As a writer of fiction and as a teacher of fiction writing, I know that the techniques of writing can be taught. But writing fiction involves more than the mastering of technique. My students have sometimes wished for a book that would not only provide advice about skills, but would somehow urge and inspire the reader to write and continue to write. I hope that Dear Writer will fulfil the students’ wishes and answer the needs of all new writers.

In other words, she has perceived a need and done her best to supply it. This is the best reason in the world for writing a book and is therefore an excellent start.

Many books written chiefly to advise and instruct and nearly all such books on creative writing have, misleadingly, a sort of leaden jolliness of tone but are in fact profoundly depersonalised affairs: the disembodied voice of authority speaks to the anonymous hordes. This is quite a hard thing to avoid when you are writing a book intended to teach people something, but Carmel Bird has overcome the problem with a single, brilliantly simple idea. Dear Writer takes the form of a series of letters written by Virginia O’Day of the O’Day Manuscript Assessment Service, and addressed to the nameless author –the ‘Dear Writer’ – who has seen her ad in the paper and sent her for assessment a story called ‘The Scream at Midnight’ which, as can be seen from its title alone, needs a lot of work. In the course of her correspondence with this woman, Virginia rather cunningly manages to get through a great deal of general and specific advice on the writing of fiction.

What this means, of course, is that Dear Writer is itself a kind of fiction. We have two characters, working their way over a period of time through a situation which calls for resolution – that is, a plot of sorts. Dear Writer is a kind of epistolary novella, in which Carmel Bird provides illustrations of her own advice on such things as characters, style, point of view, titles, and knowing what not to say.

So there are two quite distinct kinds of readerly pleasure involved here: the pleasure of gaining the advice and enjoying the style and panache with which it’s given, but also, and perhaps more so, the special fiction-reading pleasure that comes from collusion with the author – the active use of a readerly imagination to visualise the situation and to guess at the things which remain unsaid. All we have in front of us is Virginia’s letters, but from them we can infer and deduce a great deal about her character and that of the Dear Writer, as well as about the other documents in the case – the other side of the correspondence, and the successive drafts of ‘The Scream at Midnight’.

This story – which has, we are led to believe, improved dramatically by the end of the book – is used as a focus and a testing ground for the assorted Advice to Writers which is the real subject of Dear Writer. Putting the advice in the form of these letters, and attaching it to a particular short story, makes it both more personal and more specific; what this book does is show us teaching in practice. And the ‘inspiration-and­encouragement’ element, which might have rung a little hollow if addressed impersonally and directly to the book’s readers, is much more convincing as it’s presented here – as a personal address from one character to another. (Mind you, I’ve seen enough unpublished fiction in my time – published, too, if it comes to that – to know that there are an awful lot of people who ought to be inspired and encouraged not to write fiction, and I’m sure Carmel Bird would agree with me, but that’s another issue altogether.)

Dear Writer is the product of its author’s experience as a manuscript assessor and a teacher of fiction writing, and it therefore addresses itself to new and aspiring writers rather than to established or experienced ones. That’s not to say that the latter couldn’t profit by it, only that the prose is simple and lucid and the technical advice fairly basic. There’s a chapter, for example, on beginnings and endings (‘You need to be brave to remove the beginning and the ending of your story’); an excellent chapter on the importance of rhythm in prose writing (‘The satisfactory sentence has the shape of the experience it describes’); a chapter on overwriting, which gives the usual advice about the dangers of adjectives and adverbs, and which the hasty or careless reader could easily misinterpret as an instruction to do away with them altogether – a wasteful practice and not to be recommended.

There are also ‘practical’ chapters, on word processors and such, on the preparation of manuscripts, on publication and story competitions and strategies for familiarising oneself with the mysterious workings of the literary world. There’s also one lovely chapter on priorities and the nature of dedication, unequivocally entitled ‘Giving Up Housework’ (‘You have the choice of a clean house or a finished story. The choice is yours.’)

Throughout the book, however, Bird reverts again and again to the point which is clearly dearest to her heart and which aspiring writers often miss, the point which seems to have been at the bottom of her decision to write the book in the first place. In her introduction she says:

I emphasise my belief, based on my own experience as a writer, and strengthened by my observation of the progress of many students, that the source for the material of fiction is in the life, the experience, the memory, the self of the writer.

There are risks in this – of encouraging unmediated autobiography, or preoccupation with self-expression and creativity at the expense of craft and care – but Bird skirts them skilfully, and warns against such lapses. And she uses, with endearing fearlessness, words like ‘love’ and ‘courage’ and ‘passion’ in her lists of things a writer needs to have: ‘If you love your material, are passionate about it, you won't make mistakes with its details, and furthermore, your love will be a persuasive element in your work.’

How funny this book often is, and how beautifully some of it is written (one of the chapters, for instance, is headed ‘The Name of Your Angel is Desire’, which had me transfixed for a good ten minutes), I will leave to readers to discover. There are a number of good reasons to buy and read this book, not only if you’re an aspiring writer but also if you’re a student of literature, or anybody who loves to read about writing. If you teach writing yourself, it’s a godsend: I’ve been racking my brains for weeks trying to think of ideas for a one-day writing seminar I have to conduct soon, but thanks to Carmel Bird I no longer have a problem.