This post starts with thinking about what kind of procrastinator you are - because not all procrastinations are visible - and then moves on to unpick what’s actually going on underneath, to help you manage yours.

What kind of procrastinator are you?

Procrastination takes different forms - some more instantly recognisable than others - and it’s worth getting to know which way it tends to take you:

1. The run-of-the-mill, bored-and-I-don’t-want-to prcrastinator

   Writing is the opposite of the instant gratification that smartphones, the internet, the pub and the fridge offer us. (That links to one of my favourite-ever posts on procrastination, by the way) Even the most glorious flow of writing a scene that’s working really well takes sustained effort without immediate, concrete reward, and some stages of writing a novel are dull, difficult or both, just as some parts of life are dull, difficult or both. With both, being bored with your writing project, over time, may point towards the need for change, but most of the time patches of boredom or difficulty are natural and inevitable, and writers learn to live with that mild discomfort.

   

2. The it’s-not-a-good-day procrastinator

   Unquestionably there are days that you’d booked out to writing when the virus, the horrible Other Job stress or the lack of fuel and bandwidth mean you’d do better to throw in the towel and take a day off. But do the stars in charge of health, work, home and mascots really have to align so perfectly before you’re capable of finding the focus, rising above the discomfort, and getting on with it?

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But Garth’s is a more specific but also wider, more philosphical question. His charge-sheet for the classical, Iowa-Writers-style workshop is long and tackles fundamentals of creative process, aspiration and life. He evokes it both entertainingly and from a depth of experience and compassion.

So I won’t try to summarise that post here, just explore what I think of his ideas, and end with some thoughts about whether you might join or not join such a course.

Essentially, he’s come to the conclusion that the traditionally-formed fiction workshop - twelve or 14 students round a table, with a tutor as chair, sharing feedback on one participant’s writing at a time - just can’t do what it sets out to do, and does damage in the process.

For Garth, the problem is that the fundamental ideas that workshops are built on are wrong, and much of the time I agree.

1. ‘Art is democratic.’ No, it isn’t. Not everyone’s view of a piece is worth hearing, not all feedback is equal - not even the tutor’s – and it’s the artist’s sovereign right to choose what to ignore. But we are a conscious and social species, wired both to hold on to our individuality, and to fit into the group. It takes some pre-existing courage and confidence not to bend to what the group seems to be saying.

2. Workshops expect work to be shared - even when for that writer, this week, that’s not the right thing to be doing. They also expect the piece to be seriously meant, as it were - and some things we are perfectly entitled to write just can’t bear that weight of expectation.

3. ‘Authority in a workshop is generated by articulating problems’. So there’s pressure on all participants to dig out problems when maybe, overall, there really are none - or at least none when the ‘thick context’ of the piece is taken into account. And the chances are those ‘problems’ are ‘whatever is rough, eccentric, not immediately legible as “working”.’

4. Workshopping, and being edited by the industry, are completely different. In my MPhil, if someone said ‘Why did you do X?’ and I could produce a decent reason (which I usually could) that was the end of the matter, as is proper in an academic context of enquiry. When my editor asks ‘Why did you do X?’, my decent reason may be met with, ‘Yes, but it doesn’t work.’ The context is completely different.

   The rest of this post is for paying supporters of the Itch, but if you subscribe for free now, you can get a week’s free trial of the full Itch of Writing site, including the rest of this post.

   

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Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.

I came across this quote here, where it kicks off a very interesting meditation – by a psychologist, not a novelist – on how empathy works in fiction.

Empathy in the reader

When we’re defending the value of reading, writing and funding fiction in the teeth of utilitarian policies and administrators who need to draw provable and quantifiable lines between what they spend and how much GDP that spend will generate, we often talk about how it teaches us to empathise - and push the value of that in every field and industry.

And yet there’s no reason that non-fiction, particularly creative non-fiction (defined as non-fiction written using the tools of fiction) shouldn’t teach us empathy by the same means. So why bother with fiction, when making things up from scratch is so much harder work than borrowing real life and tweaking it?

This post starts by thinking about that distinction, then asks if it means that reading is really just living lite, why in fact narrative and storytelling embodies human experience itself, and ends by unpacking what this all means for your writing.

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Fiction vs non-fiction

Fascinatingly, that Couch Trip post mentions a study that shows that people who don’t empathise easily in real life have a stronger empathic response to characters in a movie if they think those characters are fictional, than if they think they’re real.

The suggestion is that in real life empathy so often feels dangerous because it involves relaxing your guard and becoming vulnerable to pain, fear and confusion coming in from outside - and thereby risking loss, overwhelm, and damage to your self. After all, any parent discovers that sometimes you have to not empathise with your child’s distress, but keep you head and heart steady, as well as your hands, while you rip off the plaster or drive away from the school gate.

Empathising with fictional characters, on the other hand, will do no worse than, say, make you cry at the end of the novel: the experience is contained between the book covers. So readers for whom empathy in real life is often too much may only be able to make the trustfall of opening up to how a story can work on them, if they have the safety net of knowing that this stuff did not, actually, happen.

In his book On Stories, philosopher and novelist Richard Kearney retells how Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was attacked by Claude Lanzmann, the director of the documentary Shoah, who maintained that making a story out of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors was, inherently, unethical: since those testimonies were broken, beyond story-making or rationalising into cause and effect or narrative arc, a piece constructed to fulfil the needs of narrative form betrayed the nature of the experience.1 The only way to transmit such witness, said Lanzmann, was to do as Shoah does and record direct statements by survivors to the camera. We can surely understand that view even if we don’t share it, but Kearney quotes some survivors who were unable to watch Shoah at all and who had never revisited their memories, but who could watch Schindler’s List and found doing so helpful.

In other words, for some people the prism of fictional form - enactment, mimesis, re-creation - is the only way they can safely approach dreadful experiences.

Is reading living lite?

This makes it sound as if reading is living lite, as it were: reality safely eviscerated. And, certainly, most of us read for anaesthesia on occasions: we read books so familiar they’re like the journey home from work; we roll into a small, familiar, safe and ultimately comfortable world for a couple of hours; we sink into crime or horror, for the catharsis of the end when the world is set to rights again.

All English teachers and slushpile readers know the heart-sink when some wild or peculiar story ends ‘and then he woke up.’ It was one of my children’s teachers who pointed out that often the child, having gone deep into its imagination and found some strange, threatening, scary things there, may need to use the story itself to declare that it was ‘only a dream’, to bring themselves back to safe, boring normality.

But anyone who’s been haunted by a book for years, or felt their life or how they see the world rearranged by a story, knows that a book is a lot more than lite. If we can slip further and better into another life and soul through prose written using the tools of fiction than by any other means, then we can also be more open to whatever joys or horrors live in fiction, than we could if knowing it’s non-fiction - ‘yes, this really happened’ - triggers our self-protective shields.

Empathy and Psychic Distance

But it’s also worth thinking about empathy in terms of pace and structure. The reader can want overall to travel along with your characters and experience their story, but still need a breather from immediate emotional intensity, and a chance for some perspective on what they’ve just experienced - just as we all do in real life.

Psychic distance is such a powerful writing tool because it reflects and embodies exactly our human engagement with human experience. We experience our lives in the world as our own viewpoint character, and our consciousness, separately, grapples with that experience and tries to make sense of it.

It’s not an accident that this separation is the key to most forms of therapeutic practice, as , also of this parish, often reminds me. And when you look at how narrative works in terms of psychic (narrative, emotional) distance, you are separating out what the viewpoint characters are experiencing from what the narrative makes and transmits of it all.

This is true even if one of your characters is telling the story, in first person. This kind of internal narrator is still a narrator: their narrator self is subtly or drastically separate from their place as an actor in the story - again, just as we are in our real lives.

So what does this mean for your writing?

• What do you want your reader to feel and think here?

  • This is something I often find myself asking students and mentees when I’m getting mixed messages from how the story’s written, or how the characters are behaving. It’s not that characters can’t have mixed or confused feelings, of course, and certainly not that everything must be laid out en clair, without subtext. But in these cases, as a reader I’ve felt not the depth of a confused reality but only the flatness of something that offers me nothing clear to engage with.

  • And it can be very disconcerting when someone giving feedback feels very differently about a character from how you feel, whether it’s someone asking you how the wife of your lovable rogue of an MC feels - or your agent saying that they think your MC’s beloved is a bit of a plonker.2 Again, it’s not that they’re necessarily right, but empathy - how much and what with - is one, crucial kind of experience that readers seek. Can you walk a few yards in that reader’s shoes, and try to understand why they had that reaction? Do you want to act on your understanding - or are they just not the reader fo you?

• ‘Another’s voice’ is as important as another person’s skin and soul: it’s your medium - your word choices and sentence structures - that make the reader feel that they’re slipping into another person’s self.

  • Writer’s yoga will help your prose muscles to respond to whatever your imagination comes up with

  • Exploring different narrative setups can help bring out narrative voices which will draw the reader in

  • Developing your understanding of narrative voice and dialogue will give you confidence to try new things

• How empathetic and exposed do you need to be to write well?

  • As I said here, the best writing does tend to come from situations and materials which are potent for you, and if you want your reader to understand why your characters are how and who they are, you will need walk some miles in their shoes, even if your readers should not and will not.

    • If something you need to write is not potent for you, then spend a bit of time finding that potency: perhaps thinking about parallel situation in your own life, or simple holding your mind to the situation until you come to feel its imaginative reality.

  • But the best writing also comes from keeping that crucial distance, which enables you to pick and arrange the most effective elements, and discard the rest, darlings and all.

