Insight, Conversation, Action, ?

In the beginning, I started out producing what I would have described as intensely psychological prose, creating entirely interior worlds, interior dilemmas, interior struggles... It seemed almost writerly. A chapter would involve one person, walking in a park, thinking. Or perhaps only sitting on a park bench. Perhaps this was because the thoughts came to me that way, and I didn't quite have the wit to dress it up more. This, I might call the Insight stage. Irony, hey.

I grew past it, in time. I started having two or even three people in a scene, even interacting sometimes. This, finally, was proper writing. They began to talk to each other, sometimes at length. They were (sort of) demonstrating things, through dialogue at least. No longer did the author clumsily illuminate via his eighteenth century narrator. Sometimes the characters even misunderstood each other, or talked across each other. Or were unreliable in their knowledge. I felt advanced.

But a different kind of pattern emerged. Each chapter, it was politely pointed out to me, is just people talking. Yet again. They were right, naturally. What was actually happening? I counted ten chapters in a single novel that each consisted in some part of two people talking at a checkout (mostly in coffee shops, but also, through a burst of wild imagination, in a supermarket).

Conversation isn't action, of course. Only action is action. Which is not to say a building blows up in every chapter, but at last I am deleting entire chapters that had seemed integral only months ago, and expressing a good thing once instead of a dozen times. It's the same thought that has football managers screaming at their daft winger to stop turning the defender and just bloody cross the ball.

I wonder what the next stage is?

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Not proud. Just saying...

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The writing season

The weather has changed. Being away, I didn't see it happen here, but I'd imagine it's much the same anywhere you go. I return from holiday to find a cooler, windier, wetter London. Trotting round my neighbourhood the colours have changed, and its not just that the housing estate has been repainted in battleship grey.

In the Eurostar magazine on the way home, an article heralded the change in seasons with the suggestion that autumn is the start of the cultural year en France, unlike ever-dynamic, always on London. I'm not so sure we're any different. The Wednesday writing group I go to has been low in numbers all summer, and suddenly in September the attendance has doubled. The deadlines of literary competitions seem to cluster around October and November; perhaps if you're interested in these things, now would be the time to prepare for them. The signs are everywhere.

I'm sure real writers don't ever slack in summer, even if real-world writers do. At least we're finally liberated of the fantasy that we might just spend the day lying in the park instead.

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What kind are you?

No update next week, as I'm on holiday. Guess you'll just have to get by with this in the meantime...

 

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Do I lose my single person discount on Council Tax if Paulo Coelho is living in my wardrobe?

I've always been able to console myself that despite lacking an agent or a (conventional) publisher I am still, at any rate, the most successful writer in my lone occupant household.

Sadly, even this turns out not to be true.

I got a letter last week addressed to "Paulo Coelho", who has given the Metropolitan Police my address in connection with an incident they would like to talk to him about. I'm not sure where in the flat he's been living but I guess it's a sign that I need to be a bit tidier around the place; clearly I'm providing too much habitat for writers. I cleaned out all the kitchen cupboards before the riots, but maybe he's been putting his head down in my wardrobe. Note to self: really must be more careful.

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Good books

The morning pages experiment continues. On the face of it, this has been spectacularly unsuccessful. Today's session was spent getting ready for Barry The Tiler coming round at five to eight. Does getting my kitchen done count as procrastination?

I had an insight. I was listening to someone the other day struggling to describe in straightforward terms what they liked to read, other than chick lit. It shouldn't be this complicated; we all know instinctively what this other genre is, even if we can't quite define it. It's the section in Waterstones or on Amazon we would all home in on, if it existed. Kind of speaks for itself, really:

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Morning pages

I had a routine of sorts. I called it the witching hour - that period of relative calm between about eleven in the evening and two in the morning when:

a) local people had stopped having daft accidents and requiring constant attention from paramedics from Europe's largest A&E department nearby,
b) the Napoleonic army of unfit, generally cow-like but nonetheless extremely noisy people popularly known as the Metropolitan police had finally gone to bed and were no longer using my street as their own personal Santa Pod, and
c) I used to have the stamina to still be awake to take advantage of the peace.

Magic happened in that witching hour, albeit not particularly publishable magic.

