Emma Darwin's Blog, page 35

Okay, so what do I think literary fiction is?

It's a hardy perennial of a question among writers, because it matters, from which agent might represent you to what cover your book might get. The forums seethe with arguments about "any book worth reading" to "would you call Dickens literary?" to "pointless pretentious rubbish" or even (seriously) "a book only academics will like".The latter can't be true, because there can't be enough academics in the world to account for the combined sales of Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Helen Dunmore, Hilary Mantel, Peter Ackroyd, Barry Unsworth, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, Martin Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco... But it is worth remembering that if you like and read literary fiction, in the world at large you are a tiny minority of book readers, and an even tinier minority of human beings. That's the truth.

But I've noticed that inside the book trade (and don't forget that, as Harry Bingham says in Getting Published, writers by definition aren't inside it) no one angsts about this question at all. They might argue about whether a book really classes as "literary", for all those purposes from imprint to bookshop promotion, but they don't argue about what "literary" is. Not that they could tell you, at least only by talking about specific examples; they just know. They're also less and less inclined to tolerate low sales in return for literary prestige, so although the market of readers is undeniably there, they're more and more stringent about whether a literary-seeming novel will get published. So I've been trying to work it all out.

The first thing to say is that it's always talked about as an either-or but actually it's a spectrum as wide as the number of books published. And a little way from the right-hand, literary end of the spectrum there's a ditch, after which books count as "commercial". I know that ditch isn't very wide because I write with one foot on each side of it. But it IS, undeniably, there. The second thing to say (since lots of the points I'm about to make are about the original versus the familiar), is that all fiction works by integrating the familiar (the world that readers experience themselves) with the new (what they don't know themselves), in varying proportions. This is as true of category erotica or the thriller which still finds a new twist while ticking the genre boxes utterly reliably, as it is of the uber-literary blockbuster novel which is like nothing you've ever read before but is, among other things, playing sophisticated games with the great and familiar literature of the past. So, here is my attempt to help you decide which side of the ditch you're on.

"Literary fiction" for the book trade is just another genre, another place on the bookshop shelf; one which carries more weight in literary prestige than it does in sales, and so gets covers, blurb, promotion and marketing to suit that market. It overlaps with, but is not the same as, "literary fiction" as something for writers to understand. And it gets confused with "literature", which means people start trying to argue about whether Dickens would, or Graham Greene... whatever. Which is beside the point. If we're talking about writers now and the readers who might buy their work, I would suggest that for a book to be classed as literary fction it needs to fulfil a good few (though not necessarily all) of the following criteria. So, a literary novel may:

1) pay as much attention to the originality and quality of the prose, as it will to the demands of plot-driven storytelling.

2) ask harder work of the reader(think contemporary poetry), both in terms of the prose, whether it's lavishly baroque or fish-bone spare and in terms of assembling the story out of the way it's told (think Possession or Time's Arrow);

3) ask the reader to tolerate not getting everything there is to be got, in the first read. Some readers love this, and feel a book's superficial if they get it all immediately. Some hate it, and feel frustrated that they're missing stuff.

4) when it comes to the proportions of originality to familiarity, there's more originality, in more aspects (plot, character, prose, ideas etc. etc.) than in commercial fiction. The more that's original and the more original it is, the more challenging it will be to read. It may or may not actually then be hard to understand at the basic, factual level.

5) ask the reader to tolerate, say, an unreliable narrator who may be lying; to read between the lines for the truth which may not be the truth actually, or not all of it; to appreciate an inadequate narrator (The Curious Incident, What Maisie Knew) and assemble the truth from what they transmit but can't understand

6) ask the reader to read between the lines of extremely bare prose (think Hemingway and acolytes) which makes no judgements and leaves very large gaps in which the reader has to do the thinking for themselves.

7) take the reader into the heads of unlikeable characters (American Psycho, God's Own Country) and enjoy being there for the human interest. Glamorous baddies, who do all the evil things we don't feel able to, have an honoured place in commercial fiction (Alexis in Dynasty) but obscurely unpleasant and disgusting ones don't.

8) expect the reader to enjoy a story where "less happens", not because nothing happens but because what happens is defined in less straighforward terms of action and emotion, may be more elliptically expressed or less clearly formed in terms of growth-and-change

9) expect the reader to enjoy a story where what you're supposed to think is less clear: both characters and outcomes are not obviously good or bad, desirable or undesirable: it may not be obvious what the reader should want to happen. This is a point excellently made in Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built.

