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Part-time mourning for writerly disappointments?

20/7/2018

The writer’s life is rife with disappointment. One of the main factors differentiating the successful from the unsuccessful is not the degree of failure they encounter, but the ability and willingness to scrape oneself up from the ground and carry on. But how do we do that? The blogosphere thrums with posts on adopting an almost military discipline, but that’s not right for everyone. It’s not right for me.

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Narrative structure, psychoanalytic theory and the grief that never goes

13/7/2018

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I sometimes wonder if there’s a fundamental incompatibility between my ambitions to improve as a writer and attract more readers, and my loyalty to my personal truth. Certainly the recent trend towards up lit seems at odds with my need to embrace both light and dark. And industry advice doesn’t always acknowledge the complexity of being human and that characters can be as motivated by loss and fear as by desire.

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Holiday settings: Murmuration & The Summer House

8/7/2018

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If you’re going on holiday this summer, you might be tempted to take one of these novels with you. The first focuses on the people who entertain and assist the visitors to a Victorian pier at an English seaside resort across a period of over a century; the second on a family taking a long holiday together on the coast of Finland. But, of course, while it might be all smiles and bonhomie on the surface, there are disconcerting undercurrents to keep you turning the page. Let me know which takes your fancy.

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Reimagining the birth pangs of psychoanalysis: When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D Yalom

2/6/2018

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In 1882, in a wintry Vienna, two brilliant minds connect. One is an ambitious, although rarely read, philosopher; the other is a highly respected diagnostician and doctor to the rich and famous. The men are drawn to each other’s ideas but, although one’s a bachelor and the other a married father of five, they have more in common than they realise. Both men’s obsession with a much younger woman is threatening their well-being.

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People studies: Sight & Consent

19/2/2018

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Although these two novels couldn’t be more different in tone – the first a literary exploration of a young mother’s development; the second tricksy thriller – I can’t resist pairing them for the other factors they have in common. Both feature thoughtful, philosophising, unnamed narrators; both take as their subject matter how we explore the inside and outside of other people, and ourselves. Both are ambitious and unusual in their approach; both are the author’s second book and a cracking read.

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My fast first draft three years on

15/1/2018

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Three years ago this week, I completed my first ever fast first draft of a novel. Four further drafts and a significant edit later, it’s ready for beta readers’ scrutiny. So it’s an ideal time to reflect on the overall process, and ask myself whether that’s a good way to go about creating a publishable book.

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Winding down and cranking up for September

12/9/2017

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I love September. I love that the world beyond my desk is winding down, my garden yielding the last of its harvest before clocking off for winter, while the pencil-sharpening back-to-work feeling – honed by decades of education and relished now without the accompanying dread – is igniting in my head. The return of some to school means the outside world is quieter and less crowded for those of us with the freedom to choose our hours of work and play, and September often brings better weather than August (although, having resorted to turning on the central heating a couple of times last month, there’s not much competition – nor any sign of improvement on that so far this month).

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The Messiah Narrative

13/4/2017

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Even if you’re not a fan of Baroque music, you’d probably recognise at least one of the magnificent choruses from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. If not the jolly “For Unto Us a Child Is Born”, perhaps the main justification for its popularity at Christmas, then you must know the exuberant “Hallelujah”. But there are fifty-one other choruses and solos that make up the three-hour long oratorio. This beautiful book tells the story of its composition and musical afterlife.

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A necessary nip of narcissism?

26/3/2017

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It had been a great night at the Polari salon in Nottingham, and the audience was waiting for the final performer to take the stage, when a woman bounded from the back of the room. Scowl framed by the hood of her black anorak, and ignoring the compere’s insistence that she wasn’t on the programme, Barbara Brownskirt barked out a series of poems from her numerous unpublished collections about, among other things, her unrequited love for Judi Dench. She was scary. She was hilarious. She was – and still is – the unsuccessful lesbian Poet-in-Residence at the 197 bus stop, Penge, and the brilliant creation of writer and performer Karen McLeod.

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Don’t be seduced by the allure of romance!

14/2/2017

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If love makes the world go round, it’s hardly surprising that romance crops up as a subplot across most genres of fiction. But, as writers, we need to beware of letting the love interest get out of hand and obscure the more complex themes of our novel. As readers, we need to be alert to publishers dressing up a gruelling narrative as a modern Pride and Prejudice because, let’s face it, sex sells.

For Valentine’s Day, I’m reviving a post that appeared in October 2015 on the Reading Writers website, which is now defunct.

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Beyond the sum of their parts?

26/12/2016

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Every novel is comprised of different parts that writers, readers and reviewers hope will combine into a satisfying whole. My last two reviews of 2016 – before I reveal my favourites of the year – are of novels for which finding that coherence is a particular challenge, but extremely worthwhile if achieved. Both published this summer, neither seems to have attracted many reviews on Goodreads, but I’m impressed with both (albeit one more than the other) so I hope you’ll at least give my reviews a chance.

