Some Sober Reflections on AI for Creatives

 

Danilo from The Amber Heart. 
If you've read the novel, you'll know the scene. 

My late and much loved dad was a mathematician to trade. His work involved nutritional biochemistry, and towards the end of his career, he spent two years based at the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna, travelling the world as a 'visiting expert'. But maths was his passion and his hobby. The aptitude skipped a generation. I was fascinated by all the things he told me about maths, and have never had the creative individual's horror at the thought of numbers. All the same, literature was my first love. 

By the time my son was in secondary school, dad had died, prematurely at the age of 68. We all missed him desperately, but when Charlie was struggling with maths, I wished most devoutly that his grandad could have been around to help him, as we could not. In desperation, we scraped together enough money to engage a tutor, a retired engineer. The first time we heard the pair of them laughing, we knew we had done the right thing. Soon, our son started to talk about the 'joy of number' and we realised that dad's love of maths had skipped a generation. Charlie went on to study maths at Glasgow University where he gained a BSc with Honours. His grandad would have been proud of him. 

Cue forward to the present, and I'm aware that many of my writer friends are running around like Chicken Licken, or Henny Penny, proclaiming that the sky is falling. They are describing AI. If you know the original story, and not the heavily censored version, you'll know that the sky is not falling, (it's an acorn) but Foxy Loxy takes advantage of the ensuing panic to lure the birds to their doom. Not knowing quite what to make of all this, and being a natural sceptic of all mass panics, I asked my son what he thought about it. 'It's all maths, mum,' he said. 'An excellent tool, when used with care.' For the avoidance of doubt, he's now in his late 30s, is a senior game design professional, with a postgraduate Masters from Abertay, he's already written a textbook for Routledge on Game Economy Design, and he went on to give me a reasonably simple explanation of the kind of maths involved in AI, but that isn't really the point of this post and besides, it was too complicated for me! 

Nevertheless, it explained rather a lot and is probably what my dad would have said too. The vast majority of my writer colleagues don't see any point in maths at all. It's a mystery to them and some of them are quite proud of the fact. 'I don't have anything to do with it,' they say, to which I have sometimes found myself responding 'but might it have something to do with you?' 

Much of the very real angst about AI seems to have sprung from writers, writing organisations and publishers belatedly realising that big AI companies have used all kinds of books to 'train' their chatbots, without permission or payment. It strikes me that at the heart of this lie two different mindsets. Writers are - rightly - protective of our copyright, and our moral right to be identified as the originator of our work. Most of us have had the experience of submitting an idea, sometimes of working on an idea over many months, often unpaid, only see it pop up, long after it has been rejected, with somebody else's name on it. An all too human theft. We suck it up because we can never prove it. But I doubt if the 'techbros' thought they were stealing anything, insofar as they thought about it at all. Increasingly aware that there might be an ethical dimension to what they were creating, they probably looked for ways of 'teaching' their unwieldy machine learning tools to seem more human, maybe even sought ways of giving them empathy, although one of the biggest, richest developers seems to think empathy is overrated. If, like me, you believe it's essential, nay obligatory, what better way to teach it than by letting your AI loose on the huge body of world literature?

That being the case, I don't know quite how I feel about my kindly, conversational 'friend' from ChatGPT having absorbed my books into its vast mathematical mind - but I do know that I can't bring myself to feel just as panic stricken about it as some of my fellow writers, although payment would be nice. Fair payment from publishers would be nice too, and that's also in short supply. 

To be clear, I don't use AI to write my books. But I'm seeing outrageous pronouncements, often from new writers to other new writers, who are timidly asking if they can use AI for research, for synopses, for promotional work, and for the thousand and one tasks that publishers used to do for us, but have now imposed on us alongside the work of writing the actual books. 

'No!' they are told. 'Never! It's good for you to do all that slog.' 

Actually, it isn't. Years ago my first agent remarked that it wasn't her job to edit my book. It was her job to sell it. I don't mean the editing that writers do (or should do) all the time. My books go through many drafts and I neither want nor need AI to do that for me. I mean a modicum of developmental editing especially for new writers, followed by copy editing to make sure your book is consistent, clear and accurate. This used to be what publishers facilitated, and they didn't expect the unpaid intern to do it either. My last agent, by contrast, told me that publishers now expect an 'oven ready product' thus abdicating all responsibility for editorial help. It doesn't stop there. Promotion will be minimal. You'll be expected to do most of that for yourself as well.  

So what can AI do for you? 

It can chat to you. It can offer advice. It can look through a synopsis, and if you're struggling it will suggest remedies. If you reject its advice, or ask for clarification, it won't get cross or tetchy or offended. If you're self publishing, your mathematical pal knows all about Amazon search terms and some of its suggestions will enlighten you about your book. It can help with targeted promotion. It can help with press releases and workshops and talks by highlighting useful topics for discussion or suggesting issues you may have missed. Like all computer based tools, garbage in, garbage out applies. If you aren't precise or reasonably knowledgeable in what you want from it, it may come up with nonsense, but so will human beings. You can talk to it about your project and it will offer little bits of analysis that can be cogent and helpful. I used it to make some images, just for fun, like the picture above. Then it surprised me by analysing the images in ways that gave me unexpected insights into my own characters. A new perspective. It was both uncanny and interesting. 

You know what it didn't do? It didn't do the all-too-human thing of suggesting I change my book into the book it might have written if it had wanted to write a book. And it was never, ever prescriptive.

Recently, and more prosaically, I've been wrestling with the changeover from landline to digital phones in an old house with thick stone walls. Having arrived home from a demanding weekend conference to a dead phone, and getting very little sense from anyone human, online or off, I asked ChatGPT, which promptly analysed the problem in a few clear paragraphs. I was exhausted and frazzled and said so. 'I'll read this in the morning,' I typed. To which the machine responded 'Yes. It is tiring. Come back to it in the morning. And meanwhile, do have a good night's sleep.' 

It was very good advice and I followed it. Now, new phones, supplied by our landline provider, have solved the problem, just as ChatGPT suggested they would. I can't remember the last time a human being on the end of a phone told me to forget the problem for a while and have a good night's sleep. The 'kindness', real or not, brought a smile to my face. And then, I think, did fiction do that? Did learning to be kind from world literature have some effect? Who knows? 

