Story Is King - How eBook Publishing Inspired Me To Hone My Storytelling Skills

Bird of Passage

At some point over the Christmas viewing marathon of the last few months, somewhat prolonged because of the appalling weather (Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice, Casablanca,  ET, Singin’ in the Rain – I was doing that alright -  Brief Encounter, thank God we didn’t have a power cut) I distinctly remember hearing Andrew Lloyd Webber say ‘story is king’ and although I have some reservations about the ALW bandwagon, I found myself in broad agreement with him. Which might have come as something of a surprise to the writer I thought I was, even five years ago.

I don’t know when this all began for me, but I suspect it was post millennium, when my previous literary agent was struggling to place a new novel with various publishers who were all telling her how it was ‘wonderfully written, but too quiet’ and no, they couldn’t possibly market it in the current difficult climate.’ That difficult climate, incidentally, seems to have been current for an awful long time and predates the recession by some years. I was lamenting my fate on a message board when a colleague pointed out (sympathetically) that publishers were always looking for the holy grail of wonderful writing allied to a stonking great story, but if they couldn’t have both in the same book, they would settle for the stonking great story any time.

 Back then, although I found my colleague’s observation to be accurate, I don’t think I learned my lesson. In fact I would say it is only over the past year or so that I have taken it on board. I have a close friend with New Age tendencies, who is always saying things like ‘the universe is trying to tell you something, Catherine.’ Well, now, I’m listening. And the fact is that I have become enchanted by story, as enchanted as I used to be when – as a very little girl – I listened to and then read for myself, the stories in the illustrated Wonder Books which had once belonged to one of my aunts, and had then been passed on to me.

Several things have contributed to this. That ‘stonking great story’ line has been working away in my head like yeast. The films I named above have one thing in common – they are all fine stories, and of course some of them are very fine novels too. It is through the medium  of those powerful tales that we are engaged, while in the sheer pleasure of our absorption, (even when the stories themselves are sad) we learn something about ourselves – and others - as human beings.  

On Christmas morning,  pottering about the kitchen, (as if I hadn’t had enough TV for one holiday) I found myself watching the Nativity,  the beautiful version with Andrew Buchan as a bewildered Joseph and Tatiana Maslany as a totally believable Mary, and becoming captivated all over again by a story which was as familiar to me as my own name, the drama and humanity of it, the way in which it engaged me on practically every level: intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and last but by no means least, purely as a piece of  entertainment.

Some years ago, as a reasonably well established playwright trying to break into television, I had struggled to please a string of script editors, until I realised that (a) the script editor earned his salary by stringing me along with endless unpaid rewrites and (b) television really wasn’t for me – although the money was an enticement. Unfortunately, it was more like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Just when you thought you might have got there, the whole thing shifted.

Recently, it struck me forcibly that all the gatekeepers I had ever encountered seemed to have quite different ideas about what they wanted from me but none of them had really taken on board who I was as a writer and – more importantly - who my potential readers might be. This realisation was both liberating and alarming, because so much of my focus had been on pleasing these same agents and editors who were - on the whole - nothing like my potential readers. The trouble was, I didn’t know who those readers were either.

Dealing in antique textiles - my lucky dragon - not for sale!

One of my other jobs involves dealing in antique and vintage textiles online and sometimes writing about them. I’ve been doing it for some years now and I could describe to you in great detail who my customers are, (many of them come back time and again and send me nice emails in between times) where they live, what kind of things they like, and why I’m so fond of them. But when it comes to identifying my readers, I’ve realised that - like so many writers – I’ve trusted other people to do that for me.

The other thing these gatekeepers had never stressed was the importance of story. They had talked about characterisation and pace and structure and plot. But the endless ‘rules’ of plotting are not the same thing as telling a good story. Not one of them had said ‘For God’s sake,  just go away, find out and then tell the story, from the bottom of your heart.’

Would it have made a difference if they had? Maybe.

When I was finishing the final edits for my most recent novel, Bird of Passage, (now doing quite well on Amazon Kindle)  I saw that what had started out as a piece of reasonably well written but rather wishy washy fiction, had actually – over several drafts, a few years and a lot more experience - turned into a real story.  I don’t know that it’s a stonking great story, (although I think my next novel, The Amber Heart, might well be) but it’s certainly a good story, a story of love, obsession, and cruelty, told from the bottom of my heart. And it's one that I hope a number of people will find moving and engaging.

