Advice for Writers (age 10 and up)

One of my nieces is taking entrance exams for secondary schools, and while visiting her this weekend I happened to read the guidance one of the schools gives the children for story-writing under exam conditions. Two particular items caught my eye which I think could be of benefit to all writers, including those of us over the age of 10, so I will share them here:

Don't attempt to write about anything you have not experienced or cannot imagine

and

Try to finish.

(Looks at incomprehensible, unfinished manuscript of new novel, sighs, goes back to work.)

Postcard Story

On Tuesday I wrote briefly about the organisation that I teach with, First Story, and I mentioned how much I'd like to publish some of my class's work on this blog, but that I was keeping it confidential for now.

Yesterday, there was a great article about First Story in the Independent. At the end of it they published this piece which was written for a competition to have a story printed on a postcard. Stories had to be 100 words or fewer. I think it is brilliant:

The first time I got drunk, I banged my head and I was amazed that it didn't hurt.
And when I caught a pigeon, tipped petrol on it and set it on fire, it flew up for about five seconds and then came plummeting back to earth.
The first time I got arrested, I was scared and I made myself look guilty when I took the blame for a mate.
When I bought 10 lighters from the car boot and set them alight, they made a massive fire and a loud bang and I remember wanting to do it again.
I remember my first sight of a serious blood leak from my head. I didn't cry until I looked in the mirror and saw my skull.

By Arran (Oxford Upper School)

Music Monday: NaNoWriMoSpecial

So here's the thing. I don't like NaNoWriMo. In fact I HATE NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is 'National Novel Writing Month' in which would-be writers are encouraged to pen their novels in one month, on the basis that a couple of thousand words a day for thirty days will get you a nice first draft. Which is true.

What is also true is that a couple of thousand words a day for thirty days in a row without repetition, hesitation or (the killer, this) deviation is bloody difficult. Very few people can toss off a novel in a month. Fewer still can write a good novel, even a good draft, in a month. Ian Rankin claims to be able to do so, Alexander McCall Smith also. You may have your own opinions on the talents of these writers, but it shouldn't be overlooked that they are both massive best-selling millionaires, which does imply some adeptness at what they do, in contrast with those of us (almost all other writers) who are not massive best-selling millionaires, which may (or may not) imply that we find writing a bit harder. They also both write genre novels (ie, in a non-judgmental sense, formulaic) with worlds and characters that they have already devised. In sum, I don't think that Rankin and McCall Smith are typical of most writers.

At the moment I am almost two years into writing my second novel. I have been working hard on it. I really don't like being told that my two years of my job can be done in a month. I am guessing that whatever your work is, you would also not enjoy a national 'your job here' month, which implied that two years of your work could be done in a month if you just applied yourself a bit harder. It makes me feel inadequate. And jealous. Definitely jealous.

So yes, let's encourage people to write - I [mostly] love writing, I love the idea that other people can get the same joy I [sometimes] get from writing - but let's not spread the idea that writing a novel is easy. Quite aside from anything, the difficult reality is likely to put off the very people that NaNoWriMo is trying to reach.

Oh, and as it's Music Monday...

For the love of Brosnan

Lalala I haven't watched it I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT.

Well what the hell else have I been watching then?

Pierce Brosnan movies. Obviously. And I have been writing about my admiration / love / obsession / pathological disorder about Pierce Brosnan over on the Beat Website. Which has lots of other fantastic and slightly more serious articles for you to read. Once you have finished reading mine, naturally.

What's that you say? A sample, so that you can decide whether to click or not? Very well...

Pierce Brosnan is everything a movie star should be: handsome, debonair, with perfect teeth and a full head of hair, able to keep his head when all around him are losing theirs and blaming it on the script / director / co-star / catering, this is a man who even managed to retain his dignity, not to mention his sex appeal, while dressed as a lobster on The Muppet Show.

Ah, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on.