    • It’s easy to be macho and suffering-artiste-ish about how it’s necessary to dare all and bare all if you want to write well - but the risk of working with truly painful material is that you constantly pull your writing’s teeth. (This is how I know this.) Far, far better - not just for you but for your readers - to write something less obviously dreadful which you are then able and willing to (re)inhabit fully.

• Reading like a writer is one way to train your empathy-ometer and develop your sense of how it all works. When you’re reading, stop and notice every now and again:

  • how much do you feel inside or outside the character’s skin here?

  • what words, phrases and paragraphs are making you feel that way?

  • how does this level of engagement fit with how engaged you are at other parts of the story? Is this overal rhythm working?

So where does that leave us? Even if you don’t buy into the full Freudian package, Bruno Bettelheim’s classic The Uses of Enchantment is still fascinating in how it explores the deep psychological events and states which the classic fairy tales embody, and embody them in a form which is not too real, not too close to home, but which can nonetheless work through the fears and angers which we must resolve in order to grow up. Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots does something similar from a Jungian standpoint, and is probably more useful, practically speaking, for thinking about structure. (It’s also much longer, mind you!).

Not that the deep fears, angers and joys ever go away. Sure, Max sails home and finds his supper still hot. But the wild things are still out there, and it’s in reading that we can go and find them again, when we need to.

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What is subtext?

Quite literally, ‘subtext’ simply means something which is ‘under’ or ‘below’, the text, as in the words on the page. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theories puts it like this:

what is suggested or hinted, what is ambiguous, marginal, ambivalent, evasive, emphasized or not emphasized.

So overall the label ‘subtext’ covers a lot of possibilities, but I don’t think those writing-group mates were applying Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of suspicion. And although a novel can absolutely have, for example, a political subtext (which is where the concept of subtext overlaps with that of themes and ideas) I suspect the writing group were talking about subtext in the form we’ve borrowed from theatre.

Photographer Minor White said, ‘One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are,’ and ‘what else they are’, you could say, is the subtext. As I said in that post, it’s the ‘else’ that raises writing from ‘enjoyable and serviceable’ to something really special: it’s when every phrase and scene is doing at least two jobs in the text. Subtext is very likely to be one of those jobs.

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Hi Emma, I’m in the home stretch and I’ve put off fully dressing my characters, adding in furniture and generally putting a fine point on the details, for the most part, until the end. It’s historical fiction and so there’s all that research. In dressing and accessorizing them, of course trying to incorporate personality, status, and narrative arc, while staying more or less true to historical record. What’s your process, if you have one, on dressing and accessorizing your characters? Does your internal editor have specific preferences or criteria for what stays on and what gets tossed?

Emma: Good question! You’re quite right that when you’re writing along and come up against a detail that will need a bit of digging, it’s often a good idea not to divert from writing the scene and disappear down a research rabbit hole. And of course with historical fiction that can happen quite often! While I’m drafting, if the need for that kind of thing comes along, if I can’t write what I need off the top of my head, I’ll probably put what’s important about it in square brackets, and sort it out during a ‘square bracket pass’.

And of course there are practicalities, which can mean it’s wise to check in with the basics of e.g. clothes, or handbags, hats, furniture, coaches, drinking vessels and so on earlier rather than later. Every now and again I’ll say to a writer I’m working with ‘So she’s running upstairs carrying the tray of gruel - so how is she holding up her skirt?’ or ‘So he’s escaped the lab, but a moment ago he’d have been wearing a white coat. If he’s now sneaking around in the woods hoping he’s invisible, when did he shed the coat?’

Having said that, I don’t by writerly nature put in a lot of clothes, accessories and furnishings, considered just as local colour and setting - so I’m maybe not the most helpful on this! Maybe it’s my drama background, but my imagination only tends to get interested when such things become part of the action: a cap to be doffed, an expensive bag you can lose or drop, a hem to tread on and fall over, a coat that’s not warm enough or a bodice that’s too warm.

If it’s a non-viewpoint character, my imagination will probably only come up with what they’re wearing etc. if my viewpoint character would notice and be thinking about how someone or some setting is rich, poor, cold, fashionable, whatever.

What I’m really saying, I think, is that I would never put that kind of thing purely as set dressing, but always for a storytelling reason.

Another supporter: I think these things differ so much from writer to writer. I have a friend who has written a couple of 19th-century-set novels and who absolutely glories in them in the physical details of Victorian life: detailed descriptions of clothes, food, architecture, carriages, hairstyles, visiting cards etc. That’s part of what appeals to her regular readers.

But when I wrote a novel (unpublished, alas) set at the start of the 20th century in Paris, the only details I mentioned were the ones my (not French) POV character would notice, the Parisian-ness of Paris, anything foreign in the environments in which she finds herself. I think my sole reference to her dress were when she leaves off her corsets; [other than that] she didn’t seem to me someone who would note what to her were humdrum, familiar clothing norms, if that makes sense? The challenge was in part trying to figure out what a foreigner from where she came from would notice as foreign about Paris in 1901, and I did it by reading memoir and guidebooks.

Emma: I think this is very true - that it hugely depends on the writer. But though you’re absolutely right that if the viewpoint character wouldn’t think about their clothes, then why would it be in the narrative, we do have the problem: what we can (and can’t) assume readers know or understand. Sometimes you will have to make sure modern readers will ‘see’ your character in, for example, long boots for riding, when people of the time wouldn’t think about it. The trick is to sneak them in in a sentence which is apparently about something else and preferably to do with the action of the scene: not ‘I was wearing long boots for riding as everyone does, so…’ but, ‘I struggled out of my boots as fast as possible, but I was too slow: she’d vanished’.

Q: Scenes: any useful tips on how to ensure you don’t enter a scene too early and stay too long? I think my natural tendency is to get in too early and stay too late, but I second-guess myself when cutting in revision. Especially when I suspect that in some cases, the end of a scene is only there because it’s always been there. I suppose I’m asking how I know when something is properly earning its keep on the micro- and macro-levels? Thanks you, as ever!

Emma: Ah, classic! ‘Get in late and get out early’ was one of the first pieces of writing advice that I can remember getting my head round - but that still leaves you working out what to cut and what to leave in.

I think the key is to know why this scene is in here: what is it doing for the story? What is the critical point of it? How much of the detailed action of the scene is serving that purpose? If it isn’t, but you still want the reader to get the material that’s in it for some other purpose (as with the boots in the previous question, say), how can you combine those two purposes in the same text?

What sections of the scene are part of its forward movement, part of a dynamic of ‘then - but - therefore - but’; part of an up-and-down of going-well and going-badly?

It can actually help to think in terms of act structure, not as a suit of armour, but a way to help you identify the main bones of what happens in this scene: act structure is fractal, as John Yorke explains in his brilliant Into the Woods, so you can useful apply it to a chapter, a scene or even a paragraph.

For what it’s worth, my mnemonic for five-act structure goes: Getting Going, Going Well, Going Critical, Going Badly and Going for Broke. This can help you decide how much you can nibble inwards from beginning and end, before the whole thing doesn’t make sense. And forget, too, that you may not need some of the middle to be fully dramatised, but only there as a bit of (vivid and specific) summarising. This is an old post about that.

Original Poster: You mean that a scene should mirror in miniature the larger act structure in terms of reversing expectations etc?

Emma: Yes, exactly. If a scene doesn’t feel right, it can be very helpful to hold an act structure frame up to it and see what’s going on.

Q: I am paying for an editor to look at my draft before I self-publish - a proper developmental/stylistic edit. I found someone who gets a good rating on the Alliance of Independent Authors site. Today she has come back with a slot at the end of September. My question is what should I aim to do between now and then? Should I give her my current draft with all the flaws I am aware of but have avoided tackling? Or should I do as much as I can myself between now and the end of September with the risk that I may do more harm than good. And what should be my priority? I’m thinking I might leave filter word excavation to her (there’s a lot needed) and focus on the characterisation issues I have identified.

Emma: It’s a very good idea to have your novel professionally edited before you self-publish, and I suggest you ask her what would be most useful for you to do, but that will depend on what you want from her.

When you’re trying to decide what you want an editor to do, it’s worth thinking about the fairly distinct stages that publishers put a novel through, not because they like spending more money on more work, but because that’s actually what’s most efficient. Follow the links for more detail:

1. the Structural Edit: storytelling (n.b. these are the ten structural edits I most often suggest)

2. the Line Edit (n.b. these are the ten line-edits I most often suggest)

3. the Copy Edit

4. the Proof-read

Not all of it is relevant to you, but when you are your own publisher it’s still essentially the same set of processes. Although there’s an overlap in the issues that each deals with - so it can be possible to work in more than one mode at once - essentially each needs a different mindset and pair of glasses.

I certainly wouldn’t give your editor a MS which is full of things you already know need changing, because why pay her to find things you’ve already found? You’re paying her to find the things you can’t see.

And there’s not a lot of point in getting down-and-dirty with line-editing type issues such as filtering, before structural-editing issues like character arcs have been tackled. Whatever you do or don’t decide to pay for, and how much you use fellow beta-reading writers for the developmental and line-edit stages, I would always suggest that anyone self-publishing seriously finds the funds for a professional copy-edit.

You could discuss with your editor whether you would like her to simply to highlight your line-edit-scale habits (e.g. filtering) for you to then work through, or whether you want her to pick up every instance of such things - which may need doing as a separate pass. It depends how she works.

Editors who are accustomed to working for publishers don’t always find it easy to transition to working directly with writers: indeed, I’ve run seminars for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (another fantastic source of good editors, by the way) about how writers think and work, to help develop a shared understanding and vocabulary. My post The Fiction Editor’s Pharmacopoeia came out of those seminars.

