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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!

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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 the the exposure of having a book out there is curiously impersonal (your mileage may vary) 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, I think you will 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 LeCarré’/David Cornwell’s son Nick Cornwell said that he realised 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 will not protect you, any more than the book being labelled as fiction will. 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 LeCarré’ 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, who 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 contibutor 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: Jo Marjoribanks might become ‘Jo Marr’. Others have fun with backwards or mixed-up spellings: my favourite is the slightly bonkers-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 LeCarré’ 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.

This new post in the Itch of Writing Guides series concentrates on how writers can use these shared systems of communication to convey their narrative.

Punctuation still has these two roles in writing:

1. evoking the pattern and rhythm of how the meaning is expressed

2. articulating the meaning of the written sentence itself.

This is true for prose narrative as well as dialogue, because even a written ‘voice’ has its origins in speech. Commas evoke the tiny lift at the end of a phrase, dashes get used for all sorts of small pauses, full stops might express how a statement stops dead, even if it isn’t a grammatically complete sentence.

The grammarians set about explaining and systematising how it all works - aka ‘the rules’ – but they tended to focus on the semantic meaning, and not reckon with the expressive aspects that creative writing needs just as much. So sometimes you may have to choose: what is correct in formal grammar for making meaning clear may not be right for making your prose as expressive and emotionally clear as it needs to be.

But that’s not a free pass for anyone who can’t be bothered to learn and understand the conventions. You’re only likely to make your writing more expressive, while never sacrificing clarity and meaning, if you have internalised a really strong sense of how and why those conventions work.

When you’re trying to move beyond correct, to right, Reading like a writer, and reading aloud can really help: when did you last stop to study and think about how your favourite writers punctuate?

On the other hand, don’t panic. Your manuscript is not a published book, it’s only a tool for producing a published book, so for many of the minor (and often disputed) conventions, being clear and consistent is what matters. Your editor or publisher may well have a different house style, and you can cross that bridge when you come to it.

This Guide covers:

Punctuation

1. Full stops

2. Semi-colons

3. Colons

4. Commas

5. Hyphens

6. Dashes

7. Question mark

8. Exclamation mark

9. Apostrophes

10. Brackets/parentheses

Dialogue

1. Punctuation

2. Capitalisation

3. Thoughts

Further Reading

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If you’re thinking at this point, ‘Well, what do you expect if you don’t plan?’ I promise you that even the most assiduous planners get stuck in this way. And, as ever, the planner’s pre-first-draft puzzlements, and the panster’s grappling with mid-draft problems, actually use the same imaginative engines, so all of what follows may be helpful at either stage.

The thing is, you might know perfectly well that the answer to, ‘What happens next?’ is ‘She escapes’ or ‘He paints his breakthrough picture’, but not know the chain of micro events that result in that macro event.

Or you might know how it happens - she picks the lock with her fork, or in posing the model he realises they look like a wolf - but not have a clue what the actual next sentence should be.

Or you may be able to write a next sentence or two, but not be able to trust it will lead to the next scene, and the next part of the story.

If you don’t know what the next sentence needs to be, you can’t know what the one after that will be - so maybe you should go back and fiddle with existing words instead? Or maybe the wheelie bins are due for a scrub? (True example! More on procrastination here.) While for all sorts of writers, the Thirty-Thousand Doldrums are a genuine thing; more here.

Luckily, questions are also your salvation. Sure, you can make a head-on demand that the easily-scared wild creature which is your creative imagination produce the goods, but the risk is that instead you put it to flight.

Instead, take time instead to think up the most helpful question, then keep on asking the questions it gives rise to. This way, you approach your imagination obliquely and quietly - and if you persist some kind of answer will come up, and you’re on your way.

As your imagination starts to move, don’t be forget to make any ‘sidecar’ notes about what this thinking suggests for elsewhere in the story - but don’t let your mind scamper off after them: log them and keep going.

1) Do you know what happens next?

1. Yes - but I don’t know how to write it.

   1. Is it the moment for covering-the-ground, moving-on-to-the-next-important-scene narration? Try writing that in far-out psychic distance.

   2. Is it the moment for a close-in evocation of a specific, immediate moment, close-in in psychic distance? You can always change the distance later

   3. Ask yourself which character(s) are the centre of the next scene. Reverse back to the last time we saw them, and ask yourself what they were doing/thinking/feeling then, which would make them act now.

   4. If you can’t figure that out, ask yourself why you can’t. (Clue: the answer is probably that their character arc isn’t fully-enough developed yet).

   5. Would a different point-of-view, or centering the next scene on a different character, break things open? Try some thought experiments to explore the possibilities.

   6. Would a different setting for essentially the same scene offer more pressures, tensions, choices and dilemmas, or simply a more exciting atmosphere - and therefore more drama?

   7. Is what happens next the right thing to be happening for the story? Ask, ‘Why this? Why here? Why now?’. Then check if different events would answer those questions more satisfactorily.

2. No, but I know one thing which happens further on

   1. Let’s call this the Next Known Thing (NKT). Peer ahead from Current Thing (CT) which you’ve just written, to that point in the story.

   2. What could happen at NKT-minus-one?

   3. What could happen at CT-plus-one?

   4. And at NKT-minus-two? And at CT-plus-two? NKT-minus-three? CT-plus-three?

   5. Nibble inwards like this from CT and NKT until you have a chain which meets in the middle.

3. No, I know nothing:

   1. Stand back and ask yourself about what’s just happened to your character. Where are they (physically, psychologically, emotionally) now? What do they need to do next? What do they want to do next? Are those different?

   2. Given who they are, what external or internal pressures would get in the way of them doing what they want? And in the way of what they need?

   3. Given all that, what might they actually do? Call that CT-plus-one and, if you feel sure enough of it, write that section.

   4. If you don’t feel sure enough, imagine onwards to CT-plus-two and maybe CT-plus-three, until they start to confirm each other, the way tentative crossword guesses start to confirm each other towards certainty.

   5. If you keep on coming up with ‘I don’t know’, take a couple of steps further backwards in your story - CT-minus-two, CT-minus-three or whatever - till you come to the last thing you do feel solid and confident about, then work forwards again.

2) Would switching out of writing prose, into ‘imagining on paper’, help?

Sometimes you don’t know what to write because your sense of this world of people and settings isn’t full enough, so it’s too soon to ask your mind to come up with the causal chain of events that emerges through connected sentences of storytelling.

