The Word Cloud

The winning stories from the Frome Festival Short Story Competition which I and Jonathan Lee judged are now up on the website, and most of them can be downloaded and read.

The best of the stories were wonderful, and all of them are really well worth a read, not just because reading good writing is never, ever time wasted, but also because if you're thinking of entering competitions, it gives you an idea of the kind of standard that you're up against.

http://www.fromefestival.co.uk/?page_id=4252

Enjoy!

Emma

Which I suppose is a plug, as I'm one of The History Girls. There are a months-worth of us, though, from Caroline Lawrence to Adele Geras, plus guests, and there's a new post every day, so it's worth dipping into.

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/

And, admittedly, the post that's up today is mine...

Emma

I was asked to write a piece for the RNA mag, about writing between genres, and I've just discovered it's their current Featured Article on the website, which is flattering. Link here.

I'm judging the Frome Festival Short Story competition this year - details here -  and I was asked to do an interview on BBC Radio Somerset about it, which might interest people who are wondering whether comps are worth it, how (some) judges (well, this judge) think, and what it's all about. It's on Listen Again here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00g9nmf

and it's 1.40hrs in.

It was a good interview, which is chiefly down to the presenter. Whenever I do interviews of this sort I'm always impressed again by the professionalism that underlies this kind of daily general programme; how presenters can switch from topic to topic, with the briefest of briefings, talk to people in a different studio 100 miles away, and weave it all into something agreeable and easy to listen to, beats me

Emma

Until recently I'd never heard of a writer editing, unless their day job happened to be with a publisher. As I've always used the words, editing is done by editors, and what I do, after I've got the first draft down on paper, is revising. But now I keep hearing aspiring writers say, "I'm editing at the moment." (Just to clarify, I tend to think of re-writing as what I'm doing when I leave behind a story which hasn't worked, and start again with some of the same ideas and characters, and approximately the same purpose, and polishing as the last pass to pick up minor slips and idiocies.)

But surely the important point is that anyone trying to write recognises that getting the first set of words down on paper is just the beginning. Does it matter what we call the next stage? I didn't think so, until I started hearing a scary number of aspiring writers saying "I've written the novel, now I've only got the editing to do and I'll be sending it out." From the talk on such threads it's clear that they see editing as a close-up process: excising unneeded words, bringing out a character more clearly, tightening up sentences. Of course, that's terribly important, and can make a huge difference to how well your story comes over; I often liken it to cleaning the windows on the Orient Express: if they're grubby enough you'll be able to tell mountains from deserts and night from day, but not much more, and who'd buy a ticket if that was all they were going to see? But it seems as if many beginner writers think this close-up attention is all that's needed once the story is basically told.

"Okay, but when did the revising happen?" I want to ask. When did you stand back and look at the whole novel? When did you really examing the structure of the bridge, counting the piers, measuring the spans, testing their structural integrity? When did you prod each character to see if they're really alive, and throw them at each other to check they really would behave as the plot requires? Now that you know what the story's really about, did you ask yourself if you've told it through the right pairs of eyes? In the right tense? Started and finished it in the right place? When did you open your ears and ask yourself if the voices are voices that a reader is willing to listen to, and for a whole novel? "Revising" is derived from Latin, to re-examine, but to me it also has a sense of "re-visit" or "re-vision". When did you revisit all those decisions you made before you began to write or on the fly so you could keep going, and make sure, with all the new knowledge you have now you've got to the end of the story, that they're still the right decisions? When, in other words, did you make sure that the train will actually start, run, stay together and arrive safely at its destination, passengers and all? What about the heavy engineering?

This kind of stuff, which I think of as revising, is what publishers call the structural edit. Since professionals have good reason to work out the most creatively and financially effective way of doing things, it's worth thinking twice before doing things differently. What beginner writers have taken to calling 'editing' is what publishers call the line edit and, if it's a separate stage, will always be the later one. And then the last stage, polishing, is not unlike the copy-edit: picking up dodgy commas, typos, wayward formatting, final checks for the minor idiocies which inevitably creep in whenever you start doing stuff. Checking the toilets, as it were, and straightening the magazines in the rack.

