This week we went to the excellent exhibition The Sun and the Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial at the Saatchi Gallery.

It’s simply conceived, organised in nine big and airy rooms, taking us from dawn to dusk and through the night. It features many striking images and objects from a diversity of times and places, and they offer us associations and archetypes found in many different cultures. The vitality of the sun, the mysteries of the moon: nothing too complex really, but a true commonality – an open and rich accounting of the world, and inclusive in a very easy way, without being heavy-handed or preachy.

Paintings, collages, textiles, costumes, installations, sculptures, Tarot cards, Aztec calendars, album covers, Ladybird books, Navajo weavings, Stonehenge, moon landings, and much much more. And the art created in workshops that’s shared in the learning centre has great vibrancy too. Such TREASURES.

I particularly liked the huge sun that is Helios by Luke Jerram. Where else can you sit in a deckchair and stare at the shapes that swirl on the surface of the sun?

Bold colours, bold textures, bold shapes. I loved it all. I’m sharing just a few of the photos I took below.

The obsessive-compulsive editor-curator in me as well as the believer in the rights of artists to be fully credited for their work is slightly ashamed that I didn’t get the names of all the wonderful contributors (though I discovered they are listed here).

But, tbh, I realise I too often find myself reading captionage rather than looking at pictures, and here, without thinking, I just found myself drawn into the images. Sometimes I need to ditch the words, stop taking notes, and immerse myself in the art.

And thanks to the Saatchi Gallery for holding this exhibition in honour of my next Tarot For Writers workshop! Celestial Navigations on Sunday 2 August is devoted to storytelling using the powerful associations of the Star, the Moon, and the Sun.

A writing experiment:

• How does the sun shine on to your story?

• What shadows are cast by the moon?

Celestial Navigations: Storytelling With the Star, the Moon and the Sun runs on Sunday 2 August – you can follow the link for booking information.

And The Sun and the Moon: Art Inspired By the Celestial is running at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea until 8 September. Go see it! One of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time.

On Monday my friend Bhanu and I went to see Origo, an installation by Delcy Morelos at the Barbican. It’s something else.

It’s a big ring of clay, steep and deep as a riverbank. You step inside the hollow wall of the ring. It’s dark, total black to start with, a void. The smells of cinnamon and cloves hit you: wow, who knew. You walk further in. Little slits of sunlight at floor level, turfy bits of roots above. You come out into the middle of the ring, into the sun. Brick pavers, sky, the tops of buildings. There’s nothing else there, another void, this time of glaring sunlight.

But there’s another doorway. You go back in again, back into the dark. It’s a little faster to adjust this time. This darkness is inviting. I wished there were little stools to sit upon and sniff the cinnamon and enjoy the darkness longer.

A big clay ring full of darkness and empty spaces. I loved it. Inspired by ‘ancestral Andean and Amazonian knowledge’, Origo takes its name from the Latin for origin. I could dwell upon the meaning of ancestral knowledge, but Origo didn’t make me think about origins. If anything, the week after our holiday to Germany and Denmark and Sweden, it made me think about destinations. Why we go places, what we do there. What we do anywhere.

This clay, this mud. It was so elemental. What went into its making? Tbh I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s monumental. Behold it. Some things should be seen and not heard or talked about.

Not talking. I’ve not posted on my blog in 2026. I wasn’t sure what I had to say! For various reasons it’s been an odd year. Though maybe every year is an odd year now.

At new year Bhanu told me to make a void. Do nothing. See what arises. A fix for restlessness, a mark for thresholds of life, a different and less rushed way of doing and being.

Initially I understood this to mean just the month of January, but after a passing remark in February it turns out she meant the whole of 2026.

Things did encroach on the nothing. Life does go on, one does have to work.

But there’s other things, and sometimes they’re too much. Social media, news media, podcasts backing up. I love the gardening reels and the animal memes, but they become an infinite scroll, and I’m better off picking up my secateurs or stroking the felty ears of a dog. But: try-hards and time-siphons and sundry other vampires, ‘content creation’ (ugh) on various platforms: that’s what embodied too much for me, and I resisted. Too much grabbing, too much noise. What did I have to add to all that? And what was I grabbing?

Which got existential quite quickly. Did I need to do a Swedish death clean? Or is there such a thing as a midlife Finnish rinse? Or maybe I’m just feeling the residue of my Saturn Return and no longer having patience for certain things (too much noise, etc., see above).

So the Void came easily.

Tbh I don’t need telling to do nothing, because I am really good at doing nothing.

Maybe not as good as my friend Angela, who takes months to write me first-class Alan Bennett-ish letters, and then WhatsApps me to say they are on their way, and then we wait to see what a first-class stamp does nowadays. Usually composed across many months, and often a dozen and once even two dozen pages long, her letters are full of the most exquisite everyday nothingnesses that are of course the true meaning of life: holidays, family news, books read, films seen, dishes made, random opinions, insurance claims for leaky ceilings, the decline of Royal Mail, and the disappearance of Marks and Spencer in Huddersfield. My kind of nothing.

Unless I am reading someone’s manuscript, or reading a book, or watching The Pitt, or pottering in the garden, I’m currently often doing nothing. Though even pottering in the garden is an aimless kind of nothing.

And then there’s the wicked nothingness of being on my phone. I’m even typing this on my phone! As my computer keeps overheating.

Doing nothing can perhaps be framed in other ways. Perhaps we can step out of the context of work, and think about leisure.

Bertrand Russell wrote an essay in praise of idleness. Its resistance of late-stage capitalism’s need for outcomes is a delight. He advocates ‘a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day’. Idealistic! But, he notes: ‘Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others.’

Anyway: back to doing something. On Monday Bhanu drew a card for me from Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe Tarot – this was a personal deck Rachel gave to Bhanu when they worked together. A personal deck that was physically MADE by Rachel and TRANSMITTED in the physical world. A deck that thus is MAGIC. Rachel is the greatest writer on Tarot, and her deck is one of the great ones even in its mass-produced form.

The card was the Ace of Stones. I used to want to pull Major cards to see what they have to tell me, but now I love to pull the Aces most of all. Rachel calls them gifts. ‘When Aces appear, miracles are afoot.’

The Stones in Shining Tribe are the Earth cards. The material realm and earthly matters that ground us. What earthly gifts do I enjoy, and share with others? What miracle can I make happen today?

Today, in fact, I went to the dentist and he fixed back a crown that fell out on holiday. In just a few minutes! An earthly gift indeed. I love my dentist. He’s good, and best of all he’s quick. A miracle-worker.

I use Tarot as a lens or a medium – a structure for daily practice and reflection. Its 78 cards give me 78 ways to think about my work, other people’s work, life in general. I know Tarot freaks some people out, but they’ve probably unsubscribed by now, so never mind.

I have to think more about what this Ace of Stones means to me. But it does have an Origo on it! Look, that ring of stone (clay) top left, inviting us into its triangular voids. Also, now I look again I see how delightfully phallic this card is. Rock hard like a stone too. Such things must be noted.

Anyway: the point of this post? I don’t know. I could relate some of this to the Buddhist idea of emptiness, but maybe today I just want to sing the praise of doing nothing. Sometimes I wish I was more outcome-oriented, but sometimes you just have to resist productivity culture and be in the moment. Sometimes you have to step out before stepping in again. Make a pause, sit in the dark, reprioritise.

Also: I have switched out podcasts for audiobooks. That has been a good fix. I never liked talk radio. The chatter! The grift! I’ve been listening to Dickens novels this year instead. Bleak House narrated by Miriam Margoyles is stand-out. I decided to take my time and turn my Dickens year into two, and for variety I’m currently listening to Interview With the Vampire narrated by Dan Bittner. I read it over thirty years ago, and I wanted to see if it’s still one of my favourite novels. It is! Maybe even moreso. I’m truly immersed. It’s such a feat of the imagination. Anne Rice was a genius. I can’t wait for the next season of the tv version to show here.

And: on 2 August there’s my next Tarot For Writers workshop. In Celestial Navigations, we’ll work with the Star, the Moon and the Sun, using the powerful associations of three of the Tarot’s most beautiful cards to direct our own stories.

Before that: on 11 July I’m doing a lecture on Writing With Tarot for members of the Artisan Tarot community.

And: on 8 September Kit de Waal and I are holding a talk on Building Your Own Creative Writing MA. I’m very excited about this. Kit and I are both passionate about empowering writers to find their own way in the worlds of writing and publishing, and in our talk we are going to guide writers to what they need to know about creating their own course of studies and resourcing their own writing practice. More on that later and elsewhere.

Other classes will be scheduled for the autumn. But I’m otherwise doing nothing this weekend. It’s Pride! It’s Fourth of July! Even though we’re in London. I’ll read some of my favourite American writers, watch some American telly.

Actually, I’m about to read some revised manuscript pages from writers I’m mentoring, and from a quick look that looks exciting too. I guess I’ve not been doing nothing at all.

First posted on my blog, 3 July 2026.

You can subscribe to my Substack below, or sign up for my mailing list here.

If you follow this link you will find my suggestions for a:

DIY MA in Creative Writing

It probably needs updating. I wrote that document in 2019, and my current self would recommend some streamlining, as there is a lot of stuff there, and overwhelm is a thing.

But for now the DIY MA in Creative Writing might have resources for interested writers making their own way in the world of writing. It seems quite a number of writers have followed it already in some way or another. Some of them have even been published, though as I always stress writing is what’s important, writing is what we return to.

The four books that I recommend as core craft texts are still the first four books I’d suggest to anyone starting out in the study of writing. My favourite, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, is now available in a UK edition too, yay.

Other writers and teachers and editors will have their own recommendations, but that’s the point: seek out what others have to say, find out what makes sense for you, and develop your own practice in writing.

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I was going to post something else on Substack this weekend (about Charles Dickens). And then I decided not to (N@zis and tech bros). And then I decided to add this post here after all - it directs back to my site anyway, where you can also sign up for my newsletter. If/when I update the DIY MA, I’ll share an update that way for sure.

Yes, my site and my newsletter feel like my own spaces, more utopian and less noisy places where I can be myself. I’m never sure about the activities and algorithms on social media, and like many others I’ve ditched several other platforms in the past. I plan on keeping wille.org going.

I like my blog. It has an innocent 2012 quality, back when, back before. I like to spend time back there.

If you fancy something a little (but not entirely) different, my Tarot For Writers workshop tomorrow is Steering The Chariot, where we’ll summon Love, Strength and Energy to drive and direct our storytelling.

And: isn’t Bleak House a great novel?! My year of reading Dickens now moves on to Little Dorrit. I’ll have to blog about it.

The standout books of 2025, which turned out to be a very good year of reading for me:

• I loved Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me. The voice, the spirit, the fearlessness: they lit me up. What a hero. If I had to pick one book of the year maybe it would be this one.

• Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was my fave novel of the year and maybe of the past many years. Big, immersive, rich – I lost myself in it, and because it was long I spun it out and just enjoyed being in that world for as long as I could. I loved its sweeping style of storytelling that reminded me of reading John Irving’s novels in my twenties. A bit Dickensian perhaps. Who’s writing these books now? Maybe on another day I’d pick this as my book of the year. Here is a lovely conversation on Substack between Kiran Desai and Junot Diaz.

• I had expected Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives to be good but didn’t realise it would be so engrossing. But of course it was! What a life in the world of books – what lives. What I loved was her utter self-possession, her authority and her wit, and how she deploys these qualities in her writing as well as her public life in the name of justice. Another hero. What a brilliant read.

• I had a copy of Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones for a few years before I finally read it in anticipation of seeing the movie Pillion. I adored both: funny, bittersweet, real. I especially appreciated each for their presentation of complex truths without judgement. Something that truly impressed me was its economy – so much packed into 120 pages. Also its voice – it really committed to Colin’s perspective. What a clever and moving and strange book – same for the film, though that leaned into the laughs a little more. Also: it’s good to read gay fiction that’s not written for straight tourists. (I’m still very excited to see Heated Rivalry when it arrives on UK tv next month though. I mean, we take these gifts when they come along.) Maybe on another day I’d choose Box Hill as my novel or even book of the year.

I really, really loved these books. Any one of them would have been enough to crown a year of reading, so the pleasure of reading all four was an utter treat. Such reading is enlarging, and transformative. My pal Bhanu Kapil talks about the practice of deep reading – these are books with depths to return to.

Other highlights included:

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes. The superficiality was entirely the point, and the subjects most worthy of skewering. (I think we are all the subjects of this one.)

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte – filthy, funny, and very smart short stories on relationships in the digital age. (Which is basically all relationships now, right.)

• The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong – I again realised some books aren’t meant to be rushed; one critic wrote a mean, petty and wrong-headed review, while another called it a sentimental novel, which I feel is a more useful way to understand it. I was also lucky to see Ocean speak at the Southbank Centre, and here is a super interview for Bella Freud’s podcast – also found as video, someone noted, on YouTube. Great for writers – among many gems, yes, the sentence is not just a butler; poesis, not just mimesis.

• Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson – a mix of memoir, horticulture and garden history, and my meditation companion for the first half of the year. I love reading about compost.

• Raucous Invention by Mark Hearld made me want to pick up pen, paper and scissors.

Among others, I particularly enjoyed Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, In the Footsteps of Baal by Warren Singh-Bartlett, Shattered by Hanif Kureishi, The Palace on the Higher Hill by Karim Kattan (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman), Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, Every One Still Here by Liadann Ní Chuinn, and The Best of Everything by Kit De Waal.

If I had finished Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, it might have made these lists too, but I have about thirty pages left as well as the other two volumes of The Deptford Trilogy. It’s my next book club read, and I am loving it. So why rush. More expansive storytelling.

This year I really think we have been blessed with some rich and entertaining books, but it was only when I got to October that I really found those of this year’s books that entranced me as a reader. Much of my reading before the autumn left me unsatisfied, and there were also some real duds. Predictably, a lot of cookie-cutter stuff from the cookie-cutter writing schools. What on earth are they teaching them there?!

With the notable exception of the glorious Sonia and Sunny, a rather downbeat realism prevailed in what I’ve read in another six titles so far of this year’s Booker Prize longlist. Each has its moments, but much also felt like rambling first thoughts of morning pages, and I felt a drab sameness. I often say there’s no accounting for taste, but here we can account for the judges. Four of them this year were fiction writers, and perhaps a prize needs greater diversity in that area. Next year’s panel includes an academic, a poet, a musician and a journalist as well as a novelist. That feels more promising.