But with the rise of self-publishing editors are getting more used to working with us. Hopefully if you separate those three editing labels out and decide what you want, it will make sense to them and the two of you can start a fruitful conversation. It’s always worth asking if an editor you’re considering working with would do a sample edit of a few pages to see if you have a shared idea of what sort of thing they’re looking for.

Another supporter: That’s very helpful about getting the most out of a developmental editor, and makes sense of why I found a professional edit quite frustrating. I particularly wanted a structural edit, but may not have used the correct term and felt I had much more of a line edit than was useful. Food for thought, thanks.

Original Poster: Thanks Emma. She seems to line edit as part of the package she offered me. I suppose I don’t feel that confident about my own judgment which is why I’m a bit wary of changing too much, though I’ve done quite a lot of structural editing. But there are certainly things I can tackle ahead of passing it over.

They were ‘nearly halfway through’ and I was ‘less than a quarter way through’ and yet there we were, both stuck. Then, as I shared my experience with other writer friends, many of them agreed (as someone bought another round, obv) that they almost always found themselves becalmed around that point.

So there you are, in the Thirty Thousand Doldrums: the following wind that carried you out of port has died away, you can’t see how to get where you’re going, all possible changes of course look equally hopeless, and when you peer over the side all you see is poisonous fish and toxic weeds.

And that’s where I got interested, not just for my own writerly self, but for my students and mentees. (Click that link to find out more about workshops, events and working with me one-to-one).

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But when you have to press the pause button for many weeks, months or years it’s another matter. Whether a previous project has come back to roost, there are research reasons why this one must wait, or non-writing work, family or health stuff requires all your attention and energy, it can be hard to keep the faith in this project and your ability to make it work.

If you have to set a project aside it can be difficult to trust that you will recover that momentum and confidence, be able to pick it up where you left off, and regain your writing mojo. I think there are two aspects to coping and even benefitting from an enforced pause: mindset, and practicalities.

Mindset:

1. There are genuine writing benefits to taking a pause, so understanding those can help you to keep your morale up in the gap.

2. Every project is the product of the particular circumstances of its writing. If you had begun it on a different day, or with a different set of research materials, or happening to have recently read some different books, your finished book would have come out differently. A pause is really just one more circumstance.

3. Every project starts in your head as a sparkly cloud of ideas and endless promise, but condensing that cloud into specific words on your pages means that all the other ways it might have been never will be. Feeling those losses is natural, but you can’t know how or why the pause was responsible for what you’ve lost, so fretting about it does no good.

4. If you’ve learnt to write even when you don’t feel like it, when circumstances are unpropitious, or when a project gets stuck, then you may feel you ‘shouldn’t’ pause properly, but ‘ought’ to grab the few scraps of time you can, and keep writing. But if the scraps are few and far apart, you’ll just end up fiddling and losing confidence, without making any real progress. Whatever your must-write demon says, it’s wiser to accept the need to put the actual writing away completely.

5. When you lose touch with the substance and detail of the writing because you’re away from it, you tend to remember it simplified, and it’s easy to get anxious about it being clichéd or too like everyone else’s (as many writers do when boiling the story down to a synopsis). This is natural, so postpone making decisions about its fate until you’re back to experiencing it fully in the round.

6. When you are able to go back to it, it’s bound to take a bit of warming-up. The fact that the first few sessions feel like wading through treacle is par for the course. Don’t despair, just keep going.

Practicalities

1. Before you put the work-in-progress away, have a think about what useful engagements with the project might be possible, if the time or chance is offered: going to a place, reading a particular book or visiting an archive, talking to someone, drawing, painting or a small developmental things?

2. Don’t think in terms of a formal To Do list, but more about making sure that if some time suddenly appears, you’re reading to make the most it. It can also keep the project alive and ticking over gently in your head, in an unpressured way.

3. The benefits of a writing pause can include some of the following. Are there things you could do that would help make the most of the pause?

   1. ideas, characters and settings get to mulch down, to change and develop, rather than immediately being pressed into service in a draft.

   2. other writing projects can ask things of you that this one didn’t - but you learn from that work, and can bring that understanding to this one when you do restart it.

   3. other people’s writing in other genres - or poetry, theatre, visual art, music, non-fiction and documentaries on apparently unrelated topics - can enrich or challenge what you thought you were doing with this one.

   4. writers go to a lot of trouble to get distance from their work, and a pause is a heaven-sent opportunity to do exactly that.

4. Make sure you have a dedicated notebook in which to record things which rise up (mixed metaphor alert!) from that ticking-along-in-the-background stage, as they occur to you. Don’t try yet - while you’re away from the work iteslf - to sort, censor or judge. Wait till you’re fully back in touch with it and then sift out what’s useful.

5. For all the reasons in that Don’t Fiddle post, resist the temptation to keep checking in with the project when you know you can do any reasonably sustained work.

6. When you do come back to it, make the most of the enforced distance. Even if you left it in a very dishevelled state, resist picking up the drafting where you left off, or diving in and starting to fix the first thing that you spot. Instead, print it out and read what you’ve got ‘like a reader’, and make tons of notes as you go recording your reactions and thoughts about it, without (yet) sorting, censoring or judging. From there, work out what your first work should be. If it’s a very chaotic set of drafts and you can’t even remember where you got to, try taming your draft.

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Readers want to feel the people and world of our story as real, even when it’s fiction and they know no one can know what 7th century London was like, or that the memoirist couldn’t possibly remember such details accurately.

And yet compared to theatre, film or graphic novels, prose fiction and memoir have only black marks on paper or screen to transmit what the writer has imagined or remembered, for the reader’s imagination to recreate it.

So how do we make sure the reader’s imagination will be able to do that work, and recreate the world in a way that feels ‘real’ to them, and is true to our original creation?

One of the best books I know to explore this is Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir: it’s a compulsory read for memoirists, I’d suggest, but I’d hugely recommend it to fiction writers too. After all, the definition of creative non-fiction, including memoir, is ‘non-fiction written using the tools of fiction’, so Karr’s book is a brilliant toolkit for both.

Plus, it’s funny: one reason this post is going up late is that I kept being drawn in to reading more! This post starts with how humans perceive the real world, and what that means for writers, before digging into Karr’s concept of ‘carnality’, how it works in figurative language, when you might not want to be carnal, and finishing with a checklist of things to think about in working with this understanding.

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Here you are, slogging away to develop and improve your own prose, characterisation, plot, character and dialogue, and then this kind of thing gets agented, published and backed to the hilt; it’s admired and hyped; it wins prizes and/or sells in the hundreds of thousands - or all of those things? And yours doesn’t?

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Truly, I sympathise, and I empathise too, particularly if I have myself recently run into one of the industry’s dead ends. It’s not simple envy, or even envy’s more toxic sibling, jealousy, it’s an honest frustration: you want to find an audience for your writing, but evidently publishers think that what potential audiences like is stuff you would hate to have to write, and the opposite of the kind of writing you’re working so hard to do really well.

But I want to suggest a new perspective on books that seem bad to you, because it’s genuinely more useful than even a cozy and pleasurable session bemoaning how the entitled lit’ry snobs are running the show, digital natives write such feeble TV-brain prose that proper books will soon be extinct, or how the cultural barbarians are at the gates.

You learn so much about writing and readers if you read at least a few miles in the shoes of someone who likes this kind of book, and those of the publisher hoping to sell it to them. And you certainly learn more than if you look only for evidence that the writer and publisher are stupid, lazy, ignorant or out to defraud us of our hard-earned £8.99.

So when you encounter a published book which you think is ‘bad’ - whether that means badly written, crudely built, stuffed with clichés, utterly formulaic, ludicrously pretentious, incomprehensibly up-its-own-arse, or too long or too short or too silly or too stupid to be borne - instead of being scornful, outraged or depressed, ask yourself, why is it ‘good’ as in ‘good enough to sell enough’? This is, if you like, one way of reading like a writer.

When you meet a ‘bad’ book ask yourself:

1. What does this particular combination of good-enough-to-sell-enough consist of? There are many different kinds of pleasures a book can promise to give its reader, although no book will deliver all of them. Does this on give the reader:

   1. A story promising and delivering the reliable pleasures of this genre, in terms of ‘story is the journey you make’ and ‘plot is the route you take’?

   2. A story promising and delivering the genre pleasures of literary fiction, which is to say: new and thought-provoking prose and forms of storytelling, ideas, characters and story?

   3. An attention-catching premise?

   4. A zeitgeisty topic?

   5. An appealing main character in an intriguing situation?

   6. The chance to live temporarily in a fascinating, idyllic, closed, vanished or imagined world?

   7. Beautifully observed life?

   8. Rich or evocative prose?

   9. Fascinating ideas?

2. Why did a publisher think it was worth gambling thousands of pounds and hours on publishing this book, in the expectation (or at least the hope) of finding enough readers and selling it to them to make that money back and then some profit?

   1. Is this by a writer those readers already know they enjoy, and trust to deliver on what the book promises?

   2. Is this by a writer very like a writer those readers know they enjoy? (Clue: look at the cover-design)

   3. Is the writer someone readers already know from some other sphere of visibility?

   4. Is this a new voice in the genre (including lit fic as a genre), who promises something new while still delivering the classic pleasures of this kind of book?