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Fictionalising the famous: de Beauvoir & Freud

9/12/2016

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Following on from my review of The Fortunes, which fictionalises the lives of ought-to-be-more-famous Chinese Americans, I’m reviewing two novels featuring well-known European intellectuals at either side (in the temporal rather than allegiance sense of the word) of the Second World War.

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A conversation like no other: In Therapy by Susie Orbach

25/11/2016

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Psychotherapists face a dilemma when it comes to sharing the fruits of their discoveries with a wider public. The technical language, especially regarding psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which practitioners use to communicate between themselves, can be cumbersome, offputting and open to misinterpretation by the uninitiated. Case studies, such as those assembled by Steven Grosz, can be both extremely readable and illuminating, but they do present a problem of confidentiality: even when clients give their consent, some would question whether, within the power dynamics of the relationship, this can ever be freely given yet, the more the details are anonymised, the greater the potential distortion. Susie Orbach is a British psychotherapist, activist and writer who has done much to demystify psychoanalytic thinking (e.g. with several comment pieces in the Guardian, including this recent one on Brexit trauma). Her latest project, on which this short book is based, is a radio series mimicking the experience of the consulting room.

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On denial, light and dark

14/11/2016

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As I speed walk along the path, the low sun flickers on and off through the trees. Dark light, dark light, it dizzies my brain as if I’m in a zoetrope, making me pause and clasp a column of rough bark for balance. Usually, I welcome the winter sun on my face, but now I turn from the light that mocks me. Usually, I’m good at seeing in the dark but, even after Brexit, I did not foresee the triumph of Trump and I’m distraught.

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Why I (and plenty of others) turn to crime (writing, that is) by Kate Evans

7/11/2016

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I’m delighted to welcome Kate Evans back to Annecdotal a year on from her popular post on Healing Words. As she’s just published the third novel in her Scarborough Mysteries series, I invited her to spill the beans on why she’s turned to (fictional) crime.

Read on for some fascinating insights into the crime writer’s mind.

We British like a crime novel, so says Alistair Horne, of Cambridge University Press. It is by far the best selling genre in the UK. Is this because we are a particularly heartless or ghoulish lot?

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Can you imagine? The NHS, then and now: The Tidal Zone & The Dark Circle

3/11/2016

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Let me introduce you to two novels by established female authors about young people struck down by serious illness, set in the social context of the British National Health Service, the first in its contemporary incarnation and the second at its inception.

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My stop on the #devilautopsy #blogtour

12/8/2016

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What would have to happen to drive an entire town insane? In Tiffany McDaniel’s unusual and gripping debut, all it takes for Breathed, Ohio, in the summer of 1984, is a heatwave and the suggestion that a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy is the incarnation of the devil.

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The stain of sin: Smoke by Dan Vyleta

7/7/2016

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Mother says that I am obsessed; that far from dismissing Smoke, I have made it my idol. Indeed I am grateful for the Smoke. It tells us when we err. Imagine a world in which we err and nobody notices. Not even oneself. Until one goes to seed by increments and slides into the madness of villainy. Smoke eats our reason with a charcoal spoon. We measure our humanity against its darkness. It is good it leaves a mark.

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Her Father’s Daughter by Marie Sizun

14/6/2016

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At four and a half, the child is blissfully content in the Paris apartment she shares with her mother. The war means little to her and, while her grandmother disapproves of her freedom to do as she likes, her mother always takes her side. The only cloud in her blue-sky world is the lie told by the two older women when they insisted the baby sister she’d seen presented to her mother in a Normandy hospital was a figment of her imagination.

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Nostalgia & Reminiscence: Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb & Just One

20/3/2016

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Mihály is on honeymoon in Italy when he bumps into János, an old school friend who, when they last met in London, stole his gold watch. The chance encounter throws up memories of his youth, an extended adolescence of irresponsibility under the influence of the charismatic Tamás, and his sister, Éva. The following day, en route to Rome with his wife, he steps down from the train to grab a coffee. Inadvertently – or perhaps with unconscious intention – he boards the wrong train just as it’s pulling out of the station. Disembarking in Perugia, he realises that he’s been given the perfect opportunity to separate from his wife.

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<<Previous

Part-time mourning for writerly disappointments?

Narrative structure, psychoanalytic theory and the grief that never goes

Holiday settings: Murmuration & The Summer House

Reimagining the birth pangs of psychoanalysis: When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D Yalom

People studies: Sight & Consent

My fast first draft three years on

Winding down and cranking up for September

The Messiah Narrative

A necessary nip of narcissism?

Don’t be seduced by the allure of romance!

Beyond the sum of their parts?

Fictionalising the famous: de Beauvoir & Freud

A conversation like no other: In Therapy by Susie Orbach

On denial, light and dark

Why I (and plenty of others) turn to crime (writing, that is) by Kate Evans

Can you imagine? The NHS, then and now: The Tidal Zone & The Dark Circle

My stop on the #devilautopsy #blogtour

The stain of sin: Smoke by Dan Vyleta

Her Father’s Daughter by Marie Sizun

Nostalgia & Reminiscence: Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb & Just One

2018 Reading Challenge

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