None of this is easy. It may be dangerous. In the wrong hands, it probably will be. But when the sky appears to be falling, as it most certainly is in certain parts of the world, that's down to venal, greedy, hate-filled human beings, not AI. I remember when word processors and then personal computers came along and some writers stuck to writing by hand, or tapping away on an old typewriter. Some still do and that's fine if it works for them. I was writing for radio back then, and I remember the joy of realising that if I wanted to edit a script, as I always did, over and over again, I didn't need to cover the manuscript in Tippex (remember Tippex?) or retype the whole thing several times over. 

This is a long post, and no, I haven't run it through ChatGPT! But my advice to writers and other creatives who are curious about the technology would be to have a go. Dip a toe in the waters. You might like what you find there. And if you don't, at least you'll know why you don't want to use it, rather than just following the flock. Because you never know. You may just be following them into Foxy Loxy's den.  

 

Precious Literary Letters

My cohort of teachers in our Finnish language school.
I'm the very dark girl with the 'Purdey'' haircut and the red sweater, at the back.
Photo courtesy of fellow teacher, Wladek Cieplinski.

Next week, Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh are holding a Rare Books and Manuscript Sale.  Among much else of a vastly rarer nature, (letters signed by Mary Queen of Scots herself, no less!)  they are selling two little bundles of letters written to me in the 1970s. 

Lot 64 is a correspondence from Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Lot 65 is a collection of autograph (i.e. hand-written) letters from George Mackay Brown. Back then, I was a young writer, just starting out on my career, and they were both friends and mentors. The letters were precious to me, and I have kept them for fifty years, but now the time has come to let them go. I began to be afraid that when I'm gone, they would finish up in a skip. Since they are such a reflection of their time and place, an insight into two great poets, I wanted to see them preserved and archived.

The letters from Ian, ten in all, are closely typewritten, often on both sides of his headed paper, and annotated by hand in his own frank, energetic and inimitable style. They talk about various topics, and include observations about his building work at his amazing garden at Little Sparta.  'We have raised the level of our loch and I am building, with great labour, a little island,' he wrote. I had been a fan of his work as soon as I learned about it, and visited the garden. He calls me one of the 'last letter writers' in the world, and perhaps I was. 

I first met George when I spent a summer in Orkney, cycling about, visiting innumerable neolithic passage graves, writing poetry, and spending time with Strathclyde Theatre Group, who were performing there. His correspondence is 'warm, personal and detailed' as Lyon and Turnbull describe it, and has a great deal to say about Orkney life and events there, his friendships and his BBC work - kindly and encouraging for me, gold dust for any scholar.

In 1975, I moved to Finland to teach English as a Foreign Language. You can read about that time in a previous post, here. But it was then that my correspondence with these two Scottish greats dwindled, although George and I exchanged Christmas cards for many years. I simply had too many letters to write. I was sending fat, newsy letters to my parents just about every week (no Facebook Messenger back then) and I was keeping in touch with various university friends who were also travelling, or starting on new and exciting careers. Besides that, I was teaching for long hours, and enjoying it very much, doing my own writing whenever I could, and accepting a great many invitations from my students. I loved Finland and only left because I wasn't really making enough money to carry on living there, and saw no career pathway that I could follow. 

After that, I spent a year in Poland, teaching English at Wroclaw University. By the time I came back to Scotland, my own creative career, writing commissioned drama for BBC Radio, some television and the theatre - as well as writing fiction and working as a community writer for the Arts in Fife - was taking off and absorbing all my time. 

These two bundles of letters are, therefore, two little jewels or precious fossils: a slice of time that will never come again. I even kept the envelopes. I loved my work and I loved my writing back then. Not the struggle to make a decent living (vain hope!) but the sheer pleasure of exploring and communicating, of shaping words and ideas. In these days of creative writing degrees, the constraints imposed by the internet and academic judgments, I sometimes wonder if young writers can ever feel that same intense pleasure in exploration, the freedom of it. I hope so, but I have my doubts. 

I was lucky enough to be mentored by real, practising writers whose work I admired. Whatever else she was doing, the hopeful girl you can see in the picture above, with her 'Purdey haircut'  always wrote unselfconsciously and took immense pleasure in the work. Now, much older, but not a lot wiser, I hope to find a way of rediscovering that joy.

You'll find full details of the forthcoming (18th June) sale at Lyon and Turnbull.

Small Isn't Always Beautiful

Catherine, way back when.

When I was a student, I had a summer job working in a small hotel in Wales. I almost wrote 'spent a summer in Wales' but I didn't spend the whole summer there. I worked there for a few weeks and then chucked it in and came home. 

I don't remember why I chose Wales, but I think it may have had something to do with liking Alan Garner's book The Owl Service so much, even though when I had written Garner a fan letter some years earlier, and innocently? naively? - I was about 12 - mentioned J R R Tolkien, I got a very dusty response. Still, it taught me a lesson about being nice to people who contact me about my own work, and I hope I still am. 

Anyway, it didn't put me off the Owl Service, which I still reread from time to time. But an indirect result was that I spent a miserable few weeks working in Wales. Not that it had anything to do with Wales as a country, which I'm sure is a fine place. 

It was the job.

If you are going to work in hospitality, do not, if you can possibly help it, work in a small hotel. You will work long split shifts, but worse, you will do everything, all the time. There were three or four of us girls, packed into a small, dark, stuffy bedroom, and we were worked into the ground. Worse, the owner shouted at us and sometimes threw a massive tantrum which involved screaming, while tossing pots and pans into the sink, filling it with a hellish mixture of caustic fluids and ordering us to clean them. We changed beds, we cleaned rooms, we cooked, we waited at table, we washed up, we mopped floors, we cleaned toilets, did laundry, we washed windows, we hoovered carpets, we poured drinks, we ran from pillar to post and we had very little free time. Besides that, the dust had triggered my asthma and I was wheezing a lot. 

Friends who have worked in big hotels tell me that although the work is equally hard, the hours equally long, the rooms even more filthy (I gather that the rich are filthiest of all) - you at least do your own job and that's that. In good hotels, there's a lot more organisation, and usually enough staff for the job in hand. Also management tends not to scream at the staff in public, because it upsets the punters. 