   5. Is this a new voice which combines different sets of genre pleasures in a way which looks new and exciting?

   6. Are there things about this book which make it above-average at disrupting potential buyers’ attention to other things, and think about reading it? Does it catch elements of the zeitgeist which will improve the chances of being widely reviewed and talked about?, e.g. demographic changes, cultural shifts, specific films or attention-grabbing genres, historical periods or events that are having a moment, or newly popular hobbies, pastimes or sports? Does it have prize potential?

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But what about the prose?

Notice how that second list doesn’t include prose, because to the industry the primary job of prose is to deliver what the book promises as well and consistently as possible, and many of those promises are not about the prose: the promise is about the message, not the medium. Only in literary fiction is does the overt promise of the book include that the medium itself, the words, will be a conscious pleasure.

To those of us who sweat blood over better writing - and toss aside books whose prose is unexciting or worse - that might seem weird, not to mention exasperating. But let’s be honest with ourselves: as Mark Lawson puts it à propos thriller writer Michael Chrichton: ‘there are three basic elements that a novel can contain: narrative, ideas and prose’ and a weakness in one can be made up for by strength in the other two. In a writer or genre whose strengths we enjoy, our irritation at their weakness doesn’t put us off.

That’s not to say ‘real readers don’t notice’ the technical issues we have to learn to wrangle: they may not know or think about point-of-view or five-act structure, but such things still make all the difference to how they experience the story. More about this here.

Where was the editor?

If what’s ‘bad’ about the book are things that writers tend to be blind to, and an editor could and should have tackled - repetitions, unbelievabilities, sketchy bits, flabby bits or sloppy copy-editing - it’s even more irritating, in a way: why didn’t they just sort it out, and do a potentially good story justice?

With a famous name and a long-time editorial partnership, it can be that the editor, too, has become a bit blind to how the writing strikes a non-aficionado: they’re not really an outside eye any more. Other authors have enough success and therefore clout that the publisher doesn’t want to risk a row that might prompt the goose to fly off to lay its golden eggs elsewhere.

By no means all bestselling or admired authors are like that: Georgette Heyer, consummate professional and massive bestseller, was horrified when she discovered that her publisher was passing her typescripts straight to the typesetter. Heyer knew every book needs an editorial eye, but her editor reckoned that a quick proof-read of the typeset version would be enough, because it would sell anyway.

And that’s the core of the brute truth: for each book the publisher has to do a cost-benefit analysis of how much to spend not just on cover designs and production, but also in editorial time (which may include freelance fees) and effort.

You’d think that the bigger the book’s potential earning power, the more work the publisher would put in - and that can be true. But the opposite can also be true: if lots of the other reasons for its saleability are sure-fire, and the editor has other books (they always have other books!) which need more work, or where editorial input will make much more difference, when it comes to an author and book with a reliable market that will buy it anyway, they may decide to just do the basics.

What can a writer learn by asking what’s good about a bad book?

Each of us will vary in what we choose to investigate - but here are some things that you could look for, and think about how you might map that insight across to your own projects?

• Why would a potential reader, picking it up, be drawn in by this particular blurb/copy and cover?

• What keeps readers turning the pages when it sure as hell isn’t the prose?

• What keeps readers turning the pages when it sure as hell isn’t the plot?

• What keeps readers turning the pages when it sure as hell isn’t the ideas?

• What are the genre pleasures the book delivers, and what does that tell you about what readers want from that genre? What is satisfying about that kind of story? What does that tell you about what is satisfying for readers - which is to say, about the kind of story you would write?

• If ‘nothing happens’ - what does the writer think is happening? Why might their readers feel that what does happen matters enough to be satisfying?

• If ‘characters are cardboard’, what nonetheless might appeal about them? Are they clear, their motivations easy to understand? Are the villians a satisfyingly simple Aunt Sally?

• If ‘the ending was really annoying’, was it over-determined and too tidy, or to fuzzy and not resolved enough? Why might the writer have done that on purpose, for a reason that seemed good to them?

• If things about it are ‘boring’ to you, or dislikeable, what might someone predisposed to like this kind of story find interesting in them?

• Is the book catching and evoking zeitgeisty things? Given there were probably lots of other manuscripts doing similar which didn’t get published, what is it this one doing with them?

None of this, truly, is to persuade you to like books you don’t, or to think they’re good in the way you hope your books are good (or will be!). What I’ve tried to unpack is how much there is for any of us to learn from temporarily considering such books’ merits instead of their deficiencies.

Whether you then go back to being incandescently furious that you’re forced to write in a world where such bad books get published, or join me, Goethe, Madame de Staël and Lev Tolstoy in finding that tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner (when you understand everything, you forgive everything) is up to you!

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When I confessed online that I’d come to actively1 enjoy writing them, and often use them in tutoring, the first responses were a slew of ‘You’re mad, they’re the worst thing any writer has to write - your poor students!’ Only then did my fellow synopsis-lovers cautiously put their heads above the parapet to agree with me.

But we all have to learn to write them, so why not turn necessity into advantage, or even pleasure?

This post starts by looking at why so many of us would do anything rather than write a synopsis, then at how thinking differently might help with that loathing, and finishes with the practicalities of writing both working and selling synopses.

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Q: I am writing a braided narrative and have two characters - lovers, but with their own stories - which I automatically write in first person. I am confident enough to stick with that for both, but they spend four out of thirty chapters together. Is that enough to prevent a first person PoV? I am happy to try it out but also mindful of the fact that I haven’t seen it done anywhere so there must be a good reason for that. It is my first novel, so not getting ahead of myself. Just read The Things They Cannot Say, which has both protagonists in first but they don’t meet.

Emma: Great question! I think the straightforward answer is that for the chapters where they’re together, you should pick one of them as the ‘I’ - the internal narrator - and keep the other as ‘s/he’, and operate by the normal point-of-view rules. In other words, it works exactly as the other chapters work: chapters narrated by A think of A as ‘I’, and B as ‘s/he’, whether B is not there or (occasionally) physically there. And vice versa, of course.

As to which of them to pick for the narrator of a together chapter, a good rule-of-thumb question for choosing viewpoints is to ask yourself which character has most at stake in this scene: generally speaking that creates the most narrative tension. Mind you, if there’s something crucial in one of their heads which they would be very conscious of but you don’t want the reader to know yet, you probably want to stay out of that head, and use the other one as the narrator/viewpoint character.

What is crucial is that when the reader lands in a new chapter, there are enough specifics that the reader senses immediately whether the ‘I’ is A or B. More here about handling dual- and parallel- narratives. (Top tip: don’t just rely on headings, because so many readers’ eyes shoot straight over them.)

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible works exactly this way, absolutely brilliantly. We get deeply involved with the ‘I’ of a certain strand, but we also see them from the outside in the other characters’ strands, so our experience of the novel’s events has all the layered complexity of actual life.

It always helps - to the point of being crucial, I’d say - if you take care to make the narrative voices of the different strands as distinct as you can, so the whole narrative is shaped by the narrator/viewpoint character’s personality, point-of-view and use of language, as well as the events and actions. Ideally, the reader will always know, without having to think about it, which the ‘I’ is in any given paragraph.

For the sake of anyone else reading this, I should say that this is the kind of question that does end up with some writers switching to third person - i.e. using a single, external narrator - because it does give you more flexibility within a single narrative setup. In switching viewpoint it still needs care to take the reader securely with you, but you can use psychic distance to get as close in to each characters’ experience as you can in first person, while also going places no character’s mind or memory can go. But if first person feels right for you and the story, then there’s every reason to stick to it.

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Q: I’m knee or even hip deep in a third draft. But a creeping feeling that not enough planning and too much pantsing has produced a plot stuck together by too many coincidences. Short of a full deconstruction, are there techniques or tricks of the trade to make twists and turns seem more inevitable than contrived?

Emma: Ah, yes, the bones are showing? A well-known editor-turned-agent, long dead, said to me that you’re allowed one thundering coincidence per novel: any more, and the reader stops trusting that the writer is dealing honestly and responsibly with them in creating a plausible ‘fictional dream’ which it’s safe to read as if it really happened.

In other words - when separate elements of a story turn out to coincide at random, or surprising things happen, the reader wants to feel, if only in retrospect, that it’s not unconvincingly unlikely: that the writer isn’t ‘cheating’ to make their story work.

But sorting out each coincidence-too-many may need a different approach, depending on what the elements are. I’m so not a crime writer, but for example:

• Look at a coincidence, and retro-fit actions, situations, or references, to make it not so very unlikely that these two people would coincide, or someone would stumble on whatever they have conveniently just stumbled on, or whatever. Late one night, the MC’s in the office looking for evidence to exonerate himself from being accused of fraud, and it’s surprising that an accountant from the other division suddenly appears ‘because I left my phone behind’ and catches the MC apparently red-handed. Plonked in like that, it looks awfully like the fell hand of the author trying to make the plot work. But if ages ago we got a glancing sight of the accountant having an affair with the intern in the next cubicle to the MC (which at the time we just took as world building) then it feels much less unlikely that she would have left her phone on the intern’s desk.

• If you have two separate coincidences that you need to make more convincing, and can make them both products of the same essential situation, it helps even more. For example: you need the MC to be stumbled on, and separately you need the intern to turn out at the denoument to have Helpful Friends in High Places. If Accountant has a massive chip on her shoulder and is committing fraud to maintain a posh lifestyle her career so far can’t support, then Intern Who Has Friends In High Places is the sort of girl they might fall for, and the affair, the phone-leaving-and-stumbling-on-MC, and the involvement of Intern, all stem from the same essential situation.

• Thinks like mis-dials and lost letters do happen, of course - but it’s more convincing if the dialler is stressed or in a hurry - and the hall floor the letter drops on to is a mess.

