The final curtain

The six month course finished in July, which doesn't really explain why I haven't posted since June. I think, to be successful, this blog would have had to have been more open, less guarded about commenting on individuals and their writing. I would have had to be less sensitive to sensitivities. Some people wouldn't even allow their novels to be referred to. Some refused to let me use even first names (hence the idea of adopting an established writer's name for each member of the group.) At the end of the day, though, if you're on a writing course and can't even mention the nature of someone's work in progress - if you're sitting commenting on each other's work and are prevented from recording those comments - if you find yourself unable to describe personalities and tensions in anything other than a bright, sunny, aren't-we-all-wonderful way, you end up with a bland account that's not really a record of anything.

And that's a shame.

It's also spectacularly untrue to the terrible insecurity, the fears and the difficulties that are part and parcel of trying to forge a writing life. And as that's what most of us on this course were trying to do, it's ironic that the participants themselves should have put the kybosh on an open record. I don't think anyone would have stolen any of our plots, or started stalking us. I think they may have picked up some ideas about how to make the most of such an opportunity (the next six month course is starting in October, I think). I think we all might have been entertained a little more; I'd certainly have posted more often.

I also can't help wondering whether I should simply have written what I wanted to write and taken the fallout as and when it came. You read certain columnists and wonder how on earth they get away with the wholeheartedness with which they expose their partners, children, families... And yet they do, and people follow them assiduously. I can't do that. Maybe I was the wrong person for the blog.

Perhaps the first thing a writer has to do is to be prepared to be laid bare. It's taken me a long time to say, 'Yes, I've written four novels and am still trying to get published,' openly, when people ask what I do. It's hard not to start apologising for your writing and for your ambitions. It's easy to think you're being laughed at, that you don't deserve to be taken seriously. The biggest difference I have noticed between published writers and unpublished writers (I'm talking about the good unpublished writers here - on this course, me, Maggie O'Farrell, Monica Ali, E. Annie Proulx) is that the published ones tend to be someone (Alan Titchmarsh, Tony Parsons), or to be married to someone (Isabelle Fonseca, Rebecca Miller), or to be someone's child (Rebecca Miller, Sophie Hannah). That doesn't mean they shouldn't be published - it simply means that they've grown up with, or lived with, a sense of entitlement. Why shouldn't I have childcare and support so that I can write? Even before I've earned anything at it? Why not indeed. But it's not going to happen, and so my writing continues to be crammed in around my three (soon to be four) tiny children, my husband, my homemaking, my teaching. That's how it is.

And it is happening. The first draft of novel number five, The Ship will be finished by Christmas.

With that sense of entitlement - the lack of any need to justify themselves - I think the Faber Academy students would have taken it as read that strangers would be interested in their ideas, their progress, their thoughts on each other's work. My hands would not have been tied from the start. People would have been affirmed, encouraged, offended maybe - but they'd not have been neutral. They'd have responded, posted, argued, defended, attacked. It would have been fun.

I hope something comes of this course. I hope that someone finishes a great novel, and that the novel is published. I hope that the Faber Academy becomes a forum for aspirational, intelligent and driven unpublished writers. I hope that I'll be able to return one day as a tutor instead of a student. 

And Austin Mallon, I do remember you. You were one of the most original and interesting teenagers I ever taught. I hope you're still aspiring to something beyond Dorking and that you've thrown off the shackles of that parochial Surrey commuter idyll. Thank you for finding this blog.

The Faber Academy students' reading will be on 30th September; that'll be goodbye, and I reserve the right to post about it. Probably two months afterwards.

Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw was so inspiring that I spent the whole of the lunch hour walking to Borders on Oxford Street, around Borders on Oxford Street and back from Borders on Oxford Street in a quest to buy her latest book, The Importance of Music for Girls, in time for her to sign it for me. Oh, they had one, the man at the desk assured me. The computer said so. But it wasn't in Biography. It wasn't in Fiction, or alongside her poetry books, or even in Music (although Toby Litt's I played the drums in a band called ok was, and that's definitely a novel.) Wherever it was, I couldn't find it, and I thought being punctual for the afternoon session was probably a sign of more respect than wandering round a bookshop pitted against the stock computer.

