Category Archives: For authors

After the party

Edinburgh, For authors, Listening, Writing, ,

It’s the first day of September, and Edinburgh breathes again.

For locals, whether we love or loathe the culture, chaos and crowds of the Festivals, their departure can feel like a special moment. The circus is packed away, and the city begins to settle back into itself. The sudden peace is often accompanied by the first hint of a change in the weather, a suggestion that autumn won’t be long.

This year I’ve spent a lot of time at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh Book Fringe. As well as readings, discussions and literary cabaret there have been book launches and parties and a steady and very welcome stream of guests – plenty of opportunities to meet up with old writing friends, and to make new ones. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s also been distracting; I’ve written very little in the past couple of weeks, and lack of time isn’t the only reason. Just as important is the lack of mental space. Of silence.

I recently came across an article that describes how mice exposed to silence (rather than white noise, music or baby mouse calls) developed new, functioning neurons in the areas of the brain associated with memory and the senses. The study hasn’t been replicated in humans, but the idea of silence as actively beneficial resonates with my own experience of quiet as something restorative. In common with many writers I’m more introvert than extrovert: though I don’t think I could go as far as Sara Maitland, embracing silence as a way of life, frequent spells of quiet time and time spent alone are essential to me. It’s why I work in a studio space with no internet, away from the noiseless noise of email and social media – and why I’m hopeful about what will happen to my work rate when I take up a Hawthornden Fellowship this winter and experience a whole month of silence.

Yesterday, walking through the quiet city streets, I found myself talking out loud. Voice, for a writer, is a kind of metaphor encompassing what is said and how it’s expressed as well as technical issues like characterisation and point of view. As I heard myself narrating my thoughts, it struck me that what I was doing was literally tuning back in to my own voice, now it was audible again in this emptier, quieter space. Preparing to get back to writing, now the party’s over.

writing still lifeThis quiet moment reminds me that a writer’s job is to make the work, and to make it as well as she can. The rest of it – the events, the reviews, the interviews, all the stuff that Helen Dunmore calls litbiz – is just glitter and confetti; as shallow as those artfully arranged instagram pics of colourful notebooks or shiny MacBooks accessorised with coffee and croissants, filtered and hashtagged: #amwriting #writerslife.

The truth of it is, no matter how perfect your notebook-and-coffee still-life seems in the sun streaming through the cafe window, you still have to take yourself off on your own to a silent place – actual or metaphorical – and focus on what matters. #shutupandwrite.  #writerslife. #nofilter.

Slow! by Alex Smith, Creative Commons licence

The slow brain theory of creativity

For authors, Ideas, Inspiration, Reading, Uncategorized

I’ve always been in awe of writers who can turn out a book every year. It’s often a contractual requirement for writers working in genres like crime and thrillers, but some literary fiction writers too are immensely prolific, from the firmly established like Joyce Carol Oates to the up-and-coming like Iain Maloney, whose latest novel The Waves Burn Bright is on top of my towering to-read pile.

Myself, I’m a slow writer. Sometimes – often – I find this frustrating. At every stage, from the emergence of a new idea and the first scribbled notes and maps to the multiple rewrites and edits, my progress is slower than that of most writers I know.

Recently, I listened to a repeat of Grayson Perry’s On Creativity and Imagination, an exploration of what we mean by creativity and how we might encourage it. I like the way Perry talks about art: he has a fine sense of the ridiculousness of much creative endeavour, as well as its importance, combined with what seems like an endless curiosity about the world around him. In this programme he describes the sign he has hanging over his workspace that says CREATIVITY IS MISTAKES – which dovetails neatly with my own favourite mantra, NOTHING IS WASTED (okay, that short story really didn’t come out like you meant it to, but look at it from another angle and there may be the germ of a novel in there, or at least a 1000-word flash fiction; and yes, you may have spent years working on an unpublishable novel, but you needed to write that mistake in order to write the next success).

But what really struck me in Perry’s exploration was a piece of research that suggests the most creative people may be those who think more slowly than others. The hypothesis is that the neurons in our brains are wrapped in white matter largely made up of fatty myelin sheaths, and the lower the integrity of this white matter the more slowly our neurons transmit information in the region connecting the pre-frontal cortex to the thalamus.  This slowness is associated with greater divergent thinking – a common test of creativity.

