Writers learn early to be wary of mirrors. It’s painful to have to score through that purple passage eloquently describing our protagonist’s physical appearance from the top of their head to the tips of their toes. When what we took for writerly innovation is revealed to be a cliché; the first time we allow our narrator to look in the mirror, could be the last.

Yet a character who never caught sight of their reflection would be an odd kettle of fish indeed. Plate-glass windows, stainless steel doors: the built environment abounds with reflective surfaces, never mind the mirror above the bathroom sink. Should these be totally out of bounds for writers? Our protagonist’s relationship to mirrors can be useful way of illustrating their character or mood. Are they obsessively drawn to mirrors or avoidant; are they anxiously checking their appearance, or an ordinary woman using lipstick and mascara to compose her outdoor face? Surely it’s the information dump that’s the problem. After all, Elmore Leonard preached against detailed description, not mirrors.

A skilfully employed shiny surface can reflect more than is apparent to the eye. For example, in Harriet Lane’s debut novel Alys, Always, Frances sees

My recent post about the challenge of representing the reality of terror in fiction attracted some interesting feedback. I’m not alone in shying away from graphic details, it seems. In fact, my main interest in fictional terror is in its potential long-term impact, which is often more subtle. Like a plucked string, terror keeps on vibrating even when the original trauma has passed.

The enduring effects of the narrator’s imprisonment and torture are eloquently described in In the Orchard, the Swallows:

They took everything from me. My health, my family. They took from me the person I might have been, and returned in its place half a man, a shadow. Even now I am not sure I will feel lasting pleasure again. My capacity for it has been damaged. The suffering has retreated, but it leaves behind it an absence, a joylessness. If you are able, imagine breathing, and nothing stirring within. Yes, I feel relief that I am free, and it is a deep relief at that, but there is no joy. My pleasures have gone from me, like petals pulled from a flower head, or lost to a winter frost.  Peter Hobbs (p 109)

Life continues, but in an almost zombified state, the illusion of safety destroyed.

In Pat Barker’s Regeneration, the trauma of the trenches continues for the hospitalised soldiers in the form of hallucinations and nightmares and in hysterical symptoms such as mutism, paralysis and bodily contortions. What was then termed shellshock, we now label post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that grants sufferers more sympathetic understanding and access to treatment. Yet psychiatric diagnosis is always a dual-edged sword and perhaps runs the risk of pathologising an extreme, but normal, reaction to an abnormal situation.

Choosing a second person narrator is a risky decision. Done badly, it makes for an irritating read and, even done well, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Although I think it’s handled beautifully in Ewan Morrison’s recent novel Close Your Eyes, a ‘you’ narrator is generally confined to the short story where a degree of experimentation is often more welcome.

There are around twenty second-person short stories and pieces of flash fiction in the anthology You, Me & A Bit of We. Seeing them together, if not quite reading them back-to-back, it’s striking how many different interpretations of ‘you’ there can be. Even though English has lost the distinction between the singular/familiar and plural/polite forms of the second person to be found in many other European languages, we still manage some diversity in its application, at least in fiction. Hovering between the more familiar first and third person narration, and borrowing bits from both, the second person pulls the reader closer to the story, pushing the identification with the narrator and/or creating the illusion of being addressed directly from the page. Either way, the fictional events portrayed can seem more real.

How does one write about terror?  I don’t mean the delicious spine tingling sensation evoked by the thriller or horror story, the literary equivalent of Halloween or the latest upside-down turbocharged fairground ride. I’m thinking that raw state of mind when logic goes out the window and with it any trace of pride or self-consciousness, when body and brain conspire towards a sole objective: survival. Even Verdi’s glorious Dies Irae doesn’t do justice to the torment.

Any strong emotion is difficult to portray; there's always the risk of overdoing it and ending up telling the reader what to feel. Like hallucinatory states, it’s an extra challenge to translate the reality of terror into language. True terror is a psychotic state where words have little currency. How do we begin to describe the all-engulfing fear, the belief – rational or otherwise – that our life is about to end?

Show, don’t tell is something of a cliché in creative writing parlance yet, when I first encountered it, it felt like a paradigm shift. I’d been writing on and off all my life without knowing there were any rules about it, and I embraced this one with gusto. My stories unfolded through a series of scenes, generously seasoned with dialogue and real-world interactions. I aspired to make my colours vivid and my smells pungent and anything masquerading as an information drop became taboo. My writing wasn’t particularly lyrical, and I learned to love cutting the bits that weren’t earning their keep, but overall I wanted the reader to get so close to my characters it was as if they’d taken up residence in their bodies.

