Not An Easy Thing to Learn

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

I Love The Brittas Empire

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

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

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

Taylor and Burton and the Taming of the Shrew

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

My Favourite Novel on Normblog - Kidnapped v Wuthering Heights.

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

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

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

Video Games and Violence - Sense and Nonsense

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

Chernobyl, Fukushima and the Ostrich Mentality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Person / Third Person

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

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

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

Pruning Your Darlings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Threads of Feeling, Textiles and Writing

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

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

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

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

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

Killing Your Darlings?

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

The Importance of Story

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