Production takes it out of you

The last few days have been crammed with activity - no time for blogging - around the 24:7 production of The Processing Room. I've been working on the image, which meant a photoshoot, and then my laboured and untutored efforts on Photoshop, and finally an SOS email to artist Ben White, who designed my website, and who now shamed me by flashing up double-quick various colour versions for me to choose from. In the end we chose ethereal blue - I'm calling the play 'an unearthly comedy' - in spite of my life-long belief that only red or yellow leaflets get picked up. (When we come to design the leaflet, we'll probably add some touches of red.)

And yesterday Mary-Ann Coburn, who is taking one of the parts, came over, and we studied the huge pile of actors' CVs I've been sent, and negotiated by email with interested directors. After which we were ravenous and stuffed ourselves with salad and smoked mackerel and cheese and cake!

Call this a writing career?

Proof copy

A lovely parcel through the post - a proof copy of Adele Geras's new novel, A Hidden Life, to be published in August.

Proofs are SO exciting! Limited in number, the cover not yet finalized, the text not yet finally corrected - they come with such an exciting sense of the process of publishing, and of privilege at being included!

The author of numerous acclaimed children's books, Adele has already published three adult novels - luscious sagas in which characters are made to confront the secrets of the past. A Hidden Life, her fourth, looks to be no exception: the story of a family gathered to discover explosive secrets at a funeral.

And there's the proof copy, sitting enticingly beside my bed, waiting for me to begin!

Cover blank

No cover for my short-story collection yet, though Jen at Salt, and I and John, and (as I said in my last post) our reading group, are all banging our heads for one. I used to do a lot of the illustrative photography for our short-story mag Metropolitan (under my other name Helen Johnson) and always had to make quick artistic decisions, so I was fairly confident when Jen asked me at the start if I had any ideas for the cover. The title is a spin on a phrase running through one story: Balancing on the Edge of the World, and the image which came to me was an androgynous figure poised on a curved surface, maybe a hill. However, Jen says that when they tried it out it looked like the cover for a management/spiritual/religious type textbook!!

'Ditch the figure' said Trevor in the reading group, and the general consensus there was that I should go for something abstract. I know that some people, writers in particular, prefer abstract covers because they don't artificially tie books down, but I have a feeling that browsers want, and are more attracted by, some concrete idea of the human situations behind that cover. And it's so crucial to get it right: although Doug in our reading group insists that he is immune to book covers, knowing that they can mislead (and pithily says that he's a title man himself), I think he's pretty unusual...

Oh well, back to the drawing board...

Reading group: A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

Everyone round to ours on Wednesday for the reading group to discuss A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami (translated from the Japanese).

None of us had read Murakami before, and during the week beforehand John and I had bumped into Doug and Ann separately, and each had told us that they were having difficulty getting going with the book. They would read a few pages, fail to get gripped and put it down, and then when they picked it up again find they couldn't remember it and had to start all over again. John and I told them that we were having precisely the same experience.

Ann said, 'I don't know where it's going', and I said, 'I don't know where it's coming from.' We felt we couldn't grasp the tenor of the opening chapters in which an unnamed thirty-year-old narrator attends the funeral of an ex-girlfriend and reminisces about their meeting and relationship before going back to his flat to find his ex-wife briefly returned to collect her things. While the stunning prose made all of this seem significant, there was also a sense of structural inconsequentiality about it, and indeed the story seems only to get going the next morning after the ex-wife has left and the vacationing narrator is called to his office to discover that he has been summoned by a mysterious stranger to engage on a 'wild sheep chase'.

Before this point, however, a surreal and absurdist element had entered the narration, which should have warned us that the conventional expectations with which we were reading this book were inappropriate: the narrator, it turns out, has a new girlfriend with ears so exquisite (and which during one conversation she sits carefully cleaning) that when they are on view and 'unblocked' in terms of channelling their power, they promote super-sensational sex. She is also possessed of a special sixth sense, which means she guesses that the phone call will come summoning the narrator, and knows it will be all about a sheep.

Hans, who had chosen the book, said he had found it very interesting but strange. He had indeed become involved at this point, and wanted to know what was going to happen, but the more that was revealed to him the less he could take it, a tale about a sheep which may or may not exist, with the power to possess a human and thereby dominate the world.

However, Doug and I had experienced an opposite effect. Doug said that once he understood he needed to accept the book as absurdist, he began to really enjoy its off-the-wall turns, its humour and, like me, its memorable evocation of the spirit of situations and things, landscape and the weather. By the end of our journey with this chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking narrator prone to bouts of philosophising which end with banalities ( 'I came to the realisation ... that I am not a whale') or are abandoned for a drink or a fag, whose Sherlock-Holmes-type reliance on clues turns out to be beside the point, we had come to understand the reason for the strangely inconsequential yet seemingly significant beginning.

The book is indeed about inconsequentiality, and the strange paradox that the seemingly inconsequential things, or the episodes which on the rational level are no longer relevant, are nevertheless evocative and important on the level of emotional experience, while the importance of those things which seem significant in the grand, Western-hero quest tradition, is unstable. Thus the girlfriend with the ears, who seemed so central to the endeavour, turns out to be not so important to the plot after all. Evidence too the absurd way, which had made everyone laugh, that the narrator gets the sinister figure who sends him on his quest to look after his ailing, farting cat while he is gone. The narrator has never named this cat, and during his narration never names any of the other characters: as Clare said, names fix things artificially and thus deny the truth that importance is relative, and reality fluid.

Several people, even Doug, thought that the ending, which I won't give away, was disappointing, but to me it endorsed this view of the book and was therefore fitting.

Then people got interested in the different covers of the book in the different editions we had and agreed that the one above (the latest Vintage paperback) was best. A general conversation started up about covers, and I asked everyone to help me think about ideas I might suggest for the cover of my forthcoming book, which isn't decided on yet.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

Swamped

And now my inbox is swamped with the emailed CVs of actresses who didn't get to see me on Monday night!

Overwhelmed

Last night was the 24:7 Theatre Festival gathering, when interested writers, directors and actors get the chance to make contact to work together on this years' projects. Well, yeah, the kind of contact sardines get in a tin... I have never seen such a vast crowd! We had to wait in a snaking queue to be processed at the door and given our designation tags (actor, writer, director etc), but long before I got to the door the tags had run out. And once inside, a seething mass! Mostly actors, of course, but also mostly young, and there are only two young parts in my play, and very few old enough for the other part I have to fill. And, just my luck, very few directors who were not already committed to plays... Or at least, that's how it seemed: maybe there were scores squashed away in the crowds and impossible to see... Oh and, then organiser Dave Slack suggested we writers get up one at at time on this huge very high podium and address that packed crowd and say what parts we had to fill... Well, I've addressed plenty of audiences, but there was nothing quite like it before: quite stomach-crunching, I'm telling you. And then scores of pretty, intent and articulate young actresses squirmed their way between the bodies to hand me their CVs, and I have such a pile of them I honestly don't know where to start...

