writing – Ali Mercer

Two new Ali Mercer novels due out in 2019 from Bookouture

by alimercerSeptember 28, 2018June 5, 20214 Comments

Book news!

I’m delighted to announce that my new novel, Lost Daughter, will be published by Bookouture in May 2019.

It’s an emotional family drama about Rachel, whose life has unravelled since her husband has been given custody of their young daughter Becca after a messy break-up.

There’ll be another book from me out from Bookouture in September 2019.

I think my younger, book-loving self (pictured here reading in bed, big fan of Enid Blyton and Bunty) would have been thrilled if she could have time-travelled to pick up the news…

Here’s what my brilliant editor, Bookouture associate publisher Kathryn Taussig, had to say about Lost Daughter and my writing (OK so this is the part when I get ready to blush):

‘It’s such a rare thing to find an author who can write family drama well, and for this reason I’m over the moon to be publishing Ali Mercer. Her writing is beautiful, thoughtful and moving. Her characters are believably flawed and yet endlessly relatable and her stories are engrossing. Lost Daughter is a perfect fit for Bookouture and I know it will delight readers of Jodi Picoult, Diane Chamberlain and Kerry Fisher.’

Bookouture are brilliant – they’re forward-looking and fast-moving but they take their time looking after their authors and getting their books just right, and they really know how to develop author’s brands and build the relationship between readers and writers. And Kathryn is a star. We’re both up for a bit of strong emotion, twisty drama and suspense, and we’re both fascinated by what makes families tick and what goes on behind closed doors. There’s no secret like a family secret, and no secret is quite as explosive as one that has been suppressed but comes out in the end…

Here’s the full announcement from Bookouture about the publication of Lost Daughter. Cover reveal due to happen in February. You’ll notice that the title has changed slightly since the original announcement – the slightly shorter version worked better with the cover design (which is beautiful – I’m looking forward to sharing it.)

I really hope you’ll enjoy Lost Daughter. There won’t be long to wait till the next one!

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream and the Cazalets: a writer tells her own story

by alimercerApril 7, 2017January 2, 2019Leave a comment

IMG_3078 (3) Before I got started on Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet books I thought they might be too cosy and cream bun-ish for me. But then enough people sang their praises to prompt me to try them, and they turned out to be much sharper and darker than I’d anticipated.

Yes, there are dresses and dinners, but also: sex, sexuality, secrets, infidelity, betrayal, loyalty, unrequited love, requited love, grief, unwanted pregnancies, children who long for lost or absent parents, marriages of all kinds, the tension between duty and desire, and the long friendships of cousins. All that plus a portrait of an extended family as a microcosm of social change before, during and after the Second World War.

So now I have just one Cazalet book left, All Change. It’s always rather melancholy to approach the end of a series. After the first four Cazalet books I read Slipstream, EJH’s autobiography, and that’s what I wanted to blog about. Any writer’s autobiography is of potential interest to anyone who writes or is interested in writing, and this one offered up numerous insights that caught my eye.

Comfort reading… but not

Slipstream is comfort reading, of a kind – up to a point. It’s the story of a woman who survived acute maternal guilt and numerous difficult though interesting lovers to become what she wanted to be – a writer. There are lots of other writers in its pages, too, in various roles and relationships, including Kingsley Amis (to whom EJH was married for many years) and Martin Amis, her stepson – she gave him Pride and Prejudice and declined to tell him how it ended, so he had to read it for himself; he encouraged her to follow through on her idea for the Cazalet books. Here’s some of what Slipstream has to say about intuition, art, war, love, learning, the work and rewards of writing, age and truth.

On intuition, art, the war years and learning

‘Premonitions bring with them a sense of powerlessness and guilt – what can be the point of even half knowing something about which one seems able to do nothing?’

‘To sit for a painter was even better than being asked to turn pages of music for a pianist: it was being a kind of associate member of the arts, and I could think of nothing more desirable than that.’

‘The war hung over our heads, but we hardly referred to it. Glass fell reluctantly from the roof of the school studio, and was kicked aside by earnest, sandalled feet… We were selfish, preoccupied and, I think now, we simply didn’t understand what was going on, as we never considered it long enough to find out. Behind it all was the feeling that we’d be dragged into it eventually so we had a kind of greedy desperation to get every drop out of every second of the time we had left to pursue our own ends.’

‘Walking home, it was clear how very little I knew and how little I understood of anything I’d thought I knew. Even learning to type wouldn’t help me with his feelings, which meant that either education, as I’d thought of it, wasn’t education at all, or it was merely a preliminary, at its best, for something that was going to last for the rest of my life.’

On the preoccupation with love and wanting to write

‘Another reason that my novel took so long was my preoccupation with love. Love seemed to me the most desirable, the most important of human emotions. As far as sexual love was concerned, I was older but not much wiser. But every other aspect of love – intimacy, affection, being first in each other’s lives – I wanted, as much as I wanted to write. The problem of how to combine them was far in the future. I thought that if I could get love right, everything else would follow naturally. I don’t write this to imply I was unusual; most women feel the same in varying degrees, I think.’

‘Furthermore I was lazy with my writing; I’d not yet learned the kind of discipline necessary for serious work.’

‘There is a great difference between wanting to be a writer and wanting to write, and this isn’t always obvious in the salad days of a writer’s creative life, and sometimes never.’

‘I knew by now that a number of people regarded me as beautiful. But much in the way that rich people don’t want to be loved simply because they are rich, I didn’t want to be loved simply for my appearance…. I simply felt I was making a hash of it, and underlying that foggy conclusion lay the dread that I wasn’t anything else. I still had the desire to write, but depression leaks energy – like pain – and all that summer I couldn’t write.’

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On the strange feeling of finishing a book and the knowledge of love

‘The feeling after completing a novel is for me like no other. It’s as though with the last sentence, I have released a great weight that falls away, leaving me so empty and light that I can float out of myself and look down at the pattern of the work I’ve made. I can see all at once what I have been pursuing in fragments for so long. It’s a timeless moment, a kind of ecstasy – a state of unconditional love – that has nothing whatever to do with merit or criticism. Of course it goes, dissolves into melancholy and a sense of loss. Parting with people one has been living with for so long and know so intimately is poignant; they are more lost to you than anyone you meet in life. They remain crystallized exactly where you left them. Altogether, it’s an occasion that makes one feel very strange for some time afterwards.’

‘I began to understand that love is neither a conditional business nor an ever-fixed mark by arrangement. People always know somewhere inside themselves if they are not loved. No gestures, talk, conciliation, pronouncements can prevail over that deep instinctual knowledge.’

‘This trip was a farcical failure… I was supposed to give a reading at Brentano’s bookshop at seven pm. When I arrived there was no audience.’

(of Doris Lessing) ‘We went shopping together, and I wanted a rather expensive jacket, and she said, “Go on. You’ve just finished your book, you can have a treat.”‘

On age, happiness and truth

‘…it’s often difficult to feel your age. Apart from the fact I wasn’t sure what this entailed, in many ways I didn’t feel my age. Like one’s appearance or handwriting, one retains an earlier impression of oneself and takes it for granted, no longer sees what one is.’