Maybe I was just disappointed that the very different Sonia and Sunny didn’t win, but I found the winner’s showing relentless, its setting sketchy, and the rise and fall of its protagonist unbelievable. He felt like a version of a person rather than someone real. It’s not that bad really, but I expect more magic from a winner. I mostly found this book: boring. If something is ultra-mimetic, whatever is being mimed could be more interesting. Readers’ descriptions of its style as ‘spare’ also grew hackneyed, and an op ed on the victorious return of masculinity in literary fiction felt ridiculous given that women wrote the winning books in only three of the last twelve years; perhaps the masculinity of four gay-themed novels during that time counts for little at the Guardian?

Taste: it’s a thing. It would be boring if we all liked the same things. The new tv version of Amadeus has been slated, but we’ve really enjoyed it this week.

Bookfluencers continue to bookfluence, and I do find a lot of the best and most reliable recommendations for books via Instagram. Substack continues to need good editors.

I was pleased to see the publication of various books by friends this year, including Jo McMillan’s The Accidental Immigrants (shortlisted for the Orwell Prize), Eleanor Anstruther’s In Judgement of Others, Fiona Melrose’s Even Beyond Death, Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar, Kate Beales’s Broken Horses, Emma Darwin’s The Bruegel Boy, Bhanu Kapil and Blue Pieta’s Autobiography of a Performance, and JP Evans’s Studies in Hysteria.

I’ve decided to read more Charles Dickens in 2026, inspired in part by my enjoyment of Kiran Desai and Robertson Davies, and also after seeing a super production of A Christmas Carol here in Twickenham this month. I’ve sometimes found Dickens hard-going in the past, but I think I’m ready. Timing is a thing too. It helped to read David Copperfield as the fantastic audiobook narrated by Richard Armitage a few years ago. I’m starting now with novels I’ve never read, Oliver Twist first because I am seeing the West End show early next year with visiting Americans. I took part in a school production in 1975, and I still know the words to the tunes.

If anyone cares to read along with any particular Dickens novels, let me know and perhaps we can arrange something. I thought it could be fun to read different books with different readers.

Praise be to the librarians! Who’d imagine that the work that they do would become such a battlefield. May they find courage and inspiration in the work of writers mentioned here, especially Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy.

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First posted on my blog on 31 December 2025. You can sign up for my mailing list and newsletter here.

Much of the work in revising and self-editing lies in tricking yourself in ways to see your work anew. In this post I outline suggestions for things to try out in your own practice.

Approaching revision and drafting in stages

After completing a first draft, it’s a good idea to put the work to one side for a span of time. I suggest at least a month of keeping your distance.

If changes occur to you while you’re away from your book, you can add them to a list of notes rather than going back into the manuscript. Perhaps devote a special notebook to handwritten notes, but also keep a document in Notes or an app on your phone for jotting down ideas on the move.

Also bear in mind that it’s unlikely that you can tackle everything in one reread or draft, from larger structural matters down to style and words at the sentence level. You might plan on doing separate read-throughs or drafts for different aspects of craft (see below).

Reading and reviewing your own writing

When you are ready, print out a copy of the manuscript for reading and reviewing.

I recommend printing in the style of the facing pages of a book (see below). I suggest formatting a draft so that it’s landscape, two columns, justified, single-spaced, and uses an elegant bookish font such as 11pt Baskerville or Garamond or something that you haven’t used in previous drafts. See your work anew.

Play around with the Layout menu till you achieve something that vaguely looks like a spread in a book; it’s a subtle step in starting to read your own writing as a book rather than a manuscript.

And don’t forget to paginate – page numbers are invaluable yet easily overlooked reference points.

You could also read on your Kindle. You can mail a document containing your manuscript to your Kindle account, and if you don’t have a Kindle, you can use its app on a phone or a tablet. Then with another subtle tricking of the self you can read your own book as if it were any other on your Kindle. (And I don’t think you even have to shop at Amazon to take advantage of this service!)

On your first read, resist the temptation to do anything other than read. Take your time, make a cup of tea, sit in an armchair and read as a reader, immersing yourself in the text (right-brained, crudely speaking) rather than worrying analytically about what you might need to fix (getting more left-brained).

If you flag things you might want to change, simply add a Post-it tab or pencil a cross in the margin. Or maybe jot a brief note in your notebook – just enough to jog your memory later. You can also, e.g., highlight words and text on Kindle without shifting gear too much.

But try not to get sidetracked into making edits; as much as you can continue the task of seamlessly engaging with your book as an experience of reading, rather than creating or editing. Just read - just review. See it again - be present with it.

Crafting your content

After reading your manuscript write a summary: of what you have already, not what you plan on changing. Take a simple snapshot of your material in whatever state it is. Use a Word document to summarise your book chapter by chapter, e.g., in note form as a bullet list or with a paragraph for every chapter. If you have gaps or identify points that need fixing, [you can add a note about this in square brackets].

Depending on what your book needs, separate read-throughs could pay specific attention to different aspects of craft and content: characterisation and setting; storylines and plot points, including setups, through lines of narrative and payoffs; structure and pacing, including part and chapter breaks.

A read for voice and style might come later, after you’ve addressed bigger sweeps of story.

As an exercise to evaluate pacing and potential engagement, try this revising experiment: A Gift on Every Page. Collate what you find into a list (Word document or Excel): plot developments, character insights, juicy dialogue, taste of setting, lyrical prose. You might like to colour code different gifts in different colours or columns.

It also helps to identify a narrative focus. For example, you could consider story types in the checklists from Ronald Tobias’s 20 Master Plots, and use them to evaluate what you have already (in your summary and list of gifts) and also to assess ways in which you might need to bring a more of a certain shape or emphasis to the story. Sometimes material needs to be pruned or tightened, and finding a story type can really help in figuring out not only what aspects of the story might need trimming but also what else might need developing.

For further detailed ideas, see Revising: A Craft Checklist.

Mapping a way forward

Write a revised outline. This is the plan you can follow in creating your next draft.

Sometimes it helps to start planning by making notes using index cards or Post-its or, if you prefer, Excel or Scrivener or a mind-map app such as SimpleMind. You could colour-code scenes or sections, e.g., for different character points of view or settings that are important in shaping your story. Organise, shuffle and reshuffle until you achieve a pattern that works.

Then you can translate such notes into a chapter breakdown in continuous narrative form, e.g., in a Word document, with a paragraph for every chapter. Fleshing out the story in condensed form can help you feel through how everything holds together.

Then make a revision plan: when and how you are going to expand your revised outline into the next draft. Be realistic. Consider your daily and weekly schedules (and holidays), as well as blocks of more intensive writing time. Set a target, e.g., a chapter a week or a word count per day. If you have the time, it can really help to break the back of a project by organising mini retreats where you accomplish the editing and rewriting of significant chunks of story.

You could input changes for each read-through as you go, or you might prefer to collate notes for each read, later adding them to a master copy that will be your working document for editing.

For that master copy, you might want to print out the manuscript in its regular professional format (portrait, double-spaced, 12pt Times New Roman, etc.) and start to make edits by hand there. Then you can input those edits into a fresh draft in a document saved with a new name.

Alternatively, some writers go straight to the screen and do their edits there.

Depending on the changes you have to make, you could also think about doing a Retype Draft.

Be sure to save each draft using a unique document name. You can save the last draft with Save As and using a new document name.

Testing your work on readers

Along the way you’ll probably want to seek feedback from valued readers.

It makes sense to have reread your manuscript before sharing with your readers; even if you’re not doing serious editing at this point, it probably won’t hurt to tidy up the writing, adding any necessary clarifications and also gaining your own sense of where you might be. It’s understandable to want the gratification of someone reading your writing and telling you what they think of it right away, but I always feel it’s worth taking control of your work at the start, rather than deferring to outside opinions right away.

Also, trusted feedback is precious, so respect your readers’ time by showing them something that’s ready for reading.

It’s also useful to line up different readers for different future drafts. Some readers are great for the bigger picture and character arcs, while someone who has good proofreading skills will be useful on a later polish.

Some readers might be trusted beta readers, another might be a professional editor doing a manuscript review or a developmental edit – though this is not a requirement. Above all, seek recommendations of readers who’re experienced in your area of writing and who will know what feedback will be helpful.

Find more ideas in my post Working With Feedback On Your Writing.

I am sure there are also ways in which you could use AI as a reader, but I’m a bit bored with AI or maybe just trying to ignore it for now. So let’s just ignore it here too! In my brief explorations of its efficacy some things are impressive but overall I feel its findings can be a bit lifeless and even wrong-headed relative to the useful input of a valued flesh-and-blood reader.

Exploring where and how your book might take shape in the world

A synopsis is the selling document you will use to pitch and sell your final draft. It’s not quite the same thing as a summary or an outline. Writing a synopsis is a special skill, and is very much designed with readers in mind, and it might be a useful exercise in identifying a commercial focus for your story. Here is some good advice on writing synopses from Curtis Brown Creative.

You might also want to write cover copy that you’d find on books in bookshops. It’s most likely that a publisher will want to create their own version, and professional copywriters are usually very good at coming up with pithy and persuasive words that conjure up the spirit of a book. But having a go yourself can be very instructive, not least in exploring your material at a very basic level. What’s at stake, and where and especially for whom?

You could also create a mood board of cover images. Pay a visit to a bookshop and investigate cover styles that appeal to you and embody the impression you wish your book to make. Again, a publisher will have expert designers, but this can be a useful exercise in conceiving your book from fresh perspectives at a nonverbal and visual level.

Polishing your later drafts

Reading your writing aloud is a tried and tested method of revising, particularly at later stages once you’ve made larger macro edits and are paying attention to the language at a micro level: the rhythm, the music, the feel of the words in the mouth. Your natural speaking voice can catch unnecessary word repetitions, clunky phrasing, or those long sentences that leave you breathless. You’ll also find ways to smooth the writing out when it’s needed.

You can also listen to your own work. I’ve known of beta readers and writing groups whose greatest value has come from reading each other’s work aloud so that the writer can hear how their own work is expressed by others and lands.

A more practical approach in Word is to use Read Aloud in the Review toolbar. In Apple Pages you can use Edit > Speech > Start Speaking. I find it useful to listen to a Word or Pages document on my phone, when necessary pausing the audio to make edits in a newly saved document on my computer.

Trusting your own vision

At some point you will have to stop editing. This, to my mind, is mostly a matter of trust – trusting yourself, trusting your instincts, trusting your own vision. This might involve clearly identifying your vision in the first place, which can take time and be a journey of its own.

Throughout, if you get stuck, try the notebook practice of Field Work. Work out your problem on the page – write your own notes processing where you are, or write into the world of your book in the voice of your narrator or characters to see if you can flesh out what you might need to do.

It’s possible that the ongoing work of drafting and editing might seed doubts, and feedback from beta readers as well as professionals can sometimes feel overwhelming or annoying. Again, come back to your own vision: what you can do, what you want to do.

At such points it can be clarifying to write yourself a brief mission statement, or to create a personal manifesto for your book.

You might repeat some or all of these stages for future drafts.

It’s best not to rush matters. If you are in a rush: ask yourself why you are rushing – you could even explore this in your notebook.

Inevitably, more haste can slow things down in the long run. I see so many writers rush unready writing into submission when a few months of sensible revision would have elevated their manuscripts; frustration and disappointment follow, not least because agents and publishers can be slow in responding anyway. Creative energies get jammed.

And finally

I’ve raised all sorts of ideas here, and if you follow everything I suggest you might labour things too much. It’s possible to make heavy work out of editing. We know after all that plenty of books get published with very little editing at all!

So be serious about improving your work in accordance with your own wishes, but also try to have fun with revision. Be playful and experimental, and give free rein to your imagination in trying out new things, but don’t overthink things and get in a tangle. Always come back to your original inspirations and check in on your evolving intentions.

And above all remember your book has to move a reader. A book has to be felt as well as read.

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My class Endings on Monday 15 December will discuss some of these matters as well as what it takes to craft an effective conclusion for a story.

I’m also planning courses on self-editing and publishing for 2026. If you’re interested, you can register interest here – give me a few lines about your project and what you’re hoping to achieve.

This post also appears on my blog.

And you can sign up for my mailing list here.

Trigger warning.1

Florence took the fateful step, in 1432, of inaugurating its own special magistracy, the Officers of the Night, devoted specifically to the prosecution of male homosexuality.2

O, Officer of the Night,

Amputate my hands and feet. Arrest me. Assault me in the street. Ban me from military service. Ban me from the bathroom. Banish me. Bash me with your song lyrics. Beat me with sticks. Behead me. Blackmail me. Blame me for plagues of mice. Blind me. Blindfold me. Blow me up. Burn me alive. Burn my books. Bury me alive. Call me a paedophile. Call me a deviant. Call me an invert. Call me handicapped. Call my family to collect me from the morgue. Cane me. Cast your stone towards me. Cast your vote against me. Castigate my allies. Cauterise the back of my neck. Chase me into the sea. Chop off a limb each day until I am a lifeless trunk. Chuck bricks through my window. Collapse a wall on top of me. Concuss me. Condemn from your pulpit the laws that protect me. Confiscate my land. Consume my city with fire. Crucify me. Crush me to death with a heavy vehicle. Cure me. Daub graffiti on my living-room walls. Deem me the outcome of experimental medicine. Deliver carpets, hearing aids and encyclopaedias to my door. Denounce me as a communist. Denounce me as a decadent fascist. Denounce me as an agent of imperialism. Deny I exist in our country. Deny me the protection of the law. Deport me. Disinherit me. Disown me. Don’t let others ask me, just let others tell. Drunk-tweet misinformation about me. Electrocute me. Entrap me in a lavatory. Evict me. Excommunicate me. Exile me. Exorcise me. Experiment upon me. Expose me naked in the forum. Fine me. Fire me. Flog me. Force me to castrate myself. Fracture my skull. Gag me. Gas me. Get your boyfriend to smack me one as I walk home from work. Give me a dose of bromide of potassium. Give me five years of hard labour. Hand down legal judgements without even listening to me. Hand out rewards to those who inform on me. Hang me by the neck. Hang me in a birdcage from the highest tower until I die of hunger. Hunt me down in Internet chatrooms. Hypnotise me. Impale me. Imprison me for life. Inject me with oestrogen. Inject me with testosterone. Insert sharp reeds into my urethra. Join with your enemies to ban my parades. Judge me with your garbled mess. Keep me in leg-irons and handcuffs. Kick me while I’m down. Kill my children. Know I am who you truly desire. Lead me naked except for a bonnet on my head to the site of my castration, then hang me upside down with my genitals in my face and wait for my bladder to explode. Leave a note in my blood on my mother’s door. Let me buy my freedom. Let me shoot myself. Let me write in secret. Let me write novels that are published only after I die. Let the birds eat me. Lie about me. Lobotomise me. Lock me away for life. Lust after me. Make me dance. Make me separate but not equal. Make me take a cold shower. Make me vomit as I look at pictures of naked men. Marry me to a woman but never to a man. Massage my rectum to kill the cells that cause me. Misgender me. Misname me. Mock attempts to include my reality in health campaigns. Out me. Peddle fearful lies about me. Pelt me with eggs. Pen op eds about me. Pour acid over me. Pretend I am dead. Prostitute me. Protest at my funeral. Pump me full of bullets when I hide in a church. Punch me. Push my bike into the gutter. Put barbed wire round my bed to prevent nocturnal depravity. Put me in a cattle wagon. Put me in jail. Raid me. Rape me. Re-educate me. Refuse to serve me lunch. Rehabilitate me. Reject my blood. Remove my books from our libraries. Say I fuck animals. Say I fuck dead people. Seal my anus with Superglue. Seize my fortune. Sell me. Send a tsunami to drown me. Send me to a work camp. Send me to conversion therapy. Send me to the colonies. Shoot me. Shut down my gathering places. Shut down my newspapers. Shut me in a thatched hut, then douse it in oil, then set it on fire. Slap me. Slash my throat. Smoke yourself a cigar while you celebrate my erasure. Spit on me. Stamp my passport to say I have a psychiatric illness. Stone me. Stop me from going to the toilet. Stop me from marching. Stop other people’s children from reading books about me. Strap me on a pile of firewood and wait to hear me scream. Subject me to electroshock treatment. Sue your employer for acknowledging my reality. Swipe right and secretly record our date and misrepresent a simile as literal fact and lose me my job all in the name of the verity of your political lies. Take away my children. Take me to a brothel. Take my name off our battleships. Tax me. Throw bricks through my window. Tie me to a chainlink fence. Transplant my testicles. Try me for blasphemy. Unleash a plague upon me. Wash me of my sins. Whip me.