Chrissie Gittins and Judy Kendall at Manchester Central Library

The lunchtime readings at Central Library have become a significant feature on the Manchester Literature landscape, and today there was a great reading from poet Judy Kendall and another new Salt short-story writer, Chrissie Gittins. Judy read beautifully from her aptly-named first collection The Drier the Brighter (Cinnamon Press), poems made sparely resonant by her own experience of living in Japan, and as delicately evocative as those of Edward Thomas whose letters she has also edited. Chrissie read from her fabulous debut story collection, Family Connections, and one of her wry stories prompted a spontaneous interjection by female audience members of a certain age on the ways to deal with broken stocking suspenders. Apparently at her Whitechapel launch Chrissie's writing was said to be a combination of Alan Bennett and Hyacinth Bucket. More like Victoria Wood meets Alice Munro, I'd say.

Judy Kendall signing copies of The Drier the Brighter


Chrissie Gittins reading from Family Connections

Getting lucky

I am so thrilled! Last night, as I was slumped on the sofa and nodding off (the effects of two glasses of wine in the pub earlier), the phone rang and I jumped wide awake: actor Mary-Ann Coburn (left), to whom I sent a copy of The Processing Room a few days ago, has read it and would like to take part! Well, wow: Mary-Ann is a fantastic and versatile actress! Just remains to decide which part she should play, as there are three she could do! Oh, and also to find three more actors, a director and a stage manager... And of course I have to keep my fingers crossed that someone else taking part in 24:7 doesn't come along and make Mary-Ann a better offer, with, say, a juicier part...

Those gruelling auditions

Well, in my last post I was saying what unalloyed fun it was to have a play in the 24:7 Theatre Festival, but today one particular angst kicks in.

Auditions. I am going to have to audition for a cast once again. Agonising for actors, and agonising for playwrights if they understand what the actors are going through.

To initiate the process, Dave and Amanda have asked us playwrights (or exec producers as we're grandly called) for word-pictures of our characters, so that they can circulate them at a gathering of people, including actors, who would like to be involved. Or the Cattle Market, as we hopeful actors muttered last year (last year I didn't enter a play, so tried my chances as an actor), waiting in queues to sell ourselves to playwrights and flap our CVs in their faces. This idea of circulating character breakdowns is a good one: it will save people my last year's experience, in which more than once I waited for up to half an hour to speak to a playwright only to be told there were no women in the play or that all the parts had been cast. Towards the end of the evening, a weary-looking playwright saw me coming, said he badly needed a pee and disappeared never to be seen again. Not good for one's ego, unless one is determinedly taking it all with a pinch of salt.

Well, lucky for me that I could (and not mind that I didn't get a part), since I'm not a trained actor with a professional CV, and acting is not my main thing, but it must have been harder for any of my fellow self-touts (in the main, new drama graduates) who had not yet developed the necessary thick skin. Of course, you didn't catch the veteran Manchester actors going through the process. 'I can't be bothered with it,' Denise Hope told me with distaste and pity when I staggered back to the drinks, but then of course she didn't need to: actors like Denise, Sue Jaynes and Mary-Ann Coburn have playwrights begging them to be in their plays or writing parts specifically for them (and, in the event, Denise was brilliant in Colin Carr's comedy, Divas and Double Glazing).

The actual auditions are difficult things. There's always an air of tension and formality which is at odds with the informality which usually rules in the sphere of drama. It always amazes me, and I can hardly ever believe it, when I read that famous actors have auditioned for parts in films or high-profile stage plays. Some pretty well-known actors did come to audition for my radio comedy drama series, The Circle (and how brilliantly they read before the director decided against them!), though the even more famous ones who took the parts in the end were simply offered them by the director. As a writer I've sat in on a few auditions, and can never feel good about it, knowing the feeling of exposure in facing that critical lineup of writer, director and/or producer, judging you not simply for your skill but for things out of your control and indeed unknown to you: the fit of your face to their concept of the character, your build, your quality of voice, or the matter of simply how you'd combine with the other actors up for other parts... And the worst thing is having to break it to the actors you haven't chosen, which once, as a 24:7 playwright, it was my duty to do.

One time I attended a whole-day audition for a theatre showcase in which a play of mine was featured. It was a kind of workshop in which all of the actors' skills were being extensively tested; they were put through their paces as a (huge) group, given trust games and exercises, while we writers and our designated directors sat around and watched. At the time I was in awe, and thought it pretty cutting-edge and much better than the formal individual 'interview' style, but a few years on I met one of the actors involved, and he told me how humiliated and used (and exhausted) all of the actors had felt, and from the way he spoke he was still smarting.

Maybe the independent film world is simply different, but I feel I should count my luck that I had such an easy time when I went for my first screen test last summer (for a small community film). I walked in, was greeted by a jolly crew (not one of them over 30), matily handed a cup of tea while I scanned the script and then shown through to the camera to read with another who turned out to be a member of the company, while the others settled down comfortably to watch. They put me at my ease and I didn't feel a twinge of nerves. (And to cap it all, they offered me the part!)

So now I've got to bite the bullet and organize auditions again. And here's my first call: the meeting for people who would like to be involved in 24:7 is to be held at Pure (in the Printworks, Manchester) on Monday 30th April from 7pm on. Anyone who would like to be involved - as an actor, director, stage manager or in any other capacity - is welcome. Personally, I'm looking for all of these. (No payment, I'm afraid, just a share of box-office profit.)

24:7 Theatre Festival 2007

News this morning that the play I wrote in January, The Processing Room, has been accepted for this year's Manchester 24:7 Theatre Festival.

Now this is no doubt not very professional or grown-up but I am very excited! 24:7 is a really exciting project to be involved with. Begun in 2004 by enterprising actors David Slack and Amanda Hennessy, it's gone from strength to strength and in the last year or so has become a significant event in the Manchester Arts calender, with the best plays going on to a run at the Bolton Octagon and participants winning prestigious Manchester Evening News Awards. Writer-participants in 24:7 act as executive producers of their plays and are responsible for getting together a production company - it's hard work, but how I love it: the cameraderie and collaboration after all that isolation at one's desk, and the chance to do those things like designing flyers and generally flexing one's publicity muscles, and contributing to the production itself. (Not to mention of course the fact that from the age of eight I've been in love with the theatre...)

I've been involved with 24:7 as a playwright twice before, the very first year with O'Leary's Daughters and the second year with a satirical monologue Drinks with Natalie which was adapted from one of my radio plays, and which I performed myself. Like O'Leary, The Processing Room is a play about identity, but like Natalie it's a comedy: three women, separately lost in a hospital, end up in a strange, indeed unearthly room and receive shocking news about themselves...

Proof positive

My page proofs came through for my collection of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World, and for the first time ever I didn't use the British Standards Institution proof correction marks.


It felt like a kind of loss. I'll never forget the first time I ever used them, on the proofs of an early short story, using the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook: that exciting sense of learning a new code attached to an extra expertise, that of the printer, and of communicating directly with him/her.

Not so long ago, though, a young relative of mine was asked to edit a journal, and I offered to buy him a book containing the BSI marks. He looked at me with pity. He said, 'Oh we don't use those. We mark everything up on Word.'