‘Nearly everyone I’d known who’d had cancer had died of it in the end. It was extraordinary how all my values shifted – as though I’d shaken a kaleidoscope and all the little segments, though still there, had made an unrecognisable pattern. Unhappy, lonely or a failure I might have been, but even those ingredients of my life now seemed precious – even desirable.’

‘On the ninth morning, I had to go into town to buy food, and suddenly – walking down the street to my house – I lightened completely as though, without warning, I’d emerged from a heavy fog into clear sunlight. I felt extraordinarily, irrationally happy.’

‘Liars destroy the currency of all words: there was no single fragment of truth I could hang on to.’

‘I’ve slowly learned some significant things – perhaps most of all the virtue, the extreme importance of truth, which, it seems to me now, should be continually searched for and treasured when any piece of it is found.’

Polly Samson and Patrick Gale: seduction, loss, land and longing

by alimercerOctober 2, 2015January 4, 2019Leave a comment

Outside was a preposterously beautiful, Technicolour autumn day, all blue skies and trees turning the colours of fire. If you’d used it in a film it would have been for heartbreak and parting, a belated outpouring of summer made all the more vivid because it is nearly time to say goodbye. Inside the grand but compact chamber of Henley’s Town Hall it was unseasonably warm; with five minutes to go there were only two seats left, and I took one of them. ‘Not much knee space. We’re rather close,’ somebody said as I squeezed in and arranged myself.

We were a packed and anticipant roomful of mostly women, book lovers and therefore by definition fond of the essentially private pastime of reading, though we were there not to read but to listen and to ask questions, to experience fiction as a public event. Instead of words on a page or a screen, we were going to see the writers who had drawn us there and hear their voices. We wanted stories, but more than that, we hoped for a glimpse into how and why they were told.

At one end of the room was a small and empty stage with three important-looking chairs, which were throne-like but in the manner of an English town hall and therefore designed for the comfortable sitting-out of long meetings as well as to be imposing. I imagine all sorts of practical things have been discussed in that room over the years: the price of corn or parking, the collection of refuse, the balancing of books and the taking of votes.

We weren’t there for any of that. We were there for semen and baby shoes, tales of a psychopathic rapist or a leech-like friend, families divided by wars and continents and the brutal convictions of an era, the tragedy of failed reconciliations and the power of impossible loves. And that was what we got, but as if that wasn’t enough, we also got to find out a little bit about what it takes to make all that stuff up and write it down.

Secrets uncovered: the prelude to post-lunch erotica

Windows were opened; the noises of outside – traffic, the market – drifted in along with the stirring of cooler air. A frisson ran round the room as our writers came in and went up to the little stage and took their places. We were on our way.

I’m sorry not to have a picture of them: they were a glamorous pairing. Patrick Gale is a dazzlingly charming silver fox, with a voice you could listen to forever – I think I’m right in saying he wanted to be an actor when he was younger and he has that gift that some actors have of making an instant connection with other people, a sort of receptivity that both gives and holds attention. I’m onto my fifth Patrick Gale novel now and am a committed member of his fan club, or would be if he formally had one. If you haven’t read any, and you have a space in your reading life for a writer who will draw you in, make you care, make you laugh and break your heart, then go get started.

Polly Samson was new to me. There’s something otherworldly about her which makes it not quite right to describe her in worldly terms. She’s beautiful, poised, measured, with the kind of cool intelligence and self-possession that suggest heat under the surface. She’s also kind of rock’n’roll. She’s a lyricist as well as a novelist; her other half is David Gilmour from Pink Floyd and when she’s working on a book she reads what she’s written each day out loud to him in the evening.

Our hour with Patrick and Polly was hosted by Lucy Cavendish, who mentioned that Polly hadn’t eaten any lunch while Patrick had got through two chocolate brownies. If he was skittish, so were we. Off we went with a discussion about how both authors’ latest books had drawn life from their family history and secrets. Patrick told us about Harry Cane, his mother’s mysterious cowboy grandpa who emigrated to Canada under something of a cloud. Patrick set out to tell a story that would explain both what had happened to him and the way the family spoke about him, ‘a story that the women of the family wouldn’t have been told, but that might have been true’: ‘my nefarious scheme of gaying my great-grandfather.’ (I think that might be my favourite PG line from the session, along with the description of the readings as ‘post-lunch erotica’.)

Polly relayed a story from her own family history, a tormenting love triangle in which paternity was at stake. A couple who could not have a baby asked a friend to father a child for them, which he duly did before emigrating to the US, with the understanding that future contact between them would be minimal. But then war broke out and the husband sent his wife and child to their biological father in the US for safety, remaining in Paris to sort out paperwork… and ended up interned and separated from them for years, after which time his wife had decided that their child only needed one father, and was already living with him. A terrible story which culminated in the husband’s suicide.

This fed into Polly’s new novel The Kindness, though transplanted into a different time and place. Polly’s own complicated parentage also provided fuel for the story, and she told us about the father figure with whom she had lost contact, who she later learned had kept her baby shoes close by all his life.

A lesson in how to breathe and a cloudy offering

Both writers read aloud from their novels. Both read scenes that involved seduction, of one kind or another. Polly’s had a specimen jar, innocence yielding to scientific curiosity and a braless milkmaid, the examination of a cloudy offering. Patrick’s had a therapist who teaches a young man to breathe, then introduces him to sex on a bed so narrow that one of them must always be on top of the other. Clients visit in the morning, but the young man is invited to return in the afternoons: ‘You can just wait in the bed.’

We laughed and fanned ourselves with the useful cards explaining who had sponsored the event. They had us. We were sold. Now we wanted to find out how they had managed it. And this is what we learned.

(Warning: there are some spoilers in what follows, though I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum, but if you absolutely hate spoilers, you should go and read the books first. If, like me, you are undisciplined and sometimes even peek at the end of a story before you get there, you won’t care.)

The novel you end up writing may be quite different, in form at least, from the one you set out to write.

This was a bit of a revelation to me as I thought it was only me that did this and everybody else just put together their card indexes or flow charts or whatever and wrote the damn things, but no.

Patrick set out to write a very simple book, drawing on EM Forster and boys’ adventure stories, starting at the beginning and rattling on to the end: wrote it, and then set about chopping it up, both to tease the reader through the narrative and to break up the sadness in it. So the novel is a bit like a thriller, in that you learn early on that Harry has killed someone and that there are loves he can’t speak about.

Polly’s last book was a collection of interlinked short stories, and she set out to write this one as a series of stories but then restructured it so that she had two main voices followed by a third voice. She had been surprised by comments that it was like a thriller, and hadn’t set out to write a novel with twists and turns, but there they were. This meant she’d had ‘the joy of writing from two perspectives’ – she gave as an example an assignation in a Paris hotel described from the point of view of both the male and female lover, a fantasy made real for one and a seedy compromise for the other.

The story will be brought to life by the happy accident of characters who make their own way in.

Patrick told the story of Troels Munck, the antagonist to Harry Cane’s hero and, for my money, one of the most terrifying and convincing villains in all of literature. (A Place Called Winter is revelatory about evil, and how people try to survive it and can be destroyed by it.) The name was given by a real-life someone who had won an auction for it to be included. Patrick described the email exchange that followed: (PG): ‘Is it all right if I turn you into a psychopathic rapist?’ [LONG TUMBLEWEED EMAIL SILENCE] (TM): ‘OK, as long as he is hot.’