Too Much Information

Yesterday, reading yet another terrible sex scene in an otherwise well-written novel, I got to thinking, not for the first time, why it is that it is so difficult to write about sex well? And I think I finally thought of an answer that makes sense, which is that sex, ultimately, is just another everyday bodily function that doesn't need to be described at length because everybody who's ever done it pretty much knows what it's like. And yet sex scenes have a terrible tendency to go on and on, as if they are describing the experience to somebody who has no idea what it is.

Consider eating an apple. As an author, you might just say "I had an apple", and everyone is fairly clear on what that means, because most of your readership will have eaten apples before. If you want to make it clear that it's a particular kind of apple experience, you might give a little more detail, such as "I bit into the apple, and the flesh crumbled in my mouth to a dry heap of powdery disappointment." Again, we've all been there. What is totally unnecessary is the following:

The apple gleamed in the bowl, its shiny red and green skin so inviting. I longed to take it, to sink my teeth into its firm yet yielding flesh. I picked it up, its luscious curves filling my hand to perfection, and carried it over to the sink, where I let the long, cool stream wash over it, my mouth watering like the tap itself. Then I opened my mouth wide, feeling my jaw tense slightly in anticipation. I bit. My teeth pierced the apple's skin and all at once my mouth was filled with juicy wetness. Its sweet, sharp tang was so delicious, better even than I had imagined. I moved my teeth up and down, chewing, chewing that melting apple flesh, my tongue wrapping itself around around its liquid goodness. I swallowed, and peristalsis wafted the apple down to my stomach, which rumbled in appreciation.

Writers: as a rule, if you're giving more information about sex than you would do about a meal, then that is TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

Music Monday on a Tuesday on a Wednesday (wish I had called it something else now)

I have been lax again. In my defence, it's because I've been nose-down making final corrections to my novel before we submit it to publishers. That's exciting. Well, it's exciting for me. I have no idea whether revealing that I am shortly to submit to publishers is a bad thing, like I should suddenly spring it on them with no warning, like a surprise inspection from Ofsted (nicking a joke from Doctor Who there), except in a good way. Like they will be more likely to love it and give me loads of money if they don't know it's coming. Like a surprise pregnancy. Oh, I don't know. This is the long way around of me apologising to my agent for letting the cat out of the bag if that is, indeed, what I am doing.

Anyway, I've been busy with that, which means why no Who review (it was brill), no Jose Gonzalez review (he was brill), and no Flight of the Conchords review (they were brill and *I met them*.) I am fully intending to post all of these things in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile, earlier today, I got an e-mail from my friend, the serious academic, which said simply 'We will always associate this song with you, Marie. Great dancing at the wedding.'

Which song? Why, this song of course.



Yes. It is now MY song. I am not entirely sure how I feel about that, but my lovely lady lumps are delighted.

And seeing as we were talking Flight of the Conchords, let's remind ourselves of their fabulous parody:

Strictlywatch Interruptus

No Strictlywatch this week either. This is the price you pay for me going away for ten days to a cottage with very dodgy (read: largely non-existent) television reception and finishing my novel. I will leave it up to you whether you think it was worth it.

(If you're very lucky there will be a double Strictlywatch Special halfway through the coming week. If you're not quite so lucky I'll just watch the dances, fast-forward through the links, and come out four hours later dazed and confused and covered in sequins and be unable to voice my feelings through the haze. If you're not lucky at all, my PVR won't have recorded any of it, and I'll be reduced to watching Jedward on Youtube instead. I wouldn't rule the last of these out either way.)

I Am Robbie Williams (Sort Of)

I finished my first draft today. (Subject to minor corrections before I send it to my agent.) I want to be honest here about what finishing was like because I didn't feel how I think I was supposed to feel.

