a set of skills for which I'm very happy indeed to pay. The only time I'm afraid of my accountant is when he phones up and asks me if I can remember what I paid £53.47p for, a year ago and what was this sum of £28.73p which I lodged eleven months ago.

Unfortunately, the relationship between writer and agent is clouded with all kinds of other emotions, and I think - like so much to do with writing - there is a certain unsatisfactory imbalance about it that prevents it from being truly professional.

One of the most interesting observations made by Dean Wesley Smith was about the way in which agents started to demand rewrites, to become - in effect - our editors. He linked this with a seismic shift in publishing which threw a number of young editors onto the market - editors who then became agents, because they thought they knew 'what the market wanted'.

I can distinctly remember that shift myself - my old agent for plays, back in the seventies and eighties, would buy me the occasional lunch, chat to me about how my writing was going, make suggestions for industry openings, negotiate contracts skilfully and ruthlessly - but would never have dreamed of offering detailed script re-writing suggestions. That was not his job.

Move forward some years and when I finally secured an agent for my prose, she asked for (and got) rewrite after rewrite after rewrite. Publishers, she said, 'demanded an oven-ready product'. She was a good editor, and I learned a lot from her, for which I'm very grateful - but I was and still am a natural 'mid-lister'. I spent (wasted) a lot of time blaming myself for not being able to give her what she wanted, when in fact she wasn't looking at what she could do with what I so clearly was. There was, I now realise, an imbalance in the relationship. But when we parted company - with the triumph of hope over experience - I still looked for another agent.

I don't know what the solution is, but it strikes me that it might be healthier all round if we paid our agents a fee, just as we pay our accountants or website developers - without giving them any 'equity' in our product. But I can't see that working, can you? And we writers are curiously reluctant to pay professional fees for a professional job. Instead, we are content to relinquish equity in our intellectual property in the innocent belief that some day - with the help of our magician/agent, we will strike it very very rich. This is unfair in all kinds of ways - not least to agents themselves who, whatever else they may be, are not magicians, but it's probably because so many of us are poverty stricken and don't have much confidence in the value of our own work. We'll believe practically anyone who tells us that if we do this, this or this, all manner of things will be well.

It ain't necessarily so.

Don't get me wrong. A good editor is a pearl of great price. If he or she asks the right difficult and searching questions (rather than attempting to rewrite for you, always a crime, in my book) you - in answering them - will become an infinitely better writer. If your editor is a friend or colleague who loves your work, and has your best interests at heart, there is no relationship quite like it! I've known it once or twice with radio producers, and theatre directors.

For fiction, there are excellent professional editors who - for a flat fee - will analyse your work, and put you on the right track. As usual, the trick is in identifying the genuine pearls. I don't have any easy answers, but it's something we should certainly be discussing. Before embarking on the long and frustrating search for an agent, we should certainly pause and ask ourselves why, these days, that generally means any agent at all, not the right agent for us - and that being the case, why is our opinion of ourselves so low while our expectations of them remain so unrealistically high?

Breaking Into Video Game Design

2011-11-17T22:23:00.000Z

I've spent a bit of time recently, helping my clever son to edit his own first publication for Kindle, a career guide about breaking into video games design. He has always been keen on writing - and very good at it, I think - but then I would say that, wouldn't I? This isn't a big book, but I do think it's one that could be very useful for any young person who thinks he or she might want to work in the games industry.

For years, Charles has known that he wanted to work in video games. As a very young child, he was always drawing and colouring in what came to be known in this family as his 'disasters': pictures full of 'happenings' - usually pretty disastrous ones! People would come into our kitchen and look at all these drawings pinned up on the wall and say 'well - er- yes!' For a while, we thought he might want to study art, but it didn't turn out that way. Instead, he did an honours maths degree. He had always been mad about board games, games of all kinds really. Every careers advisor he had ever spoken to had said that he would need to be a demon programmer, but when he did two years of computer science at Glasgow University, he found out that he didn't enjoy it much! None of this dampened his interest in games though.

After graduation (and a few months as a kitchen porter) he worked in the games industry for a couple of years - including a spell with Rockstar - on short Quality Assurance contracts, getting his name on several major titles in the process. Then he was accepted onto a postgraduate masters course in Video Game Development at the University of Abertay in Dundee - a course about which he speaks very highly indeed. Now, he and three colleagues from that course have set up their own development studio, called Guerilla Tea - also in Dundee.

As he would say himself, he knew what he wanted to do and to be - just didn't know what that job was called. Design, in video games, involves not just coming up with ideas (although that's a part of it) but making the game itself work as a game. He tells me he uses his maths and his QA experience a lot. Also all those years of creating disasters and writing about them!

If you're interested in the games industry and how it works - even if you aren't actually aiming for a career as a video game designer - you could do worse than download and read this guide. I think it's very nicely written but it also gives a fascinating overview of an industry which is changing and developing so rapidly that our kids generally know more about it than we do.

Bird of Passage - The Cover

2011-11-07T23:03:00.000Z

Here it is, at last - the cover for my new novel, which I'm scheduling as an eBook for Kindle, with a publication date of around the 18th November - that's if I can get enough concentrated time to finish the final edits and the formatting.

The cover is by a young digital artist called Matt Zanetti, a partner in the new Dundee based video game development company, Guerilla Tea. You can see some more of Matt's amazing art on GT's website, (quite different from this) and he was recently featured extensively in 3D Artist magazine. I find this cover very moving. Bird of Passage is a novel about institutional cruelty, about childhood trauma, betrayal and abiding love and it seems to me as though the cover brilliantly reflects all of these things - I couldn't have asked for anything better.

Bird of Passage - What's In A Name?

2011-10-24T14:09:00.001+01:00

If you have a quick look at the last post but one, you'll see that I was debating over the choice of name for my new novel, the one that I'll be publishing to Kindle in a few weeks time. I've scheduled it for 18th November, and I'll be having a launch event on my author's Facebook page, on or near that date - depends how quickly I can pull everything together. I say 'my new novel' but there are three novels - Bird of Passage, a big, romantic Polish epic called The Amber Heart and a brand new Scottish historical novel, which isn't quite finished, but soon will be, called The Physic Garden. I've scheduled Bird of Passage as an eBook this year, and I'll make some decisions about the others early in 2012. Watch this space!

Don't ask me how I've managed to get so much work ready to go, all at the same time, but a lot of it has to do with being 'distracted' by plays over the years, but wanting desperately to carry on writing prose fiction at the same time. Well, I did carry on writing it, but it's definitely 'mid-list' fiction, which doesn't slot neatly into any one genre. I've been having a hard time selling it in the current market - and that's even with an agent. I've had lots of 'rave rejections' as my colleague Maggie Craig calls them - editors saying how much they love my writing, but 'the marketing department doesn't think they can sell it.'

Only a little while ago, I heard yet another a literary agent talking about the death of the mid-list. Well, I hope she's wrong, because not only do I write it, but I love to read it. Besides, I'm pretty sure she wasn't taking Kindle and other platforms into account. eBooks are - thank heavens - providing a home for the kind of mid-list fiction that so many of us love - well written, thought provoking novels, telling stories we want to read, a slow burn rather than a flash in the pan - perhaps not wildly experimental or narrowly structured, but absorbing fiction that leaves us satisfied in some deep way.

Anyway, after much agonising and consulting of friends (and then ignoring their suggestions, sorry folks - but the consultation really helped!) I went with Bird of Passage.It seems to me to encapsulate everything that the book is about. The novel has been described as 'Wuthering Heights Meets The Bridges of Madison County.' I've always loved Wuthering Heights, and it did start out as a sort of homage to that novel, albeit with a Scottish/Irish setting, and a story spanning the years from the 1960s to the present. Back when I was regularly dramatising classics for BBC Radio 4 - and although they let me loose on everything from Ben Hur to Treasure Island - they would never let me dramatise Wuthering Heights. I've blogged (crossly) about that before! So I decided that I had to write my own novel.

It's about a boy called Finn, who is sent to a Scottish island farm to work as a 'tattie howker' - the Scottish name for potato harvester. (There's a very old photograph of them above and a painting by my husband, Alan Lees, below.) Even when we moved to Scotland in the 1960s, people still came over from Ireland, usually from Donegal, to dig the tatties. They were sometimes treated very badly, and their accommodation was not the best. In Bird of Passage, Finn strikes up a friendship with the grand-daughter of the farmer, a girl called Cairistiona, always known as Kirsty.

Kirsty becomes a talented and ambitious artist, but her work is inextricably tied up with her love, not just for the island itself, but for Finn, who comes and goes like the mysterious corncrake which visits the island every summer. Finn, however, is psychologically damaged by a childhood so traumatic that he can only recover his memories piece by piece. What happened at the brutal Industrial School, to which he was committed while still a little boy? For the sake of his own sanity, he must try to find out why he was sent there in the first place, and what became of his mother. As he struggles to answer these questions, his ability to love and be loved in return is called into question. He is the Bird of Passage of the title – a wanderer from place to place, a summer visitor who can call nowhere home.

Looking back at the novel now, I can see that what began as Kirsty’s story, gradually, over successive rewrites, began to change, and began to focus more and more on Finn. I found myself needing to know exactly why he was the way he was. It was as though he was insisting on telling his story and the more I wrote, the more central it became. Now, I think the balance is probably right. Kirsty is still a major figure, but Finn has his rightful place too. And there is a mystery at the heart of the novel that only Finn can solve - for himself, but for us too.

Meanwhile, a young digital artist called Matt Zanetti has done some superb cover art for me, a picture which seems to reflect the feeling of the novel precisely. A picture, moreover, which convinced me that I had got my title right. But I'll save that for a later post!

Some Thoughts About eBook Pricing - and Guilty Lending.

2011-10-07T18:45:00.002+01:00

The other night, in one of my frequent sleepless spells (my mind doesn't seem to take any notice of my body's manifest need for sleep, these days) I found myself thinking about the price of eBooks. Most writers who are publishing their backlists or their own new 'inventory' tend to go for the cheaper option, keeping the price around the £2.00 mark or less. Much less, in the case of small collections of stories, for example, which generally sell at 80 - 90p.
I've heard various pronouncements from conventional publishers on this score, most of them attempting to justify their prices for downloads which are generally much closer to the prices charged for 'paper' books.
But no matter how good the cause, there is an optimum price beyond which people - especially young people, who are in the habit of downloading music and games - are reluctant to go. In fact there is some evidence from the overall download industry, that reasonably low priced downloads tend to curb piracy. Illegal downloads are and will increasingly become a problem, but all the same, current evidence suggests that the majority of people are law-abiding - at a price! It may not say much for public morality, but it's a fact that if people can download cheaply and legally, that's what most of them will do.
I've heard publishers and even writers justifying their higher download prices by talking about 'payment for content' and it's a reasonable point to make.
The amount of work that goes into a novel is huge. Nobody is more aware of that than a novelist! But then the amount of work that goes into - for example - even a small downloadable I-Phone game is also huge, and generally involves three or four or more people going flat out for months. The single geek, working alone in his bedroom, much loved by news programmes, is rare these days. Game development is a professional pursuit and commercially licensed software costs a fortune. So does the necessary hardware. And yet these downloads are generally sold for pennies rather than pounds, with their makers depending on volume of sales to bring in the cash.
Besides, the pronouncements of publishers declaring that they (and we) must 'pay for content' would be somewhat more credible if conventional advances were not already so low and royalties so tiny that most authors almost never manage to 'earn back' even very low advances, so that they are left in a constant state of guilt - an unhealthy state of affairs and one which isn't conducive to good working relationships.
However, the thing that gave me my small moment of clarity, at three o'clock the other morning, was the fact that I was finishing an extraordinarily good book called Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris and - dear reader - I must guiltily admit that I had bought it from the second hand bookshelf in our community shop. You can salve my conscience by going away and buying a copy right now. Not only that, but as I finished it, with a sigh of satisfaction (it really is a very good book!) I found myself thinking of my various relatives and friends who might also like to read it, mentally making a little list, who to give it to first, and then she could pass it on to that friend and so on and so on...A chain of people, reading the novel, and not a sou going back to Joanne or her publisher, who put in all that work in the first place. (I do buy new books, often, honest - but I still felt guilty!)
But it also struck me that - now that I have a Kindle - if I had come across this novel at, say, £1.90, as a download, I would have clicked and bought it without a second thought. But if I had seen it in a bookshop, I maybe wouldn't. If I had money I might, but I can't even afford to heat my house, so books are a luxury. Reading, however, is as essential as breathing, so I can justify low priced download treats.And it also struck me that most of the friends to whom I had considered lending the book would almost certainly have done exactly the same. And then I started to add up the small amounts of money which would be generated for writers and publishers by each of those downloads, and it very quickly came to more, quite a lot more, than the price that somebody paid for the original book, the same paperback copy which lots of people will have read, by the time it has been passed around.
I can't believe that publishers live in such commercial seclusion that they are unaware of just how much casual borrowing of paperbacks goes on, here in the real world. Wouldn't it be better if we paid just a little for a download instead?
Of course, charity shops will suffer in the future, if this takes off in a big way. But then there's all the difference in the world between the small charity or village shop with its shelf or two of paperbacks, and the big charity business, competing with struggling bookshops, and selling thousands of freely acquired, almost new books at commercial prices, with no benefit to writer or publisher at all. The former will have no trouble finding donated books. The latter may begin to struggle a bit. I know they do sterling work, but still - I find it quite hard to have much sympathy.

Enticing Book Titles - Decisions Decisions.

2011-10-02T14:43:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking about titles this week, and here's the reason why. I'm planning to publish a new novel to Kindle in time for Christmas - I'm currently aiming to have it ready to go in November, but the title is giving me pause for thought. And the time is coming when I'll have to make some definite decisions, if only for the sake of the cover artist.

I know a great deal has been written about titles, and how attractive or otherwise they are. There are certainly fashions in titles. The wonderfully quirky and excellent 'Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' spawned a whole set of less than wonderfully quirky imitation titles which made me - personally - want to avoid the other books like the plague so I never found out whether they were good or not. A recent analysis revealed that best sellers often include specific words: dead, blue, girl, spring to mind, but there were others. The devil was more popular than God - in titles, anyway. But maybe he has the best books as well as the best tunes.

In my many years of experience of writing stories, plays and novels, I've come to the conclusion that you either know the title right away - probably before you have written the book.... or you have real problems. There is no happy medium. I knew that The Curiosity Cabinet could never be anything but the Curiosity Cabinet, and that was long before the novel was written, when it was in its first incarnation as a trilogy of plays for BBC Radio 4.

My story A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture had a name, even before the first draft was written. I had the idea for the story when I was wandering round a 'museum of torture' in a small Italian town on a quiet afternoon in October. My work in progress - a novel called The Physic Garden - will almost certainly stay with that title come hell or high water, because it seems so right for the book.

But sometimes, even while you love what you're working on, the title doesn't quite gel. My Polish historical novel went through almost as many titles as drafts before I finally settled on The Amber Heart. And this is also what has happened with the book known as The Summer Visitor. This is another novel with a Scottish island setting, similar to The Curiosity Cabinet, although the story is quite different. I don't know why I felt the need to explore this setting again in fiction but sometimes these things just happen.

It starts in the early 1960s when a young Irish boy, Finn O’Malley, is sent from Ireland to Scotland, to work at the potato harvest. He forms a close friendship with Cairistiona (Kirsty) Galbreath, the farmer’s grand-daughter. But later on, when Kirsty moves away from home, the threads that have bound these two friends so closely together begin to unravel, and it seems that only Kirsty’s ambitions as an artist can give her the fulfilment she seeks. Kirsty’s work is inextricably tied up with her love, not just for the island itself, but for Finn, who comes and goes like the mysterious corncrake which visits the island every summer.

Finn, however, is psychologically damaged by a childhood so traumatic that he can only recover his memories piece by piece – and slowly. What happened at the brutal Industrial School, to which he was committed while still a little boy? For the sake of his own sanity, he must try to find out why he was sent there in the first place, and what became of his mother. As he struggles to answer these questions, his ability to love and be loved in return is called into question.

So that's what it's about. Loosely. You'll have to read the book to find out more! But the title is still giving me pause for thought.

It started out as a novel called Darragh Martin. The story was completely different and has been drastically rewritten since. Somewhere along the way, the main character changed and his name changed too. Later on, it became The Corncrake, which I still quite like. I thought about The Bonny Irish Boy, but I don't think that does it, because he isn't bonny at all. The Corncrake is a mysterious bird - a summer visitor - and that's exactly what Finn is. So The Corncrake is still an option. Eventually I settled on The Summer Visitor which I still like. But then somebody suggested that The Water's Wide might be better and now I'm not sure. A quick poll on Facebook and Twitter has resulted in more confusion since nobody seems to be in agreement and yet all their reasons are valid and interesting! (Focus groups, eh?) Some kind person, however, has just messaged me on Twitter to say that he likes either The Summer Visitor - or Summer Visitor. And I'm thinking he may have hit on something. Because for some reason, Summer Visitor is better than The Summer Visitor, in my mind anyway - but I'm not sure why!

ALL SUGGESTIONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS GRATEFULLY RECEIVED!

Burns on the Solway Now on Kindle

2011-09-27T13:03:00.000+01:00

I've just uploaded my play Burns on the Solway to Kindle (with extreme difficulty, I might add, so if you buy it, please forgive any formatting glitches! Plays are much harder than novels to format!) It was staged at the Oran Mor in Glasgow, and is a play about the last few weeks of Robert Burns' life, down on the Solway Coast of Dumfries and Galloway. I remember clearly when I first had the idea for this play although it was many years before I wrote it and even more years before the actual production.
We were camping on the shores of Loch Ken, as we used to do every summer when the village kids were young, going off in a huge group (sometimes as many as 50 adults, kids and dogs. We used to tell the police that we were all going to be away!) to camp and go canoeing and boating. The kids, all grown-up now, still remember it as a magical time. The adults all remember it as fairly magical too, although we also remember the extreme cold, on occasions, and the thunder-storms and the mud and the endless barbecues. But on the whole, it was wonderful.
It was on one of these trips that - since son, husband, and others were out on the lake - I took myself off in the car, alone, to a place called Brow Well on the Solway, which was the 'poor man's spa' to which the seriously ill poet was sent by his doctors, and advised to go 'sea-bathing' in an effort to find a cure for what may have been a terminal heart condition, although there are still debates about the cause of his death. It doesn't look as if it has changed much in all the years since, a simple, picturesque place with a chalybeate spring, and a few cottages. From there, it's a short walk down to the coast, where the mud flats stretch to infinity and there is a wild rock garden fringing the whole place with big clumps of pink thrift, rustling in the breeze, and other small flowers clinging to the edges of the land. A deeply atmospheric and evocative place. And I was there at the same time of year - July, when the thrift was dying.
Not hard to imagine the poet here. And then you realise, with a shock, just what 'seabathing' must have entailed. The water is wide and shallow and for him to wade until he was waist high must have entailed a terrible struggle through cold water. He was still a young man, his wife Jean was about to go into labour with his last child, he was terminally ill and he was totally poverty stricken, with people pursuing him for unpaid debts. A few weeks later, after his death, he was already being lauded as The Bard and people had descended on poor Jean in ravening hordes, begging for manuscripts, anything written in the poet's hand. Ghoulish souvenir hunting is not a modern phenomenon.
This is what the play is about, as well as everything that lead up to it. There are only three characters: Burns, played by Donald Pirie, looking and sounding and being as like the poet as it was possible to be - uncanny really - an equally superb Clare Waugh as Jean, and Celine Donoghue as the musician, weaving her sinuous way between the two of them, playing a variety of instruments perfectly.
It was a lovely, well reviewed production and a totally happy process, directed by Michael Emans.
I have more writing on this theme planned - a couple of novels which are gnawing away at my imagination as these things have a habit of doing - but I can't imagine myself making a start on the first of them until next year. We'll see. Perhaps another visit to Brow Well will be needed. I love the poems and - in particular - the songs of Robert Burns and find myself coming back to the work and the man, as well as the women in his life, time after time. So perhaps it is time for me to tackle something longer on the subject.

The Secret Commonwealth on Kindle

2011-09-25T16:53:00.000+01:00

I'm in the process of uploading several of my plays - professionally produced, but as yet unpublished - to Kindle. Two of my previous plays, Wormwood and The Price of a Fish Supper are in conventional print, the former in a collection called Scotland Plays and the latter in Scottish Shorts, both published by the excellent Nick Hern Books. But even though Kindle isn't the obvious home for plays, I've decided that three or four of them might sit well as downloads and The Secret Commonwealth is the first. It's essentially a monologue, which means that it's very readable - and I'm told it's also poetic and fairly densely written, so I think people may get something - a different experience, but nevertheless an interesting one - out of reading the text. It's probably the same with the other two plays, Burns on the Solway and Quartz, but I'll blog about those in the next week or so.
The Secret Commonwealth was produced at The Oran Mor in Glasgow, during one of their A Play, A Pie and a Pint seasons of lunchtime theatre. It is the story of the Reverend Robert Kirk, a minister of the church, in Aberfoyle, in late seventeenth century Scotland. He communicated with the faeries on the mysterious and numinous Doon Hill, or Dun Sithean just outside the town, wrote a treatise about them called The Secret Commonwealth, and was said, eventually, to have been taken away by them to the faery realm, for giving away their secrets. Even his grown-up son believed that his father had 'gone to his own people.'

Liam Brennan and Deirdre Graham

It is possible, however, to read that treatise in another way. Kirk was no fool, and had been instrumental in helping to translate the metical psalms and then the bible into Gaelic. He was writing at a time when all the ancient customs and beliefs of the Gael - beliefs which early Celtic christianity had somehow managed to accommodate quite comfortably - were under threat from a new and much less compromising religion. There are some who see Kirk's treatise as subversive text, asserting the value of those old beliefs which had underpinned life in the Scottish highlands and islands for so many years.

It is this that is addressed in the play which was very well reviewed. Joyce MacMillan called Kirk 'a hero for our time' and that was, I think, exactly what I was trying to achieve with a 'lyrical yet driven 50 minute lament over Scotland's failure to integrate its dour Presbyterian faith and dogged Enlightenment rationalism, with the wilder, more beautiful and more sensual aspects of its Gaelic heritage.'

If you want to read more about the play, you can find a couple of splendid interviews here
One with Liam Brennan who played Kirk with great sensitivity and understanding, and one with brilliant young director Jen Hainey who talks about visiting Dun Sithean, or the hill of the fairies, outside Aberfoyle.

Dun Sithean

If you'd like to read the play itself, you can buy The Secret Commonwealth from Amazon's Kindle Store as a very reasonably priced download, here.
Finally, my son the video games designer has made me some lovely covers for my plays. I wanted them to be reasonably simple - I didn't want to add too much to the cost of the eBooks - but striking, and evocative of each play, and I think he has managed to achieve that.

The Invisible Woman

2011-09-16T11:27:00.002+01:00

The issue of the 'invisibility' of middle aged and older women seems to be everywhere, the word itself cropping up with disturbing regularity. I know the feeling. For a writer it's sometimes an advantage to be able to lurk quietly, watching what goes on, making mental notes, unheeded and unnoticed. At others, it can be deeply frustrating. But here's the thing. We aren't invisible to other women and especially not to middle aged and older women. Often, you'll catch a faintly jaded eye across a crowded room and know that she is feeling exactly the same as you: a mixture of indignation and amusement. That prickly sense of identification will pass between you like electricity.

To some extent, this disregard of the ‘other’ happens all the time and to everyone. It's the cause of many crass political and business decisions: this inability to put yourself in another's shoes, the assumption that just because you feel a certain way everyone else feels that way too. There was a scene during the last series of The Apprentice which neatly illustrated the problem. One of the contestants, an intelligent, determined and talented young woman, was unable to fathom why anyone might want to buy a back pack which would convert into a child's car seat. I can remember a time before motherhood when I might have felt exactly the same. But as it turned out, she was wrong, because it was a mega order for these same back packs that won the opposing team their treat. We all do it, making the assumption that everyone feels and thinks the way we do. But I suspect we do it more relentlessly when we're young through sheer lack of experience. One wrong business decision, based on a mistaken generalisation, needn't be a disaster. But this state of mind can have wider implications and the one that concerns me right now is my own field: writing and publishing.