I must be getting older; for some reason I feel like more like sleeping when it gets late at night. So I am thinking of becoming an early morning person. If I can knuckle down to write before I go to work, I can be fresher and write before my mind has become distracted by all the nonsense of the average day. It's a good theory. So far it has worked only once in the two weeks since I decided to try it. Recent early mornings have been spent organising parking and, this last week, entertaining builders. Another morning's attempt failed on account of having already been woken four times at various small hours in the morning for call-outs. But what I did achieve in that much-abbreviated attempt at morning pages was the thought 'blog entry'. When life gives you lemons, hand them off to your readers  I mean, make lemonade.

The attempt continues.

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Trust

One thing that the late and unlamented News Of The World was respected for (and for that matter, its sister paper the Sun) was its sports coverage. By this I think we all know we mean football; I'm sure Mr Murdoch didn't get where he was today by aggressively pursuing the Crown Green Bowls-playing demographic. There's no hint on the tabloid back pages that papers have any bias towards particular major players or teams, whatever skullduggery might or might not be going on under the surface. This independence reflects the isocline between the players and managers on one hand and the press on the other, and the suspicion with which the former regard the latter. Long may that remain so, if the alternative is the cosy punditry of Alan Shearer.

I mention this not because I care deeply about football, but because of envy. Sometimes I wish I could read a review in the Guardian's Review section, for example, and have the same confidence that the journalists were not mixing for social drinks with novelists; that novelists did not have a career path into journalism; that journalists did not have a career path into novel writing. There is a telling lack of honest loathing in our book talk, and when we do it, our criticisms are so broad-brushed that we can barely discern the guilty party. But we know that books can really suck, don't we? And not just collectively, when they're out with their mates. Sometimes particular books can suck, all on their own, in their own special way, whatever the hype in the media. And just occasionally, I suppose, writers work to live up to that hype they never deserved at the start.

I wrote a much more honest version of this, ten minutes ago, and thought better of it... By way of analogy, I might have called it Steve McLaren, England Manager.

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Hot & Bothered

Liars League, tomorrow @ 7:30, The Phoenix, explores a theme of 'Hot & Bothered' featuring

- Underneath by Erinna Mettler
- Brothers' Eyes and Curtain Rods by Robert Long
- This Isn't Heat by Richard Smyth
- Pampas Grass by James Holden
- Kenny by Frances Clarke

I'll be there, and I'd encourage you to be there too!

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M*a*s*h (u*p)

Why the asterisks? Because it pains me to be so modern when the thing is so old, and the fashion comes and goes. This is, depending on your bent, might go back to Laurence Sterne, E.T.A. Hoffman et al in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or was reinvented with Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. At it's simplest, it might be a pleasant parlour game (though possibly not so compelling when approaching it sober: see what you think - me, I'm distinctly underwhelmed). Or, why not a whole novel?

Personally, I'm not sure there's very much more to be achieved by this than a certain comic effect. It's a bit much to hope for pathos:

I was a shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned. As I sat in the old flat, idly touching the strings of my banjolele, an instrument to which I had become greatly addicted of late, and you couldn't have said that the brow was actually furrowed, and yet, on the other hand, you couldn't have stated absolutely that it wasn't. Perhaps the word 'pensive' just about covers it. It seemed to me that a situation fraught with embarrassing potentialities had arisen.

'Control,' I said, 'do you know what?'
'No, sir.'
'Riemeck's dead.'
'Yes, indeed,' Control declared.
'Awkward, what?'

That, you may have identified as P.G. Woodhouse (Thank You, Jeeves), with a sprinking of two or three lines from John Le Carre's classic The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. This is in fact only the smallest extract of an exercise I did for the sake of exploring the concept for this piece; I need not trouble to include any more of it here as I think the concept is clear enough (and I have no wish to bring upon me the wrath of the copyright police). My personal taste forbids the union of concepts that simply jar (Jane Austen + Zombies = a first year undergraduate's desperation for effect, in my book). In this case though, I thought there was actually surprising common ground between the two novels I was sampling, not least in the characters of Control and Jeeves. At the start of both novels, both these characters utter the very same words in response to the main protagonist - 'Yes, indeed.' Both stories are grounded in English culture and manners, albeit from slightly different backgrounds and eras, and have a similar interest in what Bertie Wooster might have called sportng behaviour, or the lack of it.

How far could this have gone? In all honesty, probably not that far. The best sampling probably comes unconsciously to both the writer and the reader. It's also quite hard to do well. If nothing else, it should make anyone complaining of writer's block reflect that writing from scratch might actually be easier.

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