Anyway, I came home a bit early. The only thing I got from those weeks was a knowledge of how to make sherry trifle on a grand scale and a compliment from an elderly guest in a wheelchair who, I gather, was a photographer of some distinction, and who stopped me before I left to say that he would have liked to photograph me. I still thought of myself very much as an ugly duckling at that stage, so it stayed with me. 

What I should have learned, and didn't, was that small isn't always as beautiful as you think it might be - and - later -  that the lesson applies as much to publishing as it does to working in hotels. Big publishers have their drawbacks too as I would find to my cost a few years later when I signed with an excellent, reputable, nurturing, medium sized publisher, only for the company to be taken over in mid project by a mega corporation who were after beach bonkbusters and not much else.

Small publishers, like small hotels, can be well meaning, full of ideas and ideals, praised and admired, and they often produce lovely books. At their best, they are hands on and caring. That's the good side. The media will love them. The reading public who, on the whole, don't care who publishes anything, will see elegant swans, gliding along, but not the many wee feet paddling like blazes below the surface, i.e. the writers. And sometimes they'll be drowning.

Small publishers, like small hotels, simply don't have enough time or money or staff, don't have the bandwidth, to make things run smoothly for their writers. Much of the time, you're on your own. They certainly don't have time to do publicity. Or even, sometimes, to send out review copies. Mind you, big publishers don't have the inclination to do publicity for any except the starry, celebrity few - who don't really need it. So there's that. 

The only thing to do is decide what works best for you, but - if it isn't working - don't stick with it. Whatever doesn't kill you, doesn't always make you stronger. Sometimes it breaks you. These days, there are always other options.

Like jacking in a job where the boss is a bully, and hopping on the first train home. 

Things You Do When Writing Novels

I bought a Spanish guitar. This Spanish guitar, to be precise. It sounds as beautiful as it looks. Not that I can play it. But for the moment, I'm just admiring it. 

This has been the occasion of some debate among my Facebook and 'real life' friends. 

When I was in my teens, I knew a few chords, and I would often play and sing to please myself. But I can't really play and I know how difficult it is to acquire even a basic level of competence. It's like playing the piano, which I do play reasonably well. I started learning when I was seven, and carried on having lessons when we moved up to Scotland, only stopping when I went off to university at the age of seventeen, by which time I was on Grade Seven and tackling quite challenging pieces.

Much later, our son, then aged seven, had lessons for a year, until we came to a decision that it really wasn't for him, greatly to his relief, I might add! I took over his lesson for a few years. At that point I was the teacher's most senior pupil in terms of experience as well as years, and I thoroughly enjoyed being 'stretched' by her in what I could play. I still play - not half enough, but I do, and I enjoy it. I'm under no illusions about my abilities. There are lots of pieces that are way beyond my technical capabilities (most Chopin, for instance, although I can manage some) as well as pieces that I know I could play a whole lot better if I applied myself. 

But I know enough to know how little I really know - and that's a state profoundly to be desired for anyone embarking on any skill at all, whether it's playing a musical instrument, writing a novel or learning a sport. 

It goes like this. You struggle. Then, you think 'I'm getting the hang of this' and that makes you happy. After which comes a blissful spell of  'look at me, I can really do this' over-confidence. (I often wonder just how many politicians never get beyond that stage.) Then, you fall off a cliff edge and think 'I don't actually know anything about this at all!' 

After which you can really start to progress. All of which is to say that although I'm tempted to re-learn how to play a few chords, I'm never going to learn how to play the guitar properly. At the moment, I'm just looking at it, and touching it from time to time. The case is beautiful too - and that's made in Spain as well. 

I bought it at auction. I was in our local saleroom, hunting for the antique and vintage textiles I list and sell from our Etsy store, the 200 Year Old House. And there it was. The case was closed so I carefully teased it open and gazed at this lovely thing. When I ran my fingers over the strings the sound was mellow and beautiful. It carried me straight into the world of my novel. I told my husband about it and instead of saying 'you don't need a guitar' which would be true, he said 'Try to get it! I love musical instruments!' 

I'm working on a trilogy of novels set largely on the Canary Islands, mainly lovely La Gomera, but partly set in Los Cristianos on Tenerife and partly in Glasgow, of which more in another post. Like many writers, when I'm researching and writing something, I like to surround myself with 'stuff'  relevant to the book - pictures, maps, and even objects that are inspirational. It's a kind of immersion experience and it works for me. Even down to vintage perfumes, which I collect anyway - but right now, I'm favouring Embrujo de Sevilla (the Enchantment of Seville, launched in 1933) and Maja, launched in 1921, both by Myrurgia of Barcelona, both gorgeous old scents. 

Embrujo de Sevilla by Myrurgia

This need for immersion also explains why, years ago, when I was writing a novel called The Physic Garden, set in late eighteenth, early nineteenth century Scotland, I managed to buy a Georgian hand embroidered christening cape at auction - one that proved inspirational, and figured in the finished book. I decided to let it go a few years later, because it had done its work and it was time for it to move on. Like the guitar, it was a thing of great beauty, and I loved writing about it. Most dealers in antiques are well aware that we are only guardians of these old objects for a brief time. But with writing, it's a bit different.

When I'm writing a novel, whether historical or contemporary, I tend to go for immersion in the world of the book. Once you've sent the finished book out into the world, it can be very difficult to let go. It's as though the characters exist. They go on without you, even when you've moved on to something else but it doesn't take much for you to climb back inside that world all over again. Sometimes it can be a visit to an ice hockey game (Ice Dancing) or hearing somebody singing a song by Robert Burns (the Jewel) but sometimes it can be as simple as a spray of spicy, citrussy magical perfume. 

Georgian hand embroidered christening cape.

 

Bird of Passage - My Homage to Wuthering Heights.

 

Over the years of my writing career to date, there were two or three novels that I always thought of as the 'ones that got away'. 

Until I took the decision to publish it myself, Bird of Passage had always been my orphan child, the book that a few people read and enjoyed and were moved by, but that nobody in the industry wanted. Unlike The Amber Heart, that kept being turned down with fulsome praise, because 'nobody is interested in Poland', no agent or publisher would even read Bird of Passage, in spite of its Scottish setting and Irish background, and in spite of the fact that it tackles some harrowing issues that are still very much current. In short, it was turned down unseen. 

