sarah eve kelly

Annie Dillard has this to say about getting stuck in the middle of a manuscript:

What you had planned will not do. If you pursue your present course, the book will explode or collapse, and you do not know about it yet, quite. … You notice only this: your worker - your one and only, your prized, coddled, and driven workers - is not going out on that job. Will not budge, not even for you, boss. Has been at it long enough to know when the air smells wrong; can sense a tremor through boot soles. … What do you do? Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do nothing. Lay out the structure you already have, x-ray it for a hairline fracture, find it, and think about it for a week or a year; solve the insoluble problem. Or subject the next part, the part at which the worker balks, to harsh tests. It harbors an unexamined and wrong premise. Something completely necessary is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.

I was heartened by the bit about ‘a week or a year’. I’m a slow writer. There are as many schools of thought on writing speed and process as there are writers; I was reading Stephen King’s memoir yesterday and he thinks that a modest beginner’s goal is 1,000 words a day. I know many people who agree with him. I think: you do what you do. You figure out what works. And what seems to work for me is proceeding very slowly.

In any case, I’ve now completed Annie Dillard’s exercise, and she’s not wrong. There’s the hairline fracture, right there, threatening to spread clear across the windshield. It was a question of something has to go. There was too much in the manuscript, and too little as well. I’m reminded of my mother’s adage: if you have a thousand dollars, do you give a thousand dollars to one charity or a dollar to a thousand charities? I have a hundred thousand words, and a dollar ain’t much. Writing should be like writing, not like juggling. (Although part of it is, of course, juggling.)

I’ve decided on the load-bearing pillar that has to go, and it hurts. A lot. Not only for the flexing of fingers and lifting of storylines and killing of scenes and starting again that will have to happen, but because that pillar was one of my darlings. I’m going to be brave. I’m going to kill it.

Till next time, &c &c.

I’m not a literary agent. You know why? Because I wouldn’t know where to begin; because I stand in ceaseless awe of what they accomplish and what they endure; because in any number of situations, I wouldn’t know what an agent should do. Nevertheless, I’m posting today not as a writer, but as a fairly decent human being, about what agents should not do.

Two days ago an agent received a bad query. A bad, arrogant, douchey query. You know how I know? Because this agent broadcasted it all over the web - not just the content of the query, but the bad, arrogant, douchey, unprofessional response said agent received when the author was confronted with her form rejection. And not only that, but the author’s name.

It is an occupational hazard of following agents on Twitter to see a lot of bad query snippets posted as object lessons in what not to do when you’re querying. And I have a lot of respect for setting strict submission guidelines and refusing to consider queries that don’t abide by them. I appreciate that agents try to teach writers lessons by telling them what not to do - and, more importantly, what to do to query well. But this particular case was not a lesson: it taught nothing. It was bullying and schoolyard antics at their viral worst.

Lashon hara is the Jewish prohibition against ‘talebearing’ or gossip. It is specifically targeted against the use of ‘true speech for wrongful purpose’. It’s right up there with murder and incest as an unforgivable sin against another human being. Lashon hara is aptly demonstrated by a 19th-century homily which gained worldwide fame in the 2008 film Doubt. The story goes like this: a man feels badly for having spread gossip, and consults his rabbi regarding how to make amends. The rabbi says, ‘Go to the roof of that building with a pillow and tear it apart, and let the feathers fly away.’ The man does this, and returns to the rabbi: ‘What do I do now?’ The rabbi says, ‘Now, go gather up all those feathers.’ It is as possible to rein back malicious gossip as it is to find every feather that was once in that pillow. It is, in a word, irreversible.

There is a specific exemption to the prohibition against lashon hara: the promulgation of true speech for a necessary purpose. As a warning, as a lesson. Airing out this query may have come within the outer boundaries of this exemption if it hadn’t devolved into a poetry contest mocking the author’s website, writing, and putative choice of underpants. People who query arrogantly are not, as a rule, arrogant people: they are usually desperately insecure people who shouldn’t be put in the stocks and subjected to public ridicule for an arrogant query. It is not only mean and bullying to no purpose whatsoever: it is dangerous. And at the very least, it is colossally unprofessional.

Who has gained from this? No one. To what purpose was it put? Yes, the query was bad, but what followed was like going after a squirrel with an AK-47. No one has gained, and this author has irretrievably lost, and for what? For one unsound move. You might say he was asking for it. The worst he was asking for was a sobering smackdown over email if the agent felt so strongly about his rudeness, not a kangaroo court.

Form rejections have one purpose: to save the agent’s very valuable time. When you get a form rejection, that’s it: no further correspondence required. This author thought he knew better, and responded. Bad move. But if there’s anything I’ve learned from my own dealings with agents - and with human beings, for that matter - it’s that usually, the best way to make a bad thing go away is to ignore it. This agent didn’t do that; this agent started a public circus. She certainly didn’t save herself any time.

Writers are constantly opining about that one writer who gives all writers a bad name. I saw a lot of that yesterday on Twitter and in the comments on the agent’s website: ‘Don’t judge all writers by that guy!’ ‘Don’t judge all Canadians by that guy!’ What about agents who give agents a bad name? To what standard are they meant to be held? How can an agent justify spending an entire business day hosting a poetry contest about this guy’s skivvies?