In short: it was horrible. I was panicking so much as I typed the last chapter that I had to keep running out of the room. My hands were shaking so much I could barely get the words "The End" onto the screen before I slammed my laptop shut. I then spent the next hour as a total wreck and was only able finally to calm down by sitting with a pencil and paper and writing things down like "I am capable of trying to imagine that I can believe that it is OK if I write a bad book and it doesn't make me a bad person." (I do see the funny side of this.) 10 out of 10 for reading comprehension if you've realised that the above convoluted piece of therapy-speak means that, right now, I don't believe that it's OK if I write a bad book, and do I think it makes me a bad person.

Weirdly, I keep thinking about Robbie Williams's recent bizarre appearance on X Factor. I think that Robbie Williams and I have a lot in common. He's obviously a huge attention-seeker as well as an artist (of sorts) who is passionate about his work, but equally he's crippled with an overwhelming fear of failure and public humiliation and he's unable to control his anxiety.

Me too, me too, me too. I am the Robbie Williams of books, and I haven't even had people heap scorn upon my "Rudebox" yet.

I don't remember finishing the first draft of Gods Behaving Badly being this bad. I think I was excited and proud of myself just for getting to the end. I had no idea if it was any good or not, I didn't have particularly high expectations for it, there was no reason to imagine it would ever be published or read by more than a handful of people.

This time, I still don't know if it's any good or not, but I have a very high expectation of my book being published, and of it being read by thousands - maybe tens of thousands - and, if GBB is anything to go by, hundreds of thousands of people. There's a series of bigger and bigger hurdles in front of me and I could fall at any one. First my agent. Then the publishers of GBB. Then my friends and family. Then the reviewers. Then the world. It's like a gigantic game of Play Your Cards Right, with Bruce bloody Forsythe hosting, and enjoyment of my book as the stake. Will it be "higher! higher!" or "lower! lower!"? I reckon GBB scored around a Jack. Chances are this one is going to be lower.

I keep telling myself that I can't pin my self-worth onto how well this book is received, and what I should really be proud of is the fact that I was willing to take a risk, the huge risk of writing another book and it not being as good and people not liking it, which is honestly the hugest risk I can think of. But the truth is I haven't just pinned my self-worth onto this book, I have superglued it on, and if I need to learn the lesson, with this book, or with the book after this one, or the one after that, that it's just a book and what matters is the endeavour and there is no shame in failure and no matter what happens I am still a worthwhile human being - well, I think it's fair to say that I'm going to be learning the hard way.

And this was just the first draft. God knows what happens once I try to actually make it good.

A Short Blog About Writing

Since Sunday night I have been by myself in a cottage in Dorset. It's my favourite place to write. It's perfect because it's so beautiful, peaceful and quiet, and because there's absolutely nothing else to do. That's an exaggeration, of course. Today I read some of the weekend papers, and went on a walk to the sea, and spent a full hour and a half lying on the sofa watching the light change outside the window. Tonight I might read a book or watch a DVD or both. But there's no mobile phone reception; only dial-up internet, which means I can't access most websites without waiting for hours; and nobody I know within miles. I have already written more in the last two days than I usually manage in a week.

I don't talk much about my writing on this blog. It's something I'm quite sheepish about. As a successful author, I feel like I should really be better at it. Authors I follow on Twitter publish daily word counts I can only dream about. Meanwhile most of what I write ends up in the bin. People keep asking me how the new book is coming and what it's about, and I get coy and don't answer, and they probably think it's because I am protective of my great idea, when actually it's because I am on my fifth attempt at a new novel since publishing Gods Behaving Badly. I don't know if and when this one might founder on the rocks too.

I do know that I am very close to the end of my first draft. This is further than I have got with anything since GBB. In writing terms, or in my writing terms, this may not be as big a deal as it sounds. If it were a journey, the first draft is just deciding on the destination and buying a map. I still have to bloody get there, but at least I know where I'm going.

I'm scared. I'm slightly in shock that I might be on the brink of actually managing this again, a second novel. I don't know if it's any good. I am contemplating new careers where I don't have to put my soul on the line every damn time. But I'm not about to stop now.

