Me Currant Projeckt

My current writing project is called The House of Writers, a novel set in a likely future where literature is as welcome as sheep droppings in a cup of Horlicks. Forced to work for the expanding ScotCall empire, most writers have packed it in for safe desk jobs answering queries about anything and everything for a population of ill-educated bozos, while only a handful remain in a raggedy office block on the outskirts of a small rural province where Scotland’s writers turn out work for a narrow audience of unhinged freaks who still like to read. The protagonist, Cal, is an idealistic and ambitious youngster who believes he can make a name for himself in the House, while his family are assimilated into the ScotCall encroach.

Each chapter finds Cal moving up the nine floors of the building—from High Quality Literary Fiction all the way up to Bestsellers up top, each populated by various eccentrics whose works have been warped and exaggerated at the whims of their paymasters. The experimental writers lurk in the basement, breaking out occasionally to cause mischief on the higher floors, steal food, and plan ways to strangle ScotCall with their own phone lines. As Cal advances, ScotCall steals office space with the assistance of his poisonous sister Kirsty, who delights in the systematic destruction of all pointless scribblers.

The House of Writers is an anarchic comedy, with no pretensions to subtlety or mainstream acceptance. The idea is to indulge in wordplay, bouncy and playful language with a funky rhythm, and sheer stylistic exuberance as a celebration of what is brilliant about literature and the reading of, and why books should take precedence over everything else, especially food and procreation. I also want to posit an alternative to the book-burning visions of Bradbury et al and suggest literature will always exist, but will simply get marginalised into obsolescence, or buried under a mound of trash, and people’s standards will sink so low, Everyman’s Dan Brown editions will be released by 2070.

This is a sketch of the novel. So far the surreal comedy is leading me into other areas of (unwelcome?) strangeness. By imposing a structure on the book, hopefully my “freewheeling” tendencies with regard to plot and character won’t lead to the sort of tedium that awaited readers of my last comedy, A Postmodern Belch. We shall see. And once again, methinks I am writing essentially for niches too small to be niches, but so be it. Long live my beloved niches. 

Turning Misery Into Art

One of the most disappointing realisations I have faced as a writer is that living through unpleasant or dark times does not automatically bestow me with an instinctive talent for writing about these dark or unpleasant times, nor does it give me instant access to the necessary emotional tools to create powerful and haunting prose wrought from the blackest caverns of my suffering. A prose style has to be sculpted to accommodate one’s flair for language, stylistic quirks, eye for detail or character insight, around the sympathetic or natural part of one’s personality responsible for the more arresting emotional peaks in a piece of work.
 

If anything the more suffering a person endures, the less likely they will be able to express themselves in lyrical streams of moving prose. Too much suffering creates psychological barriers between you and the work (writing opens old traumatic wounds), or leaves you too depressed or damaged to stare down the page (because drinking before the TV is nicer). I am not in the business of composing lyrical and emotional prose, but I do write about past miseries in the hope of connecting with the reader for a sort of shared-nod experience in between making them titter or entertaining with the language and pace and dialogue and characters in my stories.
 

This leads into the problem of trying to capture the intensity of the “minor emotions” that make up our lives. Say I was sitting alone, as all writers do, one evening and wanted to capture the slight melancholy of this loneliness in the story I was writing—not to ring tears from the reader, but make them feel a pang of semi-sympathy by way of recognition. To say James was sitting all alone in his room suggests the character’s own self-pity, and rather than feeling for him we laugh or smile at his sadness, because the very fact of someone’s loneliness suggests a personal failure that could have been avoided through being a less hopeless human specimen. We expect better of our characters. Why couldn’t he go out and make friends? Why should we feel sorry for someone who has only brought this feeling on himself? Our own experiences harden us against the experiences of people in books. Or even worse, our own feelings written on the page seem simply trivial and pathetic without sufficient artistic heft to turn them into valid literary emotions worthy of book-to-human responses.

In my own fiction, I am only interested in “minor emotions”— lonely sighs and self-pitying reflexes: failures of people to pull their socks up and solve their problems and arrive at the moments that precipitate “sweeping emotions.” People who can’t find a partner let alone lose them in a car crash. People who never find themselves involved enough to care if the whole team gets cholera. I want my stories to pirouette between these minor moments: I want my narratives to be largely comic, frosted with moments of pathos and sadness that create a coherent emotional tone behind the comedy. If I can achieve this I hope to represent the pervading sadness behind most human life and aim for a fairer depiction of the stoic emotional tapestry that makes up reality over the more manipulative focus on the “sweeping” that dogs mass-market prose.