Readers, there are people who have resorted to self-harm and suicide because of a lot less than this guy’s been put through. Stable people; balanced people. And are writers, as a population, stable and balanced? Well, I’ll let you answer that.

That’s it for today. Back to high good humour soon.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Today’s teaser takes us back in time, when Alice - the daughter of a wealthy, ambitious merchant - has first been told that she’s to be married. What do you do with news like this? You talk to your best friend, of course.

&&&&&

‘Well, you knew it would happen.’

Edmund is wearing the same wrinkled clothes he wore the day before, and Alice is lying across his chest, smelling them. He wraps and unwraps his finger in a strand of her hair. This is, she thinks, almost what it might feel like to be in love. Almost. ‘Not now,’ she says. ‘Not so soon.’

He laughs a laugh that makes his chest rise and fall beneath Alice’s cheek only once; there is no smile in it, no mirth. ‘They will make a lady of you. You’ll have thirteen babies, all of a row, just like your mother.’

She shudders. ‘Don’t.’

‘Who will it be?’

Well, the discussion hadn’t gotten that far. When she had finished shouting and her mother and father had finished shouting back, Alice knew only that she had lost.

He pulls more of her hair across his chest, his fingers clawed into a comb. ‘Choose the richest one,’ he says, ‘that’s most often at the head of an army. There are enough armies nowadays. Better a widow than a wife,’ he says. ‘You’ll have done your duty, and they’ll leave you alone.’

The clouds are heavy and fat enough to sit like a foam across the horizon, far from the meadow. Grey clouds like wet stone sit in among those of deeper and lighter blue, the sky itself blue and bluer at its height. A Titian oilwork. It looks unnatural, contrived. The rain may well stay away today. Alice watches until her eyes begin to cross, the greys and blues running over one another.

‘I say, can you choose? From amongst your suitors?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You would do well to choose one who’s away all the time. That shouldn’t be difficult, you know. The Scots Queen is over the border now and will start a war as soon as she’s got two shoes to put on her feet.’ He pauses. ‘Or you could find someone who wants to fight for the Dutch Protestants.’

‘Don’t be morbid.’

‘Or a diplomat. An ambassador. A translator.’

She finds a spare bit of his belly to pinch.

‘I mean it,’ he says, squirming. ‘They’ll find you a rich man, will they, your parents?’ And then a pause: ‘No. Titled – that’s what they want. They’ll find you a titled man, and you can have thirteen titled babies.’

‘Edmund, hush.’ She closes one eye, and the clouds come back into focus. ‘Did you really want to marry me?’

She waits for him to stiffen beneath her, but he goes on pulling his fingers through her hair. ‘Honest now?’

‘Yes, of course. Tell me.’

‘Not really.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

‘It’s nothing against you,’ he says. ‘I’m waiting for a Rosalind.’

‘Rosalind? It’s my name you object to?’

‘No, simple creature.’ He pinches her back. ‘Rosalind. That’s what I’ve called her. I’ll know her when I see her. I’m waiting for her.’

‘Oh.’ The sky is an inverted cup, and the clouds are bubbling up. ‘Henry the Second had a mistress called Rosamund. He loved her best, so my tutor tells me. He built Woodstock for her. Fair Rosamund.’

‘I know that,’ Edmund says, peevishly.

‘I wonder if men always love mistresses best.’ She sits up. Edmund laughs at her hair; putting both hands to it, she feels how lopsided he’s made it. ‘Maybe you need to marry, Edmund,’ she says. ‘Maybe it’s only after you have a wife that you’ll find your Rosalind.’

‘I’d have married you for your money,’ he says, taking her hand.

‘And I’d have left you free to find your love.’

‘And I’d have left you free to write your plays,’ he says. ‘A perfect arrangement! But listen. Do you know what wives do? Wives of rich, titled men in great households?’

Alice looks back at the house. What does Mother do?

Edmund leans closer to hiss in her ear. ‘They manage accounts. Marry any titled twat you please, and his accounts will be yours.’ She turns and looks at him. ‘And while he thinks you’re bent over his chequers, you can write.’

‘And siphon you money, I suppose.’ She falls against the trunk of the oak, exhaling loudly. He does the same, takes her hand again. ‘You could have a pension,’ she says, ‘and write your English. A great commission.’

‘You have a great commission yourself. I’m a genius, and you’re a woman. It’s funny. Genius and fertility are in God’s hands, not ours. Thirteen babies. We’ll see if you can do it.’

She yanks her hand out of his and elbows him in the ribs. The clouds are halfway up the sky now; time to go in. ‘Alice Spencer, patroness,’ she says.

‘Not Alice Spencer,’ Edmund says. ‘Alice New-Name. Lady New-Name. Not Spencer. Now come here: let me look at you properly before I’m taken away.’

Today the amazingly organized and talented Amy Bai examined the mystery of struggling to complete her third novel when writing the first two was so easy (well, I say ‘easy’). It turns out that social networking tips the scales. Maintaining a website and an active presence on writers’ forums and Twitter - well, it’s a time suck. And a good, necessary one, because we need to be out there, months and possibly years (decades?) before our novels are published.

Where I grew up, the books were dusty, leatherette-bound, the pages wavy with damp. We read by lamplight. (One night when I was eight the power went out and my dad lit a candelabra and yes, readers, that’s when I heard ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ for the first time. My dad’s a pretty amazing reader, and I didn’t sleep for about a week.) It was a different world; it was the world that made me want to be a writer.

