Showing posts with label writing advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing advice. Show all posts

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Two

 


Here's me, somewhere in the Galloway Hills, playing at Wuthering Heights. My companion's name was Andy and he was a gem of a dog, a Sheltie Border Collie cross who, fortunately, combined collie intelligence with sheltie good nature. He lived to be eighteen, and was one of the most loveable creatures I've ever known. 

We moved to Ayrshire when I was twelve, and dad - a research scientist by then - got a position at the Hannah Dairy Research Institute just outside Ayr, I spent most of my secondary school years here, first at Queen Margaret's School in Ayr and then travelling to St Michael's in Kilwinning for my two senior years. We spent a little while in 'digs' rented out by a peculiarly unpleasant elderly lady. I had a bedroom, but mum and dad had a sofa bed in the living room. The landlady had to come through this room to get to her kitchen, where she would cook her habitual meals of boiled fish. Looking back, I suppose she was strapped for cash and hated having to rent out rooms, but instead of knocking on the living room door, she would say 'knock knock' and come in. Dad swore that one day he would be stark naked when she did this. Unable to stand the smell of boiled fish any longer, we moved to a small caravan park outside town while my parents waited for completion on a house they were buying off plan. 

I made a couple of friends who lived nearby, which was just as well, because school was a different matter. I was an ungainly adolescent with the wrong accent. Everyone seemed to have known each other for years - which they had. The school had burned down just before we came north (I was yet to become familiar with the West of Scotland habit of burning down schools and any other inconvenient buildings) and half our classes were in portacabins. I didn't know that when the teacher asked a question, you were supposed to shut up and pretend you didn't know the answer. Which made me quite popular with some teachers, but not at all popular with my classmates. I also didn't know that when people asked you which school you went to, they wanted to know if you were a Catholic. All these years later this still happens. The response is always a sort of loaded silence. 

The other shock was how often teachers used the 'tawse' or 'belt' as we called it - a leather strap. I don't think I had ever seen corporal punishment administered till we moved to Scotland. At my primary school, we knew that the formidable head teacher had a cane in her office, and the 'big boys' might be sent there for terrible transgressions. At my girls' secondary school, it wasn't used at all. I recently came across early 20th century instructions from the Education Department in Leeds about the use of corporal punishment that seemed particularly enlightened - to be used sparingly, if at all. 

Nobody had told Scotland. The vast majority of teachers belted pupils every day, sometimes whole classes, and often for the most spurious of reasons, such as wrong answers or lack of understanding. I encountered more sadists in those few years than I've ever encountered since, skipping up and down with glee as they wielded the tawse. It did no good. The lads who were belted most often were proud of themselves, their hands grown horny so that they felt very little. 

I can still remember the awful sensation of approaching breaktimes when we would be turfed out into the playground, and I would either find myself alone or grudgingly absorbed into some group or other. Listen to Janis Ian's 'At Seventeen' and you'll know exactly what I mean, although thankfully, by the time I myself hit seventeen I had escaped to university and a whole new group of genuine friends. Occasionally, talking to people who were my classmates back then, I find that their memories are quite different from mine. They have no memory of the little digs, the jibes, the rolled eyes, the giggles. I was an incomer. Would I have behaved any differently in their shoes? Well, perhaps not. 

Once again, I escaped into my imagination. When we moved to our new house in Castlehill, I would walk out to Burns Cottage on spring and summer Saturdays and daydream about the poet. We were an adventurous little family. Dad had acquired an elderly car by this time, and we drove out into the countryside, went hillwalking, went on camping holidays, visited castles and stone circles and all kinds of places, perfect for feeding the fantasies of somebody like me who still wanted to be a writer. 

I read avidly and I wrote terrible adjective laden poetry and short stories. I was in love with the Beatles, especially John, and wrote fan-fiction before anyone had invented the concept. I discovered Tolkien, via my father, who found old copies of the books in Ayr's Carnegie Library long before they became so popular. I read and loved Alan Garner's novels and wrote a fan-girl letter to him, but made the unforgiveable mistake of mentioning Tolkien which elicited a dusty answer. He didn't like the comparison at all. I was mortified. It didn't quite put me off his books, but it taught me the valuable lesson that not all successful male writers are prepared to be patient with eager aspiring females, even very young ones.

For me, I think it was the beginning of the perception of just how many people will confidently tell you what you ought to be writing and how you ought to do it, although it would be many years and many disasters before I was confident enough to act on that perception. 

We all need to learn. The very best editors - and I've had some - will question you closely about your work. In finding the answers to those often very challenging questions, you'll make the work better - but it will still be yours. The worst editors and directors  - and I've had plenty - will confidently demand the kind of changes they think you ought to make, unaware that they are trying to shape you in their own image, trying to force you to write the book or play they would have written - if they had the time.

Years later, somebody I had worked with on a couple of projects said to me 'you know - you were far too compliant. You should have argued more.' He was right, but why he didn't tell me this at the time I will never know. That's how not to be a writer as well. You learn your craft by reading and writing and polishing over and over again. Not by blindly following advice from people's whose credentials you're unsure of. If you don't believe me, read Stephen King's brilliant On Writing. That's more or less what he says too. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Introduction

Two cool cats

There are times, as a full time freelance writer, when  you think to yourself  'you're doing this all wrong.'  Rather a lot of times for most of us. More recently, as I start to take back control of what I do and don't want to write and publish, and how, that realisation, sometimes howled at the stars, mostly muttered sotto voce, changes into 'You've definitely been doing this all wrong.' 

This week, on social media, somebody asked me what was the title of my novel. Which novel? There are nine of them and counting. And three fairly hefty non-fiction books as well, involving a whole lot of research. Then there's half a lifetime of assorted plays, stories and poems, many of them still in print or regularly repeated on R4 Extra.. 

Have I, I wonder, been so careful about not over-promoting my own work that I've hardly promoted it at all? I can think of several writers who seem to be in positions of power and influence in the Scottish literary establishment (for want of a better word)  who have so little actual writing to their names that you begin to wonder if their relentless self promotion works. Those of us who spend most of our time writing can only look on in wonder at just how effective such promotion of so little substance can be. Very effective indeed, presumably.

It's doubly irritating, I think, because for the vast majority of writers, the very last thing we want to do is talk or write about what we're working on right now. If, as often happens, somebody asks 'what are you working on?' having first disguised the involuntary gasp of horror, you find some way of fudging it. You never go into detail. You're happy to talk about what you have written, but never about what you are writing. And that's because the more you talk about a project before you've finished it, the more it simply disappears, like, as our national poet describes it, 'a snowflake on the river, a moment white, then melts forever.' 

There are millions of blogs and websites and books out there full of advice about How To Be A Writer. When I look back at my long and varied career to date, most of it could best be described as How Not To Be A Writer. 

And you know what? I reckon that might be more helpful than 'how to' for a whole lot of people. I've been putting pen to paper for a long time.  More or less since I could read. Since I was the little girl in Clark's sandals, sitting on a doorstep in smoky Leeds, with my nana's cat, Jimmy. My late, very much missed Canadian friend Anna, a formidable lady with a stellar career in education, once asked me about what she called my 'inventory'. Everything I'd written, worked on, published, over many years. 'Why aren't you richer?' she asked. It's a question I and my artist husband have asked ourselves many times. I mean 'rich' would be lovely, but the question really should be 'why aren't you reasonably comfortable?' Or even 'why are you still struggling?' 

Clearly, we've both been doing it wrong. 

Come back soon for another thrilling installment of what not to do. 