'Once I had a character,' she said, 'I didn't have a poem, I had a story.' I loved that. It's difficult to tell, sometimes, where poetry ends and novels begin, particularly when you're reading someone like Marilynne Robinson. On our own writing: 'This should be a disturbing process for you.' And, 'How can you articulate the unfamiliar except through the familiar?' 

On dialogue: 'Remember how much of conversation is not about what is said.'

On description: 'Describing is part of writing, but writing is not describing.'

This was a wonderful session which highlighted the problem with writing courses. For example, we were working hard on the second writing exercise, using the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to create a storyline of our own. I had an arrogant but brilliant A level student being given a second chance at a major scholarship; his teacher was shaping beautifully; I thought I had something. I wasn't alone. The Faber and Faber boardroom was in complete silence; the concentration and creativity were tangible. And then Thomas Hughes suddenly piped up, 'Monica, you'll know this - what was Peter Andre's hit single called?' And the spell was broken - whether because of the interruption or because of the forced contemplation of Peter Andre's singing I can't say. Writing courses are about a group of people. Writing itself is only about one. And sometimes, that contradiction doesn't work. Perhaps the irony is that the better the tutor, the more strongly felt the contradiction is. 

As engaging in a completely different way was Hannah Griffiths, a Faber editor who led the session on 27th May. She gave us the uplifting perspective that 'Synopses are rubbish. If they've read 60 pages of it and loved it, they're not going to reject it because of the synopsis. Unless it's rubbish. It can only be bad.' Having spent almost as long trying to write synopses of my novels as I did writing the novels, Hannah Griffiths instantly became my personal hero. That status was confirmed when she told us that she's publishing the new Barbara Kingsolver novel this November.

Louise was back from Skyros the following week. Ironically, we had a session on synopses. We imagined ourselves as commodities and wrote blurbs for our own novels, which is only slightly easier than writing synopses. 

Since last posting, I've had two more sessions with Maggie O'Farrell and E. Annie Proulx. And it is these that have meant that I'm 30,000 words in to my first draft. And that, my friends, is the point of writing courses. Identify one or two people whose work appeals to you and mentor each other outside of the course. Then the course becomes the luxury and the inevitable interruptions and irrelevances become funny stories rather than blood-boiling grievances.

Walter Donohue

The good news is that, according to Walter Donohue, novelists make better screenwriters that playwrights do. And he said lots of other good things too, like, 'Try to think of a plot with a forward momentum, a drive,' and 'The right words are the ones that sound as though they'be been written before.' And (my personal favourite), 'When two cars crash in a desert, it can only be by design.'

But what I took away were his stories. Neil Jordan wrote Mona Lisa as a screenplay about a woman needing a man, but Bob Hoskins was such a great actor that his interpretation transformed it into a film about a man needing a woman, and then he won an Oscar. This is a better punchline than that he was nominated for said Oscar, which shows why Walter is so good at his job. John Hodge (Trainspotting) puts two people in a room, makes them work out how they came to be there and whether they want to be in a room together - hey presto, a screenplay. Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) wanted to make an original and interesting film about a seedy journalist investigating the murder of a political researcher. Brad Pitt wanted to make it too,  and with the weight of his diamond-studded name, the studio swallowed its reservations about making interesting and original films and agreed to back it. But Brad wanted the journalist to be unerringly fit, gorgeous and brilliant - Robin Hood without the tights. Cue vast alterations in the screenplay. 

KM to studio: But this isn't the film I wanted to make! There's no character development if the journalist's a hero from the off.

Studio to KM: You'll make the film as Brad wants it, sunshine, if you want the funding.

