Rock-Paper-Scissors: Week Two of Poetrygate

Today's official message in the ongoing Poetry Society scandal - now five resignations, no explanations - came from Laura Bamford, Acting Chair of the Board of Trustees:

NOTICE OF GENERAL MEETING

The Poetry Society (Incorporated)
Company Number 01557657

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN  that a General Meeting  of the above-named company will be held in Lecture Theatre 1, The Royal College of Surgeons, 35-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PE on Friday 22 July 2011 at 2.00pm for the following purpose:

To outline the future strategy of The Poetry Society and to receive members’ input

Dated 30 June 2011
By order of the Board

Laura Bamford
Acting Chair

Yes, we wanted a meeting. But no, this is not the one we wanted. We want to know WHY five people have now resigned from the Staff and the Board of Trustees of the Poetry Society. Not what the Board hopes to achieve in the aftermath of those resignations.

Fascinating though it will be to 'outline the future strategy' and deliver our input as members, there does not appear to be any room for manoeuvre in the Agenda of this General Meeting. 

And why on earth is this being called a GM, not an EGM? Is that so the Board can look as though it is not bowing to any external pressure by calling this meeting, but has done so of its own sweet accord in order to be helpful to the membership?

Members need to be aware that this is rapidly becoming a game of rock-paper-scissors. We hold out paper, they go for scissors. We produce scissors, they show us a rock. 

I, for one, intend to stick to my original purpose in signing the list of members who require an EGM to be called by the Poetry Society. 

And that is not only to ask for full and frank disclosure of the events leading up to the recent resignations of four Staff members and now the Chair of the Board of Trustees, so that I may be confident that everything has been done in accordance with the rules of the Society, but also to ask why so many of our administrators felt the need to resign.

These are questions that must be asked of the Board. Nothing less than the whole, unadulterated truth can be accepted.

I would strongly urge any remaining members who have not yet given their names to Kate Clanchy in support of an EGM to do so now, so we may get to the bottom of this travesty of democracy as soon as possible.

kateclanchy @ gmail.com

Mslexia Workshop: Encouraging New Poems

The next instalment of my writing workshops for the Mslexia 2011 Poetry Competition, judged by Jo Shapcott, is now up on the Mslexia website.

It's entitled Encouraging New Poems.

Poems beget poems. The more poems you write, the more you will find waiting to be written. So when you hit a rich vein, don’t rest after you’ve finished your first draft and put it aside to mature. Keep hammering away at the wordface. 

Ted Hughes believed that poem sequences are a good way of generating new poetry, particularly during a creative dry spell. Sometimes you sit down to write something new and the words won’t come. Linking poems together can help to maintain the momentum of previous inspiration ...

Read more and follow the exercises for this instalment.

Buy A Book

Grab me on Amazon.co.uk

I spend a few minutes each day tracking sales of the various books I've edited for Embrace Books. Some days it's good, some days I zip over to Twitter or Facebook to nudge the publicity machine along another notch.

Now and then, I also check my own sales.

Novel Rank, the excellent site I check most often and which tracks Amazon sales, has started telling me a sorry but familiar tale in poetry. Sales of my latest book, Camper Van Blues, have stalled after a promising few months.

So if anyone has not yet bought my latest poetry collection, Camper Van Blues, I'd be thrilled if you could give my sales a jump-start on Amazon UK, or over on Amazon.com for those in the US.

To read more about Camper Van Blues, or buy it directly through Salt Publishing, just click here.

What else?

Leaving a review on Amazon after buying, or sharing those Amazon links on Facebook or Twitter - such actions would be deeply welcome too. It would give me a warm glow to know I had garnered a few extra sales of my own book while the others I track are also selling.

"Poetrygate": your chance to stand up and be counted

There's trouble at the Poetry Society. A few weeks ago, the President, Director and Finance Officer of the Society resigned, without explanation.

Much of the ensuing controversy has been connected to a lack of clarity from the Society following these events. The resignations have been made public, yes. But members of the Society have not been given any clear explanation for why these resignations occurred, nor been allowed any official discussion of how we move forward as a Society. It seems a reasonable request for full disclosure to be granted to the membership if these resignations are in any way connected.