My Year in Stories

The first quarter of the year was devoted to completing Arlene’s Atoms, my fingers-crossed-first-official-novel-with-a-proper-publisher-with-a-proper-desk-and-everything. The submission process was slow but steady—after sending the novel to agents and picking up the rejections from the sorting office, I sent sample chapters to promising smaller-but-more-suitable publishers. I spent the mid-part of the year working on an experimental novella, The State I Am In, a form of fictional autobiography that takes its title from the Belle & Sebastian song. More recently, I’ve been working on a second novella called My Body of Work which uses the collage technique I deployed in three extremely pleasurable-to-write pieces (one below) published in delicious venues. Busy? Yes. But not enough. “I could always have written more!” cries the dying writer.

My short fiction output this year is naturally shorter than 2011, and most of these stories were written that year and published in this one. I lost track of when each story was published.

The longest story of the year, at 7000 words, was Maybe Tomorrow at the online zine Blue Lake Review. The story was an attempt to grapple on a somewhat serious level with social alienation, loneliness and depression while using various playful techniques to lift the story from the doldrums. Four socially alienated characters attend a bogus therapy group where they are asked to draw up new routines for each other and made to abide by them. The story pays a slight homage to Gilbert Sorrentino and BS Johnson with the typographical fancies and close third-person narration while trying to break away from those postmodern influences to touch upon something more genuinely melancholy. The zine was unable to reproduce the tables I had in the story, making the fourth part harder to navigate.

A Disquisition on the Erogenous Impulse in Prose Narratives was published in April at Martian Lit. One of three collage pieces, these stories were an attempt to cope with my spiralling distraction levels while writing and the audience’s limited attention spans with short fiction from unknowns on the internet. (I’m still convinced no one reads short fiction from unknowns on the internet apart from friends of the unknowns—I have no friends, hence no readers). I felt my disaffection with character, plotline and story could be resolved by choosing an unusual theme and constructing mini-stories, self-commenting attention-seeking bits, snatches of dialogue, satire and other areas of strength for me. Time will tell as I complete my current project which exhausts this technique.

The Four Seasons of Michael Michael at Laptop Lit is written in a series of internal monologues. It was an attempt to tell the story of one man, Michael Michael, a toff going insane in his country estate, entirely from the perspectives of his afflicted family. The Wonderfully Fecund World of the Hendersons at Piker Press was inspired by the protagonist in Harry Mathews’s The Journalist who becomes obsessed with composing every miniscule detail of his day in his journal at the expense of his sanity. The story has novel potential as there can be an unlimited number of narrators and contradicting plotlines.

New Zealand magazine OneTitle, now defunct, published Writing For Carol. This story addresses my crisis about writing for an unknown, unseen and (in the case of obscure writers) nonexistent audience. For whom are we writing? People like us? Just us? Does our work reach the sort of people we want? My protagonist in this story tries tailoring all his fiction to meet one person’s needs, finding more pleasure in the act of writing when his work leads him to actually connect with this one person for real, in the flesh. Imagine such a thing!

My only print publications in 2011 were The Little Book of Nothing—a story from last year republished in the Writings on the Wall anthology, and an edited version of The Drunk & the Godly in Octavius Magazine. (Now an e-book only—grr! Full text sans edits, here). My favourite publication, which I’ve yet to see, is the Oulipo homage From A to Z published in Beeswax Magazine. The first section is an alphabetical lipogram and the second an alphabet-shaped backwards lipogram (the text takes the shape of the alphabet, omitting each letter being described). My faith in pointless constraints and innovative batshittery remains unbroken!

As an experiment this year, I self-published my first polished and, uh, serious novel A Postmodern Belch. I wasn’t doing it properly, tirelessly virally promoting my novel on the social networks and so on, because I don’t have any influential friends (except Horst). I did inform my chums on Goodreads, and some of them kindly bought copies, others reviewed the book in return for a pdf edition. The book’s page is full of splendid parody reviews written in the spirit of the book, which was more delightful than making money, in a way. A small way. If by any chance you are criminally insane and want to buy a copy—here! (Seriously, I had more fun writing the book than anything else, I hope that shows).

Here’s to 2013!

Distraction or, Look at that Shiny Thing

I have come to accept constant distraction as a part of the writing process. Having written with permanent internet access for most of my life, I can’t switch it off and concentrate fully on the open text. Because so many things swirl around in my head from sentence to sentence, I need to be able to click away, to check emails and Goodreads notifications and Facebook every four minutes. Things like: is this sentence as good as the preceding sentence? is this the best word choice here, what about these seven different words instead, is this working in the piece overall, what’s missing from this scene, is this the sort of thing I should be writing, what do I want to say here, do I want to say anything etc, etc, etc.

By keeping the internet on I am distracting all the wagging tongues in my head constantly questioning every word I write, trying to undermine my progress. But recently, I’ve found myself even more restless when writing short stories. Either I am coming around to the usefulness of the short form, or looking to evolve a long-ish short story form for the perpetually distracted reader of these times. I wrote two collage-like pieces called Digressiana that consist of complete microfictions, stories that break off halfway, little weird doodles, self-commenting snarks and bits that run throughout the piece as a whole.