That a ‘slow brain’ should be particularly creative seems at the same time both counter-intuitive and absolutely spot on. We tend to associate creativity with a quick intelligence – and indeed it seems this ‘slow brain’ creativity can co-exist alongside higher integrity white matter in the cortex, associated with increased intelligence; so the same brain can be both fast and slow. But a slow model of creativity makes sense of much ‘pre-writing’ activity which we might otherwise see as procrastination. Sleep. Daydreams. Meandering walks. Andrew Motion’s mild flu and Lem-Sip. All of these more or less passive activities can work as active strategies to allow material to emerge, to give our brains the space to start making new patterns, new connections.

What does this mean for how we organise ourselves and our work? It might help in understanding our relationship with deadlines; when they might be helpful, and when they’re more likely to be counter-productive. For me a deadline can be incredibly useful, forcing me to commit my words and thoughts to paper or screen – but this is only possible once the slow, organic phase has done its work. Until then, the only thing I’ll produce to a deadline is stress, tantrums and ultimately failure.

As well as a slow writer, these days I’m also a slower reader than I used to be, and at times I feel I’m a slow thinker too, taking a while to build up ideas and arguments and to process new pieces of information. The idea of a slow creative brain makes me feel better about this. It’s only by allowing the time for unexpected connections to occur that later – in the act of writing – I can learn the shape of the new thing I’m making, and understand what it is that I mean to say.

Image illustrating ideas

How to have ideas

For authors, Ideas, Inspiration, Writing, ,

Over the years a number of people have told me how they’d love to write a book – only, they don’t have an idea to write about. I used to be fairly dismissive of this. My view was that if someone doesn’t know what to write about, they don’t want to write but rather (lord knows why) to ‘be a writer’.

The longer I teach creative writing, though, the more sympathetic I’ve become to this attitude.

We are born creative creatures – as children we know how to play, how to make-believe. If you’re lucky, you’ll have encouraging parents and a good teacher or two; if you’re lucky, your creative instincts will survive and even thrive into adulthood. But for many of us, creativity is something that is not nurtured, is not developed. Pressures on schools to deliver academic results above all mean creative subjects are often sidelined (and sometimes, as by UK Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan, actively discouraged). For many, by the time they leave secondary education, those creative instincts that were once so strong have been all but forgotten.

So when someone says they want to write but they don’t have anything to write about, they’re voicing a genuine need – an urge toward self expression which, carefully supported and nurtured, might well develop into an ability to write for a wider readership.

When I run creative writing sessions, my work often centres around helping participants to rediscover their creative skills – and when it comes to generating ideas, there are plenty of techniques that can help. Some of the activities I use involve striking two dissimilar things together (a snippet of overheard conversion, for instance, with a childhood memory of a place you once visited) to make new sparks; freewriting, using the prompt ‘I don’t want to write about…’ (this comes from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones); asking ‘what if?’ questions (What if London was flooded? What if a computer virus became conscious? What if sugar was banned?).

Even reading widely and noting what catches your eye can be a useful approach. In a recent series of workshops on creative writing about science and technology, we used copies of the New Scientist as source material. We selected interesting stories and news items, and made notes about possible themes that might emerge from this material (for instance, a theme of watching and being watched emerging from a news item about surveillance technology) along with any personal experiences that connected with our chosen material. By the end of the session the room was buzzing with scores of promising ideas.

Of course, some people have the opposite problem: they want to write, but they have too many ideas and can’t decide which to pursue. What then?

One option is to combine them all in a single project (probably a novel, since that form is stretchy enough to contain all kinds of disparate ideas). In her guide to novel writing Monkeys With Typewriters, Scarlett Thomas describes how she uses matrixes to harness all the ideas that are currently interesting her.

