Emma Darwin's Blog, page 37

My radio story and other - er - stories...

I was foolish enough to think that when I'd got my new novel off to my agent for her opinion, life would get a bit simpler. In fact, of course, it's got more complicated, as there's a huge swathe of stuff that I put aside to get the novel done, from doing my tax return to booking a holiday, by way of returning my London Library books and even reading a book or six purely for fun. The tax return, in particular, is not only tedious to do, it also gives me a weird sensation that last year is a

Not sick of self-love

In Lots of Them I was agreeing that loving the sound of your own voice is a bad thing in a writer; it's like the dinner-party talker who is so busy singing their song that they ignore who their audience is and how they're reacting. And of course the fact that with a novel the singer and the audience are at one remove from each other doesn't absolve you of the duty - not to mention the common commercial horse-sense - to consider them. Then, as I said in Fiddling, hangovers and the Paris...

Lots of them

I happened to say on a forum just now that I'd much rather see a beginner's manuscript which is very over-written, than very under-written, since being drunk on words is a very honourable state for an apprentice writer. From the teacher's point of view it's not so hard to teach why wearing one diamond necklace is actually more effective than wearing three, and how to choose which one to leave on. Whereas a beginner's manuscript which is just bald, 'Then he did this, then I did that', over...

Feeding the hunger

When someone asks me what I do, and I say I'm a writer, they're usually mildly interested. When we've established that I'm not a journalist but write novels, they're slightly taken aback and slightly impressed, and though of course that's slightly gratifying, I still find more than slightly odd. The thing is, while I recognise that not everyone wants to or can sit down and write novels for as long as it takes to learn how to do it, telling stories is obviously as fundamental a part of human...

Ghirlandaio's maidservants

Thursday is TLS day, and I'm always pleased to see it coming through the door. Not for the fiction reviews - I don't read fiction reviews, for reasons I explored in Making the Skeleton Dance - but for everything else. It is, if you like, my liberal education in all the areas of all the subjects which my actual education didn't have space to expand into. In a review of the British Museum's exhibition of Rennaissance Drawings, which I must see, James Hall quotes a famous essay, which I must...

Repainting the (finger)post

Of everything I've posted here, I think my blog on procrastination has been one of the most linked-to, and nearly two years on it still pops up in the stats from time to time. But an article in The Author by psychotherapist and author Edward Marriott has confirmed my suspicion that 'procrastination' is the wrong word for what we all do, and some of us rather too often from time, to time, to time, to time...

Of course in the basic sense what you're doing is putting off the writing work. And...

Writing for radio part 6: recording

A few days before I was due in Brighton for the recording of my radio story, Cecilia the producer rang to say that the story did, after all, feel a bit short: could I make it a bit longer? When it comes to revisions I'm basically an adder, not a cutter, so it's not an inherently unnatural process, although you always worry that you're adding fat rather than muscle to the bones of the story. I didn't so much add, as develop latent moments in it, and I was pleased with the result. I read it...

Wake up and re-write

Whenever an editor or agent is lured into listing the things which put them off a manuscript, it seems that well up the list is a novel which starts with someone waking up. And top of the list is the subset of these which start with the protagonist waking up with a hangover or a head wound. "But - but - but -" thousands of aspiring writers cry, and they have a point. What about The Metamorphosis, just for a start? Indeed, the unrevised version of my new novel began with someone being woken...

Writing for radio part 5: editing

The first pass revisions of my story for Radio 4 were the usual ones. First, once I had the story down on the page, it was about adjustments to the structure and spacing of the piers of the bridge: this is where being able to spread the pages of a short story out is wonderful. In such a short story, and one to be read aloud, there isn't space for anything structurally complex, but it's an oldish man remembering his youth: was the frame the right width (length?); did the sense of the...

Heisenberg's taste in tapestries

Talking to the Richard III Society today, I was reminded of the moment when I got the answer to the problem of how to write A Secret Alchemy. In a TLS review of two books on the Dark Ages, the reviewer R I Moore said this:

Historians have to live with Heisenbergian uncertainty: they cannot simultaneously plot position and trajectory, without distortion. The forces that make for change are always more important for the future, and therefore in retrospect, than they seem at the time…

At the...