A $2million film set later, two weeks before the commencement of shooting, Brad decided he didn't want to do the film after all. And Brad's friend Ed Norton, who was meant to play the politician, walked out too. Fortunately, $2million meant that the studio developed a backbone. Walter formed part of a delegation to Russell Crowe, who was busy vegging in his ranch not really expecting any work in the near future, getting correspondingly unkempt and somewhat squidgy around the edges. Russell said he'd do the film, as long as a) the journalist was made a more complex figure and b) he (Russell) wasn't expected to go to the gym. Consequently our Kevin got the make the film he wanted to make in the first place.

Except that Russell then refused to shoot the final scene with Ben Affleck (who rescued the studio from Ed Norton) because he didn't like Ben Affleck's lines. Russell was kind enough to rewrite the scene, but Kevin didn't appreciate Russell's literary skills. The studio wouldn't let Kevin bring in the writer from Last King of Scotland because he wasn't famous enough and brought in a hugely expensive bigger name instead. And the studio then got the jitters over the ending and insisted on a great big shoot-out as an insurance policy against Brad's departure, even though the villain of the piece had no reason, really, to take a massive pop at Russell and should have just committed suicide as per the original screenplay.

'So,' Walter said, with a wise, avuncular shake of his head, 'the film wasn't as good as it should have been.' A bit like a grandma offering round a cake that's been made by children old enough to have known better than to slam the oven door just as the cake was rising.

Mick, Mark and the horror of the elegant variation

There were no sessions during the Easter fortnight. Personally, I was going to write at least ten thousand words - I've got a hungry and violent mob bearing down on my would-be Utopian community as they board the ship which will be their own autonomous state, and I need to know what happens. 

It didn't happen, for the reasons that it always doesn't happen. The time is coming when I will have to stamp my pretty little feet and scream and scream until I'm sick, because reasoned and rational discussion gets us everywhere in theory and nowhere in practice. But that's a whole other blog...

Wednesday evening brought us Jacqui Lofthouse, former UEA student, published novelist, huge in Holland. And Saturday brought us Mick Jackson, Booker prize nominee, and Mark Billingham, crime writer extraordinaire. Now, I may not have written much over Easter, but I read. I read every single novel that's been recommended during the course, and novels by all the guest speakers. And picking the brains of a writer whose work you're familiar with is a very exciting way to spend time. All these writers have been published, so their advice and working methods are to be taken seriously.

Louise doesn't write chronologically. She writes the scene she wants to write at the time and leaves notes in the text saying 'Big Argument Here' and comes back to them. Mick Jackson writes his first chapter first and his last chapter last and 'wouldn't do it any other way.' Mick Jackson says 'Leave room for the voodoo.' Mark Billingham states firmly that 'Books don't descend from the ether on fairy dust.' I was just thinking that, if the novel-writing ever failed him, he'd have a great second career as a stand up comic, when he said that his background is in stand up comedy - which goes to show my great insight into human nature and proves that I'll make some publisher a wonderful author someday.

The point is that there is no magic bullet. One writer's failsafe is another writer's pet hate. Mick Jackson got lucky with his first novel. Katharine McMahon wrote five before she was published. Mick Jackson writes first drafts with HB pencil; Mark Billingham buys a specific brand of Rymans notebook for each new project and starts by labelling it carefully. Good for them. but what for me?

Tomorrow, E. Annie Proulx and Maggie O'Farrell are coming for a morning of work and discussion. This has got to be the term when I get it together writing-wise, and that's only going to happen when I am under a pressure to write that exceeds the pressure to put a meal on the table, to arrange play dates for my children (3, 2 and 10 months), to support their activities, to keep up with friends, to support my husband, to be a nice person. And I hope that E. Annie and Maggie and I will create that pressure for each other. Although I do want to provide a nice lunch...

At the Historical Novel Society conference in 2005, Hilary Johnson said of writing, 'There are easier ways of banging your head against a brick wall.'

Utterly writerly

Louise wears great frocks. Tonight, even the marker pen she was using toned in with her outfit. As she says of writing, it's all in the detail. One day, I'd like to stand in front of a class in imperial purple reverse leg of mutton sleeves, and a skirt patterned in swishing monochrome with violet accents, and make notes for an eager class in purple marker pen. She walked straight out of a fashion page to exhort us to kill people when our plots begin to dull.

