It's always a revelation when you had assumed for years that everyone was agreed on a certain point and then it turns out not to be so! Being a writer, reader and one-time teacher of writing, I have always assumed that when readers come across the story ending "and then he woke up and found it had all been a dream", they do what I would, ie hurl the book across the room, curse the author for wasting their time and cross him/her off their reading list. Even if - especially if - I have enjoyed the story up to then, I feel cheated by the fact that nothing has changed, indeed nothing has actually happened and my time and emotions have been engaged to no purpose.

So it's a surprise, in a facebook discussion of John Masefield's The Box of Delights, an otherwise fine children's book which pulls this unworthy stunt in the last sentence, to find not just people who can forgive this because they like the book otherwise, but some who like this ending anyway. It has of course been taboo with writing gurus for years, but that's not just because of fashions in teaching, rather it's because this ending is perceived as so unpopular with readers as to be a commercial killer. I have always assumed indeed that editors and publishers have the same attitude to it, on the same grounds, but am I wrong there? (Re Alice in Wonderland, btw, yes, it has that ending, but (a) that doesn't make it right and (b) the device was at least a great deal newer then.)

EDIT: See steepholm's comment below for a link to a fascinating fact i didn't know about the ending of Masefield's book...

Can we figure out how to do a poll, perchance?

Poll #1485330 It Was All A Dream
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

"It was all a dream" endings are

Here's a disheartening article.

Now of course print journalists are in the business of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi about the Beeb, but the “Safeguarding Trust factual drama interactive module” can hardly have been invented by the paper, and the idea of providing an established writer with the kindly advice: “Don’t oversimplify the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’ ... the truth is rarely as cut and dried as this” and “tone of voice and facial expression can significantly alter what an audience infers about a character” is insulting in the extreme - if they really think he might not know that, then they shouldn't be employing him.

Since the BBC depends on public money, it does have to think twice before gratuitously offending licence-paying members of the public. But surely that is what editors are for, and there are also established remedies in place for aggrieved individuals. Ideally, an editor on Mock the Week, which doesn't go out live, would have cut Frankie Boyle's uncharacteristically silly and unfunny remarks about Rebecca Adlington; the man can be cripplingly funny but like most great comics he works on the edge and sometimes crosses it. Or Adlington could have complained, though in fact maintaining an attitude of dignity and ignoring the whole thing seems to have worked quite well.

But giving offence can be a perfectly legitimate thing for a broadcaster to do and some of the examples given here are ludicrous. Most worrying is the concentration on "factual drama", ie that based on real life, and the apparent inability of programme-makers to understand the use fiction habitually makes of real life:

Hugh Bonneville, the actor who starred alongside Julie Walters in BBC2’s Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, said it was time to return to common sense. “I now detect a creeping self-censorship in the television scripts I am given to read,” he said. “I remember in the light of the Queengate affair the producer of the Mary Whitehouse programme saying the compliance unit wanted him to go through the script pointing out which bits actually happened and which were dramatic invention.

“Whatever next? Do you put up a warning at the beginning of the programme telling the audience that Julie Walters is not Mary Whitehouse?”

One does wonder what warnings will encumber the screen if the BBC ever re-dramatise Richard III. Indeed, why weren't we warned when watching The Tudors that Henry, by the time he was cavorting with Katherine Howard, looked nothing like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, more's the pity?

Will Self, in an article in today's Guardian on Roald Dahl, has this quote:

I was once with Martin Amis when he was asked if he'd ever consider writing a children's book. He thought for a few moments before drawling: "I might . . . if I had brain damage."

No wonder I've always found Amis a dull author! Indeed he's a dullard full stop, if he seriously imagines you need less ability to write for the world's most discerning and least forgiving audience. When, years ago, I was reading the first page of some Amis on which bugger all of any interest appeared to be going on, I ploughed on with it in case it got better, as adults do (it didn't). A child, faced with the same lack of any narrative hook, would have thrown the book across the room and gone in search of something more interesting, an expedient I only reached after several more pages. Self, by the sound of him, would consider it, but then he's a far sparkier, more open-minded and more surprising author.