Well, of course, I knew that the BSI marks had been dropping out of use. When I edited the short-story magazine Metropolitan, by which time the job of typesetting had moved away from the printer to the desktop publisher, very few of the authors used the old marks on their proofs, they simply wrote in their corrections in whatever way they saw fit.

And when my proofs for Balancing came through I thought: well, why don't I use the software markup too? And I did, and was thus able to send them by email, as well. Jen at Salt is happy. It just remains to be seen whether the typesetter is too...

Reading group: Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn

Reading group last night, and to Hans's for the first time, where his huge window gave a view of everyone looking tentative as they came down the road, scanning the houses for the number.

Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn was my choice, Booker short-listed and the recipient of rave reviews for its scintillating prose which I had pounced on when I scanned the first page in the bookshop. The novel begins with the perspective of five-year-old Robert, holidaying with his parents and his newly-born brother Thomas in the Provencal family house which his grandmother Eleanor has signed over to a New Age cult. As Robert's father Patrick agonises, or with savage wit tries not to agonise, over this disinheritance which symbolises the poor mothering he has always suffered from Eleanor, the child Robert observes the symbiotic attachment between his own mother Mary and his baby brother, and through this 'remembers' and grieves his own once-symbiotic attachment to her, and the traumatic separation of birth.

I said that I found this beginning absolutely brilliant, perhaps the most stunning psychological fiction I had read. Unfortunately, however, I did find that the rest of the novel failed to fulfil this promise. This strikingly innovative narratorial approach is lost as the novel moves into the adult Patrick's perspective (and later into Mary's). The prose never fails to be both excoriating and limpid, the searing observations and biting wit keep coming, and I never stopped relishing them. On this level I had only one real criticism which was that although I could take five-year-old Robert's verbal and intellectual precociousness, I found it unrealistic in Thomas at two (and everyone nodded). I could see that adult Patrick was potentially annoying in his self-absorption, but his wit prevented me from being annoyed with him, which I felt was a great authorial achievement. Finally, however, the novel somehow felt to me strangely empty. There's no real story, but I didn't think this was the problem (nothing much happens, except that the old lady deteriorates over the four August holidays examined in the book and the Provencal house moves into the hands of the cult, and the books consists mainly of people sitting talking or thinking about the situation). The real problem, I felt, was that the novel had no subtext: there are no connections to be made and no meanings to be had other than those spelled out by the characters themselves, and the novel thus ultimately lacks resonance, leaving the reader outside the loop in a very subtle but fundamental way. (Although later Hans's wife Jan said she much prefers it when things are spelled out.)

Sarah said that she more or less agreed: she liked the descriptions and, like me, the beginning. There had been a strange atmosphere in the room as I had been speaking, and now there was a silence. Then Hans broke it by saying: 'I thought it was terrible.' He said he hated the beginning, he didn't believe a word of it: how on earth could a five-year-old mimic the Nanny with a page-long satirical replication of her speech - for god's sake, you'd admire a twenty-year-old for being able to do that! And what about the Nanny: she falls over carrying the baby and breaks his fall and the others are simply angry with her and walk off 'leaving her still talking on the ground!' These were just horrible people!

At which point Trevor, renowned in our group for liking most books, but who had been looking strangest of all, now jumped in. He said he just HATED this book! He said he couldn't stand the people. He said, what is this upper-class man doing whinging about his inheritance - he's a barrister for god's sake, and he (Trevor) had worked for enough barristers to know they were rolling in it!

He was very worked up. Nothing any of us could say could change his mind - that the loss of the house is a symbol of Eleanor's unconcern with which Patrick has been battling emotionally all his life (as Patrick indeed spells out in the way I find unsatisfying): Trevor thought he should simply get a grip. He said he couldn't stand the precocious children, or the way Patrick and Mary wanted in this way to make them better than anybody else's children, and look what a bad mother Mary was, wrapped up in Thomas to that extent and spoiling him. But, we said, isn't it (once again) spelled out that this is a tragic pattern: by consciously trying to avoid for their children their own bad mothering, Mary and Patrick are, ironically, repeating the patterns, Mary by overcompensation with Thomas, Patrick by hot-housing Robert intellectually and thus denying him his true childhood.

Trevor would have none of it, and Jenny joined in with her own objections: if Patrick was so resentful of his mother why did he keep going along with her wishes, executing the handing over of the house etc, - and what was wrong with her, too, the way she let herself rot away more or less wilfully? Why didn't they just get her sectioned? Clare and I said, but the point is that people get locked into these emotional patterns in which rationality has no play, as exemplified by the almost final words of the novel shouted with tragic triumph by the infant Thomas: 'Do nothing!'

All this time Doug had been quiet, and John who knew that Doug had liked the book unreservedly asked him to say why. He said that he just LOVED it - its observations, its wit, which had made him laugh out loud, and he had no problem whatever with the seemingly unrealistic precociousness of the children, as he hadn't read it as naturalistic. To strong agreement from John, he said that any novel which begins with a description of birth from the baby's point of view has to be taken on a non-realistic level, and once you do this the whole novel novel takes off and you lose all those rational objections.

However, Trevor went on chunnering, and when it emerged that St Aubyn's series of novels about this family was autobiographical, he cried in triumph: 'I knew it! That author is just having a self-centred moan!' As we walked down the road afterwards he continued his theme. We got to the corner where we had to part. 'Well, I do know the house is only a symbol of his mother not loving him,' he said, conciliatory. 'But then when you think of all the problems in the world today: people homeless, refugees wearing rags. I still hate that bloody book!'

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

Salt authors Neil Campbell and David Gaffney

Salt Publishing have just launched their new and innovative short story list, in which I'm thrilled to be included, and on Friday lunchtime at Manchester Central Library two of my fellow contributors, David Gaffney and Neil Campbell, gave a great reading from their debut collections. Lunchtime it may have been, but the room was packed, latecomers standing, to hear their two very contrasting styles. Firstly, in suitable deadpan mode Neil read from Broken Doll, ironic and moving stories of urban loss and confinement, and then David bounced on to make us all laugh with the short-short stories in which he specialises, collected in Sawn-Off Tales.

You can see from the pics below how appreciative the audience was, and how keen to snap up those striking Salt editions. (Neil is on the left and David on the right.)

If image is everything....

Image is all for writers now, apparently, so what the heck are these pics doing popping up when I do as Debi Alper has just done and type my name into Google Images?

MMU reading: Linda Chase, Jackie Roy and Jeffrey Wainwright

A fair-sized crowd on Thursday for the final event in the MMU Writing School series of readings, in which three of the school's own lecturers presented their work. Poet Linda Chase gave one of her sparky performances with which Manchester audiences have become familiar, novelist Jackie Roy read from her witty and thought-provoking novel The Fat Lady Sings, and finally poet Jeffrey Wainwright stated that although he had always up till now avoided writing autobiographical poetry, he had lately surprised himself by writing it, and proceeded to read these new poems, surprising the audience in turn and indeed moving us.

There was a celebratory atmosphere (and not just because there was wine): there was a justified feeling that this series had been a success, and that the Writing School is flourishing. During the break someone reminded me that there had been a parallel series of readings at the other university. I had still not seen them advertised anywhere, and had therefore forgotten about them, and it was perhaps not surprising then that, as she said, they weren't very well attended.