Earlier this year, a colleague called Linda Gillard published to Amazon’s Kindle Store a beautifully written novel called House of Silence which was proving – as she herself says – ‘impossible’ to sell in the conventional way. ‘We actually ran out of editors to send it to!’ she says. Now this is no beginner we’re talking about. Linda is a talented and experienced writer with a successful, award winning track record and a good agent. The book in question was widely praised, but met with what another fine writer, Maggie Craig, calls the ‘rave rejection’. The problem with these – and I’ve had plenty of them myself – is that there’s nowhere to go with them. More often than not, they will say things like ‘This is a wonderful novel’ or ‘I just love this!’ And believe me, editors don’t lightly admit to loving something. If they don't like your writing, they won't pull their punches out of consideration for your feelings. But the problem invariably lies with the perceptions of those doing the marketing who may not even have read the book. Linda’s novel didn’t slot neatly into any narrow genre. Worse, as far as they were concerned, a significant percentage of her readership (although by no means all) consists of middle aged and older women in search of a thoughtful, well written novel: books that used to be called ‘midlist’ and were deemed to be eminently publishable. Now these same books, their writers and their voracious readers seem to have become largely invisible to conventional book marketing. But these are so often readers with the incentives of time, intelligence and a certain amount of disposable income. Now, in ever increasing numbers, they also have e-readers. And more will be acquiring them for Christmas.

Recent experience would suggest that an older woman in possession of a Kindle or a Nook, wants a more varied choice of reading matter than that generally on offer in your average supermarket. And that’s in spite of the mountains of paper books published every year. Those of us who love reading can identify with the demoralising experience of visiting a big book chain and – in spite of the many exclamatory promotions – finding nothing we really want to read. Inevitably, the marketing departments of publishing houses have become concerned with selling to big stores rather than selling to readers. But the buyers for those chains of stationers and supermarkets with a sideline in books will be focussing on a narrow demographic. Happily for Linda, there is a much bigger market out there. Her novel has become a great success and continues to sell widely and to be received enthusiastically. She sold more than 12,000 downloads of House of Silence, (and counting) in approximately 4 months and she is already building on that success with another eBook called Untying the Knot.

She is not alone. With the collapse of the mid-list, there are many experienced, professional writers who are struggling to find publication for widely praised and properly edited work, writers, moreover, who already have a significant following among the reading public. My agent is currently sending out a new historical novel for me, in the usual way, and I'd be happy to find a publisher with whom I could work in the long term. But we aren't exactly being knocked down in the rush. Besides that, I have numerous pieces of good work including novels, which don't quite fit the mould of what he is currently sending out. Most of it is, I believe, work of quality, writing that a significant number of people would enjoy reading. And there seems little point in hanging onto it in the hope of some hypothetical jam tomorrow. That's the other thing about reaching a certain age. You become braver and more confident in your own abilities. (Maybe the invisibility helps.)

So I’ve started my own Kindle business with a trio of short stories, one of which rejoices in the title A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture and a novel called The Curiosity Cabinet which was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize, published in the conventional way, sold out within the year, was well reviewed, widely praised, but never reprinted, and which Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside called 'a powerful story about love and obligation... a persuasive novel very well written.’ I'm following it up with three professionally produced but unpublished plays. Some of my plays are in conventional print, and continue to sell well. I know that eBook readers are not the most effective way of dealing with plays, but the three I'm planning to publish in this way are - I think - a 'good read' as much as anything else. After that, there will be more short stories and a new novel called The Summer Visitor in time for Christmas.

There are no easy answers to any of this, but I sense that a great many writers are exhilarated by these new opportunities. As a Canadian friend remarked ‘You have a great inventory there. You should be doing something with it.’ Perhaps most of all, we need to become much more businesslike in our dealings with the industry that surrounds us, becoming proactive partners. Some of us feel that the answer to our perceived invisibility may well lie in what we can do for ourselves and for that seemingly disregarded group of 'people like us'. Because although it's wrong to assume that everyone feels the way we do, it's also true to say that there are lots and lots of people out there who do. And if the needs of that group are not even being acknowledged, still less met by the current business model, it's now open to us to seize the initiative and do something about it ourselves.

Why Do I Write?

2011-09-13T09:00:00.002+01:00

'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.'
So said Samuel Johnson. Overused and inaccurate as it is, it’s a line that has been running through my head a great deal recently. It can’t be true, of course, since my income from writing has gone down, rather than up over the years and still I write. So why do I do it?

Maybe I write out of habit. I have been writing for as long as I can remember: poems, stories, plays, articles, but now novels, lots and lots of long novels about which I think I feel more passionate than I have about any other form of writing. For me, coming to grips with this form has felt like coming home after a long and difficult journey.

Is that why I write? For the profound absorption of being in the middle of a new project? For the sense of achievement when I've finished? But there are other things I could do that would give me the same feeling, surely: less exhausting, better paid things.

So do I write for pleasure? Is it always a pleasure? Of course not. But it’s more of pleasure than not writing, which is a pain. When I don’t write, I feel ill. I could no more take a decision to stop doing it than I could take a decision to stop breathing. It's how I cope with life, the universe and everything. I write about it.

Are you still writing? Well, am I?

Of all the questions anyone can ever ask a writer, that is surely the daftest. And the most aggravating, although I reckon only another writer would fully understand why.

But who asks the estate agent – are you still selling houses? Or the doctor – are you still diagnosing? Or the plumber - are you still making a fortune out of….. ?

So why do all my friends and acquaintances, whenever I chance to meet them after a gap of years, or in some cases mere months, inevitably ask me ‘Are you still writing?’ Like that other comment ‘I would write a book if I had the time’ it implies that writing is some casual pastime, a mere indulgence, which you can abandon at will. Not a real job at all. If D List celebrities can conjure 2 book deals out of thin air there can’t be anything too demanding about it, can there? So are you still writing, or have you found something better to do with your spare time? Like canoeing, or cookery.

So, why am I still writing?
Why do I write?
I wonder.

Because I can’t do much else.
Because I want to. Even when I'm not doing it, I desperately want to be doing it. This must be how a vampire feels about blood...
Because when it is going well, there is nothing like it.
Because I go around most of the time with my head in another world
Because characters insist on populating my mind, and somehow I have to find out about them.

I have to find out, I have to know, I need to explore. Not knowing is...

This is what it is!

And that, I suppose, is the real answer.
I write to find out.
Whatever I write, whether it be a play, a novel, or a piece of non fiction, I am writing to find out what happened, what really happened, what happened to make this character the way he/she is, what is happening now and what will happen next? It’s the insistent, persistent desire to know. Non writers always think that you know it all before you start. But in my case at least, it is a constant process of interrogation. Even by the time you type The End you don’t always know. And when you write a play you never know because the actors come along and start asking you questions and then you know you don’t know much at all. Which is half the fun of it. Every book, every story, every play is a quest to find out.

So there it is. I write to find out. And all the other things as well. And for money. Of course, whenever I can, I write for money!

Cover Art for eBooks.

2011-08-28T12:23:00.002+01:00

There have been some interesting discussions lately, on Facebook and on various writing blogs, about covers for eBooks - so here's my take on it. I thought it might be informative to make a comparison between a few of my own covers. To the left is the cover image which was commissioned by Polygon for the print version of The Curiosity Cabinet. It was done by James Hutcheson and I think it's a fine piece of work, in rich reds and browns. Central to the story of The Curiosity Cabinet is a Jacobean casket in 'raised work' embroidery. You can see an image from something similar here. I know that a real cabinet of curiosities was quite different, but the casket in the novel has been on display in the island's hotel for many years, along with its intriguing contents, and this is what the hoteliers have nicknamed it. There's a scene, early in the book, where one of the characters gazes at the casket and its contents and makes the connection that they are all women's things. She finds herself wondering about the person who once owned them. I think it is this scene which is reflected in the cover. I never met James, although I was certainly asked for cover suggestions, during the publication process, and I think my ideas were taken into account. I know this doesn't always - or perhaps even often - happen. I've heard tales of wildly unsuitable covers inflicted on writers in the name of 'marketing' - covers which would probably mislead readers about the nature of the novel - and it would be true to say that there are fashions in cover design, like everything else. For a while, it seemed as though every historical novel seemed to display a nearly headless female in fancy dress, a fashion which seems fortunately to have faded!

When it came to deciding on a cover for the eBook version of the Curiosity Cabinet (now in Amazon's Kindle Store) I was delighted when my friend, distinguished textile and digital artist Alison Bell offered to design a cover for me. She's an 'island' person herself, having lived and worked on the Isle of Arran for many years, and she made the cover (below) as an artwork in response to the book itself. She says 'The narrative works on many layers of memory and time, some hazy, some forgotten, but the island's presence is constant, a refuge and a place to grow and start afresh. I wanted the colours to be soft, subtle, muted, with hints of turquoise, like the sea up there. It is a gentle book which drifts into the mind's eye as each chapter unfolds.'
It was a real pleasure to me to have the artist read and respond to my book - yet another of the serendipitious pleasures of Kindle publishing, tricky as the process may be!

I first started thinking about cover art some years ago, when I published a small poetry collection called The Scent of Blue - mostly poems that had been published elsewhere, in literary magazines and anthologies. I used my own photograph for the cover: a closeup of an antique Chinese embroidery. The designer incorporated that image into the overall design. It was very effective and attractive and I've been complimented on it ever since but it certainly made me think hard about cover image reflecting and in some way interpreting contents. I know how complicated is the connection between design and marketing and how many other factors must be taken into account, such as an overall 'house style' or an image that means that a reader will recognise you as a brand . However I do think that in this brave new world of eBook publishing, we should be just a little wary of succumbing to the same pressures that beset conventional publishing.

We need to acknowledge the expertise of artists and designers, and we will need to buy that in. But I think we also need to reserve the right to take some decisions for ourselves. If we are going to become empowered as writers, then we need to take charge of our covers too. And that may mean taking a 'horses for courses' approach. It may mean working with - and giving free rein to - artists who want to read and respond to a text or it may mean giving an artist a definite brief and I suspect the same writer may want to take different approaches for different books.

When the 'artist response' approach works well - as I think it has for the new Curiosity Cabinet cover - it results in the creation of a companion piece of art with a life of its own. There is much that can be done with this as an image for an individual book, for an individual writer, rather than a branding exercise for a publisher. I've had postcards made of The Curiosity Cabinet eBook cover, for instance, and they are a promotional tool not just for me and my book but for the artist as well.

But I'd be the first to admit that this is only one of a number of possible approaches, for an eBook 'cover' is at once more and less than a conventional book cover. The thumbnail hooks the potential reader in, the larger picture reinforces the purchase. I think we have to examine each project individually. I'm currently working on covers for three of my professionally produced plays which I intend to release onto Kindle, and these covers will have a certain similarity of theme, so that they are recognisable as part of a little series. The same goes for stories. But I'm already planning the publication of my next Kindle novel, and I can 'see' in my mind's eye the way I want the cover to look, the way that I want it to represent what is quite a dark, Gothic, Wuthering Heights-ish sort of tale - albeit with a Scottish setting.

All of which leads me to another point - and perhaps a subject for my next post. There is a lot of advice out there. Almost too much. And - of course - I'm only adding to it! When I started out on my writing career, many years ago, there was too little advice. We soldiered on, made mistakes, begged for help where we could find it, and wished that we had learned some things earlier. Now, however, a person with only a tiny amount of experience can represent themselves as an expert. We all need advice, all need to learn, all the time. But when following advice about writing and publishing, do it with your own critical faculties well tuned. If the person giving the advice is an experienced writer or editor, somebody whose work you respect, then by all means take them seriously. But just be aware that sometimes we have to make our own mistakes and find out what works for us. On the whole, the more experienced the advice giver, the less prescriptive they will be about telling you exactly what you need to do!

2011-08-26T15:05:00.000+01:00

Henrietta Dalrymple's Receipt for Cosmetic Lotion

Take a quart of dew, gathered at sunrise upon a May morning, with half a pint of fumitory water. Put to them of lavender and rose water, two ounces of each, then let all the ingedients be properly mixed and put in a vessel to settle.

Now take clean water into which you have thrown dried chamomile flowers, and allow it to simmer, gently, for some time. When it has thoroughly cooled ,use it to wash your cheeks, neck and breast. Next, when the skin is quite dry, gently apply the dewy lotion, scented with rose and lavender, and your skin will soon appear very clear and bright and white.

The Curiosity Cabinet on Kindle - Sources of Inspiration

2011-08-12T14:46:00.001+01:00

With the blessing of my agent, Edwin Hawkes at Makepeace Towle, and with the encouragement and very practical help of a number of friends who have gone before (Linda Gillard, Chris Longmuir and Bill Kirton, especially) I’ve now uploaded the Curiosity Cabinet to Kindle. It’s for sale at the bargain price of £1.94 and – right after the steep learning curve that is Kindle - I’m embarking on another exciting venture: publicising it. People keep asking me questions about all this, just as I kept asking other people for advice, and I want to blog about the experience as much to pass on some of the generous help that I received, as anything else.

But first things first. The book. Let me tell you a bit about it. Because it’s no coincidence that TCC is my first Kindle novel. When you write a novel, you have to fall in love with it. Not just with the characters, but with the idea of the book in your head. It’s hard to describe this process to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. It isn’t anything like the white heat of inspiration that new writers seem to think has to strike before they can write. So much of writing is perspiration rather than inspiration. But I’ve blogged about this feeling before. It probably applies to all creative ventures. The idea of it must excite you as much at the end of the work as it does at the beginning. Most writers have far more ideas than time to write them and we all keep ideas folders or notebooks, or similar . But the ideas we pick up and run with are those which excite us most, ideas which carry on exciting us from start to finish, no matter how many edits we have to do. Twenty or more drafts is not out of the ordinary. It can be exhausting, it can be irritating, it can even be superficially boring. It is always hard work, but all the same, you never quite lose the feeling in the pit of your stomach that here is a world you love to be in, with people you need to know more about. And that means that you are able to live with an idea for a very long time, even while you are working on all kinds of other creative projects. Which is what I did with this novel.

So - I first had the idea for The Curiosity Cabinet more years ago than I care to remember. I had read a little piece – I forget where now, but suspect it was in an Edinburgh museum – about Lady Grange who was kidnapped to St Kilda on the instigation of her husband. Incidentally, there is an excellent new book about Lady Grange, The Prisoner of St Kilda by Margaret Macauley, whom I met recently on Gigha. I can recommend this wry, beautifully written and immensely readable slice of history. The Curiosity Cabinet is, of course, nothing like this story, or only insofar as it involves a woman, in early 18th Century Edinburgh, being kidnapped to a remote Scottish Island, for reasons which are not revealed till the end of the novel. At the same time, I had been working on a truly mammoth dramatisation of Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona, for BBC R4, in ten episodes. Gradually, these things fermented away in my imagination and eventually resulted in a radio trilogy produced and directed by Hamish Wilson.

But still the story gnawed away at me, as though there was more to be told. I hadn’t got it quite right. And that was when I embarked on the novel which is markedly different from the plays. It seemed to me that I was trying to tell a passionate love story, but one in which, in some strange, almost supernatural sense – (and without being in any way an overt ghost story) - the tragedies of the past stood a chance of being resolved in the present. I spent a great deal of time on the Isle of Gigha while I was writing the novel, and eventually wrote a factual history of that island and its people called God’s Islanders (Birlinn 2006). But the island inspired the story of The Curiosity Cabinet, as much as anything else – the sense of a small world, with many layers. The sense, as Scottish singer-songwriter Dougie Maclean calls it, of a ‘thin place’ where the boundaries between this world and whatever lies beyond can be very slight indeed.

The novel was eventually submitted for The Dundee Book Prize, was one of three shortlisted, and was published in 2005 by Polygon. That edition sold out. People liked it. My hero, John Burnside, liked it. Lorraine Kelly liked it. Although for some it was seen as a ‘guilty pleasure’. Why? Because it’s unashamedly a love story of course. Well, I make no apologies for that. It is indeed a love story spanning three centuries. Of which more, later, in future posts.

For this new edition, there’s a brand new cover, beautifully made by my friend, textile artist Alison Bell, who interpreted her response to the book as follows: ‘The narrative works on many layers of memory and time, some hazy, some forgotten, but the island’s presence is constant, as a refuge and a place to grow and start afresh. I wanted the colours to be soft, subtle, muted, with hints of turquoise, like the sea up there. It is a gentle book which drifts into the mind’s eye as each chapter unfolds.’

And of course, she’s right. As an ‘island person’ herself, she can see all too well that the island’s presence is central to the book. So if you like love stories, but also if you love Scotland, and Scottish history – and small Hebridean islands too – this may well be the book for you.

Onwards and Upwards - The Curiosity Cabinet

2011-08-01T16:31:00.000+01:00

A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture, already has two lovely reviews, for which I'm deeply grateful. And now, after an intensely sociable, enjoyable - albeit tiring - weekend, I'm starting the process of formatting and checking the manuscript of the Curiosity Cabinet before launching that too onto Kindle, as well as searching for, (and finding), the rights reversion letter which proves that the copyright has reverted to me. As a writer, you become so deeply involved in the world of current work - the 'work in progress' - that it's very hard to pull yourself out of it, and pay attention to other projects. At the moment, I'm working on a newish novel called The Physic Garden, which has undergone several changes over the past year, about which I'll write in due course. Watch this blog! But I'm also spending some time rereading The Curiosity Cabinet so that I can make sure the upload goes as smoothly as possible. I don't think I'll be making many changes to it, except perhaps to the acknowledgements which now need updating.
This was a novel of which I was very fond - and I find that I still am. I don't mean in any self satisfied sense. I just mean that I still like these characters, still love this setting. It's a strange experience, rereading something you wrote a while ago (in this case, five or six years ago). It's almost like a re-encounter with something written by somebody else. Sometimes you even find yourself thinking 'how the hell did I write that?' But The Curiosity Cabinet was a project I lived with for a very long time, because I first wrote it as a trio of plays for BBC Radio 4, produced by Hamish Wilson. That was a tremendously happy production, and the novel that followed was - for some reason which I can't quite fathom - an equally happy experience. It's a quiet story, really - a Scottish love story spanning centuries - but when I think of it, it still warms my heart. I find it easy to summon up the sense of enchantment and involvement I had when I was writing it - and that doesn't always happen, believe me!
Meanwhile, because we had a great many visitors over the weekend, many of whom asked me what I was working on these days, I also had the 'Kindle' conversation with a number of people.
Me: I'm publishing some work onto Kindle. It's very exciting.
Friend: Oooooh, nooooo!
Me: But it's such a beautiful little device.
Friend: But I love books so much!
Me: Er yes, (looks around at house bursting at the seams with real paper books) So do I! But I love being able to download something at the click of a mouse. And I love being able to carry all these words about with me in one little package.
Friend: Hmm. Yes. Well, there's that. My mother/brother/sister/best friend has one. She swears by it. Well to be honest, I'm thinking of asking for one for Christmas!
There was a variation on the conversation and it went like this
Me: I'm publishing some work onto Kindle
Friend: Aaah. (cautiously) How do you feel about your Kindle?
Me: I love it.
Friend: Oh good. (sigh of relief) I love mine too, but I wondered what you might think...

Three Short Stories on Kindle

2011-07-29T23:02:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the silence on this blog over the past couple of weeks but I've been publishing a trio of short stories to Kindle, and it has been a fairly steep learning curve! You can have a look at the results here. And if you want to download them, you'll get three stories for the price of one. They are all stories about 'love' - of a kind. But not conventional love stories. In the title story, A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture, a young couple on holiday in Italy with their new baby, begin to understand how parenthood will change their lives for ever. Incidentally, that was one story where the title came first. We holidayed in Tuscany a few years ago, albeit not with a new baby, and spent a quiet afternoon of our own - well, an hour or two - in the 'Museum of Torture' in Volterra. What makes these rather revolting places so popular I wonder? But I suppose we always are intrigued by cruelty observed from a position of safety. At any rate, it was that particular quiet afternoon, in conjunction with memories of those early months of motherhood which inspired the story, first published in a New Writing Scotland anthology, a couple of years ago. In the Butterfly Bowl, a young woman has to make an impossible choice between the demands of love and her own integrity. And Breathe is a celebration of an unsung life, a lost way of living and enduring family affection.
When I decided to take Kindle publishing seriously, I thought I'd publish something reasonably short before attempting anything more ambitious. And I'm still working with my agent on looking for a conventional publisher for a couple of novels, as well. But where Kindle is concerned, I had some tremendously helpful advice from several friends who are already having plenty of success with this method of publishing, especially Linda Gillard and Chris Longmuir. It's fiddly rather than difficult, and I could imagine it would be even more tricky if you didn't have a well edited manuscript and a certain amount of confidence with manipulating documents online. You need patience, rather than techie know-how. Amazon's notes are incredibly helpful and I think most professional writers know all about the process of writing and rewriting again and again as well as checking things again and again - and again.
I've made mistakes, plenty of them, and no doubt I'll make more - but like everything else, familiarity with the medium will help. And because a number of us are feeling our way into this new and essentially liberating format there's a mutual willingness to help that's invaluable. Writers are, after all, nothing if not communicators. Yet even those of us who could reasonably claim to be experienced professionals seem to spend far too much of our working lives struggling desperately to get work 'out there.' Which is not to deny that the gatekeepers can be useful. And most of us would accept that a good editor is beyond price. But still - it can be very gratifying to be in control for a change.
My next venture will be the Kindle version of my novel, The Curiosity Cabinet and it should be ready some time during August. This was one of three novels shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize and was very nicely published by Polygon in 2005. Lorraine Kelly was kind enough to call it 'heartwarming, realistic and page turning.' It sold out within the year, but Polygon declined to reprint. Given its Scottish setting plus the fact that it's a love story or rather two deliberately intertwined love stories, past and present, with two deeply attractive heroes, past and present - I think it stands a good chance of selling well. We'll see. Meanwhile, I'm making sure it's properly formatted, and talking to a lovely artist friend about the professional cover she's designing for me. Right now, it all feels very exciting indeed!

Kindle: A Blessing for The Midlist?

2011-07-11T21:16:00.000+01:00

I'm busy investigating Kindle, although I won't be getting my hot little hands on one until next week. I can't wait! Meanwhile, I'm following the ongoing debate between those in favour of the conventional route, and those who see a multitude of exciting possibilities in online ventures. Like many writers, I can see - and am involved with - both sides, since I have an agent who is pursuing the former route, with a new manuscript - but I'm also planning to get some material out there on Kindle, with his blessing, starting with a trio of short stories which I plan to release within the month, followed by an online version of a novel which was published in the conventional way. Friends who are doing it already are finding it reasonably straightforward. The big challenges seem to lie in making sure your manuscript is as well edited, as 'clean' as it possibly can be, without the benefit of a publisher's editor and then promoting your work in all possible ways.
Oddly enough, I think this is where the more mature writer, with a track record - as opposed to the younger writer with the stunning debut novel - can score. I'm thinking in particular of the beleaguered midlist writer who may have been dropped by his or her publisher or even agent, for never quite making the big time, never quite bringing in enough cash or simply falling out of fashion with an incoming editor.
In the last few years, that term midlist has more or less assumed pejorative overtones. But in the middle of what, exactly?
Let's leave aside for a moment the brands who aren't really writers at all, although their work is carefully crafted by real writers, good luck to them. You know who they are!
At the top of the tree, there's a scant handful of bestselling writers, who make millions. Far be it from me to knock them. I'd dearly love to be among them, and have a nodding acquaintance with one or two of them. The vast majority of them are best sellers for a reason: most of them are the finest storytellers working today, and the older I grow, the more I come to appreciate the value of an interesting story, beautifully told.
Then, there are the literary writers whose experimental work brings kudos to a publishing house. Once again, I'd be the first to say, good on them, and oh how we need them out there, pushing the boundaries of fiction and just occasionally becoming that rare beast, the unicorn among writers, the bestselling literary writer!
Which leaves me with the place where I probably belong right now: the midlist, encompassing everything from well researched, well written historical fiction to finely crafted contemporary love stories, original crime, quirky comedy and absolutely everything in between. A good read. In fact, the midlist tends to be what you and I like to read when we want something to get our teeth into but not something so tough that it's impossible to chew.
I think Kindle may be a gift for the experienced midlist writer, sitting on a body of fairly recent work, who has tumbled into the marketing black hole that now seems to exist between literary and blockbuster. But let's look at a single not too recent example and imagine what might have happened today.
When the incomparable Barbara Pym was summarily and rudely dismissed by her editor at Faber, she spent the next few years in comparative obscurity before getting her second wind, later in life. You can read the salutory story here. But let's just imagine, for a moment, what might have happened, had a writer like Miss Pym had access to online publishing. She could have said 'hell mend you' or perhaps something gentler, got over the rebuff, got An Unsuitable Attachment out there, taken heart at her sales, made some money to pay the bills and moved on to the next novel. She had a wide and loyal readership. She had a thoroughly starry supporter in poet Philip Larkin, and there were other fine writers who supported her too. It wouldn't have been too hard for her to get the reviews. Just getting the work out there for the people who badly wanted to read it might have inspired her, and we might have had a few more novels from her. When we realise that her finest work, Quartet in Autumn, was yet to come, we are forced to wonder what else she might have written if she wasn't wasting her time touting good books around unresponsive publishers.
Which is a sad, and cheering thought, all at the same time, isn't it?

