Emma Darwin's Blog, page 32

Seventeen questions to ask your novel

If you try answering these for a favourite book you'll find that you can, from Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice to Heart of Darkness and To The Lighthouse, so why not try it on your own? They're deliberately bald, because there aren't only many different answers, there are different kinds of answer, depending on what your project is with the novel. But answers there should be:

Who is telling this story?

Why are they telling it?

Where do they stand in time and space, relative to the events and settings they're narrating?

Which characters' heads can they get inside?

Which characters' voices do they allow to colour their storytelling?

How much do they know that no character knows at the time, or no character notices?

What is the fundamental question or problem that the first page poses?

How does the story make that question or problem ever more urgent and important?

How is the question answered or that problem solved on the last page?

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What does your main character/s know that they want or need?

What do they want or need, but don't know they do?

How do they act to get what they need?

What external things get in the way?

What internal things get in the way, and do they realise it?

What do they do to overcome/avoid/escape/accommodate those obstacles?

What is at stake, to make them try so hard to get what they need?

What is the shape of the disaster that's waiting if they don't get it?

So, what were your answers? If you don't think any given question is relevant, dare I suggest that you check whether it really isn't, or whether it's the resistance talking? As with murdering darlings, could it be that for some reason you don't want to re-work things to the point where there is a clear answer to that question? Be honest, now...

Jerusha Cowless, Agony Aunt: "I'm not a romantic soul, but my readers will want romance"

Dear Jerusha; I have interest in my novel from an agent who has sent me very comprehensive editing notes. One of her broader comments was that the novel would appeal to female readers, who would expect a more romantic approach to my main protagonists' relationship. She wants me to show the sexual tension and electricity, flirting etc. that accompanies a new love. I agree that it will improve the novel and make the way everything goes wrong towards the end more heartbreaking, but I'm not a romantic soul and am long past my sell-by date. I had carefully avoided the romantic scenarios, hence my plea for guidance. If you can go one step further and advise me how to portray sex scenes, which are even harder, if you'll excuse the pun, than romance, then that would also be a huge help.

One of the sexiest - in a romantic way - passages in all literature, as far as I'm concerned, is the moment in Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night when Harriet, who is busy not-knowing that she's fallen in love with Peter, watches him as he's reading. It's the most beautifully written physical observation of the side of his face and, without there being a single adjective or abstract noun about how she feels or what she's thinking or what she guesses he's thinking, you absolutely know all those things. And then he looks up, she's "instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water", and he looks down again, attention riveted on the manuscript, "but he breathed as if he had been running". And she thinks, "So, it has happened. But it happened long ago... But does he know it? He has very little excuse, after this, for not knowing it", and she, and he, and so the whole relationship, have all changed. [Emma notes: Jerusha may not be quoting quite correctly, as she's in the Antarctic without a copy of the novel; I received this answer by paw of an obliging polar bear, on the way home from a holiday there.]

Everything that powers the next stage of the emotional plot is here, conveyed not explicitly - the word 'love' is never mentioned - but in the way that each character sees and reacts to the other one. It works partly because that minute observation is something that we don't often pay, except when we're in love: it's character-in-action. It's also powerful because it evokes the physicality of the characters, which is so important in a highly-charged sexual moment, although not at all in sexual terms. It's also there in what I call the choreography: who looks where, who catches whose eye, the relationship of bodies even if the characters are sitting in opposite chairs, the physical detail, especially of the kind we don't notice most of the time. (I remember years ago saying to my sister, of someone who I'd just met in a work context, "He notices me", and I was certainly noticing him, before we allowed ourselves to acknowledge a flicker of what was going on).

But it needn't be a sexual charge: you can also convey the emotional or intellectual intimacy of a relationship which is getting closer: how they speak to each other, finishing each other's sentences, or not having to finish their own to be understood; the moment when one character shows they remember or care a little bit more about the other; the moment when one breaks the other's personal space to reach out not necessarily to take a hand, but perhaps to do something quite domestically intimate, or to help the other practically. Nor need it be a set-piece, like the scene in Gaudy Night: it can be a single phrase about how her finger-tips press into the pit of your palm; about how for a moment when he looks at you there's a kind of heat between your shoulder blades; about how a stranger in the pub is wearing his aftershave. Blushing is the obvious option but needs approaching with caution, like any standard gesture: from wringing hands to shaking fists, it's horribly easy to use them to signal (=tell), rather than evoke (=show), attraction, or embarrassment, or whatever.