The Evening Standard came up with some further information, but no more than was already privately circulating between members.

Some bloggers and other commentators are now starting to discuss the matter, but timidly, most not wishing to find themselves sidelined later for having been one of 'the hardy few', as Ms Baroque puts it, who dared discuss the matter. A recent post went up at Carrie Etter's blog and was removed after a torrent of libellous comments appeared, the debate unceremoniously erased.

Now people are beginning to draw comparisons between recent events and the Poetry Wars of the 1970s, when barricades were manned at the old Po Soc HQ and poets huddled about the braziers for six long years, warming their hands on copies of each other's Selected Works.

The Evening Standard claims that all this furore has come about because "Fiona Sampson, editor of the Poetry Review, the magazine overseen by the Society, had asked for autonomy from the director, and has been pushing the focus of the society from education to promoting high-profile poets."

I have known Fiona Sampson a number of years. She is a fine editor with excellent and pleasingly eclectic tastes in poetry. Far from being elitist, as has been suggested, she has featured both well-known and small press poets in most issues, and has encouraged greater depth in poetry criticism by commissioning long critical essays for the magazine. (A bold move, even if not all those essays turned out to be equally gripping and apposite.) Whatever has gone on behind closed doors, I feel certain Fiona Sampson will have acted with the best interests of Poetry Review at heart, and that she does not deserve the vitriol that has been aimed at her in recent weeks.

Unfortunately, of course, Poetry Review is the flagship magazine of the Poetry Society. As such, it needs to fulfil quite a broad range of objectives, only one of which is to promote high-profile poets.

In light of all this, I urge members of the Poetry Society to lend their names to the call for an Emergency General Meeting, to discuss these recent events and forge a way forward for the Board and the Membership.

The reason I ask this is that we are currently experiencing a crisis in confidence among the more professionally active members of the Society, and that crisis must be addressed, not simply ignored.

I also ask that, until we have the full facts before us, critics of the Board and the editor of Poetry Review behave in a civilised manner. There is something deeply unpleasant about the sight of an angry mob hounding one individual above all others.

Apathy gives us the government we deserve. But at least members are being given the opportunity to step up and voice their dissatisfaction. But we can't do that without 340 names.

Will yours be one of them?

To Get Involved:

Anyone who is a member of the Poetry Society and would like to sign the following petition, please email Kate at kateclanchy@gmail.com and she'll put you on the list. She will not share your contact or publicise you until the list reaches 340 when it will be handed in to the Poetry Society, along with the following message:

We, the undersigned, constituting as we believe ten percent of the members of the Poetry Society, having learnt of the resignation of the Chair of the Board of Trustees and the Director, the Finance Manager and the President of the Society, and in order to determine whether the Board of Trustees has their continuing confidence, require the Board to hold an Extraordinary General Meeting to provide an explanation, in the transparent and accountable manner the members  expect of its elected representatives, of the events leading to these resignations; an independently chaired forum for the statements of members and for their questions; and a detailed account of how the Board will continue the business of the Society in accordance with its stated aims and purposes.

Latest Update: more information at the Guardian. The list of signatories currently stands at 323, as of 2pm Thursday 30th June 2011.

Roll up! Roll up! The Tin Angel rides again!

Back in the day, in the narrow-laned medieval streets of Coventry, we had a buzzing poetry open mic night called NIGHTBLUEFRUIT AT THE TIN ANGEL.

The Tin Angel was the name of the bar where we met on the first Tuesday of every month to recite and listen to poetry, stand-up and occasionally music. It was a tiny corner joint with dodgy toilets where everyone had to cram in and the windows ran with condensation by the end of the night. The evening was organised by Jon Morley of the local poetry press, Heaventree.

Then the Tin Angel closed.

For a while, Nightbluefruit drifted from place to place, homeless and unsure, bleeding regulars.

Now it's back on track, and playing out at Taylor Johns in Coventry's Canal Basin. If you're in the region, why not go along? The next open mic night is July 5th, 8pm.