It perplexes me that I had managed to go through an intensive arts education, with an honours degree in English Literature from Edinburgh University, followed by a postgraduate degree from Leeds University, followed by many years of writing, publication, production and  a certain amount of success, all the while receiving advice from artistic directors and script editors and book editors and agents – and nobody had ever pointed out the simple truth that story is king. At university, I specialised in Old English & Mediaeval Studies. This literature – spanning many centuries - is crammed with wonderful stories illustrating timeless truths about the human condition, but you’d never have known it from the way we studied it. The fact that Beowulf, Gawain and The Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales and The Icelandic sagas are as powerful and engaging now as they were when they were first written, was treated as a commonplace irrelevance. ‘If you like that kind of thing, that’s the kind of thing you like,’ said one of our tutors, looking down his academic nose at us.

Maybe I shouldn't have expected anything different. And maybe I should have known what I needed to do, all along. But the truth is that if you can't tell a good story, even if you are the most celebrated of experimental writers, with a deeply intellectual following, few people will want to listen. Robert McKee says that the ‘essence of good story is unchanging and universal’.  Your first imperative, as a writer of fiction, should be to get your head down and tell a good story.

Now, I'm trying, and what a sheer pleasure that is turning out to be!

www.wordarts.co.uk

In Praise of Love Stories (and a Valentine's day giveaway to all my readers)

Kindle version, cover by Alison Bell

Ever since I've started publishing my novels and stories (and a few plays) to Kindle, I've decided to stop apologising for something that seems to come naturally to me. Appropriately enough for this time of year - it's writing love stories. When I think about it, I've written love stories (and quite a few love poems too) all my working life - beginning a very long time ago with a short story for She magazine called Catch Two about a young woman and an older man, trapped in a lift.
There were love poems, serious and quirky, many of which have been anthologised (including a much- loved poem called Thread, in Antonia Fraser's Scottish Love Poems anthology.) And there were many plays for radio which - although not only love stories -  were so often also stories about love.

Well, I'm in good company.

Not, you understand, that I'm comparing myself to these writers - but some of my very favourite authors, such as Thomas Hardy and the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell,  Jane Austen and countless others - even Shakespeare himself - wrote about love in all its fascinating manifestations. Moreover, we're enthralled by the stories of so many people, fictional and factual, because they are wonderful love stories: Anthony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Napoleon and Josephine, Lancelot and Guinevere, Heloise and Abelard, Dante and Beatrice, Diarmuid and Grania, Robert Burns and Jean Armour (I'm working on that one myself at the moment!) Posh and Becks...enough already.

I'm not sure when I first began to feel faintly guilty about my own literary themes. Was it when somebody asked me for the umpteenth time what I wrote about, and I found myself strangely reluctant to admit to writing about love, actually? Was I afraid they might think I was trying to outdo Barbara Cartland, in pink chiffon and mascara? Not, you understand, that I have anything at all against romance. I confess to being a deeply romantic individual - I cling to it in the face of age and experience - and I like a good happy-ever-after romance as well as the next woman. Besides, I hate the kind of literary snobbery that seeks to place everything in a hideous hierarchy of worthiness. But perhaps I already had a creeping perception that any reference to the subject of love - coming from a female writer - practically guaranteed that the work in question wouldn't be taken seriously.

Does this happen to male writers? I think not. Perhaps the critics expect them to write seriously about love as about everything else. Perhaps they just assume that the male perspective will have more 'gravitas'. You know - a little like the old joke.
'I make decisions about the really important matters,' says the man. 'Like how to achieve world peace and what's wrong with the government. My wife just decides the unimportant domestic stuff like where we live, and how we spend the money and where the kids go to school and silly little things like that. '
Personally, I've read sugary nonsense by a few well-regarded male writers which has been hailed as fine writing and I do sometimes wonder why nobody has noticed. But since I'm not in the business of making enemies, I won't name names!

Anyway, back to love. At a time when I was still hoping for more conventional publication deals and scanning Scottish publishing websites, I had the heart-sinking perception of just how macho those sites were. No love stories for them, it seemed. Have things changed in the intervening period? Not much, on the evidence of a quick scan this morning.