Instead, switch to other forms of ‘imagining on paper’, such as:

• family trees; relationship trees showing power-structures and tensions

• sketch-maps and building-plans

• bullet-points of the stages of a possible scene

• a sketch-map of a character arc, or a ‘fortunately-unfortunately’ zig-zag

• spider-diagrams of ideas and themes

• free-writing of a character’s voice, or of a pen-portrait

If your imagination balks at producing new things at all, start by jotting down things you already know, and extend from there in mini-steps.

Remember that all of this is ‘in pencil’: this isn’t ‘planning’ of things you’ll have to stick to, this is just free-form imagining.

3) Do you keep ending up in cul-de-sacs?

All these exploratory processes are bound to lead you down some blind alleys, but if it keeps happening and you never even get glimpses of possible other routes, you could ask yourself why that might be.

• Have you forgotten ‘Don’t get it right, get it written (for now)’? Accepting that this next bit may be more like a Zero Draft than a fully-functioning instalment of plot may be all it takes to switch off the Inner Critic or Inner Cowardly Editor. They are trying to protect you from going down a blind alley but, ironically, they keeps declaring things are blind alleys before your imagination has had a chance to work freely and fully, and maybe discover that an apparent cul-de-sac is actually a route to something good.

• Does your writing self think more easily in terms of specifics, or in terms of structure? Check in with that link, then consider whether questions about specifics and details, or structures and engineering, are more ikely to help your imagination works more easily. And which questions feel uncomfortable?

  • Then consider if this is the moment for

    • going with the flow within your comfort-zone process and postponing the other kind of thinking till you know more

    • or keeping a firm hand on the tiller to steer straight out into the scarier waters of your discomfort zone.

• Do ideas come along but they’re all unsuitable? Ask yourself

  • Is some part of your mind censoring them? If so, why? Consider the reason for each seeming unsuitable: is there a common theme? What would happen if you stopped caring about that reason?

  • Is anything that you reckon you must stick to in fact a ‘darling’ that needs murdering?

• Is this is a part of a larger, longer-term blockage? Try my post about Writer’s Block.

• Is everything not all right and you are not OK in your relationship to your writing life and creative hopes and dreams? Sometimes the inability to think of what happens next in your story is the product of something more awry in the rest of life, which this post can help with.

Change is the motor of fiction, but reverse-engineering from a character who ends in embodied, authentic self-hood with the energy of full agency, points to a problem.

Exactly because our society thinks individualism and agency matters so much, it can be hard to get readers and their representatives (agents, editors, acquisitions meetings) to care from the outset about someone who on page one is apparently the opposite: a character beginning in conformity, in helpless, passive existence, reactive rather than active, masking or denying their wants and needs, and absolutely lacking agency and the energy that it generates.

‘I found her irritatingly passive,’ is only one version of that sort of rejection - and the writer’s exasperated, ‘But it’s all about how they grow and change!’ falls on deaf ears.

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But there’s an even more crucial, and sometimes much more daunting, question which gets asked when I’m teaching, mentoring or running workshops (do get in touch if I can help your and yours):

What Research Does Your Writing Need?

Of course you don’t want the reader to trip up on things they know are wrong: the wildly inaccurate police procedures, the hopelessly anachronistic medieval peasant food. But the more important challenge is gathering what you need to make the characters’ actions and reactions - their journey through this world - believable. And most of what makes things believable is not the material world but how people think and speak, what they feel matters and what they don’t care about.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall posited a ‘cultural iceberg’ which is very useful for thinking about this. He argued that only 10% of the culture of a society is visible as ‘surface culture’: food, fashions, language, holidays, literature and so on.

‘Deep culture’ forms 90% of a society and, crucially, that’s largely what forms and drives behaviour: for example approaches to courtship, concepts of justice and metaphysics, ideas about sin and death, cooperation and competition, notions of beauty, and so on. This diagram lays it out well:

Surface culture and deep culture interact, of course: certain foods are made as part of deep concepts in religion. So both are needed in your worldbuilding, if the reader is to feel safe to make their trust-fall into your story.

What do YOU need to research?

We all have different areas of stuff that we ‘just know’: a mix of things you can’t remember ever not knowing, and things you’ve consciously learnt. For example, if you grew up with horses, much of the time you’ll only have to decide what kind of horse the story needs and you can write everything you need; if you didn’t, you might need to do more research into that, as part of making the horses’ rôle and presence plausible in the story’s different situations. But if a character needs to ride sidesaddle, even keen riders might need to do a bit of digging, then more digging still if it’s their viewpoint character who’s riding, and more again if a crucial plot-point rests on the whole event being plausible.

But for each reader who will find it hard to trust-fall into your story because you haven’t evoked the different oddness of riding sidesaddle convincingly, there will be ten who can’t trust-fall because your character’s behaviour towards their teacher, or their children, is unconvincing or anachronistic.

This is where deep culture really comes in, so it’s worth looking hard at the lower section of the iceberg, and thinking about which of these things have an impact on your story, and which you need to find out more about. If you’re writing science fiction and fantasy, of course you can make swathes of this up - but the checklist can still be handy for what you will need to think about and imagine.

What to research: a checklist

I suggest four main headings for thinking about what you need, to reflect their different jobs in your storytelling: Important Facts; Beliefs, Manners and Mores; Voice and Language; and Carnal World. With each, it’s worth remembering

• The dictum that ‘story is the journey you make; plot is the route you take’,

• Everything varies within a society: geography, period, class (higher, lower and sideways), gender, and many other individual variables. There’s nowt so queer as folk, as they say, so beware the generalising tendencies of other writers

• So it’s worth not merely ‘satisficing’ but digging a little further each time to get a sense of the spread of possibilities - plus you often find more wriggle-room in plotting that way.

• Beware of the trickiest trap of all: your unknown unknowns. These are the things you think you ‘just know’, so don’t think to find out.1 Proving negatives is famously problematic, so all I can suggest is that when you find yourself writing things your mind is blithely telling you that you know, try to get in to the habit of asking yourself, ‘Are you sure?’.

1) Important facts which affect the plot (‘the route’):

It’s very hard to make a plot work unless you’re on reasonably firm ground on these, because they affect the basics and big structures of how characters act and what happens to them.