Do what you like to me. We are what we are.3

Last week I was very lucky to attend Contemplation and the Creative Arts: Encounters With Objects, Music, Words at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Thanks to Hannah Lucas, Tanya Kundu, Olivia Meehan and Bhanu Kapil for curating this series of practice-based workshops and inviting me along.

The whole day was stimulating.

We were welcomed with an opening meditation with the Reverend Takafumi Zenryu Kawakami via Zoom from Kyoto. I appreciated his discussion of meditation as a practice of acceptance, and his questioning of the individualism of many mindfulness practices. Embracing ambiguity and uncertainty: that’s the way.

Olivia Meehan from the University of Melbourne and Jim Harris of the Ashmolean then led us in Slow Looking exercises. This was all about attention and observation - for other purposes, perhaps, but in this instance simply for the sake of being attentive and observant.

Jim pointed out how we so often seek relationship, content and meaning when we look at art. But so much of that is supposition and interpretation; let’s slow down and start with the material facts of observation and description. The facts of the matter, what we know, what we see. Not, in this gallery setting, what we can touch! Because we can’t. But we can imagine.

Olivia told the Chinese fairy tale about the painter who paints a cave into his painting, and then he claps his hands - Clap! - and the entrance to the cave opens, and then the painter enters the painting, and then the painting vanishes. Poof! Art for art’s sake.

Clap! I fell in love with a fawn. Clap! I let myself be wooed by a stately queen who turned out to be a madonna. She reminded me of EM Forster on story vs plot: The king died, and then the queen threw a party.

Next: a most thoughtfully packed lunch.

Áron Levente opened the afternoon with a workshop on sound, music and silence called The Loudest Word Ever Screamed Was ‘Quiet’ (look it up!). I listened to a wooden chair as if I were touching it, and then we all lay on the floor in a star shape and took in sounds and silence and hummed. A further note: ‘If we need peace and quiet for contemplative practice we’re fucked.’

For the final session, Bhanu Kapil and Blue Pieta invited us all to the inaugural gathering of the Theatre of Strangers in the exquisite St Peter’s Church. Blue told us about dancer Pina Bausch’s use of questions with performers, and Bhanu told us about writing her book of questions A Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. We then brought questions of our own into the darkness, and tried to answer them in gestures and poems and pictures based on memories and retrievals and responses.

Then Blue clapped us quiet: Clap! Clap! Clap!

Later, I talked tarot in a corner of Newnham College, and then we dined in the space where Virginia Woolf gave her Room of One’s Own lecture. Charmed I was.

And Kettle’s Yard! I’m enamoured of its light and its palette and its objets, and especially of its wooden chairs and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is my new crush, especially after I discovered that 1. without my realising his art had occupied my attention so much, and 2. he was killed in action in the First World War at the age of 23. One of the great Mights!

And the day before I fitted in my first - and definitely not last - visit to the Botanic Gardens. Ah! How Russian sage entrances me.

Also the day before: dinner at Dishoom, with a very funny and smart and generous old pal.

And the morning of the workshops I walked along that stretch of river and alongside those parks that are some sort of utopia. It’s always such a treat to visit Cambridge, one of my favourite places in the world, and on this occasion I was lucky also to see old friends and meet some lovely people for the first time.

All in all: a relaxed, good-humoured, attentive, and smart couple of days. A real tonic.

At a time when prestigious institutions of higher education are in parts of the world under attack - for doing their job of educating - it was so heartening to experience another prized university such as Cambridge welcoming innovative approaches to learning and working together. Interfaith, cross-cultural, transdisciplinary: these are the dialogues we need to have at a time when so many oafs are ruling the world.

This is how we defeat them. This is how we resist. This is how we win.

Happy Easter! Enjoy your rites of spring.

I’ve gone through life not knowing until last week that there is a patron saint of booksellers, and his name is St John of God, and today is his saint’s day.

What a lovely idea.

St John of God has quite a story. He’s also the patron saint of the mentally ill, hospitals, the dying, and firefighters.

The correlations speak for themselves! This post by the Irish Bookshop amused me: The Patron Saint of Booksellers.

I love the idea of saints’ days. Maybe today we should go to a local indie or a Waterstones and buy a book and put it on a shrine.

Or write about a saint! Saint’s Day is a writing experiment about patron saints. Let one guard over your work right now.

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I’ve been reading the essays in These Precious Days by Ann Patchett on and off since 2022, when I bought this pretty paperback edition. I’m not usually the pastel type, but how could I resist it?

Various topics: travel, saints, knitting, houses, student days, books, writing. Family - stepfamily, the various extensions of family and friends. Dogs.

This morning I read about not having children. It’s also about the other things that people who don’t have children do in their lives. And it’s about the questions people ask and the things that they say, and the idleness of idle conversation.

Sometimes I find myself rereading pieces I’ve already read rather than just ploughing on. I’d read a couple of these essays before in, e.g., the New Yorker. It’s been good to read them again. Three Fathers is a great one.

I often read essay and short story collections - the good ones - over spans of years. Each essay or story can be a whole world of people and places and ideas: too good to rush, too much to digest.

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

So says Mavis Gallant.

Ann’s Lay Down Diaries and It’s New To You backlist reviews for her bookshop Parnassus Books are some of my favourite things on social media. She has such a reassuring voice, such a reassuring presence. Right now I’m thinking I’d love to publish a book just to hear Ann talk about my work. That’s my equivalent of the vain and silly Oscar speech dream. But first I’d have to write a book! That silly. For now I’ll stick to editing them and reading them, and writing in my notebooks.

These Precious Days has a big heart and remarkable clarity, plus a few sharp edges, as I so often need in a good book. A great one for the bedside table.

And I’ve not finished it yet! Spinning it out, letting it take its time, company I want to keep. It’s there when I need it. Maybe I’ll post another review when I’ve finished.

Also: booksellers. Along with the librarians, they enjoy a certain sainthood in the culture right now. I can’t think of anything better to do with your success as a writer than open a bookshop.

I just read in my almanac that 8 March is St John of God’s Day. Apparently he’s the patron saint of booksellers. Get ready to feast.

A few lines from the opening of ‘The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee’ by N. Scott Momaday:

I am a feather on the bright sky

I am the blue horse that runs in the plain

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water

I am the shadow that follows a child

I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

I am an eagle playing with the wind

Read the whole version at the Poetry Foundation. You can also watch N. Scott Momaday himself read an excerpt on YouTube.

‘You see, I am alive, I am alive’ – the voice of life, the breath of life run through this poem. It’s joyful, it’s everyday, it’s an invocation. I love it.

I love the list poem as form. Like I Remember, the I Am poem has the iterative power of repetition, which also lends a strong rhythm to the writing. There is a reason why such poems are often passed down in oral literary traditions.

Repetition brings something of the ritual too, here celebrating the interconnectedness of all things. Feathers, horses, shadows, fish: the personification here is powerful. There’s a good line from near the ending. ‘I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful.’ As Joy Harjo says in a fine short essay, it inscribes the idea that ‘the Earth, all beings, are wired toward healing’. It conveys an affirmative energy.

Also note there are subtle variations bringing shifts in pace to keep our interest: syntax, line length, the use of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

And there is plenty of concrete sensory detail to ground us.

Best of all: it’s easy, it’s accessible. You can let your perceptions and your observations and your memories wash over you and through you and out into your writing.

As a writing experiment

Write your own Delight Songs, including things that come naturally to you.

You could write a Delight Song based on your favourite associations from the natural world.

You could pack a notebook when you go hillwalking, and write a Delight Song on a mountain top.

You could take yourself to a botanical garden, and write a Delight Song about all the forms of life around you.

You could tap a Delight Song into your phone as you sit in a cafe and look out of the window at the city where you live.

You could write a Delight Song about the books who have made you the reader and writer you are today.

You could write a Delight Song on a special theme (trees, seasons, teachers).

You could write a Delight Song as field work for a character in a novel.

You could write a Delight Song out of whatever speaks to you.

And to fire you up, you might want to watch this first. Another jolt of anthem affirmation. And really: what a feat of choreography!

***

I posted an earlier version of this on my blog in the spring of 2023. N. Scott Momaday died in January 2024. The Paris Review has a wonderful Art of Poetry interview with him from 2022. As the great man says: ‘I am alive, I am alive’!

Blessings, and gratitude.

I’m teaching my Voice masterclass on 10 February, and when I cover voice I always suggest writers write I Remembers.

I love I Remember exercises. Based on the beguiling book-length memoir-poem by Joe Brainard, and popularised by teachers such as Jack Collom and Kenneth Koch, these pieces of writing simply start each line or sentence with the words I remember and then flow into a memory.

Joe Brainard’s I Remember

An extract is available from his publisher here, and here are other selections:

I remember jumping into piles of leaves and the dust, or whatever it is, that rises.
I remember raking leaves but I don’t remember burning leaves. I don’t remember what we ‘did’ with them.
I remember ‘Indian Summer’. And for years not knowing what it meant, except that I figured it had something to do with Indians.
I remember exactly how I visualised the Pilgrims and the Indians having the first Thanksgiving dinner together. (Very jolly!)
I remember Jack Frost. Pumpkin pie. Gourds. And very blue skies …
I remember the smell (not very good) of burning pumpkin meat inside jack-o’-lanterns.
I remember orange and black jellybeans at Halloween. And pastel-colored ones for Easter.
I remember ‘hard’ Christmas candy. Especially the ones with flower designs. I remember not liking the ones with jelly in the middle very much.

Rereading Joe Brainard’s I Remember today, I’m aware how it conjures up a very specific place and time. I find myself wondering what this means for the attention spans of the digital era, and whether its reference points are dated - this is pre-Girls, pre-Golden Girls, more like the era of I Love Lucy.

But then I think we simply write our own for the record, and enjoy Joe’s for what it is.

Why I Remembers shine so brightly

I Remembers rank among my favourite forms of writing, because:

• There is no better way to let your voice in writing grow.

• The writing tends to be natural and easy, unforced and uncluttered, with a smooth and even tone – writing from the heart, writing from the gut, writing with authority.

• The writing tends to be concrete, vivid, sensory, specific, e.g., elsewhere in Brainard’s poem the house that gave you a dime instead of candy, very light faded blue jeans, ice cubes in the aquarium.

• The form shows that repetition is no bad thing, but can have an iterative and incantatory force.

• It offers a strong example of the clarity and power of right-branching syntax, where subjects and verbs are placed at the start of a sentence.

• The writing usually shows rather than tells: the contents of Brainard’s version – movie stars and songs, the clothes, food, hardship and simple pleasures – conjure up a whole time and place.

• The writing is economical – each line or section stops when it has to stop, and then on to the next …

• I love lists (if you couldn’t tell).

• The form is regarded as both poem and/or prose and/or either/neither, and I love writing that plays with or maybe ignores categories, and simply enjoys being good writing.

• The process of free association often takes us to places we never expected – what arises arises. In the extract above I enjoy how we linger in specific recollections of Halloween and then zip quickly via Easter to Christmas, where we will linger a page or two before moving on again. We skip from childhood to adulthood and then back again, between private events and collective memories. There are many such threads and patterns through the book.

• The writing is uncensored, authentic. For example, in the example above we have a reference to the Pilgrims and Indians celebrating a jolly Thanksgiving. Such a recollection is based in a romanticised association, and we could break that down or add qualifiers, e.g., in terms of decolonising the historical record. But the actual writing here has an honesty – it’s about recalling a perception, a time and place, and it is being true to that, even if it’s not true to the actual historical record that that memory commemorates. Modern readers need to bring their own intelligence to matters (which, admittedly, isn’t always given).

• Elsewhere in the poem we get gender- and race-based descriptions that are products of that time, and there is a lot of sexually graphic and extremely fruity content. It means I’m usually careful about selecting extracts for classes.

• And now I am wondering how Joe’s work is faring in our new era of book bans. But again: this has a truth. These rememberings surface honest and true perceptions.

• I LOVE JOE BRAINARD! I mean, he also painted pansies and whippets – what more could I want?

• And repeating myself – the writing is natural and easy, unforced and uncluttered. Having read a lot of writing in my time that has not embodied such qualities, I have great respect for this.

The simplest things are often the best. Plain things. Once upon a time I didn’t know you could write like this. Discovering that you could - and you should - was a revelation.

Other I Remembers

I like how the imperative mood creates a different focus in Joy Harjo’s poem Remember, instructing us in reminders of our shared history and geography:

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.

Georges Perec’s book-length I Remember serves as a further point of comparison. Perec places an emphasis on public rather than personal history, adding a specifically Oulipan constraint of including only things that other people could remember too:

245. I remember the Lépine Contest.
246. I remember that Citroën used the Eiffel Tower for a gigantic illuminated advertisement.
247. I remember that de Gaulle had a brother called Pierre who ran the Foire de Paris.
248. I remember the Finaly affair.