But I know when the realisation that a love story was the - er - kiss of death struck me with some force. It was when The Curiosity Cabinet was one of three novels shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize and eventually published by Polygon (although it's now mine again, and available on Kindle) Even though no less a critic than John Burnside had praised it as a 'powerful story about love and obligation' a member of one of the Scottish book groups, asked to report on the shortlisted novels, described it as a 'guilty pleasure'.

Why guilty?

Surely not because it's - perish the thought - a story about love? So is Bird of Passage. Although it's definitely a bird of a different and much more heartrending feather.

Cover art by Matt Zanetti

The truth is that some of the greatest stories ever told have been love stories so I'm resolved to stop apologising for writing them, even though I know I'm going to have to explain that most of mine don't end happily ever after. Like life, they tend to be a mixture of sadness, change and hope for the future.
My next novel, The Amber Heart is - among other things - a love story. The driving force of the whole thing is a passionate, pretty much disastrous, lifelong love story, based very loosely on a real life and equally disastrous love story from my own family history. A Polish love story. A bit like Gone With the Wind, but with even stranger names. Coming soon to a Kindle near you.

Meanwhile, in honour of St Valentine, I'm planning a couple of Kindle Freebies - Bird of Passage, and The Curiosity Cabinet. Love stories, both of them.
I only ask one thing. If you download either or both of these novels, read them - and find that you enjoy them - please do me the big favour of telling your friends!
Both will be free to download on 14th of February. Go on. Even if you still think it'll be a guilty pleasure, you know you want to!

Catherine Czerkawska

www.wordarts.co.uk

Weeping Crocodiles: The Great eBook Debate

The backlash against eBooks has been rumbling along, sotto voce, for some time - but recently, there have been a few loud howls of anguish. The end of civilisation is nigh. Franzen was crying 'woe, woe!' This morning, it had even spread to BBC 1, where Ewan Morrison, less angst ridden, but still fairly negative, debated the issue with Louise Voss who has done rather well from indie digital publishing. It reminded me of an edition of a programme called Imagine, shown on BBC TV late last year, which proclaimed the virtues of traditional publishers as honourable gatekeepers, there to nurture, protect and promote writers. Would that they were. Would that they did.

This would all be just a little more believable if the last decade or so hadn't seen conventional publishers presiding over the slow decline and eventual death of the mid-list, that wonderful, huge, fertile, centre ground of publishing, encompassing everything from well written genre fiction to literary novels, with all kinds of fascinating stuff in between. And for a very long time, they have managed to con mid-list writers into thinking that it was all our fault. This centre ground used to be the seed bed from which the occasional (usually unexpected, almost always unpredictable) blockbuster success would spring. Sometimes - if the publisher got lucky - it might be an author's first or second book - but much more frequently it would be their fifth or sixth or seventh book. The others would have reasonable, albeit not massive sales, but would have been growing a staunch readership. And if a book did become a bestseller, some of those profits would be ploughed back into nurturing the other seedlings in the mid-list.

Then, slowly but relentlessly, everything changed. No matter what big publishers may say in their own justification, (and I exempt the small, frequently more caring independents here) the experience of most writers - even those with agents - is that editors are now almost wholly ruled and overruled by their marketing departments, and those marketing departments are looking for instant gratification in the shape of a quick and easy bestseller.

They find those quick and easy bestsellers in ghost written sleb memoirs or autobiographies of sportsmen and television chefs. And cookery books. Lots of those.

It ill behoves them, therefore, to wring their hands and weep crocodile tears over the death of the book, when they have effectively spent a decade or more kicking it in the teeth. Just about every writer of my acquaintance - and I know a lot of them - would tell of deeply frustrating rejection letters all essentially saying the same thing: 'I love this, I think it's wonderful and well written, but in the current climate, we can't publish it. Our marketing department doesn't know how to sell it.'

That being the case, how dare they scream blue murder when writers are empowered by the rise of the eBook and allowed to get the work out there themselves? To suggest 'regulating' this movement is to suggest putting power back into the hands of a set of gatekeepers who have proved themselves to be somewhat less scrupulous than St Peter. Moreover, to suggest that the rise of the eBook will stop people reading, flies in the face of all evidence to the contrary. People are reading more on their Kindles and IPads and Nooks than ever before. And to suggest that indie publishing will somehow limit the ability of writers to make a living from their work, is to display an astonishing ignorance of how most writers - even well published writers - find it almost impossible to scrape any kind of living at all from their craft.

