Katharine McMahon's Blog

black and white

2012-02-05T18:59:00.003Z

Paul Simon sings 'everything looks worse in black and white' (Kodachrome)...actually, I don't think that's true. I think different, rather. These thoughts on colour are inspired by a weekend in which we saw The Artist - and then it snowed. Snow is so weird the way it alters the familiar so dramatically, but more, is the one thing that grinds us to a halt. Changes lives, overnight.

I liked The Artist, especially the chinking of the glass on the dressing table and other quirky reflections on sound - less convinced by the wallow of self-pity. Hey. You have a beautiful girl and a dog and a promising career, what's to put a gun in the mouth for? (Well, not fond of dogs, myself).

But have been reflecting on colour, in the light of my current read - still A Fine Balance. Such a wonderfully detailed book - and in all the right ways - it's texture, rather than detail, perhaps. There's this entire world buzzing away in the background to the story of two brothers struggling to survive. Their personal lives work on a minute scale - what they eat, what they think. I realise that when I'm dissatisfied with my writing, it's often because it's thin. That wonderful sense of depth and colour and texture is lacking.

Back to work, then. And ultimately, it's about having the confidence to plumb the depths of the imagination. My Evelyn throws a party. I think back to flats I've shared, the dankness of the kitchen, woodlice in the cracks between lino and floorboard, a cupboard which you never really own, as a short-term tenant because there are other people's smells of must and spills in it.

Now, I'm getting there.

On suffering

2012-01-30T13:00:00.005Z

Do you know Auden's poem on suffering - Musees des Beaux Arts - in which he talks about suffering going on at the edge of our ordinary lives, such that we almost fail to register it.

I've been reading two novels about suffering: the first, Jonathan Buckley's Telescope, in which the narrator, though fatally ill, presents us with a delectably calm, wry tour of family life. His suffering is almost a footnote, but the book is steeped in a sort of wistful acknowledgement that life is going on, but not the sick man's. Not a hint of self-pity but it is a wonderful sideways look at life - a bit like what Icarus might have seen, before he hit the water.

And then I've begun A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Fifty pages in and hooked. Here is wonderful, engaging, intimate story-telling - people's small, insignificant lives in the foreground, mighty events just noted in the background, although their ripples can strike at any moment. And that's why I disliked reading, and couldn't watch Birdsong. That writing is the polar opposite of Mistry and Buckley.

Museums of the Mind

2012-01-23T14:15:00.004Z

And to conclude my whistlestop tour of the English cathedral cities, to Norwich. This time a meeting which meant I blew through Norwich on the fringes of time. Not a city preserved in aspic, but a rushing about, windy, well-signposted city blending ancient (cathedral), not so ancient, Jarrolds department store, and new (hideous multi-storeys and ring-road etc.)

What I loved was the rather nutty, very crammed, very busy castle/museum/art-gallery which contains a teapot collection, a Matisse, stuffed birds, Anglo-Saxon brooch pins and a rather nasty prison museum, detailing the scheming, blackguard-ly murderers who were interred there and subsequently hung. Now that is a museum. It's a museum like the contents of my mind. A right old hotchpotch of history. I've been reading Musees des Beaux Arts by Auden, where he makes the point about suffering going on in the background, while ordinary life continues. And so teapots and torture, immediate past trampling on distant past, a taste for taxidermy replaced by a taste for - well, different forms of recreating nature. It's all there, all the time. Human memory.

York and the past

2012-01-17T12:55:00.002Z

While a cruise ship was being wrecked off the coast of Italy, I was travelling up the East Coast of England to York to attend a friend's wedding.

I'd visited York several times, most notably to research my novel, After Mary, which centres around the life of Mary Ward, the 'female' Jesuit who founded a religious order, whose family was embroiled in the Gunpowder Plot, and who notably walked from France to Rome several times in her life in order to petition the pope. The Bar Convent, in York, has a museum about the Catholic recusants who resisted all attempts to stop them saying mass - it includes a priest's hole and the preserved hand of Margaret Clitheroe, who was crushed to death under rocks for her refusal to give evidence in court.

In York history is barely concealed beneath the surface. After the wedding we went to evensong in the Cathedral. I felt like a flake in the history of that place. And yet that's precisely why I love to write about the past - the fact that our lives are so multi-layered - that in my head, at that moment in the cathedral, was my friend and her wedding, and Mary Ward, and that book, and the Cathedral and the music, and the tragedy of a cruise ship, and Margaret Clitheroe, all present in one moment.

Bristol

2012-01-10T17:41:00.001Z

I spent the weekend back in Bristol, with the three women I met when I was 18 and we shared first rooms in a student house together, then a flat in Royal York Crescent. The flat was extremely chilly and run down, the crescent glorious.

We were saying how odd it was that we remembered so little of the views, but what we remembered most were feelings. It was like pressing a little button from time to time. Here, on the bridge, was where I came one night when I was feeling particularly displaced or lovelorn (and they asked me in the toll booth, if I was all right, because people who run panting up to the suspension bridge so often weren't). There, on that bench, was where one of us went to reflect glumly on the lack of a job. Here's where we revised in the sun, feeling so oppressed and as if exams would go on forever. This is the walk we took every day down to the library, in that odd, dreamlike state that comes when you have a whole day of study ahead (or not-study).

It is very strange to have a weekend so full of feeling and endless chat. And its what fuels the writing, I suspect, those very intense times, in which feelings old and new are so near the surface. It's what I aim for in my fiction, an intensity of emotion which draws the reader deeper and deeper inside the book.

New Year Resolution

2012-01-02T14:42:00.002Z

My worst ever was to resolve to have a cold shower every morning. Lasted two days during which I didn't shower because couldn't face cold water. This year I have come up with a writing resolution. Diversify. Write more, different, non-novel, to exercise the old literary brain cells a little more.

I've been reading An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. I loved the combination of music and literature (the former being the subject, the latter the medium) though I grew a little tired of the first person narrator in the end - very self-centred. It made me think that it doesn't matter what one does to improve the writing, as long as it's creative. It's like switching on a lightbulb listening to Schumann - or Dylan, for that matter. Or watching a film or a play. Or walking in the January sunshine. Or writing a letter or a bit of a dialogue or a blog.

And one more creative dynamo - turn off the computer and the mobile. Walk away from the desk. Just spend days cooking and talking and reading. In other words, have a Christmas holiday. As soon as I turned on the computer this morning the adrenalin started pumping. Yes, we're off, it's a new year.

The beauty of slow burning

2011-12-19T09:55:00.002Z

I always get a little prickly when someone says: If I had a bit of time, I'd write a book. First, it feels like an encroachment on my territory - I never say, If I had a bit of time, I'd be a brain surgeon. Secondly, it feels like a covert attack on my own process of becoming a writer. It's taken decades. And I still don't think I'm there. Writing is a craft, and a very difficult one, I think, and like anything that requires skill and knowledge and experience, those fifty thousand hours are required.

I spent the weekend with a group of close friends and family celebrating my son's eighteenth birthday. I rejoiced, then, in joys of building and nurturing relationships. These people, who know me so well, warts and all, and whom in return I love as much are a symbol of all that really matters to me. Last night I went to sing carols with my theatre group - again, decades of belonging. As with community so with writing books. It takes time. And nurturing, and sometimes the sense that this digging deep and keeping faith is a replacement for something much more buzzy and exciting just round the corner. I'm constantly fighting the feeling that I should be doing something more pressing, more immediately effective, that will make more of a difference.