I love the glimpses Louise gives us into her writerly life - yesterday she was planting trees with Michael Portillo to offset the carbon footprint of the Booker prize. And not many people can say that.

It was the last class before the Easter break. Next term, there'll be more lectures, more visits, more writing exercises, more input from industry professionals. And fewer peer assessments. 

I'm hoping to get some real writing done during the Easter break. I might pretend that the course is running over Easter and go and hide somewhere with the laptop while everyone at home thinks I'm in London. 

And I still haven't written about Helen Dunmore.

Not this, but that

Anita Shreve, E. Annie Proulx, Bram Stoker and Thomas Hughes have all had their peer reviews. There is good work going on everywhere - as you'd expect from such a competitive course. But I've been getting increasingly frustrated by these workshops. They go on for too long, at the expense of the opportunity to pick Louise's brains. We've all got a great deal to offer, but Louise is the one who's made it. Louise is the one who's living where we'd all like to be. Louise has been where we are now, and is able to translate her own experience into useful anecdotes, examples and advice. In comparison with Louise's lectures, the peer reviews are of limited value. We were critiquing John Irving last night, and almost ten minutes of an all-too-short two hours were spent debating the first name of one of the characters. Names are important - of course they are - but it reminded me too forcibly of a workshop session on another course, at which the work under discussion involved a character starving herself to death in a car. The writing was powerful and incredibly accomplished. The writer had asked the group to address some specific questions, and yet the session was dominated by three of the group banging on about the make and model of the car.

I freely admit that I don't enjoy workshop sessions unless they're with a small group of people who have deliberately elected to work together. For me, the value of the peer assessments this term has been to bring smaller groups together who are beginning to meet outside of the course. What I hope more than anything is that Louise will let the peer reviews go next term in favour of lectures, visits and writing exercises. If the reviews are to continue, I'll have to track down a half-hour glass.

The supremely efficient Ali gave me a recording of the session that I missed  - I had to be struck down with lergy on the one evening that there were no peer reviews, on which Louise was due to lecture about character for two hours. 

The more I write, and the more I fail, the more published and unpublished work I read, the more I realise that what other people think of your work is the least important thing about it. Writing that would be dismissed out of hand by every writing student on the planet gets published and makes a mint. Great writing gets published too. Other great writing doesn't get published. Some rubbish doesn't get published. There is simply no correlation whatsoever between the quality of the work and its chances of publication. Therefore, the only possible way forward is to write your story as you and you alone wish it to be written, and to be as unprecious about it as humanly possible.

And so I must stop, and get on with writing my story in the very small amount of time I have to do so.

Tempus Fugit

I thought I'd missed posting for three sessions; at last I'm at the computer and I find it's four. I think this is what happens when you try to combine some sort of regular writing with three very small children, a fierce bout of illness (first me, now doing the rounds) and essential relationship maintenance. When I sit down, I write. The fact that I've written nothing for a month shows that I haven't sat down - and even now, instead of rhapsodizing about Andrew Motion or the work of Monica Ali, Maggie O'Farrell, Conn Iggulden and Ali Smith (all workshops that have taken place in the meantime), or raging against the streptoccus A bacteria that kept me home for Louise's character workshop, I'm busy writing about how I'm not writing.

Andrew Motion came on the 25th February. He's looking forward to not being Poet Laureate any more, and says that his abiding fear is that Prince William will get married before the laureate laurels are passed to someone else (Benjamin Zephaniah, please, just in case the powers that be are reading this.) Andrew Motion is, as Louise said, 'an annoyingly talented all round literary type person,' and I know that some people were blown away by him. But I wasn't. I have a deep suspicion of found poetry - I veer away from listmaking as literature - I don't agree with the statement that our job as writers is to 'back off from interpreting objects and let them speak for themselves.' But disagreeing with Andrew Motion about writing would have been like arguing with the Godfather about family etiquette. I don't for a minute think he'd have left a horse's head in my bed, but I'm not so sure about Louise and the other students.

