Kidder on writing:

All stories are created. There’s a lot to do. You need to get to the point where your hands don’t show. Someone once said to me that if you get good as a writer you develop your own style, and if you get very good you learn how to hide it – which is as good a definition of art as any.

Kidder on how difficult it is to write about goodness without sounding uncomfortably “preachy”

…there were a number of reasons for writing Mountains Beyond Mountains in the first person. The decision to do that wasn’t so that I could preach to the reader — it was to make the story palatable. Farmer presents a pretty daunting figure. Part of that choice to use the first person was to make him seem totally human. When I first gave this book to my editor, he said, ‘you have a problem here, and it’s the problem of goodness.’ How do you write about virtue? It’s a real challenge, and one I always wanted to undertake. It’s an old idea, but readers need an everyman, someone who they can relate to and understand through.

I didn’t see [this problem of goodness] from the beginning. I wrote this profile on Farmer for The New Yorker, and I think it missed it on tone. The tone is essentially the attitude of the author toward the events and people in the story. Once my editor pointed out that problem of goodness to me, we set to work looking for the right places to acknowledge that this guy’s goodness might make you feel uneasy. I settled on having some conversation about my own relationship with Farmer’s virtue. I think there’s a reaction that often comes up of people of my generation, children of the 1960s who imagined that they’d be doing something like what farmer does, but gradually they became lawyers, investment bankers – all of which are perfectly fine, but I think there is some of that resentment in seeing that in him.

This is my contribution:

I started blogging when it was very new, and you needed to learn a bit of HTML to keep it all under control. I’m rather glad it was knew and largely unknown; there wasn’t anything to study in advance and for me the best thing about the blog was the space to experiment with writing, and genuinely “find a voice”. Most writers of any stature say that they write primarily because they like writing, not “for the readers”. If you study the form in order to write for the market, you become a particular kind of writer (not necessarily a bad one, but one with a particular technical purpose). If you want to write, just dive in and do it.

The only thing I wonder at in terms of wisdom was changing my platform – early blogspot was a bit cumbersome so I moved to Typepad, then Wordpress took over as the leading software and I moved again. Each time I lost a LOT of traffic, and dropped in the blogger “status” charts. I haven’t yet recovered my highest traffic peak. But blogging is (for me) only one segment of writing, and the blog itself has led to several publishing offers, which I think would not have come had I been able to study blogging, and styled my blog for traffic purposes.

Do you blog, or just read blogs? If you write, why, and how did you start?

I’ve just finished working on the final edits for my next book, and I’m too close to it now to know whether it will be good, or easy to read (although I hope so). What I do know is that I’ve gone another few millimetres into the groove of understanding how to write. All the unnecessary words, all the repeated words need to go. Edit edit edit. Even in the final round of edits I found places where the same word appeared four times on one page. It’s that kind of detail that clunks to the reader, but for the writer it means re-writing, rephrasing, over and over again so that you say what you’re trying to say without the reader feeling that they are repeatedly being hit over the head with the same phrase, and yet without losing the freshness of the piece.

“Easy to read” is an interesting idea. I’ve encountered many people who are taken in by the idea that if you have to struggle to understand someone’s writing, it must mean that the writer is tremendously clever. Now, I don’t underestimate the amount of work that goes in to reading and understanding complex ideas. But when a writer is consistently difficult to understand, it is just as likely that they have not fully mastered the ideas they are trying to communicate, or that they are simply not a good writer, or perhaps that they are deliberately obfuscating to feed the myth of their own brilliance.

My view is that when a long or unfamiliar word is the only one that will do, then use it; if there really is no other word to say what you mean to say, then make one up. But never use a fancy word when an ordinary one will do, unless it genuinely improves the comprehensibility or the beauty of the sentence. Good writers are very choosy about which of those words they employ, and how many, and how often.

Coleridge, one of England’s greatest wordsmiths, had two pieces of wisdom on the subject. Once he wrote that it was perfectly acceptable – necessary, in fact – to make up new words. And he made up a few himself. But only ever if there was really no existing word that could be used. A profusion of new and unfamiliar words is not a virtue, according to Coleridge. And elsewhere he wrote that when someone has been going deeply into a subject for many years, the tendency is to lose touch with people who haven’t made the steps in between. Consequently thinkers, intellectuals, academics, can end up not communicating much at all, but merely talking to themselves.

All of this inspires me to think that for someone who aims to write well, research and thought on a subject is less than half the work. “Writing up” in the academic world is like making coded notes; it’s a technical exercise that works for personal use and peer review within a specialised world. Sometimes it’s only through the process of technical writing that the idea you’re trying to grasp becomes clear – so that particular kind of writing is an essential part of the learning process. But real writing, good writing, is another animal altogether. To write well you have to master the idea, not just grab at it, and then hone every sentence into something that communicates clearly with neither excess or loss of meaning.

I have written four books now, and I think I have just caught a glimpse of what this writing game is all about. I’ve written some very good paragraphs, but there are clunks that I haven’t ironed out; I’m only gradually getting the feel for that magic spot between developing the text and over-writing. But I still aspire to be a good writer. One day. One day.