A single example will serve to illustrate the advantages:  eBook publishing often involves a 'slow burn' with sales taking off - for a variety of reasons, too complicated to go into here - some time after publication. By contrast, conventional publishing now demands the launch, the immediate and astronomical rise in sales and the ridiculously swift slide towards the remainder pile. Most writers - with a few lucky exceptions - will have been made to feel guilty about their inability to meet the wholly unrealistic targets set by their publishers - and this with well written, well reviewed and popular books - just not instantly popular enough.

So what if there is a lot of dross out there? In a virtual world, shelf space is unlimited and people are already hammering out ways of finding what they want. Besides, your dross might well be my good read, and who is qualified to make those judgements?

Speaking personally, I've had a long career which has involved a frustrating switchback. It's no surprise that many of indie publishing's most enthusiastic proponents are older writers with a good track record (and a big back list) who have encountered obstacle after obstacle - as opposed to youngsters who have not yet had time to become jaded with a decaying system.

Above all, eBook publishing gives writers the power to sell the products of their own talents, themselves. It would be far more helpful to 'beginning writers' to debate grown-up topics, as so many US authors do on their remarkably helpful blogs: the desirability of honing your craft and thinking about your readers, the importance of your cover image, the possibility of engaging professional editorial help in a businesslike way, the need to get your head down and keep writing, rather than resting on your laurels after one book - all these things are useful. Elitist hand-wringing is not.

But of course, that would mean treating the writer as an aspiring or seasoned professional, rather than a humble supplicant. All of which helps to explain why, for so many of us, the publishing industry has lost all credibility as the keeper of culture it still fondly imagines itself to be.

www.wordarts.co.uk

Five Pieces of (Possibly) Useful Advice for Writers

A trio of ghost stories, now on Kindle

I'm increasingly reluctant to hand out any writing advice at all these days - mainly because there is just TOO MUCH of it out there, and so much of what there is, is completely contradictory. And - moreover - being handed out by people who don't know enough to know how little they know. In fact I've realised that although I still love to do talks and readings, and although I'm happy to answer questions to the best of my ability, I don't even like to do 'workshops' any more. There you are with a group of people of wildly differing abilities, all with completely different aspirations, trying to squeeze your own experience into some inadequate one-size-fits-all box- ticking activity. But all the same - it IS possible to give some general advice and I've realised that all my years of experience can be boiled down into about five principles - things that, if I had known, really known about and absorbed and tried to remember, way back then - my writing life might have been made a little easier. Only a little though. When I was starting out, an older, wiser (and very successful) writer said to me 'The only way to learn to write, is to get your head down and do it.' He was right. There are no shortcuts. But for what they are worth, I'm happy to share these five little pieces of advice in the hope that some of them may prove helpful.

1 Play About 

This is especially relevant in these days of formal creative writing courses where students seem to feel (however misplaced that feeling may be) that they have to 'get it right' with an assignment in much the same way as they would have to get a factual essay or dissertation right. Unfortunately, this is never the way most creative writers work. You start with an idea of some kind and then you play about with it until you find out what it wants or needs to be. Play is absolutely essential to the creative process.

2 Allow Yourself to Fail

A brave attempt which fails is better than no attempt at all. And once again, the more we formalise the process, the more the prospect of failure becomes the big bogeyman, to be avoided at all costs. I think it's one of the reasons why I find Creative Scotland's current emphasis on the word 'investment' so worrying. I know they don't intend it to mean that investment is invariably financial and always demands a financial return - but investment and support are two different things, and even if you take the idea of monetary investment or grant support right out of the equation, you are still left with the sense that investment always assumes a return of some sort, whereas support allows for the possibility of trying and failing. The doing is  more important than any end product. It's more important to travel hopefully than to arrive. As a writer, you will start out on far more projects than you will ever finish, and this is as it should be. Trying and failing means that you are learning something along the way.  