But, as the Harriet-and-Peter section makes so clear, it's not just about evoking emotions convincingly: they also need to be working with the plot to propel the narrative convincingly. This is not as hard as you'd think, if you're already clear in your head about the structure of the relationship's development, as I think you are. When are the big changes? What happens to shift them closer to each other, and what happens when they've got closer, and when it starts to go wrong? Then it's a matter of finding actions (gesture, gaze, choreography, speech, thought directly quoted or evoked in free indirect style), to embody those shifts: literally, bring them to life in your characters' bodies, eyes, feelings and minds.

And the same is true of scenes which are specifically centred on sex, whether they're romantic or the absolute opposite. There are particular issues, as I was discussing in Writing Sex and Ringing Tills, but the real key is still 1) understanding the emotional shifts in the scene, 2) understanding what this narrator would and wouldn't say/think/understand, and 3) centring your decisions about what to write, and what to leave out, on that understanding.

And, of course, how you write it is part of the intensity of the human-ness of the scene. It's not that you should flip the 'flowery' or the 'moon-june' switch on your prose; as ever, voice/style needs to be rooted in character in action. It's a terrible cliché that you only hear nightingales when you're love, but if you think in terms of that heightened awareness of the senses, which comes with heightened emotion, then using it to heighten the mood of the writing makes sense. (Though the heightened awareness of some things can give you tunnel vision about everything else: hence the crashingly awful line but true insight at the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral, about not noticing that it's raining). So the right words will happen if you're really imagining the characters fully in the right actions. And it's not just love or desire that can be worked in this way (my definition of a romantic novel would always embrace large emotions of all sorts) because fear, or grief or scorn or anger, can also heighten sensory experience: particular details, significant actions.

Finally, I've asked Emma's permission to post her hommage to the Harriet-Peter moment, from The Mathematics of Love. It's a piece she often uses for readings, since it embodies many of the themes of the novel, but it's also a - perhaps the - key moment in that relationship. It's 1976, Anna is 15, and Emma made it easier for herself by giving Anna a camera. Or rather, Theo gave it to her...

***

Theo was sitting on one of the big sofas with a thin curl of steam rising in front of his face from his cup.

I looked at my camera. It said I had a few frames left. 'May I?' I said, picking it up.

He nodded. The light from the window stroked his cheek, and caught on his lip where it touched the cup as gently as a kiss. I got one of him stooping his head to sip coffee, and then another of just his hands.

His shirt was unbuttoned at the top and the edges of it sprang open so the white cotton collar stood away from his neck, away from the sinews and muscles and the tough, brown skin where the tendons lifted to the sides of his skull. The fine silver stubble that glittered in the light had grown since that morning, hours showing there like years did in his face. Years of talk and silence in the grooves from nose to mouth. Years of looking in the fan of light-cut creases at the corners of his eyes. Years of seeing in the pinch between his brows and the lines that ran like telegraph wires across his forehead, full of too much knowing. I looked and looked, and in my hands the shutter snatched at what I saw, but I wasn't sure whether it caught what he had seen, or what his seeing had done to him.

His hands still cradled his cup. It looked small and white and breakable.

My film was finished. I laid the camera in my lap and started to rewind it. When I looked up Theo was watching me. He smiled, and I would have smiled back only something in my chest – something deep inside the cage of my ribs – started to grow. It wasn't really happiness, it hurt too much for happiness, only I didn't have another word for it, not for the strange, soft balloon that I felt swelling up and filling my chest and my belly and my throat, and bursting out of me at last, in a great smile that went on and on like crying.

Never apologise?

I'm having singing lessons, purely for fun. And I've made a decision: I'm not, ever, going to apologise for not having practised. Never. These are my lessons, I'm paying for them, how much progress I make is up to me (until my teacher wants to give up on me) and I don't have a parent breathing down my neck*. But it's surprisingly hard to keep my resolution, and not just in my hobby, either. I'm writing a story at the moment to send in for a short fiction workshop with Ali Smith, and I'm already constructing the apologies in my head: I didn't have long; I know the prescribed title doesn't really fit my story; I'm terribly busy; I've had an awful cold... and they're all true. They're just not the point.