In Dorset it's cold and dark and I can't get channel 5. What's it like where you are?

Perchance to Dream

I am in Dorset at the moment, where I've come for a few days of calm and quiet in order to get some serious writing done on my book. In fact it hasn't turned out quite like that; I haven't written a huge amount more than I would in London (although not less, so the trip isn't a waste of time). Instead I have been walking, swimming, reading, eating and doing a lot of sleeping. I am slightly surprised by the amount of sleep I can get done; the total silence and darkness outside at night is probably helping with that.

Sleeping, inevitably, means dreams, and while I know it is odious and dull beyond measure to talk about one's dreams, bear with me on this one - I promise not to go into detail. Last night I had my most recent recurring dream, a dream I am having with alarming frequency. I have always been one for recurring dreams; I have lots involving various forms of transport going out of control (plane crash / boat sinking / I have forgotten how to drive); dreams about needing to pee but having nowhere to go, quite often combined with my other recurring dream that I have gone back to school and am being forced to do my A Levels again, so the dream takes place in a school toilet full of cubicles, none of which are suitable for some reason - this one I have so often that I got quite freaked out when I was in an actual school toilet recently; and my favourite recurring dream, that I am in New York and it's amazing. I've been having this one less recently, ever since I did go to New York and it really was amazing. It's like my subconscious can't be bothered with it any more.

My new recurring dream is that I'm pregnant. It's always slightly surprising, I never know who the father is, and my family are always there to offer support / interfere, depending on the tenor of the dream. It's not an anxiety dream, I am never particularly worried about being pregnant, nor is it an especially happy dream. It's just me with a massive bump, idly wondering what having a baby will be like. Last night I was mainly concerned about whether I should get my hair cut first.

I suppose the pregnancy dream is normal for a woman of 33. These are my worrying about having babies years. Thing is I am not remotely worried about having babies (posts about pain relief notwithstanding.) I know I am supposed to have strong feelings about having a baby, maybe be beginning to panic as my biological clock ticks increasingly loudly, or otherwise have a militant position that there will be no baby for me. In fact I feel about babies about the same way I feel about dogs. I like dogs. I play with other people's dogs. I feel no desire to have a dog of my own. However, if I were married to someone who desperately wanted a dog, I would probably get one.

Because I know that wanting to have a baby is a normal, natural thing, every so often I check in with myself to see if that wanting is there. No. Nothing. I guess I must be abnormal / unnatural. I wonder what wanting a baby is like. I wonder what people want about a baby. Is it the baby itself, is it having a child to play with, is it the anticipation of adult children? What? I once caused huge consternation by saying to a group of female friends that I supposed people wanted children to keep them company. I was shouted down. Apparently this would be an incredibly selfish reason to want a child. And anyway, your child might not want to spend time with you. Meanwhile I literally could not think of another reason to want to have a child except to spend time with it. But apparently there is something else. Something unselfish. You want the child, but the beneficiary of this wanting is the child, not you. This must be what is called the gift of life, and it's a gift I have never felt the urge to give. Generally I only give people things I'm pretty sure they will like. I am not confident enough to say that about life. I'm not even entirely sure that I like it yet. Sure, it has its moments, but it's really hard work. (The other theory, I suppose, is that your child is your gift to the world. But that is so unbelievably arrogant that I can't believe anybody thinks this way. Can they? Do they? Really?)

So I don't want to have a baby. Or rather, I don't *want* to have a baby; there doesn't seem to be the right vocabulary for saying that I don't actively want one but I don't not want one either. I've spoken to the not-wanters as well. They have such strong feelings about what it will do to them, to their lives. But I think if I were to have a baby I would probably like it. But I could say that about all kinds of things I'm unlikely ever to do - move to a new country, start a new career, cut my hair short. I might like any of them, I just don't want them badly enough to find out. So on the subject of babies, the biggest decision I am ever likely to make, I am neutral. (Although, in a way, neutral is the same as not wanting something, because if I am neutral on the subject of having an ice cream, I don't have an ice cream.) Neutral! It's pathetic. I sort of feel that I have failed the human race. Or run in it, not even come last, but just got indifferent halfway through over whether to bother crossing the finish line.