Poor Kids, A Response to the Film

2011-06-16T15:38:00.000+01:00

I watched Jezza Neumann's moving film about child poverty in the UK last week and wrote a response, which was published here, in The Scottish Review earlier this week. Click on the link, if you'd like to read more. The Scottish Review has an ever widening circulation and the response to this piece has been overwhelmingly positive - it seemed to strike a chord with all kinds of people as the film struck a chord with me and many others. But the overall media response to this film seems to have been fairly muted, which is sad. I do sometimes wonder if writers and artists are culpable too. And I don't exempt myself.
I've written what's known as 'issue based drama' in my day - quite a lot of it - but it sometimes seems to me as though too many poets, novelists and playwrights take a conscious decision to shy away from uncomfortable subjects. Perhaps we recognise that such writing will be hard to sell, hard to place in the current difficult market. And so many of us are struggling anyway. And when all is said and done, you can only write what you feel strongly about at the time. But still, I do sometimes find myself wondering, where is our Dickens? Where, for that matter, is our Robert Burns, writing passionately about poverty and injustice as well as about love?

On Not Writing: Distraction, Disruption, Exhaustion.

2011-06-14T09:10:00.001+01:00

I don’t think I’ve ever been quite this distracted before. No matter what else was going on in my life, I’ve always managed to concentrate on writing, often to the exclusion of everything else. When I look at the amount of reasonably successful work I’ve completed and had performed and published, over the years: poems, plays, short stories, non-fiction and, more recently, long and well researched historical novels, I feel an odd mixture of surprise and pride. But for somebody who usually manages to be both easy-going and utterly absorbed in her work, I've recently become aware that - in the immortal words of Joseph - things ain’t going well, hey, things ain't going well.

I’ve sometimes felt in the past that I wasn’t as focussed as I might have been, but that was generally because I had too many writing irons in the fire, rather than too few, too many projects on the go at once. Now, I seem to have far too many non-writing irons in the fire. This state of affairs seems to have crept up on me, for a variety of complicated reasons, but the time has certainly come to call a halt, take stock and do things differently. Which is, of course, far easier said (or blogged!) than done.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been struggling to balance work and finding ways of making an income, (just like most of the rest of the population, old Etonians excepted) with daily life and the demands of friendship and family, but at the moment, I don’t seem to be managing any of them very well. An involvement with a local community enterprise has only added to my woes and I’m beginning to think about straws and camel’s backs. Facebook is an additional distraction, even though it’s wonderful for networking and keeping in touch with friends and work colleagues. And Twitter. And blogging. The garden takes time, even though I know it’s good for me. The house takes time. And then there’s the other job, (not really the day job, since I do most of it online, at night) dealing in antique textiles, which seems to be much less cost effective than it once was, and – although essential from a budgetary point of view - also needs a bit of a rethink since it’s becoming hugely time consuming for what amounts to very little reward.
The harsh truth is that I'm doing too much unpaid work, and if I'm going to work unpaid, then it ought to be on something I want and need to do, as well as something with the potential to generate a little income in the future. Essentially, I need to be cracking on with new novels, especially given that the possibility of publishing online (and even making some money out of it) now needs to be added into the mix.

One thing I’m sure of, I’m not alone. Lots of female friends, professional artists and writers in particular, but others too, seem to be in exactly the same situation as me: all of us, not generally given to self pity, feeling agitated and tired and not working to our full capacity, while struggling desperately to make ends meet.
We seem to have gone straight from being distracted by the demands of raising a family, and coping with elderly parents, to fending off the assumption that we are winding down towards retirement ourselves.
And it isn’t just that we can’t afford it. It’s that with – hopefully – up to a third of life still ahead – winding down seems ridiculous.
I’ve been reading an excellent book called Transitions by William Bridges, which has helped a bit, and discussions with like-minded friends help too. I’ve made lists and plans, but then I’ve always been a manic list maker. I’ve looked at time management. I'm not short of ideas. But the harsh truth is that I need to do fewer things in my working day, but do them for longer, do them better, more exclusively, more intensively and with more deliberate and ruthless focus.

In short, I need to become more like a man.
All (reasonable) suggestions for achieving this desirable state of affairs gratefully received!

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris

2011-06-12T16:45:00.000+01:00

Just finished reading Gillespie and I, by Jane Harris, which I bought about a week ago, started reading and could not put down. I read it late into the night, woke up looking forward to resuming it and found myself sneaking a sly chapter in the middle of the day when I was meant to be doing other things. It's a big, beautifully written and cleverly constructed read. The research has clearly been meticulous. Historical research, as I know all too well from personal experience, can be a trap for the unwary. The research itself can become so enchanting that one thing leads to another, and you find it hard to make yourself stop and write the novel. But Jane Harris displays an admirable and vivid facility for transporting her readers back in time.

The story is narrated by Harriet Baxter, now an old woman, living in Bloomsbury in 1933, with her pet birds, and her servant, Sarah, for company. She remembers her visit to Glasgow, for the International Exhibition of 1888. Street plans are helpfully provided for readers who, like me, are fascinated by the details of the setting. Young, art-loving, unmarried and of independent means, Harriet meets Elspeth Gillespie, mother of gifted but fairly impoverished artist, Ned Gillespie, (this is the time when the Glasgow Boys were beginning to be in vogue) and recounts how she saved Elspeth's life when the woman was choking on her own false teeth - a typically bizarre event, wrily recounted in Harriet's precise and entertaining tones.

Invited to the Gillespie home in the West End of Glasgow, Harriet realises that she has already met Ned at an art exhibition in London. She gradually becomes a close friend of the family: Ned, his talented wife Annie, and their two young children, Sybil and Rose. When unexpected tragedy strikes this loving family, it will affect Harriet herself in unanticipated ways, and change the course of all their lives.

To detail more of the plot would, I think, be to spoil it for the reader. But I'll say this at least, to intrigue you. When you have finished this book, the story will work away like yeast inside your head. And I can practically guarantee that the first thing you will want to do, is to read it all over again. Which is quite an achievement on the part of the writer. Gillespie and I is not just beautifully written and researched, but absorbing, believable, and perhaps more than anything else, quietly terrifying: a haunting, mysterious and deeply disturbing story. It's the best book I have read this year and perhaps for a number of years before that!

Gillespie and I is published by Faber and Faber, 504 pages, price £14.99

Creativity and Wellbeing - A Few More Thoughts

2011-06-06T13:11:00.000+01:00

There's an interesting post with reference to my recent Creativity and Wellbeing piece on Chris Fremantle's excellent and insightful blog here
He says: 'If the ambition for the arts to have a wider role in society is still on the table, then perhaps its time for artists to challenge the values that are being ascribed to creativity ...to help sharpen the distinction between creating art and being creative, rather than eliding this distinction in the process of attempting to secure greater economic relevance and power.'
This is a very fair point and a fair distinction to make, but it means that we, as creative writers, artists, and others, have to make our voices heard, otherwise, people will carry on presuming to define our roles for us. And here's an example:
http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/be-a-creative-leader
This potentially useful site - which has some excellent case histories - also manages to include statements such as 'The future of the creative industries lies in its leaders.'
Might the whole future of those same creative industries not depend a bit more on the quality of the work? You can lead a horse to water, but if he refuses to drink, he'll keel over and you'll be stuffed.
We find small mention of passion, dedication, exploration, the pain and the joy, the incessant demands of the real creative impulse here. Instead, it's mostly quantified as some straightforward means to an economic end. Which can result in some useful practical advice, I'll not deny. But it's by no means the whole picture and we really have to do something to temper this approach while there's still time.

Creativity and Wellbeing : Should We Be Reclaiming Creativity?

2011-06-02T22:06:00.000+01:00

Creativity and wellbeing - I've had a longish essay on this subject published online in the weekend edition of the Scottish Review It's possibly part of something longer, although when I'll ever get around to writing the whole book I have in mind - provisional title 'Reclaiming Creativity' - I don't know. But as somebody said to me, this is in the nature of a call to arms for writers and artists and other creative people. I'd be interested to see some other responses though. So far, the reaction from creative people themselves has been very positive!

Creative Writing, Taught Courses and Tea Making

2011-05-31T15:47:00.000+01:00

I was hunting for a picture of the Japanese Tea Ceremony to illustrate this post, but will have to make do with this one instead, a lovely old embroidery of a lucky crane! Late last night, I got embroiled in one of those interesting Facebook discussions, with a couple of fellow writers, about the usefulness of creative writing courses, about why and how people write, about whether students on such courses should follow the course rubric to the letter, about whether such courses generally lead to publication and what other uses they might have for aspiring writers or for writers who are starting out, or perhaps for writers who feel they have ground to a halt and need encouragement, or inspiration, or a certain amount of 'mentoring'. We are all of us, let's face it, afraid to move out of our individual comfort zones, and it can be helpful to have a metaphorical hand to hold, while we are doing it! When, inevitably, the discussion strayed into why and how we write, things became even more interesting.

A friend expressed the opinion that writing is surely communication, and that writers must therefore think about the end product, the book, play, story and, presumably, the audience for that product. And to some extent, this is true. But the older I grow, the more I also get the feeling that somehow we have got the balance wrong, and it may be that courses in the so called 'creative industries' should take at least some share of the blame for this.

When I first began to tutor creative writing workshops, a long time ago, I was funded (not generously, but funded!) to work with groups in the community. It was in the nature of these groups that everyone wanted something different. There were people who wanted desperately to be published, people who only wanted to write for fun, people who needed encouragement to stretch themselves and a few who just wanted a chat. Some were poets, some wanted to write articles and stories, a few were interested in drama, even fewer thought they might like to tackle a full length novel. The trick was in juggling all these different requirements and abilities, making sure that each person went away from the class feeling that they had got something out of it. Difficult, but not impossible.

Then, things gradually changed. Those doing the funding began to want rigidly structured courses, and a very definite end product. This was difficult, with such disparate groups of people, with such a variety of wants and needs. In practice, it resulted in the publication of various anthologies, and certain amount of invention when it came to writing down the course structure!

But that was the start of a slippery slope which, I think, has lead us to a situation in which our colleges and universities are busy trying to offload any course which can't be 'sold' as contributing to the student's employability by the end of it. Gone are the days when anyone valued learning for its own sake. And while you can easily assert that IT, or engineering or applied mathematics will make you employable, it's quite hard to do it with creative writing. But you have to find ways of selling your course to the powers-that-be by labelling it as in some way vocational. You can either imply that it will be easier to find a publisher or agent at the end of it (a bit debatable) or you can talk about the advantage of writing skills for other employment (true, but any decent English course would probably do the same). And this need to concentrate on some hypothetical end product: employability, the acquisition of an agent or a publisher, a completed and 'oven ready' novel or script or play, means that all too often, students don't do what they perhaps ought to be doing with these courses: using them as a rich seam of knowledge and experience to be mined, giving themselves permission to experiment without fear of failure and within a sheltered environment, giving themselves permission to play about with ideas and structures and forms, so that by the end of such a course, each student might be closer to finding his or her own unique voice, ready to move on with a certain amount of confidence. But can you imagine some poor course leader having to write that as a module descriptor? No. Me neither.

We have now reached the sad situation where a recent advertisement for a writer-in-residence/lecturer in creative writing for one of our old and distinguished academic institutions was couched in such precisely prescriptive terms that none of our equally distinguished national poets or playwrights could have applied for it with any hope of success. And that way, cultural disaster lies.

Sadly, we seem to have lost any sense of valuing the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, so what chance does the pursuit of any individual creative practice for its own sake stand, in our current Pipchin-esque state of education?

'It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin's system not to encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster.' (Dombey and Son)

So where does tea come in? I drink a lot of tea. All day, really. More, when I'm writing. But I don't dunk a teabag in a mug of warm water. I mix real leaf tea with plenty of boiling water, in a rather beautiful hand made teapot, (hand made by a friend, at that) well warmed, and sometimes I drink it out of a china mug, and sometimes out of a big handmade mug, and sometimes out of a large teacup. I like the process you see, like making tea for other people too. Most people tell us that our tea tastes very nice, which I think it does. It isn't, of course, as wonderful as a real Japanese 'tea ceremony' but it's my tea ceremony, and as the ancient masters of the art of tea said - you just make tea. That's all there is to it. The whole point of such practices, though, is that the making is key. Doing. Being in the moment. Becoming absorbed in the process itself and treating all aspects of it with loving care, while you are doing it.

I don't think you can teach talent, but you can certainly teach the craft aspects of writing, just as you can't teach musical talent, but you wouldn't expect somebody to sit right down and play a Chopin Nocturne either. But I don't think you can even begin to teach the craft of writing to other people without recognising that the doing is what is really important for those who are starting out. Perhaps I mean more than just 'doing'. I think most writers find themselves living in the present of their work. Becoming absorbed. Interrogating the work itself, exploring a character, an idea, a situation. Above all playing. There's a rhythm involved, which includes imaginative play, followed by hard work, followed by more imaginative play, followed by more hard work. But you have to get the balance right. You have to allow yourself to be in that moment, without guilt, without a thought for the end product, the pass or fail. You have to be in a state of 'flow' as Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes it, where failure is not even an issue. It's the doing that matters. But I'm not at all sure whether the current structure of many of the creative writing courses on offer particularly undergraduate courses, are a help or a hindrance. I think it's a different matter with Masters and Doctoral degrees, because by then, you probably have a certain amount of confidence in your own voice, and in any case, such courses generally leave you more space to play about with the work.

Write, make tea, write.

If a particular course is taught by somebody whose work you admire and offers what seems to be an answer to a particular set of problems, for you, by all means apply. But don't expect miracles. Those generally take a little longer.

Happy Birthday To My Dear Late Dad - Julian Czerkawski

2011-05-24T11:07:00.000+01:00

Today would have been my dad's 85th Birthday. That's him in the middle of the picture, with my mum, Kathleen on the right, my aunt Vera on the left, and me with the sunhat, in the middle. We're on a Yorkshire beach although I'm not sure if it's Scarborough or Bridlington. Dad died many years ago now, at the comparatively young age of 69 and I miss him still. So when I think about him, it's with a little pang of sadness. But he crammed so much into his life, was so interested in everything, so kindly and courteous, in spite of being formidably clever, that it's impossible to remember him without a smile as well.

Dad was born in 1926 in a place called Dziedzilow, in that part of Poland called Galicia, a little way to the east of the beautiful city then known as Lwow. His father, Wladyslaw, was a landowner, one of the Polish minor gentry known as the szlachta - fiercely proud, fiercely traditional, fiercely honourable. I had another wee smile a few days ago when I heard a TV commentator expressing horrified concern about a child being taught to ride at the age of three. Dad learned to ride before he could walk, and without a saddle too! It was expected!

His mother, Lucja, was a pretty but rather flighty city girl from Lwow. Wladyslaw was a handsome charmer- in the couple of photos I have of him, he looks a bit like Olivier, playing Max de Winter, in Rebecca. He was wealthy, tremendously generous and had one of the few cars in the district. She was enchanted by him. They married young, and it soon became clear that Lucja didn't much like the countryside. Perhaps she was bored by it. My father once confessed to me that he was more fond of his father than his mother - but who ever knows what goes on in a marriage? Wladyslaw can't have been an easy man to live with. In the event, they split up when Julian was nine or ten, and she moved back to Lwow with her son, although he would travel back and forth to Dziedzilow from time to time, to stay with his father.

The war, and all the horrors that beset this part of the world, disrupted Julian's life in unimaginable ways. But this is neither the time nor the place to relate such things - although my next novel, The Winged Hussar, will be inspired by my grandfather and father's stories. The family lost everything including lives. Wladyslaw was imprisoned by the Russians, released when Joe Stalin changed sides, but died of typhus while still in his thirties. Julian worked as a courier for the resistance, was imprisoned, released, and eventually came to the UK via Italy, with a Polish unit of the British Army - I have his 'tank' cap badge still. Most of the rest of the family died in the war, including his Aunt Ludmilla, who died in Auschwitz, and a half sister who was executed by the Nazis for working with the resistance.

Dad was stationed at Helmsley in Yorkshire, demobbed as a 'refugee alien', worked as a 'textile presser' in a mill in Leeds, met and married my half Irish, half Yorkshire mum. Then, he went to night school. I remember him coming in, bringing his bike into the hallway of the flat where we lived in smoky Leeds, taking off his cycle clips. By the time he retired, he was a distinguished biochemist, had been working worldwide as visiting expert for UNIDO on projects sponsored by the IAEA in Vienna and had a double doctorate - not just a PhD, but a DSc as well.

Here was a man who - at a very young age - could easily have slipped into bitter self pity. It would have been forgiveable. Instead, he was the most positive person I have ever known - a dad in a million. I can't ever remember him losing his temper. He was kindly, courteous and artistic as well as brilliantly scientific. He had immense patience and an enviable tolerance. Perhaps most important of all, he found everything interesting, would never dismiss anything out of hand, out of prejudice or entrenched views, but would investigate and explore. He indulged all my childhood interests and encouraged me to explore a hundred new things for myself. His God was education, and education, moreover, for its own sake, for the wonder of learning. He never worked in industry, where the big money was to be made, but he loved his work, passionately. He also loved hillwalking, painting, chess, music, Scottish country dancing, photography and local history. He was an active member of the local Civic Society. He made his own wine, and adored his garden, especially fruit and vegetable growing. In retirement, he started cooking, too!

When I think about him and my mum, there's a picture which always comes into my mind. When I was ten, dad spent a year at a research institute in Mill Hill in London and we went down to join him for most of the year. It was one of the hottest summers on record. Money must have been very tight, but the sun shone and dad organised expeditions here, there and everywhere, on a shoestring. We had no car, so it was all done by public transport. At that time Mill Hill was on the edge of the 'green belt' (maybe it still is! I've never been back) and we would often go for walks, the three of us together, through fields and woods. One day, we walked into a meadow full of butterflies: clouds of them. I don't remember what kind of butterflies they were, but I remember the three of us, running through this field in the sunlight, chasing butterflies which we never caught, collapsing on the grass from time to time, laughing, and running again. It is one of the happiest memories of my life.

So, although I miss him still, I can't help but smile at the thought of him. And thank him again, for being - essentially - my hero. The best dad anyone could ever wish to have.

The Scent of the Past - Perfumes and History

2011-05-21T19:13:00.000+01:00

I bought myself a little treat on eBay the other day - a very old, unused and unopened bottle of a fragrance by Lanvin, called Arpege. There are only a handful of perfumes that I really like, and all of them are old. Almost antique! Top of my list comes L'Heure Bleue by Guerlain. I adore it, but it's not really a scent for everyday wear. I love Guerlain's Mitsouko, too, and occasionally wear Tweed, mainly because it reminds me of my mother. Not, I should add, Tweed in its later, nastier, thinner incarnation, but vintage Tweed, by Lentheric, rich and musky and heathery, the scent of my childhood. I can still remember opening mum's wardrobe door and sniffing at the scent of the perfume my father bought for her every Christmas, those lovely little bottles with the characteristic wooden top - and an expensive purchase for him in those days, when he was a struggling Doctoral student and we were strapped for cash.
But then, there's Arpege. Which I discovered only a few years ago.
Where do I begin?
This was a perfume which Andre Fraysse composed for Jeanne Lanvin in 1927, the year after my father was born, in a place called Dziedzilow, in Eastern Poland. They were quite a wealthy family, and since the Poles always had a connection with and affection for the French, I sometimes think the ladies might have worn French perfumes, perhaps even my great grandmother, Anna. I could attempt to describe this scent for you, but the wonderful perfume blog Bois de Jasmin does it better! It was reformulated in the 1990s and - unlike so many other scents, where the reformulation is a pale imitation of the original - this one is still good. Different but good. However, for me, the vintage scent is a pearl of great price, because it is in so many ways a scent of its time, rare, strange and turbulent.
The little parcel arrived, with the perfume - it was an eau de toilette - carefully wrapped in bubble wrap. I'm looking at it now. The old cellophane was still intact when it came, but I've opened that now. The box is in perfect condition, and the perfume bottle sits snugly inside, such a beautiful bottle too, tall and slender, an art deco glass bottle, with a black bakelite top, with the mother and daughter image - supposed to be Jeanne and Marie-Blanche getting ready for a ball. The scent entices - pale, golden, magical. You take the top off and sniff, and it's as perfect as the day it was bottled. Wear it, and its wonderful complexity is enchanting. It is the scent of the past, and, like all perfumes, can take you back to another time and place - in this case, as a writer of historical fiction, I find that it seems to have the power to transport me to somewhere I have never known. It's another reason why I love old perfumes, even when they may be perfumes I don't want to wear. Close your eyes, inhale, and you're somewhere else, somewhere that no longer exists.
But I'll certainly wear this one. Old scents, especially good ones, like this, made with fabulous essential oils, retain their power. Just occasionally you'll get a bottle that has 'gone off' but it's a rare occurrence. More often, the scent will have lost its 'top notes' but if you wear it and give it a little time, ten minutes or so, you'll find it's as beautiful as ever. And often too, if you can find an unopened bottle like this one, you'll be treated to the full time travel experience at first go! This perfume is perfect. Thank-you to the seller who found it, who didn't - as I suspect all too often happens - throw it in the bin, but instead allowed me to add to my little collection of magical scents of the past!

Historical Fact Into Historical Fiction - Inspirations and Challenges.

2011-05-16T16:33:00.001+01:00

I'm amassing folders full of these kind of images, right now, as well as letters, notes, and other interesting bits and pieces. Many of them are old postcards, and the one above, bought on eBay, may just possibly be signed by one of the Kossak family. Wojciech Kossak painted this picture of a wintry party (perhaps a Kulig, or sleigh party) outside the castle at Zywiec in 1913. This is now in Poland proper, but back then was in that part of Poland known as Galicia. There is some evidence that Wojciech was a visitor there himself. The signature on the card looks suspiciously like a Kossak name to me. Wojciech lived until 1942, so it could even be him. Somebody else must have thought so too, because I had to bid for this one. This family of wonderful artists is part of my family, albeit only by marriage. My lovely Great Aunt Wanda Czerkawska, who I met and stayed with before she died, although she was an old lady by that time, was married to Karol Kossak, the last surviving painter of a family of famous artists. Karol and my grandfather were great friends. Had the war not intervened, my late father would have trained with Karol, in his studio and perhaps become an artist instead of a scientist. Dad certainly sketched and painted all his life, and was a talented watercolourist. Karol and Wanda had a daughter called Teresa. She was an animator who drew cartoons, and she may still be living in Warsaw, although I lost touch with her some time ago. Which is a pity, because I'd love to see some of the fabulous old family photographs which were in her possession, love to be able to speak to her again. I was very fond of her. I met her when I was still very young, and she seemed impossibly glamorous and bohemian to me, back then! But I don't even know if she is still alive. Charming Karol - or somebody very like him - will figure in The Winged Hussar, the sequel to the Amber Heart, but meanwhile, the artworks of the Kossaks, and my forebears, among so much else, will continue to provide inspiration for my writing.

Meanwhile, there's another idea taking shape in my mind, which is that, as I continue to research the second novel in the series, The Winged Hussar, I should keep some kind of visual and written diary about the process itself, about how the information came to me. Sometimes, when I was researching the Amber Heart, this came in extraordinarily spooky ways, coincidences which are beyond belief, and which suggest that somebody out there wants me to forge on with this project!

Now, taking advice from an artist friend, I've bought a couple of large, blank notebooks, (is it only writers and artists, I wonder, who can take such immense pleasure from a blank notebook?) and will spend a bit of time not just researching and writing, but also writing about the process of research, about the need to give yourself permission to fictionalise fact. I'll also be looking at the emotional response to what is, after all, a very personal project. These notebooks should allow me to keep the fact more or less separate from the fiction. This in turn will allow me to tell the all-important story of the novel, without feeling tied down to the research, which is always a danger with this kind of fiction. I don't know how often, when teaching creative writing classes or workshops, I've queried some slightly clunky piece of storytelling, only to have the writer tell me earnestly, 'but it really happened like that.' To which the answer, of course, is that what really happened is quite possibly immaterial if you're writing fiction. It only really matters if you're writing fact. Not, of course that I'm suggesting that you play fast and loose with history or indulge in wild anachronisms. Just that the truth of the story you are telling, the fiction you are creating, is more important than the factual truth of a series of events which you know happened in your family's past.

In some ways, it was easier for me to tackle these problems with The Amber Heart because it was so remote from me, not just in place, but in time as well. The Winged Hussar will be much closer to my own heart, historical of course, but parts of it will be within the memory of people I have known and loved. And that presents a unique challenge. Given the popularity of family history research, I think it's this aspect of the project which will be of genuine interest to many aspiring writers out there.