When I taught creative writing, I'd sometimes have first years ask advice on what to study in the second year. This was when children's writing kicked in (too advanced for first years, see) and I'd always say, by all means have a go at it if the craft fascinates you, just don't, whatever you do, opt for it because you're struggling with writing for adults and think this'll be easier, cos it isn't.

In the Guardian's current series of fairytale booklets, A S Byatt describes Hans Andersen as an "emotional terrorist" who "writes to hurt". She means both as compliments; she admires him greatly.

As do I, and my first thought on reading this description was that it provided a plausible reason for the devotion of a chronic angst-cum-h/c fan like myself. But on reflection, I'm not quite sure about it. ( more behind cut )

I’ve blogged before about analysis of poems and how they work, and how some love it while others avoid it. Here’s another dip into the same pool, occasioned by a Facebook discussion of the way a poem featured on Woman’s Hour had given rise to wide discussion, all, apparently, centred on the issues it raised, rather than on the way the poet used language. Someone defended the right of readers not to care about the way a writer uses language, but instead to value a poem solely for what it does to their emotions, and of course they do have that right. Indeed you could argue that the better a poem, or any writing, is, the less its craft should be noticed by the reader, just as you don’t expect to see the scaffolding once the roof’s up.
( But... )

(and no, the answer isn't che sera, sera, third on my list of most hated songs). It's a writer thing.)

If I call someone a German poet, or a French novelist, I tend to mean someone who writes poems in the German language, or novels in the French language. The person in question might actually hold a Swiss or Canadian passport, but by and large I don't think birth nationality has anything like the impact on a person's writing that language does; we do not think of Joseph Conrad as a Polish writer. In that sense I am and will always be an English writer, though I'd probably phrase it a writer in English, because my reaction to "are you English?" would always be "no, I'm bloody not!"

Having said that, where you live, whether out of choice or necessity, is always going to affect your writing if only by osmosis. It's possible that one's sense of heredity affects it too, though myself I don't think that can go farther back than your own parents and grandparents, who will pass on their sense of who they are to you. And if you never actually go the length of travelling to your supposed roots, I'm not sure they really exist; I've met so many people who professed to be proud of their Irish or Welsh descent and yet had never set foot in the places concerned. That's at best a sentimental pseudo-attachment. But environment, whether chosen or compelled, is different.

I am by birth half Welsh, half Irish if you go by heredity, all Welsh if you go by environment, given that my mother, though wholly Irish by descent, was born and brought up in Wales. I wasn't born in Wales but I've been living, writing and publishing in Wales for 40 years and calling myself a Welsh writer. Being called one too, by most though not all -for some, writing in English is enough to disqualify you from the title, others would contend you needed to be born here and/or have the matter of Wales as the main concern of your writing; others would say you need to live and publish here while some few would include anyone born here but living elsewhere and publishing with a non-Welsh house.

"Living and publishing in Wales", which applies to me, works for most though; it does for instance qualify you for Welsh writing awards. My friend Matthew Francis the poet, who moved from Winchester, was surprised to find he at once qualified as a Welsh poet, rather in the way that football players with an Irish great-uncle used to find Jack Charlton on the phone. (At the time it might have seemed a bit daft; these days, Matthew having been some years in Aberystwyth, it seems natural). One could of course reject any kind of localism and just be A Writer, but the administrative mechanics of the trade don't really work like that; where you live determines which arts body hands out the dosh for one thing. And people do like to have a pigeonhole to put you in.

So what if you move? At the moment I'm shuttling between Cardiff and Shetland, but from next year, though for family reasons involving a Very Old Cat, I will still have a Cardiff address as well, I'll be living in Shetland and visiting Cardiff. What am I then: a Shetland poet, a deracinated Welsh poet? If someone's work takes him from Birmingham to Swansea to Glasgow he can't be an English, Welsh and Scottish poet by turns, can he? How long does it take to become something, or stop being something?

Oddly enough I've always been fascinated by deracination and changing one's identity, and I know a lot of my friends, including several writers, have done it. Any views on the above?