Even if I never reached my goal of emotional and sensory identification, at least I knew where I was headed. Telling was a cardinal sin and I’d been brought up to steer away from such transgressions.

Yet now and then, I found myself wanting to write differently. I’d write an entire short story with only the tiniest pinch of dialogue. Although I was sufficiently fond of these tales to send them out to magazines, I still suspected this wasn’t quite the real thing.

More disturbingly, I’d come across patches of telling in novels that I particularly admired. Could it be that this wasn’t wrong after all?

Emma Darwin advocates a balance between showing and telling and, through examples, illustrates the differences between good and bad telling. She demonstrates how telling can actually be quite show-y if it’s specific and appropriate to the point of view. Telling isn’t all bad, and it does move the story along.

Nevertheless, if telling is to be rehabilitated, it can still be a difficult judgement as to when to use it and how much. Emma points out that the archetypal telling-story is the fairytale (and Clare O’Dea illustrates her wonderful rant against the tyranny of show, don’t tell with examples from Goldilocks and the Three Bears). Something in the rhythms or the narrative voice compensates for the greater psychic distance. I hadn’t seen this post when I wrote My Father’s Love, recently published by Foliate Oak, but it feels like a vindication of a story that is not only 90% tell, but kicks off with something dangerously close to a once-upon-time:

When I was a baby in my cradle, or so the story goes, my father gathered up his love for me and fashioned a chalice of burnished gold.  He swaddled the chalice in a skein of silk shipped all the way from China and bedded it down in a drawer in his wardrobe where he used to store his cufflinks and bowties.  He locked the drawer with a silver key which he dangled from a string around his neck, beneath his shirt, inches from his heart.  When it was done, my father smiled, stood back and watched me grow.

Perhaps it’s the Hindu storytelling that’s done it, but I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to that style. I’m not sure if it’s another personal paradigm shift or redressing the balance that’s gone too far towards show, but I’m interested to see where it takes me. No doubt I’ll let you know.

How about you? What’s your take on showing versus telling? Is it an issue in your reading or writing or are you more concerned about other “rules”?

1. It’s unashamedly upbeat about the power of stories.

Many psychoanalytic case studies read like stories, but these are especially exquisite. Beautiful prose, tightly structured, these are moral stories without being moralistic, gentle fables in the manner of Aesop and Kipling that leave us pondering the big questions of how to live. Alongside the stories from the consulting room, there’s an examination of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and ordinary incidents from the author’s life. Without being heavy handed, he leaves us in no doubt as to the centrality of storytelling, that without our stories we are diminished:

The first person plural point of view is relatively uncommon in fiction, so hurrah for Chuffed Buff Books for inviting submissions with a group narrator for their latest short story anthology.  But does it work?  Well, as I’m one of the five ‘bits of we’ in the collection I must think so, but not everyone may agree.

I wrote A House for the Wazungu from the perspective of the inhabitants of a close-knit community asked to host visitors from abroad.  Although a couple of villagers are identified by name – the schoolmaster, Albert Lumumba, and Miriam Moto, the owner of the chai stall – I wanted to conjure a place where individual identities are subsumed within the collective, a culture that values interdependence, as in rural communities of the Global South.  The inhabitants of my fictional Kanini would be too busy surviving to concern themselves with such indulgences as communing with their true selves.

A novel written exclusively in the first person plural is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.  Here the narrators are a group of men who, as teenagers, were obsessed with the Lisbon sisters, all of whom committed suicide.  Although several of the boys are mentioned by name, it’s never clear who is speaking, so that the narrative unfolds as if chanted by a Greek chorus.  Given that adolescents, despite the undoubted self-obsession, are strongly under the sway of peer-group norms, this is the ideal form for this particular novel.  Similarly, I used the first person plural in my short story, Kinky Norm, about a bunch of teenage girls rounding on a teacher.  Although it starts with an adult ‘I’ looking back on her childhood, she soon takes refuge in the group ‘we’ where no individual is responsible for what occurs:

Given you’re still reading, I have to assume she hasn’t put you off. But would you have read on if Maeve were the opening of a short story or a novel? I don’t think I would. In those few sentences, I’ve prioritised an accurate representation of what happened – and it is absolutely true, apart from that Maeve isn’t her real name – over the form of the writing. It might serve as a provoking starter to a blog post but, were a piece of writing to continue in this vein, it would prove heavy going.