The Amber Heart - On Falling in Love with the Work

2011-05-15T13:32:00.000+01:00

I went to Glasgow, the other day, to visit my literary agent in his rather nice new premises. Not for any specific reason, but just to touch base, meet up with a few of his other clients, and have a chat with him before he sets off to New York. He's currently promoting and hoping to sell my Polish historical novel, the Amber Heart, which has now been described as 'Anna Kareninesque'. I don't know whether to be delighted or alarmed by this. Is it praise indeed (well, yes, of course it is!) or a hostage to fortune? I know what they mean, though, even though I'm no Tolstoy. It's certainly a 'big' novel and an ambitious one, but not unmanageably big, not quite a doorstop of a book - just a big story. And although somebody else described it as epic, it isn't epic in the sense of covering a vast panoply of events. It is, in some ways, a saga in the Icelandic sense, a family story, a story of lifelong relationships, a story about a house and its inhabitants, and a tale of frustrated ambitions and divided loyalties, against a backdrop of a turbulent time and place - but the story of the relationships is, I suppose, more important than the politics of the time, although political events constantly impinge on the people who are trying to live through them.

But I have to admit that - quite without having an inflated sense of my own talents - I love this piece of work, which probably sounds strange to anyone except another writer. Most writers will understand the sensation of 'falling in love' with the work but I'm not sure other people do. So let me attempt to explain what I mean.

You have to accept that you will always have more ideas than time to write them. You will always begin more pieces of work than you will ever finish. It's allowed. You have to play, in order to explore. (Although if you constantly find yourself starting pieces of work which you never finish, you have to ask yourself if you're disciplined enough.) But most writers have a number of projects on the go at any one time. Often, you will set something aside, while you finish something else. Time will pass, and what seemed interesting or exciting, a year ago, will begin to seem stodgy, boring, thin and lifeless. So you let these things go.

Most of us are reluctant to bin anything, so you probably file it away and forget about it, although you may come back to it later. This is because most of us know from bitter experience that as soon as you throw away an old bundle of notes - or delete them irrevocably from your PC - some project comes up and you find yourself hunting wildly for the very material you've lost. But amid all these par-baked ideas, there will be a few that lodge somewhere in that part of your brain where your imagination lives, ideas that you will come back to, again and again. For me, The Amber Heart was one such, and it went through a number of less-than-satisfactory incarnations before it assumed its present shape. But I had to keep coming back to it because - quite simply - I fell in love with it. And I would venture to say that it's an essential part of the process.

You know that feeling, when you're in love, and you get that flutter of excitement in the pit of your stomach, whenever you so much as think about the object of your affections? The thought of the beloved invades your mind, gives you sleepless nights, affects your concentration. Moreover, when you are in love, you'll notice that the whole world is full of things which are of interest only insofar as they are relevant to the beloved. Well, it's the same with writing. Spooky coincidences will arise, probably because your attention is so focused on your current obsession, and all these things will give you the same fabulous flutter of excitement. I can feel it now, even as I type this, can access it just by thinking about the book. It reminds me of the way you fall in love with a new baby, and shouldn't be confused with the sense of being in love with your own hero or heroine - which is another, different aspect of the process. It's more all-embracing than that. You become so emotionally entangled with the world of the work, that it's almost impossible to extricate yourself from it. In fact the only way is to replace it with a new affection, which may be the same love in a different guise.

None of which - of course - is to say that there isn't a great deal of wrestling with intractable chunks of text, because there is. Nothing, no amount of passion, will replace the need for a very great deal of hard work, the sheer slog of getting it right. But it's the love that keeps you going while you do it. Just as the love for your baby sustains you through the sleepless nights and dirty nappies. And I would perhaps go so far as to say that if you don't feel that love for whatever you're working on, where fiction at least is concerned, you have to think very carefully about whether you're in the right job. I'm not sure that the same applies to non-fiction, but perhaps it does. I'd be interested to hear what other people think.

As for me, at the moment, I'm torn three ways. I'm still in love with the Amber Heart, still have it working away at the back of my mind, still get that little tingle of excitement whenever I think about it, even though it's ostensibly finished and out there, like a grown-up child, trying to make its way in the world. But I don't have empty nest syndrome because I have another historical novel called The Physic Garden, which is calling to me. I can hear it, it's nearly finished but I know that this was and still is an affair of the heart. And meanwhile, I'm researching the sequel to The Amber Heart, a novel called The Winged Hussar, which will - no doubt - become the object of my obsessive affection for the next year or so. Whatever happens, it's going to be an emotional time!

Shadow of the Stone - My Supernatural Serial on YouTube

2011-05-08T17:14:00.001+01:00

I was surprised, the other day, to come across all six episodes of my old television serial Shadow of the Stone, on YouTube. You'll find the first episode here and I'm told that the more clicks it gets the more chance I stand of getting paid a bit of money, so please have a look at it - and if you like the first episode, do watch the rest of them whenever you have a spare half hour or so! You know you want to do it! Ah, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on!
It's old, of course and it does have a distinct look of the eighties about it. In fact, when this was being made, I was heavily pregnant with my son, who's now 24 years old himself. But in spite of carrying a very large bump about with me, I did manage to clamber on and off boats, because my husband, Alan, was working as a charter skipper at the time, for a Largs based yacht company, and the television company hired the big catamaran which he was skippering, as a camera boat. Shadow of the Stone was filmed in Gourock, and in Inverkip Marina, just down the coast, as well as in Glasgow. The Kempock Stone, around which the story is based, is still there, and Marie Lamont was a real person, who - along with a group of older women - was accused of witchcraft
This was, in many ways, a very youthful and joyful production. I was working with people I liked very much, and it was fun. The cast features both Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson, who went on to MUCH bigger things. Leonard White was a wonderful talent spotter and knew a fine actor when he saw one, even though - as you can see from the programme - they too were very young indeed.
I have one vivid memory of Alan Cumming struggling in the water and my husband Alan almost leaping in to rescue him. 'No, no!' shouted Alan C, with his usual cheeky grin, 'It's alright. I'm just acting!'
The serial was well reviewed - I remember columnist Joan Burnie loving it - but the channel did rather mess about with the starting times, and even family and friends would find themselves missing episodes, which was a pity.
There was also a novel of the series, which I had forgotten all about. It was published by Richard Drew in Glasgow. I dug it out the other day and had a look at it. It isn't half bad. I was, it seems, way ahead of my time in writing something which was Young Adult, well before YA was a publishing concept, and writing about the supernatural well before the media had cottoned on to the public appetite for such things. I seem to have done this all my writing life - suggesting things which I'm told 'nobody will be interested in' only to see them become flavour of the decade just a few years later. Anyway, I remember subsequently pitching similar ideas for radio and television and theatre, and getting nowhere fast.
I'd probably do the novel a bit differently now. We all change and mature as writers, I'm much more of a novelist than I was - back then, I was quite definitely a playwright who wrote some prose - but now I've honed my craft and I can see various infelicities, things that I would definitely edit polish, parts where the plot seems clunky - but essentially, I'm not too unhappy with the story. Once I have the current project finished -a BIG Scottish Historical which only needs a couple more months of work - and before I wade into the sequel to The Amber Heart, which I'm already researching, frantically, I may type this up again, do some edits, and release it as a Kindle download.

Not An Easy Thing to Learn

2011-05-05T14:44:00.001+01:00

April was, in many ways, a peach of a month. The weather was good, the garden was (and still is) looking gorgeous, and my son's development team won a well deserved Creative Loop award for Best Video Game Concept at Glasgow's CCA. Professionally, though, it's been a mite frustrating for me.
Have been discussing ideas of professionalism with a number of colleagues recently but a conversation with a good friend who - before retirement - worked in IT, helped to concentrate my thoughts. He is busy enjoying himself in various interesting and challenging ways. We attended his 60th birthday celebration last year (he completed his final Munro, plus ALL the 'tops') and I gave him a copy of my book about the people and the history of Gigha, God's Islanders. A couple of weeks ago, as we sat out in the garden, over coffee, he told me how much he had enjoyed reading it, what a labour of love it must have been (it's a very big book about a very small island) and how much he liked my writing style, which he found easy to read, and engaging.
What, he wonders, am I working on now?
So I tell him the truth. My agent has two completed novels which I've been working on simultaneously and which he's hoping to sell: The Amber Heart, and The Summer Visitor. I'm focussing almost wholly on novels these days, although since these are mostly historical novels, I can imagine that there are a few related non- fiction topics which I'd like to tackle. I'm rewriting a third historical novel, called The Physic Garden, major rewrites which will take me another couple of months, but then I'll have three new novels. At the moment, nobody is paying me for anything, although I hope that's about to change!
So, he says, with interest, do you engage the services of an agent? I explain that I'm considered lucky to have an agent. They tend to 'engage' you. (And don't get me wrong - I AM lucky to have my agent, who is one of the good guys!) I see him raise his eyebrows a little. So, he says, when you have a track record, like you, when it's clear that you can write, that you can deliver the goods, that you are, in fact, a professional - why can't you or your agent approach publishers with the equivalent of a business proposal? Again, I try to explain that it doesn't work like that. Even if you do have a professional track record, you yourself can't approach anybody in a businesslike fashion, much as you would like to. Unfortunately, the very act of attempting to do this, will be seen as evidence of your amateur status.
But, Catherine, he presses on, if the marketing aspects of all this are vital, why couldn't you or your agent suggest various ideas to a publisher, and negotiate round those? Perhaps writing a few sample chapters? Once again, I have to explain than it doesn't quite work like that. Or only if you're a celebrity, when it does work like that, even if you have the writing abilities of a slug. Then, of course, even the 'few chapters' won't be necessary. Because slug or no, the celebrity who decides that he or she can write - for example - books for children, is already a brand. And even slugs, properly branded, can sell.
It's clear that our friend thinks I'm a professional, in the same way that he's a professional - and, of course, I am. But it is also becoming clear to me that - across all the creative industries - the lines between amateur and professional have become so blurred that we are all (with a few lucky exceptions) treated like aspiring amateurs, no matter how experienced, no matter how seasoned. Sadly, the more our profession is treated as an industry, the less we creatives, without whom nothing would happen, are treated as professionals within that industry, the less we are accorded a modicum of courtesy and respect.
Why should this be?
One colleague blames the fashion for 'inclusion'. Essentially a good idea, this should mean that nobody is ever excluded from participation in the arts. But this same idea has now become so tied up with issues of self esteem and therapeutic ideals that nobody is ever allowed to say that a piece of work is not very competent. Nor - in the welter of suggestions that creativity promotes wellbeing - are we allowed to say that quite often the creative process sucks. You get stressed, tired, sad, overwrought. As usual in life, you have to work damn hard to achieve anything worthwhile.
But sadly, we are tied into a creative culture in which we must always encourage, always praise. We can't tell it like it is. Nobody must be put off, discouraged, demoralised. I'm not in the business of discouraging or demoralising either. But nobody would suggest that a pianist or violinist could become a great musician without plenty of hard work and practice, so why does everyone in the world seem to think that if they had the time, they could simply sit down and write a novel?
Of course, I know the answer to that one. It's because most people can actually read and write, so they think that's all there is to it. It's a bit like somebody who can play Chopsticks fondly imagining that they can then move seamlessly onto Chopin ! And sadly, too many in our 'industry' tend to subscribe to this belief, treating all of us, from amateur to seasoned professional, with the same oddly impersonal lack of courtesy.
As Scottish singer/songwriter Dougie Maclean puts it in his wonderful 'Scythe Song' -which compares learning to play a musical instrument with learning to use a scythe, skilfully, professionally, intuitively - 'it is not a thing to learn inside a day.'
Neither, dear reader, is writing fiction 'a thing to learn inside a day.'

I Love The Brittas Empire

2011-04-19T12:48:00.000+01:00

While we sit drinking our very early morning mugs of tea, and before starting our working day, my husband and I have fallen into the habit of watching one or two episodes of vintage comedies on Gold. Not only is it much more cheerful than the news, it's far less irritating than the miscellany of minor celebrity stuff that sometimes passes for news on our TV screens each morning.

Our favourite is probably The Brittas Empire, some twenty years old, and hardly dated at all. Still laugh-aloud funny, still clever, still surprisingly relevant (only just realised how much David Brent owes to Gordon Brittas) - however bizarre the situations - containing the brilliant writing, the clever direction, the fine acting and the germ of truth and pathos that all excellent comedies must possess.

Watching this morning's episode, which involved a Ruthenian juggling doppelganger, a trio of born again Christians from the church of Chattanooga, a receptionist teaching herself to play the violin, a child who lives in a cupboard and - among much else - a cycling bear, it struck me that I believed in it all. Why? Because there's an enchanting self consistency about it. Not once, watching this comic tour de force, are you ever thrown out of your willing suspension of disbelief. Nobody ever puts a foot wrong. Not only that, but although you're sometimes hiding behind a cushion with embarrassment, you find yourself sympathising with all of them - even Mr Brittas. Perhaps especially Mr Brittas who means so well, who has a 'dream', but who leaves a trail of wreckage behind him. I sometimes wonder if it all boils down to the fact that the writers who conceived of these people actually liked their creations. It's what all fine comedies seem have in common: the unique relationship between the writer and his or her characters, even the monsters, a kind of intimate knowledge which makes them absolutely real, and consequently, allows us, as fellow human beings, to identify with them. Without that, not only is there no comedy, there's nothing to engage the viewers either.

Taylor and Burton and the Taming of the Shrew

2011-04-16T22:17:00.000+01:00

Was supposed to be somewhere else this afternoon, in fact was supposed to be helping to clean up the Community Garden in our village. Fully intended to be there. Had been promised scones and tea as well. Unfortunately, I forgot all about it. Fortunately, I had a valid reason. Well, valid for a writer, I suppose. I was watching The Taming of the Shrew. mesmerised by the sheer magnetism of the Burton and Taylor partnership. This film was made in 1967. It had all the sumptuousness of a Zeffirelli production. But most of all, it had Burton and Taylor. I had forgotten just how wonderfully energetic this movie is. Had forgotten how much I love the (now somewhat politically incorrect) play, And .while we're on the subject of politics, never realised until today, just how much Will Shakespeare was (to use a good Scots word) sooking up to the monarchy. But most of all, I had forgotten about these two stars. Real, shiny stars the like of which we will not see again. Today's celebrities and WAGs and soap stars (there's oxymoron for you) pale into insignificance beside them. Can't hold a candle to them, in fact.
Sorry I missed the garden clean-up but so glad I watched the movie!

My Favourite Novel on Normblog - Kidnapped v Wuthering Heights.

2011-04-11T11:31:00.001+01:00

Just written a guest post for Norman Geras, for his most interesting Normblog, about my favourite novel. Choosing one book from so many is a very tall order - in fact I could think of a dozen or more, straight off - but if I had to pick one, I think it was always going to be Kidnapped. And you can read my thoughts about it at the link. Actually, I almost picked Wuthering Heights, which is up there as joint first for me, and - if I'm honest - probably a book which I reread even more than my beloved Kidnapped. But it's a different relationship, and the way I feel about WH is somehow more personal and private than the way I feel about Kidnapped, if that makes sense. I love Kidnapped, and admire Stevenson as a writer perhaps more than any other. But I was born in Yorkshire, and trundled over those moors in my push chair, Wuthering Heights was my first love and still retains a special place in my literary affections.

Last week, we had a couple of days staying in an apartment in the lovely Orton Hall, not a million miles from North Yorkshire, and it felt a bit like staying in Thrushcross Grange (with all mod cons, of course!)

A little way down the village street we found the Heights itself, except that you would have to use your imagination, in order to transport it to the hill above the village - but oh, what a magical old house this seemed to be. And as a writer, of course, I'm now busy inventing a story to go with it.

Video Games and Violence - Sense and Nonsense

2011-04-04T22:35:00.000+01:00

The other night, my computer game designer son sent me a link to a You Tube video of a television chat show, during which Tim Ingham, editor of Computer and Video Games magazine, was subject to a barrage of suspect statistics and ill founded accusations about the game industry. This programme was, I gather, shown in March of last year and caused a certain stir in the world of video games.
Ingham pointed out calmly, clearly and with a certain amount of good humoured grace, that the vast majority of computer games are neither violent nor sexist nor racist nor unsuitable for children. That games are given guidance certificates in the same way as films. That parents need to take a little responsibility and refuse to give in to infant nagging, without first informing themselves of the nature of what is being nagged about. Unfortunately, it's the handful of ultra violent games that tend to get the tabloid publicity.
I don't much care for gratuitiously violent movies myself. And I'm not an avid gamer, although I'm fascinated by games, and their creative possibilities. So I probably wouldn't care for gratuitously violent games either. As far as violent movies go, I get squeamish and then I get bored.
But the programme's earnest disapproval of all 'violence as entertainment ' smacks of hypocrisy and must limit the participants' options a bit. Let's face it, Star Wars could be described as violence as entertainment, and where does that leave us with masterpieces such as Pulp Fiction and American Beauty, all the Bond movies, all the Alien movies, every Western ever made, Speed, the Matrix, most of Shakespeare, all of Marlowe, just about every opera ever written, hell, even my all time favourites, Some Like It Hot and Carousel.
It strikes me that, as the present generation of gamers grow older and become parents, this is an issue which will, to some extent, resolve itself. We're in an interim period here, where many parents of teenagers are largely ignorant about the world of games.
But another, perhaps more interesting aspect of this struck me while I was watching the clip, and cringing a little.There was a certain familiarity about it. Looking at it as a novelist I could catch in the solemn listing of spurious statistics and illogical arguments, an echo of other complaints: a long list of activities which have been condemned by an older generation, frightened by something they didn't understand. These included reading for pleasure, which was condemned selectively by the upper classes who loathed the very idea of the lower orders bettering themselves and paradoxically, by some members of those same working and middle classes who felt horribly disturbed by their children wasting valuable work time on books. Read the wonderful Diary of a Nobody for a brilliant depiction of parental disapproval of youthful obsessions, in this case amateur theatricals, from 1892. Then came film, television - still seen as a Bad Thing by some people - all kinds of music, and a long list of other activities about which people become happily obsessive while others look on with disapproval.
The truth is that the world of computer games is huge and diverse, wildly creative and utterly enthralling. It is, besides, as wonderfully varied as the human beings who create the games. And for the vast majority, games are in no sense a solitary obsession. But most of us know that, already, don't we?

Chernobyl, Fukushima and the Ostrich Mentality

2011-03-30T13:06:00.002+01:00

Some years ago now, I wrote a play called Wormwood, about the Chernobyl disaster. It was produced at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre to a certain amount of critical acclaim - the reviews were excellent - and later, the play was published in an anthology called Scotland Plays, by Nick Hern Books. It is still in print, still a set text for the Scottish Higher Drama course and I'm occasionally asked to speak about it in schools. Not very often though. The play was in no sense an anti-nuclear polemic. But I think that the conclusions I drew - while leaving the audience to make up its own mind - were that nuclear power might well be far too dangerous for fallible and complacency-prone human beings to cope with. And that being the case, there will be consequences for all of us.
Not surprisingly, the play has been on my mind of late! And last week, I wrote a piece about Fukushima and Chernobyl for the Scottish Review - which you can read here.
Wormwood had a talented and committed cast. It was directed by Philip Howard and was a claustrophobic and immensely moving production. The audience could regularly be seen weeping. One thing which stayed with me afterwards was the way in which the cast, and many members of the audience, had initially failed to grasp that the default position of this technology is instablity. That it does what it does, relentlessly, and will go on doing it, unless we can find some way of stopping it. And that stopping it can be almost impossible, when the very act of working with it can be fatal.
After that Traverse season, the play never received another professional production. It had a couple of student productions, one in the USA and one in Glasgow, but that was all. I was faintly surprised by this, but only faintly. It's an uncomfortable and difficult play, and perhaps people don't want to think about these things too much - unless forced to do so by real life events.
I've been following coverage of the ongoing Fukushima situation online and on television, including watching Japanese television's coverage every night. I suspect I'll want to write about it all, eventually, although probably not another play. But I'm somewhat gobsmacked by the way in which the authorities, both here and there, keep leaking information (in much the same way as the plant keeps leaking radiation). Every time something worse happens, as it does just about every day now, things that they have constantly declared 'can't happen' - our experts and theirs keep saying 'oh well, now x has happened, but the good news is...'
The latest good news from the industry is that plutonium isn't deadly. And it's a lie, of course. But even a quick search online will allow you to find a Japanese nuclear industry report stressing the need to persuade the general public of the absolute necessity of using plutonium-containing 'dirty' MOX fuel, (as at Fukushima 3) for economic reasons.
There is no good news, today. It looks as though they have at least one melt-down, possibly more, and close-up pictures from the site show an unholy, deadly, filthy mess. Perhaps we should be sending in some of our more gung-ho experts to attempt the clean-up.
So I'm thinking that now may be a good time to renew my membership of Greenpeace, and I'm still bemused at what ostriches we human beings can be. And don't tell me how many people have died in mining and chemical accidents over the years. I know they have, but it doesn't make it any better, any more than telling me that just because vast numbers of people have been killed in hand to hand combat, dropping bombs on them is somehow acceptable.

But Albert Einstein put it better than I ever could: The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.
For some of us, that time may already have come.

Researching Historical Fiction - a Sideways Look and a Spooky Experience!

2011-03-19T15:35:00.002Z

I've been browsing eBay recently, in search of bits and pieces of research material for the sequel to The Amber Heart. The Winged Hussar will take the story of the family - and the house of Lisko - into the twentieth century, and through WW2. Unlike The Amber Heart, which was loosely inspired by several episodes from my remote family history, the central story of The Winged Hussar is based more closely on my grandfather's incredibly romantic and dramatic story. For me, as a writer, there's a difference. Because the events of The Amber Heart were reasonably remote in time, as well as in place, so long as I did my best to make the setting and background authentic, I felt free to manipulate the family stories at my disposal, which were, in any case, more like a series of small cameos. For example, I knew what the house may have looked like, there was a warlike forebear with many wives, there was a woman who had a relationship which the rest of the family frowned on. All these were grist to my creative mill - but were changed in the telling, probably beyond all recognition.

As I've said before on this blog, I have come to appreciate the value of telling a good story and telling it well. Some of my best loved writers do this and they seem to do it as the birds sing, unselfconsciouly. Stevenson, for instance, (and although I would never compare myself with him) is the most unpretentious and accessible of Scottish writers but he has taught me so very much about the virtues of seeking to tell a good story which is 'true' in the wider sense. This is 'made up truth' as another fine writer, Bernard MacLaverty, describes it.

The Winged Hussar presents me with a a different set of problems from The Amber Heart. This is a story which is closer to me in all ways. I never met my grandfather, but I know a lot about him. The temptation (or should that be 'risk'?) will be to make this biographical when, in reality, I am still writing a novel. I need to be able to give myself permission to fictionalise, to manipulate events and characters in the service of the story. And that's always a bit more difficult when you are very familiar with some of the facts. But not impossible.

Research is important. But you have to treat your findings with a light touch. There's nothing worse than indigestible chunks of fact thrown into fiction, just to prove that the writer has done his or her homework. Once again, you are looking for some essential 'truth' rather than a cluster of facts. One of the ways of facilitating this process is to amass materials which allow you, the writer, to become immersed in the background to your story, materials which have a flavour of the time and place. Which is where eBay comes in handy!

I have a great deal of material already, if the truth be told: a few photographs, lots of notebooks and hand-written accounts and sketches from my father, pictures from an artist great uncle, dozens of books, leaflets, pamphlets and Lord knows what else. But browsing eBay, I also found a great many old postcards, which are a wonderful source of background detail, especially when they are real photographs. I bought the above picture of Lwow or Lemberg (now Lviv in the Ukraine) online, along with several others, all depicting that most beautiful of cities. No wonder my grandmother loved it so much. It was where she was born, and she was never particularly contented with the countryside to which she moved after her marriage. In the event, she returned there in circumstances which were not particularly happy either - and these are part of the story of the novel. Looking at the above picture, from the early 1900s, I was enchanted to see the tramcar, the gaslamps, the attractive and peculiarly Eastern European buildings, the leafy boulevards, and most of all, the people, not many of them, to be sure, but enough to give me a sense of life going on, a life which was about to be interrupted in every sense. Here's another, from around the same time, with more people. I'm especially taken with the man on horseback.

I think one way of handling this material, of allowing it to help rather than to hinder the fiction, will be to keep separate books/work diaries, with these pictures, other material and a bit of writing about my response to them - so that in some way I can keep track of my sources of inspiration, and at the same time allow myself to set them physically as well as mentally to one side, and carry on with the story itself, secure in the knowledge that 'nothing is really lost' along the way. I like the thought of that as a process, and it's one I've used in the past, albeit not quite so formally - my source material is usually pinned up all round the room and stuffed into miscellaneous folders.

