Why Tar, Todd?

As a massive Cate Blanchett fan, I had high hopes for this film. I knew Tár had divided critics but – what do they know? I set off for my solo treat on a freezing winter’s evening, the only question in my mind when – not if – I’d be able to watch it again. Alas… even before I got home and announced ‘It was a stinker,’ I was struggling to stay awake in my cinema seat.

And yet…

Blanchett is completely convincing as Lydia Tár, world-famous conductor and maestro (‘We don’t call astronauts astronettes, do we?’ she informs the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik at the start of the film). Writer/ director Todd Field apparently created the role specially for Blanchett. It’s hard to imagine anyone else pulling it off. Her mastery of the classical music arena, as well as her apparent musical intelligence, is impressive and will surely bag her a Best Actress Oscar, to match her recent Bafta.

The film signals its intentions at the start: that long-winded interview between Tár and Gopnik is the kind of thing you’d find on an obscure arts channel. There’s no action at all. This is a film for egg-heads. It also helps if you understand German – into which Tár/Blanchett slips effortlessly and convincingly – as it’s not always translated for the viewer. Another distancing factor.

In her beautiful Berlin apartment with her partner and their child, Tár is at the pinnacle of her career. But she’s starting to fall apart. She’s treated her juniors badly – during the film we learn that her previous protégée has taken her own life. She also seems to be suffering aural delusions – or is she? And someone’s watching her…

Despite these promising complications, the pace is glacial. There is the odd tense moment, when Tár is deleting incriminating emails, or when she’s threatened by a growling dog (in a run-down apartment block, where she’s followed her latest love interest, in a scene reminiscent of Blanchett’s superb Carol). But they’re not developed.

Having felt excluded by the intense discussion of classical music terms and personalities, I was further annoyed by the film’s portrayal of the Yoof of Today, when Tár humiliates a student who ‘doesn’t get’ Bach. Okay, the young man offers a simplistic and daft argument – but some of us are fed up with the canon, in all areas of art. How much more interesting, and potentially risky, to have the young man produce a thought-provoking analysis; and for Tár to even engage with it.

A 2015 report found that women make up 1.4% of conductors in professional British orchestras. Worldwide, the numbers can’t be too different today. Lydia Tár is a successful woman in an impossibly tough field. So why does she have to be abusive? Why does she have to have a breakdown? Sure, it’s art – and the film is beautiful, the music uplifting, the cinematography stylish. But in my view art has responsibilities. There’ll be room for a beautiful film about a crazy, abusive female conductor when women in that area have achieved equality of status and representation.  

Advertisement

Getting Personal

‘Write about a time when you had to make your voice heard.’ That was the brief. The project was 100 Voices, a collection of pieces by women writers, to mark the anniversary of women getting the vote.

It was the kind of exercise I often set for students, but I’ve never done myself. I try to avoid putting myself on the page – I’d rather write about my characters.

But the project was intriguing. And a story immediately popped into my head, and wouldn’t let go.

A few years ago, I’d just finished my Creative Writing MA at the University of Chichester and was waiting for the results. I’d loved the course, and felt I’d started to find my writing voice. Then, just before the results came out, our son was terribly ill. The two events collided with each other in a way that nothing in my life has, before or since. I found myself having to speak up for him, too.

Reliving the events was hard. Would anyone even be interested? Was it fair to write about our son? I finished it, and sent it off with trepidation. Was I revealing too much? It was more personal than anything I’d ever written. Our editor, Miranda Roszkowski, liked it. Wonderfully, readers have responded to the emotion of the piece.

‘Did it really happen like that?’ I was asked more than once. But yes, it did. If I’d made it up, it wouldn’t have worked. The reader would have known that the emotion was fake. Even now, reading the piece can make me cry.

As George Saunders says, in his brilliant A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: ‘A work of art moves us by being honest, and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.’

Reading the published story reminded me that writing convincingly isn’t about what you know – it’s about what you know how to feel.

