Blow by blow: my weekly writer's diary

Turning over books is the new reading

Welcome to Blow by Blow, a new part of The Book Forge where I’ll be writing a weekly diary of my work on ‘book four’.

I’ll be telling you about what books and articles I’m reading, what topics I’m focusing on, what meetings I’ve had with publishers, what I’m struggling with, what my word count is, and how many Cadbury mini-rolls I’ve had to eat to achieve it.

This part of The Book Forge will be for paid subscribers only, from next week onwards, but this first post is for everyone to give you a flavour.

“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Samuel Johnson

I know this quote because of a great lecture I went to when reading English Literature at Durham, where the lecturer talked about the concept of ‘turning over’ books rather than actually reading them. I’m all for this. It’s a real time saver, right?!

It’s also compulsory that you read it as the Robbie Coltrane version of Dr Johnson.

In seriousness, I think about that quote a lot, perhaps because it makes me feel less guilty about the amount of non-fiction books I have that I have ‘turned over’ but not actually read from cover to cover.

And when writing a book, I do this even more, picking them up and dipping in and putting them down and almost trying to tune into their individual ‘geist’ and work out where my own book is going to sit along side that.

This week a delivery of some of my ‘wish list’ arrived from Amazon and World of Books (pictured - although I already had Women who run with the Wolves, that one is literally tattooed onto my soul), and I’ve been busily ‘turning them over’, and thinking about my own book.

I’ve been focusing in on a particular chapter too, and putting out some feelers for people I’d like to talk to in the course of researching this part. One thing I hope to do soon in The Book Forge is get the podcast up and running and then share with you the chats I have as I pick the brains of the many wonderful women I hope to interview.

I’ve been reading articles such as this one: “Is the pill blunting women’s desire to achieve?”. I like how this forces us to question whether there are any benefits to our cycles, and indeed whether there are any disadvantages to the pill. I remember writing about the Ricki Lake movie 'The Business of Birth Control’ (based on the Holly Grigg-Spall book ‘Sweetening the Pill’) way back about a decade ago when I was a columnist for Best Daily. Ricki and Holly told me at the time about how much anger and pushback they’d got for daring to question this staple of modern feminism and women’s lives.

And finally I had an hour long meeting with my editor on Friday, which was really fantastic. I’ve not worked with her before, and she is extremely experienced and…well, completely amazing really. She is so excited and passionate about this book and I finished our zoom feeling exhilarated and inspired. I feel in safe hands and also that she will be a firm taskmaster - and I like that!

So now I have some homework to do over the next week - looking at the existing chapter breakdown (already written as part of the book proposal) and beginning to flesh it out for her, expand it, and who knows, maybe even do some writing!

In the meantime, I’ll keep turning over as many books as I can get my hands on.

I’ll leave you with a Yeats poem that the Eng Lit lecturer read out as part of his encouragement to us to ‘turn over many books’; to pick up anything, turn it over, examine it, look at the world through it - it may be old and worn and or even seemingly useless, but it will nevertheless give us a new perspective on the world.

The Collar-bone of a Hare

Would I could cast a sail on the water
Where many a king has gone
And many a king’s daughter,
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,
And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
I would find by the edge of that water

The collar-bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.

See you next week! xx

This first ‘Blow by Blow’ post is for all subscribers paid and unpaid. Going forwards, Blow by Blow will be for paid subscribers only.