Is Troels hot? He’s a bully and a brute, but a compelling one – and he’s real, which is testament to the truthfulness with which he has been created. God save us all from encounters with the likes of Troels – outside of the pages of a book.

Polly spoke about Katie, the leech-like friend who was meant to be just a line in The Kindness but kept turning up. She also described the intense absorption of writing, how her children would come back from school and talk to her about their days and she would find herself not really taking it in, still caught up in the world of her characters. (I know that particular daze.) But she’d read Elena Ferrante while she was working on The Kindness – four years of close work, twenty years of gestation in all – and had found that Ferrante’s characters were as real to her as the ones she had invented herself and was carrying round with her. (Now I have to decide what to read next, The Kindness or Ferrante.)

Polly commented on how characters seem to turn up fully-formed. Patrick agreed: ‘They have to be, or they don’t work on the page.’

But what about planning? Patrick said he plans meticulously, but then ignores the plan. ‘It’s like getting ready for a play – I need to know about the characters and feel confident about who they are.’

The land you put into your book will shape it.

Patrick explained how as he worked on the book he had got increasingly angry about what had been done in Canada, but had wanted to show that in an elliptical way, without tub-thumping about imperialism. It’s there in the tragedy of Ursula. Also, as he explored the landscape and the history of the settlements, he became increasingly aware of how dangerous it was, and how vulnerable his characters were. Hence Troels.

Here’s a surprise nugget for you: there were no starlings in Canada till 1934, as a Canadian friend of Patrick’s told him after reading an early draft. Starlings follow agriculture and it took till then for them to arrive. So you won’t find them in Winter.

Patrick talked about his road trip to find his grandfather’s lot, and asked Polly if the house and garden in The Kindess were based on a real place: ‘I really wanted to go weeding there.’ Polly said the garden was a mixture of gardens she had loved.
Inevitably, your research will shape your book. Are there starlings, or not? Polly’s novel opens with a hawking scene. What size are the baby mice fed to a hawk?

Children in stories – yearned for or lost – exert a special power.

Harry Cane is a father, separated from his child by both distance and disgrace, and the plot of The Kindness hinges on the fathering of a child. Patrick said he felt that the male yearning to be a father is not much written about, and I think this is true; as he said, most stories that touch on this cast the father as the reluctant figure and the mother as longing for a child. (There is a weird nexus of cultural confusion around this, a mixture of blind spot and acute sensitivity – writers, take note: when that happens, there’s something to dig for.)

The story of Polly’s baby shoe lingered with us. (It made me think of the design for the hardback cover of Julie Cohen’s Dear Thing, which featured baby shoes, and which prompted a brilliant baby-shoe-shopping scene in the final version of the book.) At the end of the session, when I was chatting with my neighbours in the audience, one of them mentioned Ernest Hemingway’s potent six-word story: ‘For sale: baby shoes, nearly worn.’

And finally…

Patrick was asked whether he had a favourite out of his books. And yes – he does: they are the ones he wrote during the happiest times of his life: Notes from an Exhibition, Rough Music, Little Bits of Baby. ‘I’m always very protective of the most recent one, it’s like a child that’s just started school.’

And then we were done. We shifted and stretched, murmured to each other about how good it had been, formed an orderly line for books and signing, began to slip away.

Sooner or later we will start to read. We will hear those stories again, not in the august surroundings of Henley Town Hall but wherever we are – on a lunch break, in an armchair on a winter’s night, in the doctor’s waiting room. And once more we will allow those voices to take us somewhere else.

Polly Samson and Patrick Gale were speaking at Henley Literary Festival, in conversation with Lucy Cavendish, at an event sponsored by HW Fisher & Company.

The impossible choice: Kramer vs Kramer

by alimercerJune 14, 2015November 8, 20171 Comment

Has everybody seen Kramer vs Kramer? I watched it again about a year ago, as part of my research for my (nearly-finished) work-in-progress, which is partly about the aftermath of a custody battle. I was talking about it with a friend in a cafe a week ago when something unusual happened: the guy at the next table chipped in to tell us how that film had changed his life.

I’d just been talking about how I’d gone back to the book on which the film was based, and the case it makes for how, under some circumstances, the father should get primary custody after a split. Our neighbour at the next table was American, about my age – a 1970s child. He told us his parents had split up around the time Kramer vs Kramer came out and he had been about the same age as the boy in the film.

The original plan had been for him to live with his mother when everything was settled, but he had been living with his dad for a few months when his mum came to him and asked him who he wanted to live with: her, or his dad? And he chose his dad.

She’d asked him because she had seen the film and had been so affected by it. ‘A boy needs his father,’ she said.

So how had all this worked out? All right, it seemed – though it had meant the boy had to get on a plane to see his mother, which happened around three times a year.

Looking back from an adult’s perspective, he wondered if he’d understood the question in the way that she had meant it, as a choice between his parents. Perhaps he had really thought she was asking, ‘Do you want to stay here with Dad in the place you’ve got to know, or come with me to a place you’ve never seen?’ and, as children do, had plumped for what seemed most familiar, the least upheaval, at the time.

Stories are powerful things and sometimes they change lives…

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Sisterland and the writer as psychic

by alimercerJuly 29, 2013August 24, 20134 Comments

On my desk right now: Sisterland and Negotiating with the Dead

I got into Curtis Sittenfeld because of the cover of American Wife, which featured a nostalgic photograph of a hopeful woman in a skirt, on a bike, against a backdrop of some arable crop – it could be corn, or maybe wheat – and sky. It made me think of Dorothy in Kansas, but all grown up and without the gaudy technicolour magic. I kept seeing that picture in the supermarket until I bought the book.

After that I read Curtis Sittenfeld’s first and second novels, and then I was left waiting for her next, which turned out to be Sisterland, which the postman handed over to me last week, as part of a parcel of books from my publisher. (Thank you Harriet.) I finished Sisterland last night and, as I expected, I loved it.

Like Curtis Sittenfeld’s other books, Sisterland is ostensibly about a story about a unique, even bizarre, situation but also, as if by sleight of hand – or, perhaps, in the shadowy room for manoeuvre created by a really strong hook – deals with something else. So American Wife answers the question, What is it like to be married to the President? And: What kind of woman ends up married to the President? But at the same time it tackles a number of other questions, which I can’t explicitly reveal without spoiling the book for you if you haven’t read it (in which case, get thee hence and tuck in), but which can be summarised as: what if you make a life-wrecking mistake when you are young? Can you recover, and if you do, will it still catch up with you anyway?

In Sisterland, the overt question – the narrative hook – is this: a psychic predicts a major earthquake. Is she right? Is it possible to accurately predict the future? But underlying that – at least, the way I read it – is another dilemma, and this is a much more universal one: is it possible to be feminine, a wife and mother, and also to use your gifts and be free? And if you have a gift and decide not to use it, what happens to you then?

@AlisonLMercer Such a thoughtful response to Sisterland–you must have spent as much time analyzing it as I did writing it!

— Curtis Sittenfeld (@csittenfeld) July 29, 2013

Slippery doubles, twinship and writing

Sisterland sent me back to one of my favourite books about writing, Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, which talks at some length about the use of doubles in fiction, and why writers are so preoccupied by them. (Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is largely about a fraught relationship between sisters – and Curtis Sittenfeld’s The Man of my Dreams also explores this. But to take it further, to make the sisters twins and psychic to boot, makes it ever more apparent that you are dealing with two mutations of one self.)

There’s a passage in Negotiating with the Dead where Margaret Atwood draws a distinction between ‘the person who exists when no writing is going forward – the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth – and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.’

She goes on to say, ‘I am after all a writer, so it would follow as the day the night that I must have a slippery double – or at best a mildly dysfunctional one – stashed away somewhere. I’ve read more than one review of books with our joint surname on them that would go far toward suggesting that this other person – the one credited with authorship – is certainly not me. She could never be imagined – for instance – turning out a nicely browned loaf of oatmeal-and-molasses bread, whereas I . . . but that’s another story.’

The twins, or slippery doubles, in Sisterland are Daisy and Violet Schramm, except when Daisy leaves home she decides she wants to distance herself from Violet (and, by implication, from her true self), and changes her name. Marriage helps, and when we meet her, at the beginning of the novel, she has become the altogether less distinctive Kate Tucker, who, as Vi points out, sounds like a Puritan.

Kate/Daisy begins to move away from Vi as an adolescent because they put on a show together and she plays the feminine role, and is afterwards praised for her prettiness. Popularity and acceptability beckon. She doesn’t want to be weird, and she certainly doesn’t want to be like Vi, one of whose gifts is a robust indifference to what other people think. (Also, Vi is overweight, whereas Kate/Daisy is meticulous about hitting the Stairmaster.)

And so Kate/Daisy ends up as a full-time wife and mother who has done her best to abandon her psychic abilities (but has she managed to destroy them entirely? Not quite, as you’ll see – gifts have a way of passing themselves on), a woman who is dangerously flattered, at a crucial point in the novel, when someone tells her how pretty and nice she is. Meanwhile Vi lurches towards celebrity, or notoriety, with her very public earthquake prediction – much to Kate’s embarrassment and fear.

It turns out that writing about psychics is a neat way to allude to the business of writing itself. Writers intuit what might happen to characters as the story goes on, though they don’t know for sure until it happens – and Kate and Vi are in much the same awkward and uncertain position. It made me smile when Vi, having achieved some success as a psychic (though, as it turns out, only with Kate/Daisy’s help), is able to make a living out of her gift, having previously struggled along as a waitress; some of the members of her old meditation group, who have not been quite so lucky commercially, are rather jealous of her. (I was wondering if something similar might happen if one member of a writing group found herself in a position to make the writing pay for itself.)

The art of making it real

Sisterland is unsettling, and creepy and funny and melancholy, and pulls off the coup of being both startling and believable. When I read, I want to be introduced to a new world and recognise it as true, while at the same time knowing that I’m being shown people and places that I’ve never seen before; Curtis Sittenfeld has the requisite twin gifts of truthfulness and originality in abundance, which is why she is one of my favourite discoveries of recent years.

Within the first few pages of American Wife I realised I’d found a new writer that I really liked, which is one of the great pleasures of reading. The best consolation for coming to the end of a book you love is knowing that there are others by the same author that you can go on to; and reading a number of different books by the same writer helps to confirm your sense of what is unique about them, and what attracted you to them in the first place.

It’s like getting to know someone by seeing them over time, dealing with different situations and environments; you can satisfy your curiosity about what this person has done in the past, and if the writer is still going strong, you’ll be eager to find out where they’re going next.

For me, and I suspect for most of us, this doesn’t happen all that often – this finding a book you really like, and chasing up the writer’s backlist. Back in the 1990s, it was William Gibson (starting with Neuromancer ), Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin), Raymond Carver (the collected short stories), James Ellroy (LA Confidential), Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea), Jayne Anne Phillips (Fast Lanes), and Joyce Carol Oates (Blonde). Those are all terrific books, and if you haven’t read them, I urge you to at least look them up – maybe you’ll get hooked on those writers the way I did.

More recently, there’s been Claire Messud (The Emperors’ Children), George R R Martin (Game of Thrones) and, of course, Curtis Sittenfeld. I guess you might deduce from this list that, on the whole, I love genre fiction and women’s fiction (or rather, fiction by and largely about women), and my heart is unstirred by much else, and you’d probably be about right. Why exactly it should be so I don’t know. What exactly it is that gets me hooked I don’t know. Sympathy for the underdog might be part of it, but only part; I suspect I also respond to writers who let their underdogs bite back.

After I Left You: the story of my second novel

by alimercerApril 14, 2013July 3, 20147 Comments

Every story has its own story – the story of the story. Any debut novel is a tale of hope against the odds; you write it, you have no idea whether it will ever see the light of day, and then, miraculously, it does. That was so for Stop the Clock, my first novel, and yet it’s also true for After I Left You, which I started work on long before. So you could say that After I Left You is my other first novel.

The very first prototype of one of the main characters in After I Left You, which is due to be published in November this year, appeared in a fledgeling story about university students that I began and abandoned way back in 1999. The character who first emerged back then was Clarissa Hayes, the second-generation celebrity whose sitcom actress mother is a national treasure.

Clarissa didn’t start off having a famous mother, but she always seemed like a potential star herself – from the start, for good or ill, she was the sort of character you notice. It’s the presence of Clarissa in After I Left You that takes the story overseas for a brief interlude in 1990s Los Angeles, where three of the characters go rollerblading on Venice Beach – or rather, two go rollerblading and one sits out, for reasons that will become clear when you read the book. (Just to prove that I am a conscientious author and do my research, see below for a snap of me on Venice Beach in 1995.)

Some other elements of the story were present from the very first fragmentary drafts, including the idea of a secret that has caused one person to break away from a group of friends, and will eventually be revealed. Another character who appeared early on was Keith, the melancholy Gothic misfit. He attempted to squeeze into an early draft of Stop the Clock, but was cut out, which was just as well, because After I Left You is certainly where he belongs.

But much of the novel that will be published in paperback in July 2014, and is now available for pre-order on Amazon, only really came together once I had decided to tell it from the first person point of view. Anna, who is the eyes and ears of the novel, knows all too well what happened back in the past to prompt her decision to exile herself from her friends, but she’s keeping it to herself. That tension between telling and holding back kept me on my toes as a writer and hopefully will have the same effect on readers too.

Check out my blog post about the cover of After I Left You, and some of the initial reactions

Writing in the first person

What happened to prompt the choice to write in the first person? While I was working on Stop the Clock over 2009 to 2012 I read all the Twilight books, and then the Hunger Games series. Also, Fifty Shades of Grey sat at the top of the bestseller charts for months on end, and I looked through that too, purely for research purposes of course… All of these books are first person stories, and that’s what gives them a lot of their immediacy and drive.