For me it isn’t just about making time to write; it’s about struggling with being a writer at all when the writing universe I see now is giving me whiplash. I see authors killing themselves to promote their books, and yes, if it were me I’d do it - I’ll do it when the time comes, and with a big fat smile on my face 24/7 - but what I see makes me feel a little old-school. I’m a misanthrope. I like sitting in corners.

I see blog entries with images in them - that terrifies me. Embedded video? Wouldn’t know where to start. This morning I tried to sync my Twitter and Facebook accounts and got stymied at the password stage.

Again, I’m not Cnut trying to hold back the waves. This is the world we live in, and a world I’ve elected to embrace. And it could be that the old-school world I yearn for isn’t one that ever really existed - Anthony Trollope wasn’t just a writer, after all; he was a postal surveyor, too. We’ve all got to make ends meet. But Jesus Christ: Annie Dillard actually writes about writing in a cabin. Drinking tin mug after tin mug of stale coffee. And it makes me want to yell where did all this noise come from? It’s OK to yell sometimes, right?

I remember going to a conference in Oxford last year. The organisers set me up with a room in New College for two nights, and I remember thinking, ‘A dorm room; oh yay.’ But what they gave me was this: a room with a bed, an amazing duvet and pillow, a desk with a kettle and coffee and tea, a bathroom of my own, and - get this - a table with two chairs for playing chess. I could see the beautiful quad from my bay window - the building was centuries old - and I thought aaaaahhhhh and collapsed back on the bed with my laptop.

Wait. Wireless. Forgot to ask the porter about wireless.

Reader, there was no wireless.

For a minute my ribcage closed - a whole weekend without the web? - but then something else happened. I relaxed. No TV; no web. I looked around the gorgeous room. There was nothing for it; nothing to be done. I felt my shoulders descend from my ears. I heard a voice in my head: Jeremy Irons reading Brideshead Revisited, softly saying, It was as if someone had turned off the wireless. Of course he wasn’t talking about wireless-wireless; he was talking about the radio. But the song remains the same: someone had turned off the noise in my head. I sat back for five entire minutes and did absolutely nothing. I went and looked out the window. Then I went back to my laptop.

I wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

The only downside to that weekend is that I had to go to the bloody conference. At least once a week now I lie back a moment and daydream about New College, as though the magic is there and not anywhere I choose to pull a few plugs. But there was something about that place: it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t full of my stuff. It wasn’t adjacent to a hallway adjacent to a kitchen where my dishes needed washing, my laundry doing. It was an empty room.

How many empty rooms are left in a writer’s world?

Stephen King was right: forget about your dream study; forget about your dream view. They’ll only distract you. Think about an empty room. And when I think about the chaos now involved in making a name for myself and eventually marketing a book, I have to remember that I choose to leave my empty room to go to that place: I sign in to Twitter; I write in this space. I can retreat to my empty room at any time. Because what’s the business of being a writer without actually writing?

A pain in the ass, that’s what it is. Fun, yes. Mutually supportive, yes. But a distraction, a sideshow.

Till next time, &c &c.

This is my first teaser in a full gestation period, which is fitting, because our unhappy heroine in A Temperate Woman (the sprawling tale of Alice, a patroness of Edmund Spenser, chock full of sex, death, and jailtime - I won’t give away the bit about the sizzling gypsies) is about sixteen months pregnant and not enjoying it. Isabel, her midwife, is doing her best to keep her comfortable, but nothing works until Isabel - the Queen’s favourite with an intriguing and obscured past - tells us something of herself.

NB: I know this teaser is a mite too long. But teasers - like tweets - teach you something about culling: how long will you hold your reader’s attention? How long before the music starts and the hook comes out to drag you off the stage? I went over this piece four times with a hatchet to make it a mite too long instead of a volume of Remembrance of Things Past, which is what it was half an hour ago. This is what I tell people who say that Twitter is a waste of time: not to writers. Get that message out, stat! Tension in every tweet. But again, sorry: this is a mite long. And so, as an exercise for me: if you don’t read to the end (although it’s worth it), tell me when you stopped. This might be the most important writing lesson of all.

&&&&&

I pass my days writing, or else in chapel, smelling the incense more deeply, feeling the liturgies enter me. I am open to prayer in a way that I was not before.

‘It is because you need prayer, now,’ Isabel says one day late in spring. She feels my massive belly. ‘You’re carrying high,’ she tells me. ‘A boy?’

‘I’m carrying high, I’m carrying low, I’m carrying everywhere,’ I say.

It is a beautiful day, the sun filling my bedchamber, bright but not too bright. The deep green curtains are half open, the orchard beyond the window bursting into the beginnings of apples and pears and the flowers that will fill the palace during the summer. I heave myself from position to position. I thought that lying back would be comfortable, but there is no comfort in this enormous body. I am close to tears, I can feel it, for something so small as the lack of a pillow behind my back. For knowing that a pillow would do no good. ‘It is everywhere,’ I say again. ‘It might be ten boys.’ I pause. ‘What do you know?’

She tries a pillow behind my back, shifting my girth with very little cooperation from me. ‘I know,’ she grunts, ‘what it is to need prayer.’

I was right. The pillow doesn’t help. ‘Burgundy,’ I say. The sideboard, from my bed, looks a pilgrimage away. I make a token effort to move, and fall back again. ‘I want some wine.’