Part of the human condition, I suppose, never to be satisfied. To know that there'll always be someone else, or somewhere else, or something else that could have occupied that hour or year or lifetime. But I think, for now, as I sit at my very old desk (dining table inherited from a friend of my grandmother's), looking out at very old allotments, I'll settle for roots, and slow-burners.

Life and Art

2011-12-12T13:09:00.002Z

Twenty four hours of culture. First, an evening at my husband's school to view Beauty and the Beast - as performed by 60 or so pupils, complete with music and physical theatre. As usual, at such an event, I am moved to tears by the dedication of staff and pupils, the focus. This is an experience none of the children will ever forget. It has united them in words in movement and music. They have created a bond of attention with the audience.

And then, the following night, two radio experiences - most unusual to sit still and listen. The first, a tribute to Ted Hughes. Having just returned from Heptonsthall, the landscape of Hughes's childhood is fresh upon me. I understand better his relationship with the landscape. I am transfixed by the transformation of emotion into words. And then, an hour later, my friend Julia Copus broadcasts prose and poetry about her experience of IVF. That same transforming power, to make an experience which could not be more technical, and rooted in decades of science, into art - an exploration of the momentous and the personal. The root of life itself.

That's why, despite the tears and the failures and the disappointments, I am a writer, though I cannot ever claim to be a poet.

de clutter

2011-12-04T19:14:00.003Z

Not sure I'm that keen on the phrase, but a very dear friend of my mother's died recently, and left me her books. They are a collection that reflect a shared history. When she and my mother were children, they used to meet up in each other's houses, pick books from the shelves and read themselves into a stupor. Her collection includes Angela Brazil school stories, Anya Seton, Mary Stewart, Georgette Heyer, Dickens, Trollope.... And some beautiful old books about the royal family, and flowers.

But this new library has to be accommodated so I'm taking a ruthless look at all my shelves - oh dear - four rooms full at least - and out are going bad books, lifeless books, books which have no history in my life. The ones that stay are anything that counts as a classic - from Alice in Wonderland to Thomas Kenneally - it's a broad brush - poetry, plays, biography. Books by people I know, books by writers I love, books that have struck a chord in me. It's quite random. Monica Dickens stays, Steinbeck stays, Hesse stays (I have to take into account my husband's taste) but anything that I've thought... Nah, I wasted my time, or... that was a joyless, shallow read definitely goes. Actually, not many on the out pile. Oh dear.

where have I been?

2011-11-27T19:33:00.000Z

...to lovely Lumb Bank, Heptonstall, on an Arvon Course. Thirteen writers, two tutors, wonderful scenery, log fires, talk talk talk about writing. Lovely week. And for once, totally single-minded. I'm so not used to mono-tasking that to spend a week just doing one thing felt like a gift.

Like many writers, I feel a little ambivalent about the teaching of creative writing, though I do think every writer - everybody- needs a mentor. And the kind of moral support, and target-setting that a course or an MA does, and the feedback and the structure are all helpful. But Arvon is wonderful for just allowing a writer to flex a muscle or two, and try things out, and be apart, and soak up a bit of literary ozone, and talk about books and writing and why and how and when.

A visit of course to Plath's grave. It's all about feeling part of a chain of words, a struggle to find that voice.

no more leaves, I promise

2011-11-20T19:37:00.002Z

I read Zoe Williams article in the Sat Guardian about the point, or otherwise, of fiction in these dark times. Well excuse me, but I think fiction is absolutely apposite when times are dark. And no, it's not to escape, it's to underline that beyond all this confusion and uncertainty there is one certainty; that art matters. I remember going to a play at the National a couple of days after the July bombings in the London Underground. We were all a little nervous I think, at being in a large crowd in London that night, until the performance started and then it was just so committed, so much a statement that art is about another dimension that transcends whatever we might try to do to destroy the humanity in each other, that it felt like a glorious evening. So of course, novels, poems, plays, pictures all matter more than ever - and I don't think they need necessarily to make statements or reflect on the state of the world. I want my life to be about more than what's happening at this moment.

one leaf

2011-11-14T08:16:00.002Z

The book is duly launched. Wonderful feeling to have something to show for two years confinement in workroom - well, not quite, but writing a book is a bit of a solitary process.

Meanwhile an even greater achievement. To the Chilterns on magical November day - 17 degrees and everything very golden. Finally achieved my desire to catch just one leaf. Surprisingly difficult - if they fall too fast they gust away, and if they're too slow and few you have to be very lucky. But yesterday they were falling one by one from beech trees. I find it ridiculously exciting to watch a leaf drift down from high high up - something very poetic and reassuring to think it's been there, attached to its tree since last spring, while the rest of the world has been churning and agonising and making mistakes. I guess it's all about focus. In a bizarre sort of way it seems more important to have taken the time to watch one leaf fall than almost anything else I might have done yesterday afternoon.

Meanwhile, if you're reading this mad blog and you came to the launch, a thousand thanks for coming, and if you bought a book, I hope you love it, and you'll let me know what you think.

book launch

2011-11-07T18:06:00.002Z

Tomorrow I launch Season of Light. My little boat. Funny old word, launch, but actually quite accurate. It's a real case of cutting the ribbon and sending out the little craft into choppy waters. And nothing else for me to do but hope it will keep afloat.... Enough of this extended metaphor.

Meanwhile I note that Georgette Heyer has a new biography written about her, and it hasn't gone down too well. I was a great fan of Heyer's when a teenager, and I return to her in moments of great stress - the last being a few weeks ago, in Whitby in fact. I didn't choose a particularly good sample of Heyer's work, but as I read it, I did reflect on what I used to love so much. The fact was, it was a deal more fun to be a Heyer heroine, tripping in and out of disasters with a winsome smile and a toss of auburn curls - and falling in the end into the arms of some dashing or saturnine lover, than to be a school girl complete with specs, spots, plastic school bag and too much homework. Whatever else she might have done with historical fiction, Heyer made it fun to be in the past.

Now I'm not saying that the fiction has necessarily got to be fun, or historical fiction skittish or trivial, but I do think that however dreadful a situation might be, there is no need for the author to lose their sense of irony or absurdity. Georgette Heyer made me smile. My new book, Season of Light, is set in a very tricky and serious episode in history - The French Revolution - but I hope the characters are real - and therefore as subject to human frailty, and likely to be mistaken or ridiculous, as anybody today, or indeed at any other time in the past.

Whitby

2011-10-25T18:01:00.002+01:00

When I was a student I worked in a children's holiday activity centre in Whitby called Larpool Hall. This half term we went back for another glimpse. The town has changed of course. Where I once lost a child in a cave under the cliffs (he was found, thank heavens, but my nerves were in shreds) has all been tamed by a promenade to hold back the eroding shore-line, and where there were fusty little cafes there are now innumerable fish and chip shops, and gift shops full of Gothic souvenirs. (Dracula landed in Whitby). We had tea in a tea room called... The Mad Hatter... where Lewis Carroll once stayed, and we jaunted up to what must be the craziest church in England with its box pews so high nobody can see over the top.

In Whitby when I was a student there was a delectable sweetshop, but one of my charges judged it very severely because his Granny kept a sweet shop and this one wasn't up to scratch. Larpool Hall itself was a grand old house with rundown outhouses - now flats. I remember huge emotional upheavals, inevitable with a student work-force. It was a brilliant summer, but on no points would it have passed on health and safety, I fear.