Another book I tried to learn from is I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith’s brilliant novel which foregrounds the fact that its narrator is not just telling you the story, she’s scribbling it down – right from the start when she tells you ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’, and then goes on to explain she’s actually sitting on the draining-board with her feet in the sink, because it’s the last place in the kitchen with any light left. (As good a metaphor as any for the situation in which the woman writer finds herself working, with domestic concerns never far away?)

I’m a big fan of the first person narrative, and always have been. Jane Eyre and The Catcher in the Rye are two of my very favourite books. The first person works brilliantly for coming-of-age stories, and After I Left You is a coming-of-age story with a twenty-year interval, so it struck me as an approach I should try.

I also love Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which puts age in sharp contrast with youth, and has a story-within-the-story – you’ll find a bit of that in After I Left You, too.

The novel as timetravelling machine

After I Left You has two timelines, one set in the early 1990s and one in the present day, which was fun for me because I could time travel, which is something that, in my view, the novel does better than any other art form. (See The Time Traveler’s Wife, which does this so brilliantly it was always going to be hard for the film to match up.)

Like zillions of other readers, I was very taken by One Day, and part of the pleasure of that was recognising the times that the characters pass through, from the late 1980s up to the present day, which are so sharply and astutely observed; I started a little later and missed out all the years in between, but was able to play with a similar timescale.

Where? An Oxford novel, or a novel set in Oxford?

Another decision that I made at a late stage was the decision to set After I Left You fair and square in Oxford. Now, I love Oxford, and Oxfordshire, which is where I live. But I was nervous about writing about Oxford students. Brideshead Revisited, another book that I love, casts a long and rather daunting shadow, although of course it isn’t really about Oxford students at all; it’s about the big, universal themes – love, family, loss, change and the passing of time; innocence giving way to experience; wrongdoing and redemption.

Actually even Brideshead isn’t even quite what you think it is. When I re-read it I was amused to find a scene I had quite forgotten, in which the students go up to London and get bladdered and drive the wrong way up a road and nearly end up getting arrested. Not so much of the cricket jumpers and fine wines, more your everyday big-night-out-on-the-town bender. But anyway, you’ll find at least two sideways nods to Brideshead in After I Left You; a scene in which somebody throws up, and another, on a quite different note, that takes place in a chapel.

My editor helped to get me over my scruples over setting After I Left You in Oxford by sending me Jilly Cooper’s Harriet, which opens with an account of Harriet, an innocent student, being quizzed by a rather randy-seeming tutor about which of Shakespeare’s characters would be best in bed. (She reckons, not Hamlet – he would have talked too much). So then I just got on with it and Oxford fell into the place in the story that it should really have had all along.

Another novel set in Oxford (but not explicitly about students) that I’m an admirer of is Charlotte Mendelson’s fantastic Daughters of Jerusalem, just for the record.

The story behind the story

Stevie Smith typed on yellow office paper while working as a secretary; Colette was locked into a room by her husband; Jane Austen wrote in the drawing-room and covered up her work when somebody entered. There’s always a story behind the story, and when we read we often want to know about that other story, too.

When my first novel, Stop the Clock, was published in August 2012 I knew exactly what the story behind it was: it seemed clear and distinct, with a structured timeframe and a hopeful ending. The first draft was written in instalments over the course of a year, a chapter a month, and handed over to a colleague, a fellow part-time working mother, in a series of A4 envelopes. A writer friend, Neel Mukherjee, suggested an agent to approach; two rewrites later, it found a publisher.

Shortly before Stop the Clock came out, my son, then four, was diagnosed with autism. The experiences of working on the novel and having it published, and working towards that diagnosis and obtaining it and moving on, are intertwined for me. The book was a breakthrough that helped to keep me upbeat, and the diagnosis was a traumatic but fundamentally positive watershed that showed the way to our family’s future.

‘So is it easier second time round?’ This is a question that friends have asked me a few times over the last few months, and I’ve found it hard to answer, because, like one birth compared to another, it has just been so different. One thing I do remember, though. Some years ago, around 2007 or 2008, I ceremonially posted off the first three chapters of an earlier version of After I Left You to a selection of agents (not including Judith Murdoch, the brilliant agent I am now represented by, who I approached later on with Stop the Clock.)

The agents who saw this early version of After I Left You all rejected it so fast it made my head spin, and probably they were quite right to do so, as it was a long way from taking the shape it has now. Anyway, that was obviously a bit of a downer, but not at all the end of the story.

Because what I really remember from that experience was this. I had gone into Oxford with my husband, and we sent off the chapters from the post office on St Aldate’s before going out for a celebratory lunch. And it felt special. It felt Christmas Eve, when everything is quiet and expectant, and the magic is just about to kick in. It felt like something was going to happen. And now it is.

Read my blog post about the five rules for writing an Oxford novel
Read my blog post about the two types of love story and After I Left You
Read my blog post about the cover of After I Left You

What readers want to know about writers (and Stop the Clock)

by alimercerFebruary 8, 2013February 8, 20144 Comments

Book signing at an event at Wargrave Library in 2013

Meeting groups of readers is the closest I’ve come to having the stuff I’ve made up and stuck in a book come to life. Here, suddenly, is a group of women (sometimes with a few men!) talking about my characters as if they’re real people, who might walk into the room and join us at any moment. It’s a salutary reminder of how much readers bring to a book, and what a strange alchemy reading is.

Inevitably, readers have different ideas about books, just as we all have our own views of what’s going on around us in real life – otherwise, what would book groups ever find to debate? But often there’s some consensus, and sometimes readers have similar questions to ask writers. Here are some questions that I’ve been asked by groups of book lovers (most recently the Oxford branch of the National Council of Women, who had way more life experience between them than any other group I’ve spoken to, and were as perceptive as they were good-humoured).

Do you really write every evening?

As the press release for Stop the Clock explained, it was written between the hours of nine and midnight. That’s most nights from spring 2009 to around January 2012. But, if I’m really honest, not all nights. Sometimes Homeland was on. And sometimes I fell asleep when I put my children to bed. And sometimes I had just finished a draft and gave myself a week off to watch a DVD box set (hello, Game of Thrones).

I know lots of writers say you ABSOLUTELY MUST WRITE EVERY DAY or you will turn into a pumpkin. I’m sure this is very sound advice, along with the guidance that we should all exercise three times a week and eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. I don’t always manage those either. (Ahem. I think I’m better at writing consistently than either keeping fit or consuming fruit.) So the honest answer to this question is, mostly, especially when in a deadline panic. But… not always.

How much do you plan in advance?

I know one writer (a screenwriter) who won’t allow himself to start work until he’s figured out absolutely everything that’s going to happen and can’t bear to hold back from getting on with it any longer. I don’t work like that at all, though maybe it would make my life easier if I did.

Stop the Clock started with characters rather than plot. I had a rough idea of what each character was going to go through, but although I gave them a bit of a steer, I didn’t know when I first set pen to paper exactly how it was going to turn out. What happened to them over time became apparent over successive drafts.

My work-in-progress had a slightly different starting point, a revelation scene – a revelation from the heroine to the reader – that I wrote very early on. Much of the rest of the process of writing the book was finding out how the heroine got to that point and what happened to her afterwards.