10) work with explicit and/or implicit references to literature (not just Pride & Prejudice and Anne of Green Gables), art, film, philosophy, music or a few of the gazillion other bits of culture/language/ideas which you can't rely on all readers to have at their fingertips.

11) have more equivocal or unresolved explorations of the subject and themes, with more morally complex characters, with more challenging (because unsatisfying) outcomes of the story

12) expect the reader to be happy not to have the basic genre-boxes ticked: this book may not be neatly classifiable by plot-style and how its resolved, as thriller, adventure, romance or mystery.

13) if it uses a genre setting - history, space, fantasy, exotic location - to use it in challenging and original ways. Yes, a non-western-contemporary setting doesn't mean the book isn't about us here and now - a novel is always about that at some level, or why would you be writing it? But literary historical fiction isn't just modern stories with swords and nicer frocks, literary sci-fi isn't just space ships instead of cars.

And yes, I'm sure you're now boiling with examples of commercial novels which do some of these, and literary novels which don't. The point is, the more of these a novel does, the more literary it is. Notice how much I'm saying "more" and "less"? That's because it's a spectrum. But the trade has to decide where on the spectrum it is, because thereby hang many decisions about the best way to get it under the noses of reader who might buy it, and like it, whether it's covers, or review copies or prizes.

Waste not, write not

In Jerusha Cowless's most recent missive from the South Seas, she came close to telling a writer what to do. (Clearly Jerusha is not me: I try never to tell anyone what to do, only to unpick the possiblities as clearly as I can. Honest.) Jerusha hinted that a poetry course might be the best way to go beyond the edges of that writer's own commercial-mum-lit-writing nature.

And, having read Jerusha's answer, I'm working on a theory that the thing to do when you need/want a break or have got stuck with your writing, is the absolute opposite of what it was that you have been - and probably feel you "should be" - doing. Commercial novelists should do a poetry course. Poets should write Talking Heads type stories with a full plot voiced by all sorts of different characters. Womag story writers, who have to find fresh humour and drama in some of the tighest parameters in the writing trade, should start free-writing and see what happens. Literary short fiction writers wedded to the magnifying-glass perfection of their form should do NaNoWriMo and start unreeling their literary cloth with what used to be called gay abandon, before that phrase came to mean something equally delightful, but rather different. Poets who love traditional forms should refuse to rhyme or scan, lovers of free verse should tackle a sonnet, literary blockbuster novelists should try writing a Mills & Boon pocket novel where they only have 20,000 words in which everything must be clear, passionate, and tie up neatly at the end. And so on.

There are lots of excellent reasons for trying this:

Most writers could do with discovering if there are any other strings they might add to their bow, not least for economic survival but also because it might expand your repertoire and/or your craftsman's toolkit.
Western education and society train us ruthlessly to decide to do something, go for it, and (Deus vult, Inshallah) achieve it, so it's liberating to stop trying to write words which will achieve the goal we've set ourselves.
We all ought to remember that if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly - i.e. not achieve it, i.e. "fail". You'll learn just as much as when you do something successfully, and possibly more.
Doing writing stuff which is creative but isn't directed at The Project (a bit of journalling, a blog, most of all something like a poetry course or the kind of writer's group which does what writing teacher extraordinaire Diane Samuels calls "yoga for writers") means that your writing-brain is in gear, but much more open and free-form than it can be when it's locked into the need to work out how to say the next bit of the novel, with pre-decided characters, voices, plot and so on.
Actors do yoga, and our job is not very different. It's not that they're expecting to be cast in a part where the character has to be a brilliant yoga-doer, it's that the more free and flexible their body is, the better it will be able to respond to whatever the next part does turn out to need, and embody that character whoever they are.

What I'm getting at is that sometimes what's important isn't the goal/product, but the doing/process. It can be incredibly hard to persuade yourself to do writing which is a "waste of time". If the only way you can feel okay about doing something as "self-indulgent" as writing is to direct it at writing a piece which is hoping to get on a bookshop shelf or the poetry stage, then it can be very hard to change to the kind of work which doesn't have an obvious goal or even payoff. If what you really want to be is a poet - and you may well be right that a poet is what you are - and you'll never write a decent story, then is there any point in trying? If the only reason you have for the time/money/neglect-of-family which is involved in taking a poetry course, say, is that it may or may not make you a better or happier writer of novels, can you do that if you're not sure you'll ever get another novel published? Even if partner-and-children say they're cool about the apparent pointlessness of the poetry course, it can still be hard to silence your Inner Protestant, who says it's selfish and, most lethal of all, "self-indulgent".