Of course, I am reproducing in book form, so maybe that has killed the desire in me. There are tens of thousands of my offspring crowding out bookshops and bookshelves all over the world, worming their way into the minds of readers, living their lives in your memories. I am reproducing as a meme; a parasite. Basically, I am bacteria. Who needs pregnancy?

But then what are the dreams all about?

This Is A Repeat

If TV can have repeats, I don't see why the blog can't.

Today on Twitter the lovely Keris asked me to remind her of my editing / make-up analogy from my "legendary" now-defunct previous blog Struggling Author, and having tracked it down and read it, I found I enjoyed it a lot, in the way that one can only enjoy things one has written oneself and then completely forgotten every having written. So, for your delectation, here is a rare insight into the joy that is Being A Writer.

Oh fuck. Fucking hell. Fuck.

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on "rewrites" for my book. "Rewrites". Kind of suggests that you take the book and change little bits of it to make it better. I think that is considered the general idea. Doesn't sound like too much of a hassle. Shouldn't take too long.

So OK, put the rewrites out of your heads for a moment because I think most of you aren't novelists. A lot of you are women though so try this. Imagine that you are doing your make-up and it's all fine except that you have smudged a little bit of your lipstick. You try to wipe off that little bit of your lipstick and you realise that you had eyeliner on your finger so now you have smudged lipstick and a black smear on your cheek. So you wash the black streak off, but now you have taken off an area of your foundation. You reapply foundation to that area but the blending is all wrong now, so you are going to have to redo the foundation of your entire face. While wiping away the foundation, you smudge your mascara, but you can't take off the rest of your mascara without buggering up the eyeshadow. By now you look like fucking clown and any minute now you are going to have to go and wash your entire face and start again, and your boyfriend is shouting at you because you are going to be late for the party. And that's when you notice the smear of deoderant on your top.

Get the picture?

I "rewrote" something. I "rewrote" something else. I "rewrote" a few more things. And now my entire book is RUBBLE.

Fucking fuck in a fucking hat.

I'll remind you of this nearer the time (probably)...

...but I'm giving a talk at the London Writers' Club, on how to write a novel. Something I have succeeded in doing once, and failed to do on any number of other occasions before and since. Hmmm. Anyway, if you are on Facebook, there are details here and you can sign up on the page and show the world just how brilliant and popular the talk is going to be. But if you are not on Facebook, I will show mercy and give you the details anyway:

Date: July 7
Time: 6.30-8.30pm Bar opens at 6.30 (it stays open 'til later)
Venue: Clerkenwell House, 23-27 Hatton Wall, Clerkenwell EC1
Tickets: £10 in advance, £15 on the door.
Website: www.londonwritersclub.com

Tickets go on sale June 9th. Be there or etc.

In case you were wondering...

...why I've gone so quiet, it is not, as you might have thought, because I am Twittering all the lifelong day, or because I really did eat too much pudding and then die, but because I am working. In fact I've been working so hard I've barely been playing Facebook Scrabble. I know. I'm surprised too.

But don't fear, because there's a Doctor Who special over the weekend to write about, and I am also poised to review the astonishing Romeo Castelucci trilogy currently being staged at the Barbican (seeing the third part this evening.)

Are you relieved? I am completely relieved. Phew.

Every Author's Worst Nightmare

Poor Michael Crichton. Not only is he dead - a state I'm not particularly looking forward to myself, except for when I've eaten much too much - he now has to put up with the indignity of this. Yes, somebody has been kind enough to go through his computer and dig out his half-finished novels, and now they are going to publish them.