I think perhaps I plan relatively little, and then have no option but to plot: to scheme, manipulate, form alliances, and generally attempt to manoeuvre my characters – and the reader, who is just as unseen and imagined – into the parts I envisage them playing. As I go along, sequences of events present themselves and I scribble them down. Not so much planning as ‘plot and jot’.

I also listen to music. That’s my secret weapon. There’s nothing like a song for giving you a short cut to a particular mood. It’s amazing how music can bring emotions to the surface in three minutes flat that a book will toil away over hundreds of pages to elicit.

Do you do much research?

I think this is a very shrewd question. The flip-side of it is, How much do you make up, and how much do you draw from life? And it’s almost impossible to answer honestly, because just about everything is research. And at the same time, when it comes down to it, I make it all up.

The research aide I relied on most heavily for Stop the Clock – apart from my magpie memory and years of conversation with interesting friends – was a table in Sheila Kitzinger’s The New Pregnancy and Childbirth which is designed to help you calculate your due date. It was quite a headache getting everybody to reproduce within feasible timescales and when I wanted them to.

I also like asking myself ‘What if?’ and seeing what comes out.

What do male readers make of Stop the Clock?

I’ve been particularly intrigued by male readers’ reactions to this story, which is so much about women’s relationships with each other and women getting to grips with motherhood – or thinking that they would prefer not to. Some of the very earliest readers were male – my husband, the poet Ian Pindar, and the novelist Neel Mukherjee, who both encouraged me to set about trying to get it published.

Since then? The reactions have been unpredictable and surprising. I think the warmest responses have come from men of around my own age who have young-ish children. There was the twentysomething who gamely gave it a go, and diplomatically told me that he realised he wasn’t the target demographic. Though the truth is, there wasn’t really a target − if you’re at all interested, you’re it! There was also the older man who observed that it was ‘a bit birthy’. Which it is… But that’s life, I guess!

In general, amongst my very favourite reader responses are: the reader who cried; the reader who missed a tube stop; and the reader who promptly booked a holiday to Cornwall. (One of those was male, two female. The man cried.) That pretty much sums up what I wanted the book to do: to make you feel, to make you forget yourself, and to take you somewhere else.

The archetypal story you’ll end up telling, whatever you set out to write

by alimercerJanuary 27, 2013January 27, 20132 Comments

I’ve been working like a mad thing on my second novel (title tbc) over the last couple of months. The second draft is now done, so I thought I’d take advantage of the respite to write about a book that I discovered thanks to the poet Ian Pindar, my other half, who has a knack for unearthing interesting things.

This particular find is called The Writer’s Journey, and it’s by Christopher Vogler. It’s primarily aimed at screenwriters (it discusses various films, from Star Wars to Pulp Fiction) but would probably be interesting for anyone who aspires to tell stories, because it looks at the mechanics of how stories work.

It does this in two ways: it discusses a number of archetypal characters, and then it sets out the different stages of the archetypal journey that any hero (even an anti-hero) goes on. If that sounds reductive, it isn’t – the book makes it very clear that it’s all in the telling. Part of what creativity is about, after all, is putting together elements that are familiar and shared (and what is more familiar and shared than language?) in new and unexpected ways.

I won’t set out to précis the whole book, because the edition we have runs to more than 400 pages… and if you’re keen to explore what it’s all about in depth, you’d probably be better off getting it straight from the horse’s mouth. But here’s a selective taster.

Heroes: not always heroic, especially to begin with

The hero is usually confronted with an initial call to adventure, and to start off with, often resists or refuses the call. The hero(ine) of my work-in-progress does a fair bit of this – it really takes a lot to get her over the threshold and into the next stage. It’s as if there’s a force acting to keep the hero in place, to preserve things as they are, and it takes extra impetus to get them to go forward and to begin to change.

At this point the hero may encounter a herald, who announces the call to adventure; a threshold guardian, who makes the barrier between the hero and the next stage – the special world of the adventure – even harder to get through; and/or a mentor, who is there to help the hero on her way. All these roles are fluid, so the same character might take on more than one function in the story at the same or at different times; they are like costumes or masks that may be put on or discarded.

The mentor: the quasi-parental figure who disappears when no longer needed

The mentor can be a teacher, protector or guardian, serving a quasi-parental role; they are there to give the hero whatever insight is needed for the next stage of the action. The mentor’s part in the story may come to an end as soon the hero has taken sufficient information on board.

So, for example, in Game of Thrones, Sylvio Forel teaches Arya how to fight. His last piece of advice to Arya is to run, and she does, as he holds off the soldiers who have come to capture her. We don’t actually see him die (I don’t know whether any more detail emerges about his fate later on); we assume that he has been killed, but Arya thinks back to all the advice he gave her about how to be stealthy, alert and brave throughout her time on the run, so it is almost as if he is still with her.

Arya’s not the only character on a heroic path in Game of Thrones, mind you, not by a long chalk – it’s an epic spaghetti junction of individual journeys, at least some of which end in death. I’m only on the second book, and that goes for two of the heroes already.

Sometimes whole stories turn on the hero-mentor relationship – the film The King’s Speech is a good example. And sometimes the mentor function’s of imparting knowledge is partly accomplished by the hero spending a couple of hours on the internet, as in the sequence in the film of Twilight when Bella does her research and figures out what Edward really is.

Mentors aren’t always lovely and kind and inclined to do the best for their charges, either – they may not even want to let them go. Jeremy, Tina’s blunt and rather appalling boss in Stop the Clock, is a mentor of sorts, as is her married lover, but they are not exactly straightforward role models, and the lessons she learns from them are ambiguous and uncomfortable. Perhaps they both include a tinge of shadow (of which more later).

The special world: different to the ordinary world, not always in a good way

On to the next stage: the hero’s arrival in the special world. I love this concept: the special world is the world of the story, the place where change is possible, but it isn’t necessarily magical – it’s just different to where the heroine started out.

So, for example, Sara in A Little Princess starts off rich, and finds herself reduced to poverty and servitude, from which she eventually emerges having learned, among other things, how differently some people will treat you when you’re well-off compared to when you’re not (in the words of the song, Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out.)

Jane Eyre goes through more than one special world: Lowood, Thornfield Hall, the moors after her flight from marriage to Rochester, and St John Rivers’ house. For Thelma and Louise, the special world is the road trip; for the king and the therapist in The King’s Speech, it’s the treatment room.

Once you’re through to the special world, you’re particularly likely to encounter allies, tests and enemies, and the shadow may make a particularly forceful appearance. Jane Eyre’s already had Mrs Reed and John, her horrible cousin, to deal with: in Lowood there’s Mr Brocklehurst, shadow par excellence, whose hypocrisy and cruelty represent a kind of false goodness – false Christianity, even – that Jane will set herself against as she learns to trust her own heart and instincts.

Bella has James, the tracker, on her trail – and he finds her at the conclusion of a sequence which confirms her (sometimes unstable) alliance with the Cullen vampire family (when they go out to play baseball – what an all-American ally scene that is! – showing that they’re on the way to becoming a team.)

Here’s an interesting point about something that often happens at this stage: the visit to the watering hole – often, literally, a bar, as in the fantastic alien space bar sequence in Star Wars, which is probably one of my favourite film moments ever. The watering hole is a place where characters can clash (or flirt) and the truth may be revealed, like the cafe scenes in Stop the Clock when Natalie finds out more about Adele. (Allies – the pack of friends – have a huge role to play in my work-in-progress, and it has a lot of watering hole scenes.)