Mr Bates, the Post Office and Issue Based Drama

 

Anne Marie Timoney and Liam Brennan in Wormwood


If you haven't yet seen it, and you'd like to watch a perfect piece of 'issue based drama', seek out ITV's recent Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Written by the excellent Gwyneth Hughes, with a very fine cast, it tackles an injustice so colossal, so disturbing, so enraging that you'll be fuming quietly (or perhaps loudly) about it long after you've switched off your TV.

Here's the interesting thing though. I've been following this issue for years. There have been a number of hard-hitting programmes and articles about it, but this drama is the one that has 'cut through', the pebble (albeit a very fine pebble indeed) that started the landslide. 

Ever since it was broadcast, I've been mildly irritated by a string of social media posts wondering why 'they' - that perennial they, who ought to do all kinds of things - don't do a drama about a string of other issues. Everything from Brexit to migration. All of them disturbing issues with which we must sooner or later grapple.

Dear reader - and even dear writer, because some of my friends are aspiring dramatists and some are already fine playwrights  - that isn't how  issue based drama works. That isn't how you set about writing it. You don't look at a sort of pick and mix of current issues, and say to yourself 'I fancy that one' and then jam a set of characters into it.

Well, you can, of course, and people frequently do. Especially when they're starting out. The results are almost always dire. Boring diatribes about issues, with the characters purely incidental vehicles for the playwright's preoccupations or obsessions.

Back when I was writing plays, I spent a long time - years, in fact - with the idea of a play about Chernobyl nagging away at me. I'd been pregnant when the cloud drifted towards the UK so it had loomed large for me as for so many others. But it wasn't until the accounts from the people who had been most involved with it came filtering out from Ukraine that I suddenly saw the play I wanted and needed to write. The firemen and their families, the people living in Pripyat, the schoolteachers, the children, those who experienced it at first hand - those were the people whose voices and experiences mattered, and suddenly any 'issues' became secondary to those experiences. They mattered, of course, but they could only spring from characters whose lives were interrupted by that 'safety experiment' gone so disastrously wrong. 

The result was a play called Wormwood, written for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and staged there in  May 1997. It was a well reviewed but disturbing production. People cried at it. Occasionally, they fainted. If you want to read it, you'll find it online or in an anthology called Scotland Plays, published by Nick Hern Books. 

Many years later, the superb US TV series titled Chernobyl was equally focused on character.  It's hard to watch, and yes, many issues arise out of it. But first and foremost, we are captivated and horrified by what happens to the people most closely involved, from the 'party man' whose whole ethos is gradually thrown into question and destroyed, to the firemen buried in lead lined coffins. We watch and we identify with these people. Just as we identify with all these innocent postmasters and mistresses whose lives were destroyed in order to - well - to preserve a brand. We watch and we know that it could happen to us. And then, if we're honest, we also wonder if we too had been on the other side of that divide, with our livelihoods dependent on toeing the Post Office line- what we would have done differently. Would we have been brave enough to say thus far and no further? 

After Wormwood was staged, I ran a short course on issue based drama for young writers at the Traverse. So many years later, the central truth remains. The only way to 'cut through' is to focus on those most closely involved, people with whom we can identify. 

Last night, I watched a heartrending documentary about the 39 Vietnamese migrants who suffocated in a container, before they could ever set foot in England. What made it so tragic was the recognition that these were people like us, human beings, many of them young people, with hopes and fears and dreams. The last messages they sent to their families, from within the hell of that container, were mostly apologetic. 'I'm sorry' they said. Sorry for wanting to improve their lives, for taking a leap of faith for themselves and their families. 

Now there's an issue that somebody could tackle. An issue obscured by the daily rantings of our politicians. But to do that would involve immersing yourself - as the detective who investigated the case clearly did, and has never got over it - in the ordinary, mundane, precious lives of those 'people like us'. Then, I reckon, the issue would take care of itself. 


Opening scene of Wormwood at the Traverse





Not Your Friends


Charlie Brown and Lucy, by Schulz

If I had to give one piece of advice to writers who are just starting out, or to those travelling hopefully in the early stages of the journey, it would be this: many of the people you encounter along the way, agents, publishers, managers, interns, editors, producers, directors, even those who work for agencies charged with funding the arts - remember that they are not your friends.

I have plenty of fellow writers and actors I've worked with, and I would count almost all of them as my friends. We share experiences in common, we sympathise with each other, we may well compete from time to time, but we also look out for each other when the chips are down. And even when we don't see each other for a while, we pick up where we left off when we do meet. That's real friendship.

When I look back over a long career in writing and publishing, I can see that most of the mistakes I've made - and I've made plenty - have involved me misinterpreting a warm professional relationship as genuine friendship. 

It never was. 

This is not a bad thing. We don't, for example, expect our doctors or dentists to be personal friends, as long as the relationship is polite and 'friendly' and mutually beneficial. Ditto our solicitors, accountants, and whatever other professionals we work with. There may be exceptions, but that's usually because the friendship predates the profession, or the professional relationship runs parallel to the personal friendship and has lasted for many years. I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the situations where that was the case and, alas, the people in question are dead. 

Writers are often to be found extolling the 'friendship' they have with their 'wonderful' agent or director  or publisher. I've done it myself more than once. It's hard not to see it as friendship, when there are so many similarities with the real thing: the long, mutually supportive conversations, the praise, the positivity, the helpful suggestions, the promises. 

Unfortunately, and unlike real friendships that can persist through thick and thin, over many years, professional relationships may not. Sometimes they end suddenly and unexpectedly, with a letter or email. Occasionally, just when you thought things were coasting along nicely, you feel the chill wind of disapproval, followed by silence. Sometimes you realise that the person who was once so responsive - the person who made you think 'this time, it will be different!' -  hardly responds at all. You make a hundred excuses for them. To yourself and to other people. I've done this countless times with different people, giving them the benefit of the doubt, shrinking away from the obvious conclusion. Like Schulz's Charlie Brown, you can't resist one more try at kicking that ball. Afterwards, you liken it to those love affairs where you make excuses until no more excuses will do. 

It isn't a love affair at all. It's a professional relationship, no more, no less. 

The cut off is invariably a commercial decision. Mostly, it's that you simply aren't making them enough money. For professionals, the business always comes first. And you know what? That's exactly the way it should be. As long as it cuts both ways. 

It can't be said too often. A professional relationship is not a friendship, no matter how much it might masquerade as one. This is not to say that it can't be polite, congenial, supportive and very good while it lasts. All of that. But when push comes to shove, they are not your friends, and if you begin to believe that they are, you are, I'm afraid, doomed to disappointment. 

The corollary of this should be that you are free to do the same thing. Your career comes first. Look out for yourself.  Don't hang on to a failing business relationship, however cordial, because of misplaced feelings of loyalty. Save that for your real, personal friends. They're the ones who deserve it. Where business is concerned, and writing is a business as well as a vocation, speak softly and carry a big stick. Be nice, be polite, but always be aware of what suits you and your work best. They won't mourn the loss of you at all, if you walk away. Because they really are not your friends.


Listening and Watching - The Price of a Fish Supper


 A couple of weeks ago, MAD Productions staged another handful of performances of my play The Price of a Fish Supper, originally produced at Glasgow's Oran Mor as one of their A Play, A Pie and a Pint series. It's a single hander, i.e. a long monologue and consequently a very 'big learn' for the actor involved, but Ken O'Hara (above) has made the part uniquely his own. 

For me, once he is on stage, he is Rab, the troubled but essentially decent ex-fisherman who hangs about the harbour and tells his tragic (but often very funny) story to whoever will listen. 

