Do you have the bottle for a major re-write?

Yes, I have a cheeky little Sauvignon chilling in my fridge...

That might help but it's not what I'm talking about, sadly. I'm talking about bottle. Bravery. Even bravado. A touch of derring-do.

It's something that separates the sheep from the goats, writing-wise: the ability and willingness (OK, that's two things) to tackle a major rewrite. Some writers - and I'm one of them - feel that all their writing is rewriting. I'm constantly trying to improve, hone, think what might be better. But I am not talking about tinkering and self-editing. 

I'm not talking about going through from beginning to end looking for typos, or making one of your characters different, or removing a scene or thread, or adding a scene or thread, or removing examples of over-writing, or altering the pace, or injecting cliff-hangers, or strengthening a theme, or removing a theme. I'm talking about radical, fundamental changes that make the whole book different. I'm talking about The Big Rewrite. Brace yourselves. And get your bottle out of the fridge.

There are times, (and, in case you're a Supertramp fan, yes, it may be when all the world's asleep and the questions run so deep) when a BR is necessary. And at those times we must find the strength to bite the bullet and just damn well do it. 

Often on these occasions you've sensed (and ignored) an earlier whiff of eel-vomit*, a suspicion that this is not your best book, a blind faith that any holes will sort themselves by magic. You can ignore these whiffs if you want to - and sometimes, you have to because you don't know what the source of the whiff is yet - but eventually you will need to act.

(*I don't think eel-vomit smells but allow me some artistic licence. Eel-vomit is the word I regularly assign to rubbish writing.)

Let me tell you about a novel I've been writing. Let us call it Castle Crone, because that is what it is called (though it wasn't at first.) I started about four years ago. And "finished" less than a year later. I was happy with it, though I knew it had a problem with the ending - but I ignored this because it was to be the start of a series anyway - and another problem (or three) I couldn't quite put my finger on. But I felt I had something good and interesting and unusual and generally happifying. Agent loved it. So that was good. She sent it to publishers. They loved it. I received amazing feedback, including from one who said it was the best submission they'd seen all year but they couldn't take it because it competed with something they'd just commissioned. And by the way, they said, we wonder whether X quite works. And Y. And whether the ending is right?

To cut a long story short, two things happened. The recession hit, so publishers wouldn't commit to a major (expensive) series. And I found myself busy with the publication and knock-on effects of Wasted and then the new edition of Blame My Brain and then the contract for The Teenage Guide to Stress. However, during that time, I did rewrite it. Twice. Totally. Two BRs. Then I didn't like it so much, and nor did my agent. So we decided to wait till the time was right and see whether I'd like to tackle it again.

I rewrote it the following year but didn't send it out. I'd lost my way.

Ditto the next year. Wahhhhhh. 

By then, I had so many drafts I didn't know what they all were. They had document names such as "Castle Without Climber", "Final Castle With Climber", "Castle Crone With Dragon Bits", "Final Castle Sept 2011", "Final Final Castle Without Dragons" and "Final Frigging Castle".

Inspired partly by desperation, partly by a love for the world I'd created and partly by my agent, I've just done two more Big Rewrites in the last few months, including the one I finished last week, which I have called, "I'VE BLOOMIN DONE IT." 

WHAT WERE THE MASSIVE CHANGES?

1. Voice. Voice A, which I had loved (and which had made it feel really original) had to go, to make it more commercial. (Ouch, but there were good reasons - and, remember, I write for children.) Voice B transmogrified into Voice C and then a mixture of Voices A, B, C and D. Now, we all know you can't have a random mixture of voices, so that wasn't OK at all. So, I discarded B, C and D, and went back to a modified A - let's call it A2. My agent said that A2 was holding the pace back in some parts. So that wasn't OK at all. She said Voice A2 was great for one character's POV but not the rest. I didn't agree but I did what I was told, because she is Always Right. So, I then created a structured, reasoned alternation between Voice A2 and Voice E. Then I realised that Saint Agent was definitely right and I chopped Voice A2 some more until it was more of an A-. 

2. In one version, my MC was terrified of climbing, in a mountainous land where climbing is the most valued and necessary skill. In the next version, he was utterly brilliant at it, which, as you can imagine, changed everything. Like everything. Apart from the rockfaces and castle walls he had to climb. In the final version, he's utterly terrified of it... Most of the other characters also changed personalities. Often. 

3. Tense. In the first version, I used present tense, because I'd been writing Wasted, which is present tense. PT was quite wrong for this new story. As Saint Agent pointed out. Grr.

4. Structure. I can't even face telling you. 

5. Characters. There are a lot of them and I changed the relationships between almost all of them. Every change had a knock-on effect.

6. The ending. This was my final and almost last minute (heck of a long minute...) change, despite being the thing I'd known was wrong four years ago. The new ending is eleventy million times better. And so different as to be unrecognisable

7. The beginning. Because endings affect beginnings.

8. Stuff. 

The only thing that never changed is the Castle that forms the imaginary world. And that's interesting, as the whole point about this Castle is that is will not fall or be changed. It is immutable. Unlike books.

And now there is no whiff of eel-vomit!

What do I hope you will learn from this sorry saga?

1. That the writing process is not easy. But, it repays the effort. Be brave. It may be the hardest writing thing you'll do, but it will be the most important.

2. That the writing process is organic. A book doesn't arrive fully-formed. You have to grow it and shape it and be prepared to make mistakes with it and not to see them at first. I don't condemn myself for not dealing with them earlier. I don't think I could have done.
3. That a good agent is a thing of saintliness. 

4. That when there's a whiff of vomit, there's almost certainly vomit. 

Unless it's actually parmesan sauce. They do have a similar smell. However, if you know perfectly well that you haven't been cooking parmesan sauce, don't waste time thinking that's what you can smell.

It's your WIP whiffing. Take deep breaths and sort it. 

THE END. THE END

Recently, I typed THE END twice in one day. As in I finished writing two books in one day. Not Thomas the Tank Engine books, either. Proper chunky books.

Some people were asking about this on Twitter so I thought I'd explain. (Btw, this post is also on my Heartsong blog.)

First, please note that proper writers don't actually type THE END. It's regarded as a bit unprofessional. The professional thing to do is to type "ends" in little letters on the lefthand side. Bor-ring.

So, what I tend to do is type THE END in massive pink letters in a really tacky font. Then I dance around my office like an idiot - which is actually an idiotic thing to do, as my office is Not Big. And then delete it.

Anyway, how did I finish two books in one day?

Because, of course, I'd nearly finished them both the day before... My preferred method (not really the right word for my chaotic behaviour, tbh) is to work on two things at once, fiction and non-fiction. It means I never get bored. Unless I am bored with BOTH books, which is always possible, theoretically.

This time, I deliberately worked it so that I'd finish them on the same day. This gave me a stupendous sense of achievement. And exhaustion. I was too exhausted to celebrate, to be honest. Also, I was heading off to York a day later to do the York Festival of Writing, which was partly why I wanted to get them finished. And I knew that after York I'd be preparing for my Mumsnet course on parenting teenagers, so that would not allow more writing time.

The two books were The Teenage Guide to Stress and the start of a gothic fantasy series/trilogy/pair/standalone/whateverosity called (maybe) Castle Crone. I'm going to be telling you about the journey towards THE END of Castle Crone on Help! I Need a Publisher! very soon. It's not a pretty journey, let me tell you...

EMOTIONS AND WRITING

A few people on Twitter and by email have asked me to say something about how emotional upset or a serious setback can throw a writer into stress, meltdown, inability to concentrate. Is this feeling legitimate, normal, curable? Why can it sometimes be such a problem and what are the solutions?