On the Saturday workshop, Louise sent us into the streets to stalk people and get some 'authentic hardcore physical detail.' I'm not good at stalking. I was spotted, pinned down and fed by my prey. 'Well, dear,' she said, after an hour spent describing humanist wedding ceremonies and rescuing her fabulous rope of magenta beads from her soupbowl at five minute intervals, she said, 'I must be going. I hope you find someone to write about.'

I can only hope I'm better at writing than at writing courses.

The first workshops

This week, we learned that Louise Doughty can 'fix you up with as many policemen as you want, love,' and that she was not alone in being chatted up at the In Bed With... launch party with the line, 'What's a nice girl like you doing in an anthology like this?' 

In an effort to refrain from connecting the two, I'll recite the Louise Doughty Guide to Making the Most of Peer Review Workshops. 

• 90% of your feedback will be useless; 10% will be invaluable.
• Only you can tell which 10% will be useful to your work.
• Resist the temptation to defend yourself. 
• Novelists need rhinoceros hides because rejection doesn't get any easier.

Louise also mentioned Malcolm Bradbury's hatred of the excuse, But it really was like that; what life is really like is insufficient reason for doing it that way in art. This reminded me of a session on a different course. We were giving feedback about work with a promising premise that just didn't keep the reader's attention. The writer sat looking surprisingly smug and making no notes while we all sweated blood to try and help birth the story. Eventually someone asked why he was looking so pleased. 'Well,' he said, 'it's about a boring character, and you're telling me I've succeeded in getting that across.'

The first two writers on this course couldn't have been more receptive. The first, whom I'll call Alan Warner because his quirky, evocative and original piece put me in mind of Morvern Callar, was Louise's perfect sponge. He accepted every comment, only pausing to clarify points, and asked one question which gave rise to some excellent advice from Louise regarding plotting. Louise said that, whilst detailed plotting in advance works for some writers, she doesn't write consecutively herself. This frees her to write the scenes that feel real to her at any given moment; she isn't trapped or blocked by feeling forced to write a scene she's not ready for. The disadvantages seem confined to having to cut excellent work, and unwittingly submitting manuscripts with 'Big argument here' written in capitals half way down a page.

The second writer, whom I'll call Raymond Chandler, gave us a cinematographic, film noir picture of a rainy London night and a high-ranking policeman with whom at least three of the group fell in love. Raymond was praised for the lovely rhythms to the sentences, and for the evocation of place and atmosphere. At one point, Louise asked of a character, 'Is she blonde because she's blonde, or because she's drunk and has a slipping bra strap?' and advised, 'Try for something concrete, particular and different.'

AW and RC took away copies of their manuscripts annotated by every member of the group and both say they've found our comments helpful.

Or at least, 10% of them.

And the film versions will be made by David Lynch and the Coen brothers respectively.

Allies and Enemies week

At our second session, we concentrated on two things - firstly, what we were going to do about our enemies and secondly, the projects we're all intending to work on during the next six months. 

We've been both creative and committed. One group member's digging into savings for a nanny three mornings a week; another's cramming five days' work into three. We're giving up coffee or drinking more of it, rationing red wine, being firmer with our friends/ partners/ children. We're giving up on feeling guilty for putting our writing on the map of our day to day lives, whatever that might mean for those around us. Maybe we won't be thought of as such nice people any more; maybe that's the way it has to be.

Louise was delighted that we all have specific projects we want to work on. Or maybe her expression owed more to the thought of the party that she was going to afterwards - a celebration of a new anthology of erotica. Apparently the literary editors are all longing to know who wrote which story. The stories are all published under porn pseudonyms (name of first pet + name of the first road you lived in - Fluffy Grove, anyone?), and a list of the authors' real names. Louise is legally bound not to reveal who wrote what. We thought we had some inside information when she let slip that she'd written an alien abduction scene, but then she said she'd cut it. So no chance to tattle to the gossip columnists there then...