It's a play about the long, sad demise of the traditional Scottish fishing industry, a play about friendship and family, about where and how people fit into the world in which they find themselves, and the possibility, or otherwise, of redemption. It's a play that tackles adult themes and pulls no punches. 

Thanks to Ken O'Hara and to Isi Nimmo, who directs, the play has had a long life beyond that first well reviewed production. I've done the occasional after-show Q & A session. Every single time, somebody has asked me or Ken if he ad-libs it. And every time, he points out that, with the exception of the very occasional phrase, it was all written down. Carefully constructed by me. Even down to the way it's written on the page, orchestrated, almost like a long poem. (If you want to see for yourself, it's available here, published by Nick Hern Books.) 

I always wonder if they would ask the same question if I were young and male. I suspect not!

All the same, it's Ken who brings Rab vividly to life. Plays are meant to be experienced in performance. Not as words on a page.

It also makes me think about how Rab first came into my mind, telling me his tale before he told anyone else. Which is what it feels like to write in a single voice like this - you listen and your character speaks.

In the 1970s, I did a postgraduate Masters in Folk Life Studies. My dissertation was on the fishing traditions of the Carrick district of South Ayrshire. I interviewed many elderly fishermen over a period of a year. and their vivid descriptions of the herring fishing have stayed with me ever since. Even more to the point, my husband was once a trawler skipper here in Ayrshire. Eventually, he moved on to skipper charter yachts and then came ashore to work as a woodcarver and artist, but he too had stories to tell. We had and still have friends who worked at the fishing. So there was a certain amount of immersion going on for me - and many of the tales told in the play are certainly based on truth.

After the most recent production of Fish Supper, it struck me that one of the most valuable pieces of writing advice I can give anyone - whether you're aiming to write plays or fiction - is to watch and listen. Watch how people behave. Listen to how they speak.

You have to be fascinated by people. All kinds of people. What they do, what they say and how they say it. 



Blending Fact and Fiction - Writing Advice




This is one of my occasional 'how to' posts, although I don't ever presume to tell people how to write - so it's more of a 'how do I do it' kind of post. Or even 'how did I do it' because there's no guarantee that I'd do it the same way in future. Writing is always a learning process. The theme of this blog was suggested by writer friend Wendy Jones. It was originally intended as a podcast, but fell victim to various unforeseen circumstances earlier in the year. I'd already drafted out some notes in response to Wendy's questions  - so just in case they might be useful - here they are - and the podcast may still happen at some point. 

To illustrate this, I'll be considering a couple of novels published some time ago, but still available online: The Physic Garden and The Jewel.

The Physic Garden was inspired by the true story of a Scottish gardener, but it evolved into a tale of friendship and terrible betrayal, set in late 18th and early 19th century Glasgow. It's a first person narrative, told by an old man looking back on his life.  The narrator, William Lang, had a voice so strong that he simply had to tell his own story. One of my (disappearing) agents suggested that it would work better as a third person narrative and I tried it, but I just couldn't. William wasn't having it. During one of my book group sessions, after publication, a woman asked me how I could have written 'a whole book about such an unpleasant old man.' I was gobsmacked. William may be crabbit. A little tetchy from time to time. A man whom bitter experience has changed irrevocably. But this is the story of his youth, of tragic events that have made him the man he is. I loved him from start to finish. 

In the Physic Garden, (physic as in medicinal, NOT psychic as in supernatural, even though everyone thinks that's what it is!)  the garden itself is a backdrop, and the novel is inspired by a true story. Years ago, I found an old book called The Lost Gardens of Glasgow University and one of the chapters was about William Lang, who was made head gardener of the university physic or herb garden, at a very young age, after the death of his father. Sadly, the garden was dying because of industrial pollution from the Type Foundry that the university had permitted to be built nearby. Soon, young William was blamed for something he could do nothing about. It was clear that the real William had support from one of the university professors, Thomas Brown. I thought he was an older man who had taken William 'under his wing' but when I did some further research, I realised they were quite close in age. Close enough to become good friends in spite of the difference in their respective statuses. 

That relationship was the basis for my novel. I used fact - that original book - as a springboard. I also went to the Hunterian museum, and the Glasgow University library to look at various books that are key to the story. Then at a certain point in the tale, I gave myself permission to make things up. I didn’t know what the (fictional) great betrayal was that tore the friendship apart till quite close to the end of the story and this is not the place for spoilers, but I knew it was something horrific and unforgivable. 

By contrast, the Jewel is a third person narrative, the untold story of  Jean Armour, the wife of  Scottish poet Robert Burns, but with the focus, the 'experience' of the story very much told from Jean’s point of view. In this novel, I stuck to the truth as far as was humanly possible. There is a mass of information 'out there', but very little about the poet's wife. I went back to primary sources: the highly illuminating Kirk Session Minutes from Mauchline, for example, or accounts from people who had known the couple, but I did lots of online research as well. The result is that everything I wrote about in this novel either did happen (you’d be surprised by how much!) or could have happened. I even found out one or two things that aren’t in the public domain at all - for example, the fact that the whole village seemed to know that Jean was expecting the poet's twins well before they were born.

One of the keys to writing historical fiction based on fact is to realise that you can’t put everything in.  The research is just a means to an end. My advice would be to immerse yourself in the time and place as far as possible, but then write the first draft of the story without checking too many facts. You’ll soon find out what you don’t know and you can go back and fill in any gaps later, before revising and editing. You need to get inside your characters’ heads, to allow them to speak, to listen to them. 

William Lang seemed to dictate his story to me. With Jean, the poet's jewel of them all, I needed to know more about her, to explore her emotions, how she felt about her talented, mercurial, lovable and sometimes reprehensible husband and why. Fiction gave me the elbow room to do just that. 

If your book features a well known character, like Robert Burns, you will find yourself defending your point of view and sometimes your protagonist too. So many men and a few women have written about Burns. Almost all of them ignored Jean. I knew that there would be some challenges to my version of the story – and there still are!

Above all, you have to choose something that obsesses you, something you love. You are going to be living with these people and in this time and place for a very long time. (My husband swore he saw Jean in our bedroom one night, because I’d spoken of nothing else for months!)

An important point: don’t allow your characters to have thoughts and feelings they could never have in that time and place. Jean Armour was a strong and admirable woman, but she was an 18th century woman who had terrible trouble defying her parents. If I had written her as too feisty, too modern, nobody would have believed in her. I wouldn’t have believed in her. Ditto Burns, who was a man of his time and place, but one who liked women, made them laugh, charmed them. Back then, I expect I'd have fallen for him too. In the Physic Garden, William is an intelligent and imaginative man born into the wrong class at the wrong time. But he can only tell his story from the perspective of his emotions at that time, disliking the constraints, celebrating the successes, lamenting a betrayal that he still knows he himself could never have committed, but even so mourning what might have been. 'It is as though something was planned for me, some pathway I could not find, could not take,' he says. And later acknowledges that he has 'a sense of regret so profound, so bitter that it is like a physical pain in me.' 

Above all, be prepared for your research to change your mind about characters and events. Because it will. Inevitably.  That’s half the pleasure of it. We all write to find out.



 


Wouldn't it be Great?

 


The picture is only there because I like it a lot, my husband Alan Lees painted it, it reminds me of some very happy winters spent working in the Canaries - and it's also going to be used as the cover image for one of a pair of novels, coming soon. Watch this space! 

Meanwhile, back in the real world ...