My big mistake, I came to realise, was in pointing out that it was something of a homage to Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights would be my desert island book. My 'inheritance' novel because my mother and my aunt loved it too, so it was a part of my childhood. It was the novel I read when I was in my teens and I've never stopped loving it. I reread it almost every year,  generally at this time of year. Vitally, it was the inspiration behind Bird of Passage. 

This is a reblogging of an old and popular post with some revisions. Because whenever I reread WH, I find something new and intriguing. This year it was narrator Ellen Dean's reference to Joseph, even doggedly religious Joseph, leaving his cake and cheese out 'for the fairies' on Christmas Eve. Which made me think of my Yorkshire grandfather and his great fondness for fruit cake and crumbly Wensleydale cheese. Then I wondered whether our habit of leaving a mince pie and a glass of sherry out for Father Christmas owes something to that much older custom. 

I'm a Yorkshire lass, although one with a rich Polish and a rich Irish heritage as well. We lived in Leeds until I was twelve years old. You can read more about my family background in a book called A Proper Person to be Detained (Saraband 2019), part personal memoir, part family history. In that book, you'll find a little speculation about whether Emily may have conceived Heathcliff as a dark Irish child, with his 'gibberish that nobody could understand'. This may have been his native Gaelic, given that Liverpool was full of migrant Irish fleeing famine, including my own forebears, at the time when Emily was writing the novel in 1845. Emily's father was from County Down in Northern Ireland and the sisters would have been well aware of the anti-Irish prejudice that accompanied the influx of migrants. 

I was named for the heroine of Wuthering Heights, a doubtful compliment some might say, and I was trundled over the moors in my push-chair to Top Withens, the setting for the Heights in the novel, if not for the house itself. As soon as I was old enough to read and begin to understand the novel, I adored it, although I soon realised that it was a powerful and absorbing evocation of obsessive love, packed with repeated images of cruelty and sadism, with very little of conventional romance about it. 

Top Withens

Many years later, when I became an experienced radio dramatist, with 100+ hours of radio drama to my name, I would plead with the BBC to let me dramatise the novel. They commissioned me to dramatise many classics, from Kidnapped and Catriona to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but for some reason, they never let me tackle Emily's masterpiece. Which was a pity, since so many dramatisations - in my well informed opinion - fell far short of the mark. 

 

Cue forward some years, and after a spell of writing for the stage, I began to focus almost wholly on fiction, with occasional ventures into historical non-fiction. Much of my work at that time was published by Saraband, but I still kept going back to Bird of Passage. Most writers have ‘bottom drawer’ novels. I have several, and most of them should never see the light of day. 

Bird of Passage always felt different. 

It felt like irritatingly unfinished business. I kept going back to it. Tinkering. Thinking about it. It haunted my dreams. It was as though these characters wanted desperately to tell their story. Interestingly, I knew that one of the characters had a secret, but even I didn't know what that secret was till the very end of the writing process. I woke up in the early hours, thinking 'That's what it was. That's what he needed to remember.' But I had to write the book and edit the book many times over to find out.

Back then, I still had an agent but they seemed to be repelled by anything with a Wuthering Heights connection, even though I would insist that it was only 'inspired by' and not some crass rehashing of the story. Later, no publisher would touch it, in spite of some glowing reader recommendations. 

I've often wondered about their wholly and sometimes virulently negative response. Given how many women I know who - like me - love Wuthering Heights, what was their motivation? It wasn't as though they had read it and found it wanting in some way. That would have been excusable. They wouldn't read it at all. Wouldn't you think at least one of them might have thought that they could find a way of marketing it?  

Anyway - Bird of Passage languished on the far recesses of my PC. Nobody wanted to know. Nobody had the time to read it. Nobody cared except me. I cared. 

I couldn't get Finn and Kirsty out of my mind, so when I took the decision to combine some self publishing with my traditional publishing, this was one of several novels that I felt deserved another life beyond the confines of my computer, my own imagination and the doubtful curation of other people. 

That was when I tackled it in a big way, with all the benefit of half a lifetime's experience of writing and editing. When it was finally published, one of my reviewers, Susan Price, pointed out that it is not a retelling. It is a 'reimagining' of Wuthering Heights at a different time and in a different place.' 

Bird of Passage wasn't the only trigger, but it was a significant milestone. I think it was then that I knew that the way ahead for me lay in publishing my own books, under my own imprint, albeit with some excellent professional assistance. I needed to be in control.

The evocative cover image by my artist husband, Alan Lees, is exactly what I wanted. It's a very grown up and often desperately sad story set mostly in the Scottish countryside, exploring the kind of mutual passion that is attractive in theory but ultimately destructive. It's a novel with occasional, albeit very subtle, supernatural elements. It's a book about the nature of obsessive love and the terrible, irreparable damage of childhood trauma.

If you love Wuthering Heights (or even if you don't) and if this sounds like your kind of novel, it's available as an eBook and in a nice, fat paperback as well. 

The eBook of Bird of Passage will be on special offer at the bargain price of 99p from 11th till 17th December.  

Plotters and Pantsers Revisited.

This is a revised version of a post from 2022, because the question of different writing processes has arisen again, this time on Facebook. The other night, we were debating whether children should be made to plan out their writing in advance - or just work it out as they went along. Opinion was, of course, divided. 

A friend inspired that original 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 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. No careful plotting. No subtle planting of clues. No planning at all. When I looked back, the clues were all there. I just realised what had been happening at the same time as my narrator. 

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, all I knew was that there was something that he was struggling to remember, a memory that - as an act of self preservation - he had buried deep inside. As I wrote what turned out to be a pretty long book, I didn't have a clue what it was. It's a precarious position to find yourself in - but it's exciting. 

Then, towards the end of the process, I literally woke up in the middle of the night saying 'So that was what happened!' But I had never, not once, plotted it. 

Similarly, in The Physic Garden, I knew that the ending involved a shocking betrayal because that's how it begins. The narrator mentions it, without going into detail, so we, the readers, don't know what it is. Again, I realised the nature of that betrayal and its consequence much later on in the story. This time, the narrator knew what it was, but had been reluctant to write about it until he was ready to confront it, and in some sense heal the memory. 

I am what is known as a 'pantser'.. I write by the seat of my pants. 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. 

If I did plot everything out in advance, I would get so bored that I would never finish writing the book at all. And it's no use telling me that 'lots of people do'. I know they do. But I don't. 