Compared with the softer tone in Brainard and Harjo’s writing, Perec’s feels more detached, and at times even name-droppy or humourless. It feels more like a list of bald facts, plus the numbering of the items of his list feels intrusive or mechanical. This perhaps explains why I felt less connected to it emotionally.

And fifty years after it was written, I am unfamiliar with many of Perec’s specific names and events. No idea about the Lépine Contest or the Finaly affair! I am unfamiliar with some of Brainard’s references too, but somehow they get swept up in his warmth and wit, or are explained by context, so I never stumble or drift. Or maybe I’m more at ease with the memories of a gay American of a certain era than those of a French experimentalist.

Zeina Abirached’s I Remember Beirut takes the form of a graphic memoir. The bold artwork and the simple, direct lines of words make a powerful combination.

Just a few. There are many others - and now it’s your turn.

A writing experiment

Write your own I Remember. But also train your attention by introducing some focus, or some twists on the form. For example:

• I Don’t Remember - good for surfacing secrets and lies and subtexts and regrets and all that other good story stuff.

• Remember your schooldays, a holiday, Christmas, a wedding, a love affair.

• Remember your first times.

• Remember the library - a good one for book people. Remember one library, or let yourself drift into remembering many.

• Remember your blessings (count them, even).

• Remember your failures (but maybe limit them … and only if you next go on to …)

• Remember your successes (unlimited, and remembered after your failures – let’s end on a high, please).

• Remember someone who’s no longer with us.

• Write Remembers or reminders in the style of Joy Harjo’s Remember.

• Draw (and write) your own graphic I Remember in comic strip format.

• If you write fiction, do I Remembers for your characters. This can involve a slight shift in the writing, and perhaps a bit more thought than some of the more natural, I-centred versions, but it can also be a good way to graft some of your fictional content on to your own natural, easy, remembering voice.

• And invent your own rememberings too. Give us some prompts and ideas too, if you like.

You can probably write forever this way. You might want to set some limits (time; focuses). Or you might not.

There is of course a risk that this sort of writing unearths deep, sad memories. Maybe that’s not a risk. Maybe we need to confront those memories from time to time? But maybe, unless that is its purpose, we also need to set limits around that sort of writing (or have a therapist to hand). I often suggest that writers focus on, e.g., happy memories. The tone in the writing often ends up being quite soft and nostalgic, anyway.

Enjoy! These pieces really are some of the most fun in writing. And also the most rewarding, working on voice and tone, and digging into the mysterious caverns of intention. Let things arise. If you want to share your own or know of other examples, please add in a comment below.

And in case you’re in the mood for more: I’ll be talking more about voice at my masterclass Voice on 10 February.

Resources

• All credit to Joe Brainard and his I Remember, now in its own very handsome UK edition from Notting Hill Editions.

• The Joe Brainard website

• The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard from the Library of America

• Featured artworks of Joe Brainard from the Tibor de Nagy Gallery

• I Remember Joe Brainard

• Loewe celebrates the fanzines and pansies of queer artist Joe Brainard (Wallpaper, 25 January 2021), plus films in the following links

• Joe’s brother John Brainard in conversation with lifelong friend Ron Padgett – childhood, early influences

• Paul Auster and Jim Jarmusch discuss Joe Brainard’s writings – especially the brilliance of I Remember

• Curator Constance Lewallen and poet Anne Waldman, who first published I Rememberas a series of books, discuss Joe Brainard’s art – creative process, New York in the 1960s, his role as a gay artist. Anne Waldman first published I Remember as a series of books – thank you, Anne, the world is forever in your debt!

• Trailer for I Remember, a short documentary on Joe Brainard.

• Andrew H. Miller, B-Sides: Joe Brainard’s I Remember – a lovely critical overview

• Cori Hutchinson, Joe Brainard’s ‘Hot Bodies’ - for some of his art

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An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog.

Credits: The section from Joe Brainard’s mixed-media collage Blossom (1977) at the top of this page comes from www.joebrainard.org, as does the whippet below.

I went to the British Library last night to see Brian Eno and Bette A talk about their new book What Art Does.

It’s one of those topics that could easily get lofty, but they cut through the bullshit (their words! mine too!) of Artspeak, which they discussed as a real problem. The garbling just gets in the way, doesn't it, whether it’s some gruesome academic essay or the language required in funding applications. I see it spill into creative writing too. Bullshit should be a crime!

Brian as musician, artist, activist and teacher, Bette as writer and art teacher: they talked about the creation of art in very simple and direct ways, especially for its value in bringing people together. Instead of seeking ego-driven genius, let's be part of a community-oriented scenius: ‘a whole scene of people … supporting each other, looking at each other's work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas’. (I stole that from , who wrote a book telling me to, and must have taken it from Brian in the first place. There’s a bit of scenius right there.)

Brian talked about being in a band as one of these community-oriented activities. To prove his point, one in five members of the audience raised their hands to say they’d been in a band.

Brian and Bette also talked about creative behaviours that aren’t considered art, such as haircuts.

Also: the value of outsider art, which made me think of Jerry Saltz, who’s a great champion of outsider artists and whose posts I always appreciate on Instagram.

Also, as a sidenote: did we ever expect to use the word fascist so descriptively about the world around us?

Also: the value of boredom in creating art. I’ve heard Lynda Barry talk about this too.

The big insight of the evening for me: safeguarding your attention. ‘Don’t consume! Then things start appearing.’ Spend time with stuff you want rather than stuff you’re given - usually by an algorithm. ‘You can’t do input and output at the same time.’

Things to mull as I try to discipline my own time on screens and social media. On the train home, I read a book in print format and kept my phone in my pocket.

And here I am adding to the attention frenzy!

*

While we’re here: Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

I’m running my Voice masterclass on Zoom on 10 February, where something we’ll discuss is the importance of achieving a particular tone in writing.

Some definitions

Voice and tone go together in discussions of craft, but there is a distinction that’s worth grasping.

I think of voice as the vehicle of writing and speaking. It’s what carries the words. Voice starts somewhere inside, down in my belly, then rises up through the lungs and the throat, carried on the breath; this might be invisible, but it makes voice embodied, a concrete, physical thing. In my French class I was always intrigued that the stick man we labelled with captions for le bras and la jambe also carried one for la voix.

Voice is also a way of describing the distinct prose style of a piece of writing, or the personal mode of expression of a writer.

Tone, on the other hand, is a particular quality or subset of voice. It is one of the tools with which a writer can convey emotion.

Tone can also reveal the prevailing attitude of a speaker or narrator - and ultimately the writer - and it can shift through a piece of writing, at times conveying lightness, other times creating tension or darkness.

I also like to think about a specific narrative tone: the specific voice and style that tells a story.

It is helpful to consider the use of tone in other fields too: music (sharp, harmonious), anatomy (muscular, flabby), painting and photography (dark, light). The sunny tone in the photo above, taken yesterday morning, creates a more cheerful impression than the gloomier one in the picture of the same daffodils below, which I took a few days before.

Perhaps these analogies can affect how you think about your own writing: does something strike too sharp a note? Do you have too much fat? Do you need to introduce more shade or light? What emotional impression might you want to make?

In writing, tone can be expressed or controlled in a variety of ways, such as:

• word choices and vocabulary

• punctuation

• sentence length

• pacing

• the level of description

• the use of particular parts of speech

• a particular mood of address or stance

• through content, e.g., consider how violent gestures or actions can swiftly alter the tone of a piece of writing

Let’s consider a few examples.

A harsh tone

I was thinking it was hard to attribute a particular emotion to the speaker in Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’. But then I realised that is the point: this piece has a forbidding, almost cold tone. It is controlling, domineering, and most definitely superior:

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off …

The choice of the list as a form is in itself relevant: using the imperative mood, the speaker is handing out a mostly uninterruptible and uninterrupted list of orders and instructions that reinforces her authority.

This piece brings up something else. When using tone in a piece of writing, writers might have to decide if they are going to be literal or ironic: should the voice be taken at face value, or should the reader infer meaning from what can be read beneath or around the text?

In ‘Girl’ we have a first-person speaker, but we don’t need to identify Kincaid with that fierce mother. Instead, she is making a statement through a character’s words, and we come away with Kincaid’s observations on, among other things, the nature of power in that sort of mother-daughter relationship. It’s useful to consider another term here: persona. Kincaid has created a character with a particular persona, or mask, to convey the things she needs to say.

An ironic tone

Lorrie Moore’s How To Become A Writer, Or Have I Earned This Cliché? has a tartly ironic tone:

In your high school English class look at Mr. Killian's face. Decide faces are important. Write a villanelle about pores. Struggle. Write a sonnet. Count the syllables: 9, 10, 11, 13. Decide to experiment with fiction.

I adore the list as form as it’s so natural and easy, and the list-making here is rich in concrete details that are wry, revealing, and relatable. I often direct writers to create versions based on their own histories in writing.

Irony relies on incongruities: contradictions, exaggeration, understatement or the unsaid, superior knowledge, situational discrepancies. The supreme irony of Moore’s piece, of course, is that all these disastrous attempts at becoming a writer are what eventually turn the writer into a writer.

A sarcastic tone

Taking irony further, sarcasm can be a very sharp tool for writers, signifying an opposite meaning while adding a layer of scorn or mockery.

Another piece that puts a particularly sarcastic and pointed tone into a list format is ‘How To Write About Africa’ by Binyavanga Wainaina:

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment.

Its title should really be ‘How Not To Write About Africa’, shouldn’t it?! But then we’d have a scolding tone, and that’s no fun, is it. Plus it’s more likely to be ignored.

A risk with sarcasm is that sometimes it fails to land. I once used this piece in a college class, and some students were bothered by what the writer had to say as they interpreted it literally - which perhaps presents another irony.

Warmer and softer tones

In Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain the tone occasionally shifts from the depiction of gritty hardships and earthly lusts to the deeper affections its characters long for:

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.

At such points the sentences grow longer and more lyrical, slowing us down to enjoy soft-focused recollections of intimate moments; memories often invite a warmer tone. I Remember pieces often shift into the softer tone of nostalgia.

I’m also thinking of the warm tone created in, say, the novels of David Nicholls, with their generous portraits of characters’ emotional dramas, or the light and frothy tone achieved in the settings and situations of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.

And there are many other ways of looking at tone: scrappy, messy, inviting, direct.

An exercise

To practise tone in your writing:

• Write a piece based on a list in which a speaker directly addresses another person. Like Kincaid, instruct them in what to do, or perhaps like Wainaina or Moore show them how to do something specific while giving your instructions something of an ironic or sarcastic edge. Perhaps choose a topic you feel strongly about, and perhaps you could channel what you have to say through a persona. Or try a version of How To Become A Writer based on your own history.

• Give that list a particular emotional quality. A list does not have to be a bossy form. It could be cheerleading, cajoling, sarcastic, angry, bitter. As with any form, work and play within its limits, and own whatever it is.

• Be aware of your own use of language: word choices, punctuation, sentence lengths, pacing, description, and parts of speech.

• As ever, specific and concrete usually win out over abstract and vague. In the examples linked above, note how tangible details bring their writers’ worlds and messages to life: salt-fish, sewing on a button, the slut; majoring in child psychology, the Names For Baby encyclopedia; monkey-brain, a nightclub called Tropicana.

• Above all, be passionate about what’s said. Know the things that you as a writer need to say, and then in service of that cause know how your voice (or persona) can say things to convey that message effectively, either directly or indirectly.

My Voice masterclass runs on Zoom on 10 February at 7-8.30pm London time. All welcome! It comes with preparatory reading and writing experiments, and after the class you’ll also get a workbook packed with notes and resources.

An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog.

My next masterclass on 10 February is on Voice, so over the next weeks I’m sharing some of the writing experiments about voice that I frequently suggest to writers.

My take on voice is that we don’t need to find our voice in writing, but trust that voice we have already - the natural speaking voice - as a powerful foundation for our writing.

Gathering overheard dialogue as we listen to the speaking voices of others is a good task to help with this. Find a few examples of my own below. The oldest and most trusty exercises are so often the best, and this is a great one for training your attention.

It’s also a good exercise for taking you out of the self. When you need to silence the chatter of your own monkey mind, why not listen to other people’s monkey minds instead?

Where to record overheard dialogue

Try coffee shops, college refectories, cafeterias, or open-plan workspaces – public places where you can hear surprising, strange, or delightfully banal conversations and take down what you hear without being obvious. You can pretend you’re tapping away at that report at your laptop, when in fact you are copying down as fast as you can the account of someone else’s disastrous date last night. A privacy filter might help here if you feel cautious (your own privacy, clearly not theirs).

When I took her monologue class at Naropa, Bobbie Louise Hawkins told us to hang out in the lounge of the psychology department as the freedom of expression – and colour, and articulacy – of Buddhist psychologists would give us plenty of great material. The Boulder Book Store cafe was also a great spot for listening in: book people.

Public transport also offers rich pickings. Alan Bennett says he gets a lot of his good stuff eavesdropping on buses. I find trains better than the tube, which can create too much background noise; quieter suburban trains often invite juicy conversations between pals catching up as they head into town for a day out.

Posh people are great. The more entitled and solipsistic the better. As I live in West London there are plenty of offerings. My husband and I have a shorthand. We mumble, ‘OHD,’ and indicate with our eyes who we should listen to.

Some of the best bits of overheard dialogue are snatches I catch from people walking past me in the park or on the path by the river. They’re not quite the same as listening to whole conversations, but down those vibrant snatches go into my phone. I’ve heard a few gems in Kew Gardens too - all that nature must open people up.

Oh! And the things people say on their phones! Especially in the quiet carriage.

How to record overheard dialogue

Back in the olden days, Bobbie recommended we buy one of those small Sony audio recorders to record what we heard and then type it up. Another tip was to plug in earphones to pretend we were listening to a recording and disguise the fact we were actually making one.

Bobbie had gathered material for her book Back to Texas during a road trip with her mother to visit their West Texas family: ‘It occurred to me that if I slipped a tape recorder in and made tapes of everybody talking then when I got back home I could listen to it before I started to write and I'd be in the right tempo.’

Bobbie would talk about ‘families of storytellers’, and how many of us come from them. I am sure she would have loved the voice notes technology of today’s mobile phone. What we take for granted!

I have never been comfortable with tape recording, however. Maybe I am cowardly. Also, in certain jurisdictions making and/or sharing audio recordings might be illegal (though transcriptions are usually another matter). Ethics aside, I always found the tech cumbersome, and background noise can be a problem when you type it up. So I always preferred writing in a notebook very quickly in a shorthand of sorts.

Once upon a time I carried notebooks for this purpose. Bobbie told us to buy a bunch of cheap little notebooks from Target, and to have one in our coat pocket, one in our bag, one by the phone, etc.