Along with other inspirational and funny and moving contributions, my effort is part of a brilliant book that’s a testament to one woman’s persistence and many women’s courage. All profits go to the charity Rosa, the UK fund for women and girls. I hope you’re intrigued enough to buy a copy – and I hope you enjoy it.

Chasing Horses

David Mitchell on the craft of writing

When David Mitchell was a boy, he heard a family story he’s never forgotten: his grandparents, planning to travel by ship to India, had a choice of two crossings: in August or October. They decided to go in August. On the October voyage, the ship sank. The experience of hearing that story, and realizing that a different decision would have meant no David Mitchell, seared itself in his brain, and seeded a lifelong interest in the ideas of ‘causality, miscommunication – communication going wrong’.

‘Themes and ideas come from you as a writer,’ Mitchell told the on-line audience for the first Arvon at Home event. ‘You can trace your themes to who you are.’

Writers and readers of course know who Mitchell is: best-selling author of eight novels, including Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, and most recently Utopia Avenue, in a literary career spanning 21 years. He was in conversation with Front Row presenter Alex Clark, discussing the craft of writing, and offering practical advice.  

He began with the five building blocks of a novel: plot; character; theme/ideas; style; and structure. To understand how they work together, he suggested imagining an old-fashioned arcade game, with five horses racing round a track. As soon as one’s ahead, the game’s mechanism will rein it in, and another will take the lead. It’s the writer’s job to ‘keep them all within hailing distance of one another’.

Plot and character keep the story moving; style and structure don’t. Different writers are interested in different aspects – ‘Philip K Dick, for example, is interested in ideas.’ But ‘it doesn’t matter if you’re a character or ideas person – you have to get the balance right.’ This involves ‘a multitude of decisions, from the macro to the micro’; each one ‘will have a cost/ payoff’ – even if it’s something as simple as whether to use ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’.

Mitchell agreed that his writing combines an eye for detail with a speculative world of infinite possibility. This allows him to be ‘maximalist and minimalist at the same time’. Writers shouldn’t mix fantasy and realism, but apart from that, ‘give it a go. See if you can do it. What would it take?’ Here was the excitement of his creative process: ‘the more devious the straitjacket, the more audacious the escapology’. He showed us how, working on The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he solved the puzzle of how to get a woman – ‘the love interest’ – into the tiny, male-only trading post of Dejima. The series of ‘what if’ questions he asked himself was fascinating.

He admitted, his ‘on-board editor never takes a rest’; anything that isn’t ‘a four- or five-star metaphor’ is cut. But not deleted: it all goes into a Useful Bin, with the thought that it can be used again one day. Although ‘I’ve never actually gone back to retrieve anything from it.’   

He seems reluctant to let his characters go, and agreed he’s happy to see them when they reappear in subsequent books, in his ‘ubernovel’ project of linked works. Replying to a question about characterisation, he suggested using real-life experience: thinking of real people as potential fictional ones. He advised writing a letter, to yourself, from the character: better than making notes, because ‘you get their voice. If you find out something about them they don’t know, use square brackets – that can go in the plot.’

Our new, strange lockdown world may have brought productive isolation for some, but it’s increased domestic pressure for many. Answering a question on finding writing time, Mitchell acknowledged this, and advised, ‘Take all the things that are stopping you from writing – and use them as your material.’ And make notes! He quoted that other famous Mitchell, Joni: ‘If you don’t write it down, it never happened’, adding, ‘Don’t let amnesia be the decider of what’s a killer idea.’

The evening flew by; too soon, it was time to cut the Zoom link and return to our individual worlds. For a short while we’d gathered round the fire, sharing the joy of creativity, and celebrating the craft of storytelling.