But for an embryonic writer, a rich summer. It's a place which tags at the imagination, because of its hard history and its beauty and its eccentricity. Whitby, I'm almost sure, will crop up again sometime, in some novel or other...

short stories

2011-10-09T20:17:00.003+01:00

Since beginning my new Reading Matters group at the Palace Theatre, my attitude to fiction has changed - that's it, five weeks, and a new world has opened up. In the group we read short stories and poetry. It's down to me, as the group 'lector' to choose the stories. And here's a confession; short stories and I have never got on. I have always found them unsatisfactory - a bit like eating a canape rather than a three course dinner. Just when you're all settled down into the story, it ends.

Now I see that short stories are actually a wholly different genre, and that they have huge potential for a different type of writing, and learning, by a writer. I'm learning all the time from the group's response to what we read. As someone pointed out on Thursday, a short story can dwell simply on atmosphere, it can tempt or amuse or distract or educate or just immerse the reader in a moment. A novel, being a much longer journey, is a different kettle of fish altogether. It's a settling down, between reader and writer, for a long-distance ride. A short story, being one stop along the way, can be much bolder or brasher or funnier or dreamier. The reader won't get worn out because there's no time. What freedom!

The Interrogative Mood?

2011-09-30T17:10:00.004+01:00

Has anyone tried this book by Padgett Powell? Why is it so compelling? Why am I interested in all these questions about myself - or the fictional subject of all the questions - that I half answer in my head?

A couple of extracts at random: Wouldn't it be sport and fun to carry around a riding crop and whip things with it? Do you think of yourself as a quitter, and, if you do, was there a time when you did not think you were a quitter? .....Have you ever maintained a swimming pool? Have you ever been bitten by a rabbit?

One after another, strange ideas and images pop into my head. I remember handling a child's rabbit when I was a little girl - it was allowed to roam freely in her house so the rooms were full of droppings. I don't remember it biting me, but I remember vividly its soft, snuffly nose. And no, I never maintained a swimming pool... or yes, I did, on holiday, when we rented a huge villa with friends and had to fish out the debris with a net... That's the power of the book, it just makes the brain feed on ideas and questions and then move restfully onto the next.

I keep wanting to learn more about the questioner, though, and I don't think I will now. I'm nearly at the end of the book. Or will I? Is there still time?

Living in a logical world

2011-09-20T17:38:00.004+01:00

Are all writers - that is, all writers of fiction, impossibly illogical? Just wondering. I ask, because I realise I have barely a logical bone in my body, and I'd like to think that it's something to do with my method of writing fiction - which is more or less to create a landscape, let characters loose upon it, and see what happens. Logic would hinder this function somewhat. The question I have to ask is not: What logically would happen next? But: How, in an unpredictable world, would these people behave now?

I realise that the material world for me is one of extraordinary hazard. For instance, when I follow a route on a particular journey, I have no real conviction that the map will truthfully reflect the road layout, or that the roads, as I remembered them, won't have shifted, so that I take a wrong turn, not from a mistake, but because the road has actually changed. Statistics, recipes, instructions are of little comfort. I can't be sure that some strange quirk won't push the expected conclusion out of reach. Of course some logical things are really not to be trusted, like railway timetables, but life would be a little simpler if unpredictability was confined to the subjects that really are, and of course, to the creation of fiction.

Thomas Hardy's footfall

2011-09-08T13:08:00.005+01:00

To Dorset, and specifically Sturminster Newton, one of my favourite walks with a favourite friend. I love it partly because it's a beautiful walk through water meadows and farm land, partly because Hardy would have done it too, as he lived in a house overlooking the river for a couple of years, when first married. Being Hardy, he remembered those years in later life as being very happy - his marriage went somewhat downhill after that - so the walk is steeped in Hardy-esque recognition of the landscape, and that old feeling of regret that he generates wherever he's been. We looked up at the evening sky at one point and saw feathery clouds - in a poem about the place he described them as like quills. We stood on a bridge where he had mentioned the smell of eels; no eels but teeming with little fish.

In a bizarre kind of way, I have come to love the memory and effect of Hardy's works more than the works themselves. They are in the blood, but when I revisit a story or poem, it's not quite as I remember it. I hated Jude, for instance, when I re-read it - I thought it was manipulative and cruel. But the evocation of place, and of feeling, is unforgettable.

So Tanzania

2011-08-29T12:06:00.004+01:00

Anyone I've met who's been to Tanzania (and there aren't that many) has a faraway look in the eye at the very mention of the name. I'm the same. So what's that about?

We were visiting a town and schools which are twinned with my husband's school in north west London. So we drove 700 miles from Dar, and were right on the far west of the country. There is a quality to the country that hits a person right below the breastbone, in the heart. It's to do with the size and age of Africa; it's to do with the scent of the earth when you step out of the plane. It's to do with the groundedness of being there - what matters our ridiculous concerns for skinny latte or cappucino when there the aim of each day is to survive? It's to do with potential - the country is straining at the leash - pulled back by bad roads and transport generally, a struggling education system, a struggling economy, a political system still in its infancy and with all associated snags - but the people so hungry to learn and get on. And above all it's to do with a joy that we have largely lost. I found myself smiling differently in Tanzania - a wide open smile that reflected the welcome we received. Here, in this moment, now, you are welcome.

Where Have I Been?

2011-08-23T09:43:00.004+01:00

The answer is, everywhere. This is the trouble - or joy - of having a head-teacher husband. All hols have to be taken at the same time. And we've been to Tanzania - of which more later. Stunning and life-changing - the guests of schools and diocese 700 miles from the capital.

But this blog is about my new reading group - and an invitation, if you live in Watford or the local area, to join. It's a new venture, piloted by the Royal Literary Fund, and the idea is to have round table discussions of short stories and poems. But unlike a book group, the reading is done live, within the group - and will therefore be a live, shared experience.

I'm obviously very excited about this - it's high time we revived the experience of hearing words spoken, and of active discussion of literature.

Do come.

Reading Matters is a reading group with a difference. During weekly meetings we will listen to and explore stories and poems - what they mean to us and how they work.

All are welcome. No qualification required except an open mind and the desire to share ideas about writing, in conversation guided by a professional author.

Perhaps you are a mum with kids just started school, you are unemployed or retired, keen to develop your ideas about books and literature, someone who loves reading, someone who’d like to read more, or you just want to try out something new and meet a new group of people. Whatever your reason, just come.

Venue: Watford Palace Theatre

Time: Thursday mornings from September: 10.00 to 11.30

Cost: £2.00 per week (free to unemployed)

Numbers: Maximum of 12 people.

Applying: email: katharine.mcmahon1@googlemail.com or call 0774 868 1509 to book a place.

Loss

2011-06-26T20:06:00.002+01:00

I've lost a bracelet of no great value except that it was my mother's. And this household lost five hours of work on a spreadsheet last week due to a technological hitch. Time and possessions, awful to lose. But it's about more than just not being able to get things back, surely, it's about something deeper - a lack of control, and I have a feeling is associated with an abrupt encounter with our human frailty. I use these moments remorselessly in writing - it's the only way I feel any better. How can you make it better when something is gone for good? By acknowledging just that, and grieving, and understanding how little anything matters to do with material, passing stuff.