The effect—which I tried last year in a story that simulated channel-hopping—is to create a form that responds to the contemporary attention span—esp. the online attention span (where these pieces may be published, if anyone publishes them at all), where the outcome of (or details pertaining to) one story is not necessarily all the reader cares about. Having many, many stories running at the same time, stories that are dropped or resumed, interrupted, replaced with better or worse ones, might be an interesting response to the distracted reader (and writer) dilemma. Or it might make it worse, by simply encouraging the problem. Who knows. Time will tell as I explore the form. Oh look—a shiny thing!

Good Enough?

How do we decide a story is ready for publication? If we proofread, edit, and tinker with the story, deciding it reads smoothly and makes enough sense to be read by others, is that enough? NO? Apparently not. I have difficulty with this. I wrote a story this week, ‘Writing For Carol,’ about someone who writes for the image of a random girl on the internet, basing the story’s content on what he imagines this girl would like judging from her photo. Then he encounters this girl on the subway and his story takes an entirely different shape as he stalks her to glean more information about his potential audience.

I contrived an ending where the piece of writing the narrator submits for Carol’s edification is not a story obsessively tailored to her reading requirements, but an honest account of the narrator’s devious acts, plus an apology and entreaty. I felt this represented an emotional breakthrough for the character, who had been an unreliable narrator up until this point, and conveyed a general truth about writing ‘for’ a particular group of people—writing needn’t be contrived for an audience, it should simply be as honest and direct as the author can be, with no pretence or deception. All good.

But is it enough? If I write a story over several days, is that enough time? I suppose the most important questions are what does this story achieve? what does this story do that is unique? do I achieve the aims I have for the piece? So can I answer all these questions? Well, I wanted to explore the reader-writer contract on a micro-level, the mania that comes from thinking about the eyes that might scan our words and seeking to please the owners of those eyes. If we could view our audience like musicians, would that make writing easier? Would we riff out metaphors and do long descriptive solos like Clapton twiddling on his Stratocaster? Throw in a moving description of a beautiful creature to attract the women?

And build a story into this. I am happy with the story, but I have no idea what is “good enough” these days. Anyway, there I am, posing with a nut. Life is good.

Nonanononowrinomo

See, if everyone in the world tries their hand at writing novels, this unbalances the competition levels. What if these people unearth some raw writing talent and score bestsellers with the minimum of effort, while life-long grafters sweat out their twelfth debut, beating off the taxman with a shorn-down pencil? It isn’t likely, granted. What’s more likely is they’ll write a sprawling unfocused mess, one tenth of which is reasonably written. Still. Do we want to encourage untapped talent when there’s already too much to go around?

No other professions have nanomos. What about learning how to use ASCII programming to decode old computer files? Nanoasciipomo? Or how to fix a broken carburettor on the 1950s Buick 6? Nanobufixmo? Why do people think all novel-writing requires is being present at the computer enough to clack out 50000 words? (Which isn’t a novel, anyway, that’s technically a novella. 75000 plus is a novel).

See, the problem with speed-writing for me is the misleading excitement. It feels good to get all those words out, to loose those ideas on the page and get caught up in the fun of writing off the cuff. But at some point, the writing slips into stylistic repetition, flailing form, shambolic structural disaster. All the worst parts of one’s writing tend to pronounce themselves again and again. And since there’s no time to sit and consider solving these problems, the only option is to soldier on making the same mistakes for a whole MS.

Then again, this isn’t universal. Some might plan their work to the letter and use the month to knock out a formidable first draft, using the community as a support bolster. But it pains me to think of all those useless manuscripts festering in drawers condemned to a life of Stendhalian half-finishedness, when with a little more nurturing they could sing like canaries.

Talking Punctuation

Hubert Selby Jr’s work is known for its strange punctuation, deployed aesthetically to depict life among slumland characters, to give a sense of disconnection: from society, sobriety, sanity. In particular, long before text messaging turned the nation into wanton apostrophobes, Selby was writing without them: first because his typewriter was faulty, later because the technique was so effective at creating his nightmarish worlds, he made it a part of his style.

So what other punctuation mishaps might we palm off as technical decisions? Bad grammar or punctuation is usually ascribed to poor writing by characters, such as the hilarious school feedback in B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo, where the teacher asks his pupils to write, anonymously, what they really think of him. Or the appalling letters from the Mexican escorts to the hack writer in Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew.

Is there any value in “poor” punctuation techniques? Say I run together words without spaces,like that several times,to give the impression of a speedily written text, something being written at haste because of unseen threats? More or less effective than working with register and rhythm? Or how about lots of lovely stabbing em dashes—that—link—together—to—create—a—sense—of—either—fast—breathing—or—some—weird—daisychain—effect? Wouldn’t that look purdy?