Interestingly, I think what we're specifically talking about here is writing fiction. It's as though fiction, coming as it does so strongly from the emotional parts of our brain, can be more affected by intrusive emotions in our personal lives. It is also likely to be the case that more emotional people - and I count myself proudly amongst them - can be knocked more painfully off track and have our concentration more deeply affected. (Positively as well as negatively.) My brain is like a swarm of bees and is easily agitated.

For most of last year, I could not write fiction. When I say "could not", doubtless I exaggerate, in the sense that if you'd held a gun to my head, chained me to my desk and removed food (and wine) until I wrote a chapter, I'd have managed something. But, in effect, I couldn't. I didn't. I failed. It was frightening and lonely. Something had happened - several things, actually - which wrecked my ability to be creative for that period. The small amounts of fiction that I did manage - probably 10,000 words of a novel I'd started the previous year - seemed to be dragged from me painfully and unsatisfyingly. (Fortunately, I didn't have a fiction deadline to miss, so I didn't fail there.) Strangely, when I read that material now, I think what I wrote last year was pretty good, but at the time I had no emotional connection to it. I thought it was rubbish and several times I decided to quit writing teenage fiction entirely. I tried writing other stuff but that wasn't working either. I messed around, hurtling through tasks, blog posts, talks, admin, housework, anything but "proper" writing. Anything but writing from the heart because my heart was elsewhere.

Non-fiction was no problem, which is why I managed to get Write to be Published written and met my deadline. If my deadline had been a novel, I'm not sure what I'd have done. (Probably, actually, done it.) I wanted to write a novel, but I couldn't get my head around it, couldn't get my heart to engage. Lots of people were telling me different things: "Write an adult novel," "Write for younger children," "You have to stick to YA."

Some people actually find they write better during these times. A friend of mine - reader of this blog, too, and she may well identify herself because I'm guessing she knows I mean her - finds that the more furious and upset she is, the more she needs and wants and manages to write, as though her amygdala drives her on. My amygdala just paralyses me.  

What sort of triggers cause this emotional state that can so dramatically affect our writing, for better or, more often, worse? I can think of a whole range. If you don't mind, I won't say which one/ones apply to me, as the whole thing is still unresolved and raw. But here are some of the things that can hit us hard and which I know some of you have suffered:

• bereavement or serious illness of a loved one
• or serious illness in yourself
• real worry about someone very close to you
• redundancy or job loss, including being dropped by a publisher
• betrayal or deceit by someone else
• enormous loss of self-esteem and self-worth, which can be sudden or gradual
• failure to do something which you took for granted
• major financial fears
• anything which causes deep and prolonged anger, sadness, fear. Or all of them.

All of us will face at least some of those things at some point and sometimes we can move quickly through such periods. Sometimes we can put our writing aside and wait to get through whatever the awful situation is. Sometimes we don't realise that we need to pause and wait for it to pass - though sometimes we can't do that anyway.

Now, let's not make too much of a special case for writers. These things can affect everyone and most people can manage to function at least somewhat throughout traumas. But merely functioning is not the same as accessing creativity. I functioned, too. I carried on blogging, buying and preparing food for my family, socialising, smiling, getting up in the morning, doing all the things that we're supposed to do. I didn't go under. But my fiction writing was a mess. It felt horrible. Dead.

So, what are the solutions? Look, I'm no psychotherapist. (Luckily for all.) All I know is what I've learnt from a bad year and from talking to others. Some of these strategies might help you as they have me. I hope so, as I am now sailing away from the problem on a fast wind, even though the underlying emotion is nowhere near fully resolved.

Here are the small solutions or strategies that I learnt. And I'd like to point out, lest you consider yourselves uber-rationalist, sceptical, old-fashioned and stereotypically British: I'm of that ilk, too. But we're all human and if you're lucky enough never to have been rocked to your core, never to have been knocked off kilter, fine. I hope you are never tested.

Solutions and strategies - pick yours

Acknowledge what's happening - reassure yourself that this is quite normal, but that it feels like shit.

Accept that it's a phase - nothing is forever. Soon, you will feel better about it and you will process what's happened and move through appropriate stages.

Realise that there will be stages - shock, anger, sadness, loss of motivation. Each trauma and each person will be different but the way you feel today is not how you'll feel next week or next month. You may not be able to reach F until you've been through B, C and D. But you might miss out E. Or not.

Step back and take a break. For a day, a week, a whatever. Perhaps you have rushed at everything too fast and done too much and filled your days too full. I had and I'd left no time to think. Thinking is essential and sometimes we just don't give ourselves time for it. So, go easy on yourself.   

Analyse what you want from your writing. Sometimes emotional upset can make us lose our way and our focus and we wonder what we're doing and why. Think it through; talk it through; explore the possibilities in your mind. Ask yourself, "If I did this, or this, how would I feel?" Be logical.
 

Take control in small ways, as soon as you can, but don't beat yourself up when you slip back. Control is what you need to get back. We simply must not let circumstance and emotion destroy us. We have to win if we believe in free will. So, fight and win back control, in small ways first. Set small targets, such as a modest word count - more than you did yesterday. Then reward yourself for achieving it.


Walk. Walk to live and walk to write. Get out into the natural world and feel the raw wind on your face, the sun in your eyes. It's uplifting and will change you. Find high places, bright places, empty places. But while you're walking, think of your writing, your WIP or your next idea: don't waste the wonderful outdoors on thinking about your fury or your sadness.


Create strategies, not resolutions. My post on New Year's Day was written with this in mind and I'm proud to report that I'm still going strong: writing is now the top of my list whereas last year it was a terrifying task that found itself at the bottom of every to-do list. I still have the unresolved emotion. I'm writing over it. Maybe it can even make my writing better.

Yes, consider that emotion, being essential for fiction-writing, could make your writing better. Harness it and channel it. If it makes your writing angry, or sad, vitriolic or devastating, so damned what? My current novel is called Brutal Eyes. It's the most shocking thing I've written. I'm glad. I want it to be shocking. As I said earlier, some people write better when their emotions are heightened; heightened is good, but only if you can control them. I am. Hooray!

Write. Just bloody well write, OK? Once you've tried everything you think might work on the list above, just write. No one's going to do it for you.That's the scary bit, the bit we can't avoid.

Just don't let the buggers bite. Take care, good luck and remember: all this shall pass.

WHEN AN IDEA IS NOT A BOOK

The most common question people ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" For a long time I struggled with finding a helpful and polite answer to this question. (Before you say it: I know, I struggle to be polite at the best of times.) My instinct, depending on how crabbit I was feeling at the time, would either have been, "From my head, duh!" or, "Oh, I don't know, really - they just sort of come to me, ya know?"

It's not a stupid question, but it's a mystifying one for a writer. After all, an idea is just a thought and for writers and non-writers equally our thoughts come from all sorts of places but happen in our heads. So, for a writer as much as for a non-writer, a thought can be triggered by something you hear or read, or something that happens, or something that you found yourself thinking about for some reason. Sometimes you know what triggered it and sometimes you don't.

But I do now have an answer to the question and it goes to the heart of this blog post.

It's something that Brahms apparently said. Now, I heard this many years ago, so I'm not sure why I didn't think of using it to answer the "Where do you get your ideas" question. I even imagine that Brahms was actually answering that very question when he gave this answer, but what he said was (and I paraphrase because my German is nein-existent),

"The idea comes to me from outside of me - and is like a gift. I then take the idea and make it my own - that is where the skill lies."