The poster above is by the massively talented Coventry-based artist Colin Dick, pictured below. Click on his name to see an article about his work at Horizon Review, with numerous examples of his amazing paintings.

Five Things You Need When Writing A Novel

A Writing Space 
Virginia Woolf wrote an entire treatise - A Room Of One's Own - about the need for women to have a room of their own, not simply to develop as writers but also as individuals. Frankly though, it applies equally to both sexes. 

It doesn’t need to be an actual room – though my output has increased substantially since I rented myself an office downtown – but it must be established as your ‘writing space’, a place and maybe also a time you associate with settling down to write, even if it’s only that half-hour commute on the bus or train every morning. 

Try to establish a rhythm in association with these special writing spaces, and keep to a routine as far as possible. More than anything, writing responds to routine. Feed your novel regularly and it will grow strong and healthy. Forget to check in, and it will quite rapidly wither and die.

Stamina 

Some people call this will-power, focus, determination, patience, stickatititus, etc. If your novel is over 100,000 words long, it may feel as though you need an inexhaustible supply. Even if it’s a shorter book, like a novella, it will still need to go through several drafts before it’s publishable. So make sure your patience is on board before you type Chapter One.

Post-It Notes or Stickies

These are extremely useful for writers, as they can be instantly seized and scribbled upon when an idea strikes. No need to open a document on your computer or find a fresh page in your writing notebook which you will later leave on the bus. You just seize and stick. 

Will Self famously plasters his study walls with these sticky notes when planning a novel, so you’ll be in good company. (How on earth does he get them to stay on, though? Mine always fall off after a few hours, even the expensive sort. Grr.) 

They’re not very durable though, and tend to end up littering the floor under your desk, so it’s a good idea to transfer any important notes to computer later on, when you’re not actually in mid-flow.

Index cards

These are the thick paper notecards students often use for exam revision. You can buy them in bound books, which I don't think are flexible enough as a tool for writers, or little boxes to store them in, alphabetically or as you will. Some people use them to plot out their story, but I use index cards for research rather than planning. 

You can order index cards online or buy them at places like WH Smiths

When I take notes during research, I often find later that I’ve forgotten where I put them or I can’t find the right note quickly enough because it’s buried inside a giant notepad or folder. So index cards, filed in categories in a box, can be a real timesaver. 

Index cards tend to come in plain white or a selection of pastel shades. If you need categories in your note-taking, try using a different colour for each category. This can shorten the hunt when looking up a particular fact halfway through a scene.

When researching, one drawback is having to note down on each card where you found that particular fact: page number, book, author, publisher, date etc. But you could use an abbreviation and provide a key at the front of the card box. If you’re organised enough.

Large Whiteboard

This is an absolutely vital piece of equipment for me as a writer, and my personal favourite. Some years ago I homeschooled my kids, and that was when I learned the beauty of the whiteboard. 

It’s versatile and non-static – you can clean it off and start again every day, every week or every month. It’s large, so you can use it to plan a multi-strand novel with all the different character streams and their plot arcs. It can be placed above or beside your desk as a reminder while you work, and can be used over and over again for future projects. 

The large whiteboard can be a writing tool or a motivational tool. It can allow you to tick off books or internet sites you need to check out. It can plot monthly sales on Kindle or remind you about the ham sandwich you left in the office fridge. It can be used to plot complex graphs in full colour if you like that kind of thing, and it can take up useful time when you need to procrastinate. 

You can get one with a corkboard area too, but I prefer to buy a separate corkboard and use the whole space of the large whiteboard for my notes. 

Writers! What would you add to this list of writing essentials?

My Editor Is Moving On

Sorry to see my lovely and very talented editor, Selina Walker, moving on from Transworld to Century/Arrow.

But I'm sure she'll make a great success of the new job!

For those who are interested in my fiction activities, here are the details of her move at the Bookseller today.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on the second novel in my Tudor trilogy for Transworld, HIS DARK LADY, which is stuffed full of intrigue, politics, espionage, theatrical goings-on, courtly splendour, grisly high-profile executions and, of course, forbidden love.

THE QUEEN'S SECRET will be out in March 2012, under the name Victoria Lamb.