More punctuation fun is needed in novels. People still have the temerity to correct the error in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake by adding the apostrophe when he sank almost two decades of effort into breaking down all known rules of language to give us a brighter future. We owe it to him to really shake things up . . . you, knowits TRUE.

Story Structure

The rules of this new revamped QoD dictate I must produce three posts per week. Now, that may suit your tireless, endless, unstoppable breed of blogger (naming no names—cough Hart Johnson cough) but this idle thumb-twiddler finds such a regime oppressive.

Regardless, hi. Today I want to talk about a story I recently wrote and interesting structures. I like structure. I like structured days, structured months, structured sex and structured structures. In stories, structures are delicious. They help generate those other less important things—things like character (boo) or plot (booboo) or setting (boobooboo).

You’re asking: how can structure help character? If you opt for a simple three-act set-up, you’ll need your character to do certain things: to change, grow or go beyond himself. (Yes, I hate these things too, but I paid £4000 to learn they are sometimes important. So booboo). Your character will adapt in tandem with the structure, pulled along by the structure into his actions and consequences. And plot, well—plot thrives on structure! Otherwise, plot would be running around all over the shop, not knowing where to end or begin! I admit, structure doesn’t affect setting a GREAT deal. But if your structure permits long digressions, the scenery might come into it somewhere. Unlike Chekhov, who used scenery to determine almost everything else. Dear silly Anton!

But back to me. The story I wrote, ‘On/Off,’ is a structural experiment. We begin with our generative device—form—the form in this case being a reader flipping through TV channels, in the story ‘channels’ of narrative. Each narrative strand presents a murder (it’s a genre piece, so it seems) of different sorts, presenting the elements of a basic murdered husband and wife case in variations across five distinct narratives (distinct in style/tone). The idea was to create five contradictory outcomes, weaving various hypotheses around the murdered and the murderer, and create a story that functioned on its own terms.

This is why structure matters (well, form as well—in fact form is better than structure, but let’s not upset the structure of this post). It’s essential for the writer who feels himself at sea in conventions, and yes, it’s important to master conventions before they’re muddled with, but it doesn’t mean he can’t play around with them if it helps get the story out. So there. That’s all for tonight. I’m off to write a jeremiad on the toilet seat.

Why You Should Write in Complete Silence — A Post With a Tennis-Based Numerical Grouping System and Sly Attacks on Music Spammers

The problem with listening to music when writing can be unpacked via the following numerical volleys:

Serve 1: MUSIC IS MOVING.

Music tickles the parts of our emotional receptors we don’t have the time to understand. We don’t know why Billy Joel makes us weep with pleasure or why Bananarama make us break out in hotflushes of tears and love when that soaring chorus kicks in. But it does, and that doesn’t help us write a sentence. All we’d ever write is OMG I LUV YOU BILLY JOEL LICK ME LICK ME LICK ME, OH BILLY!

Serve 2: MUSIC HAS WORDS.

When we write we need words, as a rule. It’s a good idea on the whole to use words, and not, say, numbers or invisible words, like blank spaces. We could use symbols, like →→→→→→→→→→←←←←←←←←←← but that’s not going to outclass Javier Marias, is it? So we end up putting song lyrics papa don’t preach subliminally into our like a virgin text. And BMG will kill us music makes the people come together for that!

Serve 3: YOUR MUSIC IS NOT AS GOOD AS MINE.

One reason the 30 Day Song Challenge on Facebook irked me was that music love is (and should be) a selfish thing. No one really “shares” a playlist. People post links to the music they like and expect people to listen and congratulate them on their fine aesthetic standards and melodic ear. Nope! We hate it! All your music sucks! When you give a friend a CD of your favourite band, they will put this CD behind the microwave for fourteen years unless you ring them up every hour asking them HAVE YOU LISTENED YET? This has nothing to do with writing, I only wanted to make that point.

Serve 4: MUSIC DISTRACTS.

This is mainly an extension of the first two points, but it’s true. Music wants to be listened to and analysed like a poem or Lydia Davis. Or, at least, the annoying serious literate rock stuff does. The Smiths and co. They are “poets” and want their words to be studied in tandem with the music. So you can’t write and listen as they will bitch about you not paying attention, not understanding them, then sue you for accidental plagiarism.

Serve 5: HOW CAN YOU ACCESS YOUR BRAIN WITH THAT RACKET GOING ON?