I didn’t mean for it to come out like that. But remember that I am biting back tears. I am a great ball; I am the size of the sun, as graceful as a drunken man. A fat, drunken man. ‘When would you ever need prayer, anyway,’ I say.

‘I have needed prayer, madam,’ Isabel says.

The wine tastes all wrong. ‘You speak in such riddles,’ I say.

‘Riddles?’ Isabel asks, and her mildness makes me more angry, more desperate.

‘Riddles, yes! “I have needed prayer”,’ I sneer. ‘What does that mean? You are the Queen’s very favorite, you’ve known her since she was a child. When have you “needed prayer”? Why have you needed prayer?’

Isabel looks at me, and there is something wide open and dead in her grey eyes. ‘Don’t excite yourself,’ she says, tonelessly, and takes the wine glass from my hand.

Here I try to summon the hauteur of a great lady: ‘It is not for you to tell me what to do,’ I say. ‘I ask a question, and you will answer it.’

‘It is for me to tell you what to do,’ she says, and the dead look in her eyes persists. ‘My very commission is to tell you what to do. For your own safety, madam.’

‘You are hiding something,’ I say, with some satisfaction, falling against my inadequate pillows.

Isabel stands, using both arms of her chair to do so. I have never seen her look old before. ’I have learned discretion,’ she says, still toneless. ‘You might do the same, madam.’

And this is the greatest injustice of all, being accused of indiscretion when I carry such a horrid, corrosive secret. ‘You don’t know,’ I say, my voice very suddenly as barren of inflection as her own. ‘You don’t know.’

She ignores this. ‘I have asked you before not to ask me of myself,’ she says. And now she does something I have never seen her do before. She turns on her heel and almost loses her balance in doing it, and makes for the sideboard to pour wine for herself. There is a voice in the back of my head thinking My wine – how dare she – but it is a distant one. ‘Isabel?’

She downs the wine in two draughts and turns to stare at me - no, not me: my belly. ‘When will it be born?’ she asks. ‘It could be any day.’ She looks up. ‘Please God it be any day, any day now.’

‘Isabel, what can you mean?’

‘This court is a place for secrets,’ Isabel says, ‘no matter who sits at its head.’ And now she looks out the window, towards the orchard. ‘Greenwich,’ she whispers.

‘Greenwich?’

‘You want to know, madam? You want to know about me?’

I try to sit up and cannot. ‘Isabel –’

‘Yes, I have a secret!’ Isabel shouts. ‘Yes, I have a secret! Everyone has a secret! It is a part of the court garment, isn’t it? The ruff; the pomander; the garter; the secret. Yes, I have a secret.’

She moves closer to the window. ‘I used to sit in that orchard, after rainfall,’ she says. ‘I used to sit – right - there.’ And then she turns around. ‘You have a secret, madam,’ she says, her round grey eyes upon me. ‘I know nothing of what it is, only that you have one, or more than one, because you cannot be here without secrets. They make everyone behave, you see. They make everything work. I used to sit in that orchard,’ she says. I expect a pause, but then: ‘You might say that gossip annihilates secrets, but you’d be wrong about that.’ She stops a moment. ‘Of course you know that, because you’ve got something of your own, sweeting, something you’re hiding?’

A short laugh.

‘I remember,’ she says, softer now, ‘one day, when the Queen’s mother, Queen Anne, gave me a new gown. This was when I was in her service, years and years and years ago, and I had nothing, you understand, nothing but gowns that were too short and gowns that were too tight, and one gown – a blue satin one, with seed pearls – that my father spent his very last farthing on. And instead of dismissing me, instead of making fun, Queen Anne made me a gift of this gown.’

Her hands are gathered together in front of her.

‘She knew all my measurements,’ she whispers. ‘She got them all – from somewhere. She hired a tailor to make me this gown, and it was green brocade and cloth of silver and it made me feel like someone, do you understand? Someone who may well serve a great queen. She was a great queen. No one will tell you that, but she was.’ She gathers her breath. ‘When she’d made sure that it fit properly – and it did, it felt like my own skin – when she’d made sure, she wanted one thing from me. One thing, and that was to tell no one that she’d done it. It would cause an uproar, yes, among the other ladies?’ She says it just like this, like a question. ‘You’re no maid of honor, you’re not jostling for position or looking for a husband. You don’t know. But to be among them, for them to know that the Queen had made this gift to Isabel Ascham from nowhere - well. It would cause trouble, the Queen said. So she asked me, would I please be quiet about it. And of course I was.’

‘Of course you were,’ I murmur.

‘But here’s what I did do,’ she says, over my own feeble words. ‘Did I save the gown for a special day? No. Did I even wait, madam, did I even wait for the end of Lent? Because there was Lent, then, forty days of fish and penitence. But no, I did not. I couldn’t wait to wear the gown. I wore it to clean out the Queen’s wardrobe. And there it was: that gave me away. But did it give me away? No, no, it led to something far worse, because the other maids – they thought the King had given me the gown. That the King wanted me for his mistress! When I denied that, they believed it, but they were sure that some man had given it me. They knew I couldn’t afford it. And so I had to tell them, to stop them thinking this other thing. And still I’m not sure they believed me. And this,’ she says, her voice slowing now, ‘is why gossip keeps secrets. Because gossip gets it wrong.’

