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This week: a jump into the past that returns us to an eerily modern place. You’ll see what I mean a little later.

But first, let’s play, ‘Who’s the oldest?’

The oldest surviving book in the world is, probably, the Codex Sinaiticus. The word codex just means book: that is, it calls attention to the specific physical structure, involving binding on one side only of a set of loose leaves. The ‘Sinaiticus’ bit just refers to the book’s location, in the Sinai Peninsula.

This codex is approximately square. The text is hand-written. And it’s huge. The whole thing has about four million letters. It took the hides of about 360 animals, mostly calves, to make it. The book, unsurprisingly given its age and location, is a bible. The surviving text contains an entire New Testament, and most of the Old Testament as well.

But in our quest for anciency, I think we need to drop our concern with the physical structure of the document. We’re looking for ancient texts, and don’t really mind if that comes in the form of animal skins sewn together, or gold sheets bound together (like the 2500-year-old Pyrgi gold tablets), or marks on stone, or impressions in clay.

Ptahhotep

Thus liberated, we can leap back further. The oldest complete text written by a named individual is the Instructions of Ptahhotep, first found near Karnak in Egypt. The text itself is “only” about 36-40 centuries old, but Ptahhotep himself lived in about 2400 BC, or 44 centuries back. If you hopped onto a time machine and set it for that era, you’d know you’d be almost halfway once you hit the birth of Jesus.

The text begins thus:

The Governor of his City, the Vizier, Ptahhotep, said: 'O Prince, my Lord, the end of life is at hand; old age descends; feebleness comes and childishness is renewed. The old lie down in misery every day. The eyes are small; the ears are deaf. Energy is diminished, the heart has no rest … The bones are painful; good turns into evil. All taste departs.

That’s quite an intro, though the text itself is disappointingly bland. (‘Quarrelling in place of friendship is a foolish thing,’ is a fair sample of the content.)

But we’re not done. We said we didn’t want to get stuck on the codex as a physical structure, but nor should we get too hung up on the completeness of the text in question.

The oldest text in the world

What we’re after, really, is the oldest surviving text of any sort and it’s another set of ancient Egyptian advice which claims the prize: the Instructions of Shuruppak.

This text is about 4600 years old, and if you thought that Ptahhotep’s words of wisdom were a bit dull, you’ll nevertheless find them a whole class above these zingers from Shurruppak:

You should not locate your field in a road.

You should not buy a donkey that brays.

Or my favourite:

You should not abuse a ewe; otherwise you will give birth to a daughter.

That’s pretty much as ancient as we can get in terms of hard physical text, but I haven’t yet told you how that ancient clay tablet actually begins its list of inanities. It opens like this:

In those days, in those far remote days, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years, at that time the wise one who knew how to speak in elaborate words lived in the Land.

How to open a book

I promised you something eerily modern, right, and there it is. What does Shurruppak's opening remind you of? Maybe something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen … (Grimm Brothers / Sleeping Beauty)

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … (Star Wars, opening crawl)

Listen! We of the Spear-Danes in the days of old …(Beowulf)

In other words, the opening text of the world’s oldest text starts the exact same way as a modern sci-fi blockbuster, or a poem composed by a bunch of Anglo-Saxons. That sense of a time beyond our knowledge, a land where rules could be a little different. It’s like our portal into fiction.

And, given that the author of, say, Beowulf certainly didn’t know about the way Shurruppak handled his intro, or the way the Grimm Brothers would handle theirs, you have to say that this isn’t about copying. It’s not a meme that went viral. What we’re looking at here is something deeply embedded in the way we tell stories. Something hardwired.

I like that as a thought. Like it enough that I’d be happy to dedicate this email to that and nothing else.

Desperate attempt to make this whole post relevant to you

And in a way, that kind of opening to a story is useless to you. Novels don’t start that way. They search for the specific – something wholly exact in terms of character, time, place, situation. The deliberate murk of the ‘in those far remote days’ formula is pretty much anti-novel in style.

But, but, but …

I think novels do still use that sense of a story-telling portal. It’s not quite as formlised, as ritualised, but we still want to take the reader by the hand and help them to cross that threshold. We do it differently today, but that moment of transition is still jewelled, still magical. And that’s a first page, or first chapter essential right? A little tingle of magic. You want all your reader-Dorothys to say or think, ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’

Succeed in that, and you’re halfway to succeeding, period. You and Shuruppak, both.

Over to you. What do you think? How does your book start? Why do you think that 'long, long ago' type opening works so well? Why don't we use it today? Or have we cunningly adopted those tricks in disguise. Tell me what you think and let's all have a Heated Debate.