Clearly, macro and micro - engineering and window-cleaning, wood and trees, revising and editing in my terminology - are different conceptually, even if they coil tightly together in the final novel, and some writers would say they do them together.  One writer even suggests that it's only in the close-up work that he uncovers any major structural problems. It's certainly true that if you're struggling to write how a character does something something the plot needs it may be that the character shouldn't do it, and is doing his best to tell you that: you're going to have to change either plot, or character. But the talented and/or experienced writer works with a feedback loop, whether it loops once an hour or once ever six months: big thematic changes, for example, need to be carried through at the level of sentences, while a change of tone which evolves in a particular scene may make you realise that there's something awry in the novel as a whole.

What worries me is to hear so many would-be writers using a word which suggests to me that they simply don't know that the chances of the wood being the right shape from the beginning are small, that it almost certainly will need chainsaw work, and that no amount of trimming twigs is going to make it the right shape if it isn't. I think it's because so much writing-teaching focuses on the small scale. That's partly because prose is easier stuff to read and write and teach on in class-sized chunks, than structure is. And it's partly because of the focus, in teaching beginners, is on how to find material inside and outside yourself, and then learning some tools to shape a single little piece.  So writers embarking on their first novel are often quite aware of the micro-work it takes, but much less aware of the macro: in the Writers Workshop one-day courses I teach, our exercise making people write a two-sentence summary of each of the first five chapters is an absolute revelation to many students.

But if the smaller stuff is easier for teachers to handle, I'd suggest that it's also easier for the writer to face dealing with, and that's where you need to take your Anti-Writing Demon by the throat and kick him out of the room. It's frightening for a beginner writer to stand back and try to recognise if some of those fundamental decisions have turned out not to be right. Taking a long, hard look at the heavy engineering may mean you realise that a) you've got the wrong train for the route, or the wrong route for the train and b) you may need a consulting engineer to work out what to do next. It's much easier to concentrate on excising passive constructions, and whether they really did use 'wonder' to mean 'speculate' in 1710. Unfortunately, there's no point in polishing the windows for the best view of the approach to Venice, if the train won't pull your passengers up the first incline out of Victoria, let alone get them safely and happily to Istanbul.

A few months ago, in the piece I did for the Independent's My Book of a Lifetime slot, I found myself saying, "Both my first novel, The Mathematics of Love, and now A Secret Alchemy, are about love, war, and the life of the spirit. At the most fundamental level, I sometimes think, what else is there to write about?" The rhetorical question was designed to get readers disagreeing, and of course it's only partly true of my own work, let alone anyone else's. There are a million other things to write about, from being conceived, to hunting a great white whale, to chasing a nose which grows legs and joins the Russian civil service.

But both the WIP, working title Kindred and Affinity, and the little squeaks of a new story, maybe novel-sized, which I can hear in the gaps, are probably also encompassed in that definition (prescription?) of 'love, war and the life of the spirit'. This evening - maybe it's the Autumn blues - I'm wondering if it's a bad thing to stick with these same basic preoccupations; or is it simply a bad thing that I've become aware that I do? After all, a novel by definition is novel: something new. And I'm also aware that the first two preoccupations, at least, are in some ways the easy option, the safe bet for writers who can't be bothered or aren't able to try harder and write fresher, and whose fiction is therefore dull, formulaic or actively meretricious: cheap in the aesthetic rather than the financial or literary sense. Am I doing the same? Goodness knows I don't sit and think 'war sells' or 'love makes readers cry', any more than I sat down and decided that The Mathematics of Love was going to be a cross between Possession and Birdsong (not least because I hadn't read either). But here are my characters - people, times and places - and the more specific themes I want to explore - say voyeurism, surrogate fathers, enclosed societies. I start to think about how and where to build those lives so as to give the themes a chance to grow and set shoots, to dramatise them in different shapes and times. And the answer to how and where so often seems to be love and war, under the eye of a God or some transcendant and immanent force which my characters - some of them, sometimes - seem to believe in.

And yet when I look at the work of any writer I admire, I see that they, too, return time and time again to the same fundamental meditations, even if each time what the novel dramatises is individual lives: contingent, particular and, yes, new. Granted, as a human being you can't entirely escape your particular preoccupations and tastes, but to turn the question on its head why, if you're driven to examine fundamental things, keep dressing them in new clothes?

I think the newness of a novel is not accidental, nor is it superficial, but equally the oldness is neither laziness nor tedium. Perhaps it's because only it's only new things which we look at properly, being lured by their novelty into examining each bugle-beaded bonnet or pagan tattoo hard enough to see the shapes beneath: the old, fundamental things which underlie them. In other words, perhaps the oldness only works if the newness does too. A small child asks for the same story over and over again not because they've forgotten what happens - heaven help you if you change a word - but because they want to re-live the fear of the wild things, and then the comfort of getting home: it's the new (re-)speaking of the words which conjures up the oldest feelings in the world.

