Those are great titles - and yes, I do think they often reveal themselves, though it probably helps (mixed metaphor alert!) if you keep your ears pricked in the background for those vibrations. And yes - non-fiction titles, whose job is largely to label the tin with what's in it, are SO much easier!

Glad it's useful, Karen!

You're welcome, Helen, I'm so glad it helps. I do find it fascinating, and infuriating, how resistant many of us are - and specially in the echo-chambers of social media - to positive thinking in ourselves, and others. It only takes a nano-second for people (or our internalised people) to start accusing ourselves or each other of being Pollyanna, and talking as if there's some moral failing or wilful naivete in deciding not to expose oneself to it.

Hi Mark I'm so glad the blog's useful, and that's a really good question. I do think this: "Oh well. Drifting off, he reconsidered his reality: despite his grousing, he truly did enjoy this particular, supple, ebony form." isn't really FIS. FIS is essentially the real-time thought (or speech) of the character, transposed into the narrative tense and person. So if this were the real-time thought of this character, it would go: "Oh well. Drifting off, I reconsider my reality: despite my grousing, I truly do enjoy this particular, supple, ebony form." The thing is, after the "Oh well", it all sounds more like a summary or description (Telling, if you like) of the thought - a narrator's thought about the thought, than us being given (Shown, if you like) the direct voice of the thought. As ever with FIS, you have to check in with the direct thought - the "silent speech" of the character - as it would be thought/silent-spoken. e.g. if I were writing it, (not you, obv!), the actual thought, downloaded, would presumably go something like this: "Oh well. I shouldn't grouse, really - it's a lovely form, so supple, and the ebony glows. I love it most of all when the sun gets on it." so in FIS (in your example, 3rd person past tense) that would be "Oh well, he shouldn't grouse, really - it was a lovely form, so supple, and the ebony glowed. He loved it most of all when the sun got on it." And if you think of all this as something like Gardner's "Level 4", then before or after you might well be moving in or out to something like his "Level 3". So (clunky example coming up): "The reality was, Jo insisted on putting the statue smack in the middle of the sitting room window, and there was nothing he could do about that. He poured himself a drink, then sat down, waiting for the whisky to hit. Oh well, he shouldn't grouse, really - it was a lovely form, so supple, and the ebony glowed. He loved it most of all when the sun got on it. As the drink ran further through his veins, he decided that glow was worth the shadow stretched across the floor." Does that help at all?

Yes, there are lots of things which it's tempting to smuggle in as dialogue. It can work well, or it can not work at all. The dialogue first has to pass the likelihood test: you may know why the reader needs to get this, but why, in the world of this novel, would character A say this to character B? Really, would they?

One reason I think it can be a good thing to do lots of writing before you seek any feedback is exactly that - if you have a clearer idea of what you're trying to do, and how to do it, you're better placed to weigh advice, hold it up against that clear(ish) idea, than if you're only taking your very early steps. And some beta-readers care more would-be interventionist that others!

I think that's very true (at least until it gets overwheleming, and the doctoral student just wants to crawl under the duvet and hope it all goes away...). I was offered a PhD place more-or-less as I got a two-book deal, and lots of people assumed I would give up on the PhD, but I decided it would be helpful - given the weirdness of being published, and having a deadline - to have a supervisor saying, "And for the next supervision...", because with a publisher, they don't necessariliy do that, just expect the beast to appear at the end of two years, or whatever...

Yes, you do need a good command of sequence of tenses to get it spot on, I think. On the other hand, I've had students who felt more comfortable with present tense because they didn't feel clear on how to use the different kinds of past tense. I really should blog about them at some point. It was when I trying to explain the present perfect to a student whose mother tongue didn't include it, that I realised just how subtle, and useful, they are - but only if you can use them.

The alliteration in The Wound of Words is another reason it works, I think. I see what you mean about "amiant" - plus I suspect some people would be fairly vague about what it means. But it is rather a lovely word, especially in combination with "soul".

It's a great title - and I agree, sometimes thinking about the title can really help you, by pushing you into thinking about what this nascent book is really about. Indeed, my notebooks are full of titles which arrived in my head - usually a riff on some phrase overheard or read - without even a story attached.

Aw, thank you, Miranda! And yes - good teachers (including those who write the how-to-write books) should only ever be codifying what good writers have always done, as a way of helping new writers to do it too. One reason I find working with psychic distance (both in my own writing, and with students) is that it gets rid of the binary "do X, or Y" - or, worse still, "Do X, not Y" - but shows how it's all a matter of degree, and that, yes, you can make your far-out psychic distances Showy, as well as Telly!

Hi Graham - there's a Subscribe button in the right-hand panel, which should get you onto the Feedburner list. I do hope you enjoy the blog.