And it very much is like that for writers. Having ideas is easy - everyone has ideas. And so often, and infuriatingly, non-writers say to writers, "Oh, you could write a book about that." No, not unless the idea can be turned into an appropriate story, because a story is not just "something interesting that happens". An idea is not a story any more than a seed is a tree.

So, where do I get my ideas from? Ideas come because I open my mind to them; I am greedy for them. Ideas are like seeds blown on the wind: they can land almost anywhere. And when a seed lands, which seems at first as though it might grow into a story, I have to process it, like watering it and nurturing it. It needs time and all the right conditions. If I fail to give it the right conditions, or if it turns out to have been a weak seed in the first place, then I will need to discard it and move onto to a more fruitful idea.

Because, importantly, not every idea is a book. And this is a very big mistake that some beginner writers make. They (and non-writers) might think, "Ooh, imagine a woman having surgery without anaesthetic in the early nineteenth century, and her young son hearing her screams and watching her die of blood-poisoning five days later. What would that do to his life?"

That's an idea. (In fact it's the idea that begins my second novel, Fleshmarket.) But it's not a story. A story needs fleshed out characters that you care about and can make your reader care about, each character with his or her own backstory and motivation; it needs a setting and a rich environment; it needs strands and a sub-plot or two; it needs direction and form and pace and a voice. It needs to have a point and a reason why a reader would spend money and time reading it.

When you have your idea, your seed of a possible story, you need to do two things with it:

1. Be totally inspired by it - because you're going to have to live, breathe and dream it for months.
2. Think it through, logically and skilfully, working out shape and direction and looking ahead to possible problems. Many writers will write the plan out, but not everyone does this. I don't, but I do spend many, many hours thinking things through, analysing what will work and what won't. I spend that time living the idea in my head, even if I haven't worked the plot out. If the idea is strong enough and the characters real and whole enough, then I know I can grow it into a full story - but part of that knowledge comes from experience. If you are a beginner gardener, you may find it harder to identify the healthy seed at the start. Beginner writers may find themselves spending too long nurturing a dud idea.

I'm going to say that again because it's perhaps the main point of this post: Beginner writers may find themselves spending too long nurturing a dud idea.
 
This blog post was triggered by an excellent piece over at Kidlit. Please go and read it. Now you might think, "Why do I need to read about writing for kids? I'm a fully-grown adult author." If you think that, I'm sorry to say that you betray an extreme ignorance of the writing process and its demands. Only in the details of age-pitching are there any differences between writing for any age group. We all work to the same standards - in fact, I'd argue that in many ways the standards you have to adhere to in children's writing are tougher. Anyway, in terms of ideas becoming fully-grown stories, what Mary at Kidlit has to say is utterly applicable.

So, my answer to the ideas question is now: "Getting ideas is easy: everyone does it. It's growing an idea into a story that takes time and skill and determination."

People also say that getting published is a combination of talent, luck and hard work. I'd go so far as to say that the only really lucky bit is the moment the idea comes - as Brahms says, like a gift - and everything else is the talent and hard work.

To illustrate something of what I've been saying about how ideas come and how writers process them, can I ask you to go over to Jane Smith's blog, where I relate the very lucky moment which sparked the idea for Wasted, my latest novel? Unfortunately, you can't put comments there any more because Jane is moving her blog over to a fab new website, so do come back and comment here. Please! It does illustrate how luckily an idea can come and how the idea sometimes needs a long, long time to grow. If I'd written the book when I first had the idea - before I was ever published - it would have been very different and I very much doubt it would be getting the reviews that Wasted is getting. That idea really did need nurturing and I don't think I could have done it all those years ago.

Luckily, I didn't!

OUTLINE and SYNOPSIS

A request to blog about outlines and another to blog about synopses makes it sensible to do both at the same time. Authors are often frightened about both. Bite the bullet, folks, and do it, OK?

(Erm, I have just read this post of mine from a year ago, in which I professed to be terrified of synopses. Silly me. Maybe I've learnt a lot the last year. Maybe practice makes almost perfect, or at least better, or at least less scary?)

What's the difference between an outline and a synopsis?

An outline is a detailed ...er...outline of everything that happens in your book, including sub-plots and minor characters. The purpose of the outline is to ensure that the plot all hangs together.

A synopsis is much shorter (and harder to write); it shows perfectly what the book is like and what it's about, without the need for chronological outlining. A synopsis omits sub-plots and minor characters. It tells us who the MC(s) is/are and their motivations, sets up the conflict, setting, theme, voice and denouement. The purpose of the synopsis is to sell the book and the idea, and give the agent or editor a very clear idea as to what this book is like. It must be brilliantly crafted and the more time you spend on it, the better.

When might you need them?

You are highly unlikely to need to show an outline to anyone in order to sell your book. The person who most needs an outline is ...you. Well, in my case at least, as my memory is shocking and I can't possibly remember what happens in my own books. It helps clarify the time-line, too.

You are highly likely to need a synopsis in order to sell your book. It will usually go with the covering letter and sample chapters. Even published authors are likely to need to write synopses for their editors before their editors can wave a contract under their faces.

Why do authors hate writing them?

Writing an outline is boring because you have to put so much in. Writing a synopsis is painful because you have to leave so much out. Both usually fail to convey what you really want to tell the world about your book.

So, the answer to the question, "How do I do an outline?" is: you just say what happens, in what order, giving the POV. Just lay it out as clearly as possible and be as brief as you can while fitting everything in.

And the answer to the question, "How do I do a synopsis?" is only a bit more complicated.

Top tips for synopses

• Keep it brief. How brief? Different people will give you different rules, for one good reason: there is no single rule. If you want a rule: keep within two sides of A4, though you'll get agents / editors who don't mind if it's a bit longer. One side is likely to be preferable to two - ie, generally, the shorter the better. I have heard it said that single-spacing is fine - fine, whatever. I care not whether it is single-spaced or triple, as long as it's clear. If I was an agent I'd probably prefer double. But then, "Mine's a double" kind of rolls off my tongue. Honestly, spacing in synopses doesn't require a firm rule.
• Make sure you say what genre it is, and what length. Mention the setting. We need to know.
• Always make it 3rd person (but say if it's written in 1st).
• Present usually works best for a synopsis.
• Say what happens in the end.
• Omit minor characters and sub-plots.
• Don't include unanswered questions, such as, "Will Jeff save the world?"
• Don't tell the reader how exciting / brilliant the story is.
• Make the writing tight - you are a writer and everything you write should be up to standard.

Other than that, you can make your own decisions about the form of your synopsis. For example, one that I've just written begins with what could be the "blurb" on the back cover, then has a paragraph on each of the two main characters and what they are about - because it is their actions which form the narrative and so their provenance and motivations are crucial. Then I briefly outline the main parts of the story, making it sound like a rounded whole. (I hope!)

Not easy to write, and therefore something that we shy away from, but writing a synopsis at any stage (before or after writing the book) can be a very useful and focusing act.

Edited to add two tips from blog readers - 
Emma Darwin says: "The best tip I've ever had for writing synopses is to write it in a single sentence: your hook, if you like. Then expand that to a paragraph. Then finally expand that to a full page. That way, instead of agonising over what to leave out and feeling the book looks limp and lifeless as a result, you're starting with the core conflict, and only adding what fleshes it out most effectively."

And Gemma Noon: "Extra bit of advice, though: get someone to read through your synopsis who hasn't got a blind clue what your book is about - you've never discussed it, they've never beta read it, never seen a draft if possible. It is ridiculuously easy to leave out crucial info in a synopsis because you know the info backwards; an editor / agent doesn't."

No excuses now: just do it!

ANYONE FOR NANOWRIMO??

Any of you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? Do you even know what it is?? To find out, and to find out about my experiences, read how I blogged about it after doing a private version with some other children's writers and then check out the official site.