I’ve been unable to source many examples of fiction featuring hallucinatory states that isn’t jettisoned by treatises on illicit drug use or psychiatric
assumptions about psychosis. I’ve read a couple of good thrillers where it turns out that the jeopardy is all in the protagonist’s head, but to name them here would involve committing the sin of spoiling. There’s the shellshocked war veteran hallucinating birds singing in Greek in  Mrs  Dalloway, but I’m not so taken with stream of consciousness and multiple exclamation marks.

In real life, our goals are often fuzzy, especially regarding the things that matter most, and, even if we think we know what we want, we’re often quite haphazard in the way we try to achieve it. Who can show me how to take my characters along an obstacle course that will satisfy the reader without compromising on the complexity of human motivation? It turns out there are some excellent models in the novels I’ve been reading for my interviews with debut authors.
 
Let’s start with Alys, Always, the foundation for my latest Q&A with author Harriet Lane. What Frances wants is uncertain at the beginning and is gradually shaped by circumstance.  Later, when she develops her plan, the details are withheld from the reader. The tension arises, not from following her along a clear path, but from wondering exactly where she’s heading and how far she’s prepared to go. Here’s what the author told me about this apparent subversion of the motivation ideal:

Nutrition isn’t only a biological necessity; in life, as in novels, food symbolises care, and so fiddling around with it serves to make life harder for the protagonists. Writers sacrifice the desires of their characters in favour of the reader’s love of narrative tension.  On one level, the thwarting of even imaginary people seems harsh, yet one of the things that struck me across the five Q&A’s I’ve completed so far was the authors’ empathy for their creations.  Claire King told me she

and, over on The Literary Sofa, she highlighted one consequence of writing from a child’s point of view as the need for plenty of tissues.  Shelley Harris was so wrapped up in her character’s psyche that she chose
his career unconsciously, as he would have done himself.  The impetus for Gavin Weston’s novel was his concern about the fate of a  girl his family had sponsored; its completion has driven him to take a more
active role in relation to the practice of child marriage by becoming an ambassador for FORWARD.

While we might expect writers to empathise with their child characters and/or those who have been treated unjustly, their empathy for their more prickly protagonists was also apparent:

In the wonderfully wacky film, Being John Malkovich, a puppeteer discovers a portal into the actor’s head.  While I’d hesitate to imply I understand what such a complex story is  about, the motivation for returning to the portal seems as much about controlling another’s mind as his body.  Rather like a writer, don’t you think? 

For the movie’s female characters, there’s the frisson of gender-bending sex that makes me think of the female writer writing from the male point of view. I don’t know about other female writers, but when I’m a male narrator, unless he's having sex or going to the toilet, I tend to think of the dangly bit between his legs in symbolic, rather than  flesh and blood, terms.  

Yet at some level we need to convey our characters’ gender, age and physique through their bodies as well as their minds, and to experience those bodies from the inside out.  Does a fat person occupy a chair differently to a skinny one: the first squeezing into a confined space and the second getting bum-ache if you leave them sitting too long with insufficient padding?  Would a short person notice different things to a tall one as they walk down a street because their gaze is at a different level? 
What difference does it make to have big feet, or small?  To piss from a standing position or sitting down?

Complicated stuff?  It might be easier, in some ways, to create characters with unusual or distorted bodies, than to write from an ordinary body that is not one’s own.  But woe betide the writer who lets her attention lapse, even momentarily, and retreats into her own physique.  

I had great fun writing about Tamsin, a young woman who wakes up on the morning of her wedding to find that her neck has grown as long as her arm. But with every revision of the story I had to check on the physicals, walking about the house with my hand in the air where I reckoned her head would be to ensure I hadn’t fudged the mechanics.

How is your own writerly kinaesthesia and do you have examples of convincing and unconvincing literary bodies to share?

Citizens, readers and writers, gather round, for I bring you an important update!  Alone or with friends and family, in your offices, at your kitchen tables, on the commute to work: boot up your computers, flip open your laptops, wake up your smartphones and focus your attention on The Great Annecdotal Book Review!