Many writer friends seem to be in the process of trying to secure the services of an agent, a process that involves sending out the dreaded 'query letters'. Dozens of them. It's a hideous process that involves browsing agency websites and how-to posts, trying to draft out the right letter, sending it out in whatever form the agency demands, keeping records and waiting. It's demoralising not least because, although it's a bit like job hunting, getting an agent doesn't necessarily mean you'll get a publishing deal, and getting a publishing deal doesn't necessarily mean you'll make any money ...

I've posted quite a lot about the hunt for an agent already on this blog, especially in 2021, with a post titled Disappearing Agents, and a follow up post here, a week later. 

A quick Google of that term 'query letters' throws up - I kid you not - 87 million results. That's a lot more than the entire population of the UK. Vast numbers of people are busy telling other people how to write query letters. On the other hand, a search for 'how to be a good literary agent' results in 23 million results, and of those, the vast majority are still about how to get an agent, or where to find an agent, with the rest focusing on simply 'becoming' an agent.

Anyway, in contrary mood, I thought, wouldn't it be great to find pieces online with titles such as:

You're claiming to be an agent? Why is your website such a mess?

How to design an agency website that wows your potential clients.

Five essential elements of a good agency.

How to be a darn good literary agent.

The essential traits of agents that work.

What not to do as a literary agent.

Five things that make a competent agent.

Ten marks of a poor agency.

Highly effective agencies and how they do it.

How to become the perfect literary agent. 

and in view of my own past experiences

Agents: how not to disappear. 


Well, we can but dream, can't we? 

 


The Amber Heart - The Long, Long Story of a Story and Pardon Me While I Scream.


Yesterday, a friend who had just read my new book The Last Lancer, was telling me that she had enjoyed reading it - but she didn't love it as much as one of my novels called The Amber Heart. She went on to tell me how and why she loved it, which is always cheering for an author to hear. And perhaps doubly so, when it was praise for a novel with a long and chequered history. 

Now that it's available as an eBook and in paperback, at long last, I think it's time to revisit the tale of how we got here, what inspired it - and what the connection is with the true story of The Last Lancer. 

Once upon a time, when I was young and optimistic, my first full length adult novel, titled The Golden Apple, was accepted for publication by The Bodley Head, an old and distinguished publisher. To be clear, this wasn't my very first novel. There were others, tucked away in folders, never to see the light of day. Practice novels. And there was a young adult novel, published in Scotland, before young adult was even a thing. But this was my first grown up novel that was fit to be seen.

I considered myself very lucky. My agent for fiction at the time was Pat Kavanagh, and she was a fine agent with a wonderful reputation. Among other things, and unlike almost all agents now, who will tell you that publishers are looking for an 'oven ready book' (that's a direct quote from one of my subsequent agents) she didn't consider it her job to edit. That was the publisher's job. If a book was good enough, she would sell it. Beyond that, the editorial relationship was with the publisher.

Half way through the publishing process, the Bodley Head was taken over by what was then Century, an imprint of mega conglomerate Random House. What should have been a thoughtful, typical Bodley Head novel, about a cross cultural marriage, was published as a beach bonkbuster and sank without trace. It was an early lesson in the power of branding. And the disaster of the wrong branding. My editor at the time, with whom I had no quarrel, wrote to me later to say that she felt guilty about what had happened to my novel, and the knock-on effect on my career.

Still, with Pat's encouragement, I embarked on a new project. That new novel was - in essence - The Amber Heart. Back then. I think it was called Noon Ghosts. It was an epic and passionate love story, a family saga, very loosely inspired by what I knew of episodes from my own family history, not least a somewhat scandalous liaison between an aristocratic forebear and her estate manager, one which you can read all about in The Last Lancer. Knowing that at some point in the future, I might want to tackle the true story of that relationship, I deliberately set my fictional love story in the previous century. 

To my relief, Pat approved. She quickly sent it out and the responses were wonderful. She related some of the reader and editor comments to me. 'I literally could not put this book down,' one of them said. 'I read it through the night and wept buckets at the end.' There were lots in the same vein. They loved it and said so. Cloud nine loomed.

Pat couldn't sell it. 
And she could have sold sand in the desert. 

You know what the stumbling block was? It was the Polish setting. It always fell at the last editorial hurdle. The consensus in every publishing house she tried (and there were already diminishing numbers of possibilities) was that nobody would want to read a piece of historical fiction set in Poland, especially one that was aimed at a largely female readership, never mind that some of those same readers had compared it to a Polish Gone with the Wind, never mind that it was a big, sexy and ultimately tragic love story. It was too foreign and that was that.

Years later, Pat told me how frustrated she had been that she couldn't sell the novel. For her too, it was the 'one that got away'. Sadly, she died far too young. I put the manuscript away, stored all the research in a big box under the bed, and got on with other writing. I forged a pretty successful career as a playwright but I was also working on more novels, finding the pull of fiction irresistible. Many have now been published by Saraband. I'm a compulsive teller of tales, so I finished up with more novels than Saraband could ever reasonably publish.

Three in particular fell through the cracks in the publishing business: Ice Dancing, Bird of Passage and, of course, The Amber Heart.  Sadly and inexplicably, I think these three are among the best books I've written, and I don't say that lightly. Other people have told me so too. 

Time passed. 

I found and retyped the old manuscript of The Amber Heart. You can tell how long this has been going on by the fact that its first faded incarnation was on old fashioned perforated computer paper - the kind that ancient printers spat out in long reams. I expanded it, wondering if it would make a trilogy. Realised that the answer was no. Filed it away on the computer, instead of in the box under the bed. Changed computers. Lost the file. Found it. Opened it up. Cut and edited it. A lot.

Throughout this time, I had several agents. One left the business. One of them decided that she could make more money with other clients (true) and jettisoned me.  My last agent was enthusiastic, but he  disappeared before he could send it out. For all I know he may have gone out for a loaf and never come home because I never heard from him again. All of them read The Amber Heart in its various incarnations, liked it very much, but still pointed out that nobody wanted to read a piece of fiction set in Poland. Two of them told me that it needed pruning. They were right about that, at least, but the problem was that one wanted me to lose the first third, while another wanted me to lose the last third. 

So why didn't I give up?

The answer came to me when, over lockdown, I realised that Pat and all those readers had been right. It is a good book. But the others were right too. It was much too long. Stodgy in places. Going back to it, years later, and with a lot more experience as a writer, I could see clearly enough that it needed rewriting. Just not the kind of pruning that destroys the whole tree. I took about fifteen thousand words out of it, here, there and everywhere. I killed a few darlings. I think now it's tighter, more readable, less verbose. A better book.

I'm still in love with my main characters. Still love the story. And I'm still quite proud of some of the writing in it. Interestingly, I did this while I was deep into research for The Last Lancer, just published by Saraband. My very last enquiry to an agent referencing this proposed new non-fiction book (why on earth did I do it?) elicited the faintly bored response that there were 'so many similar stories out there'. That was not long before the Russian invasion. Since my grandfather was born in what is now Ukraine, in a sleigh, grew up to look like a younger version of Olivier's Maxim de Winter, was a cavalryman who drove a Chrysler and died at the age of 38, at Bukhara on the Silk Road, I suspect that there aren't all that many similar stories out there, but what do I know?

All the same, if I ever again publicly express a desire to find an agent, you will know that it's code for 'I've been kidnapped. Send help immediately.'

Meanwhile, Saraband were at the London Book Fair. I'd have thought the Last Lancer might have been a good candidate for translation into Polish and publication in that country. Poles certainly keep telling me so. And I just got a heartening and glowing testimonial from my hero Neal Ascherson. But my publisher reported no interest in it. 'All the focus is now on Ukraine,' they said. Which is, of course, where the book is set, exploring the troubled history of that region through the history of one family.