And these are small losses, but they remind me of far greater, this slippage away of people and time. And all on the loveliest day of the year so far. Have been reading a biog of Vivien Eliot. Now I know why TS Eliot thought April was the cruellest month (according to this biog) because he associated with the death of a dear friend. There you go...

nothing to read

2011-06-12T17:15:00.003+01:00

A wet Sunday afternoon. I've finished my latest novel - the one I'm reading. I've NOTHING to read. I slouch through the rooms of our house which are crammed with books. NOTHING. I look on my bookshelf which is dedicated to unread books. NOTHING. By nothing, I mean nothing I feel like reading. Oh dear. I have a biography of Catherine of Aragon. I have a novel set in Australia and one in Turkey, and one translated from the French. I don't want any of these. I want a new Jane Austen. I want a different Dickens. I want a new Barchester Chronicle. I want Barbara Trapido or Jane Gardam. In short, I want comfort reading. I want to be pulled into familiar territory, witty, safe, full of character and plot. I don't want to make an effort or be confronted with past tense or flashback or violence.

Recommendations, please.

laughing on the train

2011-06-05T19:06:00.003+01:00

I've been reading Solar by Ian McEwan. I didn't think I'd like it for some reason - the title? The subject matter? But I always like McEwan because he knows how to structure a book like noone else - it's all so beautifully crafted. And it made me laugh. There's me on a Virgin train, in very close proximity with the three strangers at my table - one engrossed on his own book, two in their lap-tops, and there's me suddenly first squirming then really laughing, couldn't stop . Everybody else looked a little embarrassed rather than amused.

I have a bit of a detached attitude to books; I suppose slightly analytical, which means I rarely find them funny. I remember laughing like a drain when I read Bridget Jones and she goes to interview Colin Firth determined not to mention the wet shirt scene in Pride and Prejudice,and I taught My Family and Other Animals once, and found the scene when two puppies are introduced to the family so funny I could not speak. The class looked at me with a kind of avuncular tolerance which suggested: She's mad. But laughter is such a tonic, especially where it's slightly inappropriate, like a train or a theatre or church ( or a classroom of cynical kids). It feels so anarchic and childish.

Thanks, Mr McEwan.

Lists are good

2011-05-18T12:50:00.003+01:00

You would think that lists are bad - i.e. dull, especially when written in a novel. And I've heard Charlotte Bronte criticised for using too many adjectives in a row. Lists of adjectives do smack of the author not quite being able to make the right choice, although I'm guilty of using several when one just won't do.

But lists of things can often be very engaging. A friend of my daughter's is doing a Phd that somehow includes pockets, and their contents. What do you have in your pocket? Just a tissue. Or a train ticket, and if so, to where, and what happened? Or the sleeve of an umbrella (actually I'm listing my own pocket contents here). I have a soft spot for umbrellas and especially for the very girly floral one currently in my possession. Or a coin. Or a cinema ticket, or a receipt. Everything tells a story. But then what I choose to list about a character can lead me all kinds of places. I remember writing the contents of Stella Wheeler's wardrobe in The Crimson Rooms, and the process of listing her clothes forced me to develop a much closer sense of who she was and what she liked. Even place names, listed, can be very useful or stations visited by a particular train. It's to do with detail, I think, the sense that there's a degree of intimacy if there's a list. Even a shopping list. I once was behind a guy in Tescos who had lots of nail polishes in his trolley. Interesting? I love looking in people's trolleys.

So, I'm off to make lunch for my son and myself. He will have a bacon sandwich with ketchup. I shall have a salad with apples, bacon, watercress, tomato and cucumber. And if you want to know how interesting food can be, read Iris Murdoch's The Sea The Sea.

Pop Up Revolution

2011-05-15T19:49:00.004+01:00

Years ago I read Thomas More's Utopia. One thing I remember very clearly about More's vision for an ideal world is that instead of currency, there was a trade in precious things. I think mention is made of a cloak of feathers being the most intricate and time-consuming garment and therefore of great value. Last night some friends came to supper, and one of them gave me a pop-up card he'd made of the Storming of the Bastille. The French Revolution has been such a topic among us, thanks to my book, that in the end he decided to take action and find a way of presenting it in pictures. The card is beautiful, delicate and intricate and a gift I shall always treasure. There are few ways of reflecting the toil of writing a book, and how it gets into the blood, but this card does.

It also harks back to the eighteenth century itself, a hand-made world. Fans figure quite large as a theme in my book, and the skill and craftsmanship and time that went into making a fragile accessory makes your eyes water. But we are always in such a hurry, and doing so many things at once, it's quite an effort to imagine the lack of speed in the past, particularly among the leisured classes.

Compare and Contrast

2011-05-04T12:10:00.005+01:00

Well, I've been reading two books that in their turn have been long-listed for the Booker : James Meek, The People's Act of Love, and Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. Russian history apparently is where it's at in historical fiction. But I really don't get the process of long-listing because one book is layer upon layer of poetic and intriguing writing, and the other is a fast-moving thriller. No comparison as regard to quality of writing on any level. But then that's just my opinion. And I know only too well how taste is utterly subjective, except on rare occasions when taste seems to be universal (e.g., oddly enough, Kate's choice of wedding dress!!!)

It seems to me that a great book, or even a really good book, has to be much more than a story. It's about depth and nuance and poetry and wit and sub-plot and crafting and surprises and delight. Or, alternatively, a perfect piece of prose with none of the above. Define perfect. Not very demanding, am I? Re reading The Great Gatsby with my son who's studying it. Tick, tick, tick the list above.

Reading Positions

2011-04-27T16:31:00.003+01:00

What's yours? I was on holiday last week in Cornwall with friends and someone commented: 'You do have a lot of positions for reading in.' Do I? Well yes, I suppose I do. And the one I never choose is upright, in a chair, with the book on my knee and my legs decorously crossed. No, to enjoy a really good read I have to be in one of the following positions: lying against a heap of pillows in bed; in the bath; on the sofa with feet propped up ; face down with feet in air (see picture); if in arm chair, curled up, or sideways with legs over the arm; in the garden in almost any position, including cross legged; on train standing, sitting; on any kind of step; lying on side propped on elbow....

So what, pray, is that about? Reading and relaxation, that's what. If at desk, or upright in chair, reading is business. If lolling, reclining or propped up, reading is part of letting go of life, and getting down to the business of other worlds.

sunshine

2011-04-06T13:04:00.002+01:00

The sun is back, hooray. We have a pond the size of a saucepan filled by two frogs and their spawn, which overnight has translated itself into tadpoles. The trouble with being a writer is that one is knocked about by the weather because it's often all that happens in a day. The sky is blue or grey or both and that alters everything, the light in the room, the quality of air on the skin, the comfort of sitting at a desk. But then, having written that, I know that weather happens to everyone. My characters in Paris are currently crushed by heat. History is full of weather. When I wrote about the Crimea and then the First World War I became obsessed by cold and wind and mud and how joyful the soldiers must have felt (there are very touching letters and drawing about it from the Crimea) when the first wild flower appeared in spring, the first touch of sunshine. A revolution fought in the freezing cold is quite different to one conducted in blazing sunshine. There's a book there, for someone. Weather and mankind. What would have happened if...

editing

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

I met an author friend for lunch the other day who told me his books are scarcely edited at all, but published more or less as he delivers them. How very frightening that must be. I never cease to be amazed at what an editor (and in my case agent), or other critical reader can find - or not find, that I just can't see - but can, the instant it's pointed out. Blindness about the written word is just astonishing. The mistakes I've made, the traps I've fallen into, the opportunities I've missed... What other misconceptions do we have about ourselves? Certainly it happens with clothes - I can dress in the morning or buy a garment that seems ideal, and then, in front of a mirror later in the day - or more likely when a daughter passes comment - feel that the dress is terrible, doesn't suit, too long, too short. Just wrong. And I guess we have no idea what we look like - we see only our reflected faces in the mirror - and I have become aware, for instance, that the mirror I have used for the last thirty years gives me quite a different image to one in a different room. So it seems to me that we really need other people to build up a portrait of ourselves. Not too honest please about certain aspects of ourselves, but about work, yes please, every time.