I’ve just looked up the word displacement in the dictionary. One of its meanings is ‘the transfer of emotion to a less threatening source’… There is a fear of failure in delaying writing….

While my new novel exists only in my head, it is possible it will convey more exactly than my last one that shadowy but compelling vision I can see bobbing somewhere far ahead of me.

And towards which I know I must swim.

Go over and read Susan’s site – there’s lots of interesting stuff there, including information about her novel about Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Today I read that my friend and fellow-author, Chris Priestley, learned a good, and not unrelated lesson through illustrating: that writing is about editing all your experience and ideas – what to keep, what to throw away, how to re-write it so it not only makes sense and grabs the imagination.

One of the most common questions a writer gets asked is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ Sometimes there is a clear answer to this question and sometimes not. The fact is that writers absorb the same fairly random cocktail of news, stories, movies and so on as everyone else, and have similar trials and tribulations, triumphs and tragedies, in their own personal lives.

The only real difference is that writers are given to dramatising (or over-dramatising) their personal lives and that a writer’s reading and viewing may (though not always!) be more selective, with a particular project in mind, and that a writer has the ability to process all this information and make new sense of it. All art (writing, painting, photography, film-making) is about editing. It’s as much about what you discard as about what you collect.

Read more here
Buy Chris’s brilliantly creepy horror stories here:

Keeping a blog has done several things for me. The first is that it’s one of the few modes of writing that you publish instantly, and get an instant response. Not everyone wants that, but I like the sense of keeping in touch with what interests readers, and what they think. The second is that long ago someone said to me, “If you want to be a writer, write every day. Doesn’t matter much what you write, but you have to do it all the time.” The blog gave me a way of writing one short piece every day about what was going on around me. Readers bugged me if I didn’t write. And after a few months I had a message from TallSkinnyKiwi, one of the granddaddies of blogging, that said “I like your blog better now. You seem to have found your voice.”

The voice matters. When I started the blog eight years ago I was writing academic papers, lectures, supervision reports and committee reports. I knew more about theology than was strictly necessary, and I could write things down that made sense, words in the right order, delivering the information. That’s what I had been trained to do. But in the process I had lost my voice; in fact, one adviser in particular had criticised me for writing “too much like a book” and insisted I rewrite some materials in a strictly technical style. The blog helped me to recover and develop a voice again.

But you know what? Before the blog I had been published – a chapter or two in a book here and there. But the blog itself actually won me two publishing contracts. I didn’t have an agent; I didn’t send a manuscript to anyone. The publisher came to me and said “We want somebody who writes like you.”

So there you go. Now I write weekly instead of daily on the blog because I spend a lot of time writing books in the voice I developed here. Right now I’m finishing a manuscript for the book of 2011. When it’s done I have to decide what to write for the one after that. Any thoughts?

When I started blogging seven years ago I wasn’t writing books. Since then I’ve written a lot of articles and three books. A couple of days ago I mentioned the conception of another book. This writing of books is becoming a new habit. And there isn’t time to blog in the same way I used to. No more the daily blogger. It’s become too many plates to spin. Time for a new plan.

Here’s my new blog strategy. I’ll post one  decent length, thoughtful post about something that matters, something seasonal. One a week, on a Tuesday morning.In between I’ll put up little top-ups as they appear. But once a week there will be something here worth reading. Stop by once a week and here it will be. I’m not giving up blogging. just concentrating my energies.

Thank you for reading. See you on Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that.

Saturday night my editor bought me supper, and after some conversations around putting the current script to bed, she started talking about the next book after that. “No, no,” I said, “I need six months off.”  She persuaded me otherwise. Something is germinating.

Jonny Baker, Mark Meynell, and Krish Kandiah were also there, Adrian Warnock was pre-recorded and Shane Hippsjoined us virtually. All good fun.

Click here if you want to watch/listen

I picked up two little writing gems this week from two completely different writers – Chris Priestley and Belle Du Jour.

Chris Priestley writes fantastic books, buy them for your kids for Christmas. This is what he says about writing:

Sometimes this process is like whittling a piece of wood, honing it and perfecting it, sometimes its like trying to catch a trout with you’re bare hands, another time it can be like doing one of those wooden puzzles where the pieces will only work if put together in one particular way.

Belle Du Jour was all over the paper recently, her identity finally revealed. She was something of a blog-phenomenon, not just because of the content, but because of her unprecedented success at remaining anonymous, even while negotiating book deals.  She also said some noteworthy things about the writing process:

1. Get writing.
It was a far more prolific and talented writer than me who once said ‘don’t get it right, get it written.’ In the last week alone I’ve witnessed an endless discussion of whether Scrivener was the right writing tool, what word count is considered sufficient day’s work, and how to find a good agent – all by people who have, as yet, not completed a single book between them…
2. Stay writing.
Once the ball is rolling, keep it rolling.Have you heard of the Jerry Seinfeld method? Don’t break the chain. Even if it never sees the light of day, write something every day, make it a habit. Make it your job to write regularly, even if it doesn’t pay (yet). Better yet, edit your writing every day too. Genius is the relentless application of attention.