For a competition the only thing which matters is how you perform on the day, and I know of teachers of acting and singing who say the same: "You can't say that at an audition, so don't say it here." Of course a writing workshop is a different thing: it's about process, not just product; it's about what you're trying to do as much as what you've done. But when I'm running a workshop, I always say that we'll take it as read that what you're presenting is work in progress: if you didn't know it could be better, you wouldn't have brought it. Besides, apologies use time more usefully spent on that better-getting. And to that end, I say firmly, I will cut short any apologies or explanations of why this piece is rough/not very good/unsatisfactory. (Though it's surprisingly hard to cut people short in practice, partly from my having been brought up to Be Nice, and partly because I'm teaching a subject which is rooted in authentic expression of the self.)

And yet still perhaps half of the students in a class will start by apologising for their work. It seems to me that what's happening is their Inner Critic, rightly or wrongly, has whispered that the work isn't Good Enough. So what they're really trying to do is pre-empt the pain of their work (and so by extension themselves) having been found wanting. They're saying to us one or more of the following:

"Please don't judge me on this. I know it isn't very good;

so I'm going to say this isn't very good, before you get the chance to say it."
don't worry, I don't believe I'm a Good Writer; I'm not too big for my boots, honest."
I really don't believe this is Good Writing; I know more than that, at least."
I'm humble really, even if I am daring to take my writing seriously."
I know everyone else in this class is better than me, but I do take this writing business seriously."
please don't think this is my best, because if you think my best is No Good, then I'm a No Good writer."

In other words, this urge to apologise for your work comes from the friction inside the necessary paradox of being a writer which I explored here: that we must be at once egoistical, and humble. It's cousin, perhaps, to the reluctance of some writers to stamp their work with their own, . I'm not suggesting that we should never say anything in a workshop about how our work falls short of what we were trying for, not least because in articulating and exploring that gap you and the others can learn so much about how to narrow all such gaps. But I do think it's worth inspecting this urge to apologise that your writing isn't up to scratch, because it says something about how you feel about your writing self, and why you feel the need to apologise for it.

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*Although one of my mother's proudest parental boasts is that she never, once, said to any of us, "You must practice," or "You must do your homework." It's true, too.

Style and Voice

I got asked the other day about the difference between Voice and Style in fiction, and I got a bit stuck because I don't really know. I never use the word "style" in the context of writing because it's unhelpful, I said, whereas "voice" comes up often. Clearly I do think something, so in the time-honoured tradition of finding out what I think by seeing what I say, and aware that I'm giving two workshops at the York Festival of Writing, one on Find your Voice, and one on The Writer's Voices, so I'd better have worked it out by then, here goes.

OED's most relevant definitions of "style" include: "the characteristic manner of literary expression of a particular writer, school, period etc. ... a particular or characteristic way, form or technique of making or producing a thing... a manner of performance", which is all very well as far as it goes. But then there's "stylish", which is at once admiring (when it's about hats) and also reductive (when it's about painting or poetry), because "style" has come to mean how something's done, not what it is, and by extension it implies too much concern with How, and not enough with What. Even the judgement that a certain writer is a stylist can, unfairly, suggest that vital things about storytelling are sacrificed to the desire for a good-looking performance.

There's also the unattractive label "prose style" for the nuts and bolts of doing a decent writing job using your command (or lack of it) of vocabulary, syntax, grammar and prosody. That command is one of the things which makes your writing yours: it all comes down to your choices as an individual, about individual words. But should those choices be led by a conscious desire to alter your "characteristic manner of expression"? I'd suggest not. Yes, prose is nicer to read if the the shape and size of sentences vary, for example, but trying to do that from the outside leads to the absurdities and awkwardnesses of Elegant Variation. I think that's typical of what happens when you start from How rather than What, because you can't deal with a symptom well if you don't understand the cause. If what you're trying to say comes out awkward, flat, hackneyed or boring, then I'd suggest that rather than tinker with How, you think deeper and wider and harder about What you're trying to say: in the language of architecture (we're building bridges, don't forget) form should follow function, not dictate it, whether the function is a power station, a milking shed or a cathedral. I do mean "what" in the wide sense of course: not just the bones of the plot but the character of it and the characters in it, the atmosphere, the underlying ideas and spirit of the story. And then, as long as your command of the tools of your trade is good enough, and flexible enough - as long as you've learnt to get out of your own light - then the How will look after itself.