From Miss, with Love

Kate Clanchy has noticed an odd reaction whenever she tells people she’s a teacher: she’s immediately given advice on how to do her job. This doesn’t happen, she imagines, with other professions. Partly, she suggests, it’s because most of us have had contact with a school, and are interested; but partly ‘it’s because of gender and class prejudice, because […] most teachers are Miss.’

She’s been called ‘Miss’ – ‘the name I put on like a coat when I go into school’ – for 30 years now. As well as being a teacher, Clanchy – a prize-winning poet, novelist and short story writer – works as a writer in schools. This dual perspective informs her wonderful book. In prose that leaps off the page she describes the ‘bodily experience’ of school: ‘a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents, and occasional sublime flights which leave you either crippled or changed’.

Clanchy admits that in school she has found more questions than answers; and it is around these questions that the book is organized. The thorny issues of current educational debate are tackled head-on, from exclusion to poverty, religion, and streaming. But, as in the best creative practice, she doesn’t tell; she shows us, through the (anonymized) detail of students’ lives. In the (confusingly named) Inclusion Unit we meet Kylie, Vikki, Clarice and Simon – each with ‘the power to end learning in any mainstream class at any time’. Their stories, ‘as stark and clear as any Hollywood movie’, detail the damage that has been done to them. Little by little, the unit staff’s attention and love raise the students’ low self-esteem; there is even some success for poet Simon, who is ‘smart as paint’. But the successes are small, and hard to measure, and don’t show up well on data. And the underlying social problems feel intractable.

Clanchy is alert to the challenges of being a school-based writer, with its ‘dubious, in-between, first-name status’. Apart from the need to be sensitive to the daily reality of teachers’ lives, there’s the question of how to encourage students to write, without exposing them, or their trauma; she recalls her own feelings of vulnerability in a writing workshop. She writes movingly about the desperation of immigrant students to write in their mother tongue, and the ability of poetry to cross boundaries of culture and language. There are some wonderful extracts from students’ work. But, for the most part, immigrant students are highly motivated. More problematic is how to motivate poor white children, whose low self-worth is often responsible for their acts of self-sabotage; or who see no benefit in working hard for future rewards, in a system that has failed them and their families.

Although Clanchy has always worked in the state system, and often in tough schools, she is unsparing about how her own attitudes as ‘a nice liberal person’ are tested, when choosing a secondary school for her son. As she observes astutely, it is ‘the most political choice we will ever make’. After weeks of Year 6 parents’ ‘crazy’ conversation – including the need for a school ski trip – they take the plunge, he attends her school, and flourishes. She points out the benefits to both sides: her son leaves with a wide circle of friends, rooted in his community; the school gains from his academic demands, and ‘high grades to spike the stats’. There’s something else, too: her son’s knowledge that he ‘had something to give – a patrimony – as well as something to take’.

‘Schools run on love,’ Clanchy declares; from ludus, the fun, experimental love of school plays and trips, to agape, the pure, parental strain which has ‘sadly disappeared from teacher training manuals’. Although it’s hard to read this account without feeling angry at an under-resourced system, and the casual damage done to children’s life chances, you finish it knowing that she’s right. Throughout the book, the idea of ‘school’ is shown to be one of love. For Clanchy’s students, it’s a place of nurturing and refuge; somewhere safe to heal, and be heard.

Kate Clanchy, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, Picador, 2019. ISBN 978-1509840298, hardback, £16.99

[This review was first published in Writing in Education, Spring 2020]

 

 

 

The Fertile Territory of Displacement

The culture clash; the outsider’s view: this disconnect is the grit in the writer’s oyster. It’s also the fertile territory explored in May We Borrow Your Country, the second publication from The Whole Kahani, a collective of female British novelists, poets and screenwriters of South Asian origin.

The group’s name means The Complete Story, and reflects the idea that any account of displacement ‘must contain multitudes’. As Mona Dash’s poem Implications beautifully shows, someone caught between two cultures can be made to feel they belong to neither:

‘Born and raised an Indian; not living in India
implied: not Indian
now British, not born in Britain
implied: not British.’