And then over to Kro2 bar with Mark from our reading group (who was also there and is an MMU student) and others. All I can say is that it's a very good job I was not on any writing deadline next day!

Reading at MMU: Alice Oswald

Omigod, last night I committed what I consider to be one of the worst literary sins: I walked in late - ALMOST HALF AN HOUR LATE! - to a poetry reading. So far I have been only to the Thursday readings at MMU, which always begin at 6.30, and I had not really registered that the Tuesday readings were slightly different not only in that, although the public is invited, they are part of the MA course, but in that they begin half an hour earlier.

Think of the poor writer - last night poet Alice Oswald. Any writer worth their salt takes an effort with their performance and builds an atmosphere. By the end of half an hour the atmosphere should be spellbinding, which it clearly was. And guess what, the door to the side of her comes open, the atmosphere cracks, all heads turn to the people in the doorway, and they become the flippin stars of the show instead! And they are so embarrassed they apologise, and thus take up even more attention, and the poet has to excuse them graciously and ask them to sit down - she is forced to include them in her own show! Oh, cringe. And then they sit, and they can't take off their leather jackets because the squeaky noise of doing so would continue to draw attention, so for the rest of the reading, every single time they shift their leather jackets squeak anyway.

When Simon Armitage read recently he dealt with such a situation with aplomb. Reading from his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he had just got to the point where the giant Knight enters, when a rather large man appeared in the same doorway, and Armitage responded by acknowledging him ironically, brilliantly and wittily incorporating the incident into his reading. But you're not always so lucky with the circumstances. Armitage was reading from what he acknowledged as a product of an oral tradition, and a shared folk tale, whereas Alice Oswald's poetry (although also drawing from folk traditions) is more internal. How much worse it would have been therefore if John and I had not entered fortuitously between poems, but slap-bang in the middle of one...

We still managed to hear a good chunk of her reading, however, including the final part of her magnificent book-length poem, Dart, and sections of a new long poem, a 'biography of the moon'.
Oswald was open and thoughtful in the Q & A afterwards, and I must say there were some pretty intelligent questions from the MA audience, focusing on Oswald's interest in the 'personhood' of things and in the fluid nature of people and the natural world.

Thursday is the final reading of the series, with poets Jackie Roy, Linda Chase and Jeffrey Wainwright - and this one's at 6.30!

The Hat Check Boy launch

Waterstones last night for the Commonword launch of Mike Duff's second novel, The Hat Check Boy, and a very jolly night it was too. Mike's first novel, the pacy vernacular tale of a contemporary yet Dickensian 'hero' making his roguish way through Manchester, sold out and was greeted with acclaim by newspapers and academics alike. Last night a huge crowd from Mike's home town of Moston gathered to hear an extract from his equally lively second book, and the questions (mostly rhetorical) and tongue-in-cheek comments began almost before he had finished reading:

Man in audience: When are you publishing a third book?
Mike: When are you finishing my bathroom?
Man on front row rather worse for drink: Mike, do you still love me?
Mike: Yes, but not in that way.
(Mike, tipsy man and audience fall about laughing)

Those of us who had undertaken to take the photos were just crap: the camera of ex-Commonword publisher Cathy Bolton ran out of battery, and the flash on mine stopped working, and all it produced was this blurred drunken image:

MMU reading: Livi Michael

Another MMU reading last night, this time from prize-winning novelist and children's writer Livi Michael. Livi is now teaching in the Writing School there, and this was her introduction reading. Appropriate then that she talked about her whole career as a writer, first of adult novels (including Under a Thin Moon and All the Dark Air), then books for younger children, and most recently teenage fiction (The Whispering Road and The Angel Stone). Disarmingly informal and amusing, she told us about the hows and whys of this progression and her various personal influences, and the different experiences of publishing 'literary fiction' and more commercially-directed children's fiction.

I have long been an admirer of Livi's work (and am pleased to say we published one of her stories in Metropolitan). She makes ordinary lives extraordinary, and the writing is spare and direct yet tense with beautifully controlled undercurrents. I was amazed and admiring to find that her children's books retain this tone - a rare feat in a genre where patronisation is all too common.

Next Thursday (15th) novelist Martyn Bedford reads, and the following week finishes off this year's readings with poet Alice Oswald (20th) and on the 22nd a triple bill of Jackie Roy, Linda Chase and Jeffrey Wainwright.

Letting go

A Guardian profile of playwright Martin Crimp continues the theme of ownership of one's work once it has gone out into the public domain:

...this is the other great paradox of his life. No matter how much he obsesses over every word, ultimately his work must be handed over to a production team. No wonder he has come to think of his plays as a brood of children. A play, he says, "contains the genetic material of the writer, but that doesn't mean you are entitled to control it. The plays depart - they go out and find their own way. You might find they do very strange things, but you have to learn to let go".

Reading group: Doctor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury

Reading group again and Jenny's choice: Doctor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury, the story of the search by young journalist Francis Jay for a famous but elusive 'Mittel European' philosopher, firstly for a proposed TV programme and later to satisfy his own fascination.

Jenny said she had chosen this novel, set in the late eighties-early nineties, because she taught in a university at that time and witnessed for herself the conference bonanzas described in the book, and the worship of starry academics - plus the fact that she had also taught in Hungary for some of that time. She found the book very true in its merciless satire of these matters as well of British television and Thatcherite Britain and the East Europeans' emulation of the last. She had therefore enjoyed the read, but found that in spite of all the chasing about there wasn't much of a story since at the end we never actually find out the truth about Doctor Criminale. I said that, while the book makes a great deal of fun of Postmodernism, isn't that a postmodern joke of the book? And that the other joke is that while Postmodernism is considered a flowering of Western intellectual thought, it is the Eastern Europeans, supposedly innocent of it intellectually, who are its true practitioners in that through political necessity their politics and indeed identity are fluid in a way the Western characters don't understand.

At this point we had a discussion about what Postmodernism was, and whether or not you could define it and the notion that if you could it wasn't Postmodernism anyway, after which nearly everything that was said was followed by a joke about Postmodernism. Everyone (apart from John who couldn't read beyond page 50) agreed that the book was brilliantly written - Bradbury's choice of diction on every occasion apt and urbanely sly - and for much of the time extremely funny and always clever. However, everyone also agreed that it was basically a one-trick book, and that it could have been much shorter, and that the characters never amounted to much more than caricatures, which though some pointed out was a postmodernist point, left the book soulless.

I also said, to the agreement of others, that I found the tone uneven, with situations presented as hilarious larks only to turn dark in the light of later events in a way which made the earlier tone, in retrospect, inappropriate - after which, the book would tip into farce again.

Hans said: so what do we think, then, that Bradbury was for or against Postmodernism? and Jenny said, 'Above it all', at which Trevor (I think) said that he thought that was disgusting, for an author to be above it all. I said that satires are always to some extent above it all, but I did agree that they don't necessarily have to lack soul. Clare said, Well, actually, Malcolm Bradbury was a show-off with all that history and theory, and everyone nodded.

And having thus despatched a giant of modern literature, we broke into several conversations, about every other topic under the sun, which seems to be our (somewhat postmodern?) habit of late, and Jenny, Clare and I discussed the girls' weekend away in Paris we have planned.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

Who is the judge?