I've another thought, though, and I still can't really explain it, but it's part of something that also feeds into the fiction. When I first saw it online, the top picture, St Sophie's Platz, almost leapt out of the screen at me. I knew I had to have it, and I would have paid more for it. Before my father died, sixteen years ago on 20th March, we had seen very few pictures of Lwow. We had none in the family. The only pictures he had managed to bring from Poland had been of the estate where he was born. Although we had talked at length about that place, he had told me very little about Lwow. The online revolution came after he died, so we had never browsed eBay together. Yet of all the picture postcards I found of Lwow - and there are plenty of them - it was this one that gave me a strange and disturbing frisson. It still does. Even now, I can scroll to the top of the page and look at it and feel a little buzz of nervous excitement. I've no idea what part of the city my family lived in, no idea where my grandmother lived, or whether this view, perhaps one of these houses or apartments had any significance for any of them. All I know is, of all the pictures I have looked at, it is this one that I find myself staring at with the most acute sense of familiarity. That's the only word to describe it. It is utterly and completely familiar to me and - in spite of the fact that I had never seen it before in my life -I love it. I can practically feel the air on my face. And I have an indefinable sense of something about to happen. As if somewhere in time, this precise place had some significance for me which I can't now remember, which is just out of reach, buried deep in my memory. Which is a spooky but by no means unpleasant experience.

A final thought - my agent's nice new website has just gone 'live' so if you want to read a bit more about me on there, do have a look. They are currently marketing all my fiction, so any professional enquiries should be addressed directly to the agency, here.

First Person / Third Person

2011-03-12T23:28:00.001Z

After a little gap, during which I've sorted out a bit of paperwork, made a lot of lists, organised a few meetings, and generally faffed about, in a miserable sort of way, I've more or less got my head around the fact that I'm just going to have to wait and see what happens to The Amber Heart when my agent sends it out. But before I really get going on the sequel, the Winged Hussar, with all the research and writing and rewriting involved, there's another project I'm keen to do some work on and I want to do it now. I'm aware that the Winged Hussar, which is essentially my Polish grandfather's dramatic, deeply romantic and ultimately tragic story, will become so all absorbing for me over the next year that I won't want to write anything else or at least nothing very long or demanding. So I want to finish this first: another historical novel but this time with a Scottish setting.

I'm about to start changing a manuscript, one I 'made earlier', from the first person narrative in which it was written and extensively revised, into a third person narrative and this is no small task. First there are all the faintly boring technical changes, going through the whole thing and translating the perspective from a very personal single narration into a third person story. But that's quite a superficial series of changes. It's only then that the really interesting work can begin, because the purpose of the change is partly to allow me to tell the story in a more flexible way, and partly to allow me to get inside the heads of a couple of other major characters. Hardly anyone has seen this new novel yet. It's set mostly in very early nineteenth century Glasgow - but any criticisms I was given of it from the few people who have read it, were all to do with the 'voice' in which it was written. Although it was a voice I had grown very fond of, to the point that I sometimes seemed to be channelling this man - and maybe I was, since he's based on a real character - I could see how the story might be better told from a different perspective. Or from multiple perspectives.

All the same, I do think this earlier first person draft was a stage which I - and the book - had to go through. It's quite a powerful story, but one that the first person form of narration doesn't allow to emerge in any fully rounded way. I can see that now, but it's taken a longish period of the manuscript lying 'fallow' on my PC for me to realise it. Changing narrative stance is something I occasionally suggest (blithely) to students if I feel they need another perspective on what they are writing. It's invariably an interesting exercise, but in this case I get the feeling it's a necessity rather than an experiment!

Pruning Your Darlings

2011-03-07T18:49:00.001Z

A little while ago, I wrote a longish post about not killing your darlings, i.e. just because something seems well written, just because you have fallen in love with a piece of your own prose, there's no reason for you to believe that it isn't good, and that it has to go! It's all to do with perspective. You could be right. It could be really good. In which case, you'd be mad to press that delete button.
However (there always is one, isn't there?) over the weekend, my agent sent me the manuscript of The Amber Heart, for my final approval on a few minor edits. These were almost wholly to do with punctuation, and concerned my rather loose (and disconcerting, at this stage in a long career) knowledge of exactly where commas ought to be used and where they can be left out. I thought I knew. And certainly, when I'm writing non-fiction, I don't seem to have much trouble. But I think all these years as a playwright, when I've used commas as an indication of slight pauses in the text for the actor, have made my use of commas in works of fiction just a little - erratic?
Incidentally, I pointed this out to a group of writers, a few months ago, and noticed the collective shudder that went through the room. Did you know that potential agents might make their initial sift of the hundreds of manuscripts which are dumped on their desks every week, on the strength of your knowledge of how to use the comma? So those among you who submit somewhat slapdash copy, in the belief that your wonderful writing will shine through, are plain wrong. Sorry about that. (And please don't point out errors of punctuation in my blog. I know, I know.)
Anyway, to get back to the story for those that want to read it: my new novel, the Amber Heart, is set in what is now Western Ukraine in a place that was - at the time that the story is set, i.e. the mid to late nineteenth century - part of Poland, a sort of rugged and dangerous Wild East of Poland, to be sure. The novel was inspired by some fascinating episodes from my own turbulent family history - about which I'll probably be blogging in due course. I've been working on this one for a long, long time. It's a tale that is very close to my heart. And it has had various more or less unsatisfactory incarnations, over the years. But now, with this draft, I know that I'm telling a big story and I think I'm telling it well.
However, when I scanned the final draft, in among those commas and a few minor suggestions about the odd word usage - there was the suggestion that I cut the last few paragraphs of the whole book, because it seemed much more poignant to end it a little sooner.
And you know what? He's absolutely right.
I had become very, very fond of those last few paragraphs. I could see the scene in my mind. And I won't throw them away just yet. But when I hit the 'accept changes' button, and looked at the ending of the book, I was a bit surprised to find that it was definitely more poignant and more moving to finish it just a little earlier than I had intended and leave the very obvious ending hanging in the air. The reader is certain what has happened. As certain as I am, having written it. So certain that he or she doesn't need to be told.
It is this kind of thing that makes a very good editor and a good editor is beyond price.
Fingers and toes crossed that soon, this much loved brainchild - and I do find myself loving this story more and more - will find a publisher.

Plays. What Constitutes a Script? A Few Dramatic Insights.

2011-02-25T16:48:00.002Z

Just finished judging a drama competition for a writers' group. There were plenty of entries, considering that this is a fairly specialised area of writing and one not everyone wishes to venture on - and the level of competence was high. This is a very good group! But working with these scripts and trying to find ways to help people improve, reminded me of a few issues - not necessarily from this particular set of entries, but from many others which I have read over the years - problems and provisos which I felt might be worth sharing with other people who might also be starting out on writing drama.

The first issue is that writers so often submit a script to a 'general' drama competition without being in any way specific as to what medium they are writing for. To anyone with any experience of the various dramatic media this seems almost unbelievable but when you look at it from the perspective of somebody just starting out, it is perfectly understandable. I think we underestimate how few people realise that a television script is, for example, quite a different animal from a stage play. This is not the time or the place to go into the many differences - but if you're planning to write drama, and especially if you're planning to write a piece of drama for a competition - you'd be wise to do your research first, get hold of some scripts, visit some websites, read some books - and set out to write your script for a particular medium and only for that medium.

Related to this, is the realisation that beginning writers so often conflate four, five or six individual scenes into one big scene - showing a complete lack of awareness of the practical processes involved. A character will get out of bed, go down the stairs, go into the kitchen, come back out, open the front door, go out into the street, walk down the street and get onto a bus, without any indication of just how this is going to be orchestrated for television or film, how long this might take and/or whether or not we really need to see them do all these things anyway. It's only possible to do it this way for radio, and even then it might be inadvisable to let the listener hear the whole process!

As far as stage plays are concerned, writers sometimes specify large casts (fine if you're aiming for amateur dramatics, but not for professional theatre, where budgets are very tight) and lots of different and highly complicated sets. If you are going to set your play in a simple, generic space which represents various spaces or places in a simple way, then that’s fine. I've done it myself, most notably in a play called Wormwood, about Chernobyl. But you can’t describe a series of very specific and complicated stage sets and have your characters moving between them very quickly within the space of a few pages, without running into real production problems.

People also seem blithely unaware of the way - for example - stage plays work in real time. So a character may go off fully clothed to take a bath and re-appear fifteen seconds later, primped and powdered, in their jammies and dressing gown, ready for bed - a tour de force of undressing and make-up that is probably beyond all but a contortionist.

Most of these problems can be remedied by people remembering that they are writing something which is by its very nature, visual and immediate. As dramatists and playwrights, we are not telling a story of something that ‘happened’ once upon a time. We are showing the audience something as it happens, and if necessary, shaping it, so that it draws the audience in. Even when characters are telling the audience something that did happen, the playwright still has to be dramatising it in some way for the audience, bringing it to life for them in the present. If one of your characters spends pages and pages telling another character all about something that happened to them once upon a time, you can bet you're committing the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing. Go back and find a way to dramatise it. A dead giveaway is when - as so often happens with writers who are starting out - the stage directions lapse into the past tense. 'He sat down on the bench and looked into the distance.' If you ever find yourself doing that, you can be sure that you've stopped writing a play and started writing a story. You are no longer in the 'now' of the drama. You have to see it happen as you are writing it. You have to be there. You, yourself, have to be in the immediate present of your play. That is one of the joys of writing drama!

If any writer has any other useful hints and tips, I'll gladly add add them to this post.

Threads of Feeling, Textiles and Writing

2011-02-11T13:31:00.000Z

Wasn't sure whether to post this on my writing blog or my textiles blog so will probably put something about it on both! It's an online exhibition called Threads of Feeling. It was flagged up by the excellent Amanda Vickery, on Twitter and I find it moving and beautiful. It could be the source of a million stories.

I have always found textiles inspirational for my writing. It's not just that I love researching costume history and finding out exactly what people would have worn. I've acquired dozens and dozens of books about textiles, costume and so on over the years - many of them from charity shops or (more inexplicably) from academic library sales where I have managed to buy quite rare books for a song, volumes which I now treasure and refer to all the time.

Getting the details right is important, (although there's a fine line between getting the details right and feeling the need to fling all your research into the story, just because you know about it!) But I also find that textiles of all kinds inspire the actual subject matter and content of my novels and plays. Many writers, but I suspect especially female writers, are fascinated by these 'made' items which are so closely related to how we live our lives, so necessary for us. There is some interlinking between beauty and utility that we love to write and to read about.

I don't think men quite 'get' this fascination but I'm willing to be proved wrong. I'm sometimes asked to talk about the textiles I write about and whenever I take - for example - pieces of Ayrshire Whitework, and allow people to handle them and look at them while they hear about their history, I do find the men become as fascinated as the women, although they may have come along to the session somewhat reluctantly, dragged there by the women in their lives!

We all know that there is something uniquely personal about items of clothing. Shoes take on the personality of the wearer. Sorting out clothes after a bereavement is always sad, but it can also be obscurely comforting. In fact I wrote about just this feeling in my novel The Curiosity Cabinet, albeit in a historical context. I'm writing about antique textiles and needlework again in a new novel called The Physic Garden where a piece of embroidery is an integral part of the story. And costume, dress, items of clothing, all figure largely in my new Polish historical novel, The Amber Heart. Researching this aspect of fiction and drama is always a pleasure for me. And because I collect antique and vintage textiles and sometimes deal in them, I find that the ideas come thick and fast. There's always something new waiting to be discovered.

Killing Your Darlings?

2011-01-26T10:00:00.000Z

David Armstrong, in his excellent book about writing: 'How Not To Write a Novel' declares that he doesn't subscribe to the 'kill your darlings' school of literary advice, and I'm increasingly inclined to agree with him. It's one of those glib generalisations - attributed to William Faulkner, so I'm told - and teachers of creative writing have been parroting it thoughtlessly ever since.
I know what they mean. There are times when we all become enchanted by the beauty of our own prose, to the point where it becomes self indulent, and we have to be very aware of that as a pitfall. But there are also times when we know that something is exactly right, is strong, well written, valuable and a vital part of the whole novel, story or play. To discard such a piece of writing on the principle that if you think it's good, you're wrong, seems like madness to me!
It's been on my mind, recently, since I received a piece of rather sweeping editorial advice to which my first response was rage, my second response was to remember the 'kill your darlings' maxim and wonder if he wasn't right after all, and my third and final response was to do some judicious pruning which the advice had highlighted, and for which I'm grateful, but to leave most of my 'darlings' firmly in place.
I'm reminded of the differences between men and women when it comes to gardening. On the whole (and I'm not talking about professionals here - I'm sure Alan Titchmarsh is a model of restraint!) men tend to hack and chop while women prune, carefully and thoughtfully, with due regard for the nature of the tree or shrub. Probably the only time I ever saw my late mum and dad - a very loving couple - arguing, was when my dad had 'done some pruning' in the garden. I remember her chasing him round the garden, shears in hand, yelling at him. Perhaps men take the same approach to manuscripts - who knows?
This is by no means an argument against revisions and editing. Most beginning writers need to learn the virtues of rewriting, over and over again. And there are a number of extremely experienced writers who - by the time they get to novel number ten or eleven or twelve - no names no pack drill - might benefit from the services of a good editor, but by that stage are too powerful to be edited. But there comes a point when you have to have a certain confidence in your own voice, in your own work. We walk a tightrope, most of us, too close to our own work to be able to see it clearly, but perhaps not quite confident enough to hold out for what we believe in. Treat your darlings like any other piece of writing. Fairly. Thoughtfully. Carefully. But as for killing them? I don't think so.

The Importance of Story

2011-01-22T14:34:00.001Z

Because I had flu just after Christmas - the flu jab I had, back in October, didn't seem to have any effect on this bug, but perhaps, as friends said, it would have been even worse without it - I spent a great deal of time huddled up on the sofa with a blanket, a hot water bottle, a succession of cups of weak tea and numerous old movies. These included Gigi, Oliver, Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music and The Railway Children. I enjoyed all of them, cried at all but Singin' in the Rain, in fact cried buckets at The Railway Children (it's the 'daddy, my daddy' moment - does it to me every single time) and took the opportunity to consider current and future writing projects, in a vague, fluey, conceptual sort of way.
My agent now has a new novel from me, The Amber Heart. I've blogged about that and also about the proposed sequel, The Winged Hussar, here on Wordarts. I thought the Amber Heart was finished in November, but then it came back with suggested edits. Some were invaluable and some made me cross. But even the ones that made me cross were also very valuable, because when I calmed down, I could see that the person who had read it definitely had a point. All of it sent me back to the manuscript with a fresh eye. I didn't take everything on board, but I made a number of changes. In some cases he had put his finger very accurately on issues that had troubled me, but which I had pushed to the back of my mind - in one case it was a plot point that had niggled at me because I sensed that the character wouldn't have behaved like that. I needed her to behave 'like that' for the sake of the story but it didn't ring true. The comments from this particular editor, although not quite addressing that point, allowed me to ask myself 'what if' something different happened. And suddenly, things became much clearer. So now, my agent has a newly tweaked draft, (I finally hauled myself off my couch of pain to type up the edits) and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's either ready to go - or almost ready to go! But I'm grateful to the agency for spending time and trouble on this. There's no point in sending something out unless it's as good as you can possibly make it, no matter how much those rewrites make you want to tear your hair out.
As I lay and watched those old movies, another thought occurred to me. As I've matured as a writer, I've become more and more aware of the value of story. A few years ago, in spite of a good deal of success as a playwright, with awards won, and with a track record in all kinds of published non-fiction, as well as short stories and even poetry, I realised that I wanted to write novels. Not only 'wanted to' - always a dodgy thing to say. The world and her husband 'want to write' a novel and at least some of them think that if they tell you their fascinating tale, you will do it for them! But I digress.
I had written a number of novels and just about all of them were weighing down my shelves in manscript form, because that was as far as I had got with them. I didn't want to abandon drama altogether, but the balance was certainly shifting. The hitch was that so much of the feedback I was getting from professionals was pointing out that these novels were 'extremely well written - but a bit too quiet.' While I was struggling with this judgement, a successful writer told me that publishers are always looking for the holy grail of the 'beautifully written, stonking great story'. Sometimes they find it. 'But' - she went on - 'if they can't have that, then they will settle for the stonking great story every time.' That single comment - a lightbulb moment -changed the way I think about my writing. It also prompted me to get my head down and work on a couple of major projects, to plan a lot more and eventually to find an agent who would market me as a novelist rather than a playwright.
At Christmas, it struck me that all those movies washing over me in a great wave of entertainment were stonking great stories. I know film is different from literature. I know many people hate musicals. I don't care if you loathe The Sound Of Music (and I have lots of good friends who would say as much!) - but there are millions out there who adore it, and one of the reasons why they love it so much, and can watch it again and again, is because it is the kind of archetypal story that human beings the world over enjoy. It's like being a kid again. When you wanted that book read to you yet again, and woe betide your mum or dad if they skipped your favourite passage!
If anything, it's even more obvious with The Railway Children. Can there be any woman who has lost a much-loved father, who doesn't watch that scene on the station platform, towards the end of the Railway Children, and who doesn't shed a tear? (I'm told Field of Dreams has the same effect on many men, for obvious reasons.) Can there be anyone - however much he or she dislikes musicals - who isn't moved by the inevitability of poor Nancy's fate at the end of Oliver? Well, possibly, but I think a percentage even of them may be resisting something deep inside themselves!
As a writer, it only surprises me that it has taken me so long to acknowledge the importance of story. I wonder if it's because I read English at university. Academia isn't too hot on stories although since I specialised in Mediaeval Studies, (full of stonking great stories, if you ask me) I wasn't your average English graduate. But then, of course, I started out with poetry and plays. And then, when I did start writing novels, I thought of the story as 'plot'. And it seemed difficult. I wasn't sure I could do it. And when I did do it, no matter how fine the writing, it all seemed a bit 'quiet.' It was only when I stopped thinking about plot and started thinking about story that I felt myself on surer ground. I had stories to tell and some of them were far from quiet. So I wonder, if we stopped advising beginning writers to consider character and plot and point of view, and started advising them to try to tell their story, as beautifully, as entrancingly, as stylishly as they possibly can - but for all that, to tell us a story - they might find it just a little easier to discover their own voices. What do you think?

A Rant In Defence of Video Games

2011-01-13T18:59:00.000Z

I am sick and tired of listening to people who ought to know better casually dismissing computer games as trash, and lumping them together, as though they were all exactly the same, much as one might say 'books induce violence and anti-social behaviour in the young ' - see how daft it sounds? Although I'm sure people used to say it, especially about 'novels' which in Jane Austen's time were dismissed as the source of so much evil!
Talk to these people and they will tell you that 'no, they have never played a video game, not once, not ever.' They seem quite proud of the fact, in the same way that people seem to be inexplicably proud of the fact that they 'can't do maths to save themselves' but would be ashamed to confess to being illiterate.
I confess that I have a personal interest here. My maths graduate son aims to work in the industry, has already spent two years working on Quality Assurance (i.e. testing) for the industry, has his name on a couple of major titles, and is now studying for a Professional Masters in Computer Game Development at prestigious Abertay University, in Dundee. This course - he's enjoying every minute of it - involves a cross-section of people coming from various backgrounds, including art and programming, but my son is one of only a very small number of people who aim to fill the - also much misunderstood - role of 'designer' within the industry.
When I told people that he had spent most of his Christmas vacation finishing off a number of academic essays and presentations about the industry, most people looked puzzled and then asked 'But what on earth can anyone find to write about on Video Games?'
Having had a look at the many thousands of sophisticated and interesting words he has written about these same games, about the psychology behind them, about innovations in the industry, I could have made some attempt to answer them, but where to start?
Part of the problem is, I think, that for people of a certain age, the term Video Games conjures up visions of Pacman, or Pong or Space Invaders, early incarnations of extreme simplicity. It's a little as though the term 'television' only invoked those tiny, blurred, black and white pictures set in the middle of massively clunky sets, without taking into account any of the developments of the last fifty years.
Another part of the problem, though, is wilful ignorance. Even among media commentators and researchers who ought to know better, the whole industry is seen as some amorphous mass. The closest I can come to describing it, is - again - to make the analogy with television. Would you judge a contemporary cutting edge drama, a mass market reality show and a children's cartoon, by exactly the same set of narrow criteria? I doubt it! So why do people do this when commenting on Video Games? Don't they realise that times, and the industry, have moved on. That there is a breathtaking spectrum of work out there, everything from multi-million dollar mass-market titles, to small downloads, with everything in between, including games which teach, and games which might well be classed as 'art.'
Moreover, the tabloid media image of the troubled 'loner' playing in his room, could hardly be further from the truth. This happens, of course, but then didn't it always happen? Didn't some kids always prefer to be alone with their trainsets or their airfix models? They certainly did when I was young! The truth is that with the new games, people of all ages often prefer to indulge in their hobby in the company of other people. Sometimes they will play in groups (either within families or with groups of friends) and often they will play online games, in contact with people from around the world. There is nothing sinister about this. If anything, it makes the world a smaller place, and the effect seems to be very positive indeed.
I have blogged before about a fabulous game called Flower, introduced to me by my son and designed by Jenova Chen. This isn't so much a game as an experience and I have to say that it gives me much the same sensation as I experience when I am deeply involved with a piece of writing, or listening to a piece of music, or experiencing some magical artwork or film. Time passes, I'm not aware of it, but I emerge tired but strangely refreshed at the other end. The world evoked by this extraordinary game, with its accompanying music, has stayed with me, giving me the kind of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' that is all too hard to achieve. My world would be the poorer if I hadn't experienced it. This isn't a game that appeals to everyone. In fact, I would say that it is a game which probably doesn't appeal at all to the young, male, gamer demographic. They probably don't see the point of it, any more than they would yet see the point of the art, music or literature which I love (although they might come to it eventually). But it's a big market out there, and it's growing all the time.
And what of the role of 'designer'. Well, that's much debated, even in the world of professional video games development. It's easy enough to see where programmers and artists and even producers slot in, but a 'designer'. Too many young people seem to have the perception that the designer sits in a room and comes up with a brilliant design document, which he or she hands over to a bunch of people who then do as they are told and create the game. From the designer's mind to your console or phone, in one easy leap. Of course it isn't like this. Not at all. But when my son was casting about for an analogy himself, I could give him one. Because as a playwright, it seemed fairly obvious to me. The role of designer seems to me to be very much like the role of artistic director, in the theatre. A director could, of course, tell everyone what to do. But it would be pretty disastrous, people would get angry and nothing much would happen. The job of director is, in many ways, as facilitator. He or she has to be able to allow all these talented people to get on with what they do best, while keeping the whole project creatively in mind, and having the courage of his or her vision to be able to make certain decisions - yes, that will work, no, don't think that's quite right, maybe, try that out and see what happens. The buck stops with the designer just as it stops with an artistic director. It is a difficult role, a challenging one - but when it works well, there is probably nothing more rewarding. So all I can do is wish my creative son all the luck in the world. Keep at it. You'll get there in the end!

Love and Romance

2011-01-06T11:27:00.000Z

My first failure of 2011 was to get some 50 pages into a novel deemed to be a classic of its kind, and to dislike it so much that I had to give up on it. I used to persevere with books on principle, but now I think 'so many books to enjoy - why bother with the ones you can't stand?' - I give them 50 or 60 pages and if they haven't hooked me by that time, I mostly give up on them. Of course I'm not passionate about everything I read. That would be too much to ask. But if you start reading something and are (a) deeply bored or (b) profoundly irritated, there's seems little point in carrying on. It's one reason why I don't belong to a book group. I rather like being challenged by a book, and am quite happy to tackle supposedly 'difficult' books. I've done it often enough when reviewing. But I don't think I could bring myself to soldier on with a book I truly disliked, just because somebody else had chosen it for me. The only good reason for doing that would be because somebody else was paying me!

But I digress. For me, one of the most irritating features of this particular book was a plethora of descriptions of women with 'voluptuously swelling breasts' and 'curved thighs'. Didn't seem to matter which character's pov we were with, his (they were all men) perception of women was the same. The women he was describing weren't real women at all. They were a part of his fantasy life. About as real, come to think of it, as Jessica Rabbit. Now I'm not saying that this author isn't with the majority here. Why wouldn't he be? And, of course, women writers do something similar when they fall in love with the heroes they create and model them a little on, for instance, Richard Armitage, Rufus Sewell, David Tennant - to pluck a few examples out of the contemporary air!

But what makes me very angry indeed is that when a man taps into his fantasy in this way, he will almost certainly not be judged for it, for the simple reason that it will not even be noticed by male critics. He may still be deemed to be writing a powerful classic novel, whereas no matter how elegant the prose, how epic the tale, how excellent the characterisation, how deep the insights, a woman's love story can still be dismissed as 'romantic nonsense' or - God help us - a 'guilty pleasure.' According to so much critical appraisal, young men write powerful coming of age stories about the male experience while young women write about relationships. Men write searing insights into emotional problems. Women write about love. Men write about the state of the world. Women write about the narrowly domestic. It's a bit, come to think of it, like that old joke about the man who says that his wife handles all the trivial things, like where they live and where the kids go to school and how they spend their money, while he decides the big important things like the state of the nation and the economy and whether we'll ever achieve world peace...