• travel: forms of transport; travel times; relative costs and practicalities

• ordinary life; housing types, costs and practicalities; working, eating and leisure hours; wages, costs and payments

• law and order systems; religious structures and sanctions; institutionalised social hierarchies and power-structures

• where and how basics such as food, heat, clothing, healthcare and sex are found, made or acquired

2) Beliefs, manners and mores which affect the story (‘the journey’)

These are probably what most often go wrong with historical fiction, but they matter just as much if you set a present-day story in a community not your own, because they’re the foundations of why your characters behave as they do. There’s a reason business people take courses in negotiating in other cultures, and it’s not just so the export director knows how to read the menus.

• fundamentals: faith and religion; generational, gender and ethnic roles; class structures and hierarchies; prejudices and stereotypes

• community: structures of allegiance and betrayal, and cooperation and competition; relationships across social boundaries; political alignments and oppositions; attitudes to disability

• social distinctions: naming conventions; job and personal titles; status signifiers; formal and informal introductions; greetings across social boundaries

• daily conventions: dress and decency; head-coverings; cigarettes, alcohol and drugs; greetings such as shaking hands or bowing;

• pastimes: sports, hobbies and games; concepts of their rôle in society; approaches to winning and losing;

3) Voice & language: the interface between reader & story

In fiction our medium is also our message, transmitting the story but also part of the worldbuilding, in both narrative voice and dialogue. You’re looking for materials to create a synthesis of the flavours of the Other (in place, time, person) voices of your setting, and the flavours which are native to your ordinary, contemporary writing voice.

• vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and sentence structure

• the differences in all of those, in formal vs informal situations and contexts

• how age, class, gender, ethnicity, job etc. make a difference

• slang, swearing and obscenity

• heightened, dramatic and poetic language vs functional language

4) The carnal world specifics which helps the reader make the trust fall:

The term ‘carnal world’ comes from Mary Karr’s brilliant The Art of Memoir, and it’s a better than ‘detail’, because it emphasises that this stuff is physical and specific, and it’s key to helping make the reader’s trust-fall possible.

• buildings: houses, churches and temples, barns, palaces, share housing/apartment blocks

• landscape: terrain, weather, roads and tracks, plants and wild animals

• power: fuels, draft animals, sailing ships, engines, motion and movement, mills and factories, big machines

• technology: telephones, swords and guns, vehicles again, musical instruments, fireplaces and stoves, hand tools and work equipment

• textiles: clothes, sails, underwear, footwear, hats, curtains, tapestries, blankets, industrial garments

• furniture: domestic fixtures and fittings, food preparation, workplace fittings

• chemistry: food, scent, perfumes, soaps, dyes and chemicals, medicines

• bodies: skin, hair, height and weight, sex, singing, dancing, makeup, body ornaments and modifications, washing and bathing, types of exercise, habits of movement

• art: religious and secular jewellery, paintings, ornaments, ceramics, fashion, instrumental and vocal music

And finally, don’t forget that all these things don’t just look certain ways to our sight, they have smell, sound, texture and taste, plus what I think of as ‘the real sixth sense’: the way they interact with our own proprioception as we handle them or they envelop us.

How do you think about first drafts?

In the first-ever post in the Itchy Bitesized series, Three Things About First Drafts, one thing I explore is how first drafts need not be the right words. In fact, there are lots of helpful ways of thinking about first drafts.

Which one of the following is most helpful for you?

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I CAPTURE THE CASTLE, by Dodie Smith

Cassandra Mortmain is seventeen, and has decided to keep a journal to practice her speedwriting in the hope of being able to get a job. It’s the 1930s, and she, her older sister Rose and schoolboy brother Thomas live in a tumbledown castle in Suffolk, which their writer father moved into in happier times, after the succès d’estime of his Finnegan’s-Wake-like novel. Then he succumbed to writer’s block and the money ran out, and now they quite often go hungry: even the towels are so threadbare ‘we have to shake ourselves dry’. The girls have been neither bred nor educated to earn a living, but nor do they ever meet anyone to marry. Their stepmother Topaz, ex-artists’ model, just about keeps everyone fed and clothed, when she’s not communing with nature or playing the lute; only Stephen, the lad who grew up with them and has always been embarrassingly devoted to Cassandra, brings in any money at all.

And then one wet night Simon Cotton, the young, anglophile, American man who’s unexpectedly inherited the estate, turns up with his brother, all-American Neil. They make friends with clever Cassandra, their glamorous mother lionises Mortmain, while Simon fall in love with astonishingly beautiful Rose. Cassandra observes the progress of their courtship, the faultlines in her father’s marriage, and her own indifference, curiously: ‘I know all about the facts of life,’ she writes, ‘And I don’t think much of them’.

Why I love it:

‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’ is possibly the best opening line ever, and every sentence of this post could have been illustrated with an equally good one. And it’s not just funny: it also sets the reader up very precisely for how this novel is going to work. Cassandra starts observing their lives just as everything is about to change, and the journal/novel is partly formed by what she observes, but also by how the events change her, ‘poised’ as she is ‘between childhood and adultery’, as Valerie Grove puts it in the introduction in my Virago Classics edition. Refracted through the needs of a very different project, the structure was a big influence on the structure and narrative setup of The Bruegel Boy.

I Capture The Castle is a minor classic of the growing-up story, and the years of its demotion (as some would see it) to Young Adult fiction avant la lettre must have kept it a secret from many adults: currently the only new physical edition I can find has possibly the most awful cover of any book I’ve ever seen, which is why the one I’ve pasted in above is the ebook. That’s a shame, because the novel is centred on one of the great human tragicomedies: the deal we all make in gaining knowledge and experience is also a loss of innocence. Both Anna in The Mathematics of Love, and Una and Mark in A Secret Alchemy owe a sizeable debt to the book.

Although the evocation of the Suffolk seasons (by a painfully homesick Dodie Smith, writing in wartime Hollywood) are quite beautifully done, the book is never saccharine. ‘It’s not a very good game,’ Cassandra thinks almost at the end, contemplating the patterns of love, sex and self-deception that have yoked each of the characters to someone else. ‘The people you play it with are apt to get hurt’.

Three reasons for a writer to read it

1. It’s a good example of how the writer can convey things through a character-narrator that the character themselves doesn’t think. Cassandra loves Rose unconditionally, for example, while we see her from another angle. Mind you, when I first read I Capture the Castle as a teenager myself, I took much of the story at Cassandra’s face value, as it were. Returning to the book in my thirties, I saw more of the satirical edge, and admired Smith’s skill in allowing us to pick up the satire through observant and detached but essentially un-satirical Cassandra: different readers (and different ages of reader) will read different things between the same lines.