Or there’s another option, one I prefer: with each idea you have, pay close attention to your own reactions. I find this helps me distinguish between a promising idea that might be perfect for another writer but is just not for me, and one that feels like mine. If I can practically feel my pupils dilating, my mind’s eye focusing, I know I’ve got something worth exploring. In Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story, Adam Marek describes how he experiences this particular sensation: ‘It’s a feeling a bit like delight, a bit like surprise, a bit like weightlessness.’

Once you’re attuned to this sensation, it becomes far easier to recognise an idea that really resonates with you, and to become generous with all those ideas it feels like anyone might write. You can become profligate: spread them around, give them away … and what you give you shall receive, tenfold.

Virginia Woolf, edited page

Surviving the rewrite

For authors, Writing,

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been absorbed in rewrites of my next novel. It’s not the first set of revisions, and perhaps my writing process is unusually inefficient: it’s not until the second draft that I’ll share the work-in-progress with a couple of trusted writer-readers, then the third draft goes off to my agent, and comes back for more (thankfully, relatively minor) amendments.

Writing is hard: all writers say it (sheepishly, because it’s not like we’re working down a coal mine). And some days, rewriting is the hardest thing of all. Every word, every sentence, has to be hauled up from the deep, to lie motionless on the page – if not dead, then at least in a critical condition. I worry that if I’m boring myself I’ll certainly bore the reader; I know every word will have to be rewritten yet again. But as I tell my students, you can’t rewrite a blank page – so there’s no choice but to carry on.

When it’s a slog like this, when everything I write seems flat and awful, that’s when I find myself wondering if it’s too late to retrain as a gardener or a dog-walker. Something useful and energetic, with plenty of fresh air.

But then … then I reach a part of the book where it’s like I’ve remembered all over again how to write. And the difference is in the unexpected. It’s about whether or not I’m surprising myself – with the turn a conversation takes, or a connection I hadn’t known was there, or just a sentence that has energy and voice, that seems to write itself rather than lurking around half-formed until I clumsily patch it together.

This is why some writers prefer not to plan their novels at all: knowing where they’re meant to be going takes away the sense of adventure and the joy of discovery. If you know what you’re going to write, what’s the point in writing it? And even though I’m a planner, I still need that sense of unexpectedness. Making minor changes to a scene may seem more efficient than rewriting that scene from scratch, but I’ve realised it’s actually harder and more time-consuming – because if you’re tinkering round the edges of something that already exists, there’s less room for surprise, less pleasure in making something fresh and new and alive.

And as with most things I learn about writing, I’ll forget this – and have to discover it all over again when it’s time to rewrite the novel after this one.

Halfway up the mountain

Resolutions for writers

For authors, Goals, Inspiration, Writing

The start of 2016 has been particularly grey. Something about the low cloud and the near-constant rain makes it difficult to look up, to look ahead. I’ve been reminded over the last week of Douglas Adams’s planet Krikkit, where the sky is so completely featureless that it never occurs to the planet’s inhabitants to raise up their eyes: they have no concept of sky, or of what might exist beyond their planet.

But today has been mercifully clear, low sun in a high blue sky. It feels like the horizon of the year is suddenly visible, twelve months away from here. So I’ve been looking up, considering the shape of the year to come.

Though September has always felt like the month of new beginnings  more than January, I’ve dabbled with new year’s resolutions in the past. Often these resolutions were to do with writing goals: finishing this draft, getting those stories accepted for publication. Writing goals can be great motivators, of course, but they can also set you up to fail. One problem is that for writers so many of our markers of success are largely outwith our control – dependent on agents, publishers, markets, judges. ‘Publish novel’, for instance, is an achievable goal now in a way it wasn’t even in the very recent past, but for writers in pursuit of a traditional publishing contract so much is about luck – getting the right book in front of the right person at the right time. And optimism can be another problem; though mine has kept me writing through the last ten years, it means that even when I think I’m erring on the side of caution my goal-setting is hopelessly over-ambitious.

When I think of goals, achievements and the year ahead, I see myself climbing a mountain. Here I am, halfway up: I can look back at the view, feel a sense of satisfaction at how far I’ve come – then turn around, and gaze up at the distance still to climb. Does anyone ever feel like they’ve reached the summit? And if that ever happens – what next? Is the descent all that’s left?