I don't think any of us found it easy to sum up our own projects. Any grand scheme condensed into two sentences is bound to sound inadequate at best, and trite, if not incomprehensible at worst - at least to the writer. What became clear, though, is that however hard we are on ourselves, we're supportive of and interested in each other. So interested, in fact, that the proffered disclaimers - this sounds unbearable, sorry for being so cliched, this is dreadful - faded away as we listened to each other.

Next week, the workshops begin. We've all been given writing samples for the first victims - sorry, willing volunteers - and we'll annotate them with positive feedback and constructive criticism in preparation for the session. This will give the writers an excellent degree of considered response as they move forwards.

My feeling is that the first workshops will mark the real beginning of the course. The housekeeping and the initial meetings are important - they prove that the ground's not going to give way beneath our feet. But tomorrow, with real words to analyse, real work to accomplish, real projects under real discussion, we'll start running. The first week really belonged to Tobias Hill; it was a privilege to be at his book launch. We met, swopped names, and learned where the toilets are. The second week belonged to Louise, who has contributed to a short story collection that's flying off the shelves and which made a highly effective smokescreen behind which we could hide our nerves at sharing our project ideas. But, with these initial hurdles overcome, tomorrow belongs to us - as long as we have the courage to take it.

The first week

The six month Faber Academy course began on Wednesday February 4th. There are twenty one of us altogether, divided into two groups. Apparently, the selection process was not easy - to start with, there were many more applications than had been anticipated (hence the two groups and the appointment of a second tutor). We're the twenty one who made it, and Louise Doughty assures us that we are all rather wonderful and show great promise. She also tells us that this is the last nice thing she'll be saying to us for six months.

'Would you have run the course if the applications hadn't been of an especially high standard?' one participant asks. Aspiring writers? Cynical? But the course isn't cheap.

'No,' says Louise, so flatly that we are all convinced and began to feel that maybe we are rather wonderful and show great promise.

For the first session. Louise asked us to think about our Allies and Enemies. Who and what are the people and things that help us to write, or that prevent us from writing? Some were obvious and uncomplicated - the need to work for pay, for example, or an addiction to Suduko. But as we continued to work on this, some precious things began to appear in a different light. Children, friends, partners - it can be hard to face up to the influences that prevent you from getting the words onto the page. Louise quoted Michele Roberts when she told us that one of the first things you have to sacrifice to be a writer is being thought of as a nice person. She sent us off to think about our enemies and to come up with constructive plans to tackle them. Her own silver bullets come in the form of the sugar free mints she keeps her desk to prevent her deserting in search of snacks. Divorce and infanticide seemed somewhat harsh in comparison, but at that point, I wasn't sure that anything less would fit the bill. 

The first evening coincided with the launch party for Tobias Hill's novel The Hidden and we'd all been invited for the final half hour. Over wine and canapes, I found that this whole writing thing is no bed of roses for anyone. Tobias Hill's a published poet and a hugely respected novelist and even he speaks with surprising diffidence about his work.

There aren't any easy answers. I'm glad that I didn't know, back in 2003 when I wrote my first novel, that six years on I'd still be unpublished and working on a fifth. In 2003, I thought that the secret to becoming a novelist was to actually write a novel. I did that. Then I thought that I'd have made it when I got an agent. I got an agent, and I'll never forget her first piece of editorial advice - she told me to change He quailed because quail is a game bird, not a verb. Why didn't I call it a day then, instead of wasting two further novels trying to convince her that the heel of the hand is an accepted term for the part below the palm that can be used to pin an unsuspecting character to a wall? But I didn't, and the price for that was high. Now, of course, I think of publication as the summit.

Apparently, it's not. 

I hope that one day, I'll be in a position to come back to that one.

We're a good group. You can feel the motivation around the Faber and Faber boardroom table. And Louise thinks we're all rather wonderful and show great promise. I can't wait to hear about everyone's projects. I can't wait to see what's going to come out of the next six months.

Allies and enemies. I am my own best and worst of both.