2. That structure. I’m always going on, here on the Itch, about the question of ‘Where is the narrator standing, relative to the events of the story?’, and the answer in this case is ‘very close’. But this is not a brain-download: it’s a brilliant example of the value of using past tense and the storytelling mode. This is no would-be movie-script, present tense, first-person, all about the moment. The small but built-in distance that diary-form brings means we know very well that this is Cassandra’s take on her world and, literally and figuratively, her construction of what happened. Indeed, the journal and Cassandra’s writing of it become part of the plot/route, as well as part of the story/journey: she (and we) are aware that how she feels in the ‘now’ of the writing affects what and how she writes. Nor does that seem complicated and self-conscious, because diary-form come so naturally in reflecting the kind of awareness that we all bring to our lives, especially as teenagers.

3. Interestingly, the film of I Capture the Castle is really rather good, even though the book’s form and structure is so – well - booky. Although I Capture The Castle was Smith’s first novel (long before The Hundred and One Dalmations), she was already a highly successful playwright: the structure of the story conveys the randomness and boredom of ordinary country life while in fact the narrative drive never slackens. The dialogue, too, reflects Smith’s playwriting expertise, and you could argue that so does the voice of the journal, being both vivid and immediate, and yet convincing as a written thing. Even the dog, Heloïse, and Abelard the cat, are part of the pattern, as gradually everyone is drawn into a complex dance. It’s Cassandra’s own story that turns out to be a funny, vivid, painful process of growing and maturing.

And did I mention that it’s also very, very funny? It’s one of those books that, if you meet a fellow fan, can guarantee companionable giggles: the legless ghost, the bearskin coat and then the bear, the crinoline, Leda Fox-Cotton, the shaving scene … I’ll stop there; you’ll just have to find the rest yourself, and join the club.

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CARELESS PEOPLE, by Sarah Churchwell

Murder, Mayhem and the Invention if The Great Gatsby

What is it?

Just as the young, rich(ish) Mid-Western writer Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were packing for the East in 1922, a very ordinary, young married woman and her lover were discovered in New Jersey, shot through the head. The murder case became a national sensation, and Fitzgerald followed it as he and Zelda settled in Long Island, drank, drove and danced their way to and from New York, travelled to Europe, came back to America with their marriage on the rocks … and all the time, Fitzgerald was, inch by inch, working on the novel that he was determined would be in a different league from anything he’d yet done in its ambition and seriousness.

As Churchwell puts it, Careless People is ‘an histoire trouvé about what was in the air as Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, including the unfolding of a remarkable tale of murder, adultery, class resentment, mistaken identity and the invention of romantic pasts.’

Why I enjoyed it:

At first I thought I would avoid Careless People. So much writing about the ‘true’ origins of novels and other art is in some way reductive. Publicity urges you to read a novel because it isn’t really fiction; Author’s Notes appease the reader who resents not being able to tell which parts of the novel are “made up”; articles focusing on the “real story” of what happened end up explaining away the complexity and fascination of how the fiction happened. I love and admire Gatsby too much to have my experience of it reduced like that.

But then I got fascinated by the New York and Long Island that Churchwell describes. Seen from Europe, it’s both extraordinarily modern and fast-moving for the early 1920s, and astonishingly primitive, frontier-like and undeveloped. The book plaits together the story of the murder and the investigation; the wider world of bootleggers, prohibition, poverty, ordinary people and extraordinary money; the Fitzgeralds and their friendships; and the strange, alchemical transmutation that goes on when a great writer takes the stuff of the real world, and of the imagination, and spins them into something better and more satisfying that a mere ‘true’ story ever could be. Instead of explaining away what Gatsby is, Careless People makes you want to go back to it.

Three reasons for a writer to read it

1. Churchwell reviews for The Guardian and elsewhere, but she’s also Professor of American Literature and the Public Understanding at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Both of these skills show in her ability to unpick, most clearly and delicately, exactly how Fitzgerald’s storytelling works. It doesn’t read as formal literary criticism, faithful though she is to academic standards of explanation and proof: her skills are put to the service of illuminating the alchemy that goes on between the world which Fitzgerald lives in and observes, and how the story ends up working on the page.

2. The portrait of the trials and complications of trying to survive as a writer both creatively and economically – even a bright, new, young, celebrated writer in the glory days of newspapers and magazines – is oddly warming. Fitzgerald seems like such a golden boy in both talent and charm, and it’s easy to see his breathtaking alcoholism as sheer self-indulgence. And yet he still struggles, still has to break off to write other things for quick money, is still derailed creatively by his emotional life going wrong, and still minds desperately that his ambitious new novel should succeed.

3. Do you need a reason to go back to The Great Gatsby? If you do, then think about what you might learn from it: about how a narrative may not be the internal narrator’s story; about how to drop scraps and hints of information not as bafflements, but as sweets dropped in the forest to lead us on; about how some of the best prose to come out of the USA in the first half of the 20th century actually works; about how a story in which no single character is likeable or endearing in any of the normal ways can still make you (all right, me) feel at the end at once so sad, and so happy.

It has many descendants, including Elmore Leonard’s ‘if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it’. But what does ‘murder your darlings’ mean?

The Bonfire of the Vanities?

Let’s not be so Puritan as to assume that anything on their pages that a writer delights in is by definition sinful, and fit only to be hurled onto Savanarola’s purifying bonfire of the vanities. King might accuse Dorothy L. Sayers’ avatar Harriet Vane of egotism but I don’t, when in Gaudy Night she says to Peter Wimsey,

‘When you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvellous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.’

I know that feeling - for a bit, anyhow - and so, I bet, does every writer reading this post. It is dead right.

Instead, let’s be very Protestant in going back to the original text, which in this case is actually by Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his 1913-14 lectures On the Art of Writing. In ‘On Style’, he says

Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament … If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

Slate calls Q ‘lesser known’ but he was a prolific professional author and critic and a massive seller and so, like many such writers, he’s well worth listening to.

For Q, a ‘darling’ is clearly a much narrower category than ‘anything you particularly love’. But the way writers have since picked it up points towards a genuinely useful idea. Sure, ‘ornament’ seems to imply fancy elaboration, but ornaments, however fancy, are sometimes essential: of the essence in that context. Think of the crown that denotes royal authority, or an embroidered robe offered to thank a saint for their aid.