Hideous. If, by some terrible happenstance, I was to go out today, eat far too much pudding, and then die, and somebody was to go through my computer, they would find at least five half-written novels, sometimes including (as the Crichton piece says) notes for how to finish them, but that doesn't mean that I actually (a) ever want them to be finished by me or (b) anyone else, and certainly (c) ever want to be read by anyone, especially (d) actual readers. There is a reason why these novels are not finished. It is not because I am (theoretically) dead. It is because they are terrible.

The fact is, writers start and don't finish terrible novels all the time, and sometimes they even write and finish terrible novels, but some kind of sanity / vanity / responsible feelings towards the well-being of the world kicks in and instead of publishing the damn things you keep them on your computer just in case one day you wake up knowing exactly how to make that terrible novel into a good novel. Here's a hint: the day that you wake up with that knowledge is highly unlikely to be after you are dead.

Aha, you might say. Michael Crichton did not know he was going to wake up dead. Therefore he might have been working on something that was actually good. Novelists might die halfway through writing something good; in fact, I bet they do all the time.

I would reply: firstly, you have a very sweet and elevated view of how much of a writer's time is spent working on something good. (I would suggest: not very much.) Secondly, you might be right. But there are *two* books that have been salvaged from Michael Crichton's, and so I would wager that one of them is a grotesque embarrassment which he'd rather was put in the coffin with him and buried.

Shall we hazard a guess as to which? Is it the "technological thriller" that he was a third of the way through writing when he died? Or is it "Pirate Latitudes, [which] is set in 17th-century Jamaica, and follows the plans of a pirate called Hunter and the governor of Jamaica to raid a Spanish treasure galleon?"

I rest my case.

Meanwhile, on a similar theme, The Onion.

I have given in.

And it only took me one month and 19 days. The month was February, mind.

Sex

I have just added a document called "sex" to the piece of work I'm developing in Scrivener. Label: "concept". Status: "to do".

I'm in love!

With a computer programme. I guess it had to happen. My geekery is finally complete.

The programme in question is Scrivener and he - sorry, it - has totally changed my life. I was first introduced to Scrivener by the Family Helpdesk, aka my long-suffering Bro, who from time to time sends me links to interesting-looking Mac software. I ignored him - sorry, it - completely. I mean, what does Bro know about being a writer? I am an artiste! As if a piece of crummy software is going to make any difference to my creativity! etc etc. I pressed delete.

Fortunately, I got a second chance. Eschewing traditional apres-ski, one of my Alpine companions spent an evening re-introducing me to Scrivener ("Haven't we met?" "No, I don't think so." "But you look so familiar. Don't I know your brother?" "Maybe..." "I remember! He introduced us! And you totally snubbed me! But fortunately I don't bear a grudge, and you can have me for a 30-day free trial, and then for life for a single payment of around £34." If only all relationships were so straightforward.)

And now it's love. Proper head over heels. Scrivener is amazing. He's - sorry, it's - everything I could dream of in a word processor. Where to even begin? Everything about him - sorry, it - is incredible. Intuitive. Adaptive. User friendly in ways I couldn't ever have imagined from my mispent youth with other computer programmes. I never knew I could feel this way about anything I could download legally. I don't want to nauseate you, like those new couples who can't stop hinting about the amazing sex they're having. I don't want you all tutting "get a study". But you can convert all your documents into index cards with colour-coded pins and move them around and reorder your manuscript and recollate it in unimaginable ways, and you can label and tag it and group things by folder and keyword and levels of completeness and any other way you can dream up for yourself, and you can attach research items to individual bits of writing and open them split-screen in the same document so you can look at loads of different things like pictures and film and music in one application while you're writing! And it doesn't even get jealous of the bits of research!

I'd better go. Scrivener and I want to spend some private time together. But don't worry, you can get your own Scrivener at the link above (as long as you've got a Mac - it doesn't work on PCs). And no, I have not been paid to endorse it. This comes straight from the heart.

Writer Recommends...