Nowadays I keep most of my overheard dialogue in Pages documents that I type on my phone. You can always pretend you are sending an email, when in fact you’re tapping out that juicy conversation between that couple in the seats in front of you on the train.

Using overheard dialogue

Using your findings is a separate process: some overheard gems might provide content, sparking some brilliant idea for a story, or giving you a new direction for something you’re having trouble with.

Other samples could provide stretches of dialogue to shape or adapt for your work. Snatches of dialogue can be lifted verbatim into your own writing. Overheard dialogue made that whole book for Bobbie, and it gave her plenty of material for other writing too.

I often ask writers to prepare for workshops by collecting overheard dialogue in advance, and then in class I get them to trade a short selection with a writing partner, creating a conversation or scene that opens with the words they were given back and closes with the words they brought along themselves. When they’re done they read their pieces to each other.

There are ethical considerations, of course, but writers borrow from the world around them ALL the time. I also feel that if people are that concerned about being overheard they should conduct such conversations in private (and especially not the quiet carriage).

And it’s a lot of FUN. In Bobbie’s workshop we’d start every class by sharing overheard dialogue we’d gathered during the previous week. We’d whip out our notebooks and read our gems aloud. This could go on for thirty minutes or even an hour. People are fun, and funny, and tragic sometimes, and overheard dialogue taps right into that vitality. As Bobbie said:

When people are really talking they can be brilliant. In intermittent fast flash statements, suddenly there is that lovely little bit of brilliance never to be said again. As conversationalists we take those moments as a beautiful bonus, and then they’re gone, but as writers you should rush to another room and put it on paper, save it out of the void.1

And let’s not just be utilitarian. Most of all I feel collecting overheard dialogue is a great exercise in listening. There’s no greater training in writing than understanding the patterns of the natural speaking voice.

Lessons in listening

• Note how spoken sentences are often short or simple, e.g., clauses of action joined by ‘and’ or ‘but’.

• Listen for the shapes of the sentences and patterns in syntax, e.g., the active vs the passive voice, the position and choice of the grammatical subject of a sentence, the clarity and power of right-branching sentences.

• Note how natural speech uses fewer complex sentences that, e.g., rely on subclauses or fronted adverbials.

• Listen for the rhythms of sentences. Note the ums and ahs and halts and repetitions, most of which would be pruned for drafted writing.

• Note the use of repetitions or other rhetorical flourishes, and how they spike energy.

• Questions really add a jolt of energy too.

• Also note the use of parts of speech. Verbs and nouns are usually most important, and adjectives and adverbs are deployed not so often.

• Notice how speech tends not to be ‘writerly’ - few of your fancy metaphors, though occasionally there will be some vivid or earthy image that grounds the language.

• And note how people telling stories often have a particular way of speaking that’s easy and direct. Speech tends to be economical: little description, little fat. And speakers assume that whoever they are talking to will get the gist of what they are saying without providing too much back story or explanation. This is something to heed in our writing – too many manuscripts labour detailed and mechanical explanations we could do without.

In particular, work out where the ENERGY lies in the voices you hear. Maybe write notes to yourself identifying some of these features in any writing you transcribe on to the page.

Tidying it up

Record everything you hear, if you can, including every um and ah and er. It’s all raw material, for you to look at later. Later on, you can type it up (if you were writing by hand), and tidy it up and shape it, though it’s interesting how little you might in fact need to do, beyond pruning those ums and ahs. Bobbie observed:

I also thought that if anybody started telling stories I could ‘improve’ them and put them in the book. That's the first time I registered how good my relatives were as storytellers. All of the stories were unimprovable. They were honed down into something incredible that I just could not improve.

There might however be subtle but sharp things to do in punctuating and organising the text:

• Think about where you might pepper the sentences you’ve heard with punctuation such as exclamation marks, dashes – for interruptions – or ellipses … for gaps … or trailing off … I suggest you might be guided here by the principle of clarity rather than accuracy.

• Consider where you might add semi-colons or commas for pauses and stops of different weights.

• You might want to break longer stretches into paragraphs, with new paragraphs for new ideas or actions - and for new speakers, of course.

• You might also want to start spacing out the dialogue with dialogue tags and/or physical description (though that’s another exercise).

• Swearing is naturalistic, but a little goes a long way in writing. Bobbie used to talk about the explosive energy of swear words in writing, and how they distract from everything else that’s on the page. Sometimes the speaker is particularly foul-mouthed, dotting every noun with a cussing adjective so that it becomes a rhythm of its own, but that almost feels like a specialist vernacular or a personal characteristic.

Trusting your voice

Find as much overheard dialogue as you can. Eating in a restaurant, waiting in a queue, walking the dog: keep your ear out. Even if you can’t take down every juicy fragment you hear, LISTEN. Absorb the patterns made by the human voice. Slow down and listen for its patterns and its energies. Grow that instinct for the sound of words, and how words can be used and put on a page.

Of course, in writing we often move beyond the natural speaking voice, adapting it for different contexts and using different styles. But the natural speaking voice is a strong place to start.

Listening is one of the greatest skills a writer can develop. Learn to listen to the world around you. It will also have an effect on how you listen to yourself, and on what you have to say and how you say it. That creative writing adage about finding your voice is a bit of a distraction - the real work lies in trusting the voices we have already, and getting them down on the page.

Some selections of overheard dialogue

• ‘I don’t want to spend my Saturday mornings sitting in a church hall listening to other people’s problems. They’re all so stupid. They were asked to sit there and come up with two things they could do to improve their marriages, and they did. One couple said it was really helpful. They’d never talked about these things before. Like, how stupid can they be? What sort of people are they?’ (At Wahaca’s burrito booth on the SouthBank.)

• ‘He knew all of the crowned heads of Europe. He married one of the Carson-Jacksons. I knew Penny way back. Almost the first girlfriend I ever had. He can be a bit chippy … He’s a very good man. I don’t think the magnums will go very far. He’s a very witty man. Beautiful manners. It’s very easy for people like him to become pompous and patronising.’ (On a train to Waterloo.)

• ‘Mud2 everywhere. It’s not like that down in Oxted. It’s very muddy. If you’ve got a wood burner it’s very nice. It’s half-term. We’re thinking we might nip off to Sicily. Just for about five days. Do you think the seaside is closed already?’ (At Norbiton station.)

• ‘Judging by their reaction last night I don’t think we’ll have any problem. Only one of them seems to live in the flat.’ (The park.)

• ‘I’ve got champagne for my doctor, and Prosecco for his assistant!’ (Near Sloane Square just before Christmas.)

• ‘I know some stuff, but I can’t tell you. I really can’t. I can tell you some stuff, but other stuff I really can’t. I really can’t.’ (College kids in Twickenham.)

Further resources

• Overheard dialogue from Script Gods Must Die

• Tube Gossip: Overheard on the London Underground (Oh, how I love the language of city life – the guttural, expletive Anglo-Saxon joy of a person uttering, ‘Twat!’ at someone barging past in one example there: the force and beauty in the ugly)

• Overheard in New York

• Bobbie Louise Hawkins - and I recommend her Selected Prose especially

• And while we’re here: George Saunders devoted a month of his Story Club to Bobbie’s story The Child

• The original post on my blog

• A Case of Style - from me on Substack

And there will be plenty more about voice during my masterclass Voice on 10 February.

I'm launching a new series of workshops on Zoom called Tarot For Writers that explores the potential of the tarot in creative writing as well as writing for personal growth. Starting with Magicians and Fools on 2 February 2025, we will talk about tarot and write and share resources, and writers who come along will take away plenty of ideas to explore at their own pace.

I’ve long been interested in tarot. My hippie auntie Marion is an astrologer, and she often used tarot. My old flatmate Mark from my first years in London had tarot cards, and he inspired me to acquire my own, a Rider Waite Smith deck I still have today.

I delved into the cards, doing Celtic Cross readings and cribbing interpretations from The Complete Book of Tarot by Juliet Sharman-Burke. Later, as a freelance editor I copyedited books on tarot and numerology. When we lived in Boulder there were several new age shops I loved to visit, and I added a couple of other decks to what become a collection. I have over thirty today - see a few at the end of this post.

When we moved back to London I took classes on tarot at Treadwell’s bookshop in Covent Garden with the late Sue Merlyn Farebrother. Sue was a brilliant teacher: intuitive, good-humoured, organised, attentive to detail, and rich in her knowledge. I’d later help her in developing a proposal for her first book on astrology, and introduced her to an editor at Rider, who published this book and her next. I’m sorry she never got to publish her book on tarot - I know it would have been excellent. Her teaching certainly was.

Sue’s classes were the place where I grew a deeper understanding of the powers of tarot. We did all sorts of exercises in class and at home. We did visualisations, we discussed the archetypes of the Major Arcana, we explored the representations of the court cards and the symbolic powers of numbers and elements. We looked at the different images of various decks. We drew one card every day for a month, and I remember being surprised - and eventually not so surprised - that I drew the same card (out of seventy-eight) seven times in thirty days: the Ten of Pentacles.

Working with tarot in writing

Around that time I remember reading the manuscript of a very well-researched historical novel that felt pretty static. It read like a sequence of richly rendered tableaux, but not much more. And I realised: this book was all Earth. It lacked Fire and Water - energy and feeling. For that matter, it lacked Air too, in that it lacked the clarity of organisation and structure that could carry a story forward. Earth (tarot’s Pentacles), Fire (Wands), Water (cups), Air (Swords): suddenly the Four Elements of the suits of the Minor Arcana were giving me a framework for reading books and understanding the balance - or imbalance - of creative productions.

I continued to use this Four Elements framework, initially only in my own mind as I took stock of manuscripts I was reading, but later on developing writing workshops too.

This Four Elements practice has become a cornerstone for much of my work, even when I’m not using it explicitly. It integrates my interest in contemplative education and holistic approaches towards creativity with my firm editorial grounding in the craft of writing as well as the practical matters of publishing.

I always explain that traces of the Four Elements that we see in the four suits of tarot can be found in other contexts, such as astrology, Jungian psychology, Myers-Briggs tests, and cognitive behavioural therapy. Someone at a workshop identified the Four Elements in the characters of The Wind in the Willows: Water for Rat, Earth for Mole, Fire for Mr Toad, and Air for Badger.

But the Four Elements always leads me back to the tarot. Once upon a time, the idea of memorising very specific interpretations for all seventy-eight cards daunted me, but then I realised I wasn’t approaching it in the right way, at least in the right way for me. I needed to establish my own interpretations and reference points.

I occasionally take courses or trainings as refreshers, and as guides I also consult resources such as the ones listed below. That sort of bookish inquiry always takes me deeper and gives me fresh insights and plenty to think about.

And most of all I’ve learned about the cards by using them, not least in areas where I have expertise, such as writing and editing.

The Major cards have, perhaps, more accessible or obvious meanings, but there’s always more to find in those archetypes, particularly when we pay attention to their meanings and manifestations in different contexts and cultures. Jungian approaches add valuable perspectives.

Something that once gave me pause in the number cards of the Minor Arcana was the great variations in imagery between different decks; some number cards, such as those of the Marseille decks, have few pictures at all beyond images of the Batons (Wands) or the Cups themselves. How do we make sense of that? Increasingly, I have come to give greater weight to the numbers themselves and their correspondence with specific energies and actions in conjunction with the relevant elements, e.g., the Aces with beginnings, or the eights with organisation and order.

I’m also interested in the ways in which the court cards represent people or aspects of our personalities: venturing forth into the world (the traditional Knights), or embodying maturity and self-assurance (the Queens). I’m also intrigued by the ways in which various decks shift the genders of the court cards, or translate them into other forms: Princess instead of Page in the DruidCraft tarot, or the Place, Knower, Gift and Speaker in Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe tarot.

And then there are decks with additional cards, such as the Shining Tribe’s Sphinx in Eden. And there are divination cards, such as the Wild Unknown Animal Spirit deck, whose gorgeous artwork by Kim Krans prompted me also to acquire her original Wild Unknown tarot deck.

All of these rich images and symbols and connections give us a powerful framework that is constantly refreshing itself. It offers food for the imagination, and it also allows reflection for personal growth and spiritual development. I often use tarot cards for daily reflection or as part of my regular meditation practice.

Approaches to tarot

My fundamental take on the seventy-eight cards is that they contain all that we are and all the questions that we have to ask - of ourselves, and in the context of writing of the stories we have to tell. When we encounter a tarot card we can ask: what does this mean for me right now? And in writing: what can this mean for my story? How is it present, or how might it be made present and brought forth in the work and in the world? And, importantly, what aspects of writing craft will help in this task?

That being said: I never fail to be amazed by the recurrence of certain cards and patterns. That’s just a fact. I recently did two three-card readings using two different decks, and two of the same cards appeared in both readings.

I am sometimes guarded around certain aspects of tarot, to the extent I was once scolded by someone attending a workshop for what they took as cautions or apologies for the use of esoterica. And she was right: no, we shouldn’t lean away from all those mysteries and wonders the tarot conjures up. We should not be defensive about using tarot, and I don’t want to give that impression.

I guess I have been put on the back foot a bit as I am aware that some people are fearful of tarot. A writer who was coming to a Four Elements workshop told me she couldn’t attend after I emailed in advance a handout using pictures of the four Aces from the Smith deck. Another friend won’t have tarot cards in the house. I discovered this only after my arrival, oops, but at least I kept them tucked away in my suitcase.

In both cases, I suspect religious traditions have created fear and superstitions about tarot, and I wonder if some subscribers will unsubscribe after this post. I doubt cards representing the Devil and Death and the Hanged Man help either, particularly as they have been used in popular culture: remember Tales of the Unexpected and Live and Let Die?

I only recently found out that tarot cards were only freely printed and sold in England after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951! Now I am asking myself whether under consumer legislation I need to declare that my new workshops are ‘for entertainment purposes only’. Does writing count as entertainment?!

But I have observed a few too many boundaries getting crossed at the fringes of those worlds where we find tarot. I remember taking a tarot course where, unasked, someone started to tell me about specific messages that my dead grandmother was channelling to me through an angel. Those messages had a couple of details that seemed unnervingly accurate until I recalled a conversation with another student in the tea break the week before, and realised those details had been overheard - and misinterpreted. It was the misinterpretation that was the clue.

And a tarot illustrator once slid into my DM’s on Instagram offering me a psychic reading based on the energy in my profile picture, saying that afterwards ‘something good will happen in your life’. Suddenly I remembered why I’d previously unfollowed their account and stopped using their deck, as they’d done this before. I now suspect the message came from a fake account, but all the same an exploitative intent was at work here.