The crucial word, surely, is extraneous: Q is talking about am element in a piece of writing which is not part of the essence of what the piece is for and about: not necessary to how it works. Even then, he acknowledges that the best way to deal with that urge is to indulge it - to let it into the first, ‘for yourself’ draft, if you like - but then to cut it for your reader. Personally, I call that process writing.

But how do you tell what is a darling?

‘Why this? Why Here?’

So your Inner Editor is trucking along through your text, and comes on some element that triggers a twinge of doubt. So it asks your Inner Writer, ‘Why this? Why Here? I’m not sure it serves the storytelling?’:

• If your Inner Writer answers, ‘No, it doesn’t, does it!’, you would cut that bit of writing without a second thought.

• If your Inner Writer answers, ‘Yes, because …’ and the reason is convincing, the twinge melts away and your Inner Editor moves on.

• But if your Inner Writer hedges, ‘No, but yes. It’s there because—’ then even though the IW recognises the doubt, they may well not want the IE to cut it. It does, after all, have a reason for existing.

Much of this kind of dialogue between Inner Editor and Inner Writer may go on at the barely-conscious level: you may well only ‘hear’ the reason you are keeping it, not the editorial unease which triggered the question.

And yet the next time your Inner Editor meets this element - or your beta-reader does - they’ll hear the clunk and ask again, ‘Why this? Why here?’.

‘No, but yes,’ says your Inner Writer again. ‘It’s there because—’

In other words, you know you’ve got a Darling when you keep finding yourself having to re-justify a certain element, and re-persuade yourself that it should stay.

How Do Things Become Darlings?

Why do we keep re-justifying these phrases, facts, descriptions or characters, when the very fact that we do so should be telling us that something’s amiss?

It’s usually because we either particularly enjoy what this thing is doing and don’t want to lose that, or because it cost us a lot to write, which unconsciously we don’t want to ‘waste’ by ditching it.

• You particularly enjoyed writing it, because it was fun wrangling the words to nail an idea or phenomenon which you want to express - which is to say, something you want to have be heard by others.

• You particularly enjoyed writing it, because it’s a style or voice you particularly enjoy reading.

• It mentions or evokes a love of yours: a favourite book, artist, place or band, a phrase, saying, concept or fact(oid), a real-life person you want to bring alive - or skewer!

• It cost you a lot to write, and you don’t want to ‘waste’ what you spent

  • financially - that travel, that course, or that expensive book

  • practically - all that research

  • psychologically - a topic that’s close to the bone for you

  • emotionally - it was difficult and distressing, and perhaps cathartic, to write

  • temporally - it took huge amounts of your precious writing time and energy

• Your delight in it is not about storytelling, but in what it says about you: that you’re the kind of writer who writes like this, or the kind of person who thinks like that. A little enquiry into the parts of you which want to be perceived like that, or are afraid of not being perceived like that, should point towards the reason you don’t want to let go of this thing.

• Someone said it was a good idea to put that element in because

  • it’s in fashion

  • it’s original

  • no one’s doing it

  • it won’t offend anyone you don’t want to offend

  • it will offend someone you want to offend or enjoy offending

  • agents and editors are saying they like this kind of thing

  • it’s what Mantel/Stephen King/Dickens/Bestseller McMillionsface/Litry McPrizewinnerface does

Don’t forget, though, that your darling may instead be a not-doing: you’re not explaining something so as to ‘build intrigue’; you’re not giving this character a parent because your parent will be convinced it’s them; you’re refusing to make the most plausible plot-move, because ‘it feels clunky’.

For example, for years in writing The Mathematics of Love, I resisted having Anna in the 1976 strand find or read the letters that Stephen wrote in the 1819 strand. But for some beta-readers, the many, many connections and echoes of settings, themes, character and psychology that I’d woven in were not enough. They went on expecting a practical and plot connection to emerge, so they spent the whole novel waiting for Anna to read the letters and for her actions to be shaped by doing so. But she didn’t and they weren’t. That was because I couldn’t face doing what I thought of as a clichéd ‘dusty letters in the attic’ manoeuvre. And for me and others of my readers, those connections and echoes were enough, in themselves, so I stuck with that.

How do you tell if a darling is nonetheless earning its keep?

And yet there are always things in our writing which cost us a lot, or read particularly well, or are busy helping our novel to fit into a particular category, which are also fully earning their keep as storytelling. So how do you tell the difference?

I think the best test is whether, as well as the aspect of this possible darling that pleases you, it’s doing something else worth doing, that couldn’t be done better by another means.

This is a subset of my general principle for really good writing, which is that every sentence, every paragraph, every scene, should be doing at least two jobs: should be contributing to the storytelling in at least two ways. As the great photographer Minor White said, ‘One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.’

One of those jobs is probably the denotation: ‘what they are’, the basic meaning that the words transmit. The other job, the else, will probably be doing something like one of these:

• evokes a character’s personality or state of mind

• adds to the atmosphere or fills out the setting

• moves the characters’ (emotional, psychological) journey on a little

• drops a ‘sweet’ of a specific detail in for the reader to pick up, the story-purpose of which may only come clear later

• makes the reader laugh, cry or think, without derailing the story

• clarifies or emphasises the structure

• enriches or counterpoints the moment with connotations, images and themes

• develops or complicates the ideas about a specific topic or theme, which are building through the story

If your possible darling is decently written and doing at least one of those second things - and more would do no harm! - then it may well be that broadly speaking it’s earning its keep. But the fact that your Inner Editor is still bothered by it shows that at the moment it’s not working as well as it needs to. So what do you do?

What do you do about a darling?

First, with your new insight into how it’s become a darling, ask again, ‘Why this? Why here? What does this bring to my storytelling?’

• If the answer is a blindingly clear ‘nothing’, or at least nothing that isn’t also being done elsewhere, then cut it.

• If it’s doing its first job well, but has no second job, glare at it till you work out what it else it could and therefore should be doing, and do that.

• If it’s doing its second job well, while your Inner Editor persists in telling you that its first job feels clunky or too dominant, then try one of these:

  • Shrink it right down, so you still get the second effect but the element as a whole doesn’t take up so much space in the storytelling. The ‘indulge it wholeheartedly’, in Q’s idea, it seems to me, could be a way to find out if any aspect of it is worth saving like this.

  • Ask yourself if the answer to ‘Why this? Why here'?’ is actually, ‘Yes, this, but not here’: these characters do need to have this row, but much later - or earlier - in their relationship.