How to remain true to yourself – or find space to be yourself – is explored with humour in The Metallic Mini Skirt by Radhika Kapur. Divya, travelling to London with her new husband, is told by her mother to ‘Be like sugar. Dissolve into your new home and make it a sweeter place.’ Her mother-in-law hovers, trying to transform Divya into a younger version of herself. But Divya hangs on to her dreams, epitomized by the miniskirt, bought to wear to a nightclub, that she dares to wear only in the shower – where she is the star of her own story.

Mothers, and mothers-in-law, loom large. The pain of loss and separation; the distance between the one who stayed and the one who left, are delicately balanced in Deblina Chakrabarty’s The Inventory. Two sisters, ‘trying to find our mother, [and] a way forward, amidst the debris of our childhood’ are going through the dead woman’s belongings. The younger sister, living in London, is wealthy but unhappy, while the older sister is struggling financially. There is all ‘the detritus of a lived life’ to divide. But in the end it is the most personal, yet least valuable, item that offers the chance to heal.

One of the most moving, and unsettling, stories is CG Menon’s Fox Cub. Grieving father Kumar, newly arrived in Britain and shocked by the sight of beggars, invites a homeless girl to spend the night with him and his wife. She accepts, and ‘unfurls like a crane, all legs and feathers she hasn’t quite grown into yet’. He feels ‘an aching kind of pride’ when, on the bus home, he’s mistaken for her father. When, the next morning, in the ‘greyish air that smells of everything shut-in and breathed-out’, he goes to check on her, he finds she’s gone – and left her own message for him.

Another male protagonist features in Reshma Ruia’s layered and clever story A Simple Man. Pikku, whose family was thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin, is now a museum security guard, ‘the guardian angel’ of paintings of ‘dead, pink and white kings and queens’. When his visiting sister, who thinks he has a ‘proper job’ in an office, wants to see his workplace Pikku becomes entangled in a web of lies, and even tries to carry out the perfect crime. Despite its light touch and humour, the story tackles head-on the racism that Pikku both inflicts and endures.

And unfamiliar territory can be close at hand. In Where He Lives by Kavita Jindal, Sabina, a young philosophy graduate, has married and moved into her husband’s home in the old city, despite her teacher’s warning that, ‘you’ll have to wear a burqa and niqab every time you step out’. The story conjures the atmosphere of a historic city, with its narrow streets and bazaars, and snap-happy tourists. Her mother-in-law says, ‘Philosophy is for people with nothing to do,’ and Sabina cannot see a way out of her mistake; until she observes how other women live a dual life, and resolves to try. This story felt like part of a longer piece, and left me wanting to hear more from these characters.

With sharp-eyed observation this collection delivers on its promise, and reveals the pain, longing, and humour to be found in the experience of displacement. As someone of Anglo-Indian heritage, hearing the voices felt particularly poignant.

I look forward to the next instalment of the Complete Story.

The Whole Kahani, May We Borrow Your Country, Linen Press, 2019. ISBN 9781999604660, paperback, £9
[This review first appeared in Writing in Education issue 79, Winter 2019]

Ode to joy (and gasps, and thinking)

Here are some of this year’s books that have made me gasp, think, or just brought me joy. Because we can all do with more of that.

Sven Lindquist’s Exterminate All the Brutes (Granta) takes the infamous phrase uttered by the mad Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and uses it as the starting point for a journey across the heart of Africa. In calm, clear prose Lindquist sets out the brutal history on which Europe built its wealth. Gripping and essential.

Toni Morrison died in August, but left us an awe-inspiring body of work; Mouthful of Blood (Chatto & Windus) the collection of her essays and speeches from over 40 years, ranges across American history, as well as discussing the details of her writing process. I particularly loved her insights on writing Beloved, the 1988 novel that won her the Pulitzer prize.