In my last post I described the experience of publishing The Birth Machine with changes imposed by the publisher which ran strongly counter to my authorial/aesthetic intentions, and the way I then felt about the published work. In today's Guardian, Mark Ravenhill discusses similar issues, focusing this time on a writer's own 'mistakes' which he or she sees only after a work has gone out into the public domain. I touched on the fact that academics, in writing about the first edition of The Birth Machine, had written about a work which in fact I did not want to own, and Ravenhill develops an implication of this:

Whether a reader likes the play or not, it will look to them like an authoritative stream of text, a definitive statement. What I see is great black holes of missed opportunities. This is not false modesty. This is quite honestly what it feels like to open a book with my name on the cover. I'm amazed that academics haven't grasped this. Whenever an academic talks to me about my work, there's still an assumption that here is a definitive, confident text that is at my bidding.

Ravenhill's statement that writers can always ever after see improvements they could have made to their work is very true. He argues, however, that writers should never let this lead them to suppress their work (as Deep Purple have, with Live at the Birmingham NEC 1993):

Artists aren't always the best judges as to which of their works should make it into the public domain. If his family had followed his instructions, all of Kafka's manuscripts would have been burnt and we would have lost some of the 20th century's most important literature.

Whose novel is it?

Notwithstanding The Death of the Author, first comes Zadie Smith arguing that a work of literature is above all the expression of an author's personality, and now here's Milan Kundera advising that an author's work is his own property to destroy, suppress or alter as he pleases, in a new book due from Fabers and extracted in today's Guardian Review.

Maybe I should have had Milan Kundera with me when my novel The Birth Machine was first published.

Like much of my work, The Birth Machine is about knowledge and power, about the different kinds of knowledge, empirical and intuitive, the knowledge of science and the knowledge of myths and dreams, and the question of where, between them all, the truth, and the power, lie. Well, this is what it's about as far as I'm concerned. It's also, for me, a novel about viewpoint, about objectivity and subjectivity, and in this, to me, the structure is all-important: I began with an objective, scientific (medical) viewpoint and slowly circled inwards to the subjective viewpoint of the 'object' patient, and through into memory and even further into dream.

But, after we'd done the deal, after the publisher had said how much she absolutely loved my novel, she told me: 'We really need you to change the beginning. We need to begin with the viewpoint of the woman patient in order to appeal to our market, ie women, and allow them to identify.'

Well, this was a feminist publisher, and I wasn't so naive that I hadn't realised that she might see my book more narrowly in terms of male power and the condition of women (or indeed that the context of a feminist publishing house might push it towards this narrower interpretation), but I was pretty shocked by this indication that the book would only be marketed to women, and deeply shocked that my structural stratagems must be discarded and with them any chance of my thematic intentions being realised. (And they must: the publisher did not feel she could go ahead unless I made the change.)

Well, I made the change. I was a new, scared writer after all, and my agent had already tried to sell the book to mainstream publishers, but the very thing which had attracted The Women's Press, the central situation of a high-tech birth, had put those other publishers off, and, insecure as I was, I didn't think anyone else would publish it. Apart from which, The Women's Press had already threatened not to go ahead with the book as I'd turned out in real life to be Not a Good Feminist in the eyes of their 'market' (which was thus diminishing before my eyes to 'Angry Feminists in the Know'). I was already on a last warning, and to get this book published, a satire about a woman making the mistake of being a Good Girl according to others' rules, I had to be a good girl according my feminist publishers' rules. And the novel was made more 'accessible', 'identifiable-with' - in post-structuralist terms less writerly and more readerly - and the political/aesthetic challenge I had intended was dissipated.

Aesthetically I felt ruined, and in some ways I didn't even want to own the novel as it was published. For as Kundera says in his new book: the beauty of a novel is inseparable from its architecture; I say "beauty" because the composition is not merely a technical skill; it carries within it an author's originality of style. Whenever I thought about 'The Birth Machine' it was the original version I thought about, and whenever I read from the book to audiences, I always read the original first chapter which had been relegated to later in the published version. So when the book went out of print and the rights reverted to me, I published a revised edition, subtitled 'The Author's Cut', with the original structure reinstated.

But by then, to many people, including academics who had written about it, 'The Birth Machine' was indeed the first published version - and many had written to me to tell me how much it had meant to them. What did this mean? In the Author's Note to the revised edition I say this:

Of course in the end it's not for me, as the writer, to say which version is better, or whether either version fulfils completely the authorial/editorial intention behind its creation, and whether indeed it matters if it doesn't - all this has to be up to readers.

But I think I was still running scared. After all, I had grabbed the first chance to reinstate the original version. And what do I think now? Well, that 'The Author's Cut' is the real version.

Being the Queen

Yesterday in the Guardian Kira Cochrane rued the fact that, since playing The Queen in the film of that name, Helen Mirren has spoilt her previous anti-monarchist credentials by paying schmaltzy obeisance to her Majesty in her award acceptance speeches.

Well, it is a bit much, I agree, but the clue to this odd behaviour is in the final quote Cochrane (sardonically) offers from Mirren: 'Having played an essence of the Queen I've lost that chip on my shoulder.' The point is that as an actor you simply can't play any character - however suspect - without identifying with them. To play even the coldest and most evil character you have to find the humanity within them, the thing which makes them 'tick', even if you have to make it up and apply it artificially. It is something of this that is allowed for when directors tell writers that actors mustn't be told about their characters, but must 'find it for themselves'.

In this respect comedy is easier, because you retain a certain ironic distance from the character (and part of the comedy for the audience, whether or not they are conscious of it, is quite often this very gap between character and actor). However, you still have to find a very personal 'connection' with the character, and this necessity for a double-act is what in other ways makes comedy harder. In a recent comedy I played a very stupid woman, the kind of woman I would die rather than identify with in real life, but I could never have done it, never have got the body language, the tone of voice, the rapport with my opposite, if I hadn't crossed that barrier.

There was one time, though, when it took a lot of crossing for an actor in one of my radio plays. The play was not exactly a comedy, but was, like many of my radio plays, pretty ironic, and the main character, played by this actor, was a spectacularly self-deluding woman and a bad mother. In any radio production the writer, director and crew sit in a sound-proofed booth and the director speaks to the actors in the studio through a mic which can be switched on for the purpose. One afternoon the actor, clearly not knowing the mic was switched on, gave a great sigh which filled our booth, followed by her heavy moan to her fellow actor: 'God, I hate this woman!'

Which made me realise why she 'd been so cool: she'd already let it slip that she thought the character was me.

Tricky, all these elisions between fact and fiction, actor and character, reality and fantasy. If you're sensible you cross back again at the edge of the stage or at the studio door. I guess a particular problem for Helen Mirren, though, is that she wasn't just playing a character, but a real, living woman.

Change at Commonword and Bitch-Lit still going strong

To Taurus bar last night for a leaving drink for Cathy Bolton, Commonword's innovative and inspirational publisher, who will be sorely missed. She's not going far, though - just down the road, and in fact to the part of town where Commonword began: after stepping in as Acting Director of Manchester Literature Festival last year, she is this year taking up the post of Director.