The Writing Spark

It's that time of year again. Mslexia, the women's writing magazine, are holding their annual Poetry Competition 2011, and have asked me to provide another series of online workshops to accompany it. Deadline for entries to the competition is July 18th.

These particular workshops guide you through the process of writing a poem from the initial spark of an idea through to submitting to a competition or magazine.

Apparently, the workshop series I created for Mslexia last time was a very popular feature of the website, which is highly gratifying. It's always good to know you've helped someone else with their writing, and even better when it's several someones!

Anyone interested in following the series this year, you can find workshop number one here. It's entitled THE SPARK OF A POEM.

The next few workshops should follow soon. Once that happens there'll be links in the Mslexia sidebar to guide you through to them. The last series are also still on the site. Just search for "Holland Workshops" and a list of previous writing workshops should pop up.

Southern Writers Conference

I'm off next weekend to speak as a guest at the Southern Writers Conference in Chichester.

I'll be talking about poetry, and even reading some of my own if they can't stop me quickly enough. If you're in the area next weekend - Friday 10th to Sunday 12th June - and are interested in writing, there may still be day tickets available.

I'm speaking on the Sunday morning, I believe.

Here are some of the other speakers' details:

Raffaella Barker, author of nine novels and contributor to the Evening Standard, Spectator and Elle, amongst others.  She is also an experienced teacher of creative writing.

Simon Hall, crime writer and (appropriately enough) the BBC’s crime correspondent for the South West.  He also narrates his own audio books.

Jane Holland, award-winning poet and novelist as well as being an ex professional snooker player.  She hasn’t offered any lessons on the Earnley table, but I’m sure that’s just because we haven’t asked.

Catherine King, well known author of popular romantic novels set in 19th century Yorkshire. Catherine will be well known to a lot of regular attendees at SWC.

Kathy Gale, with over 20 years of book publishing experience including editorial, marketing and sales management. She should make for a fascinating Saturday afternoon speaker.

Feeling Political?

This arrived today from Jody Porter at The Morning Star: 

 

Dear poets, publishers and editors,

I have recently taken over as poetry editor for the daily UK newspaper The Morning Star [link] and I'm looking for submissions of new or previously published poems.

Under the stewardship of the late and esteemed John Rety, Well Versed developed into a widely-read forum for new and established writers. It appears every Thursday and submissions will also be published and archived online.

Please send submissions, with biographical information, to: wveditor [at] gmail [dot] com

Poems need not be overtly political, but space is limited so they must be short to medium in length.

Please forward this message on to anyone who might be interested in submitting work. Any tweets or blog reposts spreading the word would be greatly appreciated.

The Latent Power of the Diary

I don't keep a diary these days, though I did keep one sporadically when I was younger. Which means my children and posterity will have little clue as to how I was feeling on a day-to-day basis, nor what I was up to.

In some ways the blog has taken over the role of the diary. Our diarists are bloggers. But how intimate is a blog, really? Our most private thoughts can rarely be voiced in a public, or even semi-private, blog. Which means the deep dark secrets of the diary must remain forever locked away in our hearts. That may be a good thing for some. For others, it's a pity.

My mother (the novelist Charlotte Lamb) kept a diary for a large swathe of her life. Some years there is a full page entry for every day, regardless of the fact that she may have also written as many as 17 novels in the same year. (For yes, that was how many novels she wrote in 1977-8, and other years in the Seventies were not too dissimilar in output.)

It's odd to read these diaries, and sometimes disturbing too. It's an eyeopener to get a more rounded view of a parent who wasn't forthcoming about her private thoughts and feelings, and it's also useful for me as a writer, for my mother reveals many of the typical issues and doubts as most other novelists - despite her success.

Much of her innermost thoughts are about her writing rather than her family. It's very much a Writer's Diary (she loved reading Virginia Woolf's diaries herself).