For my own work, I don't know. Because what I most notice in excellent writing is the things I couldn't do myself, and someone else's ideas which I must work to apprehend, I associate excellent writing with ideas and things I don't do. In which case my writing - which by definition is ideas and things which I do do - is not excellent. But maybe I'm just having a wobble about how crude the basics - for which read oldnesses - of one's writing can look, because any broad generalisation, whether it's a blurb or an elevator pitch or a snide, dismissive review, can seem a reductio ad absurdum of the complex of ideas and feelings which is a novel. The whole novel, on the other hand, not reduced thus, gives those ideas and feelings human form, so that they can dwell among us humans, and we in them.

So, today is officially the publication day of the paperback of my second novel, A Secret Alchemy. And bugger-all is happening, except for a lovely card from my editor and her assistant. But then I knew it wouldn't be. For a start, 'real' publication was back last November: it's the hardback which garners reviews (you hope); is waved at the book trade; given, lovingly inscribed, to your granny (the rest of the family and friends should bloomin' well shell out); sold to the libraries. But the big sales push has been for the paperback, newly garlanded with those review quotes, and just in time for the festival season.

And such are the peculiarities of the book trade that, actually, A Secret Alchemy has been available for a couple of weeks online and in the shops.  Best of all, last week it was The Times' Recommended Read, available in W H Smith for £2.99, if you bought the paper. It's the kind of promotion you hope and pray and try not to murder your stablemates at your publishers' for, because it can do magical things to sales: according to Bookscan, last week A Secret Alchemy was officially the 14th biggest selling paperback fiction in the UK.

Now that's a one-week-only appearance, obviously. I may be wedged between Katie Fforde and Val McDermid, but they'll still be there in quite a few weeks. But though the promotion costs my publisher a fortune, it means that there are now several thousand people with copies in their hands, who might buy my first novel The Mathematics of Love, or seek out my third. I'm not a total newbie in the sales charts: TMOL made no.7 in the Heatseekers chart, which is made up of the bestsellers among books by authors who haven't appeared in the main charts. But to have my second novel - "that difficult second novel" - an official bestseller, however fleetingly, is amazing. On the other hand it's also disconcerting. What you can't see is that I'm not really blogging here, I'm actually slap in the middle of writing the first draft of a new novel. It's bare, it's bony, I've just realised this chapter has no plot, and I'm not at all sure I like one of my MCs. So how the f***k am I going to get it higher than no.14? And now that ASA is out there, it's no longer - I'm no longer - private. Until now, the only people who held opinions about me and what I do were people I knew. Not any more.

So, what's A Secret Alchemy about? This is my publisher's blurb, so I'll turn away and blush in private, because is there anyone who can take standard booktrade hype without blushing? To quote Four Weddings & A Funeral, "if there is, they're not English":

"Powerful and utterly convincing.'"- Daily Mail

"There is historical fiction - and there is historical fiction... It takes real skill - and devotion - to bring characters blurred by the passage of time into focus, to breathe real life into them... Emma Darwin has managed such sorcery... Passion is the key to the success of this book... Spellbinding" - The Times

Two murdered princes; a powerful queen betrayed; a nobleman riding towards his certain death...

The story of the Princes in the Tower has been one of the most fascinating - and most brutal - murder mysteries in history for more than five hundred years. In a brilliant feat of historical daring, Emma Darwin has recreated the terrible, exhilarating world of the two youngest victims of the War of the Roses: the power struggles and passion that lay behind their birth, the danger into which they fell, the profoundly moving days before their imprisonment, and the ultimate betrayal of their innocence.

In A Secret Alchemy, three voices speak: that of Elizabeth Woodville, the beautiful widow of King Edward IV; of her brother Anthony, surrogate father to the doomed Prince Edward and his brother Dickon; and that of present-day historian Una Pryor. Orphaned, and herself brought up in a family where secrets and rivalries threaten her world, Una's experience of tragedy, betrayal and lost love help her unlock the long-buried secrets that led to the princes' deaths. Weaving their stories together, Emma Darwin brilliantly evokes how the violence and glamour of past ages live on within our present.

And if that hasn't put you off, you can buy it in all good bookshops now - really truly, they should have it - or online at The Book Depository, (miles the cheapest) Waterstones, or Amazon