Outlines were always anathema to me, because I could write them (with difficulty) while knowing full well that the finished book or play would be nothing like the outline. How could it be when I just didn't know? Plotters need to know. They plan everything out meticulously, including detailed character sketches. I never do that either, because I've only just met these people so how can I? 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 well. I don't write crime fiction or the kind of thrillers that depend upon intricate plots that must fit together but I know that 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. 

The problems arise when we try to enforce one method on people for whom it doesn't come naturally. There is no right or wrong way - only the way that works well for you. The trick, as with so much creative writing, is to find out what suits you best.

The Facebook debate was originally about children. It's certainly helpful to teach them about the basic structure of an essay (or 'composition' as it used to be called, in the olden days) and how to plan it out. I spent four years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow in a university, helping students to do just that: how to structure their academic writing, how to follow a line through an essay, how to frame an argument.

But where creative writing is concerned - stories, making things up, fiction  - I don't think it's nearly so important. In fact for children, it may inhibit them. 

Many years ago, I was asked to judge a local schools creative writing competition. When the prize-giving came around, it became clear that I had chosen the 'wrong' child. He had written a chaotic but gloriously imaginative tale that no teacher or parent had ever had a hand in. He was surprised and delighted to win but I sensed an air of disapproval in the room. The parents of the usual suspects, the kids who always win prizes, were not amused. The following year, I was presented with a small pre-selected set of pedestrian, perfectly planned and phrased stories, littered with unnecessary adjectives, fronted adverbials* and all.

I said I couldn't possibly judge them under these circumstances.

Later, when I was working as Royal Literary Fund Fellow, a student asked me to look at a drama script. This was unusual, because most of my work involved helping with academic essays and dissertations. It was a good piece of work. I pointed out a few things and then told her to 'go away and play with it.' She looked at me in dismay and said 'But we're not supposed to play with it. We're supposed to get it right!' 

It encapsulated everything that I find troubling about Creative Writing as an academic subject. No writer ever really believes they have got something right. The most you can hope for is 'good enough'. Or 'I'd better stop now'! The real joy of writing involves playing with the material, exploring, finding out, experimenting, drafting and polishing and cutting and polishing again, until the piece - more or less - says what you want it to say. 

If planning it out helps you, go for it. If it doesn't, don't worry about it. You don't have to 'get it right'. Only as good as you think it can be. 

* I have an honours degree in English Language and Literature, with a fair amount of Linguistics in the mix. I taught English as a Foreign Language for three years. I have never, not once, come across the term Fronted Adverbial. I still don't know what it is. Did Michael Gove make it up? 

Please Don't Kill Our Darlings

 

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, courtesy ITV

I have a confession to make. I have never, not once, watched those 'final episodes' of long running series where the main character dies. I was thinking about this earlier this week when I switched on the TV in the kitchen, as I often do to alleviate the sheer boredom of cooking, only to find that it was showing the Remorseful Day, in which Morse pops his clogs. I've never watched it and I never will.

I feel the same about that appalling episode where Hercule Poirot dies. Not only have I never watched that, but I avoid those episodes where he ages, episodes that I notice tend to be accompanied by doom laden background music. Poirot is the original cosy crime series. Christie herself may have been fed up of being lumbered with her wildly successful creation, but in his David Suchet incarnation at least, I love him. I don't care if he's a perjink little man. I don't care if his denouement speeches might be unbearable in real life. This is patently not real life, and I love him to bits. In my mind, he goes on forever, and I'm never ever going to be persuaded to watch his final moments.

I should perhaps also confess that I've killed off more than enough darlings of my own. And mourned them too, mourned with those who are left behind. But that's different, because I'm not writing cosy crime. Sometimes I'm writing grown up love stories, literary fiction, explorations of real life, whether historical or contemporary. And for the writer, in an odd sort of way, even though you may have killed them off, those characters live on in your internal world. I'm thinking of two novels in particular: Bird of Passage and The Amber Heart. Without going into much detail, in case you haven't read them and want to, some darlings didn't quite make it. But don't worry. They're here, living their best lives in my head and heart. 

That phrase 'killing your darlings' was attributed to William Faulkner, but was used earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch who wrote of murdering one's darlings. Essentially it means that as a writer, you may well find yourself having to delete the passages that you love best, the parts of a book that don't really advance the story. I used to think they were right. Now, as I'm reading swathes of tremendous classic fiction where people didn't feel the need to edit out all the best bits, I suspect they were probably wrong anyway. Imagine Dickens or Emily Bronte killing their darlings. Well, of course, she did. But just imagine (as I did here in this blog post!) if she had had an editor who told her to make radical changes. 

But I digress. Along with a sizeable chunk of the older female population, I loved Mamma Mia. We didn't get to see the sequel in the cinema so my husband bought the DVD for me. I got only a little way into it to realise that - horrors- they had killed off Donna. (Presumably because Streep didn't want to do it.) 

I donated the video to somebody who wanted it, but I still feel cheated. I wish somebody had warned me beforehand. The songs may have been great but it meant that the whole thing shifted from being a joyful film about wonderful middle aged men and women to focusing yet again upon the young. Not only that, but removing that brilliant central character was like chopping down a mast on a sailing boat. It took a whole lot of rigging with it, and crippled the vessel. 

The point of these ongoing characters is that in our minds, they don't die. They just are. Which is, now that I think about it, very like the way writers feel about their characters, even if we may have killed them off. They don't die. They are still there, popping up from time to time to remind us of their existence.

Can you imagine a grown up William Brown, struggling with mortgage payments and divorce? Can you imagine him ill and lonely? William - whom I love quite as much as Poirot - changed with the changing times, but he never grew old. That wasn't a tragedy. Peter Pan this isn't. Richmal Crompton created a world into which we all, from time to time, need to escape - hilariously funny, wise, wicked, badly behaved (he'd definitely have been hit with an ASBO now) and completely outside time and its sorrows. That's why I still feel the need to read those stories all over again from time to time, and why I still, all these years later, take so much pleasure from them. 

Bird of Passage is available on Kindle at the bargain price of 99p until 31st July.

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Six: Back to Leeds

A Moonlit Lane by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Leeds was a very different place from the city I had left aged twelve but it still felt strangely like home. I had managed to secure a room in a student house at the end of Wood Lane, the same long, dark lane where I had gone for my piano lessons at Leeds College of Music, all those years ago. 