I’m always looking for useful writing advice, and two books stood out for me this year: The Writer’s Eye (Macmillan) by Amy Weldon; and The Multimodal Writer (Macmillan International) by Josie Barnard. Weldon argues that the skill of close observation is key to good writing. A generous writer, she is unafraid to share her own successes and failures; her book is a great resource for writers at all stages. Barnard’s concern is how writers can survive and thrive in the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’. With clear and practical advice and exercises, she explains the concept of the ‘multimodal writer’, writing across platforms and genres, and how to become one. It’s not as daunting as it sounds – many of us are already doing it, and this book is a helpful introduction.

Even under the cosh of a deadline there’s always time to read a short story; one of the collections I’ve enjoyed most this year is May We Borrow Your Country (Linen Press) by the Whole Kahani, a collective of female British writers of South Asian origin. In a rich mix of poetry and prose they illuminate the experience of displacement, whether between countries, or inside a new and strange city. In a strong collection, stories by Reshma Ruia and CG Menon, and poetry by Mona Dash, stood out for me.

Apparently poetry is enjoying a revival – on my bookshelf it’s never gone away. In the wonderful anthology She is Fierce (Macmillan) editor Ana Sampson has collated a truly eclectic selection, from well-known names such as Elizabeth Jennings to newer voices like Hollie McNish. Every time I open it, I find new inspiration.

I’ve had little time to read for pleasure, but three novels made it to the top of the TBR pile. Late to the party I know, but I was blown away by Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under (Vintage) – her twisty tale of a mother/ daughter relationship, but so much more than that. Her depiction of canal boat dwellers’ lives and the natural world – the river becoming a character itself – is extraordinary. I’m looking forward to her next book, Sisters, out next year.

At 89, Edna O’Brien is still tackling difficult subjects with rigour and elegance; she recently received the David Cohen prize, widely regarded as the precursor to the Nobel. Her latest novel, Girl (Faber & Faber) tells the story of a young woman abducted and married into Boko Haram. It’s a tour de force by one of our greatest writers, still demonstrating the courage and empathy which have made her books fierce advocates for women everywhere.

Ben Lerner has been receiving rave reviews for his latest novel The Topeka School (Granta) and it doesn’t disappoint. In multiple viewpoints and shifting timelines this skilled writer examines a white family’s attempt to come to terms with the cult of toxic masculinity. Not an easy read, but a rewarding – and topical – one.

The other list I’m writing is my Christmas wish list, and top of that is The Jewel (Head of Zeus) by Neil Hegarty. I’m looking forward to curling up with this multi-layered story of a mysterious artwork and its legacy, and enjoying Hegarty’s precise and graceful prose.

Happy holidays – and good reading!

Irish Writers on Secrets and Borders

All over the world, borders are in the news. For politicians, the argument centres on the physical movement of people and objects. But there are other, intangible, aspects to such barriers.

The idea of border country can be attractive to writers. It’s a mysterious, in-between place; a romantic, shifting landscape where normal rules don’t apply.

Such romanticism is fine in fiction, but more problematic in reality, as a recent event at the London Irish Centre explored. With the Irish border again making headlines, ‘Writing Ireland: Borderlands and Brexit’, saw novelists Neil Hegarty (no relation) Andrea Carter and Anthony Quinn discuss how to make sense of something that defined their early lives, and is threatening to return.

Hegarty, author of Inch Levels and the forthcoming The Jewel, was ‘uncomplicatedly pleased’ to have been born north of the border, in Derry. ‘It’s a precise place, has a precise sense of itself,’ he said. Events he witnessed in the Troubles, and stories that he later heard, have influenced his work. He read a passage from Inch Levels in which terrified pedestrians are sheltering from a sniper. The horror and fear were palpable.

Andrea Carter grew up in the Irish Midlands and moved north to the Inishowen peninsula, the setting for her Inishowen Mysteries crime novels, to be adapted for TV next summer. Among Irish female crime writers who grew up in the 1980s, she thought, there is anger, and mixed feelings. She also felt that still, especially in rural communities, the border’s legacy had not been dealt with. ‘Old secrets are not being told,’ she said. One of the reasons was ‘a sense of loyalty’.