The shapeshifter: doubt, suspense, romance

Adele in Stop the Clock is a shapeshifter – Natalie is never really clear about what she wants, or intends (but then, Natalie is uncertain about her own desires too). Shapeshifters often crop up in romance: Mr Rochester even goes so far as to dress up as an old gypsy woman. They may be lethal (the femme fatale type). They bring doubt and suspense and are a catalyst for change (Adele is most certainly that).

The Twilight saga is full of shapeshifters, obv. I guess Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades books fits the bill, too, with a bit of mentor and shadow thrown in – is he a lover, or a horrible controlling sadist? He’s certainly in charge of an occasionally alarming special world.

The shadow: depending on your point of view

So… what about the shadow? Shadows aren’t necessarily all bad, and, indeed, in their own eyes, they may be perfectly reasonable (I’m sure Mr Brocklehurst thought of himself as a good man, a hero even, and regarded Helen Burns as a repository of villainous tendencies). Their function is to challenge and oppose the hero… and the hero may behave in a shadowy way himself at times.

The shadow’s story may be the inverse of the hero’s, with moments of triumph when the hero is at his lowest. I’ve just seen the film of Les Misérables, and was struck by how the relationship between the implacable policeman Javert and the former convict Jean Valjean follows this pattern.

Valjean goes on to forge a new identity, but Javert cannot bear to let him go. Valjean’s freedom torments him just as the prospect of a return to captivity torments Valjean. They represent wholly different and incompatible views of the law – Valjean believes in forgiveness, mercy and redemption, Javer only accepts the rule of right and wrong, and cannot contemplate the possibility that someone could be capable of change. Ultimately, one of them will have to be extinguished in order for the other to survive.

Shadows may come in unexpected (shapeshifting) forms; Cordelia in Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye is a monstrous shadow whose activities very nearly lead to the destruction of the heroine.

Ordeal and climax: life and death – twice over

Stop the Clock has a crisis scene that draws together the major characters about two-thirds of the way through. But that is not the end of the story, the final unravelling of the knots; for each character, there’s still a further confrontation to come, some more unfinished business to be dealt with.

The Writer’s Journey makes an interesting distinction between crisis or ordeal and climax. It quotes Webster’s definition of a crisis: ‘the point in a story or drama in which hostile forces are in the tensest state of opposition’. The ordeal effects a brutal and irrevocable transformation in the hero, and is a scene of death and resurrection. This is subtly different from the climax, a final confrontation, showdown or test which shows how the hero has changed and been reborn.

In Les Misérables, the crisis of the battle at the barricades puts Valjean and Javer on opposite sides of the uprising. It is followed by an astonishing sequence in which Valjean carries the injured Marius – his adoptive daughter Cosette’s hope of future love – through the sewers of Paris, emerging into the light to find Javer waiting for him.

There is a further climax to follow: Valjean must overcome his shame and tell Cosette who he really is. In doing so, he brings back not only Cosette’s mother Fantine – as if they have actually been a family all this time, separated only by death – but also the wider family of the comrades on the barricades. It’s like the sequence at the end of Titanic in which Rose returns the jewel to the sea and reclaims not only her long-lost love, but everybody else who was on board.

It may be that the point of the crisis is that it resurrects the hero, while the power of the climax is that it brings life back to everybody – even the reader (or viewer), creating a strange emotional rush that will send you on your way conscious that you’ve been somewhere else, and are now back in your ordinary world, but subtly changed.

In praise of Game of Thrones

by alimercerOctober 7, 2012November 17, 20121 Comment

Someone older and wiser once told me, ‘You can get away with a lot if you can do characters.’ I think there’s a lot of truth in this. One of the great pleasures of reading is getting to know people who seem real, even though they’re only made of words.

On the evidence of the DVD box set of the first series of Game of Thrones, George R R Martin can do a lot more than characters, but character is something he does spectacularly well. Maybe that’s part of why his fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire has exerted such powerful crossover appeal, and won over readers and, ultimately, an audience who aren’t all that familiar with the fantasy genre. (I’ve just ordered the first book in the series – can’t wait!)

Truthful characters, fantasy world

We’ve just finished watching the box set of Game of Thrones, having put it off till after I’d finished the first draft of my new novel. I knew it would be amazing – and it was. It’s a pretty unbeatable combination: the alien, unknown world that you escape into and get to know, peopled with characters who are absolutely believable. If the characters weren’t real, the fantasy might not seem so either; but because there’s so much truthfulness in the way they behave, you give yourself up to the whole of the world they inhabit. That little doubting, sceptical voice in the back of the mind that says, ‘Oh come on, this is ridiculous, it would never happen,’ is hushed, and you’re free to enjoy the ride.

Was the fantasy genre kicked off by Tolkein? If so, it really has its roots in everything that inspired him – Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf and all of that. Apparently there are dwarves and so on in Wagner (not that I would know, I’ve never quite managed to engage with Wagner, it all seems a bit lush and thundery). Maybe the fantasy genre ultimately owes a debt to Germanic folklore. Anyway, you can see bits of Tolkein in the DNA of Game of Thrones, but there’s a whole lot more sex – and a lot more women.

Girls, women, queens: powerful women in Game of Thrones

Tolkein did either elf maidens or Rosie Cotton, and not a whole lot in between. But Game of Thrones has Arya, the spunky girl who wants to be a boy, and the scary Cersei, who could be one of those fearsome Roman women, like Agrippina, who plotted and schemed to use their relationships with sons and other relatives as a way to wield power. There’s Catelyn, the resourceful queen, and her deranged sister Lysa, who breastfeeds her little boy, her only child, as they sit together on the throne. Perhaps most original of all is Daenerys, who is a weird combination of innocence and invulnerability, buoyed up by magical powers of which she herself is only just becoming aware. She is instinctive, intuitive, and, when she deems it necessary, completely ruthless.

Of course, the male characters are terrific too. Poor old Ned Stark is always trying to do the right thing, not that it’s easy. There are the snakelike, cunning plotters at court, Baelish and Varys; the psycho princeling, Joffrey, who is both cowardly and sadistic; fat, choleric, boozy Robert Baratheon; Daenerys’ hopeless brother Viserys, who wants desperately to wear the crown his father lost, but has no personal qualities that are likely to help him win it back, and few assets other than a once-feared family name and a pretty sister. There’s Cersei’s dashing brother Jaime and bully-boy father Tywin – played by a magnificently scornful Charles Dance – and best of all, Tyrion, who compensates for his lack of stature by being wittier, more insightful, more honest, bawdier, funnier and more commanding than just about anybody else.

Threat from beyond the borders and within

The story is full of threat. There is danger from the north, where the supernatural White Walkers appear to be stirring from a long sleep, and also from the south, from the nomadic, horse-loving Dothraki tribe, living just beyond a narrow strip of sea which they have never yet brought themselves to cross. The Dothraki are a fearsome lot, exactly the sort who lay waste a crumbling empire, and would have given Genghis Khan and his Mongolian hordes a good run for their money.