Hope and fiction

2011-03-23T10:33:00.002Z

I've just read this quote from Vaclav Havel, playwright and former president of Czech Republic: Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. At the moment that seems a bit of a leap of faith for the inhabitants of Japan or Libya, but it perfectly sums up the process of writing a novel - or I suspect any creative work.

My fingers are literally poised over the keyboard, ready to start a new book. I have my usual endless lists of books that need consulting, notes about character, potential for plot. I am at the very beginning and there are, as always billions of possibilities. There will be false starts a-plenty. But there is also a conviction that from this chaos some kind of a narrative will emerge. Its sense will come from everything that happens in the next eighteen months, both in the wide world as it flickers across my screens and in the books and papers I read, the experiences I have, my relationships and the stories told to me about their lives by those I meet or who are close to me, the weather, the world, the feelings I have and even the garden I tend. They are all part of the brew, which is why I absolutely cannot see the book ahead of me now. I can only believe that one will be written, and that it will make sense.

Tsunami and Bath

2011-03-16T20:09:00.002Z

Last Friday at midday I was in Bath Abbey, with a friend, reading plaques to the long dead. On the other side of the world, mayhem. The difference between tragedies of the eighteenth century and tragedy now is knowledge and scale. Those plaques in the abbey commemorate brave sad lives - a woman who lost a husband to the Indian mutiny, and then three infants during or after the voyage back to England. There are early deaths of young women doomed to act as companions to ailing aunts, and of military men and slavers who served in distant lands and came home to die in Bath in the bosom of their families. Everything is slow and sad and steady and one at a time. But Japan - and Christ Church, and Libya and Bahrain. We know so much, we live so close together. We switch on our computers and it's all there. Catastrophe unfolds before our eyes. It's been said many many times, but it's so easy to forget the individual. That's what we must do in fiction - draw the individual from the multitude, so that we never lose sight of the agony.

history and fiction

2011-03-07T09:23:00.002Z

I'm reading Alone in Berlin. It's a struggle partly because of the unaccustomedly slow pace, and partly because of the hauntingly paranoid atmosphere - nobody can trust anyone. There are many parallels with the French Revolution, and other revolutions unfolding before our very eyes. It's also made me reflect once again on the value or otherwise of fiction as opposed to an historical account. I think it's all to do with what a fiction writer sees. In probing for motive and connections, in the freedom to translate an historical incident into the multi-layered context of a novel in which all the characters are playing out (blindly in some cases) their own destinies, their own private preoccupations, which in the end turn out to be connected, a new, clearer, more emotionally charged light is shone on events. Fallada gives us a portrait of a city, and its people in the grip of Nazi repression that had an emotional energy all the more terrible for being charged with a novelist's creative perspective.

I also reflect on communication and revolutionary pace. In the French Revolution they had paper and word of mouth, in wartime Berlin the telephone. Now...

we have a title

2011-02-15T12:40:00.004Z

And about time. I can't describe the relief. It's like wandering in the dark and suddenly seeing the light - and oddly enough, it makes the whole book make sense, as if someone's given it an almighty tweak. And in the end it was an obvious choice. I thought to myself, let's go back to basics. What inspired this novel? Answer: The French Revolution.

There is a very wordy poem about the French Revolution, by Blake, and another, very famous by Wordsworth - Bliss was it on that dawn to be alive... And of course lots of fiction - including The Scarlet Pimpernel, and A Tale of Two Cities, which Dickens wrote whilst receiving chapters of Carlyle's history of the French Rev literally as they were penned. It suddenly occurred to me to go back to that opening chapter: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness....

So there it was, and is. Season of Light. Just the ticket. Full of enigma and promise.

what gives me pleasure

2011-02-02T19:05:00.002Z

It's February, it's gloomy outside and the international news ain't great. The book is knotty. And then... on a Tuesday evening, a supper date. A girlfriend invites four of us round to supper. White wine, delectable meal, conversation, everything and nothing - children, politics, law, food, holidays, clothes, age. Feel human again. Told assembled company that I feel lit up with a bit of human contact after a day's writing. They all laughed at me and groaned. Didn't I spend my whole life protecting my writing time? Yes, I hate to be interrupted by business. But the right call, the right interruption adds just a little heat to the day.

And talk, a run, a trip to the theatre, laughter, all help. So thank you, dear friend, for the trouble you took. As my husband would say, it's the simple pleasures. Yes, well, not simple for the shopper/chef/dishwasher. But simple for those who just eat and talk

Routine

2011-01-24T17:02:00.002Z

It's 17.03. That means cup of tea time before the last lap until 6.p.m. I can't help laughing when someone asks the question: 'How do you write? Do you have a strict routine?' Strict? You could set your clocks by me. Everything is done to routine; breaks, bits of housework, the time when I'm allowed to look at emails, the time when I might phone someone.

I'm certainly not alone. Routines serve all kinds of purpose. For a start they get the job done. A book can't be written unless the time is put in, end of story. And they take away choice. I can't go off shopping at eleven on a writing day. I simply wouldn't allow it, so there are no decisions to be made. And they make a day in which there might be nothing except a very unwieldy bit of a chapter to write, have a bit of shape, even if the writing hasn't. When the worst situation hits - a brick wall or lack of ideas - at the very least I know that in forty minutes time I'll be released from my desk to fold the washing or post a letter.

Or is this obsessive compulsive behaviour? A bit, I suspect. But find me a writer who doesn't have some small addiction to routine. In the end, I believe it's a bit of a luxury. On the days when time is squeezed, the gentle rhythm is interrupted and more time is spent settling to work, fumbling to reestablish a pattern.

manipulation

2011-01-17T17:22:00.002Z

To see the English National Ballet at the Colisseum dance Romeo and Juliet. I remember once being accused by a critic of manipulating my reader, and when I see a full-blooded tragedy like R and J I wonder again what that means. Because what is that story but true manipulation? Everyone knows the pair are doomed. Everyone knows Juliet will wake up just too late to save Romeo. But as the audience, we just abandon ourselves to the plot, and let it sweep us along, knowing full well it all end in tears.

I wonder if manipulation, a bit of a dirty word, in a literary context is to use tricks to tweak the audience's emotions rather than fine writing, characterisation and so on. If so I can think of a fair few manipulative novels. Or perhaps it means to be too obvious in straining the plot or character to fit the overall requirements of the novel. Either way, it suggests a degree of consciousness in the reader that the author is engaging them in some kind of sleight of hand. I once read an entire novel full of shocking events which involved a woman who it turned out, in the last chapter, was a ghost. I felt very cheated. It's like that child's trick of ending a story: It was all a dream.