• Retro-fitting the Accountant’s affair with the Intern makes it conform to Chekhov’s rule that you should only put a gun on the wall in Act One if it will be fired in Act Three, but don’t forget my Reverse-Chekhov rule: ‘if you need a gun to be fired in Act Three, you should make sure it’s on the wall in Act One.’

• If all else fails, you could try ‘hanging a lampshade on it’ as Ruth Ware puts it: just make the MC be astonished that X should turn up - what are the odds? - etc. etc. Probably only one per book, but if you’ve successfully shoved the other coincidens underground, you can get away with it.

In trying to figure out this stuff, it can help to write yourself a crib sheet: a parallel ‘What’s happening meanwhile offstage’ narrative (bullet points is fine!) to track e.g. the affair, and when it manifests bits of itself in the main narrative.

Another kind of crib sheet that can help when your story is all about uncovering the past is the one that tracks ‘What actually happened’: it helps whether your story is a classical whodunnit with a body on page one - how did the murder happen and the body get here? - or the sort which is all about the protagonist finally understanding their baffling childhood as a hanger-on of messy adult lives: write yourself a run-down of who did what to whom back then.

It might be worth deconstructing someone else’s work to see how they do it: Having been hugely enjoying Slow Horses on the TV, I’m thinking Mick Herron’s Slough House books might be fruitful. See what Herron does, to make sure that the big dramatic encounters are plausible outcomes of what has come before.

OP: Right, got it. Put some solid flesh on the bones. I like the ‘what’s happening offstage’ approach, adds depth and shadow to the world as well as authenticity to the twist.

Emma: Yes, it does add depth, I think - you may find all sorts of small aspects of ‘offstage’ peeking through in ‘onstage’ bits. When I’m planning, I often actually have a column in the grid for ‘offstage’ (or different-coloured index cards in Scrivener, say). It’s mostly to keep myself straight with plotting, but it definitely encourages me to think ‘What actually happened while X was away, which means they now now do whatever?’

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Q: Is it worth while entering competitions? I’ve entered quite a few, local and national and have never got anywhere. It’s expensive and time consuming and contributes to my general sense of my book being simply not good enough. I find myself becoming a little cynical that there are so many people out there and here on Substack who are exploiting gullible wannabe writers like me when there’s not a cat in hell’s chance. I hasten to add that I do not include my subscription to the Itch in this category. Wondering whether I should spend my time and money on cruises and mini breaks like my other pensioner friends!

Emma: Oh, I can so see why you’re feeling that way! Even the simple maths of some competitions suggests that the odds are not high (though some don’t have as many entries as you might suppose) and that’s before you’ve factored in who’s judging, and who else is entering.

But please don’t think of yourself as gullible! It’s not a stupid decision to give these things a go - at least, once you’ve checked out the competition’s credentials and are confident it’s not a scam.1 And it’s never a waste of time for a human being to put effort and disposable time and income into creative work, growing and developing skills and understanding. Creativity is fundamental to human life.

So it’s worth holding on to a version of my basic philosophy for sustaining a creative life: never embark on writing something which, if it doesn’t win the extrinsic reward you hope for (the longlisting, shortlisting, winning, commission, money, invitations, readership, contract, esteem, prize, uniform five stars, whatever) you will forever feel was a complete waste of your writing life.

Having said that, the only way to be sure the ratio of effort to success in competitions is 1:1 is if it’s actually 0:0, so it’s worth finding ways to motivate yourself to have a go.

Back on my Masters, I remember the late, great poet and writer Helen Dunmore talking about using short story and poetry competitions as a way of commissioning yourself. The length, theme and deadline give you something to start from, and in a curious way therefore take the pressure off, because if you’ve fulfilled the requirements then in a way you’ve succeeded: you’ve created something that didn’t exist before. And if it gets longlisted, or does even better, that’s even better of course, but it’s not the only value. Thinking this way can be less daunting that taking an existing story you’re super-proud of, and sending that in for judgement.

It can also help to enter more, not less: more stories, more poems, more competitions. I know money comes into it, and it’s harder with novels because there are fewer comps, but if it’s financially feasible, trying to make sure you always have some work out there dilutes the misery of any one shot not having hit the mark.

But I wonder if you just need a break? To go back to some fun writing for the hell of it, instead of the Next Major Project. Try some Appointments to Write or something similar: playful, nothing riding on it, if it doesn’t come off, tomorrow is another day ...

The exasperation of de-filtering your draft is that filtering is a natural product of your imaginative process, and so many writers find that the darned stuff gets everywhere!

What is filtering?

My original post about filtering is here, so this is a quick recap. John Gardner in The Art of Fiction compares these two sentences:

• Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks.

• She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting.

and points out how the first one includes

… the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness… Generally speaking… vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as “she noticed” and “she saw” be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing see.

It’s Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction1 who nails what’s going on:

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Catherine: A Retelling of Wuthering Heights, by Essie Fox

As the publisher puts it:

With a nature as wild as the moors she loves to roam, Catherine Earnshaw grows up alongside Heathcliff, a foundling her father rescued from the streets of Liverpool. Their fierce, untamed bond deepens as they grow – until Mr Earnshaw’s death leaves Hindley, Catherine’s brutal brother, in control and Heathcliff reduced to servitude.

Desperate to protect him, Catherine turns to Edgar Linton, the handsome heir to Thrushcross Grange. She believes his wealth might free Heathcliff from cruelty – but her choice is fatally misunderstood, and their lives spiral into a storm of passion, jealousy and revenge.

Now, eighteen years later, Catherine rises from her grave to tell her story – and seek redemption.

Why I enjoyed it:

The strapline on my proof copy is ‘Nelly Dean told only half the story’: Wuthering Heights, with its chinese-box-like structure of narrators (so different from Jane Eyre telling her own story!) is just asking for another writer to step in. Essie Fox’s seventh novel does just that - and quite apart from more literary considerations, it’s hard not to like a book which looks so gorgeous, spredges and all.

As far as I can tell (full disclosure: it’s decades since I read WH) Fox follows the original faithfully - this is no spin-off or riff - but with a crucial new lens: what if we look at Catherine’s human drives and disastrous choices with an understanding how limited her options were, as a young woman of her time, class, circumstances and personality? And what if her ghost doesn’t just haunt Lockwood, but gets to tell her own story, and simultaneously see into the mind of the daughter she didn’t live to see grow up? It’s a project which chimes beautifully with our own, twenty-first century desires to tell history “from below”: to give voice to the voiceless and the victims of circumstance.

One of the most important joys of historical fiction is how the imagined and invented intertwines with what we know as real, making the real come imaginatively alive, and the imagined feel more rootedly real. Of course WH is itself fiction, but classic fictional stories occupy a similar place in our cultural memories as the classic stories we are taught as real history. When they’re used as the basis for new fiction, either can open up similar pleasures: the strange being made familiar and the familiar strange. Catherine works so well with the same kind of pleasures: here are the people and voices we feel we know - Fox isn’t afraid to quote Brontë directly - and the heightened, Gothic world we can sink back into, the intense sense of tragedy-in-waiting - but always with the sting of the new and vivid.

Three reasons for a writer to read it:

1. If you’re drawn to the haunted halls of gothic in historical fiction - as reader, writer or both - Essie Fox really knows her Gothic. Her background is in design and illustration, and for many years her blog Virtual Victorian was a go-to for lovers of material culture. Here on substack, her new podcast is full of delights - and that pedigree shows in Catherine.

2. As a project, Catherine must have been challenging, because following the plotting of Wuthering Heights would, I imagine, have left relatively little room for manouevre - but Fox’s attention to her source feels precise and well-judged. Her previous novel, Dangerous, imagined the disgraced and exiled Lord Byron as turning detective to clear his own name. It’s a fascinatingly different take on the same central writerly conundrum: how imagine outwards from a story the reader already knows, and still make a coherent, self-standing narrative out of it. Well worth studying.

3. One of the challenges for any story which is as much about ‘then’ as ‘now’ is how to handle the moves between different pasts and presents, making sure the reader never feels unmoore, or reads some thought or action as belong to the wrong time. Essentially it’s all in the switches and the tenses - and Fox’s experience shows in this, handling it all very deftly; for more about non-linear narratives, click here.

   Thanks for reading This Itch of Writing with Emma Darwin! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Like all writers, I was a reader first and still go back to reading for rest, refuelling and working out writing problems. Like all teachers of writing I’m always going on about ‘reading like a writer’ for the same reasons - but it’s also important to stay in touch with reading ‘like a reader’. And although I don’t review professionally, like all authors I sometimes get sent new and forthcoming books.

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So I’m delighted to have finally launched Book Post. In this special section I’ll be exploring books I’ve read, from the very old to the very new, through the Itch of Writing lens: what they are, why I enjoyed them, and why they could be useful to a writer.

Do note that when I say ‘exploring’, not every book I write about will be one I think is perfect, but I shall be focusing on its merits, not its failings. I honestly believe that we learn as much from thinking about how things are working, as how they’re not working - and besides, only the gods are perfect, and not all of them. On This Itch of Writing, imperfection is just part of the human creative condition. As Anne Enright puts it, ‘In the long run we’re all dead, and none of us is Proust’.

Obviously there are only a few posts there so far, but over the weeks and months it will build. If my post makes you want to read a book, any good library should be able to get hold of it - and if the author is alive and your library system is civilised, they should benefit from Public Lending Right or equivalent payment.