I got an email yesterday from a writer with a conundrum. Roughly: “I wrote the book my heart wanted me to write and now an agent says that there isn’t a market for it.”

And truthfully, I’ve seen variants of that basic email hundreds of times over the years. It’s a desperately common predicament.

What’s more, I know the feeling. When I first set out to write non-fiction, I had a great idea for a book. I’d take a look at British history through the prism of exceptionalism. All European countries have encountered plenty of plot and plague, regicide and warfare, invasion and insurrection. But in what ways was Britain’s story genuinely distinctive? What really stood out as exceptional?

The answer turned out to be quite a lot. There was plenty of substance there for a book.

I started to write my non-fiction book proposal. It was obvious, for example, that I needed a chapter on the British navy. (Did you know that Britain once had more warships than the entire rest of the world combined?) So I wrote a long, interesting chapter on all things naval.

I made it funny. If you write these things as an amateur, you have to offer the reader something in place of years of authority. So yes, people want to learn, but they want to learn in a non-scary way and if, every page or two, they get a laugh, then so much the better.

I wrote a couple of chapters of the book and sent them out to the guy who would go on to become my agent.

He liked my idea, but rejected the proposal.

The material I’d drafted – a passion project – simply didn’t sit with the market. Yes: the market was happy with a funny book about British history. Yes: my British exceptionalism theme could work well. But the way I’d approached things was still just too serious.

In short, he said no.

Over a ginger biscuit and a nice cup of tea, he explained to me why I was wrong. What I needed to do instead. What the market was after.

Now, if I’d persisted with my original plan, I’m pretty sure I’d have found some other agent to take me on. I’d probably have found a publisher, of some sort, at some price.

But –

In competitions between your heart and the market, you have to let the market win. Every time. I had the wisdom, back then, to listen to the guy-who-is-now-my-agent, and I went on revising that proposal until he was happy.

Instead of a 100,000+ word book with chapters of 10,000 words, I ended up with a 70,000 word book with chapters of 2-3,000 words.

The advance I received, as part of a two-book deal, was £175,000, or about $230,000. I’d guess that advance was well over ten times what I’d have got if I stuck to my original plan.

And that sounds like a sell-out, a lucrative sell-out.

But here’s the thing.

The book got better.

The book that went on to be published was better than the book I’d started writing. It was funnier. More engaging. More persuasive. Covered more material. Was more memorable.

By engaging seriously with feedback about the market, that book got better – and put a lot more money in my pocket.

Of the novels I’ve written, I can think of three that went through some serious editing between the first draft-for-a-publisher and the book that went to print.

The first of those turned from a pile of steaming garden-fertiliser to an adequately good book.

The second one turned from a baggy story to a taut one.

The third one dropped its bonkers-but-entertaining ending in favour of one that precisely married up with the story that had gone before.

Every time Mr Market won. Every time, the book got better.

That sounds like it shouldn’t be the case: surely your artistic soul trumps grubby materialism. Except that the market is, in effect, the body that figures out what most pleases readers. It does that in a way that’s deeply sensitive to genre (so, literary authors needs to bow to a different god than crime writers, for example.) And the market also knows everything about every book that has been published. It churns through all that data and pops out its answers.

If the market tells you, loud and clear, that your book isn’t yet working, that is almost certainly an indicator that your book needs tweaking. Or major surgery. Or, just possibly, lethal injection.

I don’t say that the market is going to be right about every book ever written. The market will never quite know what to make of books that really burst boundaries. And there’s always an exemption for genius. Those guys get to set their own rules.

But mostly? Books get better under the discipline of the market. It’s happened for me, every single time. Chances are, it’ll happen for you too.

Now over to you. Have you reworked books to suit the market? Or did you plan them with a view to sales? And have agents been mean and horrible about your work? And were they mostly right, mostly wrong, or mostly something else. Tell me your thoughts and let's all have a Heated Debate.

WH Davies was the kind of writer you don’t get so much now. No writers’ groups for him.  No self-promotion on Twitter.

Born to a poor Welsh family in the late nineteenth century, he became apprenticed to a maker of picture frames. Bored and wanting adventure, he started to take casual work and travel, sailing to America in 1893.

There, he spent six years as a tramp – a hobo. He stole free rides from freight trains, took bits and bobs of casual work, begged door to door. He worked on cattle ships across the Atlantic. Occasionally he passed his winters in a series of Michigan jails (by agreement with those jailing him; they profited from the arrangement.)