Title title

2011-01-12T20:33:00.003Z

Playing the title game again. Reading Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog. She has great titles, confident, quirky, intriguing, just like her books. I think her titles have got better and better - Emotionally Weird was a great book but the title didn't grab. By the same token, I've never read: A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time because the title simply puts me off. On the other hand, some titles almost are into pathetic fallacy territory - Jane Eyre - the choice of Eyre is just so wistful and mysterious, and Wuthering Heights. Good old Brontes.

So why can't I find a title? The title has got to sum up the essence of the book. The King's Speech (great film, great title) in itself is pretty dull, but 'king' is evocative and of course the pun in speech is perfect. I want to be snappy and suggest period and mystery. Ho hum. I have a feeling there's a title peering at me just below the surface.

Watch this space.

Reclining

2011-01-05T13:16:00.003Z

Struck down with a post Christmas bug and therefore every excuse not to delve deeper into the French Revolution but to recline with a copy of Lyndall Gordon's life of Emily Dickinson. And what a strange life and even stranger biography. Perhaps it was reading it in somewhat feverish state but the situation Gordon describes is really beyond extraordinary - that Emily should be living in total seclusion apart from her brother conducting an affair literally under her very nose (on the dining room sofa). Very distasteful and odd and strange.

Makes me wonder how much of that was going on in the buttoned up world of the mid eighteenth century. It's certainly true that whatever we novelists can invent, it will never be half as odd as what people actually get up to. I always find biographies strangely inspirational especially those of literary figures because they are a kind of vindication. It's good to feel part of a chain of mad reclusive women - except, in my defence, nothing so odd has never gone on in my house - at least not to my knowledge. Perhaps I'd write better fiction if it did... must give it some thought.

thank you jilly

2010-12-29T10:57:00.002Z

I've spent Christmas, off and on, in the company of Jilly Cooper's latest. She is an addiction, like The Archers. Since girlhood there have been certain authors which press a button of total relaxation - Noel Streatfield, Georgette Heyer, Barbara Pym, yes, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte. I try to analyse what I love and I think the common factor is wit. And a lack of cynicism. Cooper writes of people obsessed with horses (about which I know nothing), nature, pets, sex and money. (Will not comment on own preoccupations or not with same). The good tend to be beautiful (at least underneath), kind, generous, capable of love. The bad are greedy, cruel, selfish, lascivious and mean. It's possible for bad to become good, but of course such characters show signs of potential goodness from the start, and are often to be redeemed by a loving woman. So there we have it, the perfect formula from Darcy to Rochester to Jilly Cooper; fairy tale stuff, the stuff of page after page of fiction. And I admit it, I fall for it every time. Just sometimes, it's good to pick up a book where the good end happily and the bad unhappily, where superlatives rule and where real life, for a space, is kept at bay.

the weather - what else?

2010-12-21T13:09:00.002Z

The weather matters to a book. After all, what else is happening in my room except the book and the weather? The view from my window is transformed by snow. Today we have shades of grey, fawn and white. All is muffled. If I were beginning a book or a chapter, the weather would creep in somehow, and now, redrafting, it helps to create mood. Everything is a little tense in the chapter I'm writing. Death hovers. How appropriate then, to tap into this Winter Solstice, where the world is paralysed by snow, and even to leave the front door takes considerable effort, a deep breath, a launching forward.

Some things, like snow, a writer can't help. It just comes, it insinuates itself faintly into the pages. But it is there even if I'm writing drought and sunshine.

time time time

2010-12-12T20:38:00.002Z

A question that's often asked is: 'So how do you write? Are you disciplined?' My answer is always: 'Obsessive, actually.' I treat time like there's never, ever going to be enough of it, but if I have too much time I worry too, as if time, that elastic commodity, will stretch on and on and that the writing of the book will expand too, endlessly. Perfect writing time is framed time, lots of it. For me, writing time has to be hemmed in, so that it feels like a precious commodity, but so that there's enough of those patches of time for me to feel secure that I don't have to panic or rush, both of which are enemies of good writing. But I feel about writing the same way as I do about any other activity, there must be a limit. I will be much happier gardening for an hour than for an afternoon; shopping until eleven than all day; reading for half an hour. So with writing. Limitless time is intimidating.

Now I wonder what that's about. Is it to do with having been a pupil and then a teacher, and having life divided up by bells? Is it about being a bit of a split personality and loving to be sociable one minute, solitary the next? Or is it simply a nagging sensation that whatever one is doing one has to be useful, and that any activity by itself, whatever it is, is not quite useful enough? Bizarre. But at least, in my choppy life, I come to my writing fresh each time, as if I've not been there for ages, and may never return.

transparency

2010-12-05T15:03:00.003Z

As I embark on the last stages of rewriting this latest (still title-less) book, I rely on a certain magical 'grip' which sometimes occurs in these last weeks. It's to do with being absolutely inside the characters - not overtaken by them, but knowing what they'd see, think, do as if they were my own self. I went to see 'The Master Builder' (Ibsen) on Friday, and great theatre relies on this kind of transparency too. The characters may be complex, and it may be that they are motivated by many different and opaque feelings and experiences, but the fact that they are in this state of uncertainty is itself transparent. Confusion, rage, love, doubt and all the million nuances in between, all are transparent through gesture, word and action. And so with writing when it's really taking off. The writing is such that the reader is never in doubt that they are in the presence of a living breathing character, even when that character's chief preoccupation is doubt itself.

A Good Read

2010-11-27T10:48:00.005Z

Libraries are under threat. Our travelling libraries are most vulnerable. Why are libraries always having to fight their corner when successive governments pledge themselves to the value of education for all? I've just been listening to Nick Hornby on the radio and like so many of us, his love affair with books began with the local library - free, warm, full of colour, friendly and with all those thousands of opportunities to be entertained. For me libraries have always been a box of delights. I used to love those packed rows of green tickets that the librarian used to pick through with her very clean fingernails. I used to love sneaking into the adult section and looking for something racy. And now I still love that slightly lucky-dip feel when I go into the library. What will be offered for my delectation today? I come home with a bag of goodies and depending on my mood dive in. Some books are rejected after a page, some consume me for weeks. The joy of the library is the picking and choosing. And as community is the new buzzword, don't they tick every box?

and please don't ruin it for someone else

2010-11-21T20:03:00.002Z

To see The Kids Are All Right Last Night, which caused me to reflect, somewhat late in the day, upon a crucial and blindingly obvious difference between film and novel. In a book, to create a frisson between two people there has to be a degree of nuance, a depth of understanding by the reader, a steady creation of character, to make that moment happen. In a film it can be done with a look or a touch, a flutter of eyelashes and bam. There's your moment; the audience accepts that those two people are going to end up in bed. That's the difference between having fine actors and director and merely words on the page....

And thanks to the woman who emerged from an earlier viewing yelling to her companions that honestly the whole thing could have been a sit com but didn't work as a film, she was BORED, and by the way that ending (announcing what happened to assembled crowd waiting to go in), SO predictable. Why thank you, Madam.

ending

2010-11-14T18:37:00.004Z

How do I know that a book is finished? A book has a hundred endings. There's an ending of sorts when everything's been said the first time round, but that's rarely a real ending, or even the beginning of an end. It's something to start from. And then there's lots of redrafting and re-groping towards some kind of a sense that the book is getting smoother, more complete. And there's a final ending when the time has simply gone and the book has to be finished because it can't go on and on forever being redrafted and rethought. There's a danger here, because the initial impetus goes, and the polishing replaces the passion.