The Guardian book blog discussion on The Damned United took an interesting turn when Johnny Giles unexpectedly joined in, somewhat bitter about having been used as a character in an RPF. I could understand his point of view, to some extent, but then someone else posted this:

It's a prime example of "fan fiction" really, and as such leaves that uncomfortable taste in the mouth whenever the facts are glibly massaged and scenes and conversations written to fit a self-serving tale.

- and that "self-serving" got so far up my nose that I felt obliged to jump in and point out that fan fiction is no different from any other kind of fiction in not feeling constrained to stick to the bare facts. I daresay I shall regret it...

( A piece of travel writing this time - behind cut )

Chasing Dean is here on amazon.uk.

A novel review this time:

Ghosts and Lightning, by Trevor Byrne, Canongate 2009


Denny Cullen, 21st-century Dubliner at university in Wales, thinks he's left home, but home isn't finished with him yet. Called back for his mother's funeral, he soon seems to be back in the groove, with relatives and friends who are going nowhere fast and doing nothing much (though, this being Dublin, they do it with considerable wit and inventiveness).

His sister Paula senses a ghost in the house she and Denny are allowing to go to rack and ruin; it might be her alcohol-fuelled imagination but then again it might be composed of memories of their dead mother, their absent father, the brothers from whom they are estranged and much other baggage. Before Denny can move on, he needs to decide which bits of his past he wants to leave behind, and which he needs to take with him. Though this is very much a novel of a young man in 21st-century Dublin, he is also a man with a sense of a long historical and mythological past (and his surname is no accident).

One reason this novel lives so vividly for the reader is the liveliness and realism of its voices. Denny's friends and family constantly come alive off the page: the insanely brave Paula, Uncle Victor the long-term book-borrower, gentle Pajo the emaciated recovering drug-addict with Buddhist tendencies ("he's mad into this kind o thing; life after death, ghosts, yetis, any and all religions. Basically anything there's fuck all proof for, Pajo'll believe it.")

Both fulcrum and observer, Denny himself is a joy of a voice. He is sardonically honest about himself:

Probably why I can't get a job, some witch's hex. Well, that or the fact I never filled out them forms at the FAS office

but also endlessly imaginative, as when he describes his friend Maggit having second thoughts about something he's stolen:

And wha about the kid who owned it? Is he not gonna miss it?
Maggit thinks about this. He looks into the bag again, like he might o robbed the answer as well by accident.

or when, travelling west, he finds himself overwhelmed by a sense of history:

… Dungloe, Annagary, Glencolumbkille. Never even heard o those places before, never mind been to them, and yet I dunno why, it all seems dead familiar. Mad that, isn't it? This feelin I get that nothing is new, not really.

There are a lot of very funny scenes in this novel – the car being constantly turned upside down, the funeral dominated by a priestly speech impediment. The variation of pace is remarkable too, from frenetic to leisurely and back, but above all the register of language, which accommodates colloquial and lyrical effortlessly. It's a terrifically assured and likeable debut.

So... if you recall this post, about the various possible cover pics for my Later Selected (which looks like coming out in July), folks voted here, on facebook and on a mailing list I'm on. And the clear front-runners from all sources together were ( Map )

and ( Franklin )

In fact, Map was slightly ahead, but it looks as if the publishers will go with Franklin, if they can. I'm not too surprised by that, because I've heard before that there is a belief that human figures on a cover sell it better.

"If they can", however, is the operative phrase, because that image is owned by the National Maritime Museum and so far they haven't replied to emails asking if it can be used. If it doesn't work out, I guess they'll go with Map, because I think that's public domain.

My favourite three were definitely Map, Franklin and Landscape 1 - that was probably my ultimate fave but in the end you gotta go with what'll shift copies.

It was a fun exercise, anyway! Thanks to all who joined in.

- to echo oursin's line. I'm glad Kathryn Hughes has written this article in response to Elaine Showalter, because when I first saw Showalter's theory on the absence of great 19th-cetury american women novelists, I was convinced things weren't as simple as that. Basically Showalter asked why no American Brontes or Eliots and concluded that it had to do with British women having more servants and less housework to do:

"While English women novelists, even those as poor as the Brontës, had servants, American women were expected to clean, cook and sew; even in the south, white women in slave-holding families were trained in domestic arts."