But it strikes me that this image is not quite right. It wants a shift of perspective. Perhaps the mountain doesn’t represent success. And perhaps it’s not a single mountain. Zoom out, and it becomes a mountain range. My half-way up position is not so much about goals achieved or out of reach; it’s about time. About the span of a life, and a life’s work.

In January, the years seem long – but they’re not, of course. They fly past anti-clockwise / like clock hands in a bar mirror, as we well know.

Het Lab - three dancers

Get over yourself, stop worrying, and persevere

For authors, Inspiration, Interviews, This Is How We Make It, ,

I’ve just published the latest artist interview in my This Is How We Make It series: choreographer Erik Kaiel is an articulate and generous interviewee, and his reflections on pursuing creative work have applications far beyond the world of dance.

With four interviews now online, covering performance, writing and visual arts, I thought I would pull out some of my favourite thoughts from Erik, Iain, Viccy and Jayne.

On why we make things…
‘There’s something that doesn’t exist in the world that needs to be out there, and even after you’ve made a piece it’s there a bit, but it needs to go further, like it’s not present enough. There’s something that keeps you going, that need to make and to put out into the public space.’

On the value of teaching…
‘I think teaching is returning to learning, and deepening your practice and your understanding. And I definitely think those years of teaching, even though I didn’t want to be a teacher, I wanted to be a dancer and a choreographer, it made me better at those things.’

‘I get a lot back from it. It energises me I suppose – and because making work can be a selfish thing in a way, so with teaching you feel like you are giving something back a bit to people, and passing on your skills.’

On how to make good work…
‘If you really want to be an artist, you have to not say, what does everyone else do? Not say, I need to have this and that and the other thing; or, I need a two-week vacation and then if there’s time over I will make art. Instead you say: I need a place to sleep, I need to eat, and I need to support my art-making – and then organise the rest of your life around that.’

‘If I want to have a good day I know the first thing I need to do in the morning is focus on the work.’

‘Winning prizes is important in giving me motivation, and that incentive to carry on … I rely on entering competitions to confirm that what I’m doing has some worth.’

On opportunities…
‘I like risks, saying yes to things and seeing where they go. But when I say I’m good at taking risks, I’m good at having things in place to take risks from.’

‘Basically everything I’ve done has come from a period of volunteering or doing little bits and pieces, and that developed into something more.’

‘Residencies have been key to inspiring new ideas, and developments in technique. Time away helps you to make leaps in your work, to move it forward.’

‘If you’re an upcoming comic artist and you’re not on Twitter then you’re making a mistake.’

Advice for our younger selves…
‘Advice to early-me: probably, get over yourself. So, as soon as you think you’re doing something because you’re a writer – oh, I stay up late, I don’t get up in the morning and write cos I’m a writer – or anybody who’s resistant to editing, get over that romantic view that you write and that’s it done.’

‘I used to worry more when I was younger about other people, about being current, and contemporary – but as you get older you start to think, actually, I’d rather just do what I’m interested in.’

‘Just because you can’t draw as well as artists in the comics you like, you can still make comics.’

‘I wish somebody had said, it’s important to keep going. I’m a great believer in, if you keep plugging away at it… I know you’ve got to have something there, some talent or something, but I don’t think talent is the half of it sometimes. It’s perseverance. I wish somebody had said don’t give up at the slightest rejection! You’re going to be rejected, probably over and over again, but then within that you’ll have some successes.’

You’ll find lots more words of wisdom in the complete interviews – read on here.

Reading The Last Treasure Hunt

Five ways of reaching readers

For authors, The Last Treasure Hunt, ,

There’s just one more week to buy The Last Treasure Hunt for 99p in the Kindle summer sale, which ends on 31 August – and here’s a recent review that might persuade you to take a chance on it. Amazon’s Kindle deals are a great way for readers to discover unfamiliar authors, and an important promotional tool for booksellers. But what else can you do to get your book noticed among the 20 new titles that are published every hour (not including self-published titles) – particularly if you’re an author without a huge marketing budget behind you?