Most of ending a book doesn't mean re-ending the last sentence or even the last chapter. It means rewriting those characters or paragraphs or dialogues where there are ugly spikes, or which don't work hard enough, or are dead or over-fancy. This too could go on and on forever. I do know, I think, that the best endings are intrinsic in the beginning, that the reader sighs with satisfaction, like switching off the lights at the end of a really wonderful day.

For the record, one of the best endings I know is Penelope Fitzgerald's 'The Beginning of Spring'.

Marat

2010-11-07T17:47:00.003Z

There's a very bizarre parallel between the stabbing of the Lib Dem MP last May by a 21 year old woman who was seeking vengeance for the Iraq War, and the killing of Marat, the radical French Revolutionary, in his bath, by Charlotte Corday. The two young women were of a similar age and similarly single minded. They had no care for the consequences, in fact didn't seek to make any excuses for themselves, just made a plan and went ahead.

I wonder if it's partly to do with powerlessness. Charlotte Corday was at the end of her tether. She wasn't actually anti the Revolution - in fact rather supported it in its early stages. But for many reasons she became disenchanted (to put it mildly), and the focus of all her contempt and fear became Marat, who was indeed a leading light and very vocal and prominent. Although she never lived to know it, as a result of his murder, Marat became a martyr, and his fellow Jacobins, or Montagnards, were able to use Corday as an excuse to stamp out the opposition.

But then hey, we never do learn from history, I fear. How much suffering might be saved if we had a quick check to see whether nations/leaders/citizens had tried similar in the past...

turning the page

2010-10-29T13:15:00.002+01:00

To continue on the P and P theme - why am I compelled to go on reading, even when I know the ending by heart, and how the plot unfolds? This is a vital question for a novelist approaching the end of a rewrite, obviously. With Ms Austen, I think the answer is always the same - the reader's entanglement with her heroine's emotions is such that we would follow her to the ends of the earth. And we are not disappointed by the restraint of the ending, because of all that lies beneath.

Endings are very difficult; they've got to be right, for the book, they've got to satisfy, they mustn't cheat. They must somehow, I think, be there from the beginning, although at the same time they have to be earned by the process of the writing. And quite often, it seems to me, the writer gets to the end before the reader, who wants just a little longer with a character or plot, so that the release from the world of the book might nor jar or disappoint.

Ms Austen

2010-10-21T12:43:00.002+01:00

Since the new book was inspired by the realisation that Jane Austen had a favourite cousin whose husband was guillotined during the revolution, I have every excuse to make a return journey to her novels. I read each of Jane Austen's novels on a loop, I 'd say every decade. She's the only novelist I ever read more than once - she's my security blanket, I suspect, guaranteed to keep me amused in dark times. But I always find her totally inspirational.

So it's Pride and Prejudice again. Which proves, like all the others, to be as fresh as ever. Part of Austen's appeal is that she presents her reader with a different take on what's important in the novel every time. So now I'm particularly intrigued by the page space she gives Collins to ramble on about Lady Catherine - I suspect a modern editor would have had a few comments on that. But more importantly, I realise that Austen gets away with all kinds of tricks, like telling the reader in no uncertain terms that Darcy finds Lizzy utterly sexy and irresistible from word go. The sexual pull of the novel is compelling, despite its mercenary and slightly didactic streak. Jane Austen gets away with blue murder because the emotion is just so raw. Or, as my agent once eloquently put it, she writes with her knickers off.

The French Revolution

2010-10-17T18:48:00.002+01:00

Word from the wise - The French Revolution - approach with care. Yikes. When I told a friend I was setting my new novel in the French Revolution he draw breath and said: 'You do realise the French Revolution is the most opaque period in history...' And he's right. The problem is that almost every element of the Revolution, be it a characters, places, the politics, the conflicts, is like one of those weird stone-like blobs you see at a distance on the beach and as you approach you can't decide whether it's some kind of plant or jellyfish or sea-creature. Just when you think it's definitely a jellyfish, it turns out to be an upturned shell. This applies to the French Revolution. Take Robespierre, for instance, whom most people would regard as a bit of a villain. In his early years as a lawyer he chose to represent the poor, and was against capital punishment. Take the famous image of the tricoteuses, knitting at the foot of the guillotine. Actually women were chivvied back to the hearth by the end of the Revolution. Nothing stayed the same for long, or was quite as it appeared. Nobody was clearly on one side or another.

Fortunately, I'm a novelist. My job is to find a pathway through this intriguing, infuriating, rich soup. Tough, though.

rewrites

2010-10-07T17:03:00.002+01:00

The rewrite progresses. People say: How can you bear to rewrite a whole book? Actually it's not rewriting, rather it's a shaking out and a holding up to the light. It's taking out the paint box and using stronger, deeper colours. It's deleting a mass of material that's not needed and including more of of what is. It's meeting each character afresh and wondering: What are you thinking now? What would you do now? Is this dialogue that you're having authentic?

To look back at writing which I thought as good as it possibly could be three months ago is a salutory experience. How can things be so different now? Partly it's having the benefit of a mentor to say: Just a minute.... you've really wasted that opportunity. Or: How can you expect the reader to sympathise with that character, after what s/he's just done.

The upside is that it's these few months of rewrite that transform the whole experience of writing a book from graft to something much more dynamic, and fun, even.

What's in a name?

2010-09-30T15:51:00.001+01:00

Actually, a great deal. As Proctor cries in The Crucible, he cannot sign a lie to save his life because: ‘It is my name’ - what he means is, it’s me. My own name, Katharine, has always required a degree of patient explanation. No, it’s spelt K A T H A... My father was sent back to the registrar after the name had been entered wrongly in the book - he’d spelt it Katherine. This sort of family story of course attaches even more significance to the name, and I bet everyone feels just as protective and ambivalent about their name. And having a name like Katharine allows me separate identities, I can be Katharine or Kate (and when I was a student, Kathy but never Katie) depending on who I’m with and how I’m feeling.

Now Jane Austen didn’t call her heroine Millicent instead of Emma, and in Sense and Sensibility obviously sense belongs to Elinor and less sense to Marianne. And you couldn’t imagine the Byronic hero of Jane Eyre being called Cecil Rochester. The naming of characters is nearly as tricky as naming a child, and I for one can’t write a character until I’ve fixed on a name. In The Crimson Rooms, Evelyn seemed of the period (1920s), but also a little ambivalent because it can be either male or female. And so can Meredith, the name of the mystery woman who turns up on Evelyn’s doorstep. Both these women shed conventional female roles and become engaged, one way or another in a man’s world. Their names fit - but I never worked this out consciously.

And in my current novel about the French Revolution, the heroine has two names. She’s christened Thomasina (she and her two sisters have names with masculine roots because their father longed for a son), but to her sisters she’s affectionately known Asa. This gives her a degree of flexibility. She can be Asa to some, Thomasina to others. And with Asa, as with other characters in the book, her true identity is a vital theme.

Present Tense

2010-09-22T13:03:00.002+01:00

Philip Pullman has written a piece on the use of the present tense in novel writing (Guardian September 18th). Hooray. I've never liked reading books in the present tense and only once tried to write one, with disastrous results. I couldn't put my finger on the problem until now, but Pullman's right, it's like being texted in capitals. Everything about the present tense is urgent. It is unfolding now, before our very eyes. It therefore feels unprocessed.

