Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

So, off to Chipping Sodbury. To my shame, I'd never been there before speaking at the library last night, but I'd assumed it was a dormitory town for Bristol, possibly with an old heart but drowned with modern developments. How wrong can you be. It's a lovely Cotswold town with an original market street lined with old buildings, one of which is the newly refurbished library complete with fabulous librarians Linda and Julie.

You turn up at these events unsure of what you will find. There is an imaginary vision in your head - books will be laid out for sale, drinks provided, comfortable chair for the speaker, appreciative audience. It never arrives - until last night. Everything went smoothly, I gabbled away at top rate, answered questions, signed books, drank tea and ate custard creams and twiglets (could there be a better combo?). Even better, I was delighted to see on the display stand my favourite books: they'd seen the list on my website and dug them out. It was an object lesson in how to make an author happy. Thank you.

The evening would also have been memorable for the presence of two Only Fools and Horses fans among the sea of, well, generally middle-aged women. Aged 13 and 12, they were a great credit to their mums, and behaved impeccably, listening to me going on about books and writing for hours when all they really wanted to know was what David Jason was like.

And oh dear, I probably rabbited on for far too long. I spend most of my time talking to the computer, and may have no face to face contact with real people for days, so when I see lots of them I go a bit...verbal. And it was the first Kissing Mr Wrong talk, so I was nervous on top of that - I'd wanted to read a WWI bit but on practising at home realised I couldn't without crying. Nowadays you just have to mention the Somme and I'm off.

Add prime minsterial debates and rain into the mix, and the whole thing could have been a disaster. But I had a good time. I just hope the audience did too.

Full Moons and Fibs

Last night there was the most wonderful full moon. It lit up the whole street more vividly than a street lamp when I was taking the dog for his last stroll around the block. I wrote about such a moon in Kissing Mr Wrong, a scene when Lu, my main character, was making some momentous decisions (and coincidentally also taking the dog for a wee).

After I finish writing the first draft I work out the dates and make sure that weekends and bank holidays are in the right place and so on. I checked the state of the moon on the date. Oops. No full moon, in fact there would be only a tiny sliver to hang in the sky. Three choices: change the date, change the moon, fib.

Readers, I decided to fib.

Yes, I have deliberately and in cold blood put in an incorrect fact. I am sorry, but I really couldn't change the date, and having such a round, shining, glorious moon in this crucial scene was important. I try to be reliable with the facts - if I say it's the 76 bus for the Protestant cemetery in Rome then it is - but this time my standards have been lowered. Will anyone notice, or care? Will I be accosted at lit fests with angry readers clutching lunar calendars and demanding their money back? Somehow I doubt it. But even if no one else notices, I know, and it tugs at my conscience like a healing scab.

(Though not enough to change it...)

At Chipping Sodbury Library tonight at 7.30pm, ready to be accosted by angry readers clutching lunar calendars.

Jane Austen had it Easy II

And another thing Jane Austen didn't have to contend with was keeping her hero and heroine from jumping into bed with each other. Let's face it, most people when they meet someone they like, they kiss pretty soon and if that seems satisfactory, take it further. I'm not suggesting that we all telescope those steps into the course of an evening but there's nothing to stop us doing that if we choose. And then we split up or stay together.

This makes problems for anyone writing romance. Your main characters meet early on, ideally in the first chapter, and then you have to contrive to keep them being attracted to each other while at the same time not developing their relationship. It can be done, but it's much harder when there isn't a reason such as social etiquette, religion, race or class keeping them apart.

With Nice Girls Do, the original version didn't have Will and Anna making love. This was partly because it didn't fit in with the story as it was, and also I had qualms about having Anna - who had so enthusiastically shagged Oliver at the beginning of the novel - sleeping with another man a few hundred pages along, even if he was The One for her. She was a Nice Girl, after all.

My editor said that they had to make love. In her opinion, Anna was an experienced woman, not a timid virgin and it would be unbelievable for Anna to be so in love with a man she hadn't slept with. So I re-wrote the ending, and the book IS better for it but it caused me all sorts of logistical problems that Ms Jane Austen didn't have to deal with, from the mechanics of providing a comfortable location for the event to how to make it plausible that they wouldn't come together relationship-wise until the last page.

Life might be easier now we're more relaxed about these things, but not necessarily for writers.

If anyone is near Chipping Sodbury on Thursday evening, I'm speaking at the library at 7.30pm, click here for further details. I'd love to see some friendly faces. Or any faces, for that matter.

Jane Austen had it Easy I

Lucky old Jane Austen. In her day she didn't have to worry about characters having to do inconvenient things like earning a living, they could, if necessary, just hang around doing nothing except having picnics and interacting with each other. I'm currently in the middle of my new book and oh, it's frustrating. My characters, like most people, have to keep going to work. They can't loiter and dally, except at weekends and in the evenings. And - if they're not working - there has to be a plausible reason why.