One piece of news was that Commonword's Bitch-Lit anthology (which includes my story The Way to Behave) is still going strong: Maya Chowdhry, Mary Sharratt, Michelle Green & Cath Staincliffe will be performing in character again at Manchester's Central Library on International Women's Day, March 8th, 1-2pm (Committee Room, 2nd Floor), and next week Maya, Char March and Brighid Rose will perform at London's Split-Lit Festival.

Maya also told me that we had had a really TERRIBLE review on the web, and of course I came straight home and Googled it. Omigod, so she didn't get that any of the stories were IRONIC!!! Is it not clear that they are ironic?!!! Should I not put mine in my collection, therefore? EEK!!

Those little rewards

Sometimes little things happen out of the blue that make you happy, a little reward for no extra work at all. Today: a sweet email from an Italian translator, asking if she can translate into Italian the story Compass and Torch (which will almost certainly be going into the collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World). The deal is by no means done, of course, but I'm still beaming: I don't know about other writers, but I don't think I'll ever stop being chuffed whenever someone writes and enthuses about my work.

Another typical event in the writing life: just when you get involved in a project, some other urgent thing pops up. Another email, this one from Jen at Salt: we need to choose the stories for the collection now. Which puts paid for a day or so to the new novel which popped into my head this weekend!

Radio schlock

On Friday in the Guardian Zoe Williams wrote this:

It's all very well calling Radio 4 drama inexplicably bad, but someone must be able to explain it. So I am going to make a stab at this. And then later, I am going to stab the person who commissions these plays.

It's the same everywhere I go. Yesterday I went to a party and as usual I was asked about my writing, and whenever I happened to mention that I hadn't written radio for a while, people relaxed and said: 'Oh yes, cos it's all crap nowadays, isn't it?'

Honestly, it's enough to make me think of taking radio off my CV...

Zoe Williams thinks the problem is that the themes chosen are too ambitious - (pandemics, Shoah, etc) - too ambitious anyway for Radio 4 which she associates unquestioningly with 'schlocky dialogue'. (Cringe.)

Well, I think it's the commissioning process, which took over at the end of the nineties. As I've said before, when I first started writing radio plays you wrote what you wanted, sent it in, and if they liked it they produced it. And there were real respect and encouragement in radio for good writing, which was rewarded each year with the now defunct Giles Cooper Award. But things changed, the BBC restructured and the dreaded Commissioning Rounds came in, and the 'Market' became quite frankly more important than the writer or the writing. Commissioning Editors decided on trends of the moment (in themes and style), and writers and directors had to pitch ideas within those parameters, following instructions as far as possible but much of the time second-guessing. (It was round about then that I heard from someone in the know, I can't remember who, that Tom Stoppard's agent contacted BBC Radio to say that Stoppard would like to write them a play and was told to tell him to send in a proposal, and they'd decide if it was suitable.)

If you did get commissioned, there were plenty of other obstacles to overcome. When I wrote my comedy series The Circle, each episode as I wrote it had to be read by not just my director, but a script editor, an executive producer and the head of drama, all answering to the Commissioning Editor and all coming back with separate comments according to criteria I hadn't guessed at and which now hit me like a bombshell. 'We want heart-warming drama,' they told me. 'Get rid of the irony, please.'

Get rid of the irony? But I had won prizes for my irony! My writing is irony!

Well, I was lucky with my producers: we talked and they understood and all was right in the end. Radio commissioning changes all the time, and I don't know the current situation, but you do sense that those big themes are being thought up in boardrooms. And I do know that writers write best when they're writing from the heart and not by numbers imposed from above.

The universities and author readings

Talking of author readings, as I indicated on my other blog last week, the place for readings in Manchester now seems to be the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. At last night's reading, however, I sat next to a friend who told me that the other university too holds readings open to the public. A problem however seems to be that these readings are not well advertised to the public, and you have to be in the know - he said that he had learned too late of a reading by John Banville at the other place, and last week Adrian Slatcher commented on this blog that he hadn't known about a reading I'd been to at MMU.

Last night at MMU it was Matthew Hollis. Although once upon a time besotted with Wordsworth, I am not nowadays a fan of rural poetry, but last night Matthew Hollis just about converted me back again. Though, in spite of their subject matter, there's a spareness and grittiness about his poems which make them seem not exactly rural in fact, and most definitely not backward-looking but universal and indeed contemporary. Apart from that they have a wonderful lyricism and Matthew was a great reader, and I was drawn right in. In the Q&A, Andrew Biswell, who runs the Writing School, commented that the poems were very much against the current grain in that they weren't confessional, personal or anecdotal. Matthew's brow crinkled and he thought a minute and then said somewhat tentatively that he had a bit of a problem with the idea of classifying poems as 'confessional', in that any poem is an artefact and thus something more than a mere 'confession', transcending any experience which triggered it.

Altogether he was self-effacing and always thoughtful, and open about not always knowing the answer (in spite of his status as a poetry editor at Faber): a stance which doesn't do authors much good in the wider publicity-geared world of publishing, but which certainly endeared him to this audience.

Over to Kro2 bar again afterwards and the film company were there again along with the writer who told me that he's written a special monologue for my character!

In the next weeks there will be several authors reading at MMU, including Livi Michael, Carol Rumens, Jeffrey Wainwright, Linda Chase and Jackie Roy.

Independent bookshops and author readings

The Guardian Arts Diary reports today on a bid by respected authors to support 'Britain's embattled independent bookshops' by taking part in a festival which sounds more like a moving feast: 'talks and events in independent bookshops nationwide'. There's no information about when it will take place.

It's been a while now, but here in Manchester we are still mourning the loss of our once-great author-readings bookshop culture, centred on the non-independent Waterstone's Deansgate. OK, so it cost, but did it really? There was such a buzz, which attracted so many book buyers, not just to the readings, but to the shop as a cultural centre and meeting place. I bought so many books then: it's because of that period in the history of Manchester's bookshops that my house is groaning with books, and we trip over them on the way to the loo.

Waterstone's still holds the odd reading though, mainly for local authors. On the 13th March Dedalus Press present a night of Decadence and Noir with Nicholas Royle and Andy Oates, and on the 15th there's a launch of a new book by Mike Duff from Crocus Books.

From a writer's point of view, it's a great chance to connect with readers, which is presumably why, now that this culture is to be focused on the smaller bookshops, participating writer Jake Arnott feels moved to say that 'Smaller bookshops are really where the heart of a writer lies'.

How to name a bestseller

According to Lulu.com's Titlescorer, the title of my forthcoming collection of stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World, gives it a 79.6% chance of bestsellerdom. Hm. I might be excited if the scorer included the meanings, associations or connotations of the words in a title, and not simply the parts of speech.

Thanks to Debi for the link.

Learning to adapt

Giles Foden writes in today's Guardian about the dangers of having one's fiction adapted for the screen. It's a funny business, as I've said on my other blog. As a reader I would say I don't like screen adaptations: I usually try never to see one before reading a book, yet if I watch one afterwards I'm always frustrated by the gap between the director's vision and my own. I haven't read Foden's novel The Last King of Scotland, but on this occasion I was dragged along, reluctantly, to see the film. I was bowled over - rarely has a film made such a lasting impact on me - but I know now that I'll never be able to read the book without its images and those actors in my head.