Having said that, this seemed a good moment to launching my new Itch of Writing Bookshop, based on bookshop.org which supports independent bookshops, authors and organisations. There you will find all the books I’ve already got lined up for future Book Posts, a few others that I am constantly recommending here, and my own books too. Each post will link to buy the book there, and if you do buy anything via links on the Itch, a small commission also helps to support the Itch - so thank you!

Practicalities:

All Book Post posts will be available on the Itch of Writing website to subscribers, supporters, super-supporters, followers and casual passers-by.

As with the main Itch of Writing, if you’re a subscriber you can also choose whether to have new Book Post posts emailed to you, or just read them online.

• New subscribers will automatically be subscribed to receive both emails. To change what you do and don’t receive just go to go to Settings > Subscriptions > pick This Itch of Writing and slide the toggles.

• Existing subscribers have not been automatically subscribed to receive Book Post emails, as I know lots of extra stuff in your inbox is irritating. If you would like to receive them, just go to go to Settings > Subscriptions > pick This Itch of Writing and slide the toggles.

• On the desktop version of Substack’s home page, the Book Post posts have their own special section, separate from the main Itch of Writing posts.

• On the Substack app, bless its clunky little heart, all the posts are just served up in order of posting.

I do hope you enjoy browsing in Book Post, and have a good weekend!

Using physical symptoms to evoke a character’s psychological state can work just fine - after all we’ve been using ‘guts’ as a metaphor for courage for centuries - or can have the reader wishing they’d just take some Rennies.

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Like all writers, I was a reader first and still go back to reading for rest, refuelling and working out writing problems. Like all teachers of writing I’m always going on about ‘reading like a writer’ for the same reasons - but it’s also important to stay in touch with reading ‘like a reader’. And although I don’t review professionally, like all authors I sometimes get sent new and forthcoming books.

Share

So I’m delighted to have finally launched Book Post. In this special section I’ll be exploring books I’ve read, from the very old to the very new, through the Itch of Writing lens: what they are, why I enjoyed them, and why they could be useful to a writer.

Do note that when I say ‘exploring’, not every book I write about will be one I think is perfect, but I shall be focusing on its merits, not its failings. I honestly believe that we learn as much from thinking about how things are working, as how they’re not working - and besides, only the gods are perfect, and not all of them. On This Itch of Writing, imperfection is just part of the human creative condition. As Anne Enright puts it, ‘In the long run we’re all dead, and none of us is Proust’.

Obviously there are only a few posts there so far, but over the weeks and months it will build. If my post makes you want to read a book, any good library should be able to get hold of it - and if the author is alive and your library system is civilised, they should benefit from Public Lending Right or equivalent payment.

Having said that, this seemed a good moment to launching my new Itch of Writing Bookshop, based on bookshop.org which supports independent bookshops, authors and organisations. There you will find all the books I’ve already got lined up for future Book Posts, a few others that I am constantly recommending here, and my own books too. Each post will link to buy the book there, and if you do buy anything via links on the Itch, a small commission also helps to support the Itch - so thank you!

Practicalities:

All Book Post posts will be available on the Itch of Writing website to subscribers, supporters, super-supporters, followers and casual passers-by.

As with the main Itch of Writing, if you’re a subscriber you can also choose whether to have new Book Post posts emailed to you, or just read them online.

• New subscribers will automatically be subscribed to receive both emails. To change what you do and don’t receive just go to go to Settings > Subscriptions > pick This Itch of Writing and slide the toggles.

• Existing subscribers have not been automatically subscribed to receive Book Post emails, as I know lots of extra stuff in your inbox is irritating. If you would like to receive them, just go to go to Settings > Subscriptions > pick This Itch of Writing and slide the toggles.

I do hope you enjoy browsing in Book Post, and have a good weekend!

Share

Why might you publish your writing under a pen name?

1. You are a very private person and want a layer between your self and the gaze of the audience. That is your right, of course. Having said that, in my experience (your mileage may vary) the exposure of having a book out there is curiously impersonal and much less drastic than having written the book in the first place.

2. You find it liberating. The official idea of In Bed With was that the stories themselves would be written under pseudonyms because we’d feel less shy about writing erotica1, and there’s definitely some truth in it: you are sidestepping the hampering sense of being judged. But if you’re seriously worried about your in-laws discovering you’ve written a book, you are likely to find it very hard to hide that fact in the longer term.

3. You want to keep you real name for later writing in a different genre. It might make sense - but what if this is a big hit and you want to stay in this lane after all? Will you ever get to use your real name? I would also, very gently, ask you what it is about this book, which you don’t feel is your best and most essentially you-ish writing?

4. You dislike your real name - perhaps you never liked it, or you use a married name from someone you’ve now divorced - and this is an opportunity to shed it, at least part of the time.

5. There are two of you writing. The industry tends to feel that readers are put off by having two authors on the front of a book, perhaps because they believe even readers seeking a quick comfort read expect it to be the product of a single creative brain. ’s SoNovelicious has an interesting substack about writers who write in pairs but under one name.

6. There’s an-already known writer out there with your name, and adding a middle name or initial doesn’t feel different enough. ‘John le Carré’/David Cornwell’s son Nick said that he realised that, published as Nick Cornwell, his one little debut novel would be wedged on a shelf between dozens of Bernard Cornwell’s, and dozens of Patricia Cornwell’s. Hence ‘Nick Harkaway’ for his SF/F fiction, while he writes thrillers as ‘Aidan Truehen’.

7. You genuinely must hide your real identity:

   1. If there are people who you must protect, perhaps including yourself, then you may have to hide anything which connects your memoir to their real identity. This could also be the case if your fiction is overtly based on real life (which your publicist is always going to want to push if they can). If your anxiety is about a libel suit, then a pseudonym for you will not protect you, any more than the book being labelled as fiction will, and even changing the names of the real people you’re fictionalising may not either. A publisher who still wanted to publish it would at least insist on the book being read for libel.

   2. If your work is very confidential. ‘John le Carré’ wrote his first three novels while a serving MI5 officer and after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was a smash hit, who wouldn’t stick to that name? ‘Andy McNab’’s real name is on Wikipedia but for a long time his photograph was never shown. Some of the secrecy and security around, for example, special forces soldiers who become authors is necessary, but of course it also does book sales no harm at all. How your colleagues feel about a warts-and-all portrait of their profession is another question again, mind you, especially if part of that professional identity and pride is rooted in not telling, and not showing off.

8. To suit your genre or style. Primrose is a beautiful name, but might not work if you’re writing violent and gritty thrillers, while some names might seem comical in their genre’s context, and with others readers’ prejudices may loom larger than is comfortable. Science fiction author James Tiptree Jnr is a famous example of a gender-change for a very ‘male’ genre, and there are plenty of men writing, for example, Harlequin Mills and Boon romance, and most of them write under women’s names. Using initials is, famously, one way for women writers in particular to bypass the prejudices - as in, literally, the pre-judging - of potential readers.

9. Your name is difficult to pronounce or spell, or very long, and you’re fed up with explaining it. I was once advised by a book trade insider not to put any word in a title which potential buyers might feel embarrassed about mispronouncing, so might the same thing apply to names? If you have a name which regularly throws people, you might decide to make your life easier by bypassing it. Or, of course, you might decide that this is you and you’re not changing a single letter. I have no evidence of authors with names that look as if they don’t belong to the right nationality or ethnic group for their novel being steered towards something more ‘suitable’ for the kind of book they’re writing: I would like to think it doesn’t happen, but who knows?

Why might a published author change their writing name?

1. Because you’re writing in a new genre. Even if it’s just a question of Iain Banks writing as SF as Iain M. Banks, it helps steer the right readers to the right book. Once a writer is well-known for both, things like ‘Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine’ on the front can usefully draw each readership to the other books.

2. To become a ‘debut author’ again, in either the same or a different genre. This is usually because the writer’s last book/s has/have not done well, and it washes away the dreaded ‘bad track’. It gives you another crack at, for example, the Heatseekers chart, and the publicity that’s available for debuts. There’s not much secret about your new identity within the trade once the book is published, and although readers won’t be alerted to your former life in the publicity, it may be mentioned in your bio.

3. To disguise how prolific you are. There’s a certain amount of suspicion or snobbery directed at an author who writes very fast, even when it’s Anthony Burgess or Joyce Carol Oates, as if the books can’t be much good if they took so little time to write.2 Magazines may also publish the same frequent writer under more than one name, just so their contributor list looks more varied.

4. If you want to approach new agents or publishers because your current agent doesn’t think they can sell your book. That way, the manuscript doesn’t start off on the back foot as something that one industry person already thinks can’t sell. When a new agent/publisher starts making noises about representing you, you ’fess up. It sounds underhand but it’s not that unusual.

Practicalities of pen names

1. What to use instead:

   1. Many authors keep a connection with their real name: a middle name, maiden name, or parent’s or grandparent’s surnames. If your name is just very long or awkward looking on a cover, you might just clip it: Josephine Marjoribanks might become ‘Jo Marr’. Others have fun with backwards or mixed-up spellings: my favourite is the Dr Seuss-sounding ‘E.C.R. Lorac’ as one of several pen names of the prolific Edith Caroline Rivett.

   2. Genre, pronouceability and memorability3 can all be in the mix - or it’s just a name you like, or wish you had.

   3. ‘John le Carré’ said that he wanted a name whose overall shape at a glance would be unmistakeable, which it is, and is an interesting take on the question; another version of its origins is that he was accused by one of his sons of ‘being square’ (this is, after all, the early 1960s) i.e. carré in French.