If you're going to be traumatised by a novel, it must be a good one.  If you're going to go to bed, anxious at what monsters your dreams will churn up, let it be on account of a story worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.  After nearly 600 pages in the Democratic Republic of North Korea, at least you you can go back to your own life when it's over.  Such a pity the same can't be said of the novel's protagonist, the orphan, Jun Do.  Or should that be Commander Ga?

The book can be read as a love story, a thriller, a dystopian political satire, a heart-warming tale of the endurance of the human spirit or, as Johnson himself has described it, a trauma narrative.  Yet, for me, it’s about the wasteland of a world where the individual is divorced from his/her own story and fiction is an instrument of control.

It’s not that there are no stories in this imagined North Korea.  Like children in nursery school, or the days of single channel TV, everyone must attend to the year’s Best North Korean Story, broadcast into their homes and workplaces through the ever-present loudspeakers.  Orphans, the lowest of the low in this society, are taught, through an allegorical story, that their lives have been saved by the eternal love of Kim Jong Il.  Even the hardened interrogators can quote of their favourite lines from the moralising movies of the state cinema.
 
Yet these aren’t stories I’d be proud to write, or look forward to settling down to read.  In a society where orphans are scapegoated rather than pitied, stories don’t seem to facilitate empathy in those who hear or read them. In a country where creativity is stifled, stories are designed to keep people in their place.  Children, weaned on a diet of propaganda, are confused on being told a tale in which nothing is glorified.  With little personal autonomy, character is without meaning.  Stories don’t reveal a deeper truth, but turn it upside down, yet no-one dares acknowledge the emperor has no clothes:

Only in Division 42 do officials express any curiosity about individuals, recording accounts of the prisoners’ lives.  Before hooking them up to the autopilot that will deliver a pain so vast it obliterates any last vestiges of personality, they transcribe the biographies of those who have fallen foul of the state, not to be read, but as a form of possession:

Try imagining a famous painting or bringing to mind a favourite song.  It's a simple matter to play with the image or sound in your mind, but much more difficult to do likewise with a smell, however familiar it may be.

Yet certain odours can trigger intense emotions and associated memories and, despite my warning about overdoing the madeleine effect as a cue for flashbacks, smells have an important part to play in our writing.

Some novelists have used smell as a motif throughout, to powerful effect.  In Andrew Miller's Pure, the smell of rotting corpses is ever present – not a book to read if you are feeling at all queasy.  In Alison Moore's The Lighthouse, the protagonist is obsessed with the perfume of his long-lost mother, which he tries to recreate in all kinds of ways.

In the fourth of my June short stories (yes, I know it's now the end of July), A Smell of Paint, a mother awaits her artist daughter's homecoming, gradually coming to realise that the lingering odour in the newly decorated bedroom is the least of her concerns.

With Grace Winter, heroine of The Lifeboat, now on board the author interview section of annethology, I'm wondering how to introduce her to the two characters already there: Satish and Futh.  She's certainly got food issues in common with both of them but, having survived for a couple of weeks on raw fish and hardtack, I imagine that's not something she'd be keen to discuss.  The power of memory, and questions of its validity, is an issue explored in all three novels, but, fascinating as it is, I've blogged about memory already, so I've decided to celebrate my third author interview with a quick look at some of the ways these writers have made things harder for their heroes and heroines.  This is especially useful for me, as it's something I find quite difficult: I've no problem with bleak, I just don't like making it bleaker.    So let's have a look at how Alison Moore, Shelley Harris and Charlotte Rogan have gone about it.

1.   Send them on a journey.
This can be a journey through geographical space, such as Grace's trip across the Atlantic, or a metaphorical journey back to the past, as Satish faces with the Jubilee party reunion.  Or it can be both, as for Futh, with a walking tour that recreates an earlier holiday with his father.  Not only is your character stepping out into unfamiliar territory without their familiar props, but there's so much potential for things to go wrong.  While most luxury ocean liners don't have to be abandoned, lots of us have had the experience of getting lost and arriving at our destination much later than we'd hoped, or being mentally dragged back to a place in our lives we'd rather leave behind.