Unless you write entirely from the subconscious like some robotic Joyce Carol Oates android baby mother child doctor creature thing android monkey caravan, you’ll need to think about the order which in place you words. You’ll need to spend twenty minutes choosing between screamed or shrieked, then delete the whole sentence and story, then read an AL Kennedy blog and want to punch her smug prize-gobbling gub in (kidding—I like AL, but you have to bitch-slap the best from time to time), then have nine baths and smack your kids. (Why don’t they just shut UP?) You can’t think straight if Mick Hucknall is prancing around your perineum trying to juice the sluice.*

Serve 6: YOU LIKE TO SING!

Listen to you! Golden tonsils! Listen to you belt out that Queen number when you should be writing a paragraph of description about how Kerry feels abstaining from alcohol after her cousin Jim forced her to drink her body weight in Hooch that night in Invergordon. You can’t stop yourself, you little diva! Given the chance, you’d do a SuBo and light up the sky with your money lungs, even though you sound like a cat smashing a violin against a piano in a room full of people being stabbed outside Kelis’s recording studio.**

Serve 7: THE CHAIN OF SONG NEVER ENDS.

With song comes memory, and with memory comes more songs and more memories. You should listen to music that has no effect on you whatsoever. Background fuzz. This is why people write in cafes. Coldplay in the background and that numbing DJ prattle. The numbness of FM radio has probably lead to some moments of real clarity and artistic accomplishment.

Your serve. Game, set and match, silence!

_________

* I have no idea what this means.

** Think again when you say ‘I like Kelis,’ because you’ve probably been conditioned by Ingsoc’s Ministry of Shit Pop.

The Tug-of-War Between Great Fatty Sentences Stuffed With Mustard and Mayo, and Slim Ones

What do we talk about when we talk about concision? How does a clipped sentence acquire the complexity of a page-fattening assault of semicolons and digressions? Is this a genuine artform or a logical editing and writing process? Can we make everything significant?

When I write, I set out to craft each line with care and precision, tweaking and trimming those supersized lines, those paunches on the svelte waistline of my paragraphs. Usually this approach lasts four minutes and I suck up words like a fatso gobbling burgers at the onset of famine. Afterwards, I retch out carbs until my story struts along the catwalk with the buffed elegance of a supermodel. The end product: a sort of unsteady toddle-wobble. Like a finding one’s balance after deep-gut liposuction.

It seems to me two accordions are being squeezed in the same direction. The first accordion, style, wants to show its flair and pizzazz, wants to make its mark on the page, waggling those buns of skill. The second accordion, the inner editor, knows the value of concision, how stories thrive on packing as much meaning into one sentence as possible, not cling-filming it over the whole piece. We want the freedom to write without the pressure of this micro-burden, without having to think on a line-by-line basis. But want our works lean. Sharp.

So what are benefits of sentence-by-sentence agony? Will spending an hour on one line lead to a sentence strung together by a dozen contrasting ideas, fighting for attention, or a shining little profound lovely? For me, too much chopping and changing can lead to post-op face-freaks. The process can be torturous if we take an example:

The man sat on the chair.

We take a boring a little sentence (which we shouldn’t be writing anyway), then we set at with our callipers. We want the tone to be humorous, to reveal a little character, and add description:

The plump little humbug plopped his buttocks on the hard-backed hot-seat.

We step away from this puffed-up sentence, then tinker. We argue to ourselves that the rhythm falters at ‘buttocks,’ where there should be a similar descriptive to match the multi-syllable counterparts for the man and the seat. So we torture the sentence further:

The plump little humbug plopped his big blue buttocks on the hard-backed hot-seat.

Now we’ve added ‘big blue,’ which doesn’t work since buttocks aren’t blue and it’s not clear enough to refer to his trousers (and who wears blue trousers, even in a ‘humorous’ sentence?), we’re adding to the carb content of this sentence. We’re adding detail, but we’re so fat we’re almost shut-ins. So, in a panic, we chop out some carb:

The plump humbug plopped his butt on the rickety old seat.

This sentence is still, quite clearly, a turd. Too much is being stuffed into the sentence to get across as much as possible while still retaining the humour (or style) and keeping it slim. So in a further panic, after staring at it for an hour, we trim it right down:

Mike sat down.

This tells us two things: his name and his physical state. It doesn’t show that the writer knows what he’s doing. (He isn’t, but good writing makes it look as though he does). Next we do a little word analysis of previous sentences. ‘Plump’ is a good comic word, with its pinging P sound. So plump stays. Yes. We don’t need ‘humbug’. It sounds a little forced, too carb next to plump. We don’t need ‘plopped’ either. Nor a funny word for the buttocks. The whole sentence reeks of trying too hard. And trying to hard is possibly the biggest hurdle of the writer seeking concision. Trying too hard to lard in info to make that golden sentence. How about:

Mike, plump and proud, sat on the crooked chair.*

I like this version since it reveals the comedic fatness and ‘proud’ (depending on the context), might refer to a moment of personal pride before he approaches the chair or his general demeanour. I like ‘crooked’ for chair as it’s literal and anthropomorphises the chair a wee bit. The double alliteration isn’t favourable, but can be overlooked for now.