When I did my Nanowrimo, I found it very positively challenging and interesting. It was tiring, sometimes frantic, but it energised rather than exhausted me. If you decide to join in the international one, PLEASE let us know how you get on. But do prepare for it  -  you must be at the right place in a piece of writing or idea and may need to make some alterations to your routines. You'll probably need to stock up on coffee and chocolate, too.

I'm not doing the official one, because I am not in the right place and, besides, one thing I learnt was that I could do it myself, or perhaps with a friend  -  a "writing buddy". What it mostly does is force you to find time to write, nagged  -  sorry, encouraged  -  by other people. It puts writing at the top of your to-do list (where it should already be for me but often isn't); it challenges your perceptions of what you can do, your habits and your entrenched beliefs in the writing process. All those things are good.

It's something you'll love or hate. It could change your life, or at least your writing life. And for many of us, that's the biggest part we want to change.

Even if you don't do a NaNoWriMo, do consider buying this fabulous book. It's genuinely eye-opening, and I say that as someone not addicted to self-help books or books that claim to sort out my life:

And if you'd like to swing
a few pennies my way
in doing so,
please buy it through this link.

BREAKING WRITING HABITS

Something for the weekend, as they say. A little thing to get you thinking, inspired by blogger, Twitterer and YA author, Emily Gale - read her post here first.

It got me thinking about something I've recently learnt: the things we believe are habits are just that - habits. And habits can (and very often should) be broken.

We say things about ourselves which sound like truths, but they may not be. Here are some things I've said about myself and which turned out not to be true when tested:

• I can't write fiction when other people are in the house. [Yes, I can if I negotiate untouchable space. I learnt this when my husband was home for six long months of "gardening" leave. We agreed that if I put a scarf on the door handle, he would never come in. That was a great way to get some secret chocolate eating done. But I did write. I had to.]
• I always write on a computer. [Not if I don't have access to one. I learnt this when I travelled to the Isle of Wight to stay in Alfred Noyes' house as the guest of his grandson and at the suggestion of his daughter; my laptop spookily stopped working on the train down there and didn't start working again until I was nearly home. Spooo-ky. Now I quite often write on paper, with a pen. It feels very wonderful. It doesn't look very wonderful but I can learn to deal with that too.]
• I can't write on trains or in hotel rooms. [I tried it and I could. Simple.]
• I couldn't write fantasy. [I just did.]
• I don't like short stories. [Until I read Tania Hershman's The White Road, published by Salt. For some reason, I can't do Amazon links any more but you can find her somehow.]
  

We do two things wrong, I think. [Well, I do many things wrong, but in this context just two.]

1. We make excuses for ourselves for why we don't write more, more often, more easily. "I can't write on trains" is so much more valid than "I find writing really difficult and sometimes even boring and sometimes even quite impossible."
2. We create perfect imagined situations for writing - little routines, mascots, mantras [such as tidy desks, or cups of coffee, special pens, silence, chocolate] and then spend far too long getting everything just right instead of getting on with the task in hand.

Crikey, I've even said that I can't write until I've hoovered behind the fridge. Leaving aside extreme work avoidance such as fridge-hoovering [and I've written about essential Work Avoidance Strategies here - no, silly woman, NOT essential, entirely optional] there are plenty of things we do before we write. I'll check all my email addresses, put the laundry on, tidy my desk, stuff that takes so long that I need another cup of coffee just to recover.

And so I have a challenge for you. Next time you have a time when you're meant to be writing, as in proper writing, the difficult stuff, the real important meaningful stuff, do this:

EITHER [see, I'm so kind that I'm giving you a choice]:

1. Write down all the things you normally do before you'll write; include the conditions you think are ideal, whether it's the silence, the tidiness, the coffee or whatever.
2. Refuse to allow yourself any of them. Create for yourself the opposite, if possible - the noise, the untidiness, the tea instead of coffee [yuck]. And then write - and don't stop until you've written 1000 words. Doesn't matter what the words are like, just write them.
3. Eat chocolate

OR
1. Go and write somewhere you've never written before. Anywhere: a café, another room, the park, a station, the kitchen, lying on your stomach on the floor, in the bath. Write 1000 words.
2. Eat chocolate.

That [chocolate-eating] is the only habit you should never break. After all, you couldn't write without chocolate, could you?

This is a picture of me actually in Alfred N's house, reading The Highwayman. What you can't see is that in the background I am also listening to his voice read the poem on an ancient cassette lent to me by his grandson.

PS - if you're interested in my personally epiphanal experience of that trip, here you are. Something else for the weekend.

POINTY THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: 2 - IDEAS

Continuing my series of little pointy points while I try to improve my time management skills and deal with book festival generated overload, here's one prompted by catdownunder's comment in which she reminded me painfully of that most hackneyed question that all authors get. A lot.

Pointy thought. "Where do you get your ideas from?" is the wrong question:

Listen, ideas are nothing special. Ideas are just thoughts. Everyone has them. All the time. You can't help it. Where do your thoughts come from? They come from your head, or from someone saying something, or you reading something or simply having an unexplained train of thought.

What's interesting and important - no, essential - is what the writer does with those thoughts. Shaping them into a story is the hard bit, the bit you have to learn and practise. And practise some more. And improve all the time. And sweat over.

People sometimes say to me, "Why don't you write a story about ...?" or "You should write a story about that." Well, yes, that's a thought. But it's not an idea until it's grown a lot, and in my head is where it grows. I nurture it with questions like "What if?" and "What would happen then?" and "How would it affect the story if that happened?" and "Who are the characters who will make this story grow into a full and fascinating shape?" and, crucially, "What problems am I storing for myself if I start down that particular ideas road?"

Because thinking of the idea is easy - shaping it into something that works as a piece of fiction is much much harder.

And you can do it in a formulaic way or you can do it in an original way. I can't do formulae - they bore me rigid, as reader and writer - but formulae can be very successful.

So, ask not where I get my ideas: ask how I turn them into stories that work. And for that I only have one answer: damned hard work.

NANOWRIMO - WHY? BECAUSE ...

I do have a habit of doing mad things. Frequently I regret it. Usually in the middle of the night. I once took a test to see whether I was a risk-taker. I scored pathetically on the type of risk which involves physical danger - like sitting by a window when at any moment a pigeon might come crashing through - but impressively bravely on "new experience-seeking".

If there was a category for "things no sane person would do but which aren't actually even a teensy bit dangerous" that would be my type of risk.

So, doing a NaNoWriMo is pretty much in that category. (A Nanothingy, btw, is where a group of idiot writers decide to write 50,000 words in a month. You're meant to do it while having a normal working life, though you will not be normal by the end of it.)

I am fascinated by several aspects but I'll share just three with you. And I'm going to be briefish because a) my posts are often too long (though none of you has been cruel enough to tell me so) and b) I've, er, got 5,000 words to write tonight.

1. Changing your writing habits is a good thing
We get into ruts. People ask writers things like "Where do you write?" or "When do you write?" and we have answers. We shouldn't have answers. Whatever your answer is now, why not change it? Our brains are wired to love change. They get excited by it, pumping out dopamine, the chemical that makes us learn, and live, and love to live and learn. This week, I've changed. I was a keyboard-addicted-email-addicted-writing-is-a-last resort-can't-write-unless-I've-vacuumed-the-dog kind of a writer, but I'm now a writer who can write With A Pen On Paper, in the garden, in a coffee shop, on a bus with yackety people around me; I'm a writer who writes first and does tasks later. This is a revelation.