Pardon me while I go away and scream.

Before I do though, you can download the Amber Heart as an eBook for the bargain price of 99p, from May 12th to May 19th. It's available in paperback as well. And if you want to know where the idea for the love story at the heart of that novel came from, you might like to read The Last Lancer as well. 








Bad Advice, Good Advice

 


A few years ago, it struck me that I had probably been given more bad than good advice about writing over the years, all of it from well-meaning 'experts'. I've been known to hand out quite a bit of writing advice myself over the years and sometimes I find myself thinking 'have I done more harm than good?' and not being at all sure of the answer. Although when I have commented on a piece of writing, I do tend to do so with a huge proviso that nobody should ever take anyone's else's opinion as gospel. Not ever. 

One of the most worrying aspects of my time spent as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow, at the University of the West of Scotland, where my job was to help students with their academic writing, always came when that academic writing involved some aspect of creative writing. I vividly remember telling one student that she needed to take her script away and 'play with it'. 

She looked horrified. 'But we can't play with it,' she said. 'We have to get it right!' 

How could I possibly explain to her that most professional writers spend hours, days, weeks 'playing' with an idea, trying to find out if it's viable, trying to find out what works and what doesn't. And more to the point, why were her lecturers telling her that there was any one way of 'getting it right'. Bad advice indeed. 

Bad advice I've been given over the years? 

Don't turn this radio play into a stage play. (It was crying out to be turned into a stage play.)

Nobody is interested in the supernatural. (You're kidding me, right?) 

This is a library novel fit only for housewives. Bin it. (You can read that novel here. I still get messages from people telling me how much they like it - but perhaps they're housewives!) 

Listen to your script editor. They have your best interests at heart.  (Some do, some definitely don't. The trick is knowing the difference.) 

Don't self publish. Nobody will ever read it. 

We don't have any development money in the budget. (There is, in fact, a budget. They just decided not to pay the writer.) 

Best advice I've been given over the years? Two gems that have never lost their power to inspire.

Stop watering your Dylan Thomas adjectives and watching them grow 

The only way to learn how to write is to write. And read. A lot.

Which leads me to the unexpectedly worst possible advice I've had. I used to believe it. Hell, I've probably said it myself to emerging writers. 

Write about what you know about.

That way, boredom and madness lies. I know there is some truth in it. If you're writing about - for example - Scotland, it helps to know a bit about the country. If you're setting your novel or story in an unfamiliar city, you'd better find out what you can about it. If your feisty 18th century heroine is doing things that no 18th century woman would ever do, or knowing things that she would never know, you might need to have a rethink. 

But for heaven's sake, don't be afraid to use your imagination. Stretch it. Make some leaps into the dark and see where you land. Even when I was routinely telling people to write about what they knew about, I would always qualify it with 'but you know more than you think.' Not only that, but you can find out almost anything.

Use that knowledge in a million imaginative ways. That's what writers do. 


Authenticity - Knowing What You Don't Know

Ellisland Farm near Dumfries

I've just finished an otherwise very good novel - a middle novel of a long, well reviewed series, and one I've enjoyed very much. I've loved the whole series. But right in the middle, something happened that pulled me right out of what my English lecturers, all those years ago, used to call a 'willing suspension of disbelief.' 

The novel, quite unexpectedly, shifted from its wonderful Canadian setting to Dumfries in Scotland, a town that happens to be less than a couple of hours drive from my house - a place I know well, and an area I have visited often. 

And that's when it happened. Within a few short pages, the author suddenly got everything wrong. A policeman talks about wanting a 'bacon butty' when in this part of the world he would almost certainly want a 'bacon roll'.  That probably wouldn't have bothered me, but there was a lot of business with somebody shooting hares that then turned out to be rabbits. I'm still not sure which the author meant, since the words seemed to be used interchangeably, but nobody in this rural part of the world ever confuses the two. There are lots of rabbits in our countryside (and they're not very welcome in our gardens!) but fewer hares. Hares are a completely different animal. Magical creatures. We know which is which. These are hares and they are in decline. They're not rabbits. 

Two snippets of conversation followed. And - aaargh - one of the Scottish characters talks about 'fall' when he means 'autumn' and although we're well aware what fall is, we would never use it. Finally, one of them uses a country specific (I assume) expression of sympathy -  'poor ones' - which I've never heard anyone say here, although we might well say 'poor souls'. 

All of these, within a few short pages, pulled this reader so far out of the story that it took a longish time to get back. And I've decided to take a break from the series and try something else, although I'll probably go back at some point. 

I'm not posting this to carp. (Well, I am a bit.) And I'm sure I've made similar mistakes because we all do. I'm not even blaming the writer. But this is definitely something an editor should have picked up on. This is, after all, a multi million selling author. Didn't it never occur to her publisher to check out the passages set in Scotland for authenticity? Or did they think it didn't matter?  

At a time when the industry in which we work has sensitivity readers, it seems like a no-brainer when a writer is moving beyond their comfort zone to check for authenticity. 


Tacit Knowledge and Creative Writing Workshops

Not-a-workshop in Grantown-on-Spey
 

I have regular Zoom chats with three friends, started before the pandemic as real life meetings, but continued online. All of them are professional artists. I'm the single writer, and it's always interesting and enlightening to compare the way I work with the way they work - although obviously they don't all work in the same way either. 

A few weeks ago we started talking about tacit knowledge and they asked me how that applied to my work. My first impulse was to say 'it doesn't.' But I've been thinking about it ever since, and of course it does. It's just that most writers either don't realise it, or feel uncomfortable acknowledging it. 

Most creative professionals don't retire but as time goes by, we tend to acknowledge what we do and don't want to do. We learn how to say a polite 'no'. Here's an awful admission. I've always disliked doing workshops. Worse, in all my years of actually delivering workshops, I've had an uneasy feeling that I don't know what a workshop is or should be. 

Nor do most of the people who ask you to do them. I've seen all kinds of events described as workshops from writers speaking about their books, how they researched and wrote them, to full on, participatory 'how to' sessions for a few people, which is more or less what I think of when I see the word. I still love doing the former, but the latter? Not so much. 

If you write non-fiction or historical fiction, you can give an entertaining and informative talk about your work and how you set about researching it. For example, I've enjoyed every talk I've given about The Jewel, my novel about Robert Burns's wife, Jean Armour, and I hope other people have too. This is partly because I'm comfortable with describing my research, but also because the audience for this kind of talk is usually knowledgeable, so they will ask interesting questions, and offer their own contributions. 

I've taught intermittently throughout my working life, three happy years teaching English as a foreign language to adults in Finland and Poland, numerous drama and script-writing workshops, radio workshops, and some hugely rewarding years as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at our local university, helping students with their academic writing. 

I enjoyed the RLF fellowship most of all. In those one-to-one sessions I was using my tacit knowledge as an experienced writer (although I didn't call it that) to help students see their own way through. 

'How can you read my essay and immediately point out the main thread, when I'm floundering about?' one of my students asked me. It was down to years of practice. We never did the work for them. We just showed them a way of working things out for themselves. Mostly by asking the right questions. It's what good editors and producers do for writers too. They ask the right questions and in finding the answers, you make the work better yourself. 

That same tacit knowledge is what I use when I'm writing - for example - dialogue. I've had years of writing plays for radio and the stage, and now in fiction. But if I'm asked to do a workshop on writing dialogue I feel a sense of panic. I can do it. I know what works and what doesn't. But I don't know how to explain how I do it to people who don't have an ear for it. 