So can we define concision as, essentially, a careful and precise word choice? Why not. When sentences get fat is when they have too many words signifying nothing. Or too many words with basic, simple meanings, giving the prose nothing but a surface. I think creating line-by-line depth involves making individual choices, weighing them against alternatives, then assessing their function in the sentences before and after. Which means the concision process, then, is probably better saved for draft number two.

This may sound basically obvious, but it’s simple to forget when faced with the blank page and apathy. Next time: how to bake a dolphin.

____

* Note this is supposed to be an example of an OK sentence, not a flabbergastingly good one.

Creative Non-Fiction – Second Slurpings

I thought I’d add to the insightful and delicious posts written on this topic (a staggering sumtotal of one) with a brand new sense-check-point. (A point to sense-check).

TANGENT: This blog used to be a place where I poured opinions and thoughts into the vacant punchbowl of my unconscious. Most of the time I spend reading novels and writing fiction and engage in no conversations about actual occurrences taking place in the actual world. The vacuum I have chosen to inhabit is one built on a foundation of misanthropic distance, a poor vantage point at the outpost of human suffering.

I am planning to write a creative non-fiction book about gaming addiction. Our classes have primped us for the task: I now have clear ideas about structure, tone and narrative position (exclusive terms for MA students! terms I would not have used over a year ago!) and look forward to sinking my teeth into this unfathomable undertaking.

TANGENT: The phrase ‘non-fiction’ still sends me lunging under the desk in terror. When I was a wayward undergrad and looked to the future I saw two paths: decadence and penury as a writer, or teaching snotball kiddies in Caldercruix High School. I chose the former. I have no authority to impart. I am not a voice of authority: I take notes, I listen to the wisdom of others. Facts and their arrangement is not my trade.

Right now I’m working on a detailed book proposal. (This is a lie. I spent the weekend reading McSweeney’s and the rather fabulous Dubravka Ugrešić. But let’s pretend). The proposal shouldn’t be an insult to the senses if I assume the reins of this bolting colt and take authorial control like a big grownup writer who knows what he wants.

I am concerned about research. I have a short attention span for facts and will have to process these truth-bombs in short shocks. To counter each truthfulness gleaned from the internet’s banks of bullshit I will need a shot of memoir action to keep me going. Which explains the memoir/investigation structure I’ve chosen for this purpose. Help to be found in the strategic arrangement of pages and their contents.

TANGENT: A train station opened in my hometown last month. When I went there, this ludicrous zigzag staircase unfurled along the line beside a car park barren of cars and a platform barren of life. Since I was a child there has only been one direction out of there, and the option to go RIGHT opened up such a wound of space I burst into tears.

The course has been discursive, with guests such as Kate Summerscale, David Miller, David Robinson and Edward Hollis who each contributed invaluable information on proposals, structuring and tickling the investigative spirit. Beneath this impenetrable cloak of despair I wear, this sardonic waistcoat I trail around like a string of porky entrails, I feel optimistic.

TANGENT: Optimistic being a synonym for delusional.

Creative Non-Fiction — First Fumblings

When we write stories we devise strategies to help us implant personal information. Perhaps the protagonist is a brilliant detective who happens to have acne and a limp. (Like you). Perhaps the story takes place near a gasworks and smells of sewage. (Like you). Perhaps the character speaks in tirelessly witty phrases that perfectly sum up the zeitgeist. (You wish).

Aren’t these stories merely an indirect way of discussing what most matters to us: ourselves? Is there anything more important in life than what is happening to each of us right here, right now? Why do we post Facebook bulletins with such urgency or write blogs talking up the significance of our every bowel movement?

Fiction for some can be such a dead-end. I’ve read stories drawn from personal experience that obscure the truth in an attempt to honour those involved or draw attention away from themselves, through embarrassment or not having dealt with the experience emotionally. The result is a mess. In some cases, it would clearly be easier to write about “an issue” using memoir as a springboard.

I’m starting a creative non-fiction module this week. Right now, the genre appears to be both pulpit and confessional. The ‘non-fiction’ element implies reportage and information and fact-enforced analysis. The ‘creative’ element opens up a whole box of possibilities. It suggests narrative, entertainment, a license to take risks. It invites the stuff of literature into the hallowed realm of fact.

For fiction writers who write “topical” books, it seems creative nonfiction is a much better fit. Jodi Picoult went to live among the Amish to write her novel Plain Vomit then wrote a protagonist clearly based on herself. Why the rigmarole? Why not write first-hand about the experience and the narratives within the real Amish community? Why feed us clichés and tired plots when the facts might be twice as interesting?

More on this as the crow flies. These are my first fumblings.