2. "No Plot? No Problem!" - the book by the founder of Nanowrimo, Chris Baty - is a must-read for authors. I rarely say that anything is a must-read, but this is. If you don't find something in it that excites or challenges or improves you, I'll eat my novel. I've never read a book about how to write a novel and never wanted to, but this is a totally different book about how to write a novel - it shows you how to write your novel, not how novels are written or what to put in them. Everything from time management made sexy (que?) to how to bribe, terrify or blackmail yourself or your friends into writing is covered.

3. The important thing is to turn off your internal editor. As Baty says, "The first law of exuberant imperfection is essentially this: the quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy." You're just supposed to write, get that first draft down, and allow it to be substandard. For me, it's hard not to re-write every sentence five times before going on to the next one. But it feels so much better to get some kind of flow and I used to be able to - I'm just getting it back, that freedom to write rubbish and deal with it later.

The way Nanowrimo works is that you all encourage each other. Or threaten, bribe, goad, jeer at or otherwise abuse each other. On Saturday, one of the participants and I were being silly on Facebook - "bet you can't" / "oh yes, I can" / "I'll raise you 5,000" / "losER" and in the end we challenged each other to write 10,000 words on Sunday. I woke up on Sunday with a migraine and she had a serious hangover (shame on you, Gillian ...) but we were both at our desks. (Yes, OK, I see this isn't sounding attractive.) And we wrote, oh boy did we write. Neither of us reached 10,000 - well, I could have, of course, but I felt sorry for her with her hangover, so I generously eased up and took another couple of codeine. But none of our several thousand words would have been written if we hadn't been doing this. Which feels pretty good.

Writing a novel is hard. Writing it with other people pushing and encouraging you is a whole lot easier. I recommend it. You don't have to wait for the official Nanowrimo to start - get a group of friends together online and just do it. Go to the website here for everything you need to start one. Or do a smaller challenge - anything to break whatever habits might be holding you back. (And you'll never know till you try.)

And even if you don't do anything vaguely Nanoesque, do remember:

• you can (and often should) change your habits or at least challenge them
• it really is worth reading this book:

Mind you, I have only done a week. In another three, I could be a wreck. I could really regret this whole post and be cursing the day Chris Baty ever decided not to be a normal person doing a normal job.

But at least I took the risk.

PIGEON COMPETITION RESULTS

Well, well, my husband surprised me. He went for the literary novelist. Hmm, note to self: the pen is mightier than the sword.

Here's Harry's verdict on your pigeon post pieces. (By the way, he is a man of few words so don't expect any gushing):

"I congratulate the bloggers and their creativity. Every entry brought a smile or a shiver. All should win prizes. (Steady on there. You're not that nice to me.)

I especially commend:
For wacky, original, left fieldness - bshanks (the Geisha girl)
For cool language - Jan
For wit - Rebecca (the troll) (don't make personal remarks about my blog-readers, please)
For nice try but too many words - Ebony (yeah, Ebony, read the submission guidelines, why dontcha? He liked that one a lot but he's a rule-follower so you had to go)
For management training advice - Phoenix (heh? He doesn't normally like management training advice.)

But, the winner for me - and this is because I find the evocation of war zones heartbreaking and scary - is Sally Zigmond - "when her window shattered she knew he had lied."

Well done everyone. A humble capitalist salutes your skill - all of you.
Best wishes, Harry Morgan"

Aww. Thank you, Harry. (Edited to include the words, for Sally's benefit: A very good choice - you are, after all, a man of taste.)

I should add (because it's my blog and I can interfere if I want to) that, because he hasn't been following this blog properly, he missed the cleverness of Sandra and Sarah, who both did pigeon-related spoof query letters (and one in rhyme and mentioning Werther's toffees, no less). I also loved Emma's disappearing garden idea, and Elen's detective-themed one. Really, there were loads of others he or I could have mentioned but life's a bitch. We laughed, a lot, and then we laughed again. And then we realised that a decision had to be made so I went and had another glass of wine and he made his decision. Which is as it should be.

I thought the whole thing was fascinating. So many different writers, so many different personalities, so many different takes on the same subject. Every genre was there, and every mood, from urban to surreal, from literary to chick-lit, from dark to light and from sensual to prosaic. There were the ones who'd done their research, the ones who'd used local knowledge and political topicality (comparing us to our fairly near neighbour, Fred G, are you??) and the ones who led others in new directions.

It was the world of books in microcosm.

Then too, there's the reader. Oh, the reader. The unpredictability of another person's response; the need for a writer to understand that not everyone will "get" what you were trying to do; the knowledge that your reader will judge you while not knowing what was in your mind, or without appreciating your talent or wit. Every reader comes from somewhere different, brings different desires and meanings and pleasures to the words he/she reads. And likes it differently. You don't know the reader but the reader will judge you as though you were writing especially for him.

So, when you write, and then you send it out, you take a leap into the unknown. You can't know how it will be received.

Which is so the scary bit. Trouble is, readers just don't know how hard it is. Damn them.

And then, of course, there's trying to sell books, which I've just realised I have spectacularly failed to do: my husband just picked as the winner the one person who'd already said she was going to buy Deathwatch anyway. So, that's one lost sale and we don't get to eat today. Thanks, mate. Back to my garret.

Meanwhile, thanks to everyone, congratulations to all the named writers and especially to Sally.

BEWARE OF PRAISE

Praise is very like chocolate:

• it tastes great at the time
  
• too much of it is (regrettably) bad for you
  
• it (regrettably) needs to be balanced with the sensible stuff
• once tasted, you want more and more of it
• people give it to each other to show love, to bribe them, to make friends, and because giving and receiving are linked
  
• you should sometimes reject it
• it has been scientifically proven to be beneficial to mood

Pause to go and eat some, just so's I can remember. Method-writing again.

Anyway.

So, we all need it. Praise, I mean. But actually, it's not like chocolate because ALL chocolate is Truth Incarnate (except mint flavoured white chocolate, which is pure evil and doesn't deserve to be called chocolate) but some praise is False and Must Be Rejected Forthwith.

And I don't mean that it's false because the person delivering the praise is lying. Just that they're wrong, irrelevant and not worth listening to. Sorry. No really. I am. I don't like saying this. But believing that sort of praise is the worst favour you can do yourself as a writer. Would I lie to you after all this time?

Praise from someone who doesn't know what the hell they're talking about is worse than mint flavoured white chocolate. Or those pale ones from Marks & Spencer that have absolutely no chocolate in them at all and make me gag. Oh and M&Ms - I nearly walked out of the cinema when my husband was eating M&Ms. All that vacant crunching and crappy plastic smell and not a hint of genuine cocoa. Am I showing myself up as a chocolate snob? Well, in that case I 'm a praise snob too.

You should become a praise snob. If you really want to hone your writing and get published, learn to do two things with praise:

1. store it in the cosy bit of your brain to boost you when you have no chocolate
   
2. analyse it, judge it, assess it, and be HONEST about it (Is that 4 things? Call me generous.) And sometimes, reject it.
   

Here's my fool-proof guide to assessing praise, in the context of "Is This Praise That Is In The Slightest Bit Relevant To My Getting Published?" Of course, praise about your hair-style, dress sense, new lipstick colour or new car is entirely outwith the remit of this blog, and I would have to charge a fee for such extension of my adjudicatory powers. Essentially, all writing-related praise should be thoroughly discarded (after thanking the kind donor politely and not actually saying that you've been told to ignore them by a crabbit old bat from Scotland) if it emanates from the mouths or keyboards of the following. Oh, and may I say that as individuals these are often perfectly lovely people, just that they're not qualified to praise your writing in any kind of practical sense, though they may be accidentally correct?