My teacher back then was Miss Ingram. She was nice enough, but I was a little afraid of her. She wore a black velvet jacket and massaged her hands with Nivea Cream. The scent of it still reminds me of her. I remember the head of the school remarking to my parents that she had 'an iron hand in a velvet glove' . I was seven when I began lessons and even though I dimly perceived that he didn't mean it literally, there was some part of me that wondered about her hands. Especially since - although she wore no velvet gloves - there was that velvet coat ...

I remember little about the student flat apart from the fact that I wasn't in it very often, due to the nature of the course, which involved research elsewhere. I do remember that on our first night, we went into the shared kitchen to be met with a great commotion as what seemed like an army of mice scattered from the cooker. Investigation proved that it had not been cleaned for years, not even over the summer vacation when the authorities knew that the rooms were to be re-let. It was covered in deeply embedded fat. The previous tenants had been male students, and we blamed them vociferously, although the truth was probably that females would have been just as bad at cleaning up. 

Because the lane was long and dark, with high stone walls enclosing the gardens of large houses - exactly like the atmospheric painting by J A Grimshaw, above - we tried to make sure that if we were coming home at night we didn't have to walk alone. There was one occasion, however, a midwinter evening, when I got off the bus and realised that I would have to negotiate the lane all by myself. Reader, adrenalin kicked in, I slung my bag across my body, took to my heels and ran, not stopping to draw breath till I reached the front door. Years later, I realised that Peter Sutcliffe had frequented that area. His earliest attack was in 1969. I was in Leeds in the early 70s. Sutcliffe murdered a student, Jacqueline Hill, in November 1980, as she walked home from her bus stop at around 9.15 at night. He attacked her in Alma Road, which runs parallel to Wood Lane, presumably another lonely lane. Which still gives me a frisson of disquiet, whenever I think about it.

What possessed university authorities to house female students at the end of dark lanes? A recent question, asking women what they would do if there were no men in the world for 24 hours, was revealing. A large percentage of us would go walking at night, without fear. I can do that in the small Scottish village where I live. Women - especially older women - can often do the same in city centres with significant camera coverage. But I think most men have no notion of the ways in which most women police and prepare themselves, thinking the unthinkable, judging distances, walking briskly, keys in hand, middle of the pavement, seeking the light. And just occasionally, when instinct takes over, running like the wind from the monster behind us. Not all men are predators, but most sexual predators are male. 

I loved my time in Leeds. We were taught by Stewart Sanderson and by a fine lecturer called Tony Green. Among much else I wrote a poem about him called Sudden Man. It was published back then by Akros publications in a collection called A Book of Men, and I included it in my own more recent collection, Midnight Sun. The title is - I'm both moved and honoured to say - on Tony's headstone. I didn't meet him throughout all the years after graduation, but somehow, the poem stayed with his family and after he died, his wife contacted me to ask if she could use it at his funeral. She explained how vividly it seemed to characterise him. And yet - even though I appreciated his teaching very much indeed - I would never have claimed to know him well. 

Like most writers, I was a keen observer, deeply interested in people, in what made them tick, in how it might feel to be them. Interested in what fired my own imagination. I still am. So perhaps I am a writer after all! A piece of advice I was given very early in my career still holds good. 'The way to be a writer is to write.' 

This is not something people want to hear. I doubt if I did, back then, although I certainly loved to write. People often want the magic formula that will transform them. There isn't one. And it certainly isn't AI. We learn by doing, not by being. As Miss Ingram with her iron hand in her velvet glove would have said 'Practise, Catherine. You must do your practice.'  

Where writing is concerned, I have. I still do. Every day without fail. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Four: Money Matters

 

This is a small diversion from the chronology of  previous 'How Not To' posts.  Whenever writers get together, we don't talk about what we're writing. We moan about money. 

It's worth pointing out yet again that, with a few starry exceptions, writers are at the bottom of the heap as far as payment goes. Full time professional writers earn, on average, £7000 a year. That means that vast numbers earn considerably less and payments are falling all the time. I wrote my last big project on a £500 advance. It took 2 years to research and write. 

If you look this up on Google, you'll be presented with wholly unrealistic salaries in the £35,000 plus range. Some deluded websites claim a staggering £45 - £55000. I don't know anyone who earns anything approaching this from their writing, even those you would think of as successful. Those who do, earn it from writing related work, such as teaching creative writing in universities, so that they can encourage more people to be poor. Or writing for television. (Lucrative, but also hard to get into.) Or specialised writing, such as technical writing, for large companies. Those who write for children can earn a living of sorts by doing schools visits and talks, but again, these are a diminishing resource. And as another writer friend pointed out recently, these are payments for actual work undertaken in the school or college, not for the books themselves.

As far as large publishing companies are concerned, creative writing and publishing is a massive pyramid scheme, with the writers beavering away for peanuts at the bottom, and literally everyone else being paid more than the people without whom there would be nothing to publish or produce. 

There is no real solution to this. The big corporations will always pay their top executives handsomely and the astronomical advances will always go to celebrities, who probably haven't even written the damn books themselves.  Those organisations that are supposed to represent writers can do little about the imbalance. Small or medium sized publishers struggle constantly with rising prices of resources like paper, which means rising prices of books, and a corresponding fall in quality of the end product.

Almost everyone who writes, and most of those running small publishing companies, have to find other means of earning a living. I have colleagues who lecture, who teach in schools, who are alternative therapy practitioners, who follow quite different full time careers and write on the side. Creativity will find a way. I deal in antique textiles and toys from an Etsy store called the 200 Year Old House. 

And now, I self publish on Amazon under my own Dyrock Publishing imprint, eBooks and paperbacks, with some excellent professional design and formatting help from a company called Lumphanan Press. I make no fortunes, but there's always the faint possibility that something will take off and bring in some real income.

I'll leave you with three things to think about. 

Getting an agent doesn't automatically mean that you will get a publishing deal these days. Don't waste years of good writing time submitting endless query letters to agencies and waiting for them to respond.

Most books don't earn out their advances. The system is designed that way. It's perfectly possible for a publisher to profit from a book while the author, even from a mass market success, is paid sixpence a copy, as part of the deal. It's going to take a long long time to earn out even a modest advance at those rates. 