So what's Voice? For me, if Style is one manifestation of self, then Voice is formed by self. As humans we know that each person's voice is their own: the product of their language, their character, their mood, their actual physical construction. Which isn't to say that the only voice worth working with is unmediated self-expression. "Voice" also encompasses how different stories need different voices, as Nicola Morgan explores very well here. And, of course, it encompasses character's voices, not only in dialogue or when you have a character who acts as their own narrator, but when you're working in free indirect style and allowing characters' voices infect the narrative voice. The DNA of a novel's voice can't help but be yours, but how those genes are expressed (in the biological as well as the colloquial sense of the word) will be different for every offspring.

And then there's the definition of Voice as the thing that editors and agents are looking for above all else. That's partly because it's far harder to edit a compelling voice into a book which doesn't have one already than it is to make the plot, characters or prose work better. But it's chiefly because it's the voice to which readers respond on the first page, long before they've had a chance to find out what the plot is, or care about the characters experiencing it, or know anything about their world. The voice of a novel, if you like, is the product of the writer's How and their What. As such it's the closest a reader gets to the storyteller who has created it, and it's that human presence (however implicit) that the human reader connects with. Style is a one way thing: we admire the Ascot hat on the stranger's head. Voice is about discovering the person who's wearing it.

Jigsaws, pantsers and doing your prep

One of the perennial questions asked of writers - and among writers - is, "Are you a planner or a pantser?" Pantser as in "flying by the seat of your pants": the kind of writer who dives straight into the first draft, and sees what happens. And the opposite seems to be the planner: the ones who don't start until they know a good deal about where they're going. The planners are afraid of getting lost or stalling or going wrong if they don't have at least some kind of map in their hand; the pansters are afraid of being shackled or bored or going wrong if they do. And yes, both can go wrong, and I've seen the results: the planned novel where everything fits together as neatly as a jigsaw, and is just about as interesting and believable an evocation of real life; the pantsed novel whose open-ended exploration of characters' lives and experience seems... well, endless.

And then a friend, let's call her Nicola, who's just done her first writing course, said that she had a story she wanted to write: first person, and very much the story of that single character. "But I don't know the other characters well enough yet," she said. "I'm going to have to write it from their point of view, too. I don't want to, but I know that I need to." I asked why she didn't want to. "Just because it's boring to do,' she said. "It's like doing the preparation before you can start painting the room. Sanding, and washing-down and things. But you have to do it. And if you don't, the result won't be nearly as good."

Having squashed down a twinge of teacherly smugness, because I think it was me who first suggested this trick to her, I suddenly realised what's missing from the binary planner/pantser conversation (is anything in writing binary? I doubt it.) Whether you think of it as a grid, or a synopsis, or a real or virtual cork-board of index cards, the conversation is all about planning as a roadmap, the kind of strip-map that they used in the 18th Century and is still used for the detail of motorways and canals: junctions, locks, mileages and directions. The only information is what clusters about the road, and the indications of the main routes off it. You follow it straight, down (or up) page after page, till you reach the end.

But what if you don't think of what you do before you start Chapter One as planning, but as preparation? The kind of mapping that the Beagle and all those other expeditions were doing: not planning out a route, but exploring and describing whatever they found in a new land. Not a channelling - some would say a narrowing - of possibilities, but a widening of them: an exploration of the terrain, of the kind I was discussing in "Making The Skeleton Dance"? That of course, is what we're doing with research, and in writing historical fiction I spend much of my working life in L P Hartley's foreign country. So maybe we should think of planning as research too, just research not about the real world we need to get "right" if our readers are going to trust in their contract with us, but about the imagined world that's in our heads: the people and their stories that seem to exist as if they're real.

Nicola's going to research the other characters' ideas and feelings and pasts, even though most of that will never appear in the story, not by making lists but in the same way that we find out what any story's about: by imagining, then writing, then using the writing to coax the imagining wider and deeper. It'll help to capture their voices in dialogue, and help her decide how they'd behave but, above all, it should help to inform what her real viewpoint character sees and understands about them, or doesn't understand but the reader must. Of course, she may discover that she can't, or won't, do what she originally intended with them; that's an occupational hazard of writing fiction. But, like an explorer who understands the geology and topography of the whole country and so can cope with changing route to avoid (or reach) rebel territory, because Nicola's researched these people's minds and lives all around the route of the main character's story, she should be able to adapt her story, or adapt her characters, to make it work.