• your parents, grandparents, children - other blood relatives may very occasionally give acceptable advice, but only if they are not:
• members of your writing group - I'm sorry, now I've really blown it. Sorry, guys: it's that you've got issues that get in the way. Like, you're really wanting to boost the self-esteem of the writer, and it's lovely of you, it really is, but you're psychologically, morally and ethically connected, (and you may be actually in their house and drinking their wine) and it's not possible for you to be objective (unless you're really cool, and I don't mean cool-trendy); OK, I relent: occasionally your writing group may have a point but ... will you know when that point arrives??
  
• other unpublished writers, unless they have publishing credentials, in which case listen to them (unless they fall into the blood-relly category)
  
• anyone who doesn't have publishing credentials or some other reason to Know
  
• especially the above if they're sober - alcohol is a great honesty boost
  
• your friend
• your dog
• anyone on a blog
• anyone on Amazon
• anyone posting an anonymous review, as it's probably your friend, dog, parent, publisher

Look, I know you hate me now - and we were getting along so well. I KNOW praise is important - god, I'm delicate enough that I need it too. I'm absolutely not saying ignore all praise: I'm saying assess it. I'm saying be honest with yourself. Some praise is fab but some is simply air. Poisonous air at that.

Ask yourself two questions:

1. Does this person actually genuinely know what they're talking about?
2. Is this person giving the praise entirely out of the blue and not because I happen to have put them on the spot by asking them for an "honest opinion"?
   

This post has come about because I see people being held back from publishing potential by clutching at empty praise and ignoring the much rarer really constructive criticism, which could actually improve their writing and pull them towards genuine success. Of course I love it when people say nice things to me but I grow much more from the negative points - the girl who asked me why I wrote such long chapters, the comments from readers who didn't like a certain ending - and then the praise from the specific people who I most respect because they KNOW and they are HONEST and I DIDN'T ASK THEM FOR AN OPINION.

There are people I know who are renowned for being honest in their criticism and those are the ones I work hardest to please because I know they won't say it's good if it's not. I so respect people with the guts to be honest - and I admit that I'm not one of them. (You surprised??) I know that occasionally when a friend has written something I didn't really rate, I've said some nice things. That's the problem, it's so hard not to. People say, "Be honest," but they don't mean it ...

The worst places are some online communities and forums. You see people going on-line and off-loading and everyone piles in with all the oh dahlings, and poor you, and don't worry WE know you're fab, dahling. When they haven't even read the thing that's been rejected. And of course it's lovely and kind and generous and right in lots of ways but in terms of becoming published it's so so so detrimental.

I feel really bad after this, but I'll have to steal myself and click "Publish". I really don't mean you to reject all praise but a) don't go seeking it because if you ask for an honest opinion from a friend/colleague/equal it will be highly unlikely to be entirely honest and if not entirely honest then somewhat pointless (except in a chocolately sort of way) and b) when you get praise, consider this: that if you accept praise, logically you should equally accept the negative stuff. Such as the rejections by professionals ...

And now I really am going to wimp out: you're all fabulous, dahlings. Think about it - how does that sound?

Perhaps I should more constructively say: hold all praise briefly to your heart and then let it go and focus on improving your writing.

Before I go, I should also pass you over to a post on How Publishing Really Works a while back, which illustrates this very beautifully and much more pithily than my typically over-long rant has. (Oops, Jane, that sounds like praise.)

DEFINE A TEENAGE NOVEL

OK, so two posts in a row about teenage fiction is hardly balanced, but then I never made any claim to be balanced and any time I'm asked to walk along a white line I find myself becoming suspiciously unbalanced. Besides, your comments and interest in the subject were really all the excuse I needed, if I needed any excuse to talk about one of my pet subjects, which I don't.

Do we need to define a teenage novel in order to write one?
Some teenage authors whom I respect claim not to be able or wish to define or even particularly think about what a teenage novel is when they write one. Others are with me, enjoying trying to pin it down without restricting it, and trying to reach a level of understanding that helps us identify with our readers as perfectly as possible. The former authors prove that you don't have to. But I think those authors are very few and far between and happen to write books which happen to be teenage in tone simply because those happen to be the books they want to write.

For the rest of us who dare to tread the tight-rope between writing a great story from the heart and writing a great story that will hit specific readers in the heart, and for those of us who want to understand our market, we need some analysis and some knowledge.

PLEASE NOTE: a teenager, like any other reader, is perfectly entitled to read and enjoy ANY book. When I talk about "teenage novels" I don't mean "novels that teenagers often enjoy". I mean "novels aimed specifically at teenagers" (but which other readers may indeed enjoy).

It would help if you first read my last post - COMMON MISTAKES WHEN WRITING FOR TEENAGERS. In fact, without it you won't understand what I'm about to say, especially about safety-nets. Yes, safety-nets - essential tools for writing for young people.

A perfect illustration
If you are prepared to borrow or buy three books, I can show you with absolute clarity what makes a teenage book a teenage book. A quick read of the first few chapters of these three books will illustrate all I am about to say. Without reading the books, however, you'll still get a pretty good gist of what I mean from what follows. All three start with a young person being bullied or set upon at or near school, which is one reason they make a great comparison:

Bad Girls by Jacqueline Wilson
Malarkey by Keith Gray
The Illumination of Merton Browne by JM Shaw

Bad Girls is not a teenage book - for a start, the protagonist is too young. The language is simplifed, with short sentences and gentle vocabulary, and there is a great deal of protection by adults. You can see the mesh of the safety-net. It's not particularly relevant to our topic except that it's when you then read Malarkey that you see the great leap that the reader must take, both in terms of topic and safety-net distance, to go from one book to the next. Bearing in mind that the reader of Bad Girls may well be 10 or 11 but that an 11/12 year old could easily be reading and enjoying Malarkey, and you see the leap the reader has made in a very short theoretical time. The main character in Malarkey is 16ish, which, according to the "rules" of writing for young people means that our intended readership is up to 14/15.

But then consider The Illumination of Merton Browne. There is a level of violence (extreme domestic abuse) which goes beyond what we'd be able or probably want to offer teenagers. There's a total absence of safety net. There is a great deal of swearing. The age of the character is interesting too - at the time of writing he has left school and is thinking back to his childhood, relating events which happened mostly around his eleventh birthday, and much of the initial action takes place as he arrives at secondary school, aged eleven. A teenage book would not normally be this retrospective: it would normally take place during the relevant teenage years of the reader (although earlier episodes might well be related) and in fact cover a very small part of those years. So, by having the main character an adult looking back to being mostly eleven, we already skew it for the teenage reader and make it not a teenage book.

However, it's a book which many older teenagers might like - if they could get their hands on it, which they won't in a school library in the UK or US or Australia or anywhere else I can think of. unless the librarian really wants to lose his/her job.

Why have teenage books anyway?
Ooh, I could write a whole post on this, and have already written about it in the Scotsman, but I see they have put it very annoyingly onto their "premium pages" and I'm sure you don't want to pay for it. Anyway, maybe another day. Consider simply that some people still argue that teenage books are unnecessary because readers should do what "we always did", ie go straight from kids' books to adult books. Thing is, (amongst other things), adult books have changed in the last 20-30 years and you simply cannot go from Bad Girls to Merton Browne. Or at least not without experiencing severe trauma on the way.

What you said
Some of you posted comments about eg whether Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books were teenage or not. DanielB and anonymous / tbrosz were talking about whether something was "quite right" / felt properly teenage in those and other stories which we might have thought were teenage. I haven't read those Pratchett books but I have always thought of him as one of those writers who isn't a teenage writer but who writes books that many teenagers love. I'm guessing that it's the "adult perspective" of the story that you are referring to and have noticed. Yes, in my view this would be something which would make them "not deliberately teenage books". And it's once you've identifued the "teenageness" or otherwise that (I think) you can fully understand what teenage really is. And you clearly have!