I have to call bullshit on these sorts of thing. I think it’s patently unethical to make such approaches without being invited. People often come to tarot with vulnerabilities, or grasping for specific outcomes, and we must be sensitive to all that that presents. Life has many mysteries, and I want to remain curious and open about them, but fraudulence and inauthenticity shut things down for ourselves as well as for others. We need a welcoming and respectful approach. As in writing, as in life.

New workshops on tarot for writers

Back to the writing. I think tarot is a remarkable tool for writers. Its form gives us an invitation to the imagination, an instrument for creative focus, and windows into our unconscious drives. I really love how tarot blends structure and symbol with artistic expression, and helps us compose divine messages all of our very own.

I first taught a workshop devoted to tarot and writing at the Hastings Book Festival in 2023, and now I’m happy to be launching Tarot for Writers on Zoom. The class are designed to be stand-alone and will run on Zoom at 5-6pm London on Sundays: let’s bring some light into the long dark teatime of the soul! Please note that recordings will not be available right now, as I want us all to take part free of inhibition about joining in.

The first four classes will survey the archetypes of the Major Arcana and investigate the elements, court cards, and number cards of the Minor Arcana for what they can bring to our writing.

• Magicians and Fools (2 February) - we’ll consider the Fool as a student and the Magician as a teacher to guide us through the archetypes and big themes of the Major Arcana

• Aces High (16 February) - we’ll take a closer look at the Four Elements through their purest and most powerful expression in the Aces, and particularly for the ways they strengthen voice, feeling, texture and focus in our writing

• Courtiers and Coronets (2 March) - we’ll use the court cards as the basis for thinking about character and perspective

• Write By Numbers (16 March) - we’ll identify specific actions and gestures in the number cards that can be used in plotting and structuring our stories, paying special attention to odd vs even numbers

In each workshop we’ll discuss specific cards within the structure of tarot, and we’ll do some in-class writing experiments, and you’ll take away ideas to try at your own pace. I’ll also share a handy reference on tarot for writers, and I’m hoping that writers who come along will also share their own interpretations, as tarot is rich with associations and there are always new perspectives to gather. Throughout the emphasis will be on finding inspiration and points of departure to explore in writing.

Over the weeks we’ll also look at various resources on tarot and investigate different styles of tarot decks and divination cards. Feel free to bring your own cards to class to share with us too.

And yes - the class titles indulge my fondness for puns and alliteration. There may be more.

I’m planning these classes as we pass through the rites and thresholds of late winter and early spring: Imbolc, St Brigid’s Day, Candlemas, Valentine’s, Lent, St David’s Day, the Spring Equinox. The crocuses and daffodils and the early tulips will be arriving as the sun gets higher in the sky and the days get longer: perhaps there’s no better time to stretch ourselves into new creative endeavours with such powerful inspirations.

Resources

During the classes I’ll also introduce various resources, including:

• Rachel Pollack, the classic Seventy-eight Degrees of Wisdom and also the magical inquiries of A Walk Through the Forest of Souls: A Tarot Journey to Spiritual Awakening

• Joan Bunning, Learning the Tarot - this is my go-to reference when I want to refresh my memory on card descriptions and keywords, and it’s based on an free online course that is most generously shared here: www.learntarot.com

• Jessica Doré, Tarot for Change - I love this book’s thoughtful takes, which often question the usual interpretations and find something new in the cards - you can also find her on Instagram

• Other social media accounts illuminate and inform. Try Laetitia Barber, Amanda Barokh, Biddy Tarot, Noah Rogers

• Margaret Atwood, Three Tarot Cards

• Tarot For Writers at my page on Bookshop.org

Apps

Nothing beats shuffling and cutting the cards, but it can be a good idea to carry tarot resources on your phone, if only as a reference.

• The Fool’s Dog has many apps, including ones for the Shining Tribe Tarot, whose vibrant colours look particularly good backlit, and the Wildwood Tarot and the DruidCraft Tarot, whose print decks I also own

• Tarot Pro

• Serennu offers digital shuffling and random selection from an entire deck for those who might prefer it

Maybe I’ll review some of these apps as well as decks and other resources in more detail in the future. If you have recommendations of your own, do suggest in a comment below.

A few favourite decks

My first deck was the classic Rider Waite deck. Now that I know more about its history I try to remember to call it the Smith deck, because illustrator Pamela Colman Smith’s colourful and whimsical illustrations are what captivated me then and what still captivate me now. It’s the one I always go back to.

My longtime fave is the Morgan-Greer deck, whose full-bleed colour-saturated hippie imagery is close to my heart. Artist Bill Greer studied at the University of Colorado, where I once taught, so it also has that Boulder connection. Does anyone know anything more about him?

I’ve not always favoured very culturally specific decks, but someone gave me a gift of the DruidCraft Tarot and I’ve been consistently impressed. Its guidebook always gives me something to think about.

I also love the artwork of the Wild Unknown tarot and the Wild Unknown Animal Spirit divination deck, which uses the Four Elements and also adds a number of Spirit cards.

The two most recent additions to my own collection are Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe tarot, recently back in print, and Chris Riddell’s Cloud Tower tarot.

The Tarot For Writers workshops begin with Magicians and Fools on 2 February - I hope to see some of you there.

(Posted on my blog as well as Substack. I’m trying both places out for now.)

These books either consumed me or captured my curiosity in some way in 2024:

* Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep
* Benjamin Moser, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters
* Patrick Grant, Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish
* Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
* Barbra Streisand, My Name Is Barbra
* Fiona Erskine, Phosphate Rocks
* Samantha Harvey, Orbital
* Joel Lane, Where Furnaces Burn

The Safekeep was my novel of the year. I found it gripping. Plot, setting, character, little details, big picture, unexpectedly relevant in a very important way. I also liked that I knew nothing about it. It gave surprises – so I’ll say no more.

The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters is a thoughtful and reflective set of essays about painters and paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, interwoven with the author’s personal experiences and insights. I found it beguiling and took my time reading it. In this vein I also enjoyed Thunderclap by Laura Cumming. We made a trip to Amsterdam this year and maybe I’m impressionable enough to let that guide my reading. Maybe more field trips are required.

Less by Patrick Grant is a serious and well-informed investigation of what we buy and what we throw away. It has much to say about the pseudoscience of economics and the drug of consumerism, and it made me want to shop better and shop less and learn how to sew and repair. He’s also my author crush of the year.

I really enjoyed how both Orbital and Phosphate Rocks were doing something different with the form of the novel – in different ways each felt like hybrid forms of creative nonfiction, and though I read both of them early in the year they stuck with me. Lots of good science to digest in accessible ways, plus important political dimensions. I also enjoyed Fiona Erskine’s procedural thriller Losing Control too.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a graphic novel that I got lost in. I love good hatching, and I love monsters. I have to read Book 2. And wow – what a story for author Emil Ferris too. After all the delicately observed nature writing and haiku that I’ve read in recent years, where I perhaps got distracted ‘finding beauty in the everyday’, it reminded me also to look out for the monstrous and the grotesque and relish them for what they are.

Keeping that strand of the ugly alive, Where Furnaces Burn just pipped in during the last week of the year. Like a cult literary X Files, it’s the Black Country weird noir that was written just for me. I also appreciated its structure as connected stories that are linked in some deeper way. I can’t believe it’s taken so long for me to read Joel Lane – look forward to reading more next year. All credit to Influx for bringing him back into print.

I listened to My Name Is Barbra, asides and all, and it was a feat. I only grew impatient when the namedropping of world leaders grew too too, and then when she started day trading tech stock so she and Donna Karan could rent yachts. Otherwise it’s a remarkable insight into the lives and works of a multitalented genius – singer, actor, director, producer and especially, I discovered, an editor in her capacity to feel her way into the bigger vision for a story as well as pay attention to all those important details.

(Btw are we *still* having the conversation about audio counting as reading? Everyone who naysays sounds like the most mimsy of commenters on the Guardian books page.)

There were other books I liked, but not so many that I really loved. I love to love a good book, so the absence of a few more books to be passionate about perhaps made 2024 slightly disappointing as a year of reading. So I just chose eight this year. I mean, we can add twenty pictures to an instagram carousel now, but it doesn’t mean we have to.

I also read a number of this year’s hyped and widely reviewed novels. They had their moments, but most felt predictable. I’m still waiting to read someone’s book about sisters and mothers, which I suspect could really strike home; instead I grew just a bit bored (again) of ramblings on the mating habits of heterosexuals, and was more interested in what became of the whippet, who turned out just to be a plot point. No! That’s not how we treat whippets – or draw them either: the one on the cover looks more like a greyhound or a lurcher. Then after a very good start I grew just a little bored of another writer’s furtive perving to the gallery of heterosexuals, and wondered if writing about lesbians might in fact be that writer’s forte, as that part was really well done and enjoyed a degree of inquiry and empathy. I found another blockbuster state of the nation novel bloated and cartoony. I did not enjoy Jane Austen’s Emma – I just wasn’t in the mood for it and will come back another time, or maybe it really is reactionary twaddle.

It has to be said that disliking books does give me a lot of pleasure. I try to be careful where I do it, and it’s always for books that are published and could have been edited or were just overmarketed. Manuscripts: you are safe. You still show promise and prospects. Perhaps there is no greater and more exciting reading than a manuscript that’s yet to be pinned down.

I reread The Grapes of Wrath for book club, and wondered where are the books writing about today so urgently. I am sure they’re there. Maybe they need to come to me, or I need to look harder.

Perhaps related to that, for some reason I didn’t read much in translation this year. I did resume Duolingo and am on day 38 of a streak.

I continue to do well with Twickenham library. I began reading most of the above titles as library loans, and also borrowed and enjoyed and appreciated many more: James, Stoneyard Devotional, Creation Lake. I read all of the Booker shortlist for the first time – thanks to the library.

Library books have loan periods, and I have developed a practice of skimming. At a certain point, if a book’s not biting I skim to the end. I might, for example, read the first lines of every paragraph or every page, and go further if something grabs me. Sometimes that’s enough, isn’t it?

I also buy books, especially to support indie bookshops and publishers. I think it’s important to support the indies, though some could be more helpful in supporting the customer, e.g., when the book you ordered six weeks ago finally comes in. Just saying.

I thought this Bookseller article rating editors on the basis of the prizes and bestsellers accrued by authors was a sign of much that’s clumsy and disappointing about the industry. Why measure the immeasurable?

I see continuing evidence of checklist publishing. ‘We’ve already got our gay book for the year’ – insert other identity categories to understand something of how both publishers and reviewers often operate. Publishers and reviewers need to do better. So could book influencers, who at times sound like deranged AI. I’ve come to realise a lot of BookTok and Bookstagram people don’t actually read the books. I’m so naive.

However, there are many good reviewers whose judgement I trust in both traditional outlets and especially social media. I’m not always sure about the ecosystem of Substack, but I read plenty of good criticism there, and I value the judgement of a lot of people on Instagram.

Many of the books that interest me most are published by indies, of course. I’m also thinking self-publishing looks increasingly attractive relative to the way some books get published without trace by the big houses.

I was lucky enough to see my goddess Robin Wall Kimmerer not once but twice. The Serviceberry is out now too. And though I haven’t finished the books yet one of the other great events this year was attending a British Library talk for Some Men In London edited by Peter Parker – it was sponsored by Gay’s The Word, and it was good to be in such a large space with my people, a space where we can enjoy different gay books plural every day of the year.

I was also pleased to attend good events for Ian Russell-Hsieh’s I’m New Here and Edward Carey’s new novel Edith Holler, both at Waterstones Trafalgar Square, where the staff seemed clued in and friendly.

I am most glad that Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft finally has a UK publisher and is available easily for British readers. It’s the craft book I recommend most.

Next year I’m going to try to remember to keep a record of the most interesting short stories and essays that I read, because they are so often the best writing. A few from this end of 2024:

* What Alice Munro Knew by Giles Harvey
* Between the Shadow and the Soul by Lauren Groff
* The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
* For Isabella Rossellini, Acting Goes Beyond Words by Michael Schulman – because Isabella Rossellini
* Stories I Can’t Tell Anyone I Know by Bhanu Kapil in Best British Stories 2024

Telly provided some good fiction: Somebody Somewhere, Ripley, Girls, Shōgun, Interview With the Vampire, Slow Horses, English Teacher, probably others I should have noted down. Drag Race continues to be my soap opera. I can’t remember all the films I saw but right now La Chimera and Dune 2 stood out.

Books that are coming in 2025 that I am excited about:

* Jo McMillan’s The Accidental Immigrants – a most timely tale for right now (23 January)
* Eleanor Anstruther’s In Judgement of Others – finally coming in print, this darkly comic novel outdoes other treatments of its subject matter with wit and depth (28 January)
* Fiona Melrose’s Even Beyond Death – epic and funny and heartbreaking (6 February)
* Essie Fox’s Dangerous– an historical thriller about Byron in Venice (24 April)
* Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar– the first in a most promising fantasy series from the historical novelist (24 April)

The above are all pals. I’ve read the first three and can vouch for them enthusiastically, and I’m looking forward very much to the other two. I’m also very keen to read the new novel by Ocean Vuong in May.

I go back to the fact that my favourite book of 2024 was written by someone I’d never heard of. At a time when so much is marketed and prepared for us, I feel that process of discovery has become a rare thing. More curiosity and imagination in 2025, please.

(Books mentioned here are also linked at Bookshop.org: Andrew Wille’s Reader’s Report 2024.)

The workbook for my recent masterclass on Genres and Readers provides links on specific genres and subgenres, and I thought I’d share a version of that list here on Substack too.

These lists come from a variety of sources: publishers, journalism, genre bodies, individual writers and readers, the crowd-sourcing of wikis. I’ll update with further links as I come across them, and in the comments below you can suggest any other useful ones I might add.

Defining genre

Some broader definitions and distinctions:

• Genre is a particular way of thinking about the content and shape of a story. It works internally, defining common conventions, characteristics and styles of stories, and it also works externally, offering markers that appeal to readers with particular tastes.

• Subgenre describes even more specific groupings within a genre. Science fiction, for example, includes the very different realities of space opera, dystopia, time travel and alternative history among many other subgenres. Genre can be so broad it’s perhaps more useful to be thinking towards subgenre when you get down to the writing of a story.

• Category describes not so much the content of a story as the way in which it’s classified for the outside world of readers or markets. Children’s and Young Adult fiction are categories that each contain works in all the genres, for example, and literary fiction is a category as it can include stories in any genre.

• Story type is a classification that reaches across all genres, but it can be a helpful additional lens for combining with genre conventions and specific narrative ingredients. Brokeback Mountain can be read as a Forbidden Love story type that puts a spin on the genre tropes of the western. In my experience the most useful story types are those of 20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias.