Showing and Telling

Just a quick post to point you towards a new section in Resouces, Showing and Telling: the basics. Click this link, look over to the Resources section in the far right-hand sidebar, or click on the Resources tab at the top of any page of this blog.

A rare insight

I'm in what's for me a rare state: I'm not writing a novel. But the other day I needed something to take to my writer's circle, the Clink Street Writers, for the likes of Sarah Salway, Pam Johnson, Ros Asquith and Michelle Lovric to sink their teeth into. So I did something else which is rare for me: dug out a short story which I wrote about five years ago, and which I never really got right but still think could be got right.

It's a story that started as an exercise in a third thing which is rare for me: a third person narrative, with a moving point of view and therefore a neutral but implied omniscient narrator. I'd had an interesting time doing this with my two viewpoint characters in my story Russian Tea so I decided to try working with three. Point of view becomes a much more interesting affair if each viewpoint character has reasons to feel strongly about the others, so I set up a newly-married couple, and sent the man's best friend to visit them. And since it was set around 1830, I wanted a narrative voice which had a feel of the period.

But in reading it after so long a gap, I found it curiously distanced. I can't remember if that's what I felt didn't work before, but it certainly is now. Mostly the PoV switches are okay, and the real story - which is in the subtext - I think comes across, though my fellow Clink Streeters may say it doesn't to them. The narrative voice is deliberately evoking early-19th-century, like Stephen Fairhurst's in The Mathematics of Love, but that seemed to be part of the trouble, I thought, stomping up the hill behind my house in the sun yesterday and watching big clouds moving above London: crags of dazzling ice and granite above Battersea Power Station, the London Eye, the Gherkin, Big Ben, Canary Wharf, the O2 Arena...

Was it really the period voice? It worked for Stephen, after all... But TMOL is in first person: Stephen's own, maimed consciousness colours his period voice with feeling and urgency, as he operates as his own narrator in the way I was exploring in 'Keeping up with the Jameses'. And I was considering more recently in 'Its own self' how an external narrator can take on even more colours - be as compelling - as you choose to make it. And the answer hit me, almost between the eyes: the psychic distance of this story remains, stubbornly, stuck in the middle range; thoughts and feelings are shown, not told, but they're not evoked, and it never goes into the full free-indirect evocation of any character's consciousness and experience, as it's happening. When I wrote that story I hadn't heard of psychic distance, although it's present in any piece of writing, and for the hundredth time I'm thankful for the understanding that John Gardener offers of what otherwise we can only sense. So I looked at the story and found where it went into each character's head, and just... went further. Found the voice of their thinking, their feelings, their fears.

I may not have done enough: if so then Clink will tell me as unequivocally as they always do, and I'll try to work out what more it needs. But I do know that digging out this story, which will never be anything I can sell or bother a competition judge with, has taught me something which will be immensely useful in both my own work, and in teaching others. As ever, nothing you write is ever wasted.

Handclasps, explosions, and ribbons and bows

On WriteWords, Caroline Green has been tackling the dreaded Second Novel, to follow her debut YA Dark Ride, (isn't that a great cover?) and she posted this:

I've written the big dramatic finale of my WIP and am now facing the bit I always hate. How DO people tidy things up and end a story? I always seem to go for an epilogue set a few months or so down the line but feels a bit lazy. I genuinely don't know how other people do this (and suddenly am unable to remember what happens in a single book that I've ever read). Would love to know what others think...

And I found myself saying: "I think less is almost always more. Maybe you just need to stop where you are." I very rarely see a manuscript which ends too soon, and I see a great many which have a lumpy little chapter dangling off the end, covering the next three years and explaining how they did get married and move to America where they were re-united with the long-lost stepson who got a few mentions earlier in the novel. If I ask if the writer wrote it in response to someone saying, "I wanted to know if she..." sometimes they say Yes, and sometimes they say, "I thought readers would want to know if she...", which is the writer's own Inner Reader saying the same.