Romance is, of course, a term with a long and distinguished history and a multitude of meanings. Some of my best friends - fine writers too - write 'romance'. But it has become a sort of critical shorthand for everything from beautifully constructed but lighthearted commercial fiction, (I'm absolutely certain that the critics who dismiss it so scathingly wouldn't be able to do it to save themselves) to epic and densely constructed tales of relationships in a difficult political climate - and everything in between. This allows the reviewer or literary commentator to trivialise or dismiss the novel, story or play which centres on the female experience in a way that I think almost never happens with a male writer. It shouldn't still be happening. But I'm afraid in all too many cases, it is.

Stained Glass - A Village Ghost Story

2010-12-24T14:37:00.000Z

This ghost story was first published many years ago, in a magazine called Ayrshire Life, by Kenneth Roy, now - among much else - editor of The Scottish Review, to which I contribute from time to time. It's a story with a springtime setting - just to cheer us all up - but as a very spooky tale, it might also give you a wee frisson for Christmas!

The renovation had taken time, effort and money but now it was almost complete. Jack had bought the stone cottage in the long village street because he wanted somewhere of his own, a place on which he could lavish a little affection. Originally, the house had been part of a terrace. On the right it was still attached to the row of old weaver’s houses, but on the left there was a neat gap where another cottage had long since been demolished. ‘Room for possible extension’ the estate agent’s schedule had said.

Jack had also acquired the demolished cottage’s wilderness of a garden as part of his own, though as yet he had scarcely done any gardening. He had been much too busy on the house. His neighbour on the right hand side was an elderly widow who lived alone. A friendly pub was within walking distance and for the first time since the sudden death of his wife, a couple of years earlier, he found himself achieving a kind of contentment. He had worked steadily through the winter and now, with the coming of spring, he could look with pleasure on newly sanded and waxed floors, a restored stone fireplace, a white tiled bathroom and a kitchen in fumed oak. He had resisted the temptation to buy an Aga. That had been his wife’s dream, not his, and besides, funds were getting low.

Like all old houses, the cottage had objected to the disturbance, throwing a hundred problems at him. There had been a certain satisfaction in finding solutions. In his more imaginative moments, he thought that he and the house had sized each other up, and grown used to each other. All its nightly noises were familiar now: the creak and rustle of cooling wood, the tap, tap of hot water in the pipes, the occasional mousy scuttering from the loft. There were idiosycrasies too: the spare bedroom door that would not stay shut, but swung open without warning; the cool spot at the bend in the stairs. But none of them worried him, although his occasional visitors - friends from the city - commented on them. But there was a consistency about them that was reassuring. Now he could begin to think about getting the garden into shape. He anticipated the work involved with real pleasure.

He was a young man and had taken the loss of his wife very badly. They had planned children, later. Now he was torn between sorrow over what might have been and relief that he hadn’t been left alone to cope with a family. Unable to bear the pain of so many associations in the city where they had been together since graduation, he had asked for a transfer and come to work in a nearby town where there was a smaller, quieter branch of his company. He didn’t care so much for promotion any more. All his hopes for the future had been shared with Debbie. Now she was gone, he was content to spend all his free time on the house.

“He hasn’t an idle bone in his body” they said of him in the village and that was praise indeed, for they were slow to accept strangers. But they had begun to like him.

The house, however, lacked one finishing touch and at first he was at a loss how to remedy it. At the bend in the stairs and quite high up, there was a round stained glass window, like a small porthole. Or rather there had once been such a window but what was left of it was so cracked and splintered that he had had to seal it with hardboard to keep out the winter draughts until he should decide what to do about it. He was very much afraid that he was going to have to fill the space with clear glass but for some reason the idea disappointed him. He was conscientious about such things, liking the unusual features that characterised the place.

Jack had been discussing the problem one night in the pub with a friend who had come down from the city to admire the work on the cottage. Billy, the landlord, happened to overhear their conversation, or it may have been that he was listening. At any rate, later on in the evening, he approached Jack.

‘About that stained glass…’

‘Yes?’

‘I could let you have a window. I didn’t know yours was broken. This one’s just the same.’

Jack was mystified. ‘You could?’

‘Aye. It came from the cottage next door to yours, just before it was demolished. That was before my time, but they took out the glass. So my father said. I suppose someone thought it was too nice to throw away. It’s been up in our loft for years. You’re welcome to it if you can use it.’

‘Why was the other cottage demolished?’ asked Jack’s friend.

‘I wouldn’t know.’ Billy shrugged. ‘It lay empty for years. Eventually the dry rot and the wet rot and the woodworm got to it. The way it nearly got to yours.’ He mopped at the bar with a cloth. ‘They were always a pair those two houses. Built at the same time. But houses in this village weren’t fetching the prices they are today and nobody could be bothered with it.’

‘It’s given me a nice bit of extra land,’ said Jack. ‘I’m going to have my vegetable garden there.’

‘You’re really into all this self sufficiency stuff, aren’t you?’ said his friend, draining his glass.

‘Not really. But I’ve always wanted to grow veggies.’

‘Tatties’ said Billy.

‘What?’

‘Potatoes, that’s what you have to grow in the first year. Cleans the ground. You’ll need seed potatoes.’

‘Will I?‘

‘You will. And since you’ve got the land you may as well have the window.”

Billy brought it round the next day. It was wrapped neatly in yellowing newspaper. Jack took it out and set it carefully on the floor, sidetracked for a moment by the old advertisements for corsetry and tricycles. He folded the newspaper carefully. Worth keeping, he thought. He could see that the window was a fine piece of work. The glass was clear red with an intricate little chain of flowers and leaves as a border. Afraid of damaging it, he contracted a local glazier to set it in and was pleased to notice how the afternoon sun cast a rosy glow through the red glass, shedding a beam of light over his stairs.

The window fascinated him. Every time he passed through his hallway, he found himself pausing to admire it. The morning after its installation, a fine spring Sunday, he took a bowl of warm water up to his landing, stood on a stepladder, and began to clean the old glass, carefully sponging away the dirt of years, and the traces of putty left by the glazier. Presently, however, he found his attention focussed on the patch of garden he could see outside. The stone walls of his house were very thick and blinkered his view. Also the glass itself had a flaw in it that slightly blurred his vision but, leaning a little to the left of his window, he found that he was looking down at what seemed to be a small cherry tree. He could just make out a blur of blossom, as well as a patch of grass with scattered petals beneath. Somebody was sitting there. The warp in the glass prevented him from seeing clearly but it seemed to be a young woman, dressed in light clothing, her head bent over her lap. She might be reading, or even sewing. He screwed up his eyes. It occurred to him that he must be looking into next door’s garden: the one to the right of his own house. The window must have somehow funnelled his vision.

The old lady had visitors; a grand-daughter perhaps. There was a suggestion of long dark hair, a slim frame beneath. He stopped in his work of cleaning, his hand poised over the glass. A young man had come up and slipped his arms around the girl from behind. Jack saw a pale shirt, pink in the light from the glass, though he guessed it must be white. A loose shirt, dark trousers. The girl reached up her hands to grasp his. The man bent over and kissed the top of her head. Then she half rose, and they were in each others arms, embracing passionately in the sunlight.

Jack was embarrassed. He felt himself beginning to blush. It was as though he had intruded on their sudden moment of intimacy, although they could not know it. He took himself downstairs so that he shouldn’t be tempted to spy on the couple from the bedroom window. He was a good natured young man, and felt as though it wasn’t quite honest to watch them like this.

But the stained glass held its own attraction. The morning wore on towards lunch time. Whenever he had reason to pass through the hall, going out to the shop for the Sunday papers, or carrying a mug of coffee from kitchen to sitting room, he found his eyes straying towards it. It made him uncomfortable.

At last, he went out into the garden, on the pretext of making some plans for new borders and his vegetable patch. To his right, the old hedge between his own land and his neighbour’s garden next door was high and thick, a tangle of rosa rugosa and privet and juniper. Much further down the garden it thinned out a bit and it was there that he usually looked over it, and held friendly conversations with the old lady, as she pottered about among her roses. He had given her his phone number. ‘If you need anything, just give me a call’ he had told her, promising to come through and do some weeding for her later in the spring.

But he could see nothing from this end, close to the house. He stood outside his back door for a long time, listening, but he could hear only birdsong, and the usual Sunday village sounds: a distant lawnmower, an occasional car, the excited mooing of cows let out to grass at last, the lazy drone of a small plane, practising aerobatics, high above. Nothing else. No voices at all. Were they still kissing?

Unable to withstand his own gnawing curiosity he went back upstairs to the window, stood on the ladder, and peered out again. He felt extraordinarily furtive, seeing without being seen. The couple were still together. There was a desperation about their caresses that he found both moving and distressing. Thoroughly ashamed of himself, he was about to descend and leave them to it, when he noticed a sudden quick movement, just at the edge of the glass.

A third figure had come within the compass of his vision, another man he thought, from the general size and bearing. The newcomer was standing just behind the tree trunk, in an attitude uncomfortably suggestive of extreme tension. Indeed the figure seemed at once furtive and yet poised as if ready to spring. As Jack watched, he saw the man raise a hand, a whole arm. But it was too long, too strong. He was holding something. What was it? A stick? Worse, an axe? He was stretching it up and out with a terrible tension about all his movements, a prelude to violence. It was the only interpretation Jack could place upon the gesture.

In an instant he had jumped from the ladder, and was running down the stairs, out of the back door and into his own garden, shouting ‘Hey!’ foolishly. ‘Hey! Stop that! Stop that!’
But even before he reached the part of his garden where the hedge ran low enough to see over, he felt that something was wrong. Feeling foolish, he parted the leaves and peered back along the length of the old lady’s garden. It was quite empty. A well tended lawn gave way to a newly dug vegetable patch. Jack remembered that she had told him her son was coming round to do it for her. There was a little group of apple trees bunched up at the far end. It was as he had remembered. She had no cherry tree. No other trees at all.

He turned slowly back to his own garden, looking towards his cottage seeking some explanation, but it too was basking innocently in the spring sunshine.

‘How stupid to live in a place for six months and not to remember,’ he thought, confused. His gaze slid across neglected flowerbeds to the rotting stumps of the old fence posts that had once marked the border between the two gardens, his own, and the demolished cottage on the other side. There was no cherry tree in the garden of his own cottage. The cherry stood fair and square in the middle of what had once been the lawn of the house next door. He could see it now, quite far away, with a pool of pink petals shed on the lengthening grass beneath. He glanced up to his little round window. Not easy to see that garden from up there. Particularly if you were standing to the left of it. Impossible to see the cherry tree. Completely impossible. The words dinned into his mind. His legs moved reluctantly as he retraced his steps back up to the window and peered out. The patch of grass beneath the cherry tree was quite empty now, the red glass turning the shed petals a vivid shade of crimson.

He had the window removed, the very next day. He gave it back to Billy with his thanks, explaining that it made his hallway too dark.

“I’ll just get some plain glass” he said.

With what may be considered a remarkable lack of curiosity, Jack made no enquiries at all in the village as to the history of the demolished house next door to his own. He liked his cottage far too much for that. Better not to know what had happened. When that year’s flowering was over he had the cherry tree chopped down. “It only covers the lawn with dead petals” he said, by way of explanation. Some of the villagers thought it was a shame. Others, older people for the most part, did not.

Catherine Czerkawska

Something Spooky for Christmas.

2010-12-18T15:43:00.000Z

I do love a good ghost story, for Christmas, don't you? Looking through this week's Radio Times (the BBC's definitive UK magazine for television listings) I was excited to see that there was to be a new dramatisation of M.R.James' classic ghost story: O Whistle and I'll Come to You. I won't spoil the denouement of this by relating the ending, but if you haven't read it, this is a tale about a loner, a university professor who, holidaying beside a remote stretch of English coastline, discovers an ancient whistle, tucked away among old ruins. The whistle has a Latin inscription which translates as 'who is this who is coming?' And yes - he blows the whistle. Even typing these words gives me a little frisson of pleasurable fright. By the end of the story he discovers who, or what, comes in answer to that whistle. And no - it isn't very nice!
Back in the late sixties, there was an excellent dramatisation of this same story, directed by Jonathan Miller, with Michael Hordern as the professor. The above picture is a still from that production. It was peculiarly atmospheric - deftly done - evoking the dreadful sense of nightmare that James so successfully creates in the original story. But reading about the new production, in the Radio Times, I was astonished to see that they seem to have decided not just to 'update it' which might have worked, but also to do away with the whistle. And as anyone who has read the tale knows, the whistle is the key. The whistle, with all that it implies in terms of history, belief, and reasons why, is absolutely central. To change that is to change the whole story, and that being the case, why not have the courage of your own ideas and write a completely new spooky drama? While I'm reluctant to pre-judge any drama without seeing it first, I don't think I'll be watching this one. Too afraid of spoiling it for myself. Instead, I'll give myself a Christmas treat and go back to the original story.
But it does bear out something I've noticed about dramatisations. They tend to fall into two sorts: first there are those where the scriptwriter clearly loves and understands the original, knows that changes must be made to recreate a story in a completely different medium, but never makes those changes just for their own sake. Emma Thompson's screenplay for Sense and Sensibility is as fine an example as any - not a word or image out of place, truly filmic, but also entirely true to the original.
Then - sadly - there are the dramatisations where the scriptwriter believes that he or she (and it so often seems to be a 'he'!) could make a much better job of it than the original writer, and proceeds to demonstrate that he or she can't. Into this category falls just about every attempted dramatisation of Wuthering Heights! I don't know about this version of Whistle, but I have my suspicions.
Back to Christmas spooks. If you want to terrify yourself, you could do worse that get hold of the collected ghost stories of M. R. James - read Whistle, and The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, and Casting the Runes (some excellent film versions of that, over the years) or the ghost stories of E.F. Benson. These were much overshadowed by his wonderful Lucia, but still fine stories. Or tell some real tales on Christmas Eve. Like the time I was walking down our village street, at twilight, and crossed over to speak to the old man on the other side - only to find that he disappeared, as instantly as though somebody had switched off a television picture. Later on, my husband said, 'That'll have been Jock. He always used to walk about the village in the evening.'
Jock was the village handyman, chimney sweep, blacksmith, who knew everything about everything. His picture is currently hanging in our village shop, which was once his workshop, keeping a keen eye on things. And there are those who believe he might still be around. Me too.

A Life Like Other People's

2010-12-07T16:43:00.000Z

Been reading and relishing Alan Bennett's funny, moving autobiographical book: A Life Like Other People's, not least because - although I knew that Bennett had lived in Leeds - I hadn't realised where he had lived, and how close his house had been to the place where - albeit some years later - I spent the first few years of my life. There is something uniquely satisfying about recognising a place with which you are intimately familiar, in the work of a fine writer - although I'm not sure quite why this should be! But when Bennett describes Tong Road, and Green Lane, Bruce Street and Wellington Road, I am back there again, walking hand in hand with my mother, up Hall Lane, on the way to my little primary school: Holy Family. To get there, we had to pass close to the massive, looming presence of Armley Gaol, and in those days I hardly knew what it was, thinking it some magical, sooty castle. Even more moving, though, are his depictions of his family, his 'aunties' and their attempts at glamour, their thwarted ambitions and unexplored talents, and these too have echoes in certain members of my own family, now long gone. The picture above shows my own 'aunty' looking a mite sultry, my handsome Uncle George - and my little gymslipped mum, standing in Whitehall Road, Leeds, some time in the thirties, I think.

Moomins: Tove Jansson's Genius

2010-11-30T15:46:00.001Z

Given the state of the weather in Scotland at present, I posted on Facebook that I wanted to 'fill my tummy full of pine needles' and hibernate for the rest of the winter. To my surprise, many of my friends had no idea what I was talking about, and had never read Tove Jansson's 'Moomin' books. I can understand the reluctance to try them, because if you don't know about Moomins, and have never read the books, you may well assume that they are the usual twee anthropomorphism and leave it at that.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I read my first Moomin book - like so many books that I later came to love - because my father discovered and enthused about them. My family were great readers. My mum's side of the family (Leeds, Irish, working class) gave me a series of old and magical 'Wonder Books' full of fairy tales and extracts from the classics. They also gave me Noddy and the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and the Faraway Tree. I was pretty obsessive about Noddy, much to my aunt's chagrin. She had to read them to me over and over again, thinking, so she told me when I grew up, what a selfish little pig he was!
Blyton was followed by Just William, The Alice books, the Wind in the Willows and then - later on - Wuthering Heights, Rebecca and an abiding love of Dickens. My Polish scientist dad gave me quirkier reads - well, quirky for the time: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, long before they became popular, the Narnia books, Three Men in a Boat, 1066 and All That - and the Moomins. But of all of them, I think it is the Moomin books that I love most.
It is almost impossible to categorise these books, which means they probably wouldn't have a hope in hell of being published nowadays - a sobering thought. The earlier books in the series, Finn Family Moomintroll, Comet in Moominland and so on, are lighthearted, funny, poetic, imaginative but always with a little thread of what I can only describe as wisdom running through them. No heavy handed life lessons here - just a profoundly reassuring but unsentimental understanding of the power of love and the value of kindness. When Moomintroll wears the magical and dangerous Hobgoblin's hat, and has his entire appearance changed by it, when all his friends don't recognise him, and mock him, and tell him to go away, it is his mother, Moominmamma, who looks into his eyes for a long while, and says 'yes, you are my Moomintroll.'
When he was little, this was my son's very favourite book. His battered copy still falls open at an illustration of a bridge over a stream, with young Moomintroll and his free-spirited friend Snufkin contentedly dangling their legs over it. I don't know quite why this image exerted such power over him, but I understand it very well. Many of us, I think, like to live our literature if we can!
The books though, do become more reflective and - eventually - somewhat darker. Moominland Midwinter, in which Moomintroll finds that he wakes up from hibernation much too soon and has to learn to adjust to winter, is not only entertaining but an exploration of other ways of living and our tolerance of them. We have all known - and secretly admired - a Little My (brave, difficult, rude, edgy, impulsive) a shy Misabel, an obsessively tidy Fillyjonk. The energetic Hemulen, who desperately tries to organise everyone and make them participate in winter sports whether they want to or not, is a creation at once so comic, so recognisable, and so ultimately poignant that it's no wonder Philip Pullman calls Jansson a 'genius'.
By the time we get to Moominvalley in November (in which the moomins don't really figure at all) and Moominpappa at Sea, which are both about the acceptance of change and loss and other profoundly adult emotions, as well as beautifully simple and imaginative 'reads' Jansson is displaying awe-inspiring skills.
I dramatised her short adult novel, The Summer Book, a gentle story about the relationship between a little girl and her grandmother, for BBC Radio 4. It was directed by Marilyn Imrie and starred Phyllida Law and Sophie Thompson. I had more letters about that production than almost anything else I ever dramatised for radio.
Jansson was a Swedish Finn, an artist as well as a writer, certainly a philosopher. The illustrations are part of the unique charm of these books. But it wasn't till I visited Finland itself, and worked there as a teacher of English for a couple of years, that I realised just how very 'Finnish' these books are, how the changing seasons are so important in the lives of the Finnish people, and just how many of my lovely students seemed to display all kinds of traits to be found in the books themselves. It wasn't necessary but it certainly added another dimension of understanding. I adored Jansson's work before I went to Finland. I admired it even more by the time I came back.

My Father, in Poland, in the Snow

2010-11-27T14:00:00.000Z

I'm spending a lot of time researching Polish history in general, my family history in particular, and just generally feeling my way back into that time and place. I find myself absolutely enchanted by it! It's almost impossible to describe to a non-writer that feeling of entering into another world that seizes you at the start of a project and - with the occasional hiccup when you wonder what on earth you are doing with your time - possesses you for days, weeks, months and just possibly years on end.
That's my father, Julian, in the picture. He was Julian, not the more Polish Juliusz, since my grandfather was an anglophile. Just as well really, given what happened next. Not sure how old Julian was in this picture, but he learned to ski and ride at the same time as he learned to walk. In the UK, where he finished up at the end of the war, these were not really pursuits he could ever resume. Many years later, I remember him pony trekking, here in Scotland, when our son was very small. He seemed as comfortable then, on horseback, as he must have been as a small boy. I'm not sure that he ever tried ski-ing again, although in this picture he's a supremely confident young man. If you look closely, you'll see that there's a man in an apron, in the background, standing beside the tall structure (what is it? I don't know!) and, presumably, 'keeping an eye' on him.

The picture above - summer, this time - shows him at the wheel of his father's car, (I do like the motoring gear, the goggles etc!) In the background, you can just make out a building of some sort, a group of cottages or thatched houses. And again, it's the sense of mystery about old pictures like this that I love. When and where was it. Certainly pre war. Can't you just smell the leather of the car seats? It was the only car in the district and my young grandfather couldn't really afford it, but he bought it anyway. And what is the blurred object at the top right? This picture always gives me a little frisson since the child that my father was looks so like the child that I was!
But of course, his life changed very radically, in the UK. He was a 'refugee alien' by then and such pursuits as ski-ing were way beyond his reach. He had a choice. He could work in the mills or the mines, so he worked in a textile mill for some years, and went to 'night school.' I remember him cycling home on his push bike, when I was a little girl.
He became a very distinguished research scientist, which says a great deal for his spirit, and his determination - considering that he had lost everything, and I mean everything, except a handful of battered photographs to remind him of his past.

Copyright, Intellectual Property, Publishers and and Writers

2010-11-22T13:49:00.000Z

Recent debates about these issues on Twitter and Facebook became heated and no wonder. As writers, we feel that our very livelihoods are at stake. But since at least one of these threads degenerated into an unpleasant attack on publishers, who are surely not the villains of the piece, I thought it might be worth revisiting the subject.

One of the problems is always assumed to be that we are faced with a generation of young people who have grown up with the idea that all information 'out there' should be free. They will happily pirate software, download and share tunes. Partly, this is the fault of an older generation who, in far too many cases, condone what is essentially theft. We can all help to remedy this in a small way, by setting a good example for our children and grandchildren and pointing out just how much effort - and expense - goes into creating the finished product. But given the impossibility of instituting mass prosecutions (actually, it's possible, but financially ruinous) I think everyone involved in the so-called Creative Industries needs to be able to debate these issues, and explore ways of dealing with them, to the advantage of all concerned.

Most writers can think of bouquets and the odd brickbat we would like to award to certain publishers (sometimes, come to think of it, the same publisher!) but I also think that when the relationship works well, as it so often does, we value it enormously. As a personal example, I could name Nick Hern, who has been publishing plays for many years and keeping them in print as well. Every year, when a nice little cheque arrives for my royalty share in one of his excellent anthologies of Scottish plays, I find myself giving thanks for his commitment and dedication.

But we also need publishers because they can save us from ourselves. Self publishing is a respectable option for professional writers with a project which may not be commercially lucrative enough for conventional publishing or a non fiction project with a very specialised market. I've self published a poetry pamphlet to my own satisfaction - but most of the poems had been published elsewhere first. And I wouldn't rule it out for other projects. But we have all read - or tried to read - dire examples of self published work, where it is clear that the writer has a fine conceit of his own abilities coupled with no editorial sense whatsoever. Writing is a craft and too many beginning writers seem to have little idea of the hard graft, the many revisions and drafts - as well as the vast amount of work involved in designing, producing and distributing that small paper and cardboard entity known as a book. Like all jobs which we know little about, this part of the business is a great deal more complicated than we suspect. It is argued that there should be far fewer gatekeepers, only 'aggregators' and that people should be allowed to decide for themselves. I've been known to argue as much, myself. But the grim reality is also that it can be very hard to find the occasional treasure amid the mountain of ill-thought-out verbiage and most of those treasures are the work of fellow professionals with many years of experience.

However, changes in technology do mean that all of us are going to have to adjust our way of thinking, publishers as well, although I'm sure many of them - perhaps the small to medium concerns most of all - have already taken this on board. When it comes to new developments, the video games industry may have something useful to teach us. We often assume that if people are willing to pirate music, they will also pirate game downloads. Experience and hard evidence, however, tell developers that this is not necessarily the case. Huge numbers of people will happily pay £5 or £6 for a video game download, even quite a simple one, and many companies of all sizes are making themselves a very good living this way. Not only that, but the stakes are that much lower, so there's room for experimentation and the odd failure.