As Hughes points out, it's really misleading to suppose British middle-class women like the Brontes were sitting on their hands all day just because they kept the odd maid (as did their US equivalents, anyway). In fact "the mistress of the middle-class household was most likely to be cooking and cleaning alongside her servants. In the days before vacuum cleaners, washing machines and fridges, the daily battle against soot, bedbugs, candle grease and mouldy food was one that lasted pretty much all day and required every hand on deck.".

This, though, does leave the original question: where were the American Brontes? And there probably isn't one simple answer, but two possibilities do occur. First, there hadn't been much time to build up a tradition of women's writing in America (and what there was seems to have been poetry). The Brontes, Eliot, even Austen, did have both fellow women writers and precursors, maybe not many but enough to provide a bit of vital I-can-do-this encouragement.

The other thought is that since the likes of Austen, Eliot and the Brontes couldn't hope to get paid a lot for their work, however much they might have liked to, they could at least write more or less what they wanted. Austen in particular got peanuts. There were 19th-century American women novelists; Stowe and Alcott come to mind, but they were writing neither for themselves nor for posterity. Stowe was writing for a cause, so aiming for maximum sales and publicity. And Alcott. like her heroine Jo, was writing for money, so had to do the same. I don't know what the relative markets were like at that time (other than that the US wouldn't recognise foreign copyright). Was it the case that a writer, even a woman writer, stood a better chance of actually making a living by writing in America? If that were so, it might at least partly explain writers aiming at a market that may simply have been less available in the UK. I guess the likes of Mrs Radcliff made more in the UK than the Austens and Brontes, but AFAIK, even she wasn't actually financially dependent on writing. Anthony Trollope's mum did make a living with her pen, but she was a travel writer, I think?

Interesting.

- words I'd begun to think I'd never write. Maria's first was the unforgettable As Meat Loves Salt, a dark, violent, brooding tale of the English Civil War, a clash of politics and principles, not to mention a very stormy (and slashy) affair between a thinker and a doer. It had every ingredient for pushing my buttons, including a deeply unreliable narrator who doesn't know half of what he's done himself. I was present when its first draft was being read in a workshop, and recall vividly a scene of 17th-century dentistry which had strong men staggering outside looking green.

The second has been long in coming, partly because publishers are so obstinate about not wanting writers to do something different for their second novel; I think she wrote one set in modern times and couldn't get past this mindset. But now comes news that another novel, The Wilding is on its way,and I must admit I'm not ill-pleased to find it's historical too, just because I know how good she is at that period. The woman from faber says she read it in a night and I believe her; I did that with AMLS, and it was a doorstep. But an unputdownable doorstep. This is going to be worth waiting for.

This is a really interesting blog post about the current state of UK publishing, from a young man who works in the business.

Whenever a novel starts with the character of a writer sitting in a Hampstead kitchen. struggling to finish a novel, I throw the book straight in the bin

- Mark Ravenhill: The Guardian

Oh, me too, sir! I've been thinking lately about what hooks me, in a poem or a novel, for two reasons: (i) I've been judging a poetry competition and (2) when I left work, I left my colleagues a bunch of books to give as presents/prizes to students, and a lot were modern novels I had read once and simply knew I would never read again. And that wasn't necessarily related to writing quality. Julian Barnes' Arthur & George was well written; it certainly wasn't a waste of my time but it didn't hook me enough to make me re-read it either. Ditto Orhan Pamuk's Snow. Whereas Will Self's The Book of Dave, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Pamuk's My Name is Red are no better written, in fact all three have factors that annoy me - Self's is Riddley Walker lite, Ishiguro's plotting is laughable even to me, the worst plotter in the universe, and if you're going to do futuristic science and politics it helps to have a basic understanding of both, and My Name is Red is marred for me by what seem inappropriate Americanisms in the translation. But all push some button or other that means I shall re-read them.