Writing in the present tense both solves and presents difficulties. My new book is in the past tense, third person, and I'm faced with the knotty problem of authorial position. Where exactly do I stand? I know everything of course, because I'm the author, but how close do I get to my characters? How much can I reveal, or keep hidden without manipulating my reader (or characters) too far? In the present tense the author appears to be helpless in the face of events, instead of as Pullman says: Taking charge of the story.

I love stories. If you put a gun to my head, I'd say I'd rather be reading than writing because it's so much less work. But for me the initial process is exactly the same: I want to know what's going to happen next. But when it comes to rewriting, or redrafting, it's about making a stream of really tough decisions about how to tell the story, how to get out of a cul-de-sac because something can't be told in a certain way.

Anyway, here's to the good old-fashioned past tense novel. Long may it survive.

Waiting

2010-09-17T08:58:00.000+01:00

In The Lacuna, Kingsolver describes the finishing of a book thus: ‘I feel a peculiar sadness, like missing a lively, quarrelsome friend who has ended his visit. These days I purse my lips at the mirror and wonder how it is that other men find first-class reasons to shave, change out of pyjamas, and leave the house, practically every day.’

So what is this compulsion to write? Authors are often asked: ‘Where do you get the discipline from to sit down and write every day?’ But actually it’s the wrong question. The question should be: ‘What drives you? Why can’t you stop?’ The answer is this hollowed out place in my head, actually in my entire body that is there when a book is gone. I literally don’t know what to think about, or where to rest my mind. I was talking to someone the other night at supper who had read perhaps four novels in the last decade. He couldn’t see the point of fiction. I, like all readers and writers of fiction, can’t see the point of life without stories. The narrative of my own life, to be frank, ain’t that interesting. I seem to require layer upon layer of other people’s lives. And in answer to the question, ‘Why fiction?’ I suppose it’s to do with that layering. I like reading biography and history, yes, but the pure joy of a well-crafted fiction combines biography and history with drama and poetry. It is so rich.
And so I am a hollowed out person without a book to write. In desperation, I take to decorating the loo. I listen to the radio and I make a dreadful mess with spatters of eggshell paint - there can surely be no one less methodical or impatient. The skills I apply to redrafting a book refuse to be applied to other creative tasks. I wait.

Guilt and Books

2010-09-09T07:46:00.000+01:00

What is the one thing I love doing almost more than anything else? Reading? What is the one thing I rarely allow myself to do? When I was a teenager my big treat after exams and at the start of hols was to withdraw a Georgette Heyer from the library, buy a bag of wine gums and gorge on historical fiction. Then, as now, my taste was entirely eclectic. I read Jane Austen and George Eliot with as much voracity as Heyer and Plaidy. Today in my bag there’s a copy of Lacuna (see previous blog), and a book called The Terror, about the French Revolution. I am not, it will be clear, an intellectual reader, but I am voracious.

And yet, reading, like so many pleasures, always seems to get deferred. Perhaps this is the product of a very driven schooling, and being the daughter of a Methodist convert to Catholicism. Mostly it’s just plain ridiculous that the one thing I love to do should be snatched at in between far less important things like.... gardening and ironing, for example. It’s because I like it that I feel so guilty doing it. If it were a chore, I’d be reading for hours longer. How bizarre is that?

But one of my top favourite things in life is for a friend to appear on my doorstep, book in hand, and tell me that I must read it, she’s loved it. This kind of generosity is on a par with shared recipes, or plant cuttings. The book is for ever associated with the person who recommended it so there is an additional depth to the reading. The Mill on the Floss, for instance, will always be associated with an English teacher, Austen, with my mother. In my childhood home we had a coal boiler, just the right height for sitting on (probably not ideal for one’s health), and on this I would perch, being a cold child. Mum and I would read a page at a time. What an amazing legacy she gave me. Reading is a solitary experience, on the whole, but even more delicious when mulled over and shared.

And of course, if I’m reading a book because someone says I must, why then, no guilt.

On the Beach

2010-09-01T16:25:00.001+01:00

Holiday in very hot Greece meant lots of reading. Some great books, some very disappointing. Here’s my list, in no order at all.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Sex and Stravinsky, Washington Square, The Passage, The Help, Brooklyn, The Earth Hums in B Flat.

Of these, I loved Brooklyn the best. Beautiful, restrained, elegant writing. And a couple of others, naming no names, made me reflect a lot on the relationship between reader and writer.

Two of the above books ended in the death of a key character. Now I think there is a contract between a writer and her reader and it’s about holding the reader securely in the world of the novel. The reader, after all, is giving me, the author, hours of his or her time. I don’t want her to feel cheated or manipulated at the end. You won’t catch Jane Austen killing off Lizzie Bennet just when Darcy has at last declared his love for her. What’s OK in a spy or horror thriller is not all right for other types of fiction. It’s all about a strange, enigmatic understanding of plot that the reader develops over years of engaging with stories, in fact since being told her or his first fairy story as a small child. Now of course those expectations can be subverted or upended or shattered, and that might be part of the novelist’s plan, but such subversions, I think, should be handled with incredible skill and sensitivity, and should be part of this unwritten contract from the first. So much writing is just plain unsubtle.

But now I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna, which is wonderful. The very opposite of a worthless book, full of life and character and quirkiness. And that’s the contract - as a reader, I am prepared to be lead by the nose by Kingsolver into uncharted waters because I trust her utterly.

Full Stop

2010-08-25T19:12:00.000+01:00

Finishing a book, like all endings, is a very mixed experience. One moment there is this vast, intrusive internal world, the next, it’s gone, or at least, been released. These days, with the click of the Send button, goodbye 18 months of work. All those words, all those fragments converted into paragraphs, pages into chapters, all those notes and anguished planning in the small hours, gone. It’s no longer my world, my book, a great lump of material that I’ve been holding inside me, it’s out there. It’s to be read and commented upon. And no, it’s not like giving birth, in fact it’s the opposite. Giving birth results in a warm, squeaking baby. With a book there’s a kind of sucking away, an acknowledgement that this work is no longer mine, it’s yours.

And I look forward to ending the book so much. I think: After the book is finished I will...sort out the garden, clear my son’s room (he’s not keen on this), read a mountain of novels. I count off the number of pages left to go. I can’t believe there will ever be an ending. I’ve looked out of the window at the garden longingly, at my chair in the shade, and I’ve yearned to sit there, free of the book. And then the book is gone and instead of relieved I feel bereft. Now what? Things that have never irritated me before annoy me. The fridge is filthy, the freezer needs defrosting, the garden is full of weeds. The book has been a juggernaut through all this, a raison d’être.

And then there are doubts... Will they like it? - they being agent and editor. I don’t mind rewriting. In fact I love to rewrite. For me it’s so much more satisfying than the first draft because it’s chipping away at marble to reveal a work of art (in my dreams). The first draft is like spitting out molten rock. But will they like it at all? They’ve not seen any of it. Has it worked? I give a hard copy to my daughter who obligingly romps through it. She likes it! She understands it! She thinks it’s better than The Crimson Rooms. Why? I ask defensively. More to it, she says.

And so I’m grumpy and unsettled. I don’t want to read in the garden. I don’t want to do odd jobs. There’s only one thing that will sort me out. Hey ho, a new book.