But now and then I get a mention, which is comforting. (Though sometimes not!) My memories of my childhood are pretty cloudy, but I do remember this day below. It was fantastic to come across it in her diary and remember the actual events, from Saturday 2nd October 1976:

We went up to London at noon to have lunch at Luigi's and then went to the British Museum so that Jane could look at her favourite Egyptian rooms. She loves them. Then we went to Islington to St. George's to see Richard III. Jane really loved that. She caught Alan Badel's eye & he began to "ham" in her direction. The more she laughed, the more he played the pantomime demon-king. 

The following month, my mother was diagnosed with a "massive tumour", after months of illness, and successfully underwent surgery to remove it.

I was completely unaware of this until I read her diaries, though I remember her disappearing into hospital for a few weeks around that time. I suppose, in the Seventies, in middle-class families, such problems were not openly discussed. Even today illness is rarely discussed in much detail. People 'die suddenly' or have 'long illnesses' which are otherwise unexplained. Perhaps we're still not very far removed from the Victorian aura of silence around the family in that respect. That may be a good thing. I can't decide.

Top Ten Bestseller!

Quick - look now before it updates!

My most recent collection of poetry, Camper Van Blues, has somehow managed to creep into the Salt Publishing Top Ten Bestsellers' list. You can find the list near the bottom of the Salt front page.

Just land there and scroll down.

I may need an alcoholic drink to revive me after that shock ...

London Book Fair

Had an amazing day yesterday at the London Book Fair, sited at Earl's Court. Sorry this photo of the exterior is a bit thin. Taken on my iPhone.

Apologies to all those friends and acquaintances who were also there yesterday but I didn't manage to catch up with. I know many Twitter and Facebook friends were about, and I did spot some and wave or have a quick chat - such as Danuta Kean, Carol McGrath, Kate Allan, and Lyn Vernham among others - but I missed a whole bunch of that crowd by failing to make the London Book Fair Tweetup.

Not my fault, I hadn't realised events would be on so late and booked my train for 8pm, then found that to change my Advance ticket would cost over thirty quid. Which seemed a bit steep, even for the undoubted pleasure of a LBF Tweetup. So I trundled home instead, and my sore feet thanked me for it.

Had a productive day, meeting people in independent publishing and discussing Embrace Books, and my role there as editor. I took along Rachel Lyndhurst's Storm's Heart beautiful glossy print edition as a sample, and allowed people to fondle it jealously.

And as an author myself, I met up with both my editors at Transworld, and also with my lovely and fantastically talented agent, Luigi Bonomi - who is very excited about the Young Adult novel I'm currently writing.

I received back some line edits on my forthcoming novel - in paper form, no less, egad! roughly 550 pages to carry home - and met some new faces in publishing as my alter-ego, a historical novelist.

It was a brilliant day and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A massively busy place though - must have walked about ten miles just going round and round the hundreds of stalls!

York Festival of Writing 2011

Going to the York Festival of Writing on Friday was an oddly exhilarating experience, rather like emerging into the light from a narrow, grimly-lit tunnel.

 I'd been living alone in a remote cottage on the edge of the North Yorks Moors during the week beforehand, writing the first 25,000 words of a new novel, so had enjoyed little contact with anyone - bar a few hours when my iPhone suddenly decided it had a signal, and I was able to send and receive tweets and a few Facebook messages.

But on the Friday, I left my rural retreat and drove through York - a lively, crowded city with many attractions - and on to the university campus, where the Festival of Writing was taking place.

I met so many industry people, it's hard to explain just how enormously useful this particular festival has become for writers.

I was a speaker - talking about my other incarnation as a romance editor at Embrace Books - and also took some pitches from writers. So I met plenty of interesting people that way, and hopefully gave my best pointers on writing romance in my talk.

But it was in the informal interactions - at meal or break-times, or in the long glamorous evenings at the bar - that the Festival really came into its own. We all had name badges, and soon knew most of each other's names, despite there being several hundred people there.

Which was a good thing, as it's embarrassing to be forever peering at your neighbour's breasts.