  • Think up a different scenario/character/situation which will do that second job just as well, but without the bad fit of the current element. I think of this as ‘finding the ram in the thicket’.

  • Think up a different scenario which does a different job which is just as valuable. For example, faced with clear feedback that too many readers spent too much of The Mathematics of Love waiting for Anna to read Stephen’s letters and be changed by them, I had to find a way to reconcile myself to that happening. Fortunately, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to create a whole plot-machinery for her to find the damn dusty trunk, beause the most likely form for Anna to get hold of them was as Xerox photocopies. In a novel which is rooted in photography and time, and how light writes itself on things, that was both less clunky, and far more thematically satisfying.

• Remember that when something isn’t working one solution is to do it more and more wholeheartedly. For example, if a couple of pages of gorgeous writing stick out like a sore thumb because they don’t advance the story, does that in fact mean you should allow yourself to write like that all the time, while teaching yourself to keep the story going all through this richer voice? If a minor character is taking up too much space, should they perhaps not be cut but have a bigger role in the story?

• Decide to leave it in. It’s your book, your call. The darlings that are written out of passionate love (as opposed to the ones written out of a checklist of What Agents Are Looking For This Week) are likely to be some of your most authentic, you-ish writing. Maybe that’s a good enough reason?

What can darlings teach you about (your) writing?

There’s a macho relish to so much about the ‘kill your darlings’ rhetoric - not least Stephen King’s version. And I get it, I really do: the cleansing, salt-scrub pleasures of de-cluttering and spring-cleaning. But so much of the discourse also makes me cross, because its crudity is as likely to provoke furious resistance or defensive despair, as compliance - and neither of those will end in good writing either.

Sure, if the red Darling flag has popped up over something, don’t let me stop you scrubbing that darling away. But if you recognise that some darlings are things written out of your love or desire for your writing to be a certain way, that tells you something fundamental about why you love writing. And understanding more about your writing self is never a bad thing.

And a couple of days ago a post over at the always-interesting ’s Habit of Art substack reminded me of that. Kelcey’s post is about structure, and it’s titled ‘The most powerful, overlooked, difficult element of a story (or a painting)’. It’s a very useful post, but I found myself thinking, Yes, but—.

Yes, across my work with writers of fiction, creative non-fiction, and narrative, academic and scholarly non-fiction, I’ve had plenty of students who found thinking in terms of structure difficult.

But I’ve had just as many students in all those fields whose stories, narratives and arguments arrive naturally and easily as a structure: what’s hard for those writers is getting that structure to play out in the specifics of each line and paragraph.

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There’s a built-in tension between your need for precise information and experience, and your need not to limit yourself to that, but to stay open to seeing things you didn’t know were there, and weren’t looking for.

And as I’ve just said in my new website page of Further Reading for The Bruegel Boy, all that material still needs to get into Rose Tremain’s ‘anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the artist’s mind’, ready for the reimagining which includes ‘some measure of forgetting’.

This is why research for fiction is not at all the same as research for non-fiction, even though your sources may look very similar. We are in the business of evocation and verisimilitude, not representation and analysis. That’s also why, much of the time research is ideally a two-step process: a first, ‘reading-round’, free-search phase that shapes your initial ideas and work on the project, and then a second, revisiting of the same material when you know which bits you want more of - and fresh work on stuff you didn’t know you needed.

Online Sources

Most Wikipedia articles will give you a useful overview and super-useful links and references at the bottom. The detail in some articles can be astonishing, but don’t forget that everyone starts at Wikipedia, so it’s unlikely to help you ‘make the strange familiar and the familiar strange’ that is so crucial to writing a vivid world and its people. If you’re researching a country other than the UK/US, that country’s own Wikipedia will often have a lot more material on its smaller places and native topics: get Google (not Wikipedia) to translate the pages you need to.

Beyond Wikipedia, in my experience most websites that appear to be about your topic regurgitate the same old limited stuff. Having said that, if you’re lucky some glorious enthusiasts will have set up a website: matchlock muskets, the history of the parish church, fourwheelers-versus-hansom cabs, lace-making, ale-versus-beer… Just keep googling, remember that cut-and-paste doesn’t get information into your head the way physical notemaking does, and never leave a site that you got anything from, without bookmarking it.

Books and articles

Libraries are wonderful and librarians are trained to help, while the online catalogue of the British Library and its equivalents should point you in useful directions - and even send you the book via inter-library loan. Google Scholar will find you pulrely respectable, peer-reviewed material; both it and JSTOR are terrific, if you can get access, for bits and scraps from the sort of close-up primary research articles which do give your writing the sting of the new and strange.

If you’re lucky, someone’s written the book you need. More often, we’re triangulating between different books about different things which will only get merged in your novel. But it always pays to be ruthless: perhaps you only need to read the introduction and a single chapter, to get what you need: as Francis Spufford says of On Golden Hill

I deliberately stopped trying to discover more … I wasn’t writing historical biography, and I already knew who I wanted [these two men] to be … I’m not a scholar. I know how ruthlessly willing I am to learn just enough and no more to make the view look convincing.

Making notes is the fundamental way to get the content into your head but it’s easy to end up making notes about everything, which is useless as well as time-consuming. For what it’s worth, if I possibly can I download and print the article, or buy the book.

If your local library or independent bookshop can’t help you to a copy, Abebooks is often cheaper and has more choice than The Online Retailer Who Must Not Be Named for both new and second-hand copies, and even though Abebook is actually owned by ThORWMNBN, booksellers tell me that the fee structure is quite different, and much more to the bookseller’s benefit.

I can then make notes in the margin like this:

The words in capitals I think of as ‘indexing’ and if I don’t own the book I make separate written notes in the same spirit. Don’t used post-it notes on someone else’s book: librarians know that the sticky residue is damaging, and very hard to erase.

But whatever you do, always, always make a note of your source, including the page number, and which library you got it from. It’s maddening to find a note months later, realise it’s crucial to know more about this thing, and have no way of retracing your steps to find that more.

Pictures and art

Now that art history has embraced the social-historical-cultural aspects of creating art, art historians show us what can be found by the free-searching novelist: this new post by is a lovely example. Of course George has specialist knowledge, but any of us can look at a painting or sculpture and think, ‘What does this show me (even if it doesn’t tell me) about the things it represents, the person who made it, the making of it, and the people who might own or view it’.