The need to follow the characters through till everything's resolved is a tribute to how involving they and their predicament have been for the reader. It also says a lot about why we read fiction: to feel that sense has been made of things in a way which real life frequently doesn't. But our desire to know the details of the kind of Happily Ever After that they lived, isn't one you necessarily should gratify, any more than a tragedy should explain what happened when the dead hero began to chaffer with St Peter. Even Bunyan knew to show us no more than the trumpets sounding on the Other Side. If you do want to push on a bit further after the Big Finish, I'd suggest being careful not to tie things up too neatly and tightly - with ribbons and bows, as my editor once put it - but leave it more as an opening for the next part of a story, which just at the moment you're not going to tell.

This is not the same problem as whether you should have a Big Finish in the first place. It's important not to confuse Big as in a proper climax to the problems and solutions that the book is built of, with Big as in noisy or spectacular. The real end of a novel is the final answer to the question which was posed on the first page, whether or not it was adorned with a body: What Will Happen Next? The final answer may be loud, or quiet: anything from blowing up the heavy water plant to two people quietly pledging eternal love then going their separate ways. But it is a very definite resolution of the problems and solutions that the book is built of. I think most readers do want to reach this final stage for the main problem, however many other things are unresolved or proved unchangeable. The story hasn't really done its job if, say, the fuses don't go off and the Maquis just wander away; the meeting that's planned just doesn't happen. Even if the real interest of the story is the view from the bridge, it shouldn't peter out mid-stream.

On the other hand, we don't want to reach the far side and discover what Cassandra in I Capture the Castle calls a brick-wall happy ending, where you can't imagine the characters having lives beyond the end of the book: we need to sense the countryside we've reached. How much of their lives in that countryside you then write - the consequences and finishings off - is the real decision: how they escaped after blowing up the heavy water plant; how their two, separate lives worked out. I would suggest not far, because it can't help but be an anti-climax: a set of ticked boxes, a skeleton CV of the next few months or years. And if you're itching to go on with What Happened Afterwards, ask yourself why. It is because you need to know that your beloved characters are All Right? Good teachers know that "and then they woke up" isn't necessarily a cop-out of storytelling: maybe the child needed to write that to bring himself or herself safely back from where the wild things are. But you're lucky: you can make everything safe. Just don't tell anyone else.

Its own self

One of the faux-orthodoxies about creative writing most guaranteed to raise my blood pressure is the one parrotted by newbie writers with terrible writing teachers: "omnisicient narrators are Old Fashioned". Both John Gardener in The Art of Fiction and James Wood in How Fiction Works explore all the possibilities and conclude by preferring an omniscient, third-person narrator, able to enter any character's consciousness and to narrate independently of any character. Such a narrator is even able to tell us what a character doesn't understand about his/her own consicousness: it's arguably the most powerful, flexible, fluent and, you might say (as Gardener and Wood say), grown-up, way of telling a story. 

But the novel I'm about to start is that kind and, frankly, I'm just a tad worried. It's a first for me, although I've written short fiction thus. I've decided to do it partly because it suits the story, but also because I need a technical difficulty to wrestle with before I can face the long slog of writing the damn thing. But I'm also having what you might call existential angst about it.

When your narrator is a character, what's told is limited to what they know, see and understand. And when you decide to tell the story in the third person, but limit the point of view to a single character, or a sequence of single characters, the implied narrator - the entity which is telling the reader that "X did this" and "Y thought that" - is similarly limited. But as soon as the narrator could know everything, see everything, understand everything, the decisions get a bit more complicated.

If the narrator can see everything, the choices about what it transmits to the reader are relatively straightforward: which settings and bits of the story are most essential for the reader to see? But if the narrator can know everything then how do you decide what of that knowledge to give the reader? Crudely, how can you create suspense when the narrator knows whodunnit from the first page? And yet perhaps 80% of fiction works this way, and I suspect I'm over-thinking this one. Readers aren't bothered in the least about what they're not being told: they follw the road the narrator takes. (Although there is the Fair Play rule: if Sherlock Holmes "picks up certain small things" while detecting, the reader is entitled to know what they are. You can't let us inside someone's head and not reveal the important thing in it just to "create suspense".).

