How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors

I was asked to contribute to a wonderful collection of essays titled How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, and was thrilled to find myself rubbing shoulders with writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Franzen. More than sixty authors were asked to pick an object that assists them in the creative process. Some of my fellow authors were fairly conventional in their choices -- books, pictures, pens, earplugs -- whereas others named objects more exotic. My own favourite writing tool? A boxer's speedball. It hangs in my office and it beckons me several times a day. When my brain is sagging and slumping, I tap out a triplet beat. And then, no more sagging and slumping, but spinning and swaying...

From the jacket blurb of How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors: "Where do writers get their ideas? How do they deal with writer's block? What gets them high? What gets them low? What do they do all day? With original contributions from some of the most established authors in the world, How I Write is an editorial powerhouse of more than sixty essays, featuring Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody, Alan Hollinghurst, Will Self, Nicole Krauss, A.S. Byatt, and many others. The idea was to create a book that worked like an old curiosity shop, full of letters, photographs, drawings, illustrations, and other scattered mementos. Edited by the creator of the cult-literary magazine Zembla, and designed by art director Vince Frost, How I Write is a must-have for all writers, readers, and anyone interested in books, ideas and designs. The book is now available in stores in the UK and the United States and can also be purchased online: Buy at Amazon.com      Buy at Amazon.co.uk

My Husband, The Taxi Cab & "Even The Dead Have Secrets"

Authors are privileged. Writing is a passion and we are blessed indeed that we are able to share that passion with others. However, the writing life is not without its problems. Moments of serendipity and epiphany are rare. Writing is a lonely business and facing your computer all day long without any-one around can lead to fairly bizarre monologues, not to mention the occasional episode of outright hallucination.

But it is not so much the writing as the publishing process, which is the test. Bring together a group of authors, open a bottle of wine and some searing tales of publishing woe are bound to follow. These usually have to do with the publicity - or rather lack of it - given to the novels of less well-known authors. Publishers reserve their publishing dollars for the latest Clancy or J.K. Rowling. For us lesser scribes the logic of this strategy is a little hard to follow although, admittedly, there probably is still the odd nomad in outer Mongolia who hasn't heard of Harry Potter and who needs to be informed...

My husband, bless his heart, decided to take matters into his own hands. Ever since he was a little boy, Frederick had dreamed of owning a Ferrari, an Aston Martin, a fire truck and a London taxi cab. The first three have as yet eluded his grasp, but a year ago his fantasy of tooling around London in a handsome black sixteen year old Fairway, became true. Not only did he derive great enjoyment from driving down the bus lane illegally and waving airily to would-be passengers trying to flag him down, but he also had the satisfaction of knowing that he was making a contribution to furthering his wife's career. On the doors of the cab were reproductions of the covers of my first two books.

Even the dead have secrets it proclaimed mysteriously on the back left-hand door. The catchy slogan, You will never listen to the world the same way again, was stencilled on the other side. Whether this exposure led to an increase in my sales is debatable but the cab certainly drew some appreciative - if slightly mystified - glances from passers-by.

Sadly, the cab has since been sold: parking problems becoming too onerous. Added to this, I had to ride in the back (no passenger seat next to the driver) and my husband had developed the annoying habit of simply closing the little window behind his head whenever we had an argument and he was tired of listening to me.

Before the cab left my life, however, we took some pictures. They are posted here and I hope you enjoy them!

On Reading

Writers are often asked to name the one book, which triggered in them the impulse to write. I am unable to pinpoint such a Eureka moment but the reading experience I remember best is Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. For a girl just entering adolescence, this novel had everything: passion on a grand scale, dark eroticism (remember the priest's wanton desires for the fair Esmeralda?) and a powerful myth at its heart. I still consider this tale of beauty and the beast the most romantic book I've ever read.

At that time, I was already a serious addict: reading and writing with a voracious, if untidy energy. I wrote pages of overblown prose and read everything -- from Louis L'Amour to Hemingway -- with a joyous, uncritical eye. The child reader/writer is a tiresome child. Either exhaustingly precocious or seething and sullen ( I went through both stages), our imaginations run riot. We're the ones with the imaginary friends. And even as children we tend to prefer books to people.

Ah, books. Both potion and poison. Reading is the creative core of a writer's life, but your attitude towards reading changes as you age. Once the insidious thought enters your mind that maybe you could get published as well, innocence is lost. Of course, you'll continue to read in order to make sense of the world. And you'll always be seduced by the beauty of words. But now you're not just reading...you're competing. Every time you open a book, you are measuring yourself against the voice of another writer.

Despite the pinpricks of envy, writers rely on each other for wisdom. Whenever I'm writing a passage which, frustratingly, refuses to soar, I try to remind myself of what G.K. Chesterton wrote about angels and flying. They fly, he believed, because "they take themselves lightly..."