It may be partly the fact that I react better to historical or futuristic settings,and to places that are unfamiliar to me - I want literature to be a window, not a mirror, hence my aversion to anything set in a contemporary seat of learning - perhaps, now I no longer work in one, that'll change! But that doesn't always work. I am a sucker for Polar settings, which is probably why the only novel of Magnus Mills that I re-read is Explorers of the New Century. But Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Peter Hoeg) doesn't cut it for me, despite my Arctic obsession.

With the poetry competition, in fact, I could feel myself setting the bar higher for poems that looked as if they were about to push my buttons; there was a danger of expecting more of one with a form, theme or setting that was congenial and then being unreasonably disappointed. OTOH, button-pushing does get an entry noticed as you go through the pile. I honestly believe the winner I've chosen was the best poem in the comp, but it did have a title that, for all sorts of reasons the writer can't have known about, would appeal to me. (The comp was of course judged anonymously, but I know who the winners are now, and have never met them, that I know of. I only recalled having met one person on the shortlist, even.)

Apart from the Ravenhill quote, this one from George Eliot's story "Janet's Repentance" says a lot about what hooks me in a novel. Mrs Linnet likes biographies of famous preachers, but reads them quite selectively;

"Wherever there was a predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and notes of exclamation, she turned over to the next page; but any passage in which she saw such promising nouns as 'small-pox', 'pony', or 'boots and shoes', at once arrested her."

Did a quick slot on BBC Radio (Good Evening Wales) talking about this news story - thanks to Jen for providing the link!. Thankfully the programme didn't focus on the "porn" angle in the headline but on her complaints re the fix-it happy endings of the fan stories, which she had evidently taken as a personal criticism of her ending: "There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story," she told The Wall Street Journal.

In the unlikely event anyone's that interested, the programme is here, for the next week I think. Must be about 3/4 of the way through.

I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was bloody silly, and slightly impolite, IMO, for the writers to send her their stories; did they think she had nothing better to do with her time than act as an unpaid critical service? Yes, some writers like fanfic and actively search it out, but that's for them to do; others would rather not read it for various reasons - possible legal problems. the wish to keep your own vision of your fictional world clear in your head, preciousness about what others do with "your characters" - and one might as well respect that.

But she could have reacted better. For one thing, the story is, of course open range for people's fantasies, and has been since she published it. For another, the fact that they created a different ending doesn't mean they didn't like hers; more that they were interested in exploring different possibilities.

She, OTOH, seems to have as much trouble seeing alternatives as her character Ennis does. When she says "They certainly don't get the message that if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it" there seems to be a certain Proulx-Ennis confusion going on... Ennis's fatalism is part of his character (and the plot) and he's entitled to it. But for the author to endorse it quite so heartily is a bit odd, because his mantra "if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it" depends on a very big "if". Ennis assumes it can't be fixed, and it really doesn't take that much imagination to see ways in which it could, if he wanted to enough. This was a criticism of the story among some gay people when it came out, that its vision was so unremittingly and unjustifiably bleak. Within the story, that's her choice, but to object to others trying it different (provided they are neither out to make money nor to pass off their work as hers) is misconceived, I think. (Though not quite as daft as saying the film has caused her "constant disruption" - constant income, I think she must mean.)

The BBC producer seemed to think fix-it fic had never happened before this date, so I told him about the ones for His Dark Materials. He later phoned Pullman and asked what he thought about his fix-it fics. PP said he was completely unworried about them.

The lady who did the interview, Felicity Evans, was very nice and quite clued-up on the subject, certainly very interested.

Bang on the nail, madam. Right on every count.


She gave me a stare, at first appraising, then bewildered, then accusing. "You're too young!" she cried. "You couldn't have written that book - you weren't there." It was true, I was not in Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate. "Then none of this happened to you?" she said. "Nothing. I made it all up. It's fiction."

One of the worst things about misery memoirs (apart from the fact that they're unreadable; so the writer had a lousy childhood, why should I give a damn?) is that they seem to have confused readers about what to expect from fiction, particularly when they encounter the "I" voice, which against their apparent expectations is almost always a lie. Not only that, there seems to be a feeling in some readers that fiction based on truth is intrinsically superior to invention, which has always seemed to me if anything the reverse of the case.