Ordinary Mania

Today was one of those eureka days, where things finally clicked in my brain. I’ve been working on my novel Arlene’s Atoms for nigh on two years now and have made the decision to scrap the protagonist. I made this decision by having a nervous breakdown then talking the story through with Mrs Q who urged me on with the manuscript.

The story wasn’t working in the first person perspective of a childish woman in her twenties, so the narrative will be in the third person from the perspective of a Swedish academic. I spent time working on the language of Arlene (ex-protag) and decided her voice wasn’t interesting enough to drive this novel. This is such a relief to me, as I was an inch away from giving up the story completely, which would’ve been a copout after so much work.

Unfortunately, I submitted a synopsis of my novel as an assessment which now contradicts the new synopsis. Oh dear. Still, making my academic the protagonist will allow me to be more original with the structure and inventiveness of this draft. Frankly, I need something that will get me excited about the story again. I was close to madness.

Sometimes it’s helpful to be driven to lunacy to force you into making big decisions. Not pleasant, certainly, but there is always the day after to take a bath and stitch up the scars.

Regional news: the snow has melted into piles of mucky ice. It’s like Brooklyn during the garbage strike. (Or Harlem as is). Truly revolting and another good reason to remain indoors reading and having nervous breakdowns. I've read some stonking books this month, among them Heartsnatcher by Boris Vian and Take Five by D. Keith Mano. Round-up in seventeen days!

Excuses, Executions

No-No #1: Apologising in dialogue for your ineptitude.

“You can’t put all your eggs in one chicken before it’s hatched,” Momus said.

“What?” Mimus asked.

“Oh, ignore me. I’m always mixing my metaphors.”

“You know what my mother used to say. If you can’t catch the cat, catch as catch can,” Momus said.

“What?”

“Oh, don’t listen to me. I was never any good at proverbs.”

No-No #2: Geographical idiocy to avoid research.

“Where is it?” Memus asked.

“It’s near the big building on that really long street in the centre of town,” Mumus said.

“How do we get there?”

“We’ll follow the traffic along the long road that leads to the centre of town and stop at the train station.”

“What station?”

“The central one.”

“How will we know we’re there?”

“There’ll be a sign.”

No-No #3: Surprise yourself out a hole.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Momus said.

“What?”

“Well, it’s something that’s been on my mind for a while now, and I’ve been meaning to get around to telling you?”

“What?”

“It’s hard to find the words, Mymus. I want to tell you that—”

“Yes?”

“I want to tell you—”

“Yes?”

“I want to—”

BANG CHINK!

“Oh God! Not another piano. When will they stop dropping pianos on our lawn when we’re having these conversations? Right. You get the brush, I’ll get the dustpan.”

No-No #4: Fill a page with affirmatives.

“So did I tell you about Mmmus?” Meymus asked.

“Yeah.”

“Really cute.”

“Yeah.”

“Really tall.”

“Yeah.”

“Likes ham.”

“Yeah.”

“And carrots.”

“Yeah.”

“And muesli.”

“Yeah.”

“And suicide.”

“Yeah.”

“And drugs.”

“Yeah.”

“And Drano.”

“Yeah.”

“And despair.”

“Yeah.”

“And me.”

“Yeah.”

“Shut up.”

“Oakie dokie.”

Narrative Class [5]

Over the last few weeks on the course, I’ve been getting strong signals that my planning and practical application skills need to be bazookaed and built from scratch. This surprised me as I have always been a naturally analytical person, but less so for writing.

Today we discussed narrative position in depth and I felt lights switching on in those blank rooms in my brain. I’m not in possession of a clever, ingenious or fast-acting mind. I’m lucky to have been allowed into another university, frankly. I’m sure someone made a mistake. So when we are told about a crucial skill integral to our future as writers, I need some time to grapple with this concept. Not the skill itself, merely acknowledging this fact. I put this down to a pathological avoidance problem, but that’s another story.

We discussed the various nuances of first and third person narrators, ranging from interior monologue to detached, informational voices. How to shift between positions in the chosen narrative style was demonstrated by a story which goes from close third person narrator to omniscient within the space of a sentence. Reading the story again in this context really opened my eyes to the depth of subtlety it is possible to have in a story. It is also incredibly intimidating.

Today I felt knowledge and understanding dripping through. To avoid making a decision on narrative position from the outset only leads to bits falling apart, stories crumbling like unloved cake. I’ve decided to revisit a past project for the next assignment, which I’ve been sellotaping together from bits of gleaned information. I hope to be able to lay proper foundations—cement, bricks, stanchions, the whole caboodle—this time.

I feel confident about my writing most of time, but when there are glaring design glitches, things peter out and I’m left with more folders stuffed with stale work I can’t use. My confidence has slumped in the last month or so as a result. I’ve decided to switch to using paper and a pen for first drafts. It’s easier to make brain-scraping decisions without a cursor blinking at you all the time.