In first person, or third-limited, things are automatically subjective, and there's a lot of scope - fun, even - for getting the reader to understand things that the character doesn't understand. In A Secret Alchemy it's not me saying that's what happened to the Princes in the Tower, it's their mother; my project was to imagine how those stories might have seemed to her. But if the narrator can understand everything (which is the true meaning of "omniscient") then is it making an objective statement of what "really" happened, of how the novel-world, at least, actually works? I shy away from creating James Wood's "essayist" narrator, using a fictional form to make explicit, authorial statements about how things are. This, indeed, is in some ways, what gave the "omniscient" narrator a bad name, as part of a tetchy, Oedipal rebellion among Modernist writers resenting a narrative that seemed to assert that Father (or Mother, in the case of George Eliot) Is Always Right.

Or should I imagine a narrator who has, however slightly, a personality and therefore a "take" on these events? Ah, that sounds more like it! That doesn't only help me to decide whether a scene should be narrated in this way or that. It's also liberating: as soon as you recognise one point-of-view, you recognise the possibility of others. And this is also why I prefer A S Byatt's term, the "knowledgeable" narrator, to "omniscient". Because I am knowledgeable about these characters and their world, but I don't pretend to be presenting all the answers, any more than I want my novel to be arguing a thesis.

And finally, this decision about endowing the narrator - however unembodied it is - with a "take" on things, also helps with the other big decision: voice. My "natural" voice - in the sense of one un-mediated by a particular character - does have a particular cadence, structure, style, as everyone's does. Is that how I want this narrator to sound? I'm not sure. I need a voice for this novel which isn't my own, but it's no character's either. It's... itself, whatever (whoever?) that self is.

Alarm bells and coughing fits

It's surprising what you can learn from popular fiction. Apart from containing the first full-frontal sex scenes I ever read (learnt a good deal there), Judith Krantz's Scruples also supplied me with a piece of understanding which is nothing to do with sex but which has stayed with me. Towards the end of the novel the heroine is watching her new movie-director husband edit a movie. I don't have a copy of the book these days but, as I remember, she notices how the most beautiful piece of film or exquisitely acted scene will be be cut, if it spoils the structure or pace of the move as a whole.

I can't really say that I've looked to the S&F novels of the late 70s and early 80s for much in the way of writing advice, though I'm sure the mega-sellers such as Krantz's could teach many of us a thing or two about storytelling. But perhaps sacrificing beauty is a good way to think of this question, and a better one than the often-quoted "murder your darlings", which has strong whiff of the nastiest side of your Inner Calvinist: if you love it, it must be bad, and if it's bad you must kill it. But you'll know by now, from posts like The Common Scaffold, that I don't think it's useful to beat ourselves up for a "failure" which is a natural result of how writing happens. Certainly, an alarm bell should ring if there's a bit of your story which you keep finding reasons to keep. If it were clearly wrong, you'd have cut it ages ago; if it were clearly right, you wouldn't have to keep finding reasons to keep it, because we only need to cling to things when they're threatened. But it's your own writerly horse sense which is threatening it, because it slows the pace or unbalances things; it pulls the reader out of the story and wrecks the fictional dream; or it breaks up the voice as badly as a soprano's fit of coughing.

So why do we cling? There are various possible reasons, I think. Did it cost a lot of effort in research? In writing? Do you love the non-fiction material you know or discovered (we historical fictioneers are horribly prone to this)? Does it bring in something or someone precious to you, in however disguised a form? Did it slake the deep writerly need to get something or somewhere which matters to you down on paper? Or the need to pin down an idea or an observation? Is it something someone told you is a requirement for the genre, or an agent-catching idea? Is it funny of itself, or touching? Is it just really, really well written - a piece of prose you're rightly proud of? To cut any of these out of the book would be to lose something well worth saving.

Only of course you must cut them. Your story-train may rush across Picardy at a speed even Hitler didn't dream of, or it may amble through remote mountain passes so slowly you can see every gentian, but if you don't build it right then it won't withstand the journey, and if it stalls the passengers will sooner or later get off. But that doesn't mean your darlings are worthless, or you were stupid to write them, or you're a wimp to want to keep them. Of themselves, these are all good things in a piece of writing, and as well as the fact that good writing is always worth doing, you almost certainly needed to write them before you could find out that on this train they're bad for the aerodynamics, or obscure the view of the Alps.

So next time the warning bell rings in your writerly mind don't either stop your ears to it, or let it deafen you to the piece's merits. Give yourself a chance to enjoy what was good in the writing and why it's there; let yourself know that it was good, and you wrote it. And then get out the knife.