So we must ask why. Partly it seems to be the perception of value for money. Partly, it's because, even with these reasonably simple games, there is the possibility of an update, or other 'enrichment' in the future. And partly, I suspect, it's that - although the video games industry has its problems, a relationship has developed between producer and customer (often by means of related online material, blogs etc) which in turn leads to an acknowledgement of value and a willingness to pay. Since a similar positive relationship usually exists between writer and reader, we must find new ways of tapping into all that goodwill. Most of us already do this, but I get the sense that the games industry is also researching itself in a seriously committed way, (my own son is part of that movement!) while so much of publishing's relationship with the new technology seems to be posited on assumption, rather than hard evidence. But perhaps it's too soon. Perhaps the evidence will come. At any rate, the advent of e-readers, of Kindle and similar methods of delivery for the written word mean that the technology is in place to do the same thing for publishing. These are early days, and there are interesting possibilities for writers and for booksellers as well as publishers, in facilitating this method of delivery, not as a replacement for the conventional book, but as another aspect of distribution to a changing demographic.

As writers, we should be supporting bodies such as the Society of Authors, in making sure that we are fairly rewarded for our Intellectual Property within this changing market. But I think we might also stop talking about copyright, and start talking about IP. Intellectual Property theft has many manifestations, from the blatantly criminal pirating of material, on an industrial scale, to the borrowing-without-permission of copy from a blog or website as a one-off irritant. The former should be addressed with the full might of the law - or as much of it as publishers and writers can afford. The latter might be better remedied, in the first instance at least, by pointing out the 'error' and asking for attribution. In hard cases, fighting fire with fire, online ‘outing’ of culprits can have devastating effects on recalcitrant offenders. But whatever the transgression, it is the concept of Intellectual Property that seems to me to stand most chance of appealing to the emotional involvement of those people at the other end of the chain, who are guilty of the many small piracies that could add up to a big loss of income for all of us. If I accuse you of infringing my copyright, you may not give a damn. If I accuse you of stealing my Intellectual Property, you may at least pause for thought. Words are powerful tools when it comes to stirring up emotions. As writers, we know this better than most!

It will be difficult, if not impossible, to turn the tide by conventional means. Somebody working in the video games industry said to me, 'Effectively, you can't really protect your IP. People will steal it if they want to.' But the companies involved at least do whatever they can to try to protect their creative ideas, not least in enforcing secrecy agreements on their employees. There can be few professional writers who haven't seen at least one cherished idea turning up with somebody else's name attached. Most often it's pure coincidence. Occasionally you just know that it's been stolen, but there's not a thing you can do about it. And you have to get the stuff out there, take the risk. This is quite different, however, from seeing a project which you and others have taken to hard-won completion being pirated by somebody else - these are the true parasites and they drain the lifeblood of the industry. But we must remember that tides are also sources of energy, and perhaps, instead of struggling to turn this particular tide, we should be seeking ways to harness it to our own advantage.

As an example, I do wonder why publishers can't keep their entire backlists active in download form, for which readers would pay a smallish amount, a fair percentage of which could go to the writer. There are, no doubt, all kinds of logistical and legal problems with this, but it seems to me that the availability of many of these texts, coupled with a willingness to support writers in their own publicity drives, might be instrumental in sparking a renewal of interest in a particular writer and lead, eventually, to hard copy sales of new work. It should not be beyond the bounds of possibility for agents, authors and publishers to hammer out reasonable deals along these lines. At the same time, this might allow smaller publishers to address the problem of the 'collapse of the mid-list.' I can visit a supermarket these days, and hardly see a single book that I might want to buy, although I can fully acknowledge that no self respecting business is going to turn down the chance to capitalise on a brand. On the other hand, the potential cheapness of downloads, means that many publishers might be able to follow the example of the games industry and supply new mid-list novels, initially as downloads, relying on the potential of the internet to spread the word to niche markets and capitalising on the often considerable online following of a mid-list author.

A parallel and fascinating example from the world of games involves a game called Flower, which – being gentle, philosophical, poetic and demanding of no particular technical skill - is vastly different from our conventional ideas of that industry. It was never going to be a so-called Triple A title, on sale in the big stores. But sold on the Playstation Network, as a £6.00 download, and spread largely by word of mouth, bloggers and a few mentions in significant books, it gives hours of pleasure to many thousands of people worldwide, (myself included) and has made a tidy profit for its extraordinary development team, with the backing of a major company, backing which would probably not have been forthcoming without the possibility of distribution in this easy, cost effective way.

It is my view that, in the current highly polarised debate, we are not only underestimating the exciting potential of new technologies, but also underestimating the genuine fairmindedness of many - not all, but certainly many – people, young and old, who would be prepared to pay a reasonable price for what they see as a good return in terms of entertainment.

We have to work out exactly how to organise this team effort, between publishers, online and real world booksellers, (the return of the smaller, private, niche seller might be facilitated if downloads could be obtained instore - especially if these smaller bookstores offered coffee, wifi, and their own expertise and advice), agents, writers, illustrators and all those other invaluable professionals in the middle, such as editors and publicists. All of these have their counterparts in the games industry, and without them, nobody would ever think they could produce a reasonably complex and entertaining game, even as a simple download. Or if they did, they would soon find out how hard it was. The 17 year old genius producing a best selling game in his bedroom is something of a myth. Look at the credits (beautifully organised within the game itself) on Flower. Look at exactly how many talented people have worked to produce this ‘simple’ hugely creative game even though it was initially conceived in the mind of one man. It is in working out how best to facilitate something similar for the written word that the challenge truly lies.

Are we up for it? I certainly hope so. Because I think that if we go about it in the right way, the benefits for all concerned could be immense.

My Polish Grandfather

2010-11-17T23:07:00.001Z

Here he is, my Polish grandfather, Wladyslaw. This little picture of him (looking a bit, I always think, like Olivier, playing Maxim de Winter, in Rebecca) accompanied my father to the UK, via Monte Cassino, in the later years of the war, when dad was still a very young man. Nobody knew what had become of Wladyslaw, and it was many years later when I began to piece his story together. I am still doing it and it has proved to be altogether more romantic and tragic than almost anything I might be able to make up. One of my father's favourite movies was Dr Zhivago, and - when I began to find out exactly what had befallen my grandfather, and what an extraordinarily eventful, albeit very short, life he had led - I could see exactly why this should be so. There's definitely a quality of that film - with its tale of a deeply attractive man, a beautiful woman, an illicit and ultimately doomed love affair, the demands of family and the tragedies of war - about Wladyslaw's story.
But fictionalising all this - ah, that's where things get a little tricky. I always find, when writing historical fiction, or drama, that there comes a moment when, no matter how much research you may have done, you have to give yourself permission, as it were, to turn aside from the research and dive head first into the piece of fiction you wish to create. But the closer you are to your subject matter, the harder it can be. It is always the rejoinder of the beginning writer, when faced with editorial criticism of a piece of fiction, however mild or tentative, to say, 'But it really happened like that!' Which is, of course, entirely immaterial. As long as there's a certain level of authenticity about a piece of fiction, as long as you don't make howlers that jolt your reader out of their willing suspension of disbelief, the fact that 'it really happened like that' is neither here nor there. What matters is the 'made up truth' of your work. As my agent says, there's always the risk, with historical writing, that a project will fall between two stools, being neither accurate non-fiction, nor a fully imagined piece of fiction. And the closer you are to your subject matter, the harder it can be to achieve the required separation.
My new novel, The Amber Heart, set in nineteenth century Poland, is finished now and with my agent, and I'm about to start work on the sequel, The Winged Hussar. But I'm aware that with this tale, I'm on more precarious territory.
The Amber Heart is loosely based on some episodes from my own family history. The house - called Lisko, in the novel - was a real house - alas, no longer in existence. One of the characters, in particular, was inspired by an historical character about whom there was a certain amount of material in the public domain, because he was a Polish representative to the Austro Hungarian parliament. And the love story which is central to the Amber Heart was inspired by the tale of a scandalous liaison, related to me by my father, about his own grandmother. But that time and place always seemed so remote, fascinating and wildly romantic, as to be the very stuff of fiction. The resulting novel isn't quite family history - it's genuine fiction, inspired by family stories. With the Winged Hussar, the sequel, however, I am on more familiar territory. I grew up with stories of Wladyslaw. I never met him, but I knew a great deal about him, even before I began to interrogate his life. I met one of his sisters, and spent time with his best friend. I loved him although I had never met him, used to dream that one day, he might turn up on our doorstep. So how to turn his life story into a credible piece of fiction? And how to avoid the pitfalls along the way?
Well, I came up with the idea - and I must confess that I've borrowed this from an artist friend who is embarking on a creative practice PhD - of keeping detailed diaries/scrapbooks all about my research and my writing, not just the usual complicated notes for the novel, but books that will allow me a certain amount of reflection on the process itself and my own emotional response to it. These should allow me to document the reality behind the story, should give me something concrete, which I may even be able to turn into an interesting non fiction project once the new novel is finished. The diaries will, to some extent, anchor me in reality, and allow me to reflect on my own pursuit of this mysterious character who is a part of me and to whom I feel strong emotional ties. But at the same time - I hope - they will also allow me to move confidently forward into the stand-alone fiction that the Winged Hussar must become, if it is to be a marketable and readable novel and a genuine sequel to The Amber Heart.
And I'll post a little of that exploration on here, from time to time, especially where I feel it may help others who may be embarking on similar projects.

Ideas, Poland, The Amber Heart and The Winged Hussar

2010-11-08T18:10:00.000Z

A few weeks ago, I was asked to speak to a group of first year Creative Writing students on the topic of 'Ideas'. It is probably the single most frequently asked question during readings and talks - 'Where do you get your ideas from?' - and the temptation to reply with suggestions like 'www.ideas.com' and 'Ideas-R-us' is almost irresistible. Well, I did resist the temptation, and I think the session was both productive and interesting - they were a lovely group of youngsters - but I still feel that if you have to ask that question, you may be in the wrong line of business. Most writers of my acquaintance have far more ideas than time to work on them. We all have folders and/or notebooks, stuffed with them. Of course most of these fledgling ideas don't stand the test of time, and are discarded along the way - get tipped out of the nest, so to speak. But every now and then, something stays with you and nips at you until you simply have to do something about it. The ideas are never the problem. But getting started, deciding what shape something should take, finishing, revising, revising again, finding time, finding commitment, finding a certain relentless application, revising for the twentieth or even the thirtieth time - all these can be a little problematic. But not the ideas. They just come and keep on coming.
However, I am currently in a bit of a quandary. My big Polish historical novel, The Amber Heart, is currently with my agent, who loves it, and is about to start sending it out. The Amber Heart has been rewritten to within an inch of its life and we are both very happy with it. It is set in the nineteenth century and is very loosely based on some episodes from my own impossibly romantic family history in Poland's 'wild east'. I am sitting here with a draft of a Scottish historical novel called The Physic Garden which I think has potential, but which I also know needs a great deal of work, (essentially, changing a first person narrative to a third person narrative, and adding in several other points of view) before it can be sent out. So I'm wondering whether to do the necessary work on that, because I'm very fond of it, and think I could make it work, before going back to Poland.
But if I go with my heart's desire, what I really want to do is to start writing the sequel to The Amber Heart. This is - again very loosely - based on the story of my grandfather, the grandfather I never knew, who was born in a sleigh, and went on from that somewhat surprising start in life to have a short, dramatic, and also impossibly romantic story. It will be called The Winged Hussar. I have done lots of factual research already, know more or less what the story is, and feel a bit like a diver on the edge of a pool. Once I pass the point of no return, that'll be me for the next year or so. But it will be a big project - I know that it will be emotionally draining - and I need time and space to work on it, which means that I also need somebody out there to have a little faith in The Amber Heart. At present, I'm in a kind of limbo.
And here's the interesting thing. I've been browsing online for pictures of Lwow/Lemburg/Lviv which was the closest city to the place where these people lived, and the city where my grandfather first met my grandfather. Back then it was Polish - now it's Ukrainian. These were deeply troubled borderlands, and that's part of the story. But to my surprise I find that eBay has a number of old, hand tinted, colour postcards of the city, not just buildings, but street scenes, with people, horses, horse-drawn vehicles, trams, from the early years of the twentieth century. I find that I can sit for hours, gazing at these. I'm even in the process of buying some of them. I find them not just fascinating, but curiously moving. They give me a small pain, in my heart, a sense of sorrow, loss, nostalgia. Not sure what the right word is, but I'm fairly obsessed with them right now. It strikes me that any one of these people could be one of my forebears, but I wouldn't know it. That man crossing the street, he could be my great grandfather. In another picture, there's a smart little girl, arm in arm with an older woman, and she could be my grandmother. Those shops, perhaps they visited them. For many years, when my father was young, I was told stories about this time and place, but they were as remote and inaccessible as fairy tales. Now, suddenly, because of the internet, they are real, they push themselves into my consciousness and into my dreams - a thousand stories, begging to be told. I'm obsessed with them. What can I do, but obey? Where do you get your ideas from? That's the easy bit. It's knowing exactly what to do with them that's problematic.

Paying the Piper, Again.

2010-11-04T21:56:00.000Z

Excellent piece about 'getting paid' on Jenn Ashworth's blog - here . I think we all know this, but I also think that we can't be reminded of it too many times, because it's a hard row to hoe and we regress, unless reassured that fellow professionals, like Jenn, feel the same. The labourer IS worthy of his or her hire, and just because we love what we do, we shouldn't be conned into thinking that it isn't work. It is.

Telling Tales

2010-10-26T14:48:00.000+01:00

Some time ago, I asked on Facebook - which is where I do a lot of my writerly networking - why so many people I knew were being told that some of their work was 'beautifully written, but too quiet.' It had happened to me too. At the time, it seemed a little unfair, and there were those who said that it was 'just one of those expressions' that publishers or agents use when they have to turn you down, but can't really think of a valid reason. Which is comforting, but not, I think, entirely true! One friend and well-published fellow writer, however, said that she was sometimes told the same thing. She said most publishers and/or agents are looking for the holy grail of the beautifully written, stonking great story, but if they can't have both in the same package, they will settle for the stonking great story any day. I'm sure this is absolutely true, and as time has gone by, and I've been working on the latest (big, Polish, historical) novel, The Amber Heart, I have started to see just how right she was and how very much story matters.
We are, after all, creatures who love to listen to stories. It is one of the things that makes us human. From the time when we can first talk, we are enthralled by narrative, by the act of listening, or turning the page, (even little children are fascinated by the physical act of turning over, long before they can read) or watching the screen, to find out what happens next.
I've come to realise, therefore, that we ignore this natural instinct at our peril. We can craft our elegant prose till the cows come home, but if the reader doesn't care what happens next, then we aren't going to get anywhere. Which is not to say, of course, that honing the prose doesn't matter, because it does. It matters a lot. But if we are writing for other people, as well as for ourselves, we also have to be aware of the need to hook the reader into the narrative so that he or she is desperate to turn the page, desperate to know 'what next', and may even stay up all night, if need be, to find the answer.
I've been thinking about this a lot, recently, because it strikes me that Firebrand, Gillian Philip's wonderful and deservedly well reviewed new novel, has exactly this quality. It is beautifully written, it is hugely imaginative, it is involving and surprising and original - but, above all, boy does it have a stonking great story. Not only that, but when you get to the end of it, you're left thinking 'so how quickly will she have finished the next one, so I can find out what happens next.'
It's a gift, this extraordinary storytelling ability and Philip has it in spades.
But it is also - to some extent at least - a craft and one which, as writers, we should all be aware of.
It isn't possible to teach somebody with no talent how to write. But, given that somebody has a natural talent, a natural curiosity about human beings, and the desire to learn, they can be helped towards an understanding of what makes a good story. And I sometimes think it is an aspect of the craft of writing that is all too often ignored in creative writing classes, because teachers (and I don't necessarily excuse myself here) concentrate a little too much on the beautiful prose, and not quite enough on the nuts and bolts of plotting, the generation of excitement and drama, and the sheer skill of telling a great story and telling it so well that - as with all the fine storytellers you can think of - Dickens, Stevenson, The Brontes, Austen, Hardy, M.R. James, E.F. Benson and so many more - the joins between the wonderful prose and the wonderful story don't show at all. We read the book, we are in the reality of the tale and - as I recently did with Firebrand - we finish with a sigh compounded of satisfaction, regret that it's finished and anticipation for what might come next.

Tell Me A Story: The Pillars of the Earth and Single Father

2010-10-25T11:59:00.000+01:00

Last weekend, I almost broke one of my cardinal rules, when deciding which TV programmes to watch. I paid attention to the previews in the Radio Times: fulsome praise for Single Father and faint damns for The Pillars of the Earth, from David Butcher. Normally, I read them and then ignore them, preferring to make up my own mind. In this instance, if my husband hadn't suggested that Pillars of the Earth might actually be good, I might well have given it a miss. 'It ought to be either a romp or a sweeping saga but it's neither,' says DB. Why ought it? Afterwards, it struck me that I get bored by romps and sweeping sagas in about equal measure. The Pillars of the Earth has - so far - kept me glued to my television, in a way that few other dramas have, this year, and the main reason is that it is a wonderfully involving story, beautifully acted, visually stunning, thoroughly well told. In fact it's just sweeping enough to be exciting but not so sweeping that the viewer doesn't give a stuff; just enough of a romp to be emotionally engaging, but not such a ridiculous mangling of historical fact that it challenges the viewer's suspension of disbelief. I love it and I love it most of all because it's telling me a damn good story, and I find myself sitting, enthralled as a child. Believe me, that doesn't happen very often on UK television these days.
On the other hand, reading Butcher's ecstasies about Single Father, I did wonder if we'd been watching the same thing. Don't get me wrong. I've been watching this and been entertained by it. Any new TV drama is to be welcomed. But this has been mostly because of the very fine acting of David Tennant and Suranne Jones, who could perform the phone book together, and still make you watch them. Did I find it 'grabbing me by the emotional lapels and demanding attention'? Er, no. And I'll tell you the thing that irritates me most about it. It's that they have set a drama in Glasgow, and not made it about crime, drugs and murders (two cheers). But then, they've chickened out, haven't they? They've deliberately manipulated the plot so that they can go to Edinburgh to make it picturesque,with lots of touristy shots of the castle, Princes Street Gardens, and so on, ignoring all the very real beauties of Glasgow itself. Shame on them.
More about 'story' in the next post.

Submissions, Rejections - and Reappearances.

2010-10-19T17:01:00.001+01:00

This morning, my post contained a fattish package from Birlinn, who published my history of Gigha, God's Islanders, a couple of years ago. The package contained a very pleasant, albeit apologetic letter from the managing editor. Besides the letter, there was a little wedge of papers, the first three chapters, plus synopsis, of a novel called The Corncrake, which I had submitted to a Scottish publisher called Mercat Press, 'a number of years ago', having heard good things about them from one of their authors. I'm not exactly sure how many years ago, because I don't have my original letter and I had long since assumed that the submission had fallen into the Great Silence which usually befalls unsolicited manuscripts not sent through an agent. In 2007, Mercat merged with Birlinn, and 'some archive material was set aside and subsequently overlooked.' A quick glance at the chapters revealed that they had long, long ago been superseded by other work. What writer stands still for four or five years? Which made it all the more strange that they had 'reviewed it once more but regret that, bearing in mind current market conditions, we do not feel it would be suitable for our current list.'
This put me in mind, very vividly, of a story told with some relish by a friend who (sometimes) writes for television. She was surprised to find in her morning mail, a very old script, with a similar kind of letter. 'We have reviewed this but regret etc etc.' What was even more surprising was that the script had been bought, made and shown by this same company, some years previously...
Since submitting The Corncrake to Mercat all those years ago, I have - of course - moved on. I have a new agent, and the Corncrake itself has been more or less consigned to the dustbin. Writing is a job for me. Not a hobby. To be honest, I have taken a little of the material it contained and have rewritten it, comprehensively, into what amounts to a completely different novel. Both my new agent and I, myself, feel that it is a much better novel. The characters are different, the names are different, the story is dramatically different. Only a little of the setting remains. But even that novel - although I am very fond of it - isn't currently 'on the market' because it too has been superseded by a sweepingly romantic historical tale which my agent and I both feel is potentially more commercial, with the additional possibility of other novels on the same theme.
I suspect that most professional writers would - if an old manuscript came dropping onto the mat - find themselves in much the same position. So while I genuinely appreciate the letter, which was kind, generous, and apologetic - I hope I meet this nice man, one day! - I find the assumption of stasis just a little worrying. But then, perhaps his experience has taught him that many people are content to recycle the same old stuff for ever and a day, without attempting to progress at all.

Some Useful Quotes from Playwright, David Mamet

2010-10-18T09:50:00.000+01:00

I have found all of these useful, at some time or another, and not just for plays. They make sense when applied to other kinds of writing too!

1: Things have been disordered. The drama continues until a disordered status comes to rest.

We don’t have to worry about creating a problem. We make a better play if we worry about restoring order.

2: It is the objective of the protagonist to keep us in our seats.

3: Alice said to the Cheshire Cat, ‘Which road should I take?’ and the Cheshire Cat said ‘Where do you want to go?’ and Alice said ‘I don’t care.’ And the Cheshire Cat said ‘Then it doesn’t matter which road you take.’

4: How do we keep the audience’s attention? Certainly not by giving them more information but on the contrary, by withholding information. By withholding all information, except that information, the absence of which, would make the story incomprehensible.

5: The deeper you can think, the better it is going to be. Deeper, in the sense of writing, means ‘What would it be like to me?’

6: Clichés in themselves are not necessarily bad. But maybe if we thought deeper, we could find a better way of expressing things.

Ten Practical Tips on Preparing a Manuscript for Submission.

2010-10-16T11:35:00.000+01:00

A writer friend who teaches on various creative writing courses told me the other day that he had started one course by attempting to give students advice about layout, revisions and how to submit a manuscript. 'They laughed,' he said. 'They thought they already knew all about it.' Predictably, as soon as the coursework started to come in, he realised that they knew almost nothing about it. They just thought they did.
I've been considering this thorny issue recently for a number of reasons. My nice new agent, when reading through my latest manuscript, The Amber Heart, told me that he thought the actual novel was 'wonderful', but then went on to issue a rather stern admonition about my use of commas which was - seemingly - not all it should be. He was right, of course, and I went back over the manuscript with a fine tooth comb. But I've also spent some time, recently, reading other people's manuscripts for a literary competition which I was asked to judge, and although the standard of the actual writing was - in many cases - very high, the standard of presentation, even among the prizewinners, was not good. And it wasn't just commas and a bit of careless word spacing, either!
So here are my ten practical pieces of advice on preparing your manuscript for submission.
1 Never send in a handwritten manuscript, even if it means bribing a friend or relative to type it up for you.
2 Never attempt to save paper by copying or printing on both sides of the paper. Printer paper is cheap, especially in supermarkets (you can buy 500 sheets of good 80 gm paper in Morrisons for rather less than £3.00) and just for once, forget about saving the planet.
3 Never attempt to save paper by formatting your manuscript in 9 point with no spaces between lines. You need decent margins, 2 or at the very least 1.5 spaces between lines, and 12 point font, something clear like Ariel or Times New Roman. So it uses a bit more paper. See (2) above!
4 By all means use a Fast Draft setting for your own printouts, but when preparing a manuscript for submission, make sure that it is printed out properly, even if it means buying a new print cartridge. (These are always cheaper online.)
5 Never staple the pages together. Leave them loose. For stories or poems, you can use a paper clip, top left corner. For novels, leave all the pages loose. They can go in a box or wallet file if you are posting them.
6 When sending speculative submissions to publishers or agents, these should never be more than the first three chapters and a synopsis, plus covering letter and CV if applicable.
7 Do not lay out your manuscript, whether story or novel, in the 'report' format that seems to have become increasingly acceptable for academic essays. Have you ever seen a published novel laid out like this? It is very disconcerting indeed to see these strange blocks of paragraphs, with acres of white space between them and no indents. Write your story in the format that you see on the printed page with proper old fashioned paragraphs, with indents, with dialogue also indented, and with the occasional space which may indicate the passage of time within a chapter, or a change of perspective.
8 If you are not good at punctuation, try to get somebody else to check it for you.
9 Make sure you use your spell checker before sending your manuscript out.
10 Make sure that your whole submission, whether it is for a competition, an agent or a publication, looks neat and professional. If you ever find yourself thinking 'that'll do' you can be sure that it won't. And all of the above apply, even if you are making an online submission.

This may seem a little pedantic, and it is! But consider for a moment - the person you are submitting to may well be seeing not just dozens but perhaps hundreds of submissions every week. There is never enough time, nor enough people to read them and - as an editor once confessed to me - the easiest way of sorting them, initially, is to take all the badly laid out, badly spelled, poorly presented manuscripts and put them right at the bottom of the pile. Where they may well remain for ever. If you don't care enough about your work to devote a little time to presenting it in the right way, why on earth would you expect anyone else to care enough to read it?