‘Is that your secret, Isabel?’

‘Madam, that is not what a secret is,’ Isabel says. ‘A secret is something you carry inside you like a canker. It is heavy and horrid and all your own, and you want desperately to be lightened of it, but there is only one thing worse than carrying a secret, madam, and that is being lightened of it.’

A silence. She looks around her, patting her sides. ’See here,’ she says, and she is different now; she is something of the Isabel I remember from only moments before. She busies herself with my coverlet, her ordinarily deft fingers fumbling. Watching her, I understand: there is natural grace and there is learned grace, and she must have spent a lifetime practicing grace. One upset – one memory – and it is unlearned. ‘You wanted the stories of King Henry’s court, did you not? You wanted to hear stories. Well, I have told you a story. I knew kindness from Queen Anne, and I have known kindness from – from her glorious, glorious daughter. Nothing but kindness.’

If I were reading the words Isabel speaks to me now, on paper, I am sure that I would see phrases, entire blocks of words scratched out, illegible. ‘I’m sorry, Isabel,’ I say. ‘I was bloody before, just bloody, and there’s no reason for it. I just feel so fat.’

She feels my forehead. Her hands are hot. ‘Don’t think on it, madam. I have known my share of changeable women.’ She smiles. ‘And you have every excuse! Not like me!’ We look, together, at my belly. ‘Please God it be soon,’ she murmurs. ‘Please God it be soon and I can be home again.’

In between bouts of banging my head against the wall, I do a lot of thinking about education, what it means, and how it defines people. Something of myself, she says pretentiously: I’m in the creamy middle of a PhD at Cambridge. I do history. This will be my third degree (heh).

One way and another, I recently came across this article, entitled ‘The Disadvantages of an Elite Education’. For these purposes, we need only this snippet:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.

So says Mr (pardon me: Doctor) Ivy League.

If all goes well, I’m going to graduate with a doctorate from the best history faculty in the world in eighteen-odd months. I’m going to be Dr Sarah (Cantab). And my question is this: where in fuck does this guy get off? Or, put another way, I really don’t think the problem is with his education. Not his Ivy League education, anyway.

This sort of thinking seems to be endemic among people with postgraduate educations. They think they’re different. OK, maybe they are: they’re nerds. But hold on; someone’s about to start flailing hands and hollering that I’m missing the point. He’s talking about an elite education. Rich schools for rich kids. But again, here I am at a rich school for rich kids (I personally don’t know any rich kids, and I’m certainly not rich myself, but there you are), and all I can think is what the hell?

For reasons passing understanding, there is a perceived value difference between the hyper-educated and good, sensible people. But this guy makes it sound like apartheid: that there is such a gulf between those within the ivory tower and those without that we can’t possibly understand each other. He makes himself out to be the Earl of Bedford trying to milk a cow.

Again, I’m about to be told that I’m misinterpreting: maybe this is a specifically American thing, as so many things are?

The real question is: does education change you, or does it just fail to correct what was wrong with you in the first place? It’s no joke that most of the professors I know are profoundly socially maladjusted people, and it has fuck-all to do with the gap between their educations and anyone they might condescend to talk to. They go into what is largely a profoundly solitary profession because that’s what they do best.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe in education. Look at me! I’m doing it! I’m being educated! I don’t know how to stop! But yesterday, for example, when two guys came to see if my roof needed replacing, it never occurred to me that because of My Higher Education, I might not be able to shoot the shit about the weather. And it troubles me that there is any notion - from within higher education or outside it - that this should be difficult because of what I’ve learned and the culture in which I’ve learned it. All I can imagine is that PhDs from posh unis who feel uncomfortable chatting with the many-headed probably felt that way before they got to the posh uni.

I have a friend who gave up what would surely have been a remarkable academic career in English Lit - she was almost finished her PhD - to be a housewife and a mom. Does this mean she threw her education away, do you think? I have another friend who holds an MA in Political Science. She spent three years eyeballs-deep in HIV/AIDS research, and now she’s managing a gift shop. My uncle was shortlisted for a Rhodes Scholarship; he tossed that in to be a carpenter. Did they throw away education? Set fire to all that money?

Now, the author of this article is telling you precisely this: that there is no moral difference between a Yale-educated politician or professor and a carpenter. Or a housewife. If you read the whole article, you’ll see it’s an indictment of the system: the kids just get spoiled. They have a sense of entitlement forced upon them, a sense that they’re better than everyone else. And it seems they just can’t help absorbing that message.

(Because, you know, they got into the Ivy League, which naturally means they’re idiots.)

Good for him for acknowledging what a false premise that is (although of course, as he points out, it isn’t: the Ivy Leaguers do get better treatment than the rest of the world). But he paints the system of elite education as an abusive parent, blaming the institutions and not the individuals.

Maybe it’s because I’m Canadian. Maybe it’s because I’m Albertan. Maybe it’s because most of my closest friends - and the people I respect the most - are people who opted against higher (or at least postgraduate) education. But I just don’t get it. I’m at the University of Cambridge. At the end of this degree - should that ever come - I will arguably be a leading authority on Anglo-Jewish midwifery. So when does my sense of entitlement kick in? When do I get to start ordering off-menu? When do I get the fucking affidavit telling me I’m better than everyone else?