Of course Wikimedia Commons is a fabulous source, but don’t ignore how different the experience of the real, physical thing is if you can get there: scale, 3D-ness, context, lighting and the sheer physicality of the materials, experienced together, make a direct encounter a completely different thing. So get there if you can.

When at the last minute I scraped together the money and time to whizz to Vienna for a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of Bruegel paintings, I was taken aback by how they are… not exactly small, but definitely not big. I might have computed some of that from the measurements in the more scholarly art books, (though it’s shocking to me how even scholarly books about photography often tell you zero about the physicality of the actual, original, prints.) But without the cheapest flight to Vienna I could find, and an even cheaper hotel, I’d never have felt the intimate connection I did standing before something like Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, and that fed directly into The Bruegel Boy. And then it snowed…

Places

It’s astonishing what you can do these days with Google Image Search, Satellite and Streetview. Travel guides are well worth using for a curated, intelligent overview (rather than TripAdvisor) and if you’re writing historical fiction and can lay hands on, say, a Baedeker of the right date, so much the better.

But if you can get to the place it always helps. Particularly if you won’t be able to the two-step return, it’s really worth thinking beforehand about what you’re hoping to get out of the visit:

• geography: rivers and hills, flora and fauna, the colour of the earth, alleyways and staircases

• atmosphere: scents, sounds, feels, details, symbols, light and shadows,

• specific buildings - the town hall, the castle - that you’ll use undisguised

• general models to base imagined places on: the contour and scale of the landscape (surprisingly hard to tell from Google), suitable homes/shops/factories to adapt for your characters.

• museums and the tourist office for historical info, books and postcards

Then look at your story and plot, what you need and where might give it to you, and make a plan of campaign. Transport, travel times, opening times, car hire arrangements, and anything that you need an appointment to access all come into the plan - but leave yourself enough room to wander around, follow your nose, be led by new ideas for the story, and seize unexpected opportunities.

For a longer trip I’d also suggest keeping some kind of journal, noting down the atmosphere that photographs can’t capture, and catching and pinning down how your thinking and plans for the story are evolving. And consider taking a decent camera rather than just your phone: nice pictures are excellent material for substack, illustrated talks, and promotion online.

Audio-Visual

Mining videos, documentaries and podcasts is much like mining books, except that they’re more annoying to flip to and fro in - but at least podcasts have show notes for their sources.

Making notes really is your friend for these - but don’t forget the Rule of Three: if you’re to get past the level that everyone knows, and the one that some people know, to the third level which will have the sting of the real and new, you will probably have to dig back from what’s on film to its source.

But interviews and oral history recordings can be fantastic for hearing voices and specifics, vintage footage has similar value, and I’ve recently taken to using audiobooks for the rolling-round stage, with the option to buy a physical copy for notemaking if I need to.

People

YouTube has vastly increased our access to information without having to make direct human contact, but you still may find emailing or talking even better. Most people love talking about their specialisms, but they’re still doing you a favour: think out what you want to know so you don’t waste their time, but again be open to the unexpected opening up as you go. Be polite, remember they are giving you a slice of their 4,000 weeks on this earth, take No for an answer, make notes as well as - with their permission - recording the conversation, and send them an invitation to the launch.

But also remember that this person is not the only, absolute authority either: no one person can be (except on their own life, I suppose) - and they may not really get difference between what they personally know, however authoritatively, and what will be plausible for the reader. You are still at liberty to do as you choose with what they tell you, including changing it or ignoring it.

Still, as I said in This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin, in writing the disaster novel about my family,

I knew I would find it incredibly difficult to reject, creatively speaking, what [any] interviewees said about the real people I had taken for my characters, even when what I wanted to do instead was emotionally and creatively valid. I couldn’t – I wouldn’t – give anyone else such power over my empire.

So I didn’t interview anyone. And no, there were many reasons for the disaster but that decision wasn’t one of them. Your book, your rules, and check this post if you’re worried about staying ethical.

Don’t use fiction as a research source

It’s not a good idea to use other people’s fiction - novels, plays, films - as research sources for your fiction. Not only do you risk taking for fact what is actually the author’s invention (that was how Georgette Heyer knew that Barbara Cartland had plagiarised her), you risk plagiarism or breaching the author’s copyright.

Even more likely is that what you write will have that third-hand, standard-issue flatness. If you write a scene in New York’s Central Park based on watching half a dozen movies, readers have seen those movies too, and we’ll smell that your scene is off-the peg. If you want to use things you met in a novel or a film, track them down to a non-fiction source and then you can work honestly and creatively from there.

The only exception to this rule is if you want to use, say, 1920s-written fiction as research material for your 1920s-set historical novel. It can be a gold-mine of information about manners, mores, social codes, clothes and all the rest, so go ahead.

And finally

as I said in When Do You Do Your Research?:

It’s really worth accepting that there is no single, perfect version of a finished story that you must strive towards, which means there’s no single process which can lead to that perfect version.

On another day, with a different mood, train, weather, or copy of the book, you might end up with a slightly different novel. So be it.

Of course, it’s a rare novel which doesn’t need you to find out something - if only what was on the news the year you turned ten - and I’ve dug into the How of doing research here.

But the question of When looms particularly large over any project set in a world that the writer can’t know directly. That’s the very definition of historical fiction, of course, but it’s just as lively for those setting their story behind the scenes in a nuclear reactor or the National Theatre, or on the planet Zog, or in their own home town in the year 2157.

Part of the answer, of course, is ‘When you can’: when the childcare or respite-care stars align; when the tiny local library with its cache of local history material is actually open; when the other job sends you somewhere anyway; when there’s a special offer on the fares.

In everything to do with writing it’s really worth accepting that there is no single, perfect version of a finished story that you must strive towards, which means there’s no single process which can lead to that perfect version. Whether you find that horrifying or liberating is perhaps a matter of temperament, but the skill of the artist is to know when to refuse or fight the obstacles to reaching that imaginary, unattainably perfect version, and when to fold them into the process.

Research we must, however: the photo is of all the books I’ve just pulled back off my shelves to make the slightly belated Further Reading page on my website for The Bruegel Boy - and of course we want it to serve our creative purposes as well and fully as possible.

But although it’s obvious what we gain by researching, what might we lose? Rose Tremain’s quote is key, here; there’s more in that link, but what matters here is this bit:

[In] the novelist's task of reimagining reality[,] reimagining implies some measure of forgetting. The actual or factual has to lose definition, become fluid, before the imagination can begin its task of reconstruction. Data transferred straight from the research area to the book will simply remain data. It will be imaginatively inert. [my italics]

When Should You Do Your Research?

