Emma Darwin's Blog, page 33

A word in your ear

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine writing a novel which was trying to set forward a thesis, or prove a point. Indeed, when I told a literary journalist that one of the themes of The Mathematics of Love turned out to be lost children and she asked me what it says about lost children, I floundered: I hadn't had an argument or a thesis, just an emotional centre for the novel.

But the novel I've just finished is the first which has come from an idea. I knew from the first moment that it was going to be about betrayal. So I went what Ishiguro calls "location hunting": I sought out a time and a place, and then people, which would embody all the things I wanted to... I nearly said "say", about betrayal, but that sounds too tidy and conclusive. "Explore"? "Evoke"? "Embody", perhaps, because that's what we do, as novelists, isn't it: we tell stories and poke ideas around by means of particular, fictional human bodies. These bodies are enmeshed as we all are in nets of allegiance and trust, and now they're threatened.

The novel I haven't started writing is the first thing I've ever written which takes the least account of a review of my work; in The Times Sarah Vine said, of The Mathematics of Love, "Everyone is, at the core, vulnerable, their happiness bittersweet and fleeting but nevertheless priceless." And when I happened to remember that (it's the sort of review you do remember) the wisps of story and characters floating around in my mind suddenly made sense, and the novel got its word; this is a story about happiness.

So then I started thinking about whether there was a one-word description for their predecessors. I knew from early on that The Mathematics of Love was about voyeurism, and later lost children. But if you'd asked me what A Secret Alchemy was about I would have said "Elizabeth and Anthony Woodville, and a modern historian." It was my agent who said, "It's about marriage, isn't it?" and she was utterly right, and the title came from that knowledge.

So could you give your novel a - I hesitate to call it a theme - a one-word tag? It's a bit terse for the inevitable interviewer's question, "What's your book about?" but at least it'll stop you rabbitting on for paragraphs: the interviewer wants two sentences, max. Like an elevator pitch, the idea of reducing your book to a single word is at once horrifying, because it seems so reductive, and immensely useful. Not because it's easier to sell: one word can't be High Concept in the way the movie industry wants. It's useful because, your one word having emerged or been found, it stays in your ear as you write. Pieces of plot become coherent and significant, instead of being a means of pushing your characters around. Small scenes, minor characters become part of the whole when your one word colours what they say and do. There's a reason to choose one name, or refer to (not quote - too expensive) one song lyric, rather than another. It's a way of channelling some of the millions decisions you must make into a more coherent stream than they'd otherwise be. It's not reductive, any more than it's reductive to find the first right colour for a room in a precious ornament or beloved rug: it's round that which you'll build the rest of the colour scheme. Even though only some people will look at it and say, 'That's a wonderful colour!", just about everyone will (you hope) find the room more welcoming/appealing/ordered/attractive/exciting, because of it.

The York Festival of Writing 2011 #FOW11

This year's York Festival of Writing is two months away, on 25th-27th March, and I'll be there, along with dozens of other authors, plus agents, workshop leaders, publishers, editors and several hundred writers at varying stages of their aspiration. I'm leading a workshop on The Writer's Voices as well as a mini-course with my companion-in-crime, Debi Alper, on Finding Your Voice. I'm also doing Book Doctor slots, though they're filling up fast, I see. Last year was huge fun, in a head-spinning sort of way, and afterwards I blogged about it all in Ducks, Dreams and Cross-channel Ferries. But what about the expectations of it before the event?

For some it's the chance to hear writers they admire talk, or to get to grips with particular aspects of writing - point-of-view, internet marketing, thrillers, establishing character - in the company of an expert. The chance to have coffee with a book trade professional or buy them a drink is the lure for others, and many want to meet other writers in the same boat as themselves. Writing is a painfully isolated business at the best of times, and oh! the joy of meeting others who know exactly what you're talking about, how it feels, and who might even have a good idea about how to get your Chapter Ten out of the doldrums. There's a bookstall throughout the festival, with all the authors' books on sale, so a signed copy is a nice souvenir, too.

And for many, of course, the glittering prize would be to be Taken On By An Agent or even A Publisher. It's very understandable: York is all about getting your work publishable. But what would be a shame - a folly, though an understandable one - would be to pin all your hopes, and all your reasons for coming to York, on that one outcome. Yes, some will reach it. No, not everyone will. In my Twelve Tools (Not Rules) of Writing, I said that you should never write something purely to achieve an external goal, and I'd suggest that it's true too of spending money on your writing: that you should never do it purely in the hope of buying a leg-up to get over the wall into the book trade.