Scary as this may seem, there is a difference between learning technical aspects of writing in a classroom and applying them to your own work. The two sides of writing and theory can be symbiotic, so what matters, I think, is an awareness of the possibilities for how to tell your story, having the necessary technical knowledge at your disposal to make professional and informed decisions on the work, and to justify these decisions. This could be the difference between ‘aspiring’ and ‘professional’ writer.

Narrative Class [4]

I’ve been meaning to keep on top of the MA reports, but have been distracted by— well . . . writing. Something must be going right.

The last few classes were on tone, structure and character. This is sort of thing I should be writing about but frankly, transcribing my notes is tiresome and I wouldn’t want to spread course material over the internet, or the whole university system would collapse.

Tone in particular has been my greatest concern over the last four months. I’ve written a few short stories with tighter viewpoints, narrative voice and rhythm. These involved stripping the humour from my work, which was successful in the case of a horror story, and writing a story with more sentimental content, which also went well. Both these stories were picked up when I sent them out, so I am happy with progress on this front.

My current full-length work is an attempt to explore the limitations and possibilities of narrative stance. The character, writing in the first person, refutes the success of first person as a means of storytelling while telling a perfectly engaging story in the first person. The second section, narratorless, questions the need for a third or first person POV by telling a story through documents that perform the function of plot, character, back story, etc.

The third section is, appropriately, in the third person, and is a story written about two real people—the narrative is reportage (or spying) tailored to fit the romance market. The writer’s impositions (via footnotes) gain hold of the narrative, twisting the focus of the story.

I have very clear ideas about this project, but we’re being trained to assess the worth or purpose of our work through a ruthless interrogation process. This helps to get to the heart of a project—listing its intentions, ideas and themes until a definitive purpose emerges. Almost like a psychiatrist asking: “Yes, but what do you really feel?”

My first assignment went OK-ish. It’s tricky to turn a reflective essay into an original piece of writing. It’s a skill that would be really useful in creative non-fiction, the module I’m doing next year. I overdid the humour in this one, knocking the tone off-balance so it sounded like a piss-take. Oops. I want to write the story, though, as I have a voice in mind for the lead.

The geese above are named Concert & Roderick.

Journey to the Heart of Cliché

I took a trip on the S.S. Essess to the Heart of Cliché. My heart was pounding as the waves crashed against the ship. It was a stormy day and my soul ached to uncover the truth. I felt a longing deep down inside and suddenly realised I was looking at the world as if for the first time.

My guide for the Heart of Cliché was a tall, pock-marked man with wild eyes. He lead me down a dark, airless alley. My heart beat fast in my chest. I hoped at last I would shake this curse of cliché. Time was running out. This was my last chance. At the end of the day, when all was said and done, I needed a change in my life, and yearned for freedom.

I entered the Heart of Cliché. He spoke:

“Visitor! You have travelled far and wide to be with me. You heart aches to be free from this slavery. There is a fire burning inside you. We all know that a stitch in time saves nine and that many hands make light work and that too many cooks spoil the broth and that we can’t see the wood for the trees and that beauty is only skin deep and that . . . ”

“Stop!” I shouted.

“ . . . we shouldn’t beat about the bush or let the cat out of the bag and you should keep your nose to the grindstone and it isn’t over until the fat lady sings and we can kill two birds with one stone and there are plenty more fish in the sea . . . ”

“I can’t take it!” I said, and ran off.

I ran and ran until my legs ached. Then I thought better of it, and I ran until the tendons in my calf region experienced a pulsating throb. Tomorrow would be a better day. Or, at least, tomorrow would be day of marked luminescent improvement over today. This would need some work.

Narrative Class [3]

Lin Anderson lectured this week on researching for crime fiction. The gist: speak to relevant professionals, hit the libraries, don’t be afraid to email old friends, collect specific details from crime folks, write about someone’s head exploding and use episodes from real life.

This left me wondering how much of crime is actual fiction. If a crime writer speaks to forensic scientists and notes down specific details from cases, bases characters on people, and so on, the novel becomes, to an extent, a transcription of actual events and cases.

There is a curious line between ‘being authentic’ and writing fiction. This is the line crime writers must straddle, presumably, and it’s not as if exact dialogue, scenes, or descriptions are taken. Crime is the genre for those who prefer more grim reality in their escapism.

First assignment this semester involves researching. I’m looking forward to seeing what detail can do to a story. My other pieces are held together by a few stringy ideas, usually with no researched detail whatsoever. In the past I wrote a novella on the teachings of Albert Adler, Austrian psychiatrist, and I sometimes look up street names. That’s it.

In other news, Calpol are facing bankruptcy. This news has put a strain on my day. Today has been very strainy.