Norms and variations and genre-blending

In the comments for the New York Times Best Books of 2024 someone remarked, ‘I keep seeing a genre I think of as bourgeois navelgazing, and in these interesting times I need something more engaged.’ And maybe that comment belongs to yet another genre: that of snark!

Genres create norms, but also the possibilities for variations too. Some of the more original stories arise when writers pursue what Donald Maass calls ‘genre-blending’. You can bring ingredients from one story into another, e.g., making your romance into a spy story as well might lift your material and give it more of an edge.

I’m also thinking about cosy - which is everywhere. Cosy crime is now met with cosy fantasy and cosy self-help and cosy nature writing and cosy Japanese coffeeshop whimsy, and I detect hints of cosy in plenty of other places even if the genre definition isn’t so sharp, e.g., cosy Olive Kitteridge-ish retirement fantasies.

I guess cosy is a VIBE, and vibes can be an important aspect of genres. (In the English department this gets called MOOD, if we want to get technical.)

Consider how you might combine conventions for a new genre or a subgenre of your own.

Making genres work for your own writing

None of these genre descriptions are hard and fast divisions, and there are plenty of overlaps and blurrings that raise questions about what they really mean. Commercial fiction is a broad category that includes popular works in all the genres, for example, though literary fiction can be very commercial too, especially when it wins prizes. Orbital by Samantha Harvey is a good example.

Sometimes a genre is obvious from the start of a new project, but too I often suggest that writers take whatever material they have and then start writing the story they want to write with whatever magic is summoned up by these ingredients. We can pay attention to the needs of genre or subgenre further down the line when the story feels as if it needs some focus or reining in.

So don’t get too bent out of shape about this. This is creative writing, not an English exam. Find descriptions that speak to you, and then make them work for you.

Links for different subgenres and categories

Literary fiction, upmarket fiction

• What Makes Fiction Literary? by Donald Maass

• Literary Fiction from Masterclass

• Upmarket Fiction: Everything You Need to Know from Jericho Writers

• What is Upmarket Fiction? by agent Carly Watters

Fantasy, science fiction, horror

• Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Sub-Genres from Worlds Without End

• A Guide to Science Fiction Subgenres from Pan Macmillan

• Subgenres of Horror from Puzzle Box Horror

• Fantasy Subgenres from Masterclass

• Speculative Fiction, Fabulism, Slipstream, and other Fantasy Subgenres from Book Riot

• The Weird: An Introduction by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

• Folk Horror: An Introduction by Andy Paciorek

• Utopian Literature and Dystopian Literature from Masterclass

• Domestic Fabulism from Electric Lit

• Slipstream by Bruce Sterling

• What Is the Uncanny? by Ray Malewitz

• What Is Magical Realism, Really? by Bruce Holland Rogers. Writers sometimes say they are writing magical realism when their stories are more literary and have little in common with the elves and magical quests of Lord of the Rings, but I hew pretty close to this definition, which pays attention to perceptions of reality in specific cultural settings. I suspect it would be more helpful to consider certain books simply as literary fantasy, or in the context of one of the many subgenres of fantasy or horror

Crime, mysteries, thrillers

• Popular Genres of Mystery and Suspense from Novel Suspects/Hachette Books

• Traditional Mysteries and Detective Novels, Hard-Boiled Fiction, Thrillers, Police Procedurals, Crime Novels by crime fiction editor and bookseller Otto Penzler

Romance, women’s fiction

I’m not sure about the term ‘women’s fiction’, as it seems so gendered, and I know some writers prefer not to use that term. But then other writers prefer this description to romance, because the stories they are writing are not primarily romantic fiction.

• What Do We Really Mean By Women’s Fiction? by Rachel Howard on LitHub - including links to several thoughtful essays on this topic.

• Romance Genres by Michelle M. Pillow

Historical fiction

• What Is Historical Fiction? from Celadon Books

• So, What Exactly IS Historical Fiction? by Marianne Kavanagh, who proposes it’s more of a category than a genre

Action-Adventure-Westerns

Currently action-adventure stories seem more popular as a specific sales category in children’s literature, but there is a certain style of old-fashioned storytelling that reaches into various genres: westerns, spy stories, military stories, sea stories, and also fantasy and science fiction.

• Adventure Fiction from TV Tropes

• Children’s Adventure from University of South Australia

• Western Fiction Genres from New Novel Writers - and they aren’t always set in the American West.

Nonfiction

Lots more could be said about this, but I’m just adding this for now:

• What is Creative Nonfiction? by Lee Gutkind

Further resources

• The Book Genre Dictionary

• List of Writing Genres from Wikipedia

• TV Tropes - the ‘devouring pop-culture wiki’ contains much more than tv

• 20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias

• Genres of Writing from Story Grid - this could feel a bit overegged, but it’s a really interesting analysis if approached lightly and selectively

PS I’m running my series of craft masterclasses on Zoom again in 2025, starting with Beginnings on 13 January at 7pm.

Supply and demand

One of the first hardback novels I ever bought was The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, which in 1989 was £11.95, or in today’s money £41.82.

By contrast Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, published in September 2024, has a recommended retail price of £20.00, though - as seen in the picture above - The Works in Richmond was selling it yesterday for £10.00.

Relative to other expenses, book prices haven’t really increased very much in thirty-five years, have they? In some cases, they’ve even fallen in absolute terms.

And that means royalties and author earnings have decreased in relative terms and also absolutely: in 2022 an Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society report showed that since 2006 the median earnings for authors had fallen by 60% to £7,000, and the proportion of authors earning all their income from writing fell from 40% to 19%.

No wonder we read so many articles about the challenges of surviving as a writer. The value we place on writing is cheap.

It reminds me of an interesting proposition made by Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid in his book So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance (2003):

The poet Judson Jerome once said that if writers were truly considerate, they would place a five-dollar bill in each book they put into circulation, in symbolic recognition of the time they were asking of their readers and friends. This is a rational solution in a market economy: if supply exceeds demand and no one is forced to buy, prices will drop until they fall below zero, and writers will have to pay rather than charge to be read.

A welfare state solution would see the creation of a national corps of literary geishas, with degrees in literature and the psychology of writers. They would work full time with the writers whom no one read, listening to them, reading their work, praising them, and consoling them.

A waggish thought experiment, but it makes a point. We write and we publish into a world that is saturated with words and with writing.

Changes in publishing

Back in 1989 it seemed possible for writers to make at least a modest living, but so much has changed in the world of books since then. Among other things:

• The collapse of the UK’s Net Book Agreement in the early 1990s meant that books can be discounted.

• This in turn means that the royalty per book is smaller.

• The end of the NBA also created the conditions in which high-volume, high-discount bookselling could flourish on Amazon and other online venues, as well as in non-traditional outlets such as supermarkets and discount stores like Costco.

• Book sales can be tracked and rated, and data about a book’s performance is more widely available, even if it’s just an Amazon ranking.

• Many of us read ebooks and audiobooks.

• Books compete for our attention with other digital formats: blogs and Substack and podcasts and games and TikTok and Netflix and much more.

• Self-publishing is much easier, bypassing the gatekeepers to create opportunities for all. Writers no longer need to invest in getting their books designed and printed but can typeset their own books and use print-on-demand production, or simply upload to the Kindle bookstore. All can have the prize of publication!

• Social media create opportunities for writers to establish a profile and platform with a network of followers.

These are just a few of the significant shifts and innovations that have had a bearing not only on book prices and author earnings but also the involvement of authors in how they are published.

Art and the money machine

An important part of my job is helping writers manage expectations and find reward in their work. Develop that voice, flesh out those characters, and pin down those plot points: these are skills of craft and technique that can improve your storytelling, and they can be practised and grown to make you a stronger writer, and that’s what I’m here for.

But then there is publishing, and if we want to be published, at this point in history, we have to accept that it’s taking place within the framework of a market economy, and that our work will become a commodity. So however much we’re writing for the joys of creative expression and artistic community, these purposes are also entwined with expectations for commercial success. It’s likely there will be challenges as well as successes along the way (and even the successes can sometimes present challenges). Disappointments and frustrations can creep in.

We can try to be upbeat and identify these hurdles as lessons, but based on my work as a developmental editor and book doctor they are often real points of anguish and suffering for debut as well as experienced authors.

Without being too much of a Debbie Downer, the submission process can be draining. We know that most manuscripts don’t get an agent, but it doesn’t help that many submissions are not only initially unacknowledged but never get a response. And even if an agent takes interest, in recent years I’ve heard far too many tales of writers sweating over revisions on the advice of an agent and sending them in but never hearing from said agent again (big-name agencies, reputable agents, agent-of-the-year agents). Ghosted writers: ghosting agents.

If misery loves company, many agents also report that their own submissions to publishers increasingly go ignored. One very good agent at a very good agency told me that one well-known editor at a prestigious imprint has never replied to any of her submissions.

Yes: long hours, and burnout, and there are more manuscripts than ever, but all of this is unprofessional, and it pains me that writers have to put up with it. Submittable and Query Manager are simple technologies available for tracking submissions. They can and should be used to keep writers informed.

Even manuscripts that do find an agent do not follow a guaranteed path to publication. I’ve often heard the statistic that only two out of three manuscripts sell to a publisher. And publication doesn’t always translate into the success that writers hope for. A book gets overlooked by reviewers. An event at a bookshop or a festival is attended by a small handful. Or there’s not enough ‘marketing’. Or they never find their books in bookshops. Or a second book in a two-book deal is published without trace, and a third book is not acquired because of ‘disappointing sales’.

And let’s talk about money. There isn’t much transparency about the subject in the world of writing. Some book deals do get significant advances with announcements in the trade papers that in themselves are the beginning of the marketing campaign: look at this big book we’ve just acquired.

But we don’t often hear that the debut novel that took years to write received an advance of £10,000 (a decade ago) or maybe £5,000 (more recently) at a literary imprint of a big five publisher, or even £1,000 at an independent press, or even less, or maybe no advance at all but some sort of profit-share arrangement. Or that authors’ second or third books often receive even lower advances than their first. And that’s before we consider the agent’s cut, and maybe the cost of creative writing courses, or fees for mentoring and manuscript reviews.

I particularly feel the pressure on debut authors to succeed. Like all artists, writers grow through practice, and their best work is often ahead of their first or even second or third book. But it does feel as if the pressure to excel is now there from book one. A cool sense of your own vision and value in writing is perhaps a requirement.

There is the option of self-publishing, and some authors make a great success of it, but too I have observed plenty of writers who’ve invested time and effort in self-publishing to generate only a small number of sales.

I shan’t go on. William Burroughs sums things up more eloquently:

And what does the money machine eat to shit out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.

William Burroughs did at least live off a trust fund. But we CAN do better.

Sufferings - and joys

To name it is to tame it, and these points of anguish lead me to the concept of suffering we find in Buddhism, where it is sometimes translated more subtly as dissatisfaction. The idea of suffering can, after all, feel rather catastrophic, even if it does sometimes feel as if we are living in the end times.

So let’s frame matters in terms of what Buddhists see as the root poisons of dissatisfaction: aversion, attachment, and ignorance. For example:

• aversion arises in the form of hostility when our books are declined, or anger when agents fail to respond to submissions, or resentment when truly shitty books get on to bestseller lists (even or maybe especially as an editor I feel that one sorely and regularly)

• attachments to our material can stand in the way of a clear approach to editing, or grow into cravings for an elusive place in the bestseller lottery

• ignorance about the business of publishing can lead to all sorts of muddled thoughts and emotional churning, feeding those aversions and attachments in unproductive ways; sometimes it’s simply a matter of feeling neglected by an uncommunicative editor or agent; sometimes it’s a matter of just being ignorant about your subject matter and unprepared for reader responses and also let down by a publisher more interested in your celebrity than the quality of your work.

These root poisons have cures. In abstract terms, the obvious ones are overcoming anger and blame by finding joy and sharing compassion, freeing ourselves from needless attachments, and dispelling our ignorance by educating ourselves. I often suggest simple ten-minute free writes:

• I’m angry about …

• I’m attached to …

• I’m ignorant of …

But then also:

• I can embrace … Or maybe just: What I love about writing …

• I can free myself of …

• What I know is …

This could sound wishy-washy, but it’s a start towards understanding, and small steps lead to grounding solutions. Publishing often seems like a hermetic world to outsiders and even to experienced writers, and ignorance is perhaps the poison that needs treating most of all. This treatment starts with self-knowledge.

For example, I often ask writers about sales figures, but they have no idea, and sometimes they seem afraid to ask. So: ask. What’s stopping you? And if you don’t get an answer to your email, call your agent or your editor, or ask to speak to the royalties manager. Some of us don’t like the phone, but emails stack up inboxes or get waylaid by junk filters. In general, our reliance on email can be a problem.

And if it turns out sales figures are good or even just okay: GREAT. And if they are disappointing at least we know, and can work out whether there’s a way to improve them, or whether we need to file this away and move on, focusing energy into new projects and considering ways to do things differently in the future. And most importantly of all, the air can be cleared as bottled-up tensions are released. A professional relationship gets on to a surer footing.

• If you’re a published writer: what do you wish you had known when you were starting out?

• If you’re not yet published: what do you wish that you knew?

Valued readers …

Write for yourself, but if you want to be published know that you have to write something that someone wants to read. And by someone I don’t really mean a literary agent, as they’re winging it much of the time, or an editor, who can’t truthfully predict the ups or downs of the market. And both agents and editors are trained mostly to say no. They won’t know why they are saying no some of the time, but they will just know that at a level of instinct that they don’t know how to sell a particular book, or that they just don’t love it enough.

But know what readers want to read. Know what readers value. A reader’s time is precious, so understand what sort of books might be enjoyed by readers of your own writing. Keep an eye on the books in your genre that get into the bestseller lists. Know what’s winning literary prizes. Browse whatever is sitting on the tables and face out with recommendations in your local bookshops.

Read reader reviews on Amazon and Goodreads - yes, some of them are dumb, and others are very looooong, but a lot of them will give you a real sense of what clicks with readers. Pay special attention to how books make readers feel. Your potential readership might be niche, or it might be wider, but it can help to understand such matters of taste in addition to mastering the craft.

But don’t be too guided by the market either, because markets get saturated, and taste runs in cycles. Understanding your genre can be particularly important.

Horror was one of the first genres of writing I loved as a reader, for example, and I read plenty of it in the 1970s, but even by the time I started working in house in the 1980s and 1990s its popularity had waned somewhat. Established blockbuster authors such as Stephen King and Clive Barker continued to sell in hearty numbers, helped by film and tv adaptations, but there were fewer debuts in this field.

I was editor for an excellent series of vampire novels, but their sales never really matched our expectations, and that author took his talents in another direction. Maybe we’d call this pivoting nowadays, but that wasn’t invented yet, and he’s now a very successful popular historian - he’s super smart, so I wasn’t surprised.