Recently I went to lunch with another author friend and I mentioned I'd been having a lot of trouble with the story for my next book. She said, "Have you resorted to reading The Seven Basic Plots yet?"

Why yes, as it happened, I had started it that very morning. The basic premise is this: every story that has ever been written - or written successfully - can be boiled down to fitting in with one of the Seven Basic Plots. (One or more, that is. Lord of the Rings is all seven.) The plots are: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth.

[Aside that few will get: turns out I don't favour the Oxford comma after all, Persephone. But then again I am a Cambridge girl.]

To get detail on how those plots work, you'll have to read the book - which is 700 pages long, so you'll need some spare time - but you can get the gist just by looking at their names. They're archetypes which provide satisfying arcs for stories, without which you can be left feeling that something is wrong, that your plot's not "happening", not moving. They can be perverted and inverted but ultimately, if what you're working on doesn't even almost cosy up to one of these plots, it is worth giving some thought to why not. I am sure that you can get away from them and write other types of stories (stream of consciousness poeticism or whatever - definitely not my style) but you will need something damn impressive to replace them with. Ultimately, these arcs are satisfying, and there's a reason we have been using them over and over again for thousands of years.

I am only halfway through Tragedy with Rebirth yet to go, and then hundreds of pages of explanation of archetypes within archetypes, but already I'd say it's proving enormously useful in terms of how I think about story, and spotting where things that I have written have got wrong - and right. Gods Behaving Badly is a Quest with a Voyage and Return in it, possibly a touch of Overcoming the Monster, and the whole thing plays out as a Comedy. Not bad for 80,000 words.

I'll report back when I've finished it (if indeed I do finish it - book is *long*) but so far so useful. Highly recommended to other authors, struggling or not.

And so say all of us.

Here's something I hate: the use of the Royal We in reviews*. Take, for example, Sharon O'Connell's recent write-up of Antony and the Johnsons in Time Out:

"This may be verging on the sacrilegious, but we like the idea of AATJ rather more than we like their music and, if we focus too much on Hegarty's voice... its mannered wobble does our head in."

Who is this we? Ms O'Connell and the whole of the staff of Time Out? Ms O'Connell and her mates? Ms O'Connell and her dog? Ms O'Connell and the Queen? I think "we" should be told. In any case it's a bit weird that they only have the one head between them.

This is on my mind of late because the same Sharon O'Connell delivered a devastating attack on the Ting Tings back in January, which employed the same "we" tactic. At the time I had never heard the Ting Tings, but the viciousness of the review, coupled with the use of "we" implying the weight of multiple concurring opinions, caused me not to bother to listen to their album until I heard it at a friend's house and realised that it was, in fact, great. I had been so subconsciously convinced by the use of "we" in the review that everyone was on the same page about the shitness of the Ting Tings that I didn't even have the confidence to seek out my own opinion. Sad. Last Friday I went to their gig and absolutely loved it - they're brilliantly energetic live and push their album tracks up to the proverbial eleven. Had I not heard the album by chance, I wouldn't have had that great night out. And it was a great night out. Even if the mythical "they" disagree.

Ultimately using the "we" is a bit of a cheat, hiding your opinions in a group in order to make the reader feel like the left-out fool should he or she disagree. It totally defeats the notion of a review being just my opinion, no more valid than anyone else's. WE think so. Therefore YOU are wrong.

Special prize to the first person to comment saying that the Ting Tings really are shit**.

*Of course I have probably done it myself at some point. But we do love that David Tennant, now, don't we?

**Not really.

The New Statesman on Strictly Come Dancing!

Seriously, I went on the New Statesman site and there it was. It was the first piece I clicked on, which tells you something about my aspirations to seriousness. And it is a pretty serious piece as it happens, or at least compared with my coverage anyway...

Hmm. (a) Send my cv to New Statesman in hope that they might like a more playful TV writer? (b) Crawl back under my rock of frivolity?