It's like when my woodcarver husband takes a block of lime and cuts off all the pieces that don't look like whatever he wants to make. He can teach people the basics. Teach them about wood and tools and techniques, but if they can't see the wonderful thing inside the wood, can't feel the shape of it, it will take more than a couple of workshops to acquire the feel for it that is the result of years of practice. It's the same with writing. I can give people rules for writing dialogue. I can frame exercises to help them. But there is no shortcut.

None of which is to denigrate the role of really good mentoring, done with a light touch. Somebody with lots of tacit knowledge helps us to find a way through our problems, often by questioning what we're not doing, rather than telling us what we ought to be doing. 

Intuition is a whole other can of worms. On the whole, I think the more you work at  your craft, whatever that is, the more intuition you will acquire. That way, your tacit knowledge becomes intuitive, so that you can look at a piece of work, get the feeling that something is wrong with it and often, but not always, fix it for yourself. 

Plotters and Pantsers - which one are you?

 


A friend inspired this post and I'm grateful to her. She observed that she had been taken by surprise by the ending of one of my novels called Ice Dancing and my immediate thought was 'so was I!' I honestly had no idea how it was going to end until I started writing the last couple of chapters, and suddenly saw what should have been staring me in the face at the same time as the narrator herself discovered it. The odd thing was that it didn't involve any manipulation of the story. When I looked back, the clues were all there. I didn't have to plant them at all. 

Which in turn led me to think about a couple of other novels where the ending had taken me by surprise. Without any spoilers, in Bird of Passage, I discovered the trauma that the 'hero' (if he can be called that) Finn was trying to remember at about the same time that he realised it himself. Until that moment, I knew there was something, but didn't know what it was. I literally woke up in the middle of the night saying 'So that was what happened!'

Similarly, in The Physic Garden, I knew that the ending involved a shocking betrayal - because that's how it begins. With the narrator mentioning it, without explaining it. Again, I realised the nature of that betrayal and its consequence only when I got to that part of the story. 

I am what I believe is known as a 'pantser' in creative writing circles. I write by the seat of my pants. Although that isn't how I'd ever describe it myself. I write to find out. I always know the beginning, and I sometimes have a very vague idea of the ending, sometimes as little as the last few lines - but I never know how to get there. And if I did, I would get so bored that I would never finish writing the book.  

Outlines were always anathema to me, because I could write them (with difficulty) while knowing full well that the finished book would be nothing like the outline. How could it be when I just didn't know? Plotters do seem to know. They plan everything out, including detailed character sketches. I never do that either, because I've only just met these people. It doesn't feel precarious. It feels uncannily as though the story is already there, waiting to be uncovered. 

All the same, for many writers, plotting works extremely well. I don't write crime fiction or the kind of thrillers that depend upon intricate plots that must fit together but I suspect they do need to be pretty well plotted in advance. Otherwise you might find yourself desperately trying to tie up too many loose ends in the last chapter. Or in the last episode, as happened with a recent, deeply annoying TV series. But it would be interesting to hear from crime writer friends if this is indeed the case, or if there's a sort of half way house where you have a broad outline that you flesh out as you're writing. 

There is, of course, no right or wrong way - only the way that works well for you. The trick, as with so much writing, is to find out what suits you best. And the only way to do that is to carry on writing. 



 

To Beta or not to Beta: That is the Question!

 


I've been working on a big research and writing project throughout Covid - a piece of narrative non-fiction that seems like a companion book to A Proper Person to be Detained

The Last Lancer is about the Polish side of my family, especially the grandfather I never knew - his background, his milieu and what became of him. It's a good story but it was probably the most difficult thing I have ever had to research and write. I now have a draft that I can send to my publisher. It will need more work, but I'm at the stage where I've done a lot of revision, but I don't know whether it's good or bad or indifferent. What I need now is time and distance and a fresh pair of eyes. 

Eyes I trust. 

When I was chatting about this on Facebook, somebody asked if I didn't use some kind of market research and let other people read it at this stage to judge the response. It's a fair question, because I know a number of writers who do just that and find it very useful. They call them Beta Readers, a select group of people who will give feedback on a reasonably early draft. 

The term originates with Beta Testers in the video games industry, although it's worth pointing out that Beta Testers aren't there to shape or question the essential idea and structure of the game, nor even its development. That is done by teams of professionals. They are there to discover annoying glitches in the almost ready project, and their parallel in the world of publishing is probably a copy editor - somebody who spots all your silly mistakes, the punctuation glitches, the names that change, the infelicities, the repeated words and so on. 

My gut response to that perfectly reasonable question was 'Noooo!' It surprised me that I had such a visceral reaction, but like many writers, I can hardly bear to talk in any detail about what I'm writing while I'm writing it, let alone allow anyone to read it. If I do that too soon, it so often melts away, like snow in sunshine, leaving a little puddle behind. I don't  even let my supportive husband read it at this stage. Not even when I've written it and done some revisions and have a decent early draft.  

All the same, you reach a point where you are too close to the wood to see the trees. At that stage you need to hand the manuscript over to some trusted individual, an editor, a publisher, an agent if you have one. 

I have many friends who are great readers, but I wouldn't want any of them to read an early draft of a book. 

Beta Readers may work well and if they work for you, that's fine. Every writer is different. But they're not for me. Partly it may be that I've taught creative writing to mixed groups who critiqued each other. Often, with the best will in the world, and often without knowing they're doing it, people will critique a piece of work according to the way they would have written it themselves, and that isn't always what's needed. Sometimes, too, a reader and a book are just not a good fit. Nothing wrong with the reader but nothing wrong with the book either. 

The other difficulty is that at this stage, too many different opinions may be problematic. One or two trusted professionals - that's fine. But even then, I've experienced two different agents reading the same novel and recommending that I remove a third of it. One was certain it should be the first third and one the last third. (I did neither although there were significant edits!) On another occasion, a young intern at an agency read a book called The Physic Garden, later beautifully published by Saraband, and said that it was 'just an old man telling his story'! I don't blame her. It simply wasn't for her. And it is a bit of a Marmite of a book. When people love it they really love it, but a few readers dislike the narrator (the old man telling his story) and tell me so. That's fine. He's crabbit. I'm very fond of him. 

Then there was an early experience of a play developed over several weeks of rehearsal, about which - after a very successful production  - the director pointed out that I had been 'far too accommodating' with editorial suggestions. I should have fought more, he said and I think he was right. 

I wouldn't use Beta Readers myself, although I would use an experienced editor, one who would ask all the right questions. But I'm old and wise enough (I hope) to  know what works for me. 

Essentially, whatever works for you is good, but remember that not everyone will like your book or your characters. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything wrong with them. 

Finally there is one bit of advice that may be useful. Beware of anyone attempting to rewrite for you. The best editors or directors or producers - in fact anyone who comments on your work - will never attempt to do this, although they may point out sentences or even paragraphs that are unclear or don't work effectively. What they will do is query and question you intensively, these days using Track Changes software, so that you can have an online conversation about the manuscript. The best editors will look at structural problems if there are any. Then they will hone in on those parts of the book or play that you have been most uncertain about - and there will be many uncertainties, if you're honest with yourself. He or she will ask the right difficult questions and in finding the answers to these questions, you'll make the piece of work better.  

This is a difficult, professional job. Choose your help wisely. 














Writing Advice: Getting the Details Right


This isn't really a 'how to write' blog. But I've been writing in so many different media for so many years now, that occasionally things occur to me that may be useful for people who are just starting out on the long road to publication or production. I used to teach Creative Writing for various organisations, so I have a good idea of what works and what doesn't. For the New Year I've dug out my big folder of 'how to' notes and I'll be including an occasional post with what I hope may be useful advice. Some of it should be self evident - but isn't always. 