It's like going to enormous lengths of clothes, makeup and travelling to get to a party you don't want to go to, purely in the hope of meeting the love of your life. Chances are - loves of lives being thin on the ground - that you won't. And if that's all you're thinking about, you may not see or hear the lovely, gay man who might become a really important friend; the nice, clever woman who might offer you a job; the children who make you laugh; their step-mother who runs the PTA and books your theatre group for their AGM... As I was talking about in Several rabbits at once, networking only works if you know who you are (why you're there in that sense) but don't have too fixed an idea of what you want.

Of course what the workshops and talks and mini-courses offer is more pin-downable, and one huge reason for coming to York is to find help to become a better writer. You could find some of that elsewhere, but there's a fizzing chemistry when there's so much being offered by so many different people all in one place - and it is all in one place - which seems to double the effect. There's all the talking and meeting and gossipping over food, coffee, drink (lots of drink...), during the strolls to and from the rooms, on the train. There's the sense that we're all part of a community of people who think that writing matters, whether you've just written your first short story or are hammering away at a novel you hope will get you onto a MA or into The Bookseller.

And when you're gazing at two top agents talking to each other, or hearing what this editor's looking for or that publisher thinks will be the Next Big Thing, or watching a bookseller scuttling in from a star author's event and unpacking a box of books, and perhaps you're feeling daunted, just remember: it all starts with us and what we do, and none of those people would have a job if we didn't exist. And nor would York, because it exists for us.

The desirable difficulty of sleeve and paint

Oh, how I do love a thoroughly counter-intuitive discovery! Apparently, the plainer and cleaner the typeface, the less a reader will learn and remember of the detail of the text. A typeface which slows the reader means they learn and understand more of what's being said. Not just the denotation, but the connotations, the friction between them, the prosody which affects the tone and 'feel' of the piece... they all have time to grow and flower, and create a full meaning, rather than only a basic meaning, in the reader's mind.

This sounds to me like something fairly fundamental in human consciousness. In Rembrandt's painting The Jewish Bride, for example, the huge, thickly embroidered sleeve of the man is the most extraordinary assemblage of paint. Rembrandt used the skin from paint left out overnight to create the the white highlights, and even as you sense the richness of the cloth and the pride of the man you can see the wrinkles and bumps of it; your eye-movements catch on the physical nature of the art, the extreme paint-ishness, in a way which makes the mimetic nature of art – the evocation of the garment – even more vivid. And I don't think you have to know anything about painting technique, let alone be thinking about it, for that effect to work on you; it's built into what the artist has done to the canvas.

Journalists are taught to work with received phrases so that readers can understand them with minimum puzzlement and maximum speed, and move on. Whereas one important characteristic of literary fiction is almost always that the words on the page are more unusual for that subject, or more unusually put together. Once un-received words or conjunctions of words catch on the ear and mind as the eye catches on the roughness of the sleeve, then the mind has to work harder – so probably slower – to understand it. This frustrates readers who just want to get on with the story, but at a slower speed of taking in the denotation, the connotations to begin to flower. (Though readers who don't know how to slow down deliberately in reading an apparently super-simple text may also be frustrated by not finding those flowers either.) That's not about consciously appreciating technique in a writerly way, versus immersing in the story, as much pro- and anti-literary talk assumes; that's about how the brain works.

Experts in pedagogy call it desirable difficulty. Studies show that students are most satisfied by the courses where both goals and processes are made very clear, and are worked through in an organised way. But they also show that such courses don't help students gain good understanding or grades nearly as well as courses where both processes and goals are more opaque and less easily found. In having to work out what they need from the course, rather than being told, and then grapple it out from what they're offered instead of being shown what they must learn, students integrate the new knowledge and understanding: it becomes their own.

And then a student learning to write poetry said how hard last lines seemed to be: it was difficult to avoid them being trite or a let-down. And I talked about the first of Edwin Morgan's Glasgow Sonnets, and said about the end,

What he hasn't done is gone on to write - to spell out, make explicit - the conclusion that he (presumably) wants you to come to. The poem led us to that point, and now leaves us there, to think and feel in the space after the last line; the understanding is ours, not handed to us by the poet...

As any adult finding themselves crying or laughing on cue in a well-made Disney film knows, we can be made to think and feel precisely as an artist wants us to. But the experience of most really good art is a more ambiguous business; it offers both sleeve and paint and the perceptual friction between them, to get you to grapple out what you see, think and feel. And because it's you who did the grappling, the thought and feeling are yours: you make the book, or the picture, your own.

If a thing's worth writing...