Those who made a big impact on me are too numerous to mention, but a good starting list would include Philippa Pride, who is Stephen King's editor and also a renowned Book Doctor; Lorella Belli, a London agent and incredibly glamorous, besides being a great conversationalist; Donna Condon, commissioning editor at Piatkus; Patrick Janson-Smith, formerly MD at Transworld, now at HarperCollins with the Blue Door imprint; Ashley Pharoah, the utterly gorgeous creator of cult TV series like Life on Mars, and an extremely funny man; Carole Blake, brilliant literary agent; and writers Jean Fullerton, Debi Alper, Kate Allan, Jane Lovering, Tim Murgatroyd, Louise Allen, Toby Frost, Julie Cohen, and many, many other wonderful authors, agents and editors who wandered in and out of my conversations all weekend, handed me manuscripts at meal-times, in the ladies' toilets or during seminars, and even stood me numerous drinks at the bar when I was looking thirsty.

Such a hard life, being an editor ...

I would heartily recommend the York Festival of Writing to anyone thinking of getting into writing, or improving their lot there, for such a stellar cast would be hard to better.

The Endless "To Do" List

It often feels these days as though I have an endless and bewildering "To Do" list, which keeps rolling and threatening to overwhelm me.

Everything goes onto my "To Do" list: my daily editing jobs, my own writing goals, children's dental or clinic appointments, my husband's weekly shirt wash, bills to be paid, general housework, gardening, food shopping, the car MOT, book reviews I've foolishly offered to write, family birthdays, personal letters I keep putting off, and even interviews I've agreed to do.

What keeps me on top of most of this multi-tasking? (I do fumble the ball occasionally, it can't be denied.) Believe it or not, it is this humble product below: the Pukka "Things To Do" book. 

 

I have not been paid to say this, but this little notebook has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. I fill it out religiously every evening, listing jobs for the following day, with any tasks left undone rolling onto the next day. Then I cross each one off the list as I achieve it.

My memory is so rubbish, I genuinely need something like this. It has 115 daily planners, with a large notes section opposite each list, so can contain far more information than could be squeezed onto an office whiteboard and, as long as I don't lose it or other factors intervene, it keeps me on track with all my various jobs.

Right. Now I can cross off "Update my blog at Raw Light". Phew.

The Natural Evolution of Books

It's "Read an E-Book Week". Have you read yours yet?

Poetry at Saumur, from March 14th

For those Francophiles and French-speaking poets among us, here is a reminder of the upcoming spring poetry event at Saumur from March 14th - 20th: Le Printemps des Poetes.

Non French-speakers, excusez-nous for five minutes ...

L'association Littérature & Poétiques organise pour la première fois à Saumur :

le Printemps des Poètes

du 14 au 20 mars 2011

dans le cadre de la manifestation nationale du même nom (13ème édition)

dont le thème cette année est : D'infinis paysages

(www.printempsdespoetes.com) du 7 au 20 mars 2011

dans la ville et l'agglomération de Saumur durant la semaine du 14 au 20 mars prochain.

Writing the Imperfect Synopsis

Writers hate the synopsis. It interferes with our illusion that writing fiction is some mysterious creative process, handed down by a lyre-playing Muse, to be messed with at our peril. It makes our writing feel like a grubby commercial venture. The synopsis, in a writer's eyes, has more in common with a business plan than a showcase for the writer's talent. The agent or editor features in this hellish fantasy as a less than friendly bank manager, glaring at them from behind an imposing desk, or perhaps as a gatekeeper, with a large "Keep Out" sign above their heads.

I've just finished a one page synopsis and sent it off to my agent. I have no idea if it was any good. It is what it is. But the power of the synopsis lies very much in the eye of the beholder. One agent or editor may adore a particular approach to the synopsis, while another despises it. A good writer always writes for a specific (imagined or assumed) readership, so tailoring a few pages to a particular kind of reader or brief shouldn't be hard.

If you know what is preferred by the person to whom you are sending the synopsis, all well and good. But if you don't, what to do?

A synopsis is more than an extended blurb. It has to achieve a number of goals. First, and most importantly, it should tell the person reading it what happens in the book. Note, not what the book is about, per se, but what happens and in what order.

That's trickier to achieve than it sounds. Good novels have sub-plots that weave into and through the main plot. Do we mention those? Do we leave them out? If they have a bearing on decisions made, actions taken, that turn the plot, then they need to be in the synopsis. If they are secondary to that plot-turning process, then we can safely leave them out.