Another one to think about is perhaps Doctor Who - much loved by teenagers for generations but (you'd agree??) not exactly "teenage"? Like Pratchett? And Children of the Stones?

Which I guess brings me to my attempt at a definition, granted that all definitions break down when you start to pick at their edges, and that there will be exceptions, and that books are just books forchristsake and why should they have to be pigeon-holed ...

The "definition"
I see a teenage novel as a story with a teenage character(s) at the centre, written from a teenage viewpoint, which explores a situation which teenage readers often fear, aspire to, dream about or experience, and which provides an emotional connection to themselves as teenagers now. It has no visible boundaries or safety-nets and may be frightening, cutting-edge, brutally honest, shocking or sad, (but doesn't have to be) but in fact there are boundaries of acceptability and hope:

"it takes them to the edge but will not throw them over."
That's my definition anyway.

Of course, I can't shut up when I should so I feel obliged to give a few extra "rules", some of which I touched on in the previous article but which bear repeating:

• the teenage characters find their own solutions because the story is about them and not the adult secondary characters. Get the adults out of the way. Kill them if necessary (preferably before the book starts, or at least before we get to care)
  
• though some teenage novels are deep and some are shallow (as with adult books), the language does not patronise by trying to be simple
• although the voice is teenage, this does not mean you have to sound like a teenager - see my post on voice. The voice has to be appropriate, a voice they'd like to listen to. ie not a teacher, parent, middle-aged person, sad git, kid
• the protagonist is usually a bit older than the intended readership (this applies to writing for younger children too)
  
• no message, remember - or at least not an in your face one. You're a writer not a teacher.
  
• the pace is likely to be faster and tighter than in adult writing
• a teenager (see my book Blame My Brain for a defence and explanation of the details of this, and for an entertaining read, and to save your sanity if you happen to share your living quarters with a teenage specimen) may be 11 years old, but by the age of 15/16 is off your readership radar
  
• the writer must be aware that the level of literary criticism of plot, structure, language, themes to which the book will be subjected by the young reader will be intense - if you think you're writing for kids and that kids don't know how to tell you what's wrong with your book, you're in for a big shock!

So, Amy-Jane, I don't know if this answers your questions, and the others who contacted me off-blog! In my opinion, yes, you do need to know whether your book is for teenagers or not, but you could be lucky and have pitched it perfectly anyway ...

Daniel and Jane - re the 70s series the Children of the Stones, it's worth remembering too that teenage fiction really had only just got going at this time, all in the US - with SE Hinton's The Outsiders and Paul Zindell's The Pigman (God, that's brilliant and devastating in a simple way that only teenage writing can be) both in the late 60s, and then the fabulously dark Robert Cormier - OMG I am The Cheese* - from the 70s. He, incidentally, was edited by my main editor. (Main? See, I'm so rubbish I need more than one ...). Anyway, I guess the rules and possibilities of teenage / YA fiction were so new by that time that adults still very much ruled the roost. Whereas now, we know who's in charge, don't we?

*title of book, not an existential statement

One other point - teenage or YA? YA is more a US term, though we often use it in the UK too. To be honest, no difference is usually implied between the two terms, though sometimes YA refers to a slightly older teenager, but I think this distinction makes it too complicated and unnecessarily pigeon-holey. Outside the book world, young adult refers to 18-25s (eg in medical terminology) so it can be confusing for people outside when we talk about YA.

In the last post I said you had to be able to reel off at least ten favourite teenage authors or books and some of you enthusiastically came up with your own lists (full marks to you). Well, of course, I have a few more because you can't keep a keen reader down:

• John Marsden's Letters from the Inside
• Alice Kuipers' Life on the Refrigerator Door (though you'll need a lot of chocolate to get your life back on track after either of those)
• Adele Geras' Ithaka - nothing to do with the fact that she reads this blog; I'd just forgotten how much I'd liked it and it's very different from the dark cold ones on my previous list. Adele writes books for many different ages but Troy and Ithaka, which fit my criteria for teenage novels, are my favourite.
  

And now I'd probably better stop talking about teenage books before the rest of you disappear. Next, we'll have How To Be a Lovely Publishable Author. Or something. And relatively soon I'll be able to tell you what topics and dates I'm doing talks on in the Edinburgh Book Festival. You never know, I might just be doing one on teenage writing, so then I'll be able to rabbit on for a whole hour. And there'll certainly be one on How To Make a Publisher Say Yes ... Just think, you could actually come and see my boots in real life.

Have a lovely weekend. I had a near death (not exaggerating) incident on the motorway yesterday and made my first ever 999 call, from a stationary and exceptionally vulnerable position in the middle of an intersection between the UK's two biggest motorways (yes, I know, nothing compared with US motorways but they are Big To Us), having been hit by a lorry which didn't stop to see that it had knocked us off the road. So I am planning to count my blessings for being alive. I think wine and chocolate may well be necessary in extra quantities to get me back to a normal mental place.

By the way, if you ever see a car stopped in an incredibly stupid place, risking being smashed to pieces by speeding cars from six lanes of two motorways, I would ask you to consider that it might not be there on purpose. Some of the drivers that passed us clearly had not worked this out, judging from the way they hooted their horns at us and shook their fists.

Pah! Give me teenagers any day.

WRITER'S BLOCK AND AN APOLOGY

Apologies to those of you who lovely people who commented or contacted me personally to say they really liked my idea of doing online one-to-one tuition: I'm afraid it's not going to happen, or at least not in the foreseeable future. I was going to do it, really: I spent the weekend planning it, creating a new blog to give you all the info, working everything out in huge detail. The blog was all ready to go live. Just needed to click a button, though first I was going to ask lovely Jane Smith of How Publishing Really Works to say what she thought. While I was doing it, I admit that a major part of me was screaming NO! You see, although I love teaching and would have enjoyed so many aspects of this idea, I have a habit of doing too much, spending too long at my computer and not enough time getting a life, and I know that I am supposed to be writing books, doing talks, and all the other paraphernalia of being an author (including this blog, which I really enjoy doing), all of which would be enough even if I didn't have a husband, dog and occasionally two daughters. Not to mention the chocolate habit.

But I wanted to do it, and I'm an idiot, so I was ploughing on. Then, yesterday evening, my husband and I were going to the cinema, just about to leave the house, when the phone rang. It was a friend to say that a good friend of ours had died. Just like that. Out of the so-called blue.

I don't believe in signs, but I do believe in listening to yourself. And my first rational and coherent thought was a cliché: life's too short. Then another one: you only get one life. And finally a line from my favourite film, The Life of Brian: "Life's a piece of shit, when you look at it."

But life isn't a piece of shit - life's good, mostly. Life is for living and loving and so I'm going to live it and love it, and that means making time for myself, family and friends, chocolate, novels, the best words I can produce in the best order I can design. And that means no new and possibly exhausting projects like an on-line writing school, at least for now. Even though I'd have got a lot of satisfaction from it, it's not what I know I should be doing and I know this is the right decision. I hope you understand.

What I will do is include some posts about the various things I'd have taught you if you had signed up for my mad idea. This blog started as purely advice about getting published, but since the most important step towards getting published is writing the best possible book, I should and will include some advice about that, and I'll focus especially on the most common things people do wrong in their writing.