2.  Foist other people on them.
We all know that every protagonist needs an antagonist, someone to thwart their story goals.  But they don't need to be much of a villain to make life difficult, they can just be other people being themselves.  When Satish's childhood friend pushes him to attend the Jubilee reunion, she can't possibly understand the trauma she's rekindling.  Okay, the proprietor of the guesthouse where Futh begins and ends his circular walk isn't a bundle of laughs, but he isn't to know that Futh doesn't understand how other people's minds work and has no idea of the suspicion his behaviour, in all innocence, is arousing.  Grace, on the other hand, perhaps stemming from a lifetime of economic dependence in the days before women had the vote, never in my opinion completely loses control, despite relying for her very survival first on her new husband, then on the shifting power dynamics within the lifeboat, and finally on the opinion of the jury about the part she played in the murder of Mr Hardie.  The much quoted truism that we can't live with other people and can't live without them either applies as much to novels as to real life.

3.  Get down to basics.
You know about Maslow's hierarchy, and our basic human need to address our fundamental physiological concerns before we can move on to higher-order issues.  I've already mentioned how getting enough, or the right, food had me worried across all three novels, especially The Lifeboat where Grace was at genuine risk of starvation.  This was also one of those rare novels where the characters get to go to the toilet – or not, as it happens, given that lifeboats aren't provided with such luxuries, so the poor women had to fiddle about with a bailer under their ankle-length skirts. 
Not exactly life-threatening, but I do know from experience it's extremely painful, so I did sympathise with Futh and his blisters, while cursing him for buying new walking boots before setting out on a long-distance walk, and I'm not sure that I could have done that to him.

Still, the Beatles got it wrong about Jude: it's not the author's job to make it better, we've got to take a sad situation and make it worse.  Or at least until the very end of the story.

Please share your views on this or any other aspects of the author interviews.  The next one, with Gavin Weston, author of Harmattan, should be launched fairly soon, with a post about the end of childhood following on not long after.

As for my own writing, June is shaping up to be my personal short story month, with several publications promised: one I've been waiting for for about a year (the contract's signed but I'm not holding my breath) while another two were only accepted this week.  I'll keep you informed.

I'm watching the evening news and somebody's been killed in a car crash. Let that be a lesson to us all to drive more carefully, I think. A life cut short: a tragedy for his family and friends.

Then they bring on a representative of said family and friends to spell it
out for me, to mumble through the cliches of loss just in case I haven't got the message. Hey, I want to tell the programme editor, I'm a grown up. I've been to that place where you can't understand how the world keeps turning without that person in it but, even if I hadn't, I think I'd understand that if you lose a loved one you feel sad. My heart hardens for every talking head that tells me how wonderful the deceased was. I think of all the senseless deaths from war and poverty and corruption that don't make it onto my TV.

Don't try to dictate what I should feel!

I get a similar reaction reading some fiction, where the required emotion seems to be shouting at me in capital letters, bold type and underlined  three times. I don't think I'm lacking in compassion – in fact, I'm quite easily moved to tears – but it's been known for an overdone death scene in more than one bestselling novel to have me in fits of laughter.

A good novel should take us on an emotional journey but, frankly, if the writer lacks the wherewithal to carry the reader with her, perhaps she shouldn't leave the house at all. Or perhaps a leisurely stroll to the coffee shop is the right journey for some if a round-the-world tour entails lost
luggage and a night in a prison cell. A lot of people can appreciate a really good cup of coffee: it doesn't have to be the big drama every time.

What do I think does make for an emotionally satisfying read?

… or from the perspective of a baffled child who inevitably won't have access to the whole picture, but the adult reader will feel the full poignancy of the impact of the tragedy on both him and his parents.

And always always understatement: trusting the reader to know enough about the workings of the world to understand that there's something seriously wrong when it doesn't occur to a child to tell her father that her boots are pinching her toes and she needs new ones. (I know, not the main scene of the novel, but nevertheless a beautiful depiction of child neglect.)

Or keeping us hoping for a favourable outcome against the odds – whoever heard of a hostage situation where they all lived happily ever after? – as if the reader were living it with them day by day. I've read this a couple of times and I still don't know how she does it, but I feel like King Canute trying to hold back the  tide.

Again on endings, how about the shock emotional punch? We knew from the start that Kevin had killed several of his schoolmates, but I was in tears when I discovered that that was only the half of what he'd done. Then another thing that makes this book so powerful is the complexity of Eva's  reaction. She's as far removed from the grieving relatives on my TV news as you can get. Having struggled to love her son since before he was born, we might expect her to be glad of an excuse to give up on him, but it seems that it's only once the world confirms that he's evil that their relationship can really begin.