I've been reading a contemporary thriller. I won't name it, even though it's a very good read. It fairly gallops along with plenty of surprises along the way, although less than half way through, I've guessed at least part of the ending. That, though, is more my problem than the writer's. The more you write yourself, the more you tend to be able to guess what's going to happen next. 

No. The niggling irritation involved a garden. 

The story is set in spring (I think) a warm late spring, in the South of England. The house has a big garden. Early on, we're told that it is full of wild garlic and lavender. Now, although wild garlic flowers and scents the air with its wonderful pungency through the spring of the year, it tends to be found more in ancient woodlands, bluebell woods in particular, flowering from April to June after which it is masked by other growth. By May, the scent of bluebells usually takes over. Lavender stays green throughout the year in mild climates, so that's fine. Although it wouldn't be all mixed up with the garlic. Later though, that same day, we're told that the garden is miraculously full of flowers including foxgloves, night-scented stock, hyacinth? As any gardener, even the most amateur among us, knows, your foxgloves and night scented stock are summer flowers. Hyacinths? Not so much. Not even bluebells if that's what's meant. 

We all get details wrong. But it is this kind of precise detail that can pull the reader right out of the story, challenging her willing suspension of disbelief. On reflection, it's indicative of a wider problem, because I'm still not 100% sure at exactly what time of year the story is set. Sometimes it feels like summer but other details mean it must be spring. In which case, yay for the wild garlic and hyacinths. Not so much for the foxgloves and night scented stock.  

It shouldn't matter at all. But it sort of does. It irritates, because this is a much lauded traditionally published novel and it's exactly the kind of thing that a good editor should immediately pick up on, writing 'flowers? time of year?' in Track Changes. Then perhaps even extrapolating from that a question about timescales, the when of the story. That's what good editors do. They pick up on the small things with wider implications. They ask the right questions and in finding the answers, you, the writer, make the piece of work better. 

So much of writing involves finding exactly the right word. That goes for things as simple as garden flowers, as well as complex emotions. If you're not a gardener, then Google is your friend. 




 

Telling Tales



All my writing life, people have been giving me advice. Some of it was solicited, and some of it wasn't. Some was useful and some wasn't.  I once asked an established artist friend if people routinely told her that she ought to make drastic changes to her work, and she looked at me as though I had gone mad. 'No' she said. 'No, they don't!' 

I don't mean skilled editing. A good editor can help you to see the whole wood when you're obsessing about individual trees. I mean the person who tells you to turn your book into the kind of book they would have written themselves, if only they could write. Two different people once told me to cut a third of a novel. The trouble was that one wanted me to cut the first third and one wanted me to cut the last third. 


Neither of them was right, although the book in question certainly needed a lot of pruning. In fact when I did prune it, here there and everywhere, I probably deleted just as much as they had been recommending. But they had gone for the easy option which said more about them than it did about the book. 

Beta Readers worry me. I don't have them, but I worry about other people's reliance on them. Most (although not all) writers want to be read. We're in the business of communicating. And we often have some hypothetical reader in mind. But most of the time, we're writing the kind of book we want to read ourselves, telling the stories that gnaw at us till we put them into words, the ideas we feel passionate about. 

Which is why when somebody says 'I've got this great idea for a book!' our hearts sink. We may smile politely, but what we're really thinking is, 'well go and write it then.' Other people's ideas for books are just like other people's dreams. Only our own are interesting to us. We may like to chat to our readers once the book is published. I know I do. We may like to hear from them, and answer questions and even debate with them. But I don't want any random reader critiquing my work before the event. 

Which leads me, in this rambling post, to note that I've just finished reading Kingfishers Catch Fire and I'm wondering as I do with all her novels, why it has taken me so long to discover Rumer Godden's work. Why didn't it feature as part of my course work all those years ago when I did a degree in English Language and Literature and when the first two years consisted of a quick gallop through 'the canon'. Mind you, the canon was mostly male, dead and English (even in Edinburgh) so it isn't too surprising. 

If you haven't read it, do. Immediately. It's magical. And very relevant indeed at a time when, as the Covid threat begins to recede a bit, so many people seem to be deciding to move to rural communities in order to 'find themselves' and finding mostly that they don't know how to live in rural communities. Or they make television programmes about 'finding themselves' in rural communities where people have already found themselves, thank-you very much.

Godden tells wonderful tales. And that brings me back to the thorny problem of advice. I'd lay bets that if a beta reader had got their hands on Godden's extraordinary work they would have told her everything that was wrong with it, just because it is so strange and so different from anything they might have read before. 

Then it struck me that the one piece of advice I wish somebody, anybody, had given me when I was just starting out, was this: Tell your story and tell it well. But first and foremost tell it for yourself. If you're bored with it, everyone else will be. If you're engrossed in it, passionate about it, and if you truly know what you're writing about, there will certainly be somebody out there who loves it too. 



The Deserving and the Undeserving Arts



Victorian workmen

My deserving great grandad, next to the man with the tar barrel.

Back in Victorian Britain, if you were in desperate straits, you had to prove that you were one of the 'deserving' as opposed to the 'undeserving' poor. Heaven help you if you didn't tick the right boxes in terms of general worthiness and conformity with the values of the time, because your bum would be right out of the window and you'd be heading for the streets or more likely the workhouse because 'sleeping out' was illegal too. 

When I was writing A Proper Person to be Detained, it struck me that there are now some correspondences between the deserving and the undeserving poor (at least some of my forebears would probably have been labelled undeserving) and the current state of the arts in this country, where professional creative people who find themselves down on their uppers can expect to get funding only if they are classed as 'deserving'. You have to tick all the right boxes in terms of the dreaded 'outcomes'. There have to be 'outcomes' and if these can be described by buzz words like 'community' and 'well-being' and 'inclusivity' and 'diversity', so much the better. We all have to do good, and prove that we're doing it. 

I can hear the outraged counter-arguments even as I write this. 'Why do you think you should get any funding at all?' But this isn't a post about me. I've done pretty well out of funding support and I expect to carry on working hard at what I do for as long as I physically can. Also it should go without saying that those charged with distributing public funds should certainly make sure that those same funds aren't going to be frittered away on - say - a new kitchen or a holiday. If public money is being distributed, the public should surely get some benefit out of the results. (Wish our politicians would play by those rules though, don't you?) And yes, diversity and inclusivity are well worth supporting. All of this is true.

But not all worthwhile arts projects have obvious or measurable 'outcomes'. And therein lies one of the problems.

I once tutored a writing group in an area of social deprivation in a small Scottish town. It was a pleasure from start to finish. We were inclusive and diverse and I think we fostered a whole lot of well-being. But at some point in its long history, we were told we needed an 'outcome' in order for me to get the vanishingly small sum of money I'd been paid for doing it. And by 'outcome' they meant something that could be weighed and measured. 'People enjoy it,' didn't come into the equation. 'It's good for people's mental health' might have swung it, but how on earth do you measure that? We soldiered on, producing end of year anthologies for a while, but in a mixed group of writers of all ages and stages and literary forms, it was a thankless task. I eventually did it for nothing so that we could jettison the official demands but the wonderful group voluntarily decided to pay a little each week and gave me some cash so that I was never out of pocket with the travelling. 

Over the years, when it comes to the arts, and the need for some kind of funding, I have come to believe that the bodies charged with distributing the cash should, in a good proportion of cases, focus less on 'outcomes' and more on the nebulous set of criteria that go to make up the kind of professional art or writing or music that can seldom if ever be defined in terms of stodgy dodgy box ticking. 