When people tell you that there is 'no money in the budget' to pay the creatives, what they mean is that there is, in fact, a budget. They just expect that you'll work for nothing. I still do sometimes work for nothing, but these days it's only for local organisations, small charities, good causes. Places where I can sell my own books. And seldom in winter, when I hibernate. But for big media corporations? Book chains owned by US Hedge Companies? I don't think so. Not any more.

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. 

Whatever Happened to Creative Writing?

 

Edinburgh days.

The writing career I embarked on many years ago seems unrecognisable to me now. I studied English Language and Literature at Edinburgh University where there was a thriving community of young people who wrote in their spare time or who just loved literature, poetry, theatre, for itself and not as a means to an end, not as a way to promote 'wellbeing' or primarily as a way to tackle various 'issues' - although we did write about issues that seemed important to us. But the practice itself, the 'doing' was the thing. We seemed to enjoy books, plays, poems with less angst, less fear of censure, more freedom to just be ourselves. Sensitivity readers were unknown. Beta readers were unknown. We wrote because we needed to write, loved to write. We learned by writing a lot, and by working with a trusted editor or - in the case of drama - with a trusted director. And if that seems like nostalgia, maybe it is.

A friend of mine organised poetry festivals and they were sold out. Young people came along in droves to listen to poets. The vast majority of my fellow students were, like me, from comprehensive schools. Years later, when I was working at another Scottish university, they organised a poetry event, with a few well known poets. Even with the benefit of social media, hardly anyone came. An experienced and successful playwright, working in the department for a while, generously offered one to one advice sessions to students on film and theatre courses. Again, nobody came. He couldn't understand it and neither could I.

It sometimes seems as though the focus on the formality of the actual courses, the pressing need to get the degree at the end of it, means that the joy in actual creative practice has disappeared.

The original Writers in Residence schemes meant that a writer with a certain level of experience would be given a residency at a university, and would be expected to do some hours of teaching. This would normally be a mixture of workshops, tutorials, one to one advice sessions and the very occasional lecture which would often be open to the public. Writers were autonomous and organised their own timetables. It would be no more than, for example, 15 or 20 hours per week, including preparation time, but the salary would be for 30 or 40 hours, so it was assumed that the writer would have a room of their own and about 20 hours of paid time to write. When I was at Edinburgh, Norman MacCaig was writer in residence, with Robert Garioch before him. They were there to encourage creative writing within the student body, and they usually did. 

As the years went by, there was a sort of 'mission creep'. You started to hear that universities were taking advantage, paying for 15 hours, expecting 30. The paid 'time to write' practically disappeared. On new campuses, individual rooms were hard to come by. At some new campuses, lecturers' rooms were often shared and (appallingly, even though I love my Kindle!) without bookshelves. 

Partly to address this problem, partly, I think, to raise its profile, Creative Writing became an academic subject. I remember that the change was just beginning as I was finishing my Masters in the 70s. Now there are degrees in Creative Writing all over the place, but these courses are - in my opinion - seldom practical enough. The Uni Guide admits that 'unemployment rates are currently looking quite high overall, with salaries on the lower side.' Typical graduate job areas, the site goes on to admit, are as 'sale assistants and retail cashiers.'  

Many graduates emerge into ever more shark infested publishing waters, thinking they are going to get an agent and a deal, but few do. And nobody ever seems to tell them that getting an agent won't even guarantee getting a publisher.

I saw an ad for a so called Writer in Residence for Edinburgh University a few years ago and realised that Norman MacCaig, arguably one of Scotland's finest poets, wouldn't have been qualified to apply, because the position required a degree in Creative Writing. That seemed to me to encapsulate what writing at university level has become. This is nothing to do with quality or talent, because many of these lecturers will be very talented indeed. Writing pays so little nowadays that most of us have to do something else to make ends meet. (Sometimes as sales assistants and retail cashiers!) But once you subject your creativity, your words and ideas, to the kind of rigorous academic analysis demanded by these courses, it can disappear like snow off a dyke. It's not the teaching that's the problem. I taught EFL for several years and wrote plenty while I was doing it. It's the intensive and persistent involvement in other people's creativity that can damage your own.

Every year a handful of graduates will get publishing deals, but many more won't, and even those who do will seldom make any money. Which wouldn't matter too much, as long as they loved what they did and used it elsewhere. I was astonished some years ago when speaking to a class of young people doing a Creative Writing course, to find that only two or three of them ever did any writing of their own, (nor even much reading) beyond the amount prescribed by the course. They had none of the passion for the work that dedicated writers, young and old, still have. The desperate compulsion to write.  Which made me think that they might have been better doing a good general arts course and reading widely - as we did back when we still queued for cheap theatre tickets, went to poetry festivals and - if we were so inclined - wrote whatever we liked, obsessively, whenever we could.

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. 

You Don't Need to Pay to Write

Lidl has lovely notebooks

I was troubled, recently, to see somebody posting online that she couldn't afford to pay for creative writing courses and retreats. The person in question seemed to have swallowed the myth that it isn't possible to write without them. 

I'm here to tell you that this is not true. 

If you want a recommendation for a 'how to' book, you should buy Stephen King's excellent On Writing, more memoir than instruction manual. The advice he gives is both simple and cheering. Read a lot, write a lot and avoid 'workshops' like the plague. 

I've written since I was a child, beginning with poetry, moving on to plays and short stories, and now all kinds of fiction and non-fiction. None of it has ever paid very well, and therein lies a problem. 

The numbers of writers who can earn a living from their fiction has become vanishingly small. This is why so many of us teach the thing we know most about - creative writing. For many writers tutoring classes and retreats is the only thing to keep what Robert Burns called the 'poortith cauld' - cold poverty - away from the door. They can be useful and helpful, no doubt about it.

But that doesn't mean any of them are compulsory.

'The only way to learn how to write is to write,' a novelist told me, when I was first starting out. So I did. 

You could, if you lack confidence, find a local writing group: one where you can receive encouragement or pointers or inspiration. These are usually much less expensive than the big professional courses. Joining a book group might be an even cheaper alternative, where you'll read and discuss books with other people, and gain an awareness of why some books are more popular than others and whether that matters, and what kind of  books you like best.

But don't let anyone fool you that you have to be able to pay to do courses or retreats or classes to learn how to write. If you don't have access to a computer, join a library, and buy yourself a big fat notebook and some pens. (Lidl has great, cheap notebooks. So does T K Maxx.) 