But I do think this is somewhere where society's goal-orientedness and anti-"self-indulgent" psyche can really screw things up for a creative person. I've just worked out that, in order to send my agent a 140,000 word novel, I've written/re-written nearly half a million words. It's wasteful, yes, but it's wasteful in the way that it's "wasteful" to make sure nursing rotas build in enough time to talk to the patients: the good outcomes are not predictable in either scale or nature, but they are, absolutely and proveably, real. And, goodness me, it's not as if nature isn't wasteful. Whether you're counting sperm, or stars, there are a great deal more than the minimum necessary for life, love and beauty. And it's the same with writing.

Published, unpublished and taking your proof to bed

Over on Sally Quiller's excellent blog, she's been asking why unpublished writers sometimes seem to resent published writers so, when being published, after all, is what they're all trying for. And that set me wondering more widely about the often uncomfortable relationship between those who haven't ever had their name on something that appears in editorially-controlled print or electronica, and those who have.

Sally's talking about the feeling that published writers "don't deserve", for example, to be allowed to enter competitions which appear to be chiefly intended for unpublished writers to get a toe on the ladder. (And "published-only" competitions generate resentment in reverse.)This one, I think, turns on what you think the function of a competition is, and of course that's going to depend on the competition.  But for the short-fictioneers, in particular, competitions continue to be the means by which many get published.

The resentment is rooted in various misconceptions. First, that once you're published you'll go on being published. Would that that were true, but it isn't. No author likes to make much of just how little they're paid, how often their work is still rejected, how much they fear the moment when their agent suggests they write under another name... So the public and the aspirers continue in happy ignorance of how, actually, things aren't changed much by having once been in Waterstones.

Another problem is that "being published" is, in some ways, a qualification. Someone who isn't your mum has said that your work has merit, that it's of a certain standard, and put their print bill where their mouth is. That may also open the doors to other things - jobs, freelance work, competitions, admiring friends-and-relations. It is an qualification, and one which seems likely to change your life.

But of course it doesn't, not really, and that's the second misconception. Aspiring writers focus on "the book in my hand": it's like Christmas and they can't think beyond it. Of course that's a great moment: I took the bound proof of The Mathematics of Love to bed with me for several days. But it is only a moment. Once you've been heard, you've been heard. It's when you realise that you're thinking, "What next?" that you realise that not much has changed, because when you travel to a foreign land, the first person you meet is yourself, and that self is, as usual, trying to write a new novel.

And then of course there's the status, or whatever you'd call it: the public face. If "being an author" is now the job that more people want than any other, then I've apparently got it, and so have a fair few others, from J K Rowling to the latest signing by a little indie press. Having a job (which isn't a job) that lots of people (albeit from happy ignorance) want, can go both ways. Very, very occasionally someone comes all over wobbly to meet Emma Darwin, Novelist (me? do they know what I'm really like?) though not as wobbly as the Darwin-freaks do. It's weird, but it's an ego-trip of sorts. Occasionally, though, things get trickier. It's a delicate balance in dealing with aspiring writers, to be positive and encouraging, because the key to good writing is confidence as much as craft, while being honest and managing expectations.

Sometimes people resent you for trampling on their dreams, even if you thought you were just tiptoeing round the edges. More seriously, occasionally you run across someone for whom Being Published is The Thing Which Will Make Them All Right, but instead of using that fierce (although arguably unhealthy) drive, to make friends and write better, they look at someone who has reached the All Rightness which has so far eluded them, and feel a corrosive sense of their own inadequacy. Then, whether they're Caliban, playing group dynamics behind the scenes, or are overtly hostile, attacking what they see as the cause of that corrosion - i.e. the author who was only trying to help - is a way of avoiding having to feel and know the nasty stuff inside themselves. And they're who forum moderators and spam blockers are for.

Luckily, most of the time it's not like that at all. For each bitter and twisted Caliban, there are ten aspiring writers who are cheered to know that a publishing contract is a good thing to have, but a really, really bad thing to pin your life, hopes and self esteem on. And they're grateful that we're honest about it.