Perhaps a strong leader could rally the various powerful families of the seven kingdoms of Westeros and see off these dangers, but no. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a power vacuum is particularly untenable. The seven kingdoms have had a mad king, then a drunk, hunting-mad king, and beyond that the succession looks uncertain. There are internal factions, old grudges, uncertain loyalties, and one very big, incestuous secret, threatening to destabilise everything.

Not so very long ago…

Go back five or six hundred years, and that was pretty much what the British state was really like. There were pretenders to the throne; noble families battling it out for power or, the next best thing, proximity to power, and, on occasion, paying for it with the lives of their heirs; question marks over whether those heirs were really descended from their supposed fathers; strategic marriages; wars fought as displays of wealth and power; brutal punishments – amputations, beheadings, burnings alive – and, inevitably, less able sons taking over from capable men, and mucking things up. (If you can manage three generations of leaders who can hold onto the reins of power in such a set-up, you’ve got a dynasty that hold a rare and special place in history – like the Tudors.) It’s ironic that we tend to talk of the hereditary principle today as bringing stability, when history shows it’s anything but. If you want a stable state, you want stable institutions; have a figurehead monarch by all means, but on the whole, the less real power they have, the better.

Power and vulnerability

Game of Thrones is all about power: what people will do to get it; how they behave when they have it; how they survive, or go under, when they don’t have it. It’s also about love, loyalty and honour – and their opposites, hatred, treachery and betrayal. There’s a flavour of many different times and places in the mix, from the Wars of the Roses to the Ottoman Empire, where, if I remember my history correctly, the sons were kept locked away until the Emperor died, whereupon whichever one had the support of the army made it to the capital first, and the others were strangled with silken cords. However, having grown up a prisoner, the new Emperor would be barely fit to rule. This system limped on for a surprisingly long time before eventually collapsing. But it did in the end, as all empires do. I have to say, by the end of series one of Game of Thrones, I’m not filled with confidence about the outlook for peace and stability in Westeros, and wonder if its decline and fall is on the way sooner rather than later.

The landscape of Westeros felt recognisably like a reimagining of Britain to me: cold to the north, beyond the Wall, with a coastal capital further south, separated from potential invaders by a thin strip of water. But then someone else pointed out that North America also has an icy north and a hot South. Perhaps the geography of Westeros is just another way in which the Game of Thrones stories put a fresh spin on familiar patterns.

Watching the extra feature on the DVD box set about the making of the series, and the dedicated work of so many people – the animal trainers, the carpenters, the location scouts, and so on – it was amazing to think that all of this had originally been made up by just one person. That’s the potential power of the writer for you. A king can only rule a kingdom, more or less wisely and well; but a writer can create it.

Random new terminology I learned this week…

The comments in this week’s Guardian Review section about J K Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy included a couple of references to the Harry Potter stories as ‘low fantasy’, which I assumed was people being snooty about it, but no – it’s a whole genre of its own, in which fantastical happenings take place in the real world, as compared to high fantasy, where the whole world is fictional.

I also discovered, via Wikipedia, that there’s a narrative technique called sexposition – a TV technique for keeping viewers watching while you’re giving them chunks of narrative information by having some steamy goings-on for entertainment while someone explains it all.

Stop the Clock quick quiz #1: are you Tina, Natalie or Lucy?

by alimercerOctober 2, 2012November 17, 20124 Comments

If you’ve read Stop the Clock, you’ll have a pretty good idea about who Tina, Natalie and Lucy are, and if not, you will have by the time you’ve finished this quiz!

At one point when we were working on different ideas for the covers I came up with a long list of accessories and clothes that might work for each of them. It was really good fun – a bit like a grown-up (ish) version of dressing-up dolls. Yes – that’s the kind of research I like doing – scouring the internet for Tina’s watch, Lucy’s engagement ring, Natalie’s friendship bracelet… (I’m guessing male writers very rarely end up doing this kind of thing…)

So, here are some quick questions that will help you work out whether you’re more of a Tina, Natalie or Lucy. I initially turned out to be perfectly evenly balanced mixture of all three, which is probably only fair… But then I added the final tie-break question, and although I love all those films I am a particularly big fan of It’s a Wonderful Life, so that makes me a Natalie!

1. Your ideal working wardrobe consists of…

A Pencil skirt, killer heels, feisty attitude

B Comfy old favourites – loose trousers, big cardigans, things that don’t pinch when you sit down

C Your family is your job now. For the school gate, you dress in knee-high boots and skinny jeans in winter, or floaty skirts and sandals (and pedicure) in the summer

2. Your overall look could be defined as:

A Melanie Griffith post-makeover in Working Girl

B The girl-next-door in jeans and beat-up Converse

C Betty Draper

3. Your favourite perfume is:

A Dior Poison

B Soap and water, perhaps with an occasional squirt of something from the Body Shop

C Chanel no 5

4. Your ideal night out with friends would be:

A Cocktails at the Cobden Club/Atlantic Bar/Sketch

B Lager down the local followed by karaoke, just like the old days

C Everyone round to your house for supper – something out of Delia Smith (tried and trusted) followed by a screening of Mamma Mia

5. Your ideal date would be:

A Dinner at Moro followed by hot sex in a boutique hotel (though you won’t want to get too carried away and end up being late for work the next morning)

B Holding hands in the cinema and crying over a film… then being whisked a little out of your comfort zone for hot sex that catches you (almost entirely) by surprise

C A long country walk in the Cotswolds, a pub lunch, and hot sex back in the beautifully appointed holiday cottage. Someone else would be minding the children back in London, obviously

6. You read:

A A bit of whatever everyone’s talking about, plus the odd pageturning thriller/crime novel

B Chick lit and romance

C Historical fiction. If it’s Tudor, chances are you’ll love it

7. (The tie-break!) Your favourite old movie is:

A His Girl Friday. This black-and-white Howard Hawks film about a supersharp journo, with its famously rapid-fire dialogue, made you want a career in newspapers – shame you’ve never had an editor who looked like Cary Grant

B It’s a Wonderful Life. Small-town James Stewart in near-despair and Clarence the angel trying to earn his wings. Still gets to you every time

C The Sound of Music. Romance, music, lots of children, and you have a secret soft spot for Christopher Plummer. Plus you still sometimes put on ‘I have confidence in me’ when you’re getting ready to go out

Mostly As – you’re Tina, a career-focused siren. You like to be in control, but life has a way of turning your best-laid plans upside down – still, if anyone can cope with chaos and come out on top, it’s probably you.

Mostly Bs – You’re sweet-natured, supportive Natalie, an idealist who perhaps hasn’t quite yet found what she wants in life. You don’t particularly care about social status – what you yearn for is a sense of purpose. Perhaps you don’t realise just how strong you are, but anyone who underestimates you does so at their own peril.

Mostly Cs – you’re Lucy, the domestic goddess. Others may brand you a yummy mummy, but that’s not how you see yourself; you’re just trying to do your best for the people you love. Actually, you’re tough, resourceful and resilient, as becomes apparent when the going gets tough. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘a woman is like a tea-bag – you never know how strong she is till she gets in hot water’.

Tag: writing