As night follows day, a new novel has entered the works, just as the final draft of the novel I think of as my Betrayal novel, has left them, going from my desk to my agent's and onwards. Not that it's new in the obvious sense; it first appeared, untimely, almost exactly two years ago. Since then I've been... not exactly ignoring it, but making no effort to do more with it than I couldn't avoid. I've bought the occasional book that caught my eye, clipped articles out of the TLS, gone to exhibitions that were relevant, collected postcards and leaflets, made a note of something I heard on the radio... but I've never allowed myself to sit down and Think.

And then a week ago, I did. In among lots of other, duller work, I was able to allow myself some treats: hours I could spend on this delicious stage of creating a novel. I collected up all the clippings; trawled my notebooks for the scraps and even pages headed "Happiness novel" (and found various nice things along the way); dug in the pocket at the back for the bus-tickets on which I'd scrawled things; found the one written with an inkless biro, my thought showing only as indentations. And then I pulled the cellophane off a big, squashy-covered Moleskine and found a magazine file, and sorted everything out. A few days later I began to try to germinate a few of these seeds. And later again I did a bit of what others might call planning, but I call thinking-aloud-on-paper, and from that made a working notebook to refer to, because free-thinking, like free-writing, and shaping the result into something useful, is a two-stage process; the time and paper spent turning the former into the latter is time well spent.

And now that I've done some brooding over characters and ideas, made spider diagrams of how characters relate to each other (in the emotional as well as familial sense) and imagined outwards to things which might happen, I realise that it's no longer a matter of deciding to work on the novel; like a new baby, it's taken up permanent residence in my life. It's such an exciting stage, this business of watching the clouds of unknowing massing, that it's hard to put off the moment of starting to condense them by writing Chapter One. But, having spent two years not starting it, I'm beginning to think that I should add to the four things which you need to have, if you want to become a writer. As well as persistence, hard work, talent and luck, I think you need patience.

Perhaps patience is part of craftsmanship. You need to put up with the fact that at the moment your ducks are wonky, you need to not launch into the new novel before it's ready, you need to not send your half-baked novel to agents just because you're longing get your singing heard, and you need to not throw in the towel at the first rejection, or even the twentieth. It's not that no publisher ever needed to be nagged for an answer, heaven knows. And it's not that history isn't full of novels written in six white hot weeks of inspiration - some pieces of writing come righter, quicker, than others - although it's rather less full of novels bought on the strength of an unfinished draft.

And certainly some kinds of patience come with confidence, or rather trust, and I write as someone who is extremely impatient in every other part of life. This will be the ninth novel I've written, so although I don't have a story yet, let alone a working plot, I have absolute trust that it will come, and come when it's good and ready. And I'm in the position - at the moment - to trust that when it's written, at least one agent and two editors will read it. But if you can't choose to feel patient, you can choose not to act on your impatience to do the next thing, to reach a goal, whatever you need to prove to yourself, or whatever The Ropeseller says about the market. It's not that you abandon the goal - although letting go of the outcome can have all sorts of good results - it's that you don't rush upon it. You don't let your desire to acquire the product overwhelm your respect for your process. If a thing's worth writing, after all, it's worth waiting for.

Starting to breathe

Over on Nicola Morgan's blog she has one of her typically common-sensical pieces about if and how an agent was right to reject a manuscript on the grounds that the writer's not so young any more, and limited in how much she can travel. Her conclusion is that the agent has a point, for general reasons to do with how the book trade works, but no, those reasons aren't conclusive. In other words, the general nature of the book trade doesn't translate into a particular - and therefore absolute - rule. And then in the comment trail agent Carole Blake says, "Writers shouldn't be discouraged by generalisations thrown out at random: I believe generalisation is often the enemy of truth."

And so do I. How often on this blog have I found myself saying, "It's not as simple as that"? Most recently I was exploring the value of recognising that, in "The opposite is also true." And then it came to me that, of course, generalising is the enemy of fiction. I'm not alone; in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel Jane Smiley argues that it's the very nature of the form to resist generalisation. It's a form born to tell stories about individuals "as if" they had really existed, including (as drama, for example, can't) depicting their individual, internal consciousness: the place where they are most intractably themselves. However much the writer chooses characters to be representative (and thereby hangs many a row, such as over Eastenders this week), their representative function will always be undermined by the fact that they are only themselves; at some level we know that others might be different. And most readers love to feel that a book lets them into lives they'd never know otherwise, but hate feeling that the writer has an agenda (political, moral, social) which forces human particularity into a pre-determined mould; for them the novel dies on its feet. 1984 may say some very big social and political things, but it only gets to do that because we also want to know what happens to that person and consciousness named Winston Smith - and what does happen, it's not a coincidence, horrifies us.