If we categorise the timing of your research into four basic relationships to the first draft, we can look at the advantages and disadvantages of each possibility - and that should help you make the most of the pros, mitigate the cons, and make your peace with all those cloudy, dreamy, ‘other’ versions of your story that might have been, had you done things differently.

• Early ‘roll around’ in the material for your new idea: reading freely, making some notes, visiting sites

  • Pro: you absorb the broader landscape, experience and voices of this world; it’s an early warning if something turns out to be impossible or too difficult; ; it’s a good first dip into what you think you’ll need and a means of mapping the material to go back to later; notes can help things stick in your brain, but be ignored later; there’s plenty of time for the essential ‘forgetting’ to happen before you start drafting

  • Con: the project may change later so the time you spent seems to be wasted; you may not seek and gather specific info you later turn out want but can’t easily go back to1; your Inner Critic may shout that it’s stupid to spend all this time/effort/money when you don’t know what you need

• Research while planning the first draft: getting practical about what’s needed

  • Pro: you won’t plot based on guesses and risk major reworking; you hear the historical voices which can start to compost into the voices of your novel; you stumble on riches you didn’t know to look for; there’s still some time for ‘forgetting’

  • Con: you don’t know what details you need; you can get bogged down or daunted in the sheer volume of material; research is crack cocaine for procrastinators; as you develop the story the research-tail risks starting to wag the story-dog

• Research during the first draft: popping out of the writing room to grab what this scene needs

  • Pro: you can tailor what you research efficiently to what you need at this moment; you can feel reasonably confident in that as the basis for the next several chapters; the voices of letters and diaries can flavour and shape your prose

  • Con: there’s no time for ‘forgetting’; there’s maximum risk of ‘inert data’ hitting the page; the research-tail is even more likely to wag the story-dog; all that vivid material can result in Too Much Stuff on the page.

• Research after the first draft: parking the draft in a drawer and getting back out there

  • Pro: you know what this story is and what you need; your more exact questions about specifics are more likely to dig up fresh and interesting answers; the story-dog is more substantial and sturdy, so the research-tail is less likely to wag it; can work well as a way getting some distance from the draft before you start back in revising, while still feeling you’re working on the novel

  • Con: you may discover you ‘can’t’ do what the story needs; it’s hard to ignore solid facts and authoritative interpretations that you find but which cause your story problems; you may not be able to use riches you stumbled on relatively late in the day; when you do find something thematically or historically delicious, the temptation to distort the story to fit it in may be hard to resist

Fortunately just being aware of the drawbacks of researching at each of the points may well be enough to avoid the worst of them at the time - and to help you spot and edit out the rest later.

And Finally

I’ve posted before in and around the business of research, so these links should also help:

• how ‘write what you know’ is both a ridiculous command, and a gold standard, for writing what you don’t yet know;

• how good research is merely necessary to good writing and never sufficient;

• how what historians write may even be counter-productive and

• how to cope when the facts - or the ‘facts’ - mess with your fiction

• why apparently wasteful process are creatively important

For what it’s worth, I’m a big fan of ‘rolling around’ in the material - not least because it’s such fun - and over the years I’ve learnt that it’s also wise to check the broad structural questions of time and geography early in planning, because they can wreck your plot like few other things. And, personally, I never write worse prose than when I have a history book at my elbow, so I tend try to avoid researching during a first draft, and simply generate a big list of things to find out once it exists and I know what this story needs.

But that’s just me: other writers find that feeling their factual feet are on solid ground at every step is the only way to hold on to their confidence in their storytelling.

As so often, what matters is that each of us understands the drawbacks our chosen processes might have - and plans how we will overcome them.

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THE ANATOMY OF GHOSTS by Andrew Taylor

What is it?

It’s the late eighteenth century, and bookseller John Holdsworth has fallen on sad, hard times, with bankrupcty, the death of his child and the suicide of his wife, both by drowning. To help the crazed son of a possible patron he must find the truth of the ghost of a drowned woman which has been sighted in Jerusalem College, Cambridge.

But this is the time when the Enlightenment has reached some minds but not many institutions: the Master is dying, the rich students are debauched and ignorant, poor students are servants to the point of accepting money to write essays, debts will land you in prison and sex is a commodity which can kill. (Did I mention that there’s a satirical streak too?)

Why I enjoyed it:

Here is the enclosed world of the classical detective story: its hierarchies and tensions, the limited circle of suspects, the reasons for innocent people to lie, the stranger in town – or in this case, in College. So in one sense it’s a classically-built ‘varsity crime novel: if you know your Sayers, Morse, Imogen Quy, or C P Snow, then it’s fun watching the same conflicts and dynamics, snobberies, self-deceptions and fears refracted and reflected in a gilded, filthy, time-spotted roccoco looking-glass.

And yet that’s only a small part of it; while never letting the tension slacken, and providing twists galore not just in events but in characters, Taylor also meditates on loss, grief and love, and weaves a delicate and moving tapestry of John’s slow, hesitant, un-looked-for growth into some kind of hopefulness.

Three reasons for a writer to read it:

1. It’s set in a very specific time, in one sense, between the American Revolution and the fall of the Bastille: the Englightenment turning-point in all sorts of ideas about how minds work, how they fall ill and how they mend, and what, if anything, the supernatural consists of. And yet I never felt that the project was to demonstrate these, or explain things, or do anything that a history book would be doing. They come along, wholly naturally, as part of how people are, and why things happen … which is much harder to do than you’d think. Maybe it helps that Taylor started as a crime writer, not an historical writer.

2. The prose is perfectly pitched. While there’s scarcely a sentence – period details aside – which would seem out of place in a contemporary-set novel, whether it’s the hallucinations of bereavement or a brutal initiation ceremony, the pace and shape of them are infused with their setting: again they’re the natural embodiment in this writer’s voice of a fully-imagined and inhabited world.

3. It never does any harm to read books that have won prizes, and The Anatomy of Ghosts won the CWA Diamond Dagger for 2009. Plus, Andrew Taylor is hugely experienced, has been very highly regarded since his debut, Caroline Miniscule, knows exactly what he’s doing, is currently in the bestsellers’ lists with A Schooling in Murder, and has won more Daggers than most of us have steak knives. He’s a writer to learn from, as well as to enjoy.