Happy New Blog

Happy New Year to everyone.

To welcome 2006, I am today setting up a new blog dedicated to the art and craft of writing.

Words of advice, warning, instruction and erudition from yours truly (with my writing tutor's hat on) and from the great writers of the present and the past, far better qualified than any of us to talk with authority about how to produce the sort of writing that makes your toes curl, your face light up, the tears cascade, that sticks in the head of the reader long after the book is laid down and that will live long after the writer him/herself is gone.

So if you're trying to become a better writer (and that should include all of us!); whether you just want to improve the quality of your writing or whether you wish to get your work published and paid for; if writer's block hits you or you just want inspiration, why not drop by Writers' Blog? www.weejie.blogspot.com

See you there!

West Side Stories cont.

THERE'S A BOOK INSIDE ME
This is for all those zillions of people out there who want to write a novel. In fact, more than that, it's for all those enthusiastic, adventurous, hopeful and stubborn souls who not only want to write their novel, they also want to see it in print and for sale. I'm with you on that.

And yes, we'd all like it to be a best seller, but that's the icing on the cake. We don’t really set out thinking that's what it will be – I suspect even the biggest sellers – especially the biggest sellers – take their authors by surprise. Because how can we tell what's going to tickle the fancy of the great reading public out there? That many-headed monster which gets pleasure from the solitary process of reading. If that solitary pleasure proves to be a mass delusional pleasure so much the better – but really, if we're honest, we just want somebody, just one single person, to read and enjoy. A small enough ambition. Of course, once that happens, once that one astute person found our book and got delight from it – well, that's the point when the 'why not?' kicks in. If one person liked it, then there's no reason at all why another shouldn't – and another and another. In fact, it's madness to think that there could possibly be only one person out of all those zillions who liked our book enough to read to the end. Unless that's your mother, of course. Speaking for myself, if it wasn't good enough, my mother wouldn't read to the end. Not sentimental in that way at all. And why should she be?

Whereas I suppose if either of my sprogs ever get to the point of producing a book – and I can see it happening one day: probably Thing 1, but maybe even Thing 2 might get the itch to write something longer than a song with a middle eight and whatever it is that goes round the outside - I would read it to the end, my red pen hand twitching all the way.

This is my umpteenth attempt at that book. And as it is a truth universally acknowledged that we should write about what we know, I'm writing about what I know – how to attempt to write a novel. Rather tautological, self-reflective and, some might say, self-indulgent, I know; too much navel contemplation doesn't necessarily make for enthralling reading. Buddha contemplated his navel for thousands of years, until one day he wondered what would happen if he unscrewed it. So he did, and his arse fell off. I hope he laughed. Presumably this is why so many statues of him show him with a big beaming smile and belly wreathed in laughter lines.

And humour's one thing I'm aiming at – I want to make you smile. A small enough ambition, but one that would make me smile back. And that can't be bad.

I might want to make you cry as well, of course.

Perhaps this self-reflective novel, where the form is the content, and the content is the form, is the way of writing a drama which has no conflict. If it's just the outpourings of my writing brain – well, what is there be conflictual about? Although you might find yourself arguing inside your head, screwing yourself up with problems or non-problems of your own making, I can honestly say I don’t do that. Too well-adjusted. Too sensible. I can't really get too pissed off by not being able to finish a novel. Too lazy. And that's surely a big reason why I don't succeed. Laid back isn't the best way to be when what you want to be is an achiever.

West Side Stories cont.

DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
This is that thing I advise my students against: an autobiographical novel. Who wants to read about your life? say I. Unless you're one of the great and good or the mad and bad, in which case by all means autobiog and novel away, there will be queues of people at Waterstones desperate to buy your book and have you scribble your holy name on the front page. Little matter whether The Celebrity can write well enough to make the book worth reading. Little matter, indeed, whether the book was even written by them in the first place. The point is to have the book to hold, to get that little bit closer to glory. Bugger actually reading it – which will only devalue it anyway. A signed mint condition novel by Supermodel Supernova must be worth – ooh, lots, in a few years time. Aye, that and all the other 9,999 copies she signed.

So if you're going to write a novel, I say, make it readable for its own sake, keep them turning the pages desperate to see What Happens Next. Most unlikely that the raw material of your life will have that quality.

But here I am, doing the unjustified myself. Of course, the phrase autobiographical novel does rather give the game away – it's the ultimate oxymoron (a posh word for a lie). If it was truly autobiographical it would, of course, be non-fiction. And without a doubt unpublishable. But that lying little word allows me to lie myself, to exaggerate, stretch and mould the actualité. So maybe by the end I won't be sensible any more.

INTERJECTION
- So how do we know what's true and what's made up?

Ah, Friend, I've rattled your cage so soon. Good morning to you. I hope the sun is shining on you. Here it's dreich and drizzly. But maybe I'll paint us a rainbow in the next scene.

- Stop avoiding the issue. I've paid good money here for this book, and now you tell me you don't even know what genre it is. Is this going to be a fascinating insight into how you got where you are today – or is it an escapist fantasy, an act of wish fulfilment, to improve your life which clearly you find unsatisfactory? Otherwise you're be pleased enough to stick to straight autