I am addicted to cookery books. I have a large number and like nothing better than to waste time looking at the splendid glossy photos and scanning the ingredients. Of course, most of the time, I never go on to cook the dish. Or if I do, I end up adapting that ingredients list, exchanging...
Fiction imitates life. That’s the idea, anyway. Fiction sets out to create situations, scenarios and settings with which we, as readers, can identify, relate or at least imagine. Yet in many ways, fiction is utterly unlike Real Life. Take the turning points the author has to create and inject into the story to propel the...
It’s not my phrase – fingertip history – but I love it. The historian and commentator on British social history, Juliet Gardener uses it when talking about fiction written immediately in the wake of historic events, the recounting of an age unclouded by nostalgia or hindsight. And in recent months, my reading diet has been...
That’s what Virginia Woolf considered necessary to become a writer of fiction. a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, Further on in the wonderfully sharp, observant, amusing and perceptive A Room of One’s Own, which grew out of a lecture that the author had been...
Most readers, when engrossed in a novel, probably give little attention to the narrative point of view. It’s one of those phrases – narrative perspective, narrative voice, point of view, that attention is drawn to on creative writing courses. The reader is obviously aware of a first person narrative as in Jane Eyre, for example,...
Except something within us which is always surprised by change. Not my words but those of Thomas Hardy. And I certainly agree with the sentiment. In fact, the sheer absurdity of how swiftly time goes – not just the days and weeks and months but the years. The decades. How is it possible, for example,...
Recently, I came across a post by a literary agency, claiming that the problem with too many fledgling novelists is that their novels are not sufficiently ‘page-turning.’ The article claimed that this was also the affliction of 19th century novelists who created too many diversions in their narratives. The contemporary reader, evidently, has no time...
There is a phrase which is often heard and frequently repeated that is used to describe people – people from the past who have made a particular impact or have striven and/or achieved something new. Something apparently unexpected. Original. Of course, they were ahead of their time. But it has struck me recently, hearing the...
Good literature, people agree, is long-lasting. It rides out fads and fashions so that years, decades, even centuries on, it still speaks truths to us. And I don’t just mean those huge universal themes to be found in Shakespeare – the perils of excessive ambition or jealousy or pride – the fatal flaws of the...
So at last my house move has begun to seem like a distant nightmare and I am happily – very happily – settled in somewhere that is now feeling very much like Home. And now that the decorators have finally departed leaving a splendidly refreshed and bright interior – I was beginning to feel as...