But generalising is also the enemy of your writing. At the most basic show-vs-tell level, "It was a wet day" doesn't draw us into the characters' experience the way that "a cold blob of rain dripped onto my nose" does, although telling has its place. And one of the reasons for getting your feet on the ground that you're writing about is that you discover the odd, crunchy details which are essential to the basic contract between writer and reader; as John Gardner says, it's by convincing readers with the accuracy and vividness of how you evoke things, that you get them to forget to disbelieve your story never happened.

More seriously, if you don't discover how, actually, a 15th century cook would make a pie or how a rock musician re-strings her guitar in the dark backstage, then you're going to have to fudge it, blur it, and avoid giving the reader enough (wrong) details for them start disbelieving again. Of course you may be able to write your way round the problem, or decide a small fudge won't matter. But the more you blur things, the more you make bland and un-quarrellable-with, the more you slip into an all-purpose likelihood, the less that world will breathe.

Even with characters, working with general likelihoods is dangerous. Everyone conforms to some stereotypes attached to their age/creed/class/ethnicity/education/job/gender, and not to others, but if you only work with these general "truths" the reader's mind slides over them, because, as with second-hand language and clichés, there's nothing to make it stop and really experience what's being depicted. We only get engaged when you start drawing out the particular of that life from the general of what's usual about that kind of person. Then they become individuals to us because they start working as fiction works. Of course you may need to work extra hard with the detail if you're going to convince us of something which runs counter to our expectations - even if those expectations are wrong. But that's a good thing, because you have to find convincing, particular roots for how and why this character is as they are. In resisting generalising about them, you find the truth of a particular human being, and they start to breathe.

It flows. So what?

Last year I went to an induction day at the Open University for new Associate Lecturers in Creative Writing. And the moment which raised the biggest laugh was when someone said, "How do we get the students to say anything more about each others' work than 'This flows really well'?" Not only did we laugh, but it became the running joke of the day, because we'd all seen and heard it so often.

Okay, perhaps that's a less than warm and empathetic attitude towards neophyte writers but, dammit, if we're going to engage with them and their writing warmly and empathetically in class - which we must, to do our job properly - we have to let off steam somewhere. Good doctors don't make jokes to patients, they save their gallows humour for the canteen, and good teachers save it for the staffroom. And "It flows" really doesn't tell you a lot, does it? Specially since they usually go on to suggest a few moved commas, spot a typo, say that they really like the characters and want to read more, and that's that.

Of course, anyone who's ever been on a training course for trainers will be familiar with the 'praise sandwich' principle, although it's always more effective if even the first slice of bread has a bit more substance than "it flows". But even in places which are avowedly (and sometimes expensively) set up to make your writing better, beginner writers seem to find it very difficult to talk detail about either good or bad stuff, and I'm sure what can come over as a culture of bland niceness is really just blandness. If I had 50p for every time I've responded to student's B's general comment about student A's piece being exciting or funny or flat or sad, with "Okay; but what actual words are doing that?" and a dead silence has followed... I wouldn't have doubled my fee, but the latte at lunchtime would have been free. Sometimes the silence is thinking time, of course: if I let it run long enough someone ventures a word or two. And certainly with any given set of students they do get better at it over time.

But it's not just me, and it's not just creative writing. As any teacher or lecturer in Literature - English or otherwise - would tell you, most students have to have the thumbscrews applied before they'll talk about specific words, sentences... the nuts and bolts and beams and rivets of what we make. Perhaps it's a change in English teaching which I've observed, towards something richer in cultural context but poorer in close reading? But we all have to write word-by-word, so why is it so hard to read that way?

Books such as Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer help, as does a firmly applied poetry course or two, and reading fiction in which the quality and originality of the prose is as important as the story it's telling. And one thing I notice when I'm teaching someone whose day job is the law is that they may lack many things in their writing, but they never, ever need teaching that individual words matter - and I'd always credit my lawyer-father with any word sense I have, as much as my English-teacher-mother. Perhaps if we could convince our students that a contract (or a treaty) might be made or broken on each word, so it had better be a good one, they'd get the message and start worrying about, and worrying away at, every word. Especially since it's just possibly true.