The writer’s responsibility for respecting a shared history that’s still alive, even if unspoken, was a key aspect of the discussion. Crime writer Anthony Quinn, whose work has been described as ‘the noirest of noir’, now lives back where he grew up, near the border. He felt ‘blessed and cursed to have lived during those times’. The barrier now exists only in terms of folklore, he said. But this is ‘rich fictional territory for a writer’. In his work, he tries to be fair to both sides, and to honour the past. He has found that people bring him stories – they want their voices to be heard; to be able to move on. ‘It’s only by letting light and air in that you can begin to heal.’

What is it about Irish people, asked a questioner, that they’re so good at keeping secrets? The audience responded with an affirmative laugh. Colonisation means you have to keep your cards close to your chest, said Hegarty. ‘Everyone is playing their part.’ One of the problems with Northern Ireland, he added, is that ‘the stories aren’t allowed to be aired, dealt with, set aside gently’.

Working on his latest book, Hegarty had to add information about the border for non-Irish readers. Twenty years ago, it was a physical, manned presence; today you can’t tell where the north ends and the south begins. ‘It’s terrifying that that would change,’ said Carter. ‘It frightens me.’

The evening was a good-humoured and witty discussion. As writers, the participants recognized that their experience, despite its traumas, had benefited their art; and was safely in the past. But there was no disguising the tension of the subject, and the fear that the chaos of current politics – despite the glib assurances of politicians – could bring a very different future.

Permission to Stop

A few weeks ago I finished a big project: the ‘final’ draft of my novel-in-progress. I sent it to trusted readers, and waited… Their comments came winging back: lots of great suggestions for strengthening the plot, improving the pace and deepening character motivation. Plenty for me to work on.

I sat down at the p.c, ready to hit the keys.

I got up again. Made some tea. Did the washing. Got out the vacuum cleaner. I went back to my desk and stared at the screen.

I created a new document and typed in headings. I deleted those headings and typed in new ones. Hour after hour I fiddled about, going nowhere. Outside, the temperature rose. Inside, the temperature rose. It felt like the whole world was on holiday.

After a week or so I was still moving headings around and writing Plans, and fighting a rising sense of panic. Sitting at my desk was a chore. I had nothing left to give.

Eventually I realised – I’d lost touch with why I was writing in the first place. Why not do what I encourage my writing students to do, and have fun? Take some time out to be playful, to read, and learn from other authors. Then turn up at the page and see what happens.

I covered pages in freewriting. I tried memoir; produced some (terrible) poetry. Picture prompts were great. There were seeds of stories in strange combinations of words, and half-sentences that promised a whole world.

Moaning to a writing friend was therapeutic. She’d felt the same. Just sharing the thought with her was liberating – it gave me permission to take my foot off the pedal. I remembered a story I wrote years ago that I’d always loved. I went back to it and found a detail that made me want to know more. I wrote more; moved paragraphs around. I began to feel the pull of the story – and the fun of writing again.

Sure, taking writing seriously means treating it like a job. But the pressure to stick to a daily routine isn’t always conducive to creativity. Anyway, writing’s a weird job: a mixture of lonely toil, flinging work out into the void, and scanning ‘Results’ lists in nerve-shredding hope. Learning to expect rejection – but believing in yourself enough to keep going. Recognising, in saner moments, that each of us is different; that we all write in our own unique way, and that we all take different routes. Clinging to the hope that hard work and persistence will get us there in the end.

It will. But in the meantime, it’s a great idea to take a holiday. See you in September!

An Evening with Lionel Shriver

What to expect from an evening with Lionel Shriver? Spikiness? Controversy? It’s not going to be dull. ‘I don’t set out to offend people,’ she told interviewer Cathy Galvin, with a smile.