The truth is that nobody really knows what generates that holy grail, word-of-mouth; and though a marketing team and a budget to cover billboard ads, shelf-space in WH Smith and competition entry fees will help, for most authors that’s far from the reality. So with that caveat, here are five promotional tips I’ve collected recently from authors, agents, publishers and publicists.

1) Make your book easy to talk about
This tip came from Jonah Berger’s book Contagious, recommended by author Viccy Adams. If your story is easy to talk about, it’s easy for people to recommend – in other words, it lends itself to word-of-mouth success. That’s why, although The Last Treasure Hunt is about a lot of things besides celebrity culture (friendship, competition and betrayal; success and failure; our insignificance in the world, and the tension between anonymity and recognition, between living at the centre and on the edges; what it might mean to make the right choices in life, or the wrong ones…) my publisher smartly summed it up as ‘a modern media morality tale’. It’s a memorable tagline, and hopefully intriguing enough that potential readers will want to know more.

2) Make it easy to buy
Newspaper reviews and media coverage will all help build awareness of your book, but for this awareness to translate into sales the action of buying it needs to be made as easy as possible. And while there’s not much you can do if your book isn’t prominently displayed in high street bookstores, you can make sure it’s simple to buy online by including direct links to the major booksellers on each page of your website, and on any ‘guest blog’ posts you write for other websites. Thanks to author Mandy Haggith for passing on this tip, which she picked up from creative entrepreneur Jo Penn – it’s one that seems obvious, and yet I hadn’t included these links on my website until Mandy prompted me to.

3) Use clever pricing
A while back I attended a Scottish Book Trust event for new writers, and one of the interesting things that emerged from a panel discussion was a broad consensus that the usefulness of social media in promoting books is more and more limited, simply because of the difficulty of being heard above the cacophony of marketing messages. Publisher Scott Pack suggested that clever ebook pricing strategies may be a more effective way of reaching readers. For instance, he might sell an author’s first book for 99p to attract new readers, while their subsequent titles are priced at £3.99 or more. Scott has blogged here about strategic pricing. If you’re a self-published author, pricing is something you’re in control of; if you’re traditionally published, you can still use pricing as a sales strategy if you sell signed copies of your books directly to readers through your website – for instance, offering discounts for a limited period to promote your book as a seasonal read or tie in with events like World Book Day.

4) Do everything
Thanks to my agents for this advice – that it’s worth taking any and every opportunity that comes your way. You may feel intimidated by the prospect of a radio interview. You may struggle to fit in an event with work and family commitments. Or you may think that a talk in front of a handful of people or a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it slot on local TV is barely worth the trouble. But each of these things can lead to other, bigger opportunities – and it’s impossible to tell when that might be the case. So say yes to everything; at the very least you’ll meet some interesting people, and know you’re giving your book its best chance of success.

5) Be nice
I’ve saved my favourite tip until last, because it’s also the most rewarding. A couple of weeks ago I begged a friendly publicist to tell me the secret of making books sell. There’s no secret, she told me – or if there is, no-one knows what it is. And then she added: Oh I know. Be nice to booksellers. (No surprise that she turned out to be a former bookseller herself.) Booksellers are lovely literary types, of course, so it’s no hardship to follow this suggestion. And if a bookseller loves your book, and likes you too, there’s no better champion to have – except maybe a librarian. So, be nice to them too.

writing desk

The room can write the book

For authors, Uncategorized, Writing

A few weeks ago I took the plunge, and rented an external brain.

This is not the opening line of a science fiction story (though, hmm, maybe it could be…). My external brain is a studio: a corner of an industrial building, a partitioned space shared with eight artists. A bookshelf and a reading armchair, an office chair and writing desk, and a good long surface for laying out pages and making plans – plus a stretch of wall-space, so I can draw out structures and schedules on huge flip-chart sheets.

Reading chair
The reading chair

I first came across the notion of a room as an external brain in Vincent Deary’s How We Are. Early on in the book he recounts how, before he started to write, he organised his workroom: ‘collecting and ordering the books, papers and articles into one space. I mapped the shape of this book onto a wall chart … I filled a filing cabinet with files, one for each chapter …. I spent several years getting this book out of my mind, and then two months spreading it all over this little room.’ Now, he says, the room can write the book.