Of course, there are advantages if you can find them a good job, but not all jobs are suitable for writing purposes. At Westonbirt Arboretum last summer I stopped and chatted to a bodger about his work - strictly speaking, a bodger is a man who lathe turns green timber to make chairs legs. He ran chair making courses in the woods and said out of nowhere, 'I wish a romantic novelist would come on one of my courses, I think I'd be a brilliant hero.'

So I told him what I did, but decided against having a bodger in my next book. His chairs were beautiful and I can see there are lots of opportunities for sensuously running hands over chair legs, but it's a solitary, static sort of job, and you're stuck out in the woods. I had a similar problem when I made Will in Nice Girls Do a gardener; he generally had to be there. (And writing this, I realise we never see Will anywhere else except the garden.)

Office-based work is even worse. It's difficult to get any novel action going when you're hunched over a computer all day, and it's hardly wish fulfillment for most people. Small wonder that many main characters have jobs in journalism or PR where they can get out and meet people. Then there are jobs that lack a certain something. I'm sure there are lots of fabulous dentists out there, but it's not a very sexy job. Obscure jobs can be fun - Natalie's job in A Single to Rome was a delight to write - but there are pitfalls here. The least sexy job I've come across was in a self published thriller where the hero was a specialist in intestinal worms in pigs. Original, yes, but I could never take to him - I always knew where his hands had been.

So what with the mechanics and sex appeal and originality - oh yes, it would be so much easier if they could all just hang around and intermingle without having to worry about the 9 to 5.

Making Good Choices

I don't know about you, but in my real life there's an awful lot of hanging around and doing small repetitive actions such as teeth brushing, showering, getting dressed, eating breakfast and so on. If we included every single one of them in every single novel, then each book would spread to 1000s of pages - if they were ever read. So a writer's first job is to make certain selections of the kind of actions they're going to include, and most of us do this automatically - I don't think it's ever occurred to me to write about a character going to the loo for example, and I can only remember one bit of student work where it featured.

So, we choose not to include basic bodily functions. If you accept this premise, from here it's not a hard step to accept that as writers we are continually making choices, and there is no absolute requirement to include any information at all. Most importantly this means that you leave out any boring bits. There is no reason for including them. If they bore you, they'll bore the reader.

If your character needs to pass the next two weeks but not much happens, then simply write, 'the next two weeks went by without anything happening.' If your character had a puppy when she was 8, it may have mattered to her, but is it relevant for the reader now? If not, then you don't need that bit of backstory. If you've written that the character went by car, would it be a more interesting choice if the car broke down and he had to go on foot, or call a taxi? If he goes by foot he might see something interesting, by taxi and the driver could have a conversation with him.

Choices, choices, choices. You are making choices all the time. Learn to make good ones and relax about ditching bad ones.

Arbitrary Stories

All stories are what you, the writer, make of them. If you give the bare bones of a story to different writers, they will choose different elements to add, different voices to work with, different styles, different tones, different settings, different everything! The same story can be compelling or dull, depending on how you tell it.

With an arbitrary short story, you get supplied with the bare bones of a plot to which you then add the details. I love doing this in large groups and seeing all the variations that emerge from the different imaginations. Here's one we did in class last week...

Read 1, and write a paragraph. Then read 2, and write another paragraph following that direction, then 3 and so on.

1. Someone is on their way somewhere.

2. A form of transport goes by - they get on.

3. They see someone - describe this person.

4. They find something in their pocket.

5. It makes them remember something.

6. They reach their destination.

7. They change their mind about what to do next.

All story telling is about going from A to B to C to D, what matters is how we write the journey.

Ooops! I've Done It Again

My first book was called Adultery for Beginners and was the story of Isabel, wife of Neil, who has a torrid and obsessive affair with a man called Patrick. Patrick, I realised quite recently, was an amalgamation of of a couple of men I'd known, but at the time of writing I could honestly put my hand on heart and say none of the characters were based on any real people or events.

Then my sister sidled up to me. Several people had asked, she reported, her eyes not meeting mine, whether the character of Neil was based on her husband. I was astounded: as far as I was concerned the two couldn't have been further apart. I couldn't see why anyone would think that. Well, she replied. There's the moustache. And the job. And the ex-pat angle. And the reading computer manuals in bed (which I naturally didn't know about). And... I was so embarrassed because the points of similarity were there but honestly, it had never occurred to me before.

And I've just done it again. Kissing Mr Wrong has as its main male character a WWI expert called Nick. And my son is a WWI expert called...Nick. My only excuse is that I think it's a nice name and apologies to my son...but if he's divorced with two children, then as his mother I really should know about it. I suppose that's the answer - you give 100 characteristics to a character, and the chances are some of them are going to coincide with those of a member of your family and friends. Still. It is embarrassing. Sorry Nick.