Wonderful writing, as with every other art, comes straight out of nowhere and practically hits you between the eyes with its quality. It doesn't have to be opaque or difficult or snobbish. It can be as popular as you like, but you know it when you experience it and it can be life changing. And it's often art or music or writing that nobody would have predicted beforehand would prove to be so absorbing for so many people. Or as William Goldman says, 'nobody knows anything.' 

Take Craig Mazin's extraordinary Chernobyl. Who could ever have predicted its success beforehand? 
Chernobyl? Who would be interested in that? (Well, I would, but that's another story!) Besides, they would have said, Mazin writes comedy. And I doubt very much if it would have ticked any boxes at all about community involvement or well-being. Definitely not well-being. It might have slid under the funding wire with 'environment' of course. But that would have told you very little about the quality of the writing, the acting, the production, everything about it. 

I don't pretend to know what the answer to this conundrum is, but I know it isn't what we've got right now. The power of professional arts to entertain and inform and enlighten and move and  - yes - to include is too often hedged around with constraints that seem to reduce those arts to very much less than they could be. Practitioners spend too much time jamming their fascinatingly diverse and imaginative projects into a set of uncomfortable one-size-fits-all holes. 

Why are we surprised when what often emerges is deserving but irredeemably 'square'. 




As A Writer: Five Things I Would Do Differently Now

Whether you are in the early stages or in the middle of a career in writing, but struggling, you may find this post helpful. It arose from a conversation I had recently with an artist friend. We often compare notes about our respective professions and it's always illuminating for both of us.

'Would you do anything differently?' she asked me. 'Knowing what you know now?' 

It struck a chord with me, because it's something I think about quite often these days - how I might have done things differently; how I might have approached things, so that I ended up struggling less and enjoying the process more. Opportunities are very different from when I was starting out: it was better in some ways, much worse in others, so I realise that hindsight is a great thing. Nevertheless, here are some thoughts on where I went wrong. 

1 I would pay a lot less attention to advice about what I should and shouldn't write
Practically every single piece of advice I've been given about what to write as opposed to how to write it, has turned out to be wrong. I don't mean technical development advice. All of us need some of that, and if you can find a good editor or mentor  - somebody who is willing to work with you and whose advice you know you can trust - then seize it with both hands.
We all need to learn our craft.
But I mean the casual, throwaway advice, often from people who are in 'the business' in some way.

Write this, don't write that. 
There's a market for this or this but not for that. 
Don't turn this radio play into a stage play. It won't work.  
Don't write non fiction. 
There's no market for the supernatural.
There's no market for ... just about anything you fancy writing.

When I felt in my bones that I wanted to write something, I was right and they were wrong. Often, I was simply ahead of the game.
Read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade and then write what you want because he was right. Nobody knows anything.  

2 I would do a postgraduate business studies or marketing course.
I've only learned about the business side of writing and publishing as the years have gone by. I'm still not great at it, if the truth be told, but I'm better than I was. The 'creative industries' are full of writers who don't know nearly enough about the business side of writing and publishing, about being self employed and running your own business.

This means knowing your responsibilities as well as your rights. Being professional. Meeting deadlines. Writing for love but publishing for money and treating it as a business at the same time. Knowing what the cost of running that business involves, even if you're working from home.

All those years ago, when I started out, a knowledge of business wasn't deemed important for people working in the arts, on the creative side at least. We left all that to the middle men and women. Silly us. Because suddenly, we found that we were working in something called the Creative Industries, while still being advised not to worry our little heads about such things. I suspect even now, many university creative writing courses do little to address the business and marketing side of creative practice.

Understanding the business side of things is vital for anyone hoping to build a career as a writer - and it would have been so much easier if I had known more about it earlier.


3 I would never work for any big company on the promise of exposure or jam tomorrow or a  future commission.  
This is closely linked to 2 , above. I've done this two or three times, mostly with television proposals. I don't mean a basic proposal or submission. Getting a foothold in any area of creative practice means actually doing it. When a fellow writer told me, a long time ago, that the only way to learn how to write was to write, he was absolutely right and most writers do an awful lot of writing on spec before publication or production.

This was something different. I already had a track record, but this involved months of unpaid work, encouraged by a script editor. When I look back on the waste of time, I could scream, and yet it was my fault. I was a willing volunteer. I went along with it in pursuit of all that lovely jam tomorrow. Eventually, it occurred to me that the script editor was being paid - not handsomely, but a whole lot more than me - to work with a number of different proposals, most of which would never be made. This would have been fine if they paid development money for the work involved. But they never did. There was 'no money in the budget'.

Whenever anyone says this to you, bear in mind that it means that there is, in fact, a budget. They have just never included the writer in it.  There should be a fee for this kind of speculative work that they are asking you to do. And if they decide not to use it after all, there should be a kill fee - a sum of money to give you some compensation for your time and effort. 

4 I wouldn't write radio drama at all. 
This is a big - and quite emotional - issue for me. I began my writing career as a poet and short story writer (with a decent publication record by the time I was thirty) and in parallel with that as a radio playwright. I loved the medium. But with hindsight, radio drama was a dead end for me.
I worked with some fine producers, people I still admire and they taught me plenty.
I used to say that radio taught me how to write dialogue, but I was pretty good at that anyway and I could have learned.

As a career pathway, it was useless.

After a while, radio drama that had once been exciting and experimental for me, became something of a treadmill, albeit an enticing one. It was hard work, but it was fun to do. It was difficult to turn down commissions, because it paid some of the bills, but it wasn't nearly as well paid as a 'proper' job would have been, and yet it was equally time consuming and tricky. While I was writing for radio - sometimes ten part serials for the Classic Serial slot - I wasn't writing other things. And yet I was always a single commission away from financial disaster.

There was only one real outlet for an experienced radio dramatist, and that was via the BBC. If the work dried up, as mine did, almost overnight, there was nowhere else to go, no other outlet for a very singular set of skills. Just at the point of commission, there was a change of personnel and the plug was pulled on a major series. I did a bit of audio work for various visitor attractions. I turned to theatre for a while, and enjoyed the experience, but eventually I returned to the work I should have been doing twenty years earlier: writing fiction and popular non-fiction. I'm glad I did, but I wish I'd done it much sooner. Radio allowed me to feel that I was making a living as a writer, but the reality was that I was going nowhere and had relinquished control over my future to a single editor.

5 I wouldn't be ever so humble.
The truth is that now, writers do have options, self publishing, blogging and podcasts to name a few. As I said at the start of this small rant, hindsight is a great thing and most of us find it hard to plan out a creative career. Life takes us where it will. Perhaps all of us should - with the provisos of being polite, businesslike and responsible - learn to be a little less accommodating.

As with every single area of life and work - and the creative industries are no exception - people will want to look after their own interests. This doesn't make them bad people. It just makes them human. But the 'creatives' working at the sharp end tend to get into the habit of seeing themselves as supplicants, of being scared to rock the boat, of assuming Uriah Heap levels of humility. Actually even this isn't always true, and I'm told by publisher friends that those with the least talent are invariably the most entitled and rude. So don't let's get carried away with ourselves!

All the same, what we are looking for is a modicum of professionalism in the way we are treated, with the proviso that we behave professionally in return.

To that end, we need to be aware of our own agency, aware that we are sole traders, navigating difficult and precarious waters for the sake of ourselves and the work that is so important to us. In the words of Bill and Ted, we should at least try to 'be excellent to each other.'

That shouldn't be too much to ask for, should it?


Starting out.