Don’t think the rhetoric at Cambridge isn’t piled just as sky-high as at a place like Yale or Columbia. We’re centuries older, after all. We lift our noses at you. I just don’t happen to imbibe it, because I’m not a total tool. I’m older, and I’m a foreigner, but that matters less than you think.

What baffles me is how many postgrad-educated people I know - and know of - who spend hours and days of their lives that they’ll never get back navel-gazing about this shit, about how they should treat the goddamn plebs. How they should fashion their conversation. Here is a truth that I’ve hit on any number of times over the course of my research: if the way I’m learning is how experts become expert, I’m never going to believe anything I read ever again. Not because I doubt the integrity of my scholarship, but because I haven’t found that low door in the wall yet: I’m still faking it, because I haven’t made it yet.

My MA supervisor promised me that during my thesis defence, there would come a moment when I knew it was over, knew that I’d passed. He was wrong. That moment never came. Not only do I not believe I’m morally superior to the average bear, I don’t necessarily think I’m smarter, either. I think this much: that I know a lot about one relatively small thing because that is where my fascination and my imagination took me. It doesn’t make me better than you. Am I the exception? Or have I joined a league of antisocial, entitled assholes who blindly believe everything they’re told?

(Oh my, this has turned into a rant.)

I want to make it clear that I don’t hold anything against the author of this article; it hit a nerve, but there’s wisdom to it. I’m just sick of the gilded-cage arguments; I’m sick of educated people publicly congratulating themselves because they managed to carry on a three-minute conversation with a locksmith or helped to hoist a two-by-four. The assumption is that there is somehow a skill in descending to the locksmith’s level; this is what I can’t stand. Any academic who’s seen eyes glaze over when telling people what they ‘do’ should be flattered that the locksmith let the conversation carry on even that long.

I suppose this is a class thing. Where I come from, the world is run by oil barons with ninth-grade educations. Maybe that’s the one gift that Fort McMurray, Alberta, the last place God made, has bestowed on me. The people who are better than us aren’t the ones with the elite educations; they’re the ones who saw a well, tapped it, and went for a beer.

Till next time, &c &c.

There is - egad - a romance in the novel I’m currently writing. I love the boy; I love the girl; I can’t make them talk. Paranormal romance author Jill Myles claims that in her writing, she treats her characters like Barbies and tries to get them to make out. That is an excellent tactic. I wish I could do it.

The major problem is that the romance begins in 1576. And so I think of falling in love (I have some experience with this). I think of this: screaming down Groat Road behind the wheel of prospective boyfriend’s car circa 1998 listening to Everclear’s timeless ‘Santa Monica’ and hearing a quiet voice from the passenger seat saying, ‘I’m fine with you driving my car, but we don’t know each other all that well - I just gotta say [bracing for impact] that if something happens you’re paying for it…’

(Reader, I married him.)

I think of coffee shops and sharing Italian sodas and inept chess matches. I think of watching Crimes and Misdemeanors and sharing a blanket on a couch. I think of charged instant messaging. I think of that moment on The Office in the second season when Jim and Pam share an iPod for one beautiful moment when all is clear: they are in love.

I think of awkward moments with condoms. (Sorry, Mom.)

Now, I haven’t been on the market since 1998. There have been fraught moments since then, charged moments, but nothing substantial. I lit my follow-spot on the guy who let me drive his car and haven’t looked back. And I can’t imagine falling in love in the new millennium. Texting. Webcams. Skype. As Liz Lemon says, there are so many more ways for a guy to not call you now!

All the same, I can’t divorce even my very first feelings of real love from technology and modernity. Theatres, televisions, telephones, chat, email, cars. Italian sodas, even. Meeting at the Choklit Shoppe. I know that the core of love itself is a timeless thing, and I know a lot about history, but I keep trying to imagine how two people met and fell in love in 1576. Was it all just making eyes and meeting in alcoves?

In my first novel, I wrote a scene in which the boy is trying very ineffectually to relace the stays of the girl. This was lifted directly from life, from the first time a guy tried first to take my bra off, and then to put it back on. (Sorry, Mom.) That was easy; that could transpose. I have a lot more trouble taking contemporary forms of entertainment - jousts, bear-baiting - and turning them into venues for romance.

I imagine the answer is to hitch my camera to the shoulder of my protagonist and see - really see - what she sees. To understand deeply and completely that she doesn’t have a mobile in her pocket, that she doesn’t have video games distracting her. That messages took weeks. And understand, most importantly, not what was different about sixteenth-century lovin’, but what was the same.

It’s all just an excuse anyway: I’m shit at writing romance. How I ever managed to beguile anyone is a mystery to me; I have absolutely zero frame of reference to work from.

And now: back to it.

Till next time, &c &c.

Coming to you this Friday morning with a lot of absolutely brilliant thoughts on publishing. Sat down to write; didn’t have a drink. Sat down to write; noticed that Brother John had chosen a pair of trousers that were about nine times too small for him (this was funny). Changed John’s pants; sat down to write. Gaby the Cat starts yelling. Fed Gaby - she didn’t want food. Noticed the litter box: ick. Cleaned out the litter box. She is still mewling but I choose to ignore it for the moment.

Man: other living things. Now, to business.