I'm so glad it's useful, Kate, and many thanks for sharing it in your turn. I do hope the blog goes on offering what you need.

Yes, it's very true. It's not a given that the outcome of the story has to be kept a deadly secret throughout. And, of course, in e.g. the Greek theatre, everyone knew the story of Oedipus and the other figures anyway, so there was no such thing as a spoiler anyway. Indeed - what about Hamlet, and the Dumbshow of the play: it doesn't seem to alert Claudius that the play's going to be about his murder of his brother, until they go into the spoken version...

You're welcome, Chris. I do agree that the sensation of writing creatively for a PhD is ODD - but I'd like to think that supervisors are alive to that, and do their best to mitigate the weirdness, and within reason, respect the student's process. Hope it gets easier soon!

Yes, I think that's a very good point: there can be a gap between what we are aware of, and what's actually going on. Of course, if you're far out in psychic distance, firmly in the hands of a narrator, you could write "She had no idea why she banged the window so hard - but the pane cracked".

Hi Sue You're absolutely right that it isn't a comma-splice, and I agree that the two clauses nonetheless sit oddly together and don't feel right. When I read it over, I realised the sentence would be fine if the second phrase was part of a longer sentence with a series - a list - of actions: something like, "She went to the shops, bought a loaf of bread, and made herself a sandwich."* Which is the big clue to what's going on. With a list of actions - main verbs - it's perfectly correct to leave out the subject ("she" in this case), if it's the same one throughout. So "She went to the shops and bought a loaf of bread." would be fine. Which explains why this example feels uneasy: in English, a list that only has two things in it needs an "and" between them, not just a comma. BUT, speech being more informal, we do this kind of thing all the time, because the meaning's perfectly clear. I think writing like this reflects how people actually speak - and with texting and messaging, the difference between how people speak and how they write is disappearing. Prose fiction, too, has always had one foot in how people speak (to mix my metaphors!), which is why we talk endlessly about the "voice" of a novel even though it's in print. For expressive purposes we might do all sorts of things which are formally incorrect in "proper" grammar and syntax, but which create an effect (pace, dialect, voice, incoherence, accent, intensity, impressionism, whatever) that the writer is after at that moment. (NB: in my first example, the comma after "bread" is optional; I put it in to make the three separate clauses clear. Many people won't bother, and some people would say it's incorrect, if you (wrongly) think a comma after an "and" is incorrect.)

Ha! I love a good, extended metaphor!

Hi Jonathan - I'm so glad this has been useful to you. Psychic Distance does take a while to wrap one's head around, let alone have it become an automatic tool, but I think you're probably in the majority who realise that their narrative spends too much time at the farther-out levels, and could do with getting in closer more of the time. As a very broad rule of thumb (is that a mixed metaphor?) I would say that my narratives go further-out when they need to cover the ground, or to explain something in a swift, summary sort of way - very often as the run-in and run-out of scenes, or if there's a bit in the middle of a meal or a day, say, where not much happens. And things close in at the heart of a scene, the places where close-up psychological experience of the evolving moment, is crucial: cruxes, turning points, core conflicts, the central event of the scene which is why it's in the story at all. As you get more used to using PD, and more confident, then with a new piece your mind hopefully will get to the point where it instinctively says "right, closesr in now," or "a bit of far-out scene-setting now", and the right sort of words will emerge organically. It's a bit harder to do across a whole, pre-existing project, perhaps, because there isn't that organic relationship with your imagination. It might help to think of other uses and of far-out distances: the terms I use to help myself thing about them are things like "Telling, informing, explaining, summarising, covering the ground." When do you want to be doing that? And when do you want to be using the closer-in levels, as captured by terms like, "Showing, evoking, presenting (without explaination), elaborating, digging into the full experience of the moment?"

Apologies (not really!) for the rabbit-hole effect of the itch, but I'm so glad this piece has been useful. I think your tense set-up sounds very effective, and I've done similar things myself - My novel A Secret Alchemy is a case in point: three first-person narrators, three different timeschemes and time-frames, all three with a past/present tense element, but being worked in very different ways. Not everyone likes that book, but no one's ever said that the tenses didn't work.

What an excellent story, Alan! Thanks so much for sharing it. I always say it's a huge mistake to write anything which you'll feel was a totally waste of your life if it doesn't achieve the outcome that you're aiming for. Of course we're all furious and pissed off if it "fails" in the worldly sense, whatever that means to the writer. But as long as you wrote it from a need and desire, in search of creative satisfaction, then those hours/months/years were not wasted. Also thanks for reminding everyone that getting an agent is not the be-all and end-all of everything that can happen to one's writing life...