As a writer, though, it's a different story. Someone comes along and offers you a big bag of money to turn your novel into something which will make it a hell of a lot more famous than it ever was before - or in, my case, famous in a way it never was. I had had bad luck with my second novel, Body Cuts. Halfway through the editing process my editor at the small publishing house left to pursue her own novel career, and the publisher failed to tell me, or to make clear to her replacement where we were in the editing process, and as a result the book went to press without my final editing. The reason for such mix-ups suddenly became evident. Weeks before the book was due out the publisher was bought up by another, and although my book had been announced in the trade press, it failed to appear. When it was eventually published, no new announcements were made in the trade press by the new publisher, and not long after that the original publisher's fiction list was remaindered.

In the meantime, however, during the short time that book was in the bookshops, the TV director John Glenister happened to pick it up, got hooked and immediately decided that he wanted to adapt it for TV. How cool was that? How could I refuse such a chance of resurrection? My usual reservations about screen adaptations went shooting off into the ether.

In fact, in the end that adaptation didn't happen - people at the BBC had moved on, artistic and funding policies had changed - but as I had been working on the adaptation with John, I took it to a Channel 4/arts-board screenwriting scheme, and here my reservations dropped back down from the sky. My God: the changes I was expected to make!! My main male character should be a different sort of person, my female character's mother ought to die!!! Needless to say I soon dropped the whole idea, and contented myself with salvaging from this last experience insights for my satirical (and entirely fictional) story, 'The Shooting Script', which may be included in my forthcoming collection from Salt, Balancing on the Edge of the World.

We haven't yet decided which stories will go in this collection, but one which probably will is 'Power', which looks at the stresses on children of quarrelling parents through their contrasting voices (previously published in Power [Honno]), a story I adapted as a radio drama. It was the second time I had adapted my own fiction for radio: earlier I worked on my first novel, The Birth Machine. Both times I worked with the director Michael Fox and both times I was given free rein to adapt my work in ways which allowed me to stay as true to the original as I wished. I have to say that adaptation for the verbal, non-visual medium of radio is a different thing altogether: I don't feel in any way that the transformations stole the souls of the original fictions in the way screen adaptations so often seem to do.

Out in Manc

To Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School last night for a great reading by tutor Simon Armitage, and on to the Kro2 Bar afterwards. There Steve Waling and I sat and patted each other on the back for getting on Salt's publishing list, and, with silly grins on our faces, compared notes about how great they seem to be, and how much effort they seem to put into marketing their books. Steve's poetry collection comes out in April and he told me that Publishing Director Jen Hamilton-Emery had been up to make a podcast of him reading a poem and talking about his book for the website.

I haven't been out much recently, and I should go out more often: as we sat there shamelessly congratulating ourselves, a film company for whom I worked as an actor last summer walked in. The film we made has been really well received, apparently, and they're doing another, and would I be free? Yippee. Acting is one of the things I love best in the world (much easier than writing!!). I'm not telling you the name of the company or the film, because I play a pretty uncool character (it is a surreal comedy, I hasten to add), and that's not the kind of image you need for marketing fiction, now, is it?

That photo thing...

So Salt asked me to provide some recent publicity photos PDQ. Oh, help. That dreadful process again. And my last photographer has moved away. Where would I get another one? Fellow bloggers Manchizzle and Adrian Slatcher came to my aid with suggestions, but their contacts appeared not to be around. Then John reminded me how fantastic the photos had been last summer for the Manchester 24:7 Theatre Festival. Yes!! Dave Slack, the festival's organiser, put me right on to their photographer: Tom Wright. And there I was within a day or two meeting him in the city centre.

What sort of thing did I want? Tom wanted to know. I resisted the urge to say the thing which made my last photographer go white even though I was joking, ie Please try and make me look glamorous if you can; I didn't even say Just making me look not plain ugly would be great, and I gave him the publisher's specs: interesting urban shots.

I suggested the new white bridge over the Irwell, which is always appearing in telly dramas like Cold Feet, and as Tom checked the light I leaned on the side in the hope of looking writerishly thoughtful. A man walked past and stared. He kept staring, turning back. More people came, in both directions, all staring back over their shoulders. I cracked up. And the bridge turned out not to be the best suggestion: it shook as people passed, which was not so good for focus, and it was so huge that it was hard to get a shot of it except from a distance. At Tom's more sensible suggestion we moved off to the old arched bridge. A woman stopped. 'Oh don't forget your bag will you, dear?' she cried, scooping it up for me and spoiling the shot. More people endangered their lives by walking while looking backwards at us, and again I had to make the effort to straighten my face.

At the end I took a shot of Tom taking one of me, and if I hadn't still been laughing it wouldn't have been blurred.

Expectations unfulfilled

On Tuesday the reading group met at Clare's house to discuss Jack Maggs by Peter Carey. Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang is the only book ever which has had a universal thumbs-down from the group – no one had been able to engage with it - and when Clare (who had not been a member then) suggested this book everyone groaned. In the end, however, we decided not to be so prejudiced and to give Peter Carey another chance.

It was a freezing night, and the fire in Clare's Victorian terrace was roaring: a fitting setting for discussing this novel set in Victorian London and featuring an eponymous protagonist not a million miles removed from the character Magwitch in Dickens’ Great Expectations and antagonists with parallels in its hero Pip and in Dickens himself. Like Magwitch in Dickens’ novel, Jack Maggs, a convict deported to Australia, has made good there and now returns to find the young man (in this case Henry Phipps) who once as a boy took pity on him, and whose secret benefactor he has been all along. Unaware like Pip of his true relationship to Maggs, Phipps absconds on receiving news of Maggs’ imminent arrival, and Maggs becomes involved as a ‘patient’ with the Dickens-like novelist and mesmerist Tobias Oates.

Clare introduced the book briefly by saying she had really liked it because it was a ripping good yarn. The recreation of the Dickensian story-telling mode and atmosphere had really pleased her, she said, and Doug, who – The Kelly Gang apart – is a big admirer of Carey, agreed. Jenny then scowled and said she liked a good yarn as much as anyone, but she didn’t think this was one: she thought the story was far too convoluted and meandering, with lots of extraneous elements and ends which she failed to tie up. Trevor agreed with her wholeheartedly about these faults and said that if Maggs and Oates hadn’t gone on that wild-goose chase to Gloucester, spending 20 pages on the coach journey, he might have finished the book in time, which he didn’t, and anyway there was nothing in the book beside story, which actually wasn’t enough for him. Doug and Clare countered, But that’s Dickens!

I then said that I did think it stood up as a pretty good ripping yarn, but that like Trevor I find story alone unsatisfying in novels, and agreed that if you read the book on that level it’s unsatisfying. I said I would wonder what the point is of simply writing a pastiche of a Dickens novel in this day and age, if I had not read the book as a postcolonial ‘writing-back’, and Ann, who is studying postcolonial theory for her PhD strongly agreed.