The room can write the book. What an appealing idea that is. I’ve been writing at home for a decade, decamping to libraries and coffee shops when cabin fever strikes. But with two all-encompassing writing projects on the go – a PhD and a novel rewrite – I needed the ‘cognitive prosthesis’ Deary talks about. I needed a space that was dedicated to reading and writing; somewhere I could make my thinking visible. I needed to be away from the easy distractions of radio, kettle, garden. Above all I needed to avoid the internet, with its seductive illusion of productivity (social media is promotion; aimless surfing is research). We’re all vulnerable to this: even big name writers like Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen have to resort to extreme measures to keep themselves away from its temptations.

planning desk
The planning desk

Deary also talks about rooms as ‘spaces of embodied routines’; how repeatedly using a place in a certain way creates powerful behavioural cues. When I sit at my desk at home, it’s automatic to check email – but when I walk into the studio first thing in the morning, it’s automatic to flip open the laptop and begin work where I left off the previous day. And for me, sharing a studio with artists taps into older behavioural cues: having spent four formative years at art college, working in a creative visual environment somehow facilitates my own imaginative work in a completely different medium.

‘Without this room,’ says Deary, ‘I’m just a guy with a notion for a book. Equally, without me this room is, well, just weird. Together, the room and I can do stuff that alone would be impossible.’

Author event at Books Books Books, Lausanne

Tips for terrified authors

For authors, Performing

For many people, speaking in public is a genuinely frightening ordeal. Years ago, I studied on a course that was assessed partly on a presentation to my (small, friendly) student group; for months in the run-up to The Day, I existed in a state of anxiety, falling asleep each night to self-hypnosis tapes in an attempt to manage my fear.

Fifteen years on, I may still get a flutter of nerves before stepping in front of an audience, but that crippling fear seems like nothing so much as a bad dream. Over the last month, I’ve appeared on local TV; held three launches for my debut novel; performed a reading and Q&A at an author event in Switzerland; and taken part in an advice panel for postgraduate creative writers. There’s no way round it: if you’re an author, public speaking is increasingly part of the job.

So if the prospect makes your palms sweat and your heart skip – if you’re breathless right now at the thought of it – how can you learn to endure, and even enjoy, the experience? Here are five tips that helped me to feel confident in front of a crowd.

1) It’s not about you.
When I started teaching creative writing, this was my mantra. In those early days, remembering that the focus was not on me but on my students allowed me to feel comfortable in the classroom. But surely appearing at an author event means it is about you? I prefer to think it’s all about the book. The book wants to be read – and it’s my job to bring it to life for potential readers.

2) Be prepared.
Being thoroughly prepared for an event can help you feel more secure. Attend other author events to get a sense of the questions you might be asked; think about how you might respond, and jot down some notes. Practise reading aloud; record yourself, so you can fine-tune your performance to make sure it’s engaging. And if you always read your work aloud as part of the writing and editing process, you’re one step ahead – you’ve already put weeks of effort into making your prose sound great.

3) Keep it brief.
Short is always good when it comes to book readings. It can be reassuring to know that you just need to reach the end of the page without your voice going AWOL – and since it can be hard for listeners to stay focused on longer extracts, the audience will thank you too. Similarly, if you’re new to speaking in public and the idea of giving a five-minute reading makes you deeply anxious, try not to be persuaded too far and too quickly out of your comfort zone: an hour-long discussion about the themes of your novel, for instance, is something you might want to build up to gradually.

4) It’s normal to be scared.
Fear can be deeply physical: you may feel unsteady, light-headed, dry-mouthed … the list goes on. There are some practical things you may be able to do to conceal these physical signs of nervousness: sitting rather than standing, leaning on a lectern, using a mic, having water to hand. But really, so what if people notice your hand is shaking, or hear the wobble in your voice? We all know how hard it is to be the centre of attention: the audience is on your side, willing you to do well.

5) Get older.
An easy one, this! The fear of speaking in public is often tied up with insecurities about how others perceive us. But time is on your side, since one of the great liberations of growing older is caring less what people think. Perhaps one day you’ll face your audience wearing purple, with a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit you.