Bedroom eyes

The perennial question came up: "I'm 30,000 words in, and it stinks. I've a nasty feeling the central idea is no good and the writing's rubbish. Should I keep going? I've got a completely different idea, which is much more promising and likely to work." I've ruminated before about writerly adultery, and the third-of-the-way-in mark seems to be the writerly equivalent of the seven year itch. When you're cohabiting with a novel, sharing the washing up, mortgage, tricky family stuff and leak in the roof, the Other Idea is so very delightful. It smiles at you in the candlelight of the restaurant, laughs back at you over its shoulder as it skips away along the beach, has a clever body and a beautiful mind, and oh, those bedroom eyes... But it's not the one who's there when you come home, when you go to sleep, when you wake up. It's not the one who's still there when you're ill, who still needs you when it's tired and grumpy, who is words of your word, flesh of your flesh. And most of the time, most of us, know it.

Lots of people (including me) often liken books to babies. But if our relationship to a book must ultimately be that of a parent, while we're writing it it seems to me that it's more like a marriage. "Where did you first meet?" the audience asks, and the answer may be that you saw The One across the carriage, on a train you wouldn't have been on but for the faulty signals at Letchworth. Or a friend had given you the history book she said you'd love, and there was The One in all its glory. "Was it love at first sight?" Yes – you were obsessed, dreaming of The One day and night, could think of nothing else until you'd tracked The One down and got its address. No – it sort of crept up on you that the quiet one in the corner of the office was The One.

The courtship, it seems to me, is when you're getting to know The One and it you. It's all that dreaming, wandering through museums, sharing the books and films you love, finding out whether the conversation goes round in circles, or leads off in new directions. And then one day, when it seems likely that most of those directions are places you'd want to go together, you realise that this really is The One, for the long haul. And you get engaged.

Now things get a bit more formal. Never mind bridesmaids' dresses and booking the wedding capsule on the London Eye, this is about a joint mortgage and finding jobs in the same city: research, some solid planning, plots and schemes about process, condensing the mist into trackable streams of water. This is where you work out what you really want, how it really ticks, whether you really can make it work till... death do you part.

If so, then writing Chapter One is like taking your wedding vows. Less scary, of course, because no one except you and the novel can hear yourselves promise to have and to hold, for richer or poorer... unless you have an agent or publisher as witness. There are hazards, of course. Once, a New Idea of mine didn't have the decency to wait until the honeymoon was over, but actually popped its head round the door on the day that the WIP and I set off from the church. And we all know couples where The One was clearly The Wrong One, even if it took a messy three-way struggle to tell you.

I don't want to scare us all: what we write is never set in stone, and sometimes you can only discover that a project is the wrong one by, at the very least, cohabiting with it for a while. But when you actually start spinning all those ideas, feelings and experiences into a thick, single story-rope, then you've reached the moment of no turning back, the moment when instead of being two entities flirting or courting, you become one. Of course, you may ultimately find out that, sadly, you gave it every chance and it's never going to work. So be it. But being divorced is not the same as never having been married.

Peering at the horizon

I've known authors who can't concentrate for more than 15 minutes without pulling their head out of their fictional world to click through to their fix, even when they have scary contractual deadlines to meet. I've known some who spent days writing macros so the hit could happen automatically. I've known some whose struggle to withdraw had them staring at the screen, sweating with the effort of Not Going There. Even case-hardened Harry Bingham, novelist, non-fictioneer and director of Writers Workshop, who knows more about the book trade than most of us ever will, has confessed to being ever so slightly addicted since his latest book, Getting Published, was launched. And, worst of all, there's a funny little website which Jessica Ruston describes as "crack for writers", because the hit is so intense, and so easily bought, that it's lethal.

I'm talking about Amazon rankings, and yes, I've been addicted to. I haven't had a new book out for a while, and so my novels are chuntering happily along in what look like the lower ranks till you realise there are books on Amazon whose ranking is in the millions. But I still take a peek every few days. And yet Amazon rankings don't tell you how many books you've sold. For one thing, all the online sellers together are only 13% of the market by volume. And because online is very ill-suited to discovering new unknowns, to quote Harry, "if you're a first-time novelist, you can probably chalk up the online market as another place where you're not going to sell in any volume". So how much can even the biggest of them tell you about how your book's doing overall? Although a spike in the ranking is evidence that your book has been bought or searched for, as a way of judging sales it's little more than useless. Amazon, understandably, keep the algorithms they use very, very secret, and although I'm told it's possible to subscribe to Neilsen BookScan to get sales figures for your ISBNs, I've yet to find out how, or how much: this is serious business data at serious business prices, and even then it doesn't reflect every book sold through every till. For actual figures, most of us rely on our publisher's royalty statements, which are a) notoriously baffling b) six months late c) include books which will be returned.