Shriver fans and fellow-writers had gathered at Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly for the Word Factory event. ‘So the short story doesn’t sell?’ was the Shriver-ish title for the evening, during which we discovered that her latest collection, ‘Property’, went for ‘a six-figure sum’ – the kind of number only dreamed about by short-story writers in the audience.

Shriver read from her story ‘Vermin’, part of the collection, about a couple in a rented house in Brooklyn. On discovering that someone wanted to buy the house because the street was ‘good for a family’, they decided to buy it themselves. They became home-owners, and that’s when the trouble started…

Although she prefers reading novels to short stories – or was that just a provocation? – Shriver writes stories in between her books because ‘it’s satisfying to have something complete’. She admitted that her novels suffer from being pushed aside to make way for work that has an imminent deadline, such as journalism. She’s ‘more loyal to something with a due date’.

Her early novels were critical, but not commercial, successes. She was ‘fortunate to be rescued by [We Need to Talk About] Kevin before I quit’. She admitted that ‘bad reviews still irk me’. She used to think that ‘writers who didn’t read their reviews were cowardly or lying’ – but wished now she could do the same. But ‘I don’t have the discipline’. She was scathing on the ‘capricious and faddish and arbitrary’ literary world. What does your success mean to you, she was asked. It ‘should make me take the whole farce less seriously’, she replied. One suspects it matters too much.

Writers hoping to learn about Shriver’s own process would have been disappointed, although there were some nuggets: she has no second readers – ‘never, ever’. She knows what’s wrong with her work. ‘Why would I ask someone else?’

It was a shame there was so little insight into the process of selling and marketing short stories – and why Shriver believes they sell. Writers who had come to hear insider tips, or how to get their collections out there, must have left disappointed. People would always rather read novels, she thought.

For fans of the short story, not much insight. She was surprisingly ambivalent.

For fans of Lionel Shriver, it was right on the money.

 

Writing Props

I’d never call myself superstitious. I walk under ladders. I sit in row 13 on the plane. I’m secretly pleased when a black cat crosses my path, but I don’t salute magpies. I can work (or stare out of the window) anywhere; I don’t have a special pen, or special paper.

Watching a documentary on Philip Pullman recently, I was fascinated to hear him say that for each novel he writes, he colours the top right-hand corner of his notebook pages with a coloured pencil. A new colour for each novel; the same colour for each notebook page. He can only write on paper with two holes per sheet, but buys paper with four holes (so he covers the other two up). Not exactly superstitious, but a sort of writing ritual.

I don’t do things like that. Or do I?

For some time now, I’ve been working in a hamster nest. I’m surrounded by a creeping tide of Stuff, gradually covering any clear space with a kind of impossible-to-categorise driftwood. Things came to a head recently when my pc died, spectacularly, of chronic Update failure. Installing a new one meant moving the layer of protective skin that had grown around me on my desk.

Taking out the old machine was bad enough. But making space for the new one meant moving a handmade plaster pot, crumbling at the edges, made by someone years ago at junior school, full of what I think are called ‘Treasury tags’ – bits of string with metal either end, to keep papers together – all unused; five cards from friends, with inspirational quotes; four photographs – one of Jean Rhys; a seaside painting; a pot of clips and pins; two tubes of hand cream; a clock; a small wooden box that once held wooden bricks and now has drawing pins; cuttings that will be useful one day; four piles of books; a crystal paperweight; a pot of pens and pencils; a desk diary and three years’ worth of notebooks. Then the actual books and draft I’m working on, plus my current notebook.

My new laptop is fast and efficient: I’m thrilled with it.

I’m even more pleased that all my treasures are back where they should be: in my eyeline, cheering me up when I’m stuck. Familiar things that I like my gaze to fall on. Voices from family and friends, encouraging me; urging me on.

Maybe not superstitions, but definitely writing props. What are yours?