I also think that some of the appetite for horror was being redirected into crime and thrillers. The Silence of the Lambs delivered the real if sensational horrors of serial killing in our real world. We published Patricia Cornwell’s first Kay Scarpetta novel Postmortem (1990), which was innovative not only for setting its investigation in a forensic science laboratory but also for its protagonist: a chief medical examiner who was a woman.

And then in 2005 along came Twilight, published in the UK by my former employer. I’m not sure the great success of these books was entirely predicted, but it wasn’t long before bookshops were creating sections for paranormal romances and urban fantasy. Horror had a new spin.

The popularity of Twilight also expanded Young Adult fiction as a category of writing. And taking things in another direction Twilight in turn generated fan fictions, and one of those was Fifty Shades of Grey, and erotica for women readers became a very popular trend.

And today horror is popular again, and in new ways and with new forms. I’m loving the revival of British folk horror in various works of literary fiction, and from other parts of the world various works tinged with horror are also being translated: books by Olga Tokarczuk, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, and I’m currently reading Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez.

And by constrast there is an appetite for healing fiction, such as Matt Haig’s Midnight Library and Miye Lee’s cosy Korean fantasies set in the Dallergut Dream Department Store. Cosy categories fascinate me: cosy crime is now joined by cosy fantasy and cosy Christmas romances. The writing is not always to my taste - I probably prefer a firm grip to ‘a warm hug of a book’ - but I’m curious about the next cosy spin.

Take some ingredients of whatever is popular, perhaps, and consider how you can put your own slant on them. This doesn’t have to pander to the market. Think of it as a creative constraint.

… and valued communities

Sometimes I think much of the greatest suffering faced by writers arises from working so much in isolation: loneliness. There are ways to make connection and create meaningful networks.

For example, check out which authors are featured at genre events or conventions such as the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival or the World Fantasy Convention and maybe go along and see what they have to say. If you’re shy, just being present and listening can be fortifying.

Attend bookshop events locally or on Zoom, or take yourself to a salon such as Words Away run by my chum Kellie Jackson.

Sign up for a workshop. Yes, you know a lot about writing already and could in fact be teaching the class, but there are always lessons to learn and perspectives to gain.

Follow genre organisations and writers on social media. Not only will you build an instinct for where your writing belongs, but community has a value in itself, and in many ways is one of the most everlasting rewards of writing.

Know your own value

Also understand that even though a book might not fully earn you a living, it could help you make a living in less direct ways. Publishing a book gives you the value of an external stamp of authority, which often reaches out to readers in ways that, e.g., even having a PhD won’t. I’m thinking about writers such as astrologers and life coaches with whom I’ve worked. Their books have not earned life-changing advances but they have made significant differences in their professional lives for how they have added credibility to their profile.

And above all, know the value to yourself of writing.

A book might cost a reader £20, or be discounted to £10, or come in paperback more cheaply next year, or be borrowed for free with a library card. And smaller monetary exchanges can accrue greater value when they accumulate in volume in the context of a bestseller list.

But a financial value can’t really be placed on that sense of joy I see in so many other contexts of writing:

• The delight of authors speaking to their readers at events - readers who’ve not been bribed with five-dollar bills, at that!

• The prestige of a literary prize …

• … which can also be matched by the frisson of recognition from a great reader review - one that really grasps what you’re doing and even sees things in your own work that you’d never noticed.

• The pleasure of seeing foreign editions of your work - sometimes the advances are small, but they mount up and can make a difference, so there is in fact a financial value here too.

• Lifelong friendships emerging from workshops and conventions, and writing pals who met on social media getting together in person for the first time.

• The unboxing of a debut and sharing it with friends and family.

• The unboxing of any later book by any author, as the delight doesn’t go away.

• All the valued gifts that arise when you walk through the world as the sort of writer who, as described by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, is ‘in service to what matters most’: speaking the truth, extending compassion, acts of healing, acts of reciprocity.

And, perhaps most of all, the quiet reflective pleasures of sitting and writing a story that you believe in - a story that you really value.

*

These matters lie at the heart of my forthcoming Zoom masterclass Genres and Readers on Monday 11 November at 6pm (London). We’ll also talk about navigating feedback on our writing, the querying process with agents and editors, and other aspects of writers’ relationships with publishers and the book trade.

Above: A selection of romantasy, cosy fantasy and YA fantasy in Waterstones in Richmond. And at top: some discounted bestsellers in The Works in Richmond.

Once upon a time I read a guide to writing novels by a leading light at a well-known creative writing establishment, and it had a whole chapter on dialogue, and every single example of dialogue in that chapter was taken from a Hollywood film.

But a film is not a novel!

I grow impatient with the deference given to screenwriting practices in the world of fiction. Screenplay structures get crudely applied to prose fiction. ‘It’s like a film.’ ‘It has filmic qualities.’ ‘Can’t wait for the film’ of some treasured book - which can be lovely, of course. Especially if it’s a good adaptation! Sometimes it seems that the movie version is what’s aspired to or even grasped for - it’s as if it has higher status.

But when a book is being written the requirements of prose are what we should pay attention to.

And though dialogue is often the most important part of any scene, as it quickly brings characters and settings to life, there is more than one approach to representing it.

Direct speech

The most obvious to render dialogue is direct speech. The words captured on the page are the words as a character speaks them.

Many writers do direct speech well, and it’s central to how they bring characters and worlds to life. Think of the wit and bite of Evelyn Waugh, or subtext in the stories of Ernest Hemingway.

In Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ two characters talk around a very sensitive subject without being explicit about it, and that evasion says so much about that very subject: not just what it means at the point in the relationship between these characters, but also what it means in terms of transgressing the law, and what it means as a matter of life and death. It can’t be spoken about, and what’s unsaid is all.

Good dialogue usually serves more than one purpose. It moves a story along, but too, for example, it also reveals something of character. Roddy Doyle is very good at capturing what people say as a reflection of who people are, as illustrated by this selection from The Snapper:

—Hey! Jackie roared at the lounge boy. —Get your body over here.

They laughed.

The lounge boy was sixteen and looked younger.

—Three vodkas an’ two Cokes an’ a gin an’ tonic, said Jackie. Got tha’?

—Yeah, said the lounge boy.

—An’ a package o’ crisps, said Yvonne.

—Ah yeah, said Sharon. —Two packs.

—Do yeh have anny nuts? Mary asked him.

—Jesus, Mary, yeh dirty bitch yeh!

They screamed.

—I didn’t mean it tha’ way, said Mary.

Here’s our filmic version of prose: crisp, quick, funny, energetic - what you see is what you get, and what you get are flesh and blood characters, with their world opening up to you.

But not all direct speech is done with such immediacy. I’d dare to say it’s one of the most common weaknesses in unpublished manuscripts. People either do it well, but if not it can very easily feel laboured, or stilted, or too naturalistic, with every um and ah relayed.

I remember reading a manuscript in which a group of characters met in a bar and conversed in info dumps and ping-pong speech for sixteen pages without anything happening - though one character did go to the toilet twice. It was perhaps truthful to life, but it was boring, and it didn’t help the story move along.

Indirect speech

In addition to the spoken content, or what’s actually said, the presentation of dialogue matters as well. Waugh’s and Hemingway’s characters speak within speech marks. Doyle’s characters do it with dashes. Kent Haruf’s and Sally Rooney’s characters speak without either.

And in prose direct speech can also be replaced by indirect speech (sometimes called reported speech), which recounts what has been said in the words of a narrator. It can paraphrase, but too it can compress and summarise whatever was spoken.

Given that to some degree it’s putting what’s been said into other words, indirect speech might seem secondary, perhaps the more muted step-sibling of the splashier and more attention-seeking direct speech. But I must insist that there’s nothing inferior about it.

Think, for example, of the scene at the end of Chapter One of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, where Colonel Aureliano Buendía recalls that warm March afternoon of his childhood in Macondo when he and his brother were taken to the fair, where their father, José Arcadio, was seeking out his old friend Melquíades:

The gypsy wrapped him in the frightful climate of his look before he turned into a puddle of pestilential and smoking pitch over which the echo of his reply still floated: ‘Melquíades is dead.’ Upset by the news, José Arcadio Buendía stood motionless, trying to rise above his affliction, until the group dispersed, called away by other artifices, and the puddle of the taciturn Armenian evaporated completely. Other gypsies confirmed later on that Melquíades had in fact succumbed to the fever on the beach at Singapore and that his body had been thrown into the deepest part of the Java Sea.

We avoid here any info dumps (aka expository lumps). A lesser writer might have laboured in direct speech an explanatory account of the death of Melquíades. We are simply given that potent line ‘Melquíades is dead’ in quotation marks, with the narrator deftly jumping forward in time to the later occasion when the demise of Melquíades would be described to their father, sharing with us a couple of rich details but no more of that conversation.

Márquez’s style accommodates digressions, but the storytelling doesn’t linger too long. The narrator points us forward:

The children had no interest in the news. They insisted that their father take them to see the overwhelming novelty of the sages of Memphis that was being advertised at the entrance of a tent that, according to what was said, had belonged to King Solomon. They insisted so much that José Arcadio Buendía paid the thirty reales and led them into the center of the tent, where there was a giant with a hairy torso and a shaved head, with a copper ring in his nose and a heavy iron chain on his ankle, watching over a pirate chest. When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:

‘It’s the largest diamond in the world.’

‘No,’ the gypsy countered. ‘It’s ice.’

Those last two lines of direct speech place an emphasis on what’s most important. There has been other dialogue, of course, but it’s indirectly rendered: we have all those insistences of the children (I mean, who wants to listen to whiny kids?!), as well as the transaction of paying the entrance fee, which that lesser writer might enforced upon us as a tedious exchange in direct speech.

Then another longish paragraph of seventeen lines concludes the chapter, its voice building momentum as it fuses description with indirect speech, though it also incorporates a couple of direct intrusions: ‘Five reales more to touch it’ and ‘It’s boiling’.

I love the effect of these brief shifts into direct speech - each instance really spikes the energy, as does the final line of the chapter, where direct speech works as punctuation of all that’s gone before, delivering the grandiose statement that captures so much of what this magnificent novel is about:

‘This is the great invention of our time.’

Throughout this chapter it feels as if direct speech was rationed, with only the juiciest bits saved for direct transmission, and giving space to a rich storytelling voice.

I also think of my teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins in her astonishing story ‘The Child’, which was originally published in her collection Almost Everything and was recently selected by George Saunders for his Story Club. You can listen to Bobbie reading it here.1 The opening paragraph:

After the child had been taken from the water. After someone had said it that the pool cover should be taken completely off to see whether he might have slipped through he was so small and the cover was removed and there he was in that strange element. There was a question of shock and something like discretion that could not let them use one of the long poles with nets on the end to reach into the water and manipulate the small body toward waiting hands at the poolside. That expedience was so possible. The poles were right there but. The owner jumped into the pool fully clothed and gathered the dead child to himself as if he hoped to save it back into life. As if it still might be that he would be in time. And the awkward moment was past. It had been dealt with humanly with an implication of hope and salvaging against the grief that was now all that could happen seeing the child's blue tinted face.

Plenty was surely spoken in this opening scene of that story - someone asking to remove the pool cover, someone saying he was so small, all the other panicking responses and exclamations. But they are not registered directly, and instead we are left with this somewhat flattened narration with at times strange syntax, uttered by a narrator who feels as if they are trying to regain control at least of this account of what happened.

And then in the middle of the next paragraph:

And still no one said it, that he was dead.

This story is all about what’s unsaid, what can’t be said.

And when the small body was tidily on the bed in the ambulance and whisked away with tubes taped on the arms and injections still continuing and the ambulance attendant not looking at the mother, it would be so complicit what they knew together and no one would say now, not yet.

Later, we are told of ‘an earlier drama’ when the mother met the child’s father (‘He said that he wouldn’t marry her’), and then the narration of what happens after the baby is born slides into the diction of spoken words, though still as indirect speech, and perhaps this was in fact internal speech (‘She began to worry about the baby’s heart, poor baby. Oh, the poor baby’). And then we experience the aftermath of the child’s death, and life goes on, sort of, and anything that is said there again gets conveyed as indirect speech.

Only in the last two paragraphs of the story do we finally get any direct speech, after the mother’s parents come to visit (see above). It’s hard to know exactly what to make of what that mother means when she finally gets to speak in her own words, and why it is rendered directly, but it certainly lands with an unsettling effect. ‘Can you believe it?’ she laughs, leaving us with that lingering question, which, among other things, made me realise this is a horror story. What a terrible tale for anyone who’s lost someone too soon, and its power comes from the tone of its telling, a tone that would probably be diminished by various characters chipping in with direct speech.

What’s notable in One Hundred Years of Solitude and ‘The Child’ is how the indirect speech and direct speech as well as other description and action come together with narrative force. Dialogue is playing a part in both cases, but not in a literal way. The poor baby. It’s not obvious, and it’s not on the nose.

It’s a style I enjoy reading. A story is being told, and a storyteller takes a central part here, and there’s much to be said for that role of a confident narrator. Gimme some storytelling with my stories.

And too: at other times gimme some direct speech for its vivid and sparkly power.

(But no banter! No Marvel banter!)

Developing your own indirect speech

As a writing experiment, rewatch a favourite scene from a film, play or tv show, and then write it as indirect speech plus description. You can use direct speech too, but only selectively.

(You might also want to refer to a screenplay or playscript if one is available.)

Also try rewriting sequences of direct speech as indirect speech in pieces your own writing. Again, save up the juicy bits for direct speech, but otherwise let a narrator do the work.

And then lean into this practice a little more, perhaps. Don’t feel obliged to show rather than tell every scene with page after page of direct speech, though do think about those instances where you might use direct speech for best effect.

Another writing experiment: write a story or a scene that uses direct speech only at the beginning and the end to top and tail the account.

Further resources

For what it’s worth, the guide with the best advice on crafting dialogue is Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway; it’s notable that it comes in one of her two chapters on creating characters. Stephen King’s On Writing also has an excellent section on dialogue too. Both books use examples from prose fiction! King has some salty words about one otherwise good storyteller’s tin ear for dialogue, and he gives us examples - when you’re a king you have no worries about naming and shaming either.

And of course all I say for fiction can work for narrative nonfiction too.

My next Zoom masterclass, Showing and Telling on 14 October, will cover plenty of tips about ways to make your direct speech vivid and engaging, alongside further sermonising about indirect speech and the power of narration - consider this post a preview.

And below is the end of that first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude,2 and here is a link to The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins - do seek her writing out. If you don’t know her work, she’s one of those writers awaiting your discovery.