So even though we know it tells you almost nothing, our fingers wizz up to start typing in the address bar a-m-a-z... and we're there. New book. Scroll down. Ahhhhh. Older book. Scroll down. Oh. (Or sometimes the other way round, which in a funny way is nicer.) Back to work. Sticky bit. Pause for thought. Address bar. a-m-a-z...  It is about money, of course, or at least how near you are to your advance earning out. It's about your career, of course, and - if you're someone who thinks that way - about how well you're doing against your competitors. But actually the rankings are a pretty hopeless way of measuring even the latter, because what you're really hoping to outdo, as an author, is your publisher's expectations of what your book will sell.

So why do we do it? For the first week, of course you can forgive yourself. But after that? After six months? Three years? The problem is, I think, that writers have no immediate audience. We can't see the faces of our readers, we don't hear applause or the silence that's even better, we can't watch people looking at our pictures, and we're incredibly lucky or J K Rowling if we happen to see someone buying our book. No wonder the figures on my PLR statement for Large Print loans always make me want to cry: suddenly a number has become a real, if vague, person. Other than that, though, we sing into the wind, and only know we're heard if we happen to spot the smoke signals. Is it any wonder that we keep looking up from our manuscript to peer at the horizon?

Fight, flight and pouring that glass of water

It's amazingly hard, before you're published, to think beyond that glorious moment. But one thing that many aspiring writers know about and are horrified by is how "these days" (Dickens of course, being "these days") authors must do all sorts of events, appearances and readings. Since writing has an unsurprising habit of attracting people who are very happy to spend large amounts of time on their own, and who find themselves more eloquent on the page than in person, many of them are terrified.

Performance nerves are entirely natural: it's a mild case of fight-or-flight. Actors, musicians and dancers feel it, and so do teachers, barristers, best men and captains briefing the platoon. It sharpens your reactions, narrows your focus and makes you want to pee. It uses up blood sugar (which was why doughnuts were so welcome in Mexico) to give you extra energy, and the day you don't feel keyed-up and a little nervous before a gig is the day you'll stop performing well. If you can trust that the slight flutter in your stomach won't lead you to say anything daft, or dry up (it won't), then you can safely settle in for the show.

I feel keyed-up and alert before events, but I don't (so far) get nervous. But I do know what the true, paralysing, brain-fudgifying, hand-shaking, sick-making, tongue-tying stagefright is like, because it was a large part of why I wasn't as good an actor even as I might have been. On the other hand, I have several writing friends who used to be actors and felt no more than respectable stagefright when playing a part, but for whom reading their own work and talking about it is pure horror. And I was just brooding on this when an aspiring writer confessed that she was terribly nervous before taking part in the Getting Published day, even though she's someone who "doesn't get nervous". The thought of discussing her work with a book doctor (who wasn't me, but could have been) was terrifying. 

That disabling terror is different. A clarinettist friend sought professional help when it threatened to destroy his career. The physiological stuff that Wikipedia lists was unmanageable, and yes, a fear of wrong notes and missed entries is sensible. But of course he'd rehearsed enough, so why does sensible anxiety become overwhelming terror? The terror of What the Book Doctor will say is a clue: to stand up and do your stuff lays you wide open to the judgements of others. That judgement may be that you're Bad, says your unconscious, anxious from infancy to please parents and pseudo-parents by Being Good, because what will happen if you don't please them is too terrifying; to a psychotherapist it's not ridiculous to talk of fearing judgement as fearing anihilation. Writers are less likely to have sabre-toothed music teachers or carnivorous critics in the audience, just twenty (or 200) well-behaved, well-disposed people, so the fear seems quite disproportionate to our situation. But infant fears know no proportion: this is a small piece of an ancient, fundamental terror. 