Though much will depend on the length of synopsis required or requested. My recent synopsis had to be one page only, and that meant squeezing a complicated plot down to its bare bones.

With fleshier synopses of two to three pages, or even longer - though if you start writing the book itself instead of a non-fiction summary of its parts, you're in trouble - you could perhaps afford to mention the milk-maid's dalliance with the master, which provokes the son to leave home and join the army, which makes the wife hate the husband - and the freckle-faced milk-maid - when her beloved boy is subsequently killed in action. Otherwise, just start with the married granddaughter packing her bags years later, when her husband has an affair with his secretary and she remembers her grandmother's suffering under similar circumstances.

But only mention it in passing. A few words should suffice.

A synopsis should also sketch out the characters of your main protagonists, but without going into unnecessary detail. (Impossible? Perhaps!) It should also convey a sense of what kind of book this will be, whether it will have a strong sense of place or time, and if it will be eerie or funny, slick or innocent, fast-paced or leisurely. But always without labouring the point or stating such things baldly. Do not open, for example, with 'This is a funny book.' Keep that for the 3-minute pitch. The synopsis is a different beast altogether, where on-the-nose statements cannot be admitted - except by the very, very skilled or the very, very famous.

So here I am with my recent synopsis. Roughly 250 words to describe a book which is admittedly short at an estimated 65,000 words - it's a Young Adult historical - but nonetheless complicated, with a couple of weighty sub-plots and some historical background to boot.

To keep the thing short, I jettisoned the sub-plots except as passing references to unnamed characters at points where they impact on the main plot. I omitted to mention several important personages who will have to appear in the book occasionally - because it's based to some extent on real events - but who have almost no bearing on the main action. Mostly I assumed historical knowledge (though it's true we had already discussed the historical background over a deliciously tasty lunch last month) and so didn't need to sketch that out beyond mentioning the dates over which the story is set.

I did not, however, as many writers like to do, give a 'flavour' of the book by writing it in the same 'voice' as the book. I have never understood why this is a necessity with some editors. If an editor needs a sample of actual writing, they should ask for it. The synopsis is an entirely functional and non-fictional document, written by one professional for another, already weighed down with strict requirements of form and length versus the demands of the plot; it shouldn't also be laden with the ludicrous expectation that it should sound 'fictional'.

One common thing writers feel instinctively when describing their stories in advance is that they shouldn't reveal the ending. 'I won't tell you what happens after that ... but it's very exciting.'

We don't do that in the synopsis. It's a non-fictional document, remember? It's like packaging; it should tell the would-be buyer what's inside, and how many grams of fat, and is that saturated or Omega-3? In the synopsis, we tell the editor and agent precisely what happens at the end, and why. Yes, even if it's going to spoil it for the little darlings.

Having said all that, the synopsis must be a flexible document. It should be constructed like a house in an earthquake zone, to move subtly with the earth, not resist the quake and tumble down, killing your protagonists in their beds. Publishers ask for changes. Sometimes they ask for them at the start of the writing process, and sometimes halfway through - or later. You will need to be open to those changes, and not have your story so tightly bound together that no daylight can be admitted between plot-points. 

So the ideal synopsis is a little imperfect: it should err on the side of being too lightly written, kept flexible, with gaps - rather than holes - left for the editor's input, and neither too pithy nor over-ornate. A synopsis should always suggest rather than state baldly. Never forget that your synopsis will become, in many cases, a collaborative document. Writing a novel isn't quite like writing a screenplay, but by the end of the process, a number of different experts - often with clashing views on how a novel or even a synopsis should be written - will have stuck their fingers in the pie of your story and cheerfully wiggled them about.

In other words, you need to bear in mind that your finished novel may not resemble that first synopsis at all. It may have certain vital elements that were carried over, a basic thread or theme, perhaps even the same characters. But they will be changed now, their existence and actions more suited to what your novel has become over the course of its writing.