Most of the others looked at us pretty suspiciously, and feeling therefore somewhat like the school swots Ann and I talked about how Carey switches the narrative/focal places of the Magwitch/Maggs and Pip/Phipps characters, taking Magwitch from the periphery of Dickens’ Victorian-colonial narrative to the centre of his own, and exiling Dickens’ hero to the periphery. Australia in this novel, which in the Dickens novel is the ‘other’, is here ultimately anything but. By placing into the narrative a Dickens-type novelist who mesmerises Maggs in order to obtain his secrets and thus material for a novel (Maggs feels that Oates has stolen his soul), Carey explores in a dramatic way the process of colonial-novelistic cannibalisation. In the Dickens novel, Pip, who at first, like Phipps, tries to avoid the convict and is dismayed to discover he is his benefactor, comes to care for him, but Carey allows no such colonial false-heroic sentimentality. Neither does Carey give Maggs the narrative punishment of death which Dickens metes out (in the Victorian-colonial universe the only fate for an exile trying to return must be punishment). Instead, in Carey’s narrative Maggs learns to divest himself of his own colonial yearnings – his wish to ‘father’ the unpleasant Phipps - and to value the life he has built elsewhere.

Everyone else said that none of this had occurred to them in the reading of the book, and that they hadn’t even thought of the parallels with the Dickens characters – and certainly not with Dickens himself – even though they had read Dickens as children and even though the Magwitch/Maggs parallel had been mentioned when the book was suggested.

Ann then suggested that this novel is really nothing much unless read through the filter of Great Expectations, though of course those who had enjoyed it without doing so did not agree. I said that I had never been very happy with ‘writing-back’ fiction, as it seemed to me secondary rather than primary literature. I had often felt the same about a lot of feminist literature in which supposedly male texts were ‘recast’. Jenny eagerly agreed: she said that that sort of feminist fiction ‘re-gendered’ texts but ultimately retained their structures. At which point I got quite excited, as I have always maintained that it is only in structure and form and language that literature can be truly radical.

And then Mark arrived on his bike, true to form and too late to take part in the discussion, bringing in a blast of bitter night air, and Clare shut the door quickly and got out the boxes of chocolates she’d had for her recent birthday, and the room disintegrated into several conversations which were nothing whatever to do with the novel.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

Short stories on the up

In December I wrote about the state of the short story and the fact that there were signs of a resurgence, with several small publishers beginning to specialise in the form. Well, I am thrilled to be able to say that in October one of those publishers, Salt, is to publish a collection of my stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World.

Salt, based in Cambridge and run by Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery, are turning out to be marvellous. The whole thing happened very quickly: a fortnight before Christmas I sent them a sample three stories, and by mid January they had offered to publish a collection. No messing about: straight through came an author questionnaire which made it very clear that Salt empower their authors by involving them in publicity and marketing at every stage.

Take a look at their site, and you'll see how classy they are, both in terms of literary standard and marketing flair. It's no wonder that they've gained such prominence and respect in such a short time, and I feel just honoured to be published by them - alongside several other Manchester writers, as it happens, including Steve Waling, David Gaffney and Neil Campbell.

How to read plays

Not long after I wrote in November about the frustrating business of submitting my fringe-produced play O'Leary's Daughters to mainstream theatres last February, I received a response from one of the theatres I had given up on.

They enjoyed reading it, they said, and admired both my 'confidently fluid writing style' and the 'economy of my stagecraft'. For once they did not take the schematic structure and my 'other devices' as mistakes, but unfortuntely they found them 'alienating'. Oh.

Mm. Why, I wonder? None of the audiences in the three fringe shows found them alienating in the least. Those audiences laughed and cried (some coming out with wet faces), and in the 24:7 production they stood at the end of some performances and whistled.

I read on to the end of the sentence: '...and they didn't allow the drama space to breathe.'

Ah! That breathing kind of drama! Not the tight stuff then, not the stuff where you're pulled on an emotional rack, breathless with all your senses attuned... But the breathing stuff, the stuff where you can lie back, relax.... They couldn't be meaning naturalistic drama, could they?

Of course they could. Here's the next sentence: 'It was also felt that the piece might benefit from a deeper exploration of the causes of abuse and a more balanced approach to the nature-nurture debate.' What?!!!! Lordy-lor, this NOT a play about abuse! Yes, all three characters have been abused, and use their childhood abuse as their defining experiences, but this is a play about IDENTITY, not abuse per se!

Gotcha. You didn't want me to write anything so abstract or surreal, in fact even though I'd said in my letter what the theme of the play was, such an idea was so far from your concept of what a play should be, that you couldn't even see when you read it that that's what it was.

You wanted me to write a different play.

That inspiration thing...

Who was I kidding? This is just a different, new (for me) way of writing a play, I told myself, as I sat at my desk all January, and the play seemed to ease its way out of the ether only slowly, and then to disintegrate on the page, only to begin easing its way out again from a slightly different angle.

But I had to face it, I wasn't making progress. I knew what the themes were, I thought I knew the characters and the story, but something was sticking: in the middle of the play there was a dark patch, a blank, a big chasm over which I had to get the characters, and which I never would until the damn thing disappeared, lit up, turned into some kind of solid ground. Oh, I could think of plenty of ways to do it in theory; I even drew myself a little picture/diagram, my two characters standing together at the tram stop at the opening of the play and curved lines showing the journeys they would make away from each other and back again to the conclusion. But would it actually happen? Would it resonate, buzz in my belly, take on that alchemical fizz which makes a play really happen? Would it heck. And I was getting so tired. And other things were piling up: the washing, the unanswered mail, the blogging!, some publicity work I was meant to be doing, the crucial matter of earning a living...
Really, sometimes writing is the hardest thing in the world....

I was writing this play for a deadline, the 31st of January. Last Saturday, 27th of January, I decided I would never do it now, not just for the deadline, but anyhow, anyway. The play was a dead duck. I was a dead duck. My recent much larger writing project had drained me, of imagination, of inspiration. Maybe I would never write again.... I gave up, gave in. I went downstairs and started sorting the piled-up washing, I went out to the shops and for once didn't rush to get back but wandered...

'I've given up,' I said to John. And guess what? As I said it, in a flash, in a single instant, the real play, the one I was meant to be writing after all, popped into my head fully-formed. I got up on Sunday morning and put my pen to paper and the play just flowed. I was in that ecstatic fired-up state, where you're not really thinking so much as tuning in, where it feels as if you're acting as a conduit, this buzzing thing - this play - simply coursing through you and out of the nib. I wrote all day - I was writing much longer hours now but no longer exhausted - and on Monday I did the same and completed the handwritten draft. Tuesday and Wednesday I rose at six to the laptop, and by 5.30 on Wednesday afternoon, the deadline, I had the typed draft in the post.
Really, sometimes writing is the most exhilarating thing in the world...

Looking at it now, I can see that this was the same play from a different angle, but a very different angle. I could say I wrote it in only four days, but the real truth is that I was gestating it for the whole of January. There's never really a simple answer to that question you're often asked at readings or when you give talks: How long did it take you to write it?

Fay Weldon once wrote: if you're blocked, go away. Write something else, or do something else altogether. She's right.