I sometimes get queries from A-level students along the lines of "in your poem about the sandman, who's the woman on the beach?" If I reply; well, she's the poem's protagonist, I get the comeback "no, I mean who is she in your life, is it you, your mother, a friend?" When, like Grant, I reply "she's someone I made up for the purposes of the poem", I sense disappointment, as I do if I explain that even when poems are partly based on truth, writers monkey around with the facts, change he to she, set it in a different place, write a better ending than real life did.

The poem I get the most queries about is ( this )

Kids invariably want to know who was who; was the grandmother yours (one asked if I was the grandmother!); was the boy your brother. I explain, patiently, that the whole point of the poem is that you can't ever know; the writer is a liar and you have to accept that, because the lie is the way into the kingdom of story. But I sense that they want desperately to pigeonhole things, perhaps because exam questions are slanted that way.

Slash Study Day was great, as ever. (Incidentally the young folks who organise it don't get paid; they are doing arts admin degrees so it's part of their course and they get marks for it. It's always been impeccably organised and was again this year, so I've fired off an email to young Mara saying so, in hopes she can use it as evidence come marking time.)

And altariel had a great idea for continuing the merriment at Redemption!

I enjoyed everything I saw, but the afternoon panel "Slashing the Academy" was just brilliant, the most informative session I've ever been to there. The split was very neat: words v pictures, so all the vid and comic fans went one way and all us wordfreaks the other. And we got three fascinating talks about how authors appropriate and shape other people's ideas to their own purposes. First Dorothea Schuller from Göttingen Uni talked about HD, whom I knew as a poet but not as a prose writer, concentrating on how, in her prose, she subverts classical motifs to express her own bisexuality.

Then, by happy chance, Gemma Bristow went on to HD's husband, Richard Aldington, and his "Myrrhine and Konallis" poems, a classical pastiche f/f idyll he was using as an escape from his imminent enlistment in WW1. The story of the genesis of this, and his use of a French original which itself claimed to be translation, was mesmerising - it suddenly occurs to me that James Elroy Flecker's deeply homoerotic poem The Hammam Name also claims to be a translation (from a poem by "a Turkish lady"); this ruse was clearly in vogue! As a bonus Gemma passed round her copy of the beautiful book in which Aldington had bound the M & K poems together with his First World war poems - it would have been worth the trip just to handle that.

Last, Hanna Rochlitz of Kassel Uni discussed textual and autobiographical influences in Forster's "Ralph and Tony", which was totally new to me, and RTD's "Queer as Folk" and New Who, making a persuasive case for seeing QaF as a queer riff on Old Who and a sort of tryout for New Who - I can't believe I had never noticed that Vince and the annoying Rose have the same surname!

I feel my brane has been stretched....

I've been reading some posts recently about writers' style choices, with particular reference to tense and voice. The debate in sallymn's lj was on fan fiction but the comments could have come from any litfic list too - especially the folk who shy away from first person narrators (not to mention second person ones). I might get around to posting about that later, but this post is about tense and why a writer might choose to do something other than the default. Because there was a tone about some comments that, again, I've heard in litfic contexts, of vague injury, as if the writer had used some stylistic device purely to be awkward - or clever. And I really don't think that is usually the case. If a writer decides to tell a story (whether in a novel, poem or story) backwards, or with unreliable narration, or entirely in interrogative mode, or in an unexpected tense or voice, it's usually because something about that story seemed to demand that technique. You can't always tell why when you're doing it; it just feels right, but a bit of analysis later will sometimes tell you why.
( more behind cut )
Maybe I'll go on with this tomorrow....

To make it clear, first off: I am not a fan of Rowling as a writer. I think she falls into that quite large category of writers in certain genres who have good ideas but never develop a half-decent prose style; she writes flat and 2-D.

But in the recent kerfuffle about Dumbledore I am all on her side for purely writerly reasons. Of course I can see why people concerned with gay rights are saying, why didn't she write that into the books instead of saying it afterward; it would have given us this great boost/role model etc.

