DOWN TIME

Doing Writing, Teaching and Learning sometimes seems like way, way too much, especially when Commuting and Early Starts are factored in. I spend a lot of my time on South West trains, out cold, mouth open, crossword akimbo. Really, really not a good look.

But on days like to today - sun shining, PhD novel out in the world, thesis humming along nicely... I feel almost like a proper writer. Still slept on the train, though, slumped over G2 like a mad lady.

BEST LOVED DICKENS?

Cheekily wondering how many people who voted for "Great Expectations" in the Guardian poll have actually read it, and how many are really thinking of the David Lean adaptation. Not that it's not a fantastic novel.... etc etc. Sometimes a book makes an impression in people's minds which is not the actual book, but a sort of facsimile of the book. And Pip bumping into Magwitch in the graveyard at the beginning of the Lean film could provide just such a facsimile. Not to mention Jean Simmons as Young Estella. Or Martita Hunt as cobwebby Miss Havisham. Just saying...

NEW NOVEL, NEW ME?

One month before my new book is due to hit the book shops - that it, if any of them are still open in November. Will people want to read advice about How to be a Writer in the current dire market for fiction? Who knows. What strikes me as pretty ironic now is that it is full of apparently wise words about how to stay motivated and On It at all times, when in reality I am as jumpy as hell and prone to mood swings which would do a Red Bull fuelled teenager proud.

The writerly personality is NOT phlegmatic, patient or well adjusted. The writerly personality is weird, introspective and given to unleashing the power of its negativity. People don't write because they have words of wisdom to impart, or because they know any more than anyone else, or even because they are any better at writing, but because if they don't write they will go bonkers. By which I mean, slightly more bonkers than they already are.
And then comes the really weird bit... that you wouldn't exchange this state of being for anything.

CHISWICK BOOK FESTIVAL

*Takes deep breath* Here's a bit of self-publicity - off to the Chiswick Book Festival tomorrow, to talk about my new book "How to be a Writer", which is published on 3 November. (Spot the synergy there?) I'm one of a sort of smorgasbord of people who will join Celia Brayfield to talk about being a 21st century writer.

So what is my key message to the Chiswick book folk? That times are changing in publishing land, and no one knows where we are heading, but if you want to negotiate from a position of strength, be the proud owner of a lot of words.

When I sent my first novel opening off to my first agent, twenty years ago, I was sending her all the words I possessed, hastily typed up from a few scrawled sheets of A4. I had no plot, no direction, and precious little characterization. And when she (quite rightly) pointed out the shortcomings of this draft, I was utterly bereft, and had no other words to fall back on.

Be focused, be professional, but above all - be prolific. As Virginia Woolf said, "What one wants for writing is habit."  More on this later...

BRONTE BUSINESS

How much Bronte can we take? More specifically, how much Jane Eyre? It's on at the Duke of York's down't road and I toyed with idea of going to see it tonight, in an open-minded sort of way, but thought - No! So I am, after a long silence, blogging about a film I haven't seen, and don't propose to see, even on LoveFilm, probably. Which is very post-modern of me, or perhaps just lazy. With so much Stuff to see and so much Comment to absorb, perhaps it is sane and restful to occasionally have a little ruminate about things you aren't seeing, or doing, or even thinking, and opinions that you haven't got.
And just in case this seems a bit info-lite, here is a link to a piece by Blake Morrison who has seen it, has loads of opinions, and is actually from Yorkshire.

http://gu.com/p/3xmf2

RESPECT FOR MELVYN BRAGG

Current state of play is that I have a book coming out in six months which is just bursting with sensible advice for writers and wanna-be writers. Which is good, of course, and I am v. excited about it, though also nervous, as it's like one long feature which will be out there in the public domain for, ooh, decades, I should think. Which is sort of daunting. And there are autobiographical bits, which might a bit too autobiographical. But most of all, what is annoying me about my Writing Life a the moment is that there needs to be more of it. I'd like to move to a Scottish island, or rent a Cornish cottage on a rocky outcrop high above the sea, or a flat in Paris where all I had to look at was cats on rooftops. (French cats, with a special extra layer of attitude.) Instead, I have teenagers, and IKEA, and a man doing the kitchen floor, and the washing basket keeps overflowing, and I'm usually on a train, often one that has broken down and... so on.

So it's useful to remember that busy people are often Very Prolific Writers. Step forward Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot (Henry James once said she "did not suffer from cerebral lassitude"). And my own particular modern favourite, MelvynBragg, the man who does everything, including write loads and loads of big fat novels.

Happy juggling!

DOWN WITH GENRE SNOBS!

What should we look for in fiction? Are the "best" books those which are deemed to be "literary"? There seems to be an assumption about some critics - and readers - that genre fiction is always of a lower order, written cynically or obediently by lesser artists who lack the vision, originality or courage of the True Writer. Sara Sheridan (above) raises this issue in relation to the forthcoming Edinburgh Festival, and the BBC has been accused of similar snobbishness.