One of the great things about coming from a broken home - well, my broken home - is that you get to examine both parents’ book collections on their own. If they were still married, who knows: the books might be piled willy-nilly and you might not know whose was whose. Both my parents have remarried, but for whatever reason neither of my stepparents has any real interest in reading, nor in collecting books. So my parents’ collections stand alone.

This much I remember from my childhood. D.H. Lawrence. Alice Munro. Salman Rushdie. Marcel Proust. John Fowles. Margaret Laurence (big one). Anne Tyler. Anne Michaels. Margaret Atwood. A few Annes; a few Margarets. Not unlike the characters in my own historical novels.

The bookcases are wooden now, but that’s because my parents are bona fide middle class now. Back in the day, when they were shabby genteel, the books sat on two-by-fours held up by cinderblocks; they were artfully arranged in artfully concealed cardboard boxes. They piled up everywhere. Both my parents love books. I think that’s probably what kept them married for the entire twelve minutes they were married.

This was my first impression of reading. Books piled upon books. And it was about a lot more than reading - in fact, I don’t know if reading qua reading was the single most important feature of them. It was the way they made a room look. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted a house with built-in bookcases, wall after wall filled with books. Is this because I’m an avid reader? Of course, but. It’s also because I love the look and smell of books. It’s the only aesthetic taste I’ve ever really developed. Soft furniture and hardwood floors and books.

My parents worshiped books; so, in turn, did I. It was my first real motivator for becoming a writer. This is deep-tissue stuff; it goes all the way back. I wanted to make more of what filled those rooms.

Whither iPad, world?

[Big fat NB: I am not Cnut trying to hold back the waves. I am not a reactionary about technology. Ebooks are here; digital publishing is here. I’m not going to sit in my basement with a stick and flint and cry about moveable type. That’s not what this is about.]

The first thing I saw in the iPad demonstration was an image of one of the bookshelves I so covet. An image on a nine-inch screen. You choose the book you want with your finger. God knows how many books this thing can hold. I was attracted to it at first because I find now that I’m attracted to shiny things on spec: I have a laptop; I have a netbook; I have an iPod Touch. I love them all, each in different ways. They give and give and ask very little of me.

But I have two observations about the iPad. The first is in the form of a friend’s tweet: ‘I’m holding out for the Mini iPad.’ Basically: I’m happy with my Touch. I don’t really know what an iPad offers that I can’t get from my Touch. I’m probably woefully ignorant. The second is this: I’m sorry, dudes, but it looks like a Speak n’ Spell. What’s the point in an almost-life-sized QWERTY keyboard if there’s no way to type?

The bigger question is this. There’s no denying that ebooks are the Way of the Future, even if the Future is going to take a long time to get here. I decided I wanted to be a writer in, what, 1984. Long time ago. Finally I put all my ducks in a row; finally I pull my shit together and have something to offer, and two things happen: the bottom falls out of the market, and there are iPads. This means it’s harder than it’s ever been to sell a book; there’s more competition than there’s ever been; and it’s very possible that when I do make my bones and publish for the first time, it’s gonna be read on an iPad. Not filling up shelves held up by cinderblocks.

This might sound like whining, but it’s a small-scale big deal for me: if my first real desire to write came from existing in those rooms full of books, what do I do with a future where there are no more rooms full of books?

Well, first I take a deep breath. Books aren’t going anywhere yet. In my lifetime, my dream of walls of bookcases and hardwood floors and soft furniture is entirely within reach (if I ever get a job). If it all goes digital after I die, well, I’ll be dead.

Second, I realise this wonderful thing: it doesn’t stop me wanting to write; it doesn’t actually stop me wanting to be read. There is, for example, no bound paper version of this blog, which I have loved and given to and returned to for (holy shit) eight years now. And yet here I am. You can’t be a reactionary about technology and rely on it as much as I do.

Third, and the revelation stops here: I don’t want an iPad. I just don’t. I never wanted a Kindle and I don’t want this. This is a relief: one less thing to covet. We could all do with coveting just a bit less. I don’t want a Mazarati and I don’t want an iPad. All is right with the universe.

I thought I could fold this into some other thoughts I’m having - mostly about advances - but there’s no comfortable segue, this has gone on long enough, and I have index cards to scribble on (almost typed ’struggle on’, which is more apt). So more on that later. Happy weekend, all; shabbat shalom.

Till next time, &c &c.

… is his ability to complete one thing and begin another.

You may have noticed that your hostess is going through a small-scale existential crisis. The words aren’t flying onto the page; Sarah feels imbued neither with purpose nor with conviction. It’s a tough place to be.

Today, in the throes of attempting to look everywhere except at either my computer screen or the ream of papers surrounding me, I saw an old friend: high up on my mom’s book case was my Master’s thesis, sitting in proud red leatherette under a half-inch of dust. I pulled it down. ‘Have you read this?’ I asked my mom. She admitted that she hadn’t, but was quick to reassure me that she was very proud of me and that she was sure it was very good.

Now, if you want to keep your friends, pretty much the last thing you should do is force your Master’s thesis on them. I’m always looking round the corner for the person who found this tome a mesmerising page-turner, but I’m not holding my breath. In short: I don’t bear a grudge against my mom (although, you know, it was dedicated to her, and she hadn’t read the dedication either).