3 Make It Real

People are often told to write what they know about, but my qualification to that is that you know more than you think, and if you don't know, you can always find out. Making it real, though, involves more than just research and it's almost impossible to show people how to do it. (If I could, I would be richer than I am right now!)  You can be writing the most wild, off-the-wall fantasy and still make it so real that your reader believes everything, implicitly. Think of Ray Bradbury. He could write about a woman who played the rain on her harp and I still believed in it. Hell, I could see and hear it! Conversely, you can be writing the most everyday domestic story and discover that your readers don't believe a word of it. Beginning writers will often say 'but it really happened like that' to which the only possible, albeit a little rude, answer is 'so what?' You're the writer, and you must be in charge of your own material. Give yourself permission to shape it. Get inside your characters' heads. Above all, inspire your reader with confidence. The answer always lies with you, the writer. If you have created a fictional world which seems as real to you as the world outside (and sometimes even more real than that), then your readers will believe in that world as well. But the only way to achieve that is... well, you could start by paying attention to 1 and 2 above!

Being curious about everything helps!

4 Story Is King

I resisted this for years. But over Christmas, I heard Andrew Lloyd Webber saying it and although I have a few reservations about the ALW bandwagon, I found myself in agreement with him. I wish somebody had said this to me years ago. Forget about the formal intricacies of plotting, forget all those prescriptive pieces of advice about structure. Just tell the story as engagingly as you can. If you get that right, whether you are writing in a particular genre or experimenting wildly, everything else will fall into place. William Trevor's short stories are truly wonderful not only because they tell us so much about what it is to be a human being - which they certainly do - but because they are always very fine stories as well! Make it live, shape it, craft the raw material of reality into something better. Every truly enthralling novel, film and stage play I've ever seen, literary or popular, difficult or easy, has an enthralling story. Kids know all about story. Even when publishers in droves were telling writers that fantasy was dead in the water and sending polite rejection letters to JKR among others, kids were still demanding a magical story. When Harry Potter was first published it was kids who spread the word about it being an enthralling read. They know a good story when they read one and there's no fooling them. (Yet still so many of our critics seem to think that writing for children is a soft option! Nothing could be further from the truth. And I don't write for children. But I certainly admire those who do.)

5 Once You're An Experienced Professional - Behave Like One.

This is possibly my most contentious piece of advice. We writers are notoriously bad at treating ourselves as professionals, even when we are seasoned and experienced, with an excellent track record. I've just been reading a piece about teachers which posed the following questions:

'In what other profession is the desire for competitive salary viewed as proof of indifference towards the job? In what other profession are the professionals considered the least knowledgeable about the job?'

The answer to that would also be writers.

People who wouldn't get out of bed without payment often expect writers to work for nothing. I'm not talking about the freebies we all do from time to time where nobody gets paid, or where you work for a profit share. I'm talking about those gigs you're sometimes invited to do for large commercial organisations where everyone else is on a fair (and sometimes a very fat) salary but where you're told there is 'no money in the budget to pay the writer.' And when you're feeling nervous, watch this and take heart.

If you're going to work for free, do it for yourself, work at something you love, or for whatever worthy cause you subscribe to. For the rest, be aware that a whole industry has grown up which is happy to cast the 'talent' in the role of humble supplicant, grateful for any crumbs of recognition. But only you can do something to remedy that.

Oh - and I've one last piece of advice, which is to treat all advice with healthy scepticism. Even this blog! But do feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments section!

Catherine Czerkawska

www.wordarts.co.uk

List Mania

I don't know about you, but I'm a great maker of lists. In fact I have a folder on my PC titled Catherine's Lists. It contains documents such as a To Do List (work) a To Do List (other) an ongoing Shopping List and a Gardening List.  Before Christmas these were joined by Gift and Card lists. After Christmas, these were replaced by lists of all the little things I hadn't done over the holidays, but now needed to tackle. And now that most of these are out of the way, I'm about to embark on a massive promotion list for my eBooks. And then, of course, there's a publishing schedule to consider as well. Arguably, the most important of the lot.

There's even - I kid you not - a Mega List, which is a sort of list of lists.

And while I'm in confessional mode, I have to admit that I have been known to ADD things to my lists that I have already done, just for the pleasure of being able to cross them off!

My sister-in-law told me last year that she never ever makes lists and never has done. In fact it was plain that she couldn't understand why I would need to. Which makes me wonder - is the world divided into list makers and - the others. And how on earth do they manage?