Meanwhile, I am myself learning the brutal reality of writer's block. It does feel as though something physical is sticking there, that if I tried to get back to the novel in progress today it just wouldn't work. Creativity needs space and there's no space in there right now. If I sit at my desk and stare at the screen, nothing will come and the more nothing comes the worse it feels. So, I'm going to switch the computer off and I'm going for a long walk with the dog. She won't be pleased, as it's raining and she's not stupid, but we're going. Walking and fresh air - even wet fresh air - always work for me.

Normal service and "crabbit old bat" sense of humour will be resumed. Just don't go away and please do take care.

IN DEFENCE OF AUTHORS, AND ABOUT TIME TOO

First an apology: this is not the Thursday light relief that I promised. That story of extraordinary and hilarious incompetence is coming, I promise (something for the weekend?) but I have a need to offload something that is seriously bugging me first.

Warning: crabbit old bat in major full swing. But with a difference. Today, I’ve had enough of criticising my fellow authors, unpublished and published - because we’re all in it together, dahlings - for things like “Inexcusable Ignorance” and general tawdry and unprofessional behaviour. I think I even perhaps once mentioned drunkenness and unpleasantness and possibly arrogance. How could I? Anyway, I’m going to turn the tables. Yes, I am. Now it’s the turn of you nasty mean editors and other forms of publisher, and even booksellers. Because you just don’t understand us, you really don’t.

I feel that in the very few weeks that this blog has been in existence, I have had many approving noises from (wonderful) publishers and (gorgeous) booksellers and I’ve accepted them all like the pathetic, insecure gallery-playing author that I am. And I would not be surprised if you fabulous, long-suffering, aspiring authors were not sitting there weeping quietly and bravely at the crap I’ve been dealing out to you, allowing yourselves to be flagellated by the likes of me. (Please don’t get too excited by that concept - it’s really not nice and, anyway, I mean it only metaphorically.)

So now I say, ENOUGH! Let’s hear it for authors, and let me send a message to those powerful, cruel publishers and booksellers who hold us in their thrall. (Just what is a thrall anyway? I don’t know, but it sounds like a very nasty thing in which to be held.)

I should start by saying that of course I know, and have said before, that very occasionally an author lets the side down by behaving as though he (or even, more occasionally, she) has a brain the size of mouse genitalia, an ego in inverse proportion to said genitalia and an alcohol habit to match the inverse proportion. Occasionally, it must also be said, authors are exceptionally rude and crass and many other unacceptable things. But APART from those few, we are simply misunderstood. And the sooner that editors and agents and booksellers understood this, the better for world peace and various other useful things.

So, let me, on behalf of my suffering writerly colleagues (to whom I apologise for all previous cruelty and mockery - though I don’t take it back, because it was entirely justified most of the time) enlighten those professionals who take such pleasure in berating us for our failure to understand the errors of our ways.

1. It’s a real bugger being an author, sometimes. Honestly, it’s over-rated as a holiday destination.
   
2. We suffer constant insecurity. (Most of us. And we hate the others, so that’s OK.) Well, how wouldn’t we be insecure, when people regularly tell us we’re rubbbish, even once we’re published? And if anyone says nice things, they’re most likely to be a) our publicity people b) our parents or c) deluded (which includes our parents).
3. Would you like it if your work was reviewed negatively and those negative comments were put on the internet for like EVER? Would you like it if your audience went on message-boards and said a load of rubbish about your oeuvre? The fact that this ignorant rubbish is often written by people who should be asleep instead of messaging crapness at 3 in the morning, and that they can’t spell, doesn’t make it hurt less. Actually, it makes it hurt more to think that such a stupid person would care enough to have gone online to over-share - I mean if the book was just mediocrely awful, wouldn’t they just have ignored it and watched re-runs of the X-Factor?
4. Some unpublished authors absolutely and utterly deserve to be published and have a glittering career in front of them - perhaps far in front of them but distance is like size: not everything. No one should assume that because an author has failed to be published (yet), they are rubbish. Lynn Price of the phenomenal BehlerBlog was kind enough to be fabulously, well, kind, about my writing - which is a) wonderful of her and for me but b) confusing because in that case how come I was unpublished for so almost-soul-destroyingly long? The point being? The point being that for very many painful years I had regularly and horribly assumed that I wasn’t good enough and for that long I was the person that published writers (including me, until now) and editors and booksellers often knock: the wannabe no-hoper, the deluded idiot who really should just keep on with the day job because everything else - the dream - is nothing more than a dream.
5. We work for years and years and years (and in my case years) before we earn anything at all from our writing, because we love it are and drawn to it and driven to it and yet some (most) of us will never earn anything approaching a decent salary for it. No violins, please. And OK so some of us don’t deserve to earn anything from it, but we lay our heads and hearts (and actually sometimes lives, though I can’t claim such bravery myself) on the line in our belief that what we produce is art and matters. And what do we get for that? What we get is 96% of the world never having heard of us, 3.9% of the world messaging at 3 in the morning to say what rubbish we are and the remaining 0.1% being either related to us in some way, or pathetically undecided.
6. We cringe in abject mortification (and some) when we go into a bookshop and our books aren’t there and 99% of the time we slink out (after buying something we didn’t want, just to make us feel there was a point in being in the shop in the first place) and the other 1% of the time we pluck up courage to ask the busy and godlike bookseller if by any chance they might consider - pretty, pretty please - stocking our book because it’s quite a good book and it’s had some lovely reviews which unfortunately you, o glorious bookseller, don’t seem to have seen but if you were to consider stocking my humble little book I promise I will come in and give up my time - free, because of course my time is free since no one’s sodding well going to pay me for it - and do an event for you to bring five people into your shop because I’m such a loser (cue more cringing embarrassment and mortification), four of whom are related to me and the other one of whom came in looking for a birthday present for his mother but got forced or confused into listening when you locked the door. Trust me, it’s AWFUL doing the “how to help bookshops sell your book” thing, unless you have a monstrous ego, which I just don’t, so I apologise in utter shrivening abjectness to every bookseller whom I have failed to help sell my books. And they are many. Oh, how often I have slunk away, worm-like, and how often you have never seen me. I have never put my books face out (yeah, I know, I’m really rubbish as an author - please don’t tell my publisher /agent /editor /daughters / dog and everyone else who relies on me to earn some money for them) or done anything remotely annoying or in-your-face - and more’s the pity, according to my publishers and my royalty statement. I am sorry, so sorry, and please forgive me and please stock my next book because it will be much much better than anything I’ve ever done and has a gorgeous cover, which you always say is the MAIN thing.
7. It’s a real bugger being an author sometimes. Frankly, it sucks. But you know what? We love it. So forget your violins and take back your sympathy because I’m changing nothing. Sorry, but I just can’t do enough to help you sell my books because I’m too shy and pathetic and actually, you know, I am supposed to be WRITING. And you are the bookseller and that’s why you do it so brilliantly and kind of that’s why I would like to think I’m the writer in this deal and you’re the bookseller / editor / publicity person / EXPERT. And yes I KNOW I am supposed to help but please just let me go home and write. Where the hell is that garret I dreamt of for so long, and that delicious loneliness??

So anyway, calming down slightly (but not much) in the spirit of almost Valentine’s Day (omigod, better go out and buy something for him - maybe a BOOK, and if so then certainly and absolutely from Vanessa’s fabulous bookshop) let’s show a bit of a loving understanding for all those misunderstood authors out there. Yes, sometimes we're rubbish but we are trying not to be. We're doing our best to overcome our paltriness.

Yep, it’s a real bugger being an author sometimes. Which, to be honest, is why we eat chocolate. It gives us courage to brave all you scary, scary professionals. Chocolate is the only known antidote to insecurity. That and shoes.