2. At the querying stage, writing under a different name is really no big deal. Generally speaking, you approach the agent/publisher under your real name, and mention in the covering letter that you’re planning to write under something else, but it’s fine to bring up in the I’d-like-to-represent-you conversation. Do make sure the manuscript has your real name on it, too, so it ties up with your emails: ‘Joe Smith writing as Katja Fanshawe-Mvula’ will do nicely.

3. Contracts: The agency contract will be in your real, legal name and so will publishing contracts; the latter will including what name that book is being published under.

4. Places which channel the fees that you’re owed for your writing being used - chiefly Public Lending Right (for library loans) and the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society (for copying and using your work) - will need to know both the writing name and your real details, so they can send you the money.

5. If you have to be careful about your personal security, I suggest taking advice before you approach the trade. Once you have an agent and a publisher, they should be able to help you implement what’s needed, and there are consultants such as Anna Caig, who can help with what’s possible in marketing, comms and social media.

6. If you and your book are involved with government or the armed forces there will be protocols about what they will need to check and approve. I would imagine it’s similar in the corporate world: take independent advice.

7. We write our names so automatically: it would be worth practising writing your pen name before you set out for your first signing event.

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I had already made a conscious and peaceful decision not to go down the professional-theatre route, yet I still felt the sting of envy to see others doing what I’d once hoped to do. (These days, I’m just happy and grateful for what I learnt from theatre.)

This post starts by thinking about different kinds of writerly envy, and jealousy, then teases apart the intrinsic and extrinsic forces that exert themselves on your writing life, and ends by exploring what you can do to hold to your passion while still making your peace with what actually happens.

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These days they use Scrivener and do the whole thing virtually, but their process hasn’t changed.

Other writers (full disclosure: including me) start at what they at the moment envisage as their Page One, and keep writing forwards until they reach what they at the moment envisage as The End. However much they might leave details to be filled in, and even though they later cut, add, change or transpose many elements, the foundations of the text are constructed in the same order as the reader will encounter them.

Other writers again have different hybrids of these two basic approaches, particularly if they write novels with non-linear narratives, when the order that the physical book lays out the text for the reader to read is not the order in which the events occur during the timeline of the story.

This post starts by thinking about the likely pros and cons of writing in-reading-order, and writing out-of-reading-order, and what that means for your own process, including planners, pansters and those of us who write non-linear narratives. It ends by bringing in the voices of many writer friends about how they do things, to help you sort out what works best for you, and for your different projects.

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First Draft Written in Reading Order

Advantages:

• It’s easier to keep the plot - the chain of cause-and-effect - working properly and convincingly.

• It’s easy to stay clear on what the reader does, and doesn’t, know at any given point, and continuity slips and horrors are less likely.

• The writing experience stays close(ish) to the reading experience and it’s easier to judge pace, scale and structure.

• If you’re a planner, and know what comes next, you can hope it won’t need too much wrangling in second draft for everything to fit together.

• If you’re a pantser, and don’t know what comes next, you can trust your storyteller’s instinct to lead you organically towards the next thing, in a way which should also feel natural to the reader.

• With non-linear narratives, you stay closer to the reader’s experience of the connections and transitions between the different threads.

Disadvantages:

• You have to write the next bit, even if it’s boring, you’re not feeling connected to it, you’re not sure what it should be, or you’re lacking a piece of research you can’t do yet.

• You may tend to ‘write your way in’ to the main story, and only later discover just how much of the early text isn’t wanted.

• If you’re a planner, what you planned for crises and climaxes may turn out to be unsatisfactory when you actually try to write them. When you change the plan for these later stages, everything that was heading for them now needs reworking, which can be quite a job.

• If you’re a pantser, you can find you’ve written huge amounts that turn out to be not what’s wanted at all.

• With non-linear narratives, you may struggle to keep each thread consistent and convincing with the previous instalment, when you last worked on that thread weeks or months ago.

First Draft Written Out of Reading Order

Advantages:

• You can write whichever section of the story you currently see most clearly, are most sure about, or have the most energy and desire to write.

• By first writing later sections which are a defining part of the story, you will know what the earlier ones need to be working towards.

• If there’s research for a scene that you can’t do yet, you can work on other things till you’ve done it.

• If some sections will be emotionally tough to write, you can hold back on those till you have the space, resilience or resources to cope.

• If you’re a planner, you can hope that the scenes you write will be a reasonable fit for that part of the story, and won’t need much rejigging.

• If you’re a pantser, you can hope that being able to put your energy into whatever seems like a good idea to write will keep you energised for the long haul.

• With non-linear narratives, you can write all or several instalments of a single thread all in one, and only figure out the strongest places to chop it up and weave it in once you know what it is.

Disadvantages:

• If you’ve written all the scenes you have most energy and excitement about first, motivating yourself to write all the dull linky bits after that can be very difficult.

• Continuity slips and confusions are almost inevitable.

• Working out how everything fits together, and knitting it all up, in second draft can be a real headache.

• The research you haven’t done yet, so haven’t written that scene, might have informed other scenes - but you’ve already written them and changing things demands loads of not always mutually compatible tweaks

• If you’re a planner it helps, but you may still find that many links of cause and effect don’t actually work properly and are hard to see clearly and sort out.

• If you’re a pantser, even just working out what you’ve got, let alone knitting-it-all-up stage, can be an absolutely nightmare.

• With non-linear narratives, you lose touch with the reader’s experience of switching between the two threads, so may not realise when things get confusing, or you’re asking too much of the reader’s effort.

What Does This Mean For Your Process?

Clearly, there’s no one right or wrong way, and I suspect it’s also affected by whether you’re a crazy-first-draft writer, or one who tends to write-and-revise as you go, and how big the gaps are between writing sessions. And genres whose plots need precise engineering and depend a lot on suspense and who-knows-what-when (including the reader) are maybe harder to write out-of-reading-order.

As with everything about your writing process, the key is to

1. understand the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches

2. think about your default process, and ask if a different one might serve you better

3. decide what to do for this project

4. make the most of the the advantages, and do your best to mitigate the drawbacks.

These Itch of Writing posts might help:

• The Tool-Kit: Process, Planning, and How to Get Out of the Doldrums

• Don’t Fiddle

• What is a Zero Draft?

• Taming your Draft

• Why I’m a Convert to Writing With Scrivener

• Jigsaws, Pantsers and Doing Your Prep(aration)

• When Do You Do Your Research?

Other Writers on How They Write

So I asked about among my writer friends - between them they write genres including crime, women’s fiction, thriller, children’s, horror, romance, scifi and literary fiction and memoir, and are a mixture of million-sellers, self-publishers and midlisters - and got an interesting variety of responses.

I’ve divided them into in-reading-order writrs, and out-of-reading-order writers, but you’ll see that it’s not really as binary as that. Some writers mix and match between the two processes, for certain stages of developing the draft, certain structural moments, or certain kinds of story. For Kate Armstrong the form she’s writing comes into it: fiction is different from memoir.

Have a browse, and see what resonates with you - but whatever you do at the moment, you are not alone! Having said that, as ever, if you encounter a process which doesn’t merely not-resonate, but actually fills you with furious horror, it’s worth having a think about what fears it has brought up. Is that a useful insight about this, or other aspects of your writing?

Always or usually in-order-of-reading

Ruth Ware: I write strictly in order, because I think with crime it’s very hard to hold in your head what the reader knows if you’re not following the breadcrumbs along with them.

Laura Shepherd-Robinson: I cannot begin to conceive of writing a book out of order. I find it mindblowing that people do this!

Rowan Coleman: I can only write in order!

Roz Morris: I draft [in] the structure I feel the reader should have. But I change it a lot in editing… I might decide a scene should come later because the same events would have more power.

Helen Grant: I always write in the order in which the book will be read. That does mean that if I have difficulties with a certain bit, I am stuck there until I resolve them, and this is an issue that has bothered me in the past. So with my current WIP I decided to do all the logistical thinking *first* and write a full synopsis, which I would then write to. The synopsis ran to eight pages. The book is going quite quickly.

Kate Machon: I usually write in order, but if I get stuck on a scene or exactly how a situation is going to play out, I will jump ahead to the next section which is clear in my head, and backfill the gap later.

Daniel Blythe: I always try to write roughly in order, but always end up going off in different directions.

Rowena House: Tried out-of-order several times with early drafts and failed. That said, developing the story put it out of order as I massaged the first half to build to a revised denouement.

Rebecca Mascull: I always tend to write in the order it’s read, mostly because I plan extensively before writing, so it’s all there already to write from. If I’ve had two parallel narratives, I’ve written the two separately and put them together, but only when I had a mystery plot where I really needed to see the line of enigma throughout each strand.

Rod Duncan: I try to write in order. The process is complex enough for me without the added issue having to hold a different sequence in my mind from the one that is on the page. This may be influenced by my neurodiversity - since dyslexics are often said to have problems with sequencing. I make extensive use of the ‘document map’ facility of MS Word to give me a visual experience of the sequence of the whole manuscript.

Cath Nichols: In order, then shuffle things around if I want to tell things out of order. If two time periods I might write the ‘now’ one first then the historic one - that’s maybe the only occasion I write out of order. If I don't follow chronological time I would be hopelessly lost!... Once I have most of it there, I might write inserts out of order because by them I know where things lie.

Sheenagh Pugh: I think my two novels were mostly in order, but if I had research to do on a particular chapter, or was stuck somewhere with it., I did sometimes write ahead. With the second one I had to be careful about chronology when doing that, in fact I even created a spreadsheet of what was happening when…I didn’t want bluebells out in October or a twelve-month pregnancy.

Leigh Russell: I start at the beginning and keep going until I reach the end of the story. Anything else would get me in a terrible muddle.