Play 200 and the Lunardi Bonnet

2010-10-07T18:54:00.001+01:00

Play 200 at the Oran Mor - and an excellent review by Joyce Macmillan. I haven't been to see this - or my own contribution - yet, but plan on going on Saturday. The show consists of lots and lots of 2 minute plays, loosely themed on Glasgow Then and Now. It's remarkably hard to write a 2 minute play without turning it into a comedy sketch. Mine was about eighteenth century balloonist Lunardi's visit to Glasgow. They tethered his balloon in Glasgow Cathedral, since it was the only public space big enough to hold it. I find that image enchanting! I've cheated a bit, though, since I've already used that story in a novel called The Physic Garden. Or perhaps I should say a 'half written novel' called The Physic Garden. Mind you, it's as good an illustration as any of how ideas germinate and grow and change. The Physic Garden started out as an idea for an Oran Mor play, which I even drafted out, but was never very happy with. At last, I decided where the problem lay. The whole idea was much too big for a 45 - 50 minute play. It kept fidgetting, pushing against the time constraints, desperate to break out. So then, I thought I might write it as a full length play. But I kept postponing it as a project, or tinkering around the edges, never feeling very happy with it. And all the time, I could hear this voice inside my head, telling a tale that - somehow - needed to be told. So I let the voice take me where it would, and some 90,000 words later, it turned into a novel. But that wasn't the end of it. Because - some months later - having left those 90,000 words to lie fallow, and having let one or two people read the novel, I now think that it's only half the story. So what I'm about to do is write the other half, prune the 90,000 words I've already written, interweave the two tales - and bob's your uncle. Or not, as the case may be.
Will it work? I've no idea. And if other, more pressing projects intervene, I'll probably shelve it and get on with more immediate work. But I know that it will be there, lurking at the back of my mind, waiting its turn. And I think that I now know what needs to be done. Just a case of getting on with it, really!
Meanwhile, I found the story of Lunardi and his balloon lurking in there, when I was looking for inspiration for a two minute play - so in a way, it wasn't only a response to a request for a contribution - it was also a small way of experimenting with the ideas in the novel, trying to find out if they might have a life of their own. I think they probably do!

The Publishing Angel

2010-10-06T16:33:00.000+01:00

My agent is in Frankfurt, my novel is with my agent, and I'm here in Scotland, waiting to see what happens next.
Meanwhile, I'm saying prayers to the Publishing Angel.
Is there such an entity? I hope so. Because the Parking Angel works pretty well. I should know. I've been using his services for many years now.
I first heard about him/her from a friend who said that she always found a parking space by asking the Parking Angel to find one for her. I was suitably sceptical, but at the time I was doing readings in a wonderful tea house called Tchai Ovna, on the South Side of Glasgow. This has since closed, although the West End Tchai Ovna is still open. The South Side Tchai Ovna was in Shawlands, a place in which it is notoriously difficult to find any kind of parking space, in the evening - this is because it consists of rather narrow streets with lots and lots of small flats and houses. There was one memorable occasion when - having driven round for about an hour, occasionally hampered by pizza delivery vans parked in the middle of the road - I just turned around and went back home again. I thought I would have one last try, drove up to Shawlands in some trepidation and invoked the help of the Parking Angel.
Almost immediately, a van pulled away from the kerb, and a very large parking space materialised. Moreover, it was right in front of a church!
Since then, I have regularly employed the services of the Parking Angel in all kinds of tight places, and I can state that he almost never lets me down.
But it has occurred to me to wonder why I can't therefore invoke the Publishing Angel as well. I mean, there must BE one, mustn't there? And if there is one, I reckon he might look a lot like the rather militant chap above, who lives in Glasgow's amazing Necropolis. In other words, 'a bonnie fighter.'
So come on, Publishing Angel. Lend me your muscular right arm. Please.

The Amber Heart and Made Up Truth

2010-09-27T12:21:00.000+01:00

The Amber Heart, all 130,000 words of it, is now finished and with my agent. I have come to think of it as 'The Great Polish Novel'. Great is right in one sense, at least. I printed it out, last night, and it would make a pretty efficient doorstop. It is loosely based on my own family history, but - of course - very much fictionalised. I've been thinking about this project and researching it for years. In fact, I've made previous attempts to write it, but this is the first time I've achieved something I'm really happy with, and my agent seems to like it too. This is the first of two planned novels. The sequel, called The Winged Hussar, is already under way. The story is almost impossibly romantic (in the best sense of that word, I hope!) But as ever, when working with factual material, the trick is to give yourself permission to move away from those facts, and shape it into a work of fiction: what that fine writer Bernard MacLaverty calls 'made up truth.'
As a writer, when you are working with beginning writers, they will sometimes say 'but it really happened like that' - whenever you query some aspect of a piece of fiction that doesn't quite seem to be working.
It is, I think, one of the first and hardest lessons you have to learn. When you are writing fiction, you are aiming for 'made up truth.' It has to be believable in the sense of being self consistent, in the sense that your readers will say 'yes, life is like that' or 'yes, people are like that' or 'yes, I believe in this world you have created for me.'
But 'it really happened' is no guarantee that your readers will suspend their disbelief. You are wooing them and winning them and drawing them in. Therefore, if you are writing fiction, and not biography, you have to give yourself permission to do whatever it takes to achieve that!

Firebrand by Gillian Philip

2010-09-18T16:30:00.000+01:00

I've been reading the new novel by Gillian Philip - Firebrand. This is the first book in the Rebel Angels series of novels. It is also the best and most exciting read you will have this year. Or - quite likely - next year as well. Go out and buy it now! This is, nominally, young adult fiction, but I suspect anyone from teens onwards will be captivated by it. I remember talking to Gillian about this book, the first of a series, some time ago, and thinking 'I'd buy that. I'd read it.' Well, here it is, and it surpasses all expectations. This is fantasy, but a world so fully and vividly realised, so self consistent, that you immediately enter it, believe in it, become involved with it. This is, of course, down to the quality of the writing, which is exceptional.
Firebrand is the tale of Seth, the young Sithe warrior, through whose eyes the story is visualised - flawed, deeply attractive, deeply likeable, utterly real. It is also a tale of two worlds, running side by side, and of what happens when the border between those two worlds begins to be compromised. Gillian has based the setting of this tale on old Celtic legends of the Sithe, the People of Peace, the fairy folk of old Scottish stories, with the result that there is an essential familiarity about all this. It doesn't feel 'made up' at all. It feels entirely and disturbingly real.
Coupled with that, of course, we are in the hands of a superb storyteller and a fine writer. The pace of this is mind blowing. Once you start reading, you won't want to stop. Once you get to the end, you'll want to read the next book in the series. Personally, I can't wait. And I'm more than honoured that Gillian used a quote from my play, The Secret Commonwealth, at the start of the novel.
Firebrand is published by Strident, one of the most exciting and innovative publishing houses in Scotland and is available from major bookshops including Waterstones, and online from Amazon.

Scottish Shorts - Short Plays from Scotland

2010-08-31T13:31:00.000+01:00

On Thursday of last week, I went over to Edinburgh to the Playwrights' Studio summer party, and the launch of Scottish Shorts, a new anthology of short plays from Scotland, edited by Philip Howard, just published by Nick Hern Books and which includes my own play, The Price of a Fish Supper. This was the first time I had actually met Nick Hern - and it was a great pleasure to meet a publisher who (a) seems to enjoy his job so much and (b) is tremendously positive about books in general and plays and playwrights in particular. Some years ago now, Nick Hern published my full length play about Chernobyl, Wormwood, in another anthology called Scotland Plays, and has kept it in print ever since. The play was first produced at the Traverse in Edinburgh, and I have already had tentative enquiries about another production to mark the 25th anniversary of the disaster. Nick Hern says that these anthologies are still selling pretty well and I can vouch for the truth of it because a nice little payment arrives each year . He offers writers a small advance and a royalty, and also handles enquiries about licensing of the plays for professional production. The books are well produced and edited, and - unlike so many publishers - he keeps things in print, with small runs. Wormwood is on the Scottish Higher Still syllabus, so schools which offer courses in drama (not - sadly - South Ayrshire, which seems to approve of neither drama nor history at secondary school level) buy a number of copies.
But, as talented playwright Jo Clifford remarked to me at the launch, what a pity that, although all these plays are kept in print, they are seldom if ever produced again. There is a vast body of vibrant and exciting work floating about out there which can be read, thanks to Nick Hern, but not seen and heard. And there is an argument to be made that - unlike, for instance, a novel - a play which is not being produced, which has no audience to see it, and interact with it, is frozen, static, not quite alive.
Years ago, when my son was studying English at school, it saddened and infuriated me in about equal measure, that there seemed to be no notion of taking students to see productions of the plays they were studying. They were being asked searching questions about the text which could only really be illuminated by seeing the play as an entity on the stage.
In the current financial climate, and with current government attitudes to the arts, things are clearly not going to get better any time soon - but with that small light on the horizon of a possible new production of Wormwood, I'm keeping my fingers and toes crossed!

Wuthering Heights Again

2010-08-11T15:11:00.000+01:00

I blogged about this when it was first shown, but last night - weary to the point of catatonia, and with absolutely nothing else to watch while I drank a late night cup of tea - I switched to the repeat of the first episode of ITV's recent dramatisation of Wuthering Heights, half hoping that it might have improved in the intervening months. It hadn't. The best thing about it was still the scenery, which was gorgeous. Everything else was wrong.
I have a great many friends who adore WH (and about as many who loathe it!) and I think all of us who love it tend to share the same reservations about the many and varied dramatisations to which we have been subject over the years. These are major reservations which are almost never inspired by - for example - the dramatisations of Austen novels which have come to our screens over the past few years. We may have a few quibbles about these, but on the whole, they are forgivable and in some cases - the film version of Sense and Sensibility springs to mind- we get so caught up in the brilliance of the production that it's hard to find any fault at all! This never seems to happen with Wuthering Heights. Instead we watch, with the triumph of hope over expectation, only to have our fears realised yet again. They can't ever seem to get it right.
I know it's a difficult novel, but I still find myself wondering why, since when I talk about it to the friends who DO love it, we all seem to love it for the same reasons: the intensity, the passion, the cruelty, the primitive, mythic quality, the uncompromising nature of so much of it, the way in which we don't need to like these characters to be caught up in their story.
So what was wrong with the latest version? Well, just about everything except the landscape jarred with me. Wuthering Heights itself was all wrong, for a start: much too big, too clean, too grand. It looked more like Thrushcross Grange. The Heights of the book is described as a Yorkshire farmhouse in the old style, sprawling rather than monumental, with its yard, and its sheepfolds and stables: low ceilinged, dark - except for the roaring fire at the very heart of the house, whose flames run through the book, warming the place and the people, central to the story. I've never pictured it as the large, light building of this adaptation. Cathy was all wrong too, but then they never do seem to get Cathy right. She's always too wishy washy and while I'm at it, the real Cathy would have scorned to call Heathcliff 'my love' all the time, the way this one seemed determined to do, whining about his desire for revenge. She's never ever strong enough. Frankly, she should be lovely to look at but mad as a fish, difficult, dangerous and not very nice to know.
Heathcliff looked all wrong too, but maybe that's a personal judgement. Worse, his lines were all wrong. The central conceit of WH is that Heathcliff is utterly obsessed with Cathy, and no matter how badly she treats him, he would die rather than take his revenge on her. But that won't stop him taking his revenge elsewhere. (In many ways, this has the strange, claustrophobic atmosphere of a Jacobean revenge drama). If she asks him not to do something, whether it's refaining from killing lapwings, or refraining from killing her husband, he'll obey her but only because it's her. When she's gone, when she is no longer there to temper him, he becomes utterly demonic. But this doesn't make any sense at all, if you haven't shown the extraordinary nature of that relationship first.
Better to quote from the book itself, don't you think?

'You teach me now how cruel you've been—cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you—they'll damn you. You loved me—then what right had you to leave me? What right—answer me—for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you—oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?'

'Let me alone. Let me alone,' sobbed Catherine. 'If I’ve done wrong, I'm dying for it. It is enough! You left me too: but I won't upbraid you! I forgive you. Forgive me!'
'It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?'

I strongly submit that if you can't live with that central premise, can't accept the novel on its own terms, rather despise it in fact, then you had much better dramatise something else: Jane Eyre or Villette for instance. Instead, they always seem determined to transform Emily into Charlotte, even if it means rewriting the whole story in the process. It won't do. Definitely could do better.

The Amber Heart

2010-08-09T13:55:00.003+01:00

I'm currently revising my great Polish story, now called the Amber Heart, which is loosely based on episodes from my own Polish family history. Browsing my bookshelves, recently, I came across some illustrations of work by artist Juliusz Kossak who was the rather famous grandfather of my own gorgeous great uncle Karol Kossak (below).

I met Karol in Ciechocinek, where he was living with my Aunt Wanda, when I was a very young woman and he was an old man. I think I fell a little bit in love with him, and even wrote a poem about him called Potato Fires:

I remember

talking with my uncle Karol,
walking arm in arm
on Polish evenings when
mist spread over flat fields
and women were burning
the last of the potato leaves.

We wrinkled our nostrils.
It was a kind of myrrh for us
preserving the moment yet
bitterly telling time.

There was no cure for it.
Though I hurtled through youth
for love of him
he’d gone too far before.

In truth, he was the closest I would ever come to meeting Count Danilo from the Merry Widow, and it occurred to me that that was indeed his world. It was part of my heritage too, but as impossibly strange, remote and magical to me as a fairytale - or a Viennese Operetta!

The pictures by Juliusz Kossak, and his equally famous son, Wojciech, were something of an inspiration for me, when I was writing. There's a heroic quality to many of them, for sure, but also a lovely evocation of atmosphere and detail that is something all writers of historical fiction are searching for. Even now, when I look at them, I get a little thrill of excitement. It's the equivalent of walking through the fur coats and out the back of the wardrobe - and it's part of my own family history. How wonderful is that?

Focus

2010-08-03T14:25:00.000+01:00

A couple of years ago, feeling that my career was somehow 'stuck' and that I was floundering about a bit, I booked an advice session from the Cultural Enterprise Office in Glasgow. It turned out to be very helpful in allowing me to assess where I was at, and where I might want to go in the future and I would certainly recommend it to any writer who, in mid career, has that familiar feeling of frustration that things may not be going quite the way he or she expected or wanted.
The single most useful piece of analysis, however, and - as it turns out - the thing that has stayed with me over the succeeding months, has been the idea of 'focus.' What emerged from an afternoon of detailed one- to-one discussions with the adviser, was a sense of my own dissatisfaction with the way I work - not so much with the work itself, which I love, as with my propensity for spreading myself too thinly. Am I a playwright who also writes novels? Am I a poet who writes plays? Am I a historian who writes lots of other things? A number of conclusions and recommendations emerged from the session but the one that I have carried with me all this time is the idea that - for various reasons, some personal and some of them practical - I have always found it hard to focus. I don't mean that I start things and don't finish them, because I do. I finish lots and lots of things! But ... when I'm working on a novel, I do find myself wondering if I should be writing a play. When I'm writing a play, I'm distracted by the thought that I could be making more money writing for business. I'll have a spell when all I want to do is write poems, and then, quite suddenly, the need to do this will vanish, and everything I want to write will present itself as a novel or a short story.
Over the year or so since that session, however, it has become increasingly clear to me that my main focus, the place where my true love of writing lies, is definitely with novels. There is quite simply nothing I would rather be doing. And the result is that I have a couple of manuscripts to sell, and another one on the way. But this is also a frightening realisation since it is now so hard even for agents to find publishers, and yet novels take up very large swathes of your time! And so, it's time to recognise my own fear - and do it anyway.
I was considering all this last night, when - having watched The Dragons' Den - I was involved in a discussion about successful people in all walks of life - how some people make it, while others, arguably with equal amounts of talent - don't. The conclusion we reached - and it may seem obvious, but I hadn't clarified it in my own mind until that point - was that the people who had made it in a big way all had massive 'focus' in some aspect of their working lives. My friends who have been most successful are those who - perhaps not immediately, but at some point in their lives, maybe even quite late in their lives - have found out what they really want to do and then gone for it, relentlessly. This may or may not have involved money. For some of them the money-making was purely incidental. For others, they made very little money, but didn't care. The focus on something was all important. If you look at successful people currently in the media you'll find plenty of examples. Mary Portas has that same almost scary focus - in her case, on the retail experience. The Dragons themselves seem to have a focus not so much on their individual businesses - but on making money. I know a few people like that. We probably all do! They are the businessmen and women who seem to have the midas touch. All their enterprises prosper, and it isn't necessarily because they are ruthless or greedy. It's more that the actual business of making money, of profit and loss, seems to fascinate them so that they focus on it more clearly, more exclusively than any of their competitors, regardless of whatever business they are involved in.
Looking at some of the most successful writers I have known or worked with, the single most important thing they seem to have in common is that same ability to focus. And I don't just mean the ability to ignore distractions and naysayers. It's more than that: it's a kind of singlemindedness. Given the obvious necessity of a baseline of real talent (without which, nothing) success so often seems to come to those who are very clearly focussed on some aspect of writing. They seem to know exactly what they want to do and they go for it, like an arrow, strong and straight and true. Obviously, they may then go on to do other things, to branch out and experiment but I become more and more convinced that part of the trick of professional success in all walks of life, is to find out exactly what you want to do - and go for it.
Of course, the finding out can be tricky. Self help books tell you to listen to your 'inner voice' - but I'm not sure that it always tells you the truth. Because your inner voice can be frightened as well. And of course - as we concluded in our late night discussion - it may be that what you want is not to focus on any one thing. My own father was a case in point. He was clever man and a distinguished research scientist, with a myriad of other interests. He had a good career, but by no means as starry as some. It didn't matter to him. His interests were many and varied, he loved his life and his family, and he was one of the happiest people I have ever known.
All the same, I've reached some conclusions, the main one being that from now on, my focus has to be on novels. Long fiction seems to be where my heart lies, as well as my head!

Marit Barentsen and The Scent of Blue

2010-07-31T12:50:00.001+01:00

Had a lovely email from Dutch artist Marit Barentsen asking if she could use an extract from my poem The Scent of Blue, in a design for a 'skinny' card, which she wanted to show on her blog. I was delighted -and I love her card. You can see it here if you scroll down the post. And what a fascinating website this is! One I'll definitely go back to again and again, I think.
I wrote the poem The Scent of Blue some time ago, and then later on, published it in a pamphlet of the same name. You'll also find the whole text of it somewhere in this blog!
I don't know why my poetry writing is so erratic. I think it's probably because novels are certainly my first love, followed by plays, with poetry and short stories hovering somewhere in the background. I have ideas for more novels than I will ever have time to write, and spend a lot of my life half in and half out of whatever fictional world I'm currently involved in. Mostly, it seems much more real to me than the 'real' world I inhabit! However, I began my writing life as a poet, years ago, but poetry seems to come and go with me and when it's gone it's gone. Then, quite suddenly, something like The Scent of Blue will arrive, and I'll spend an intensive few weeks working on it - only for that particular muse to desert me all over again.

The Price of a Fish Supper - Scottish Shorts

2010-07-30T13:27:00.000+01:00

My play, The Price of a Fish Supper, is about to be published by Nick Hern Books, as part of a new anthology of Scottish Plays - Scottish Shorts. It's already flagged up on Amazon, and I'm told it'll be published in time for the Edinburgh Festival. The editor is Philip Howard, late of the Traverse - a lovely director to work with - and I'm slightly phased by the distinguished company I find myself in with plays by Stanley Eveling, Louise Welsh and David Greig among others. I've a soft spot for this play so it'll be nice to see it in print, especially since Nick Hern has a reputation for keeping books IN print.

The Amber Heart

2010-07-19T16:24:00.005+01:00

Many years ago now, I began to research my impossibly romantic Polish family history. That was in the days before the internet made these things easier, but it was also while my father was alive, and - fortunately - I persuaded him to write down as much as he could remember. He even made little sketches of the estate where he was born, and the house he had lived in, as a child. This was an essential part of the process, because he had come to the UK just after the war (via Monte Cassino, in Italy) bringing with him a handful of photographs and almost nothing else. Then I set about the fascinating, frustrating but ultimately very rewarding task of trying to track down the history of a family which had - essentially - been swallowed by all the upheavals taking place on the fluctuating Eastern borders of the country to which I owe half my blood: Poland. It was a journey full of serendipitious discoveries and surprises and I found it at once moving and exciting. Of the discoveries which engaged me immediately, one involved a remote relative who was said to have had many wives, (albeit not all at the same time!) and to have died in a riding accident in his late eighties. Another one involved a widowed Polish great grandmother who - although born into the nobility - had married her Ukrainian estate manager which was completely explicable, once I had ferretted out other details of the relationship. And thirdly, I found out about a great uncle of the family who was a medical doctor, and a politician, a Polish representative to the parliament in Vienna, a lovely man, by all accounts, who was immensely popular with the younger members of his family. I even managed to access his obituary from a Viennese newspaper of the time. All of these things began to ferment in my head, and have resulted - eventually - in a tale of epic proportions, loosely based on fact. I say loosely because as all historical novelists know, you have to give yourself permission, as a writer of fiction, to depart from the factual truth as you know it, and make sure that you are writing a readable story! The Amber Heart is the result. It's currently with my agent, along with another novel, The Summer Visitor, and now I must wait and see what he makes of it. More about the Amber Heart in future posts.

Debating Creativity

2010-07-15T21:22:00.003+01:00

About to start writing a series of articles on the thorny subject of Creativity, for the Scottish Review. Eventually, I'm hoping that they will form the basis of a whole book on the subject, but there's a long way to go in terms of reflection and research.
At least some of this has been inspired by a great many interesting discussions with a friend who is a visual artist. We find ourselves profoundly disturbed (actually, sometimes the emotion seems closer to rage!) at the way in which the word creativity has been commandeered by so many people who wouldn't know what it was if it came up and bit them on the bum.
More to come!

Flowerfield

2010-07-09T15:29:00.004+01:00

This is the working title of a new project: an idea that has been nipping away at me for weeks now. It is very hard to describe this process - the sheer compulsive delight of it - to anyone who doesn't work creatively. But it is, I suppose, the answer to that perennial question - every writer has heard it, at almost every reading - where do you get your ideas from?

THIS is where you get your ideas from, except that it's almost impossible to define what 'this' is! It's a process, I suppose and you feel it as much in your stomach as in your head! Butterflies, like the feeling you got as a child, when you were anticipating something wonderful. Something seen or heard or discovered, sparks something else in your imagination. And then you spend days, weeks, sometimes months, thinking about it all, often in the early hours of the morning. On this occasion, I was quite alone, visiting a place, (briefly) at a particular time of day, at a particular time of the year. It was a place I had written about before, but the character who came into my mind had nothing to do with that. This was a new person, new to me, but it was as if I was suddenly looking at something through her eyes and with her memories. This is a very odd sensation, for sure, but it is also very wonderful, and more exciting than anything else I know. I knew instantly who she was, what she was doing there, why she had come back there, and what her memory of the place was. I also knew something about the history of the place. And I knew that there was doing to be some connection between the two. What I didn't know - and still don't, not in any great detail - is what exactly that connection is, and how the story is going to pan out. But I'm slowly but surely starting to put the pieces together. It always amazes me how this feels like 'finding out' rather than 'making up.' It's as if the story exists somewhere as a truth, and the writer's job is to tease it out, rather than invent.

A Warm Welcome Back to Wordarts

2010-07-01T15:13:00.002+01:00

I've been away for quite a long time. Actually, I haven't been away at all. I've been writing and revising madly, pondering and contemplating changes and coming up with lots of new ideas. There's something about springtime that always has this effect.
Besides, I'd found myself getting bored with my own blog and that will never do! I needed a break, but here I am, on the first of the month, back on board. Moreover, I have a nice new agent, with a nice new agency, a whole host of new projects, several things on the boil at once, and hope in my heart. And here's a nice new picture of an old source of inspiration for me - the isle of my heart and the setting for a brand new novel, with this time - I hope - the stonking great plot that eluded me for so long. Well, if not a 'stonking great plot' then an interesting plot. Involving, dramatic - and rather sad, too. Or so I'm told. Let's hope nice new agent can find a very very nice new publisher to take this one on board.

Random Strange Derivations (1)

2010-03-09T09:56:00.003Z

There is a (somewhat revolting) expression for perspiring profusely, which is known as 'sweating cobs'. I'm not sure whether it's peculiar to my native county of Yorkshire, but that's where I heard it first. It was only when I was studying Old and Middle English that I learned that the word for spider is 'attecoppe' - meaning 'cup of poison' which is fairly self explanatory.
The word cob is sometimes used for spider in Yorkshire - hence 'sweating cobs' meaning that the droplets are running down, like little spiders! Strange or what?
When I was a child in Yorkshire, we also used to call those floating seeds that sail through the air in late summer 'hairy cobs'. We would blow on them and hope that they would float upwards, chanting 'hairy cob, hairy cob, bring me some luck' - or sometimes 'bring me some money'. I assume that these too were seen as 'hairy spiders'.
Not a lot of people know this! I didn't even know it back then, when I was using the word!