There have been times when I've decided to go cold turkey and do without the torture and tyranny of my To Do lists. On average, I've lasted about two days. The only time I really do without them is when we go away on holiday. This doesn't work if we're going abroad, because the week before departure is spent in such a frenzy of list making and checking that I need a few days to recover. And before I know it, I'm making a list of all the things I'll need to do when I get home again. But if we're having a few days' blissful break here in the UK, I can manage to be relatively list free, and the relief is exquisite. Unfortunately, by the time we're through the door the lists are crowding my head again.

Yoga helps. Still your mind, our teacher says, and I find that I can and do. And  I once bought a book on Time Management which was so list obsessive that even I baulked at dividing my day into ten minute segments and listing what needed to be done in grids. So maybe I'm not that bad after all.

I did consider making a New Year's Resolution to cut down on my list-making, but by the time I had added a few more ideas,  I actually had a list of resolutions, top of which was not making too many lists.

So do they help, all these lists?

Well, I get a lot done. I feel organised.  And when I'm in the middle of a writing project, a book or a play, it seems quite important to make some kind of schedule and try to stick to it - otherwise it's all too easy to let other things get in the way. You have to learn to prioritise when you're a writer and making lists is definitely one way of working out what's essential and what's not. Although I have to say that when you're on a roll, deeply absorbed in writing or revising, all the lists go by the board, and you do almost nothing else but write, eat, drink and sleep!

Meanwhile, it's rather nice to find yourself on other people's lists sometimes, like this one, by Brendan Gisby on Amazon, and this one as well ! Thank-you Brendan!

Writing Resolutions for 2012: Just Do It!

First of all, let me wish a very happy and productive 2012 to anyone reading this blog - and I know that includes a number of writers of all ages and stages. (Don't you just hate the term 'budding writer'?) so let's hope at least some of that productivity relates to writing and publication, indie as well as conventional.

I finally published my new novel Bird of Passage to Amazon Kindle, between Christmas and New Year. I'd fully anticipated getting it 'out there' in time for Christmas, but in the event, a string of minor edits, and then the Kindle formatting, meant that it proved even more time consuming that I had anticipated. But then, where writing is concerned, just about everything does!

I was amused to see somebody on a book forum the other day, blithely pointing out that since it should be 'easy' to write a thousand words a day, it should be equally easy to finish a novel within three months. Well, it's possible, and some people manage to do it. They tend to be experienced writers who are very sure of the genre in which they are writing - and sure of their own skills in that genre. (Or complete beginners, who are too inexperienced to know how little they know!) But when it's the former, the results can be very good indeed. However some novels take years to write and those results can be very good indeed too. As usual with writing, there are no right or wrong answers and the only certainty in this business is that anyone who tells you that there are, is certainly wrong.

Still, at this time of year, it's worth pondering the value of writing something every day, or almost every day, even if it's not a thousand words. The truth is that sometimes it will be much less or nothing and sometimes it will be much more - three or four thousand words if you're on a roll - but the one thing that you can be pretty sure of is that if you want to 'be' a writer, you have to - er - you know - write something. I know this sounds daft, and I'm pretty sure that none of the followers of this blog will be culprits, but I have - over a long writing career - met a surprising number of people who are forever claiming that they 'want to write' but when push comes to shove, they don't actually do it. I don't mean writing well. I mean the act of putting one word next to another on paper or on a screen.

They will have many excuses, but lack of time is always number one. I know this because it's an excuse professional writers use all the time - I do it myself. 'I didn't finish this or that project because I didn't have time.' It's not true. It usually means that I wasn't committed enough to the project in question, or got bored with it, or realised it wasn't going anywhere. If you really want to write (and you have to want to write something, whether it's poems, stories, novels, plays, or a blog,) then you will beg, borrow or steal the time from somewhere. I have friends who have worked full time at the 'day job', brought up children, looked after sick relatives and still managed to grab a few hours each day to devote to their writing, sometimes in the early hours of the morning, sometimes very late at night, sometimes by just pulling the occasional all-nighter and soldiering on through next day's fatigue.