Nick Sweet: I start at the beginning and take it from there. Generally I don’t see very far ahead, so it's a matter of finding out what happens as I write.

M G Harris: Plan extensively and write in order. Might be fun to try a different order!

Lin Treadgold: I have often swapped chapters around but generally I just write it as it comes out of my head.

Ruby Speechley: I write my thrillers in order, summarise each chapter on index cards to check pace, events in different POVs etc and sometimes move chapters around at the editing stage.

Emma Darwin: If I don’t write in reading-order I get hopelessly confused with timelines and, crucially, what the reader does and doesn’t know - though a lot gets switched around in editing. The only time I didn’t was in The Mathematics of Love, where each chapter has a short tailpiece. The voice of those is quite different, so to keep it consistent, I wrote the whole lot in one go, then stitched their echoes and references into the two main narratives.

Always or usually not in order of reading

Julie Cohen: I’ve written a few novels in a different order than the way the reader will encounter them. The most obvious one is Together, which is told backwards, but I wrote it forwards and then rearranged it. But with several other novels that have had separate and alternate timelines, or significant backstories, or multiple points of view, I’ve often written each timeline or backstory or POV separately and then interwoven them in the edits. I do plan the novel in its final form first, but in these cases I write in a different order than in the final draft.

Kate Armstrong: The two novels I’ve written I wrote start to finish - i.e. fully in order. My memoir I ‘plotted out’ and wrote out of order (mostly as I became emotionally resilient enough to face each section of the content).

R N Morris: For the first time ever I seem to be writing a novel out of sequence. I’m not sure why I’m doing it, just that it feels the right thing to do this time!

Kat Devereaux: I always write dual POV and/or dual timeline, and I will generally get well into writing one before I go back and start weaving in the other. I find it useful to stay in my principal protagonist’s headspace for a while, and it also helps ensure that the two narrative strands fit together as closely as they ought.

Loree Westron: I usually know how the story begins and ends, so I write those scenes first. In the novel that's about to be published, I wrote scenes and chapters as they came to me (minimal plotting involved).

Teika Bellamy: I [normally] write in order, but with my latest [commission] I was in a low place…So I eased myself into it by first writing the scenes that were most emotional, and which most reflected my own emotional state at the time. Very slowly it started coming together, but I’ll be honest, I found it a challenge to stitch together and to get all the scenes in the right order.

Clodagh Murphy: I always write out of order. It’s just the way I’ve always done it and I sometimes wish it wasn’t. I’ve tried to write in order, but never get very far. The advantage for me is that it makes drafting quicker as I can jump around and write the scenes I’m most excited about, that are fully formed in my head. The disadvantage is that when it comes to rewriting/editing I’m left with all the less fun stuff like transitions, adding action to dialogue, scene setting, etc. I can get carried away writing pages of dialogue, for instance, but then have to go back and put the characters into a place and a time and add some action so it doesn’t read like a radio play. Another disadvantage is that I can end up with a scene that I love but ends up not fitting anywhere, no matter how much I try to shoehorn it in.

Sally Nicholls: I write out of order. I always have - it dates back to being a little girl walking around my primary school playground writing dramatic extra scenes from the books I was reading.

For me, the advantages are that I can write the scenes that are most vivid in my imagination first, and I can write in a way that suits my mood - if I’m feeling like an action scene I can write that first and so on. If I’m stuck with a particular scene, I can miss it out and come back to it later. I often find that when I’ve written more about a character, I’ve found out the things I need to know about them to finish that difficult scene. Often the problem is that I didn’t know the character well enough to get them out of that hole. Sometimes I come back and find I don’t need the scene at all. My earliest scenes will often be key bits of character development or backstory that help flesh out the character. The advantage is that first drafts are much easier to write. The disadvantage is that second drafts are a pain in the proverbial. I often find that I’ve got three scenes that basically do the same thing, but one important bit of information isn’t there at all. I need to write a lot of linking scenes to convey the passing of time. And do a lot of deleting.

This style also reflects the sort of books I write. I often have short chapters and a lot of self-contained scenes. I’ve written one epistolary novel, and another which is diary entries. I have written novels which are more free-flowing, but these tend to be shorter.

When I talk about this with groups of writers, I usually get 15 baffled faces and one person going ‘Yes! I thought I was the only one!’ I think it’s a style that choses the writer rather than one I’d suggest people chose - I can’t really write any other way. One thing which may be helpful for other writers, however, is skipping over a scene you don’t know how to write, putting a placeholder sentence like “HE ESCAPES THE CELL” and coming back to it when you know the characters better. I often suggest this to teenagers who find themselves stuck in chapter 3 and don’t know how to move past the block.

Sam Burns: I write almost everything out of order then edit in order. I will have a skeletal plot crib in the draft, in reading order, but I'll fill it in in whatever order I fancy, often starting with the conclusion. (I used to read books back to front as a child sometimes too.)

Catherine Cooper: Mine are not in order. Scrivener is brilliant for moving things around later. I mainly do it to stave off boredom and if I get stuck on where one thread is going I can move to something else. I’m not sure I’d recommend it as such it’s just what works for me!

Matthew Francis: I don’t plan much and don’t write in order. The shape emerges gradually. I don’t even write an orderly succession of drafts - I work at one till it breaks down, usually less than halfway through, start again, salvaging anything I can from the previous one and so on until I finally know what I’m doing, after which it all falls into place quite quickly.

Louise Walters: I usually like to start with the start (or what is planned as the start) just to set the tone and feel in my mind. I sometimes then jump to the next big scene. Jumping around a bit can be helpful If I’m stuck on one particular scene. Mooching off to another part of the story can be really helpful, for all sorts of reasons: plot hole fixing, new ideas to take back to earlier scenes or chapters, that sort of thing. I write short first drafts, really skeletons of the novel which I then have to flesh out. At that stage I am definitely jumping all over the place.

Myfanwy Fox: At the end of a complicated novel, my three main characters were separated and had a lot going on but needed to cross paths (missing), or find one another at important moments. I wrote each character separately and then edited according to my vital events timeline, which was sketched out on a piece of A3 kid’s drawing paper (after several scribbled drafts). The final edit had each character appearing in sections interspersed. It was absolutely fiendish while I was getting my head around it all but really worth the challenge.

Judi Moore: Recently I’ve been doing a lot of drafting at workshops, where we write to a prompt, 2 pieces a week maybe 500 words each. Now I am stitching these together for various pieces of long and longish fiction. It is a bally headache to do, but the stories do develop quickly in my head. Perhaps oddly, I don’t find them difficult to hold in the mind, nor get them confused. The only frustration is that I can’t work on them all simultaneously, and they do take a long time to sort out.

Kath McGurl: I write dual timeline fiction, in which a historical mystery is uncovered and resolved in the present day. I alternate the two stories each chapter. I usually write the first few chapters, then push ahead with the historical story to the end, then come back and slot in the contemporary storyline. I also tend to write chunks of backstory in one hit, and slot those in to the overall novel later. So no, I don’t write it in the order readers will read it at all! I once tried writing it in the final sequence but found it hard to keep swapping from one story to the other while writing. Prefer to focus on one at a time. And on another occasion I tried writing the contemporary first. But when I got to the point where the characters needed to discover the truth about the past, I couldn’t write it because I didn’t know it myself, because I hadn’t written it yet. So I’ve not tried that again.

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Truth Like Water by Carys Shannon

As the publisher puts it:

This is a story of lost women – some who can be found again, and some who can’t.

In a small estuary village on the Welsh coast, Catrin is mourning the anniversary of her mother’s drowning when a teenage girl disappears on the same mudflats. Terrified of history repeating itself and driven by unresolved grief, Catrin becomes obsessed with finding Emily.

Her search dredges up dark revelations from the village’s past and present, uncovering secrets about Catrin’s own family. Secrets that her parents had never wanted her to discover.

Why I enjoyed it:

Any novel which opens ‘The first dead body I ever saw was my mother’s’ is either going to draw you immediately in, or have you gently deciding that you’ll need to wait for the right day. That’s a compliment, by the way: Truth Like Water is powerfully atmospheric, ‘Welsh noir at its best’ as one reader describes it - but it’s far from being a routine whodunnit. It’s ’s debut as a novelist and it’s as atmospheric and evocative as the scent of the salt marsh itself. The story that unfolds - both the narrative of the present, and the dredging up of the past - intertwine to make something quietly devastating.

Three reasons for a writer to read it:

1. The story is very atmospheric. That’s partly because the action of both past and present is well-rooted in the physical geography of the estuary, so events and setting feel bound together with a sort of inevitability. But also, crucially, there are no great swathes of ‘description’, no rich embroidery over the fabric of events. The atmosphere mostly comes from the vivid particularity, the specifics within ordinary-seeming sentences about characters’ actions and reactions in that setting.

2. As an internal narrator, Catrin combines narrator and viewpoint character, and we know who she is - and who she was, and would like to be - through how her narrative embodies her story. Using a first-person narrator for a story which is all about uncovering a mystery can help to make the writer’s options manageable, but it can still make it hard to judge how and when the character discovers things. But if there was any sleight-of-hand going on, I didn’t spot it, so the story unfolded very naturally.

3. It’s very well written. I am increasingly unable to be bothered with so-so prose unless I have other strong reasons to want to keep going with a book, but this is a great example of prose which direct and uncomplicated, but supple, always working precisely as the storytelling needs it to. It’s present tense, which can be an awkward fit with an internal narrator, but it never seems clunky. And the dialogue is great: it feels alive and true, both when I mentally read it with a Welsh accent, and when I switched that off and just read.