Things which have a proper name

I did laugh when Michael Caine recently agreed in a radio interview that he's "an instinctive actor", and promptly went into a HIGHLY technical description of how if you're talking to another actor in a scene, you should look into their left eye with your right eye, which gives you the perfect angle for the camera to pick up your expression, without it appearing that you're looking at the camera at all. No other combination of gazes will do... Oh, and don't blink, not ever, unless you want to show weakness... Instinctive? I don't think so. Caine's art, it seems to me, is the sort which conceals art, which is perhaps what makes the "instinctive" tag seem right even though he puts enormous thought and technical control into what he does.

It's a funny old business this, isn't it: the assumption is that there's a binary opposition of conscious technical understanding, versus instinctive creativity; actors talk about having technique "to fall back on", and "technical" is so often used as a synonym for dry and dehumanised. And then on a WriteWords thread crime writer Helen Black talked in detail about how she builds the opening of her novels, and then said,

I've never done this consciously, however. But that's something I often notice here on WriteWords. Someone far more knowledgeable than me will explain in a writerly way why certain things in writing work well. These things often, it transpires, even have a proper name. And I often sit here thinking, 'I do that', though I couldn't tell you how or why I do it.

Helen is a writer who wrote a novel for fun and got it published, and she's worked out her very demanding genre from first principles: she's followed her own instinctive decisions about "Like this? No, like that. And a bit of The Other. Only the other way round..." to the point where she has clear principles of storytelling without ever having been near a course or a textbook. Is she very technical, or very intuitive? The answer is, of course, is that she's turned her intuition into technique, even if she has no technical terms.

There are so many ways to discuss the same piece of writing. Helen talks about how she introduces her detective with a domestic scene so we get a sense of her as a character before the plot kicks off. I can say that in the novel I'm reporting on the structure means that the jeopardy doesn't increase, or I can say the story fizzles out. A critic discusses how Joyce roots his single day in Dublin in the archetypes of Greek Myth, and Simon Armitage talks about "giving a poem a thump to see if it rings true". "What do you mean by a slack sentence, a bland plot, really rich writing," asks the exasperated beginner? What do we mean by "voice", come to that, or "structure"? Such metaphors are writerly shorthand for how grammar, vocabulary and storytelling are working. Like intuitive writing, intuitive analysis is quick: none of us, for now, need to get down to the chromosomal level because our intuitive understandings are talking to each other. One marker of a promising student is that our metaphors make sense to them even when they've never met them before. And invariably their writerly/readerly intuitions, if not yet their technical awareness, are also operating well already: that's what makes them promising. But it's my teacher's mind, not my writer's mind, which could explain what we all mean to the rest of the class. And it's also why some terrific writers can't teach for toffee.

And it's as a teacher that I can reverse the polarity, unpicking a subordinate adverbial clause of purpose to find out why it sings. I do it not just because it amuses me (and others, to judge by the stats) nor because I don't think you can write well without being able to label the parts of speech, nor because technical understanding is handy when you need to sort out a sentence which your intuition calls clunky, or change novel genre or poetic form. I believe - no, I know - that talking technically (which probably means with proper names) about intuitive perceptions (as I was doing here) opens your ears and mind - your intuition - to the absolute molecular level of writing: how - really how - words work on each other and us, how stories are told.

The opposite is also true

A notably relaxed Christmas must be making my mind even flakier and easily knocked off-course than usual: when I turned on the radio and heard about crisis talks in Northern Ireland that awful, sick fear came over me as it does over anyone over a certain age: "Oh God! What now?" So when it turned out that the crisis was an acute water shortage, I started to laugh. Yes, it's clearly no joke at all for those suffering from it, but hey! not so long ago a headline like that would have heradled some new horror in what we once thought the most intractably, murderously divided society in Europe. My default fear was understandable, but unfounded.

Then I found Susannah Rickard's splendid post over on Strictly Writing, where she's thinking laterally about the Christmas story as an example of ruthlessly effective plot building. Whatever your individual beliefs it's not often that we step back and read such stories as narrative, but it's not just fun: it gets you thinking about how any story can - must - be built to keep us reading.

And today here's Saul Bellow, quoted in the TLS. From the little of him I know, Bellow tickles all my prejudices about a certain kind of writer, but oh, I do so agree with this, especially the bit I've emboldened:

Are most novels poor today? Undoubtedly. But that is like saying mutilation exists, a broken world exists. More mutilated and broken than before? That's perhaps the world's own secret. Really, things are now what they always were and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow. We may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it! To identify oneself with a better past! No, no!