Much as we might wish, in real life as in novels, bad things
only happened to bad people, we're less likely to feel manipulated as a reader if we find a less sympathetic character tugging at our heartstrings. So Eva
Khatchadourian, so David Lurie: they feel like real people, rather than symbols for a particular emotion, stumbling through life in a not particularly admirable way. They're
also caught up in something much bigger than themselves, so that what we feel is not just for them as individuals, but for the whole situation, in Lurie's case the pain of a country picking up the pieces after the damage wrought by apartheid.

Of course, this is nothing like the whole story. There's much more could be said about each of these novels as well as about the markers of emotional depth. And not just a little anxiety in setting such a high standard in relation to my own work. (I can only fail, and each time fail better.) But an important theme, I think, and one to keep coming back to.
What do you think?

Mmm, the smell of new-mown grass, the tang of rosehip syrup, and in a flash, your heroine's whisked back twenty years to that fateful night in Paris.  Don't do it – or at least think twice before you do!
Why not, if it was good enough for Proust,  surely it's good enough for you and me?
Well, according to the latest research on involuntary autobiographical memories, it just won't come across as natural that way.    Although such memories do spontaneously occur around 3 to 5 times a day in real life, they tend to be triggered by abstract verbal/linguistic cues more often than sensory/perceptual cues.  
Don't say I didn't warn you!    Jim Reeves is here to back me up on vocals and a virtual prize for the first person to spot where I haven't followed this advice in my own work.
What's next?    I still haven't produced the promised post on blogging, so maybe we'll have that, although, after Carlie's interesting feedback on my last post, I maybe ought to prioritise a thing I've got in draft on what qualifies you/me/us to call ourselves a writer.
On that point (both the last post and self-abasement), did you notice the gaffe in advertising today's post?    Something touching on the psychology of writing: were you expecting something poignant or something pertaining to?  English is such a complicated language, luckily we have our whole lives to learn to use it correctly.
If you haven't done already, do pop over to sit awhile with Isabel Costello on the literary sofa for a fabulous post and discussion on writerly and readerly frustrations.

Not being an early adopter of all things technological, I wasn't in a great hurry to join the blogging bandwagon. Except for the fact that both involve using ideas to construct sentences, I didn't see much overlap  between writing fiction and a blog. Would it be worth the time and effort if no  one were to read it? Would I be opening myself up to spiteful anonymous attacks? Might I, through the mysterious machinations of playground politics (sorry, the freedom of the internet), be simultaneously  lambasted and overlooked, and still be no further forward with what I consider to be my real writing?

Ten days in, I'm beginning to revise my opinion. The similarities are
greater than I'd – naïvely, glibbly – imagined. Because, in any kind of writing, there are always choices to be made about how to present oneself. There's always the question of narrative voice.

I'm writing as me, but as a particular version of me. Perhaps that's why I adopted the playful/witty/irritating/endearing username Annecdotist (delete as appropriate, but before you judge, please consider  what it's like to spend your whole life answering to an indefinite article). It's me, with a tale on the end. 

Unlike creating a narrator for my fiction, I'm not burdened with designing the details of Annecdotist's appearance and habits as these, for better or worse, are fixed. Or should they change, they do so in negotiation with me. No need to file reminders about the colour of her bedsheets or that she needs to stand on a chair to reach the spare mugs on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboards. But this doesn't mean I have no decisions to make about how I present my narrator. Far from it. It merely draws my attention to the more subtle aspects of narrative voice, that are perhaps more important but harder to pin down:

How chatty should I try to make Annecdotist to entice you to listen? How authoritative? How humorous? How open? If I allow her to be too opinionated will I alienate some potential readers, but if I don't take that risk will the whole thing be altogether too bland?

I ought to be asking these same questions of the narrators of my fiction, but it seems more acute here, where I'm developing the voice in public (I wish!) right from the start. I'm curious as to how Annecdotist will develop over time and how she will feed into my fiction, if at all. Even though I do all my writing directly onto the computer, it's only Annecdotist that I identify strongly with the digital world. She's like one of those people kids used to think lived in the telly or one of those sophisticated androids from films like Blade Runner and if only I could locate the screen on my computer to fine-tune her settings, I'd have nothing to worry about.

Perhaps other more experienced writer-bloggers have sussed this one out yonks ago, or maybe your personalities are so well integrated your one-size-fits-all personas will serve you well at anything from a job interview to a beach barbecue. Whatever you think, perhaps you'd like to enlighten me?