In 1908, in London, he heard about the Klondike gold rush and sailed to Canada. He jumped on board a freight train, hoping to cross the continent on it, but slipped and was caught under the wheels. He lost his foot immediately, then his leg below the knee.

He never made his fortune in a gold mine. He left his life of tramping behind him.

He returned to Europe, to London, and started to write poetry. He still had no money, and lived in hostels for the homeless, and in those places writing poetry was something to be done strictly in private. To raise the funds for his first self-published book of verse, he had to save some cash. That meant leaving the hostel to spend six months tramping the countryside, living in barns.

In 1905, he published his work, and sold it by pushing his 200 copies through the letterboxes of wealthy literati, asking for payment if they liked it.

And –

Enough of them did.

Some high-minded journalists and other opinion-formers gradually got behind his work, and Davies gradually became a bestseller and a fixture (albeit an odd one) on the London literary scene.

He’s best known now for his memoir of those years a hobo – Autobiography of a Supertramp, a book I strongly recommend. And also for this:

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

And so on.

He’s right, isn’t he?

I’m signed up to some self-pub-oriented newsletters, and one of the things that I find permanently daunting about those things is the sheer damn productivity of some writers. Books, four or five of them a year. Ads on three platforms, expertly created, tested and monitored. And newsletters. And conferences. And podcasts. And – blimey.

Those guys probably work out four times weekly, arrange amazing date nights, and have everyone’s Christmas presents already bought and wrapped.

I’m not like that. Nor, most likely are you. Nor do you actually have to be like that to succeed.

And yes. I’m a big believer that the activity of “writing a book” needs to involve time spent at a laptop, hitting keys. If you don’t do that, you’re not a writer.

But the best ideas don’t always come from screentime. Sometimes you need to take the dogs for a walk. Or go for a swim. Or walk under green trees and watch where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

I’d say most of my biggest ideas have come that way. Never in isolation, of course. You also have to read your research. To start mapping your ideas on paper (or screen, or post-it notes, or an assembly of well-trained labradoodles.)

But still. That melting place in your brain where you are considering a problem without quite knowing that you’re considering it. That place where the light comes in sideways and finds new things to illuminate?

That place is precious, and we writers should treasure it.

Davies’ poem ends:

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

So that’s the message for this week. Take your phone or laptop and hurl it, right now, into the nearest duckpond. Walk until you see some wild clematis or a squirrel on manoeuvres.

Think of your characters, then forget them.

Let the magic happen.

And how about you? Is the nearest duckpond full of your expensively acquired electrical gadgets? Do you have to walk a very long way to find wild clematis? And where do you get your ideas? What do you do to encourage sweet inspiration to bless your endeavours? Let me know below and we'll all have a Heated Debate.

My last post was about –

Well, I can’t remember, because the thing that dominated your reactions afterwards was my use of y’all. In particular, I had people writing to me from Scotland, Northern Ireland & Australia telling me that I didn’t have to raid the American South to come with a perfectly good you-plural, when I could use a perfectly good Scottish/Irish/Aussie youse.

And youse feels just right. I’m going to use it more often from now on.

But that brings us on to the matter of which version of English we should respect as authoritative.

Standard British English (SBE), because the Queen speaks it? Standard American English (SAE), because Donald Trump speaks it (kinda)? Or maybe some other kind of English, because both those Englishes have had their turn in the sun?

The answer, of course, is that it’s a stupid question. No particular English is more authoritative or appropriate than another. You speak with (and write with) whatever’s right for the job at hand.

Now most of you, I expect, write in SBE or SAE, and I’m sure you do that proficiently enough. But what when you have a character who doesn’t speak one of those Englishes? Perhaps that character speaks (for example) African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)? Or perhaps they’re someone who speaks English, imperfectly, as a second language?

So how do you represent their dialogue on the page? How do you, in printed form, capture the way they speak?

Either way, you don’t necessarily want to stuff your SAE / SBE into the mouth of that character. That might show a kind of disrespect to the character and the language they speak. (Which would be stupid, not least because those other Englishes are quite often more expressive. Did you know, for example, that AAVE has a full four versions of the past tense: I been bought it, I done buy it, I did buy it, I do buy it? Sweet, huh? AAVE has three versions of the future too.)

So you’re determined to honour the status and expressive power of those other Englishes. But how?

Let’s say, for example, that you have a Yorkshireman as a character in your MS. (Yorkshire is a large and self-confident county in the North of England.) Let’s say your novel is set in the London advertising world. Most of your characters don’t talk Yorkshire. This particular one – we’ll call him Geoffrey – does. You want to mark the way he speaks as being different; that’s part of what makes him who he is. It’s part of the richness of your characters and the dialogues they get into.