At last I have proper words for the angry boredom I feel as pubs, forum threads and letters-to-the-editor chunter that It's All Getting Worse, and The Barbarians are At The Gate. Such a mindset is as narrow and shallow - as self-centred, you could argue - as the one which thinks that everything's fine because the recession has brought down the price of designer labels. Pessimism or cynicism isn't necessarly cleverer, cooler or more profound than optimism, trust or wholehearted joy.

What I'm picking at, in a very laid-back, I'm-on-holiday-and-can't-be-bothered-to-forge-the-links-properly sort of way, that it's bad for me/you/one/everyone to look for, and therefore see, nothing but confirmations that our default take on the world is the only one possible. I sometimes say to students that it's a very good habit, when you're writing a story, to try turning your defaults upside down: to make the postman a woman, make the teenager friendly and helpful, make the neatly-dressed middle-aged man high on drugs. Yes, it's partly that it may make a story come over a little fresher, and if it doesn't work you can always turn them back again. It's also because following through the consequences of that simple, mechanical decision may take the story to places you'd never otherwise have gone. But, more broadly and more seriously, whether your reading of choice is Brett Easton Ellis or Barbara Cartland, Hilary Mantel or Mike Gayle, it's worth remembering that it is your choice partly because you like that author's defaults, and the chances are that they've therefore become your own. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that it's every writer's sacred Duty to Art to re-invent their writerly self from the DNA upwards with every book, and besides, there's real creative value as well as pleasure for readers in ploughing your own furrow to perfection, as Wodehouse and Heyer knew. But I do think it's important for that decision to be a conscious choice based on knowing what other possibilities exist.

I think it was Beethoven (though do tell me if it wasn't - I've a feeling it might have been a Russian) who was complimented on how in his music he brought order and harmony out of chaos. And he answered, "Yes. But the opposite is also true." So my writerly New Year's Resolution isn't about writing more or tweeting less, it isn't about reading more Great Works or more newspapers, and it isn't even about keeping up better with the endless self-employed paperwork. It's to keep checking in both my life and my writing, to see whether for any given assumption, perception or conclusion, the opposite might also be true.

Ice crystals forming

I went away to not-write. One of the things they don't tell you at Hogwriter's College is that once a large part of your mental and financial self is involved with writing, no writing you do can quite escape a price tag of its likely cost or profit in terms of time, career, craft-training or hard cash. And so the pressure to keeping going with your writerly work can be as relentless as the pressure once was to put it away, and go to office parties or wipe toddlers' noses.

But for the first time in a very long time, I had neither a novel of my own to plan or write or re-write, nor a novel of someone else's to report on. My Open University students had done some lovely pieces, but the tutorial was drawing to a close. There's a short story I want to write even though I suspect it's really a novel, but it's a big, structurally complex beast that can perfectly well wait. I'm not even riding on that great WriteWords institution, the Lifeboar, who was once a Lifeboat: the place where everyone with work out on submission huddles together for warmth, and waits for signals from beyond the horizon.

So I emailed the wonderful Deborah Dooley, a journalist who also runs Retreats for You in her home in the indecently pretty North Devon village of Sheepwash; and I just got there before the snow cut them off again from Exeter. Deborah and Bob know that even writers who have built space and time for writing into their ordinary lives, sometimes need to be somewhere else to find it. There's a lot to be said, too, for having three lovely meals a day appear and disappear without you having to lift more than a knife and fork – or a spoon for the sticky toffee pudding. Then there's the massage she can arrange for your writer's shoulders and back, and the perfect balance of Do Not Disturb in your white-washed room with a fringe of thatch outside the window, and good writerly company downstairs by the Rayburn when you want it. My fellow-guest Michelle covered the walls of her room with yellow post-it notes, planning her YA novel, and worked for two lots of four hours a day, while I put on boots and took my camera, and went out to use my eyes and not my word-mind. I sat by the fire and read, finishing the utterly wonderful Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor, and reading the fascinating (though very arguable-with) Empathy and the Novel by Suzanne Keen. I talked writing (because I can't not), but I didn't do any, because I didn't have to and I was loving it. And I slept. I haven't slept so much for years.

So I didn't really see it coming when a little set of words, which I jotted on a scrap of paper weeks ago, suddenly came to mind again, and I found that I'd sellotaped them into my big notebook. Words: words for substances growing into images that grew into metaphors and thence into ideas. I sat in the window-seat and jotted one of those multi-meaning words down on the next page of the notebook and like frost-crystals more words began to form on its edges. I separated some crystals out, and grew more frost-crystals on each of them. A place name floated up, and then the place it came from, not in Devon but another of those haunted, liminal landscapes where the Celtic past is still present and our Anglo-Saxon lives can so easily bleed back into it. The place name was part of a journey: physical but also figurative. An opening sentence came.

