On Writing
"How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?"
“How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?” E.M. Forster
I was sitting with a group of strangers the other day, when one of them, on hearing I am a writer, asked, “What is it you write?”. I replied, with the kind of self-protective false modesty typical of writers, “Anything that anyone will pay me to write.” It’s not entirely untrue, but it is far from being the whole truth. 1
I cannot remember a time when I did not write - which, to me, says something about the links between writing, memory, and identity. This is a fascinating nexus I will return to in a future article. For now, though, suffice to say that the writing I did as a young child was, to my great good fortune, nurtured and enhanced by the school I attended (the French Lycée in London), and the superb teachers I encountered there. Not only were we taught to read attentively, we were also taught to learn about writing by creating texts in the style of the writers we were studying. It was an extremely good apprenticeship, carried out in two languages, with imagination and rigour.
Slightly tangentially, the fact that, although I come from an Anglophone family, my schooling was entirely in French from the age of four until I was about eleven or twelve gave me an invaluable insight into the ways in which language shapes thought, and vice versa.2
What is it, though, about writing that has kept me in its thrall from the age I could first hold a pencil and form words, until now, coaxing out sentences from the keyboard on my laptop? Part of it at least, is because, for me, as for Forster’s intransigent old lady whose remark sits as an epigraph to this piece, I only really find out what I think when I see what I say. It is only in reading what I have written that I am fully confronted by my beliefs, my assumptions, my prejudices, and my passions - it is in writing about others that I learn about myself.
That is emphatically true of the core writing which I do now, which is writing crime fiction. But it has taken a highly varied writing journey to bring me to this point, with each way station along the path bringing new challenges, new insights, and new skills.
I started my professional writing career in publishing translations from the French of books on history and on the history of ideas.3 It was here I learnt that translating is a kind of Method acting, becoming the character you are presenting. I was not so much substituting words in English for words in French, as conveying the meaning of the French into an English which was true to that meaning.
I was also at that time writing book reviews for one of the UK broadsheets, which, in an era before the internet, and even before fax machines (yes, there was a time when that was so!), meant writing to a strict word count and to an extraordinarily tight schedule, with copy being sent by post, or, in an emergency, being phoned through. An extremely helpful discipline which has stood me in good stead throughout my professional life - though I have to admit that being able to compose materials right up to the very moment they need to be emailed through has made me a great deal more offhand about deadlines than I ought to be.
My writing journey continued through providing English text for children’s information books published by Gallimard Jeunesse, the prestigious French publisher, and from there to writing and publishing school textbooks for use in teaching both English language and English literature in secondary schools in the UK. These years of crafting information books for a whole range of readers and purposes taught me the crucial importance of being clear and unambiguous in both language and syntax - there is no room for stylistic flourishes in information writing, however tempted the writer.
I was still engaged in writing and editing school textbooks when a friend pointed out to me an obvious fact that I had been too close to see myself - the reading that engaged me most was crime fiction, so why wasn’t I following my passion? And so I did.
I started by learning more about the genre, going to as many crime fiction and mystery writing conferences and conventions as I could, meeting writers, hearing them talk, and reading their books. From there, in order to develop my understanding, and to help others develop theirs, I launched a digital magazine called Crime Fiction Fix, which ran for a number of years, providing articles on and insights into the art and craft of crime writing, and publishing video interviews with scores of notable crime writers, in which they talked about how they worked. These articles and videos form part of a substantial archive to which subscribers here can have access.
In 2014 I was commissioned by Robinson, an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group, to write How to Write Crime Fiction, which came out in 2015. A revised and updated second edition is coming out in November 2024.
And so, after this long apprenticeship, I turned to writing crime fiction myself. And it was through this process that I began to be able to see what I thought important in the world. There are a myriad reasons for writing, as Elisa Gabbert’s superb article in The Paris Review4 makes plain, and as we will be examining in more detail in a future article. Sufficient for the moment a statement made by outstanding mystery writer Vaseem Khan said in a recent piece for the Crime Writers Association:
“We do what we do, first and foremost, because it is our passion. And, like everything else in life ruled by passion, the cold calculus of reason goes out the window. For many of us, writing is a sweet madness, an insane joy. We write when we have only the glimmer of a hope of publication. We write when we know that the advance we will be paid will barely buy a pint within which to drown our sorrows. We write even when reviews slap us in the face like a Frenchman with a white glove. We write when we are down to lift ourselves up. We write when we are joyful because it is at one with our spirit. We write because we have to.”5
The articles which will be published here are drawn from three main areas of interest - my own writing in progress, words and writing in general, and crime writing in particular. There will be explorations, cogitations, and, sometimes, book reviews, as well as insights from myself and others on how to go about writing, whether fiction or non-fiction. The common thread is language: how it works, how we use it, how it shapes us.
With great humility I’d like to finish with a quotation from Salman Rushdie’s extraordinarily courageous book about the brutal knife attack which half-blinded him and almost ended his life:
“Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. If I had been unexpectedly caught in a knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back.”6
Let us see here what tools we too can shape and sharpen to cut open the world and, perhaps, sometimes, create beauty.
A side note: in response to being asked which of her writings had earned the most, Zoë Sharp, crime writer extraordinaire, replied, “Ransom notes”. Hmm - a potential sideline?
For one fascinating insight into recent thinking on this, it’s worth looking at Lera Boroditsky’s article in Scientific American, February 11, 2011.
Amongst others, On History by Fernand Braudel, China: A Second Look by J. Broyelle et al., and The Intellectual Origins of Leninism by Alain Besançon. My writing name at that time was Sarah Matthews.
Elisa Gabbert “Why Write?” in The Paris Review July 6 2022.
Vaseem Khan Red Herrings: the bulletin of the Crime Writers Association May 2024.
Salman Rushdie Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder (Jonathan Cape, 2024).