Writing in the Guardian, Sheridan says:

"I live in a City of Literature, but I worry about that title. I think I'd rather live in a City of Words. Literature, to me, isn't necessarily a good thing – it's exclusive, for a start. It doesn't sell to ordinary people in mass-market locations. It tells people what they ought to want to read, rather than simply grabbing readers by the imagination (which to me, has always been a writer's job, whether they are literary or not)."

Very true. This insistence on a literary pecking order is the result of muddled thinking. The divisions between literary and genre fiction have not been made by writers, but by publishers and booksellers. In fact, literary fiction is itself a genre, which came into being in the late 1960s when the Booker Prize was conceived to promote "serious" writing. What matters is that writers write good books, not where they are situated in Waterstones, or the minds of critics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/edinburgh/2011/apr/21/writing-literary-commercial-sara-sheridan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/21/bbc-genre-fiction

THOUGHT FOR THURSDAY

One of the wisest men in cinematic history is Danny the drug dealer from 'Withnail & I'. And yet, his advice is widely ignored. Perhaps because it is extremely hard to follow. But just for the record, here it is again....

'Find your neutral space.' If there is one thing that a writer MUST do, that's it. Oh, and write as well. 

SOLITARY SISTER

Now, the thing is, I have been vg in terms of setting up some kind of virtual identity, but my fear that this might prove to be another distraction (from writing) was well founded. I am drawn towards my Facebook page by some horrible cyber-gravity, irritated when people comment on each other's pages but not on mine, wrong-footed by the glamorous and famous and their seemingly effortless communication with the similarly blessed.

I am sitting here at my kitchen table, and quite frankly I would rather live inside my own head than peer queasily into other people's.... So what does that make me? Salinger? Emily Dickinson? I wish that was my problem - but it's the opposite. It's this corrosive desire to be relevant and likable and to be blended in. Sometimes, socialnetworkspace is not the right place for writers to be. Sorry, Zeitgeist.

BAD ENOUGH?

Motherhood is meant to be long one guilt trip. So much so that I feel guilty if I don't feel guilty - only slackers think they are just about getting it right. But if you want to do anything else apart from rant/agonise/spend/yell/micro-manage/spend/rant/agonise you have to give yourself a break sometimes. Having kids is not an excuse for not writing: it's just a mammoth day job.

Cheering thoughts from The Observer, who have come up with a brilliant roguess's gallery of dire fictional mums. Top of the list are meddling, foolish Mrs Bennett; the wonderfully dysfunctional Marge Simpson and dear old Norma Bates. Something for everyone, really...

And just think, if we were all perfect, where would we get our material? Good people are notoriously dull in fiction, so let's hear it for bad enough mums everywhere.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2011/apr/03/ten-best-fictional-mums-in-pictures

The Glums

What I am thinking now is that there are times when everything just seems to drain away. No energy, no ideas, this horrible empty space. At which time, the white eye of the PC (I don't do lap top or smart phone) leeches onto mental space. Upstairs, my son is shouting at Call of Duty (enemy soldier failed to die despite his Big Gun); on the floor above my daughter is probably playing the disturbing truth game that appears to be a Facebook offshoot. Hell knows. Their dad is at yoga. At least someone is waving the flag for mind, body and spirit.

I'd be sitting in the bath listening to Radio Two if it was still Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie, but now it's gone all Jo Wiley, so I sit here, staring at the white eye, all flumped out.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR...

It being spring and everything I suddenly feel as if the Writing should recommence. Long train journey overland to Brunel University, during which I felt fluey and peculiar, imbibed industrial quantities of Vitamin C infused smoothies, and read James Shapiro's "Contested Will".  The first chapter is about the deification of Shakespeare. I was dimly wondering why we are so quick to assume that genius is more than human. Looked out of the SW Trains window at burgeoning back gardens, greenly tinged, mostly featuring standard issue trampolines.

Great quote from Diana Wynne Jones, who died this week, to the effect that we are all geniuses, but it can take a while to find out what we are geniuses at. Tragically, some of us never find out. My genius might be for whinging rather than writing. Only time will tell. It certainly isn't for knitting, dieting or moderate drinking, that's for sure.

http://www.therejectionist.com/2011/03/in-memoriam.html

LAST WORDS

It is exactly seventy years since Virginia Woolf's "death day" and I think we should morbidly celebrate that fact. Perhaps we should make more of the final days of great writers, even those who decided to end their own lives. We are too squeamishly polite about death, as if it was somewhere in between saying "pardon" instead of "excuse me" and fornicating with the vicar at the village fete.

And we also seem to assume that each day of a suicide's life must have been bathed in shadow, whereas in fact Woolf was a wry, sociable, practical person. There even are photos of her laughing in a swim suit (which I must admit is a bit disconcerting).

She wrote about walking in London, the smell of a spring day, the joys of polishing silver.  And her writing voice is eminently sane and sensible. She seems easily as cheery as - say - Beryl Bainbridge or Kingley Amis, and we don't see their departed selves as being particularly sombre. Her madness, as she called it, was one facet of her character, not her whole identity. Her industrious application to developing her craft strengthened her writing muscle, as she knew it would.

Am I the only person who loathed the N.Kidman portrayal in "The Hours", all grim prosthetic nose and drooping ciggie? I would rather have let Emma Thompson have a go, which is saying something.