I still don't have a character, let alone a story; I only have words, substances, sensations: a sense of consciousness but without connections. I still don't know what it's about: it's the absolute opposite of my novel-story. If I were a poet it might be a poem, for a good poem is always a journey, but I'm not, and in that form I couldn't do it justice. It isn't a novel, though no doubt some of the crystals will reappear in one, in a different pattern because all ice-crystals are unique. I don't know much about it at all, really, except that some of my best stories started this way, so I hope this one has too: by not-writing.

And while more ice-crystals form on the page and perhaps in the air, I hope that you all have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year writing or not-writing, and I thank you very much for doing so much to make this blog what it is.

Guest Post: Where Writing Meets Baseball

One of the pleasures of blogging is meeting people who I might not have met otherwise, and such a person is Barbara Baig, a hugely experienced writer and teacher of writing in the US. Her new book How to be a Writer is a fascinating  how-to book which can guide anyone to become a better and more interesting writer than they are, and therefore also an exploration of the practice of writing, in all senses of the word: the kind of thing which I think of as yoga for writers. So when Barbara told me about the research which suggests that expertise - craftsmanship - comes about not from innate talent but from practice, I asked her to do a guest blog explaining what, on the face of it, is the exact opposite of what most of us believe. Over to Barbara.

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What makes certain people really good writers? Most of us are sure we know the answer to that question: innate talent. Some people have it; others don't. If we have it, writing will be always be easy for us, and success will naturally come our way. If we don't have it—even if we love to write—we will struggle; we will feel we don't know what we are doing as writers; success will probably elude us; we are doomed to spend our lives envying those fortunate ones, gifted at birth with writing talent.

This view of talent in writing—or in any other field—is part of our world-view, reinforced by Hollywood movies about great artists, the content of literature courses (only "great writers" need apply), and Aunt Ermyntrude, who never fails to remind us that, if we were really talented as writers, we would know it by now, so why don't we give up this writing nonsense and settle down to something sensible?

This view of talent is so prevalent, it's no wonder most of us take it to heart. There's just one problem, though: it's not true. For several decades, scientific researchers in the field of expertise studies have been trying to figure out what makes certain people really great at what they do. What they have learned has shown, conclusively, that what we think we know about talent is wrong. They have studied chess players and writers, artists and firefighters, tennis players and violinists and nurses, and people in many other fields—and in none of these studies did they find evidence of ANYONE who was "born great" at something. Three British researchers in this field of expertise studies have concluded: "The evidence we have surveyed…does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts." To put this another way: Talent, that innate natural gift, that ability to achieve great results without effort, is a myth.

So, if it's not talent that makes some people outstanding in their field, what is it?

The expertise researchers have the answer: deliberate practice.

I'm not an expertise researcher; I'm a writer who specializes in the teaching of writing, something I've been doing for almost thirty years. For most of that time I taught "writing process," an approach that many of you are probably familiar with. After a while, though, I lost my initial enthusiasm for this approach; I felt it wasn't doing enough to help my students become better writers. What was missing? I spent a lot of time thinking about that question, which then led me to others: How do we really learn how to write? And what, exactly, should we be learning, anyway? For years I thought—you might even say, obsessed— about these questions.

When answers came, they arrived, not from writing, but from two unexpected sources. One was music; the other, baseball. In my forties, I took up the piano, an instrument I hadn't played since childhood, and I began to listen to the  Boston Red Sox baseball games on the radio. (At that time I was living in Massachusetts.) And gradually it dawned on me: how do musicians learn to play an instrument? Through practice. How do baseball players learn to play the game well enough to get to the major leagues? Through practice. I thought about Ted Williams, the legendary Red Sox hitter, who, as a kid, went to a neighborhood park every day after school and hit baseballs until it was too dark to see. I thought about Vladimir Horowitz, the world-famous pianist, who said, "If I don't practice for one day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it."

And then I realized what is missing in the way we learn to write: we almost never get an opportunity to practice.

That's because in school, where most people learn to write, writing takes place under what I call "performance conditions": it counts.  It's going to be read and judged and graded. The same thing is true in most creative writing workshops: we're writing pieces that will be critiqued, pieces we want to make "good enough" to get published. But when we do something only under performance conditions, we're not likely to be able to learn anything about how to do it well; performance conditions create anxiety and stress that block learning.

And so I came to the conclusion that if we want to write, or to become better writers, what we most need is the opportunity to practice.