There are, however, practical things you can do about it, starting with with checking out the venue and asking as many questions as you like, continuing with a few breathing and voice exercises, and ending with remembering to pour some water into your glass while you're being introduced, so you're not faffing with the bottle top later. There are more psychological things you can do too: tackle your Inner Judge. But that's a whole new post.

As my granny used to say

The most I've ever laughed at a book is at the weekly Anger Management group sessions attended by the cast of Wuthering Heights, in Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots. And if one of your favourite literary love stories is that of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, then knowing your Donne makes it even better. Only, of course, there'll be readers who don't get the reference, so don't get the joke, and can't be swept away by the love scenes. Equally, you're not going to baffle many readers if you make someone say "Bonjour", but what if they're talking Greek? What if your reader is in a country where French isn't a standard school subject? How does a reference which meant nothing to you make you feel? Did you feel frustrated that a brick in the novel's meaning was missing for you? Did you feel excluded from the club of people who'd understand? Were you annoyed with the author for snobbery or did you feel it was your failure or ignorance? And then this question cropped up on a forum:

I make a reference in my book to a couple who are dating being "as chaste as Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe" because they haven't yet kissed. Is this a common enough reference point that people will get it? The target audience is probably female 25-45.

So I'm the target audience, but although I understood it was about a chaste couple, several of us had no idea who they were. And yet others of similar age, gender and background were absolutely astonished that we hadn't. What did we mean, we'd never read Anne of Green Gables? How could we possibly not have? Whereas if it was Katy Carr, Rose Campbell or Rebecca Rowena Randall, I'd have enjoyed the book even more for its evoking a different bookish joy, and mentally called cousin, as my granny used to say, with the writer and other readers, for the bonding pleasure of sharing an in-joke.

But if the reference is more elliptical or its significance less spelt out, and above all if the reference is meant ironically - if the point is that Anne and Gilbert are in fact not chaste a bit - then I'm really not going to get it. So if you're wondering whether to include a reference that some readers won't get, it's worth thinking about how your reader may take it.

get it, love it, love the book more for it.
get the reference and understand the point - how it applies.
get the reference but don't understand the point - the significance for the story.
don't get the reference, do understand the point and don't mind.
don't get the reference, do understand the point, feel excluded from the club of people who get it.
don't get the reference, don't understand the point, don't mind: it might come clear later and if it doesn't it doesn't matter (the spirit in which I read Woolf).
don't get the reference, don't understand the point, DO mind: feel not just excluded but also frustrated: here's something, that is perhaps important, that I haven't got.

So one function of your beta-readers is to find out what responses you get to your references, and it's worth asking someone a bit further away, culturally speaking, than your siblings. Obviously whether "don't get, don't understand" annoys the reader or not, will depend on their temperament. But we all have knowledge that seems central to us, and perhaps to most of the people we mix with, which is not in the least standard for others. I often feel I'm missing nuances and even important things, when I'm reading American fiction. And culture includes period as well as background and nationality. Someone didn't know why Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm had such an odd middle name. "Haven't they read any Walter Scott?", my granny also used to say.

Hanging on in there

In Denotation and Connotation: enjoy!, I was exploring the connotations of a word in Eleanor Catton's story "Two Tides", where what it denoted was straightforward. But clearly, if you get stuck on the basic meaning of a word, you're less likely to also pick up the connotations of it. That whole first sentence goes like this:

The harbour at Mana was a converted mudflat, tightly elbowed and unlovely at any tide but high.

But some readers stuck on what, in physical terms, was denoted by the...

Denotation and Connotation: enjoy!

A recent and very fascinating thread on WriteWords has been unpicking the opening of Eleanor Catton's story "Two Tides", which was published in a recent issue of Granta (the Summer 2009 New Fiction Special, if you want to track the story down). I won't précis the discussion here, because the whole thread's worth reading and ranges over a good deal of ground, (the story's well worth reading too) but even a single sentence (or rather, half sentence) illuminates all sorts of interesting things...

Jerusha Cowless, Agony Aunt: "Understated and 'gentle' just is my voice"

Some time ago, I lent This Itch of Writing to Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt, so that she could reply to an aspiring writer. Since then Jerusha has been travelling the world from New Zealand to Harmondsworth, in search of new ways to understand our peculiar art and craft. But every now and again another cry of writerly anguish reaches her by pigeon post, and she stuffs her reply into a bottle and tosses it into the sea to reach me. As she did with this one.

I've published four novels with (and...