The thesis is very good. Did I think this while I was writing it? No. Did I think this when I defended it to a committee of my superiors? No. Did I think this when I saw it bound in red leatherette for the first time? No. It took a long time to see it for what it was, and a lot of that time was taken up in forgetting. Forgetting the bits that I glossed over. Forgetting the bits that were finished not because I’d said all I had to say, but because I was too tired of looking at the page, or had indigestion, or went out drinking. Forgetting all the rough edges.

Given some objective distance – viz. a lot of time spent not looking at it or thinking about it – I can return to the old MA thesis and thumb through it with a fond eye, not only giving the Sarah of 2006-7 a reassuring pat on the back, but seeing, as a historian, that it’s a fine piece of scholarship.

It was something I finished. It was something I thought I couldn’t do, and yet here it is, in living colour.

It feels good to have things done. I’m sitting here in amongst a pile of papers and books and, well, knitting stuff, and all of it (except the knitting stuff) is related either to a presentation I have to give next week or a scholarship application that I have to send, like, last week. All of it’s sitting here on point, tools to help me through this massive quagmire of writing and research that, for reasons passing understanding, I decided I wanted for myself.

But the thesis is here too.

It’s bound; there’s nothing I can do to it. If I read it closely enough, I can remember little tiffs with my supervisor, points of contention during the defence, but I read the words and think: I won. It’s finished.

It’s about the Elizabethan privy chamber. It has nothing to do with Anglo-Jewish women or medical ethics or hospital minutes. It’s not on point – and it is. Because I’m sitting here looking at it, knowing that this thing that I was convinced was beyond me is complete and well-done. It reminds me that I did it once, and it riles up the tiny voice in the back of my head telling me I can do it again.

The only thing that could help more is having my name on a novel sitting next to it. But one thing at a time.

Till next time, &c &c.

Golly, writers have to pay attention to a lot of rules these days.

Not just submission guidelines, either. Like, writing rules.

On one hand, you’ve got industry insiders telling you which paranormal creatures are coming in, and which ones are going out. (I don’t write paranormal, but I think maybe vampires are going out and angels are coming in and zombies are going strong? If I’m wrong, check back in ten minutes and maybe I’ll be right.) You’ve got word count guidelines. You’ve got agents who love prologues and agents who hate prologues. Your novel has got to ask the Seven Vital Questions. You can’t have a Happy Moment until Four of the Seven Vital Questions have been Answered (and this can’t happen until after the tenth chapter). Your novel must not begin with the protagonist waking up from a dream, and certainly cannot end that way. The novel’s Third Vital Question can neither be asked nor answered on Shrove Tuesday.

I love this one: the market can’t handle X, Y, or Z. But don’t write for the market.

All the same people who are giving us these Seedlings of Wisdom are also telling us this: just write. Everything else is procrastination. Just Do It.

Here’s the thing. All these rules need a spreadsheet and I’m no good at Excel (which is too bad, because the temp agencies I’ll be applying to with tears on my CV after my PhD is done really want Excel).

Anne Lamott says of her writing students: ‘The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people really want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published.’

It’s a stout thing to say: I write for the joy. I write to create. I write because I have to. All these things are true of me. But hell yeah, I want to be published too. Even in this market, even for the proverbial dozen doughnuts and a stick in the eye. I want it.

And I have to say this, even though it’s gonna make me sound like one of the bad guys: it’s hard to keep your joy. It’s really hard. And it’s not just the market. I think the cacophony of available information and advice can hurt us if we’re not careful. There are so many opinions, so many tips, so many Don’t Go Theres that writers are afraid to move. They’re being told to Just Do It but they no longer know how.

No one ever apologises for this, nor should they. The bar is constantly moving for writers, and it’s the writer’s job to know where the bar is and clear it. Because an unknown writer is nothing, no one: the rules are never going to change to make the unknown writer happy. In fact, a few less unknown writers overall would probably do the world some good. They could move on from writing dreams and do something useful. Patricia Finney says if you get the urge to write, don’t. Fight it every way you can. Only if you lose every one of those fights should you give in to writing. If at all possible, make your mark on the world in some other way.

I say I’ve lost all the fights. I can’t do Excel, after all.

But I submit this: looking for tips and tricks and What’s Hot and What You Must Never Do In A Novel is just like research, and just like reading over what you’ve just written and worrying one sentence for weeks on end. It’s procrastinating. We are being besieged with Rules and while it’s good that they’re there – it’s good that we have access to so much information – there’s an extent to which we have to treat the Rules like pop-up ads and block them out. Otherwise nothing gets done. You know John Irving still writes longhand? There’s something in that.

Writing is terribly, terribly solitary. If you want to write you have to be willing to stand in a corner and just watch without interacting with anyone. The words on the page are yours; whether they ever see the light of day is your call. And the sad sorry fucking truth is that you can’t write for the market: the market is fickle; the market changes. Publishing is slow. You can’t write What’s Hot Now because by the time it’s on shelves, it won’t be Hot anymore. But if you really like What’s Hot Now, write it, because it’ll come back. These things always do.

It’s not for us to be arbiters of the Rules, nor to complain about them, nor to necessarily pay any attention to them until that first draft is in the can. The Rules won’t help you with your first draft. They help you to polish; they help you to present. But if you’re in the Creamy Middle of your first draft, don’t read a tweet or a blog post and panic and go back and change everything. Keep your horse blinders on and keep going.

Once again, most of you probably don’t need to hear this. But I needed to write it down, for myself.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.