That's because practice is the way we humans learn our skills, from learning to walk to learning to drive a car. No one is born with an innate ability to be great at something; she or he has to LEARN those skills. And the more we practice, the more our skills improve. It's certainly true that some people are more fortunate than others in the opportunities that come their way to learn and practice. Take Mozart, for instance. In  popular imagination, he's the "divine genius" from whom masterpieces simply poured forth. The truth is that Mozart was lucky enough to be born to an ambitious musician, who was also a skilled teacher, and who put his son into training as a musician and composer from the age of three. When we look at other people who have achieved great success, we see the same pattern: the golfer Tiger Woods was also taught by his father from an early age; the Bronte sisters spent their childhood writing small books; the Beatles had the opportunity to play for thousands of hours in Hamburg clubs.

The expertise researchers have even come up with a formula for outstanding performance: if you want to be really great at some activity, you have to put in at least 10,000 hours of practice. (That's about three hours a day for ten years.)

Now, realistically, most of us don't have the time for that kind of practice. But what stands out for me in the findings of the expertise researchers is not what they say about how some people become great, but what they tell us about how we can all learn.

Take someone who wants to play baseball. A good coach will help him (or her) break down the activity of hitting a pitched ball down into its component parts and demonstrate how to practice each part separately. A good music teacher will do the same thing with her students, taking the work of performance and breaking it down into particular skills, which can then be practiced separately.

This breaking down of an activity into component skills, and then practicing each one separately, is the key to learning to do anything well. K. Anders Ericsson, perhaps the most prominent  of the expertise researchers, has explained that deliberate practice consists of "training activities that have been specifically designed to improve some aspect of an individual's target performance." Deliberate practice activities are designed, also, to be repeated—not just a couple of times, but over and over and over. It's through this repetition that skills that first feel awkward—like swinging a baseball bat or writing a declarative sentence—become so automatic that we can rely upon them to serve us well in performance situations.

If we want to apply the deliberate practice approach to becoming better writers, we can. To do that, it's helpful to distinguish in our minds between performance writing (writing we want to make good enough to get published) and practice writing. Then, when we sit down to write, we need to give ourselves time to practice, so we can learn and develop our skills.

But what, exactly, should we be practicing?

Here we writers aren't as fortunate as aspiring baseball players and musicians. The teaching of skills through practice is traditional in sports and music, so coaches and teachers in those fields have an established repertoire of practices to make use of. But writing isn't typically taught in this way. For the past several years I've been developing a practice-based approach to help writers learn their skills. Here's the general framework I've come up with:

When we write, we need two main categories of skills: I call them "content skills" and "craft skills." Content skills are the ones we need in order to come up with ideas and material for pieces of writing; we need, for instance to have well-trained faculties of observation, imagination, curiosity, and others. We also need the skill of establishing a natural relationship with readers, so we can communicate our content to them. Craft skills include "large craft"—that is, an understanding of how one's chosen genre works—and "small craft": the ability to use language to communicate and to move our readers (that is, skills in diction and syntax), and a solid foundation in English grammar.

Like aspiring baseball players and pianists, we can't learn our skills all at once. We have to practice them separately. I have devised a number of foundational practices which I teach in my workshops, in my book, and online (www.wherewriterslearn.com). I also believe that every writer can identify for herself the skills she needs to learn; in effect, to create an individual learning plan. One of the things the expertise researchers have discovered is that people who become great in a field ultimately become their own teachers.

Deliberate practice is not easy. It's not just hacking around—doing endless amounts of freewriting, for example; and it's not doing things you already know how to do. Deliberate practice is highly focused and intentional—you're engaging in a particular activity, and doing it over and over and over, because you are trying to build one particular skill. When you feel comfortable with that activity, you challenge yourself to begin again with an activity you're not so good at. So, for instance, if you're not good at collecting material for writing, you practice that; if you're not good at getting characters in and out of rooms, you practice that; if you're not good at writing complex sentences, you practice that. You can decide what you need to be practicing at any given time.

Anders Ericsson and other expertise researchers have conducted hundreds of studies on what makes people really good at an activity, and they have concluded that deliberate practice really works. Not only does it build skills, which we can then count on to serve us when we return to the realm of "performance writing," it also develops in us the habit of focused attention so necessary to the producing of excellent work, as well as to our everyday well-being. Deliberate practice also quite literally builds our brains, establishing new connections and increasing an important substance called myelin. Most of all, perhaps, deliberate practice builds our confidence. When we have trained our skills, then we know what we are doing when we write. We no longer need to spend time wishing we had innate talent. We can, instead, focus our trained skills on producing the best writing we can.