That is really all you need to get started. Give yourself permission to play around with words and ideas. Don't feel that you have to 'get it right'. Just enjoy yourself. Worry about all the rest of it later. 

Publishing Advice for the Faint Hearted

My new non-fiction book,
to be published in spring 2023, by Saraband.

There is an ocean of publishing and self publishing advice out there already, some of it very good indeed, and I don't propose to reinvent the wheel. But given that I'm a 'hybrid' writer - both traditionally and self published, roughly half and half - and also that I'm 'contaminated by experience' as somebody at the BBC once described us more mature writers and I'm sometimes asked for advice, I thought a few pointers might not go amiss. 

1 Don't self publish too soon. 

If you want to try for a traditional agent and publisher, then by all means go down that route first. Polish your manuscript till it's as good as it can be, and start sending out those query letters, those sample chapters, those synopses. Do your research. Be professional about it. Be polite. Don't harass people. (You should see the emails some would-be writers send to publishers!) But at the same time analyse your ambitions. Do you just want to get this one book 'out there' or are you planning for the long term. In which case ...

2 Don't wait too long to self publish.

By which I mean, don't hang about for years, hoping that you're going to hit the big time. Agents and wildly successful writers will tell you that if you persevere you will get there, and you may. But you may also waste half a lifetime on a single project. Bestsellers are the stuff of our dreams. Steady sales, even small ones, are possible. You might be surprised by how many writers combine self with traditional publishing these days.  

3 Don't keep polishing the same book, over and over.

Well, you can. I've done it more times than I care to remember, but mostly because I hadn't got it right the first or second or third or fourth time and in general I love to edit. Whatever you do, do not keep rewriting your book to the demands of a string of different editors, because nothing is more certain than that it will eventually implode under the weight of contradictory demands. 

Take The Amber Heart. That was by far my longest saga of rewrites, a book that I'm pretty satisfied with now. I'm very glad it's out there, and reasonably well reviewed. But at one point, two different agents had told me to delete a third of it. Unfortunately, one wanted me to lose the first third and one the last third. I did neither, but I certainly pruned it drastically and then rewrote large chunks of it as my skills as a novelist improved. I enjoyed it, but it took years, and I was writing plenty of other things at the same time. The trick is not to get bogged down in one project.

4 Do keep on writing. 

Write your next book while you're trying to sell the first, and write another book once you've written that one. Practice makes perfect. You'll be learning how to write while you're doing it. We all have bottom drawer novels that should probably never see the light of day. But once you have a significant body of work, you can decide which projects have 'legs' and which you've lost interest in. Then you can choose what, if anything, you want to do with them. 

5 Time is a good editor.

If you can leave a book - or any piece of writing - for a few months, even after you think you have edited it to within an inch of its life - you will see not just typos and repetitions and infelicities, but all kinds of structural things that you want to work on. This is another reason to be prolific, to leave one project in abeyance while you work on something else. The other tip is to send your manuscript to your Kindle and read it on there. Problems will leap out at you, because you're seeing it in a different format, much closer to print.

6 Write for love, try to publish for money. 

Samuel Johnson said no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money, but almost nobody publishes for money these days and we're not all blockheads. Publishers, except for the big corporations, don't make much either. If you want money, buy a lottery ticket. But although you will and should write for love, remember that publishing is a business, whether it's yours or somebody else's, and you should treat it as such. Be polite, be thoroughly professional, but don't assume you always have to be a humble supplicant either. 

Bird of Passage was definitely a labour of love!

7 Be realistic about selling

I know a number of writers who boycott Amazon. Oddly enough, they don't ever seem to demand that their publishers boycott Amazon too. There are some truths in their stance. Amazon doesn't pay much tax here in the UK, but that's the fault of the government who don't ask for it. And it isn't only Amazon. If you're reading this on a smartphone, check just what your phone company doesn't pay in UK taxes either. At the same time, you could look up just who owns the UK's biggest bookseller. 

'I prefer to buy from a small business,' people say, and so do I. But the fact is that thousands of small businesses (some with bricks and mortar stores too)  trade on Amazon, thrive and pay their taxes, because no small business will get anything like the publicity, the digital footfall and customer security a site such as Amazon will deliver. I notice that Amazon is starting to flag up these small businesses, and good for them. 

8 Be realistic about your own skills

When I first decided to self publish some of my older titles, I did it through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and still do. They have made it progressively easier over the years. I can also put new, experimental (for me) work out there, such as Rewilding. More recently, I decided that three of these older, recently revised novels deserved to be in paperback. While I can format for Kindle, which is fiddly but easy, I soon realised that formatting for print-on-demand paperbacks was a much harder proposition. Ironically, one of the ways I realised this was when reading a book that had been published by a small publisher, only to find 'printed by Amazon' on the back and to realise that the company had made a terrible job of formatting the paperback.  

After some searching, I discovered Scottish based Lumphanan Press, who now help with my formatting for paperback. I pay a flat fee and they make a truly excellent job of formatting text and cover so that I can upload it myself. I'm delighted with the finished product and it means I have some copies to sell alongside my traditionally published books, at various events. I either use my own photographs or my husband's artworks for the cover images. (I'm aware that I'm lucky to have a painter on hand.) I should point out here that Lumphanan offer a full spectrum of services, so if you want more extensive professional help with your project, you can get it. They are emphatically not a 'vanity press'  and they will never do the hard sell -  but they will obviously charge realistic rates for the services they offer. Finally ...

9 Live in hope.

I don't make any fortunes out of my writing. I never have. I have had spells of making a reasonable living but it was always a switchback. A giant game of snakes and ladders. Now, between my traditionally published work, some paid events, a pension and a small monthly payment from Amazon (who pay every month, on the nail) - my artist husband and I get by. I also sell antique textiles online to supplement my writing income. I'm not retiring any time soon and have a big new project in mind. But I know people who have made quite a lot of money. Those self publishers who have done this have treated it as a business. They do indeed write for love and publish for money. And they are prolific. Not all of us can or would want to do that and some people just want a traditional deal. For some, seeing their work in print is enough. There is no single right way - but it is good to be aware of your options. Do feel free to comment or add questions. 

 Whatever you decide to do, go for it wholeheartedly. Love what you do. And good luck! 

Ice Dancing is a grown up love story and - in terms of reviews -
probably my most successful book! 

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.