Rather sadly, the days of the writer as eccentric genius, who goes off into a hotel room for ninety days and emerges with a ground-breaking novel handwritten on a roll of perforated paper - which is then published to great acclaim without the agent or editor having done much beyond changing a few commas and lighting a congratulatory cigar - are long gone.

So the synopsis is unavoidable, and one of the banes of a writer's life; it represents the key to the first gate of the novel, beyond which a writer may not pass without permission.

Or not in any hope of publication.

On the Road Again

In North Wales tonight, in a slightly chilly waterfront hotel, poring over the latest revisions to my novel. The deadline is next Monday, and I'm almost there with the book.

Plenty of fiddly little things to attend to though before I hand over the final draft to be copy-edited. Assuming my editor doesn't ask for further changes once she's seen how I've handled her original requests, that is.

Yesterday, I gave a lively workshop on novel-writing and took ten pitches for Embrace Books at the annual Get Writing Conference at the University of Hertfordshire. Some of the pitchers went away disgruntled, having been informed that their novels were neither romance nor historical women's fiction, and therefore wouldn't fit our lines. I was later described as 'the Simon Cowell of romance writing'. Some people are so touchy ...

Met some marvellous people at Get Writing 2011 - readers, writers, editors, agents, buyers - including John Jarrold, Scott Pack, Matt Bates, the inimitable Raymond Tallis, and of course our own Jonathan Pinnock, soon to be launching 'Mrs Darcy Versus the Aliens' with Proxima Books (Salt).

Tomorrow, I am giving an interview at Bangor University, followed by a poetry reading in the evening, in connection with their Creative Writing courses. I shall read from my latest book of poetry Camper Van Blues, plus one or two poems from earlier books if there's time.

The rest of this half-term week will be spent between the Midlands and the deepest, darkest reaches of rural Cornwall, where relatives will be visited and children entertained.

Then I've arranged a two-night stay at a hotel near where I live, in order to polish off the last revisions, read through the whole manuscript, and prepare my Author's Note and Acknowledgements. There may be some head-beating against the wall involved if I don't manage to tidy up my revisions before that weekend. Because Monday will be too late to change my mind about them. 

Roll on, the ides of March. By then, I plan to have started my next novel.

Dabs with the Language Sander

Revisions on my Tudor novel are almost done. I mention this because I've been blogging mainly about poetry in recent months, yet I seem to have spent most of that time writing - or fiddling about with - prose.

It's always been a secret thought with me that prose rhythms are akin to poetry, or ought to be. Certainly I take my time over sentences that don't sound 'right' to me in their context, whatever that may be.

A good sentence should flow, should be both elegant and fit for purpose - by which I mean it should communicate whatever the writer needed it to communicate, which might be nothing or everything, or any point in between.

Clumsy writing is the last thing I want to find when looking back over what I've written.

Unfortunately, it's almost unavoidable in early drafts.

This is how it happens. You need to present a thought or a situation or a mood, and the words don't want to come, but you don't have time to coax them. You're a professional writer, you have deadlines, you have bills to pay. So you bodge it. You write what is needful and make a mental note to return later - preferably after dark when no one but the night watchman's cat is there to witness your shame - and rewrite the damn thing so that it says what is needful without leaving mental splinters in your reader's head.

That's one part of the revision process. Sanding off the rough edges.

A less pleasurable part of revision is having to rejig characters who now have beards, or no longer have beards, or whose motivation is entirely changed, or who must now swim the moat instead of swinging across it with the help of trailing creepers.

I'm joking, of course. But when you change even one detail, you quickly realise that nothing happens in isolation. Everything in the novel is interconnected. This is where we get our word 'text' from, a marvellously hard-working word which is related to 'textile' and the idea of weaving.

So once you decide, at the revision stage, that a minor change needs to happen, you also need to find places where a knock-on effect will occur following that change, and to make sure everything remains consistent within the world of your novel. Once you have six or seven 'minor' changes like this to make, the process of scouring the book for places where further changes need to happen becomes quite time-consuming and fiddly.

And meanwhile, you can't help little dabs with the language sander ...

But the hardest work is more or less over. I have one key scene to entirely rewrite, and maybe a short chapter to add early on, and the rest is about style.

Then I have the next book to begin.