Many years ago, when I was 'budding' myself (yeuch!) a distinguished writer replied to one of my fan letters that 'the only way to write is to write.' He was right, of course. The only way in which you can call yourself a writer, whether in bud, or in bright green leaf, is to DO it.  It's only by doing it that you can actually find out what you want to write, what form you want to write it in, and whether you actually have anything interesting to say. You may start by 'wanting to write' poems, so you do it, and find that actually, your poems are more like short stories. So then you write short stories. You may try your hand at writing short stories and find them full of visual images and dialogue, and wonder if you could write plays as well. The truth is that most writers play about with different forms, seeing where they want to go.

But in order to come to any realisation about the form that might suit you, as a writer, you have to give it a go in some shape or form. I think for many people, though, there's an element of fear involved and I suspect that the internet, which is crammed with opinionated people (like me, so sorry!)  has hindered rather than helped. Being judged for something so personal is scary. Being told what you ought to be doing by screeds of people is singularly unhelpful. Our first ventures into writing are generally quite tender little seedlings and it's all too easy for them to be trampled under foot.

As with so many things in life, a great many people prefer to say 'I could have been a contender' rather than having a go at something, and - possibly - failing. But I've news for you. Nobody who attempts any form of creative endeavour, ever believes he or she is good enough. Every single writer, including highly successful professionals, goes through agonies of self doubt. And we've all failed. Often. It doesn't make us stop writing though. We write because it's a kind of compulsion. An addiction. We can't help ourselves.

But if you make any New Year resolution about your writing, let it be not to put yourself down before you've even started. Ignore your own doubts. Get yourself a nice notebook and doodle in it: poems, ideas, words, phrases. Or set up a blog (here on Blogger - it's free and easy!) and resolve to write something, anything, once a week.

Above all, just do it. You know you want to. As Mrs Doyle would say, 'Go on go on go on go on go on!'

New Website - and a very Happy Christmas!

Just launched my nice new website, here, designed and built by Ayrshire company, Paligap  I'm delighted with it, although it has certainly taken me long enough to get around to commissioning it! And I'm well aware that an out-of-date website is worse than no website at all.

Paligap built my first site many years ago, when they too were just starting out - I remember visiting them, two pleasant and enthusiastic young men, in premises tucked away down a little back street in the town of Ayr. I was very happy with that first website, but as time passed, my work changed. I thought about changing the site too, but I couldn't justify the expense to myself, in view of the fact that I wasn't at all sure any longer what I wanted it to say! So I concentrated on blogging, while I thought about it, and wrote, and then thought about it all some more.

Paligap, meanwhile, expanded and grew. They moved to nice new premises, and then - more recently - to even nicer premises in an old but very distinguished part of the town. And they gained some very distinguished customers in the meantime. (They are still a very pleasant, friendly company to work with though!)

And I went through a succession of changes in my working life, what I wrote, what I wanted to do with it, where I wanted to go with it. The single biggest change, though, was signalled by two things - the collapse of the mid-list as far as conventional publishing was concerned - and the advent of 'indie publishing' - the possibility of publishing work directly onto Kindle and other platforms, avoiding the increasingly complicated strings of gatekeepers which had interposed themselves between the writer and his or her readership. Suddenly, there was a very definite possibility of getting the work out there instead of spending years and years rewriting it to the demands of an increasingly prescriptive industry - and that came like a wonderful breath of fresh air.

I've written about that change more fully elsewhere, especially in the Scottish Review, here - where you can read a longish essay about the concept of the mid-list - what it is and what has happened to the writers who belonged there. Just as I was assembling ideas for my new website, I read a wonderful little book called How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months (I know, I know, we should all be so lucky!) - but it's a lovely, entertaining, useful book, full of bright ideas. And the biggest, brightest idea of all, the best piece of advice - although there's a lot more, you should buy it - is that the writer should spend time thinking about/focusing on/building a relationship with his or her readers.

It was a moment of enlightenment. I don't know why, because it's kind of obvious when you think about it - but over the past few years, writers have been concentrating so hard on the long and difficult hunt for an agent, and then the equally long and difficult hunt for a publisher - that they/we seem to have neglected the person who really matters - the reader.

Fortunately, enlightenment came just in time for me to make a few changes to my new website (thank-you John Locke!) and it's now aimed fairly and squarely at readers, or potential readers. Which is just as it should be.

Meanwhile, this will be my last post before Christmas - so let me wish all of you a very happy and joyful holiday season - and a very successful 2012.