Only she isn't in that business, she's in the writing business and in this at least she acted exactly as a writer does. You tell your readers what they need to know. You yourself may know umpteen facts about your characters that you never choose to pass on to the reader, because they don't happen to be relevant to the story. They still matter because the knowledge of them gives you a priceless authority and security in dealing with the character; they are the seven-eighths of the iceberg that can't be seen on the surface. Put it all on the surface and you rob the reader of the chance to get to know this person the way they would in real life, slowly, from what he says and does; you also rob the character of any mystery and possibility.

As to the "why say it now" question, she was giving an interview in which she got asked a direct question on the man's love life, and answered it honestly. AFAIK, no-one has asked it before; maybe they should have. But to say "if it was so, it should have been in the books" is to misunderstand how authors work. You don't put anything in just because it's so, unless it has a clear bearing on the story. Dumbledore was the headmaster of a boarding school. Whatever his sexual inclinations, he was scarcely likely to be making a parade of them in that situation (the mere fact that he was an elderly bachelor gave some hint for readers if they wanted it) nor as far as I can see were they relevant to his role in the books. Much as I hate to disagree with the (truly heroic) Peter Tatchell, I'd have thought, if anything, that it makes a better point on his side for her to say so casually, after the event, "oh well, he was gay of course", as if it simply hadn't been necessary to mention it and nobody should be surprised, because that's pretty much how it should be.

Austen, apparently, used to indulge family and friends with answers to questions like "who did Kitty Bennet marry?" She knew, and didn't mind answering honestly when asked, but it didn't mean she had to put it in the book in the first place.... oh hang Kitty, what has she to do with it?

Well, that was interesting, principally because the split was much the same as on the list - ie more people want to know than not, but for those who don't, you really do risk ruining something. One person on the mailing list - a novelist - did say she thought knowing the facts did not invalidate or make impossible the first reaction to the seemingly folk-tale, mythological aspects of the story, and I'd like to think that was a universal reader reaction, because it makes life much easier for writers, but it isn't.

One of the biggest problems for writers is knowing how much to reveal. Too much, and you leave the reader feeling patronised and with little to do. Too little, and said reader may be scratching head in resentment thinking you're trying to be a clever bastard. My work colleague the poet and novelist Christopher Meredith, talking specifically about poetry, says there's "ambiguity hurrah", which leaves readers standing at a crossroads with lots of paths they might choose to go down, and "ambiguity boo", which leaves them standing at a crossroads wondering why the hell there aren't any signposts. That's a great definition; the only trouble is deciding which is which. And of course it is partly personal. There are people who will willingly either spend hours working out the meaning of a really abstruse bit of J H Prynne or find themselves able to react to it without teasing meaning out of it. I'm neither; I don't care for poem-as-crossword-puzzle and I can't react to words as if they were musical sounds divorced from definitions. OTOH, I don't mind being sent to a dictionary or encyclopaedia, whereas some of my students, if that happens to them, immediately yell "elitist" (no, dear, the author isn't elitist just because she has a wider vocabulary than you do and has read some Greek myths). Then there's personal information, which no-one can know the significance of unless you tell them. It's difficult, when you do know this, to guess what your reaction would be if you didn't. I think Louis MacNeice on bells would still sound vaguely doom-laden if I didn't know he lived next to a churchyard in his childhood, but who knows? And certainly when I first read his couplet

My mother wore a yellow dress.
Gently, gently, gentleness.

I took it to mean she had been a notably gentle person. Actually she was a notably ill and depressed person; what he was remembering was the necessity to go on tiptoe around the house to avoid upsetting her with normal childhood noise. Yet he must have been aware of the ambiguous reading and felt it was ambiguity hurrah.

One person on the list said "I want to know, but immediately after reading the poem". Now there's an easy way of doing that, which is footnotes, and you can even put the notes at the back of the book so that those who don't want them can ignore them. A way to please everyone, you might think - but you wouldn't credit how vicious reviewers can be about notes. Some feel they should never be necessary (bloody silly, IMO, since putting all the info in the poem can be a quick way to ruin it) and will always carp about it in reviews. I stopped using notes for ages because of this and have sometimes, at readings, had Joe Public suggest they would be a good plan - I agree, but that's why you don't get poets using them; they're too scared.