Well, we could have our Geoffrey speak like this:

Ear all, see all, say nowt;
Eat all, sup all, pay nowt;
And if ivver tha does owt fer nowt –
 Allus do it fer thissen.

(That’s the ‘Yorkshire motto’ and translates as: Hear all, see all, say nothing. Eat all, drink all, pay nothing.  And if ever you do something for nothing – always do it for yourself.)

But doesn’t that look unbelievably patronising? We have our book full of London ad-world types, then in walks Geoffrey sounding like something dragged from the rougher end of one of the Bronte novels. It would be hard to have Geoffrey speak like that on the page and not somehow create the idea that he was comical, or stupid, or boorish, or ignorant.

The solution, of course, is precision. (Most things in writing are.)

Take a look at that motto again. Some of the words are exactly the same as Standard British English, but just rendered phonetically – ear for hear, ivver for ever. But why do that? We don’t generally write phonetically. When I talk, I’ll seldom pronounce the last g in going, though some English speakers would. So if you were writing a character like me in a novel, would you write goin’ for going? Surely not.

So rule 1 is: You don’t describe accents phonetically. Doing so just looks patronising and clumsy.

But that rams you straight into the second issue, which is: what do you do when you encounter a word (like the Yorkshire nowt) that just doesn’t exist in SAE or SBE?

And the answer there is equally obvious: nowt is a perfectly legitimate word. It just happens to be a Yorkshire one, not an SAE / SBE one.

So rule 2 is: You include non-standard words / phrases / grammar in exactly the way that your character would use them.

So we’d rewrite our Yorkshire motto as follows:

Hear all, see all, say nowt;
Eat all, sup all, pay nowt;
And if ever tha does owt for nowt
 Allus do it for thissen.

That removes the patronising phonetics, but honours the separateness of Yorkshire-ese by including its words and phrases in full. You haven’t lost a jot of local character. All you’ve lost is a metropolitan sneer towards non-SAE/SBE speakers.

If you wanted to tone this down a bit (and I would), I’d use always for allus, and maybe yourself for thissen. I’d probably also swap in you for tha, just because you want to nudge the reader about a character’s voice and accent. You don’t need to bellow.

And –

You can have fun. I once created a character who stemmed from the Orkney Islands, off the north Coast of Scotland. Even by Scottish standards, Orkney is remote – so much so that it spoke Norn (a version of Norse, the language of the Vikings) until a couple of hundred years ago. Since then, that Norn has softened out into Orcadian, which is a sister language to Scots, which is a sister language to English.

But –

It’s a strange and beautiful thing. The language is sort of comprehensible to a regular English speaker, but only just.

So on the one hand, my Orcadian character (Caff) says things like this:

‘Ye’r a guid peedie lassie. Th’ wurst damn cook a’m ever seen, but a guid lassie fur a’ that.’

You might not know what peedie means (small), but the rest of it is straightforward.

On the other hand, Caff also says things like this:

‘Thoo dohnt wahnt tae be skelp while turning,’ he says, as his hands show a big wave hitting the ship side-on as it turns. ‘If tha’ happens, we’ll hae oor bahookie in th’ sky in twa shakes o’ a hoor’s fud.’

And this:

‘Whitna raffle wur geen and gottin wursels intae noo, eh? A right roo o’ shite.’

I wouldn’t say that those are totally incomprehensible – roo of shite means roughly what you think it might – but you wouldn’t especially want to be tested on the detail.

When writing that kind of thing, you want to dance your reader along a line of comprehension / bafflement. I reckoned that readers wouldn’t know what skelp meant, so I added half a line of explanatory text about waves hitting ships to make it clear. But whitna raffle, roo of shite, bahookie in th’ sky and the rest of it – well, I just wanted to dangle those lovely, strange phrases in front of my readers’ noses, so we could enjoy their Nordic, sea-green beauty without comment.

My character’s reactions to this dialogue were much as yours or mine would be. She understood some of what she was being told, but not all of it. Her own ripples of confusion added a layer of enjoyment to the interactions.

Oh, and if you’re sitting there quietly impressed by my mastery of Orcadian … well, I did what I could using a dictionary that I bought online. Then I sent the relevant chunks of my draft to the editor of The Orcadian newspaper, and he was kind enough to correct my text where it needed it.

That’s all from me. Youse have a good weekend.

But tell me what strange and beautiful accents do you incorporate in your work? And how do you represent them on the page? Do you have especial bugbears? Or things you love. Or bits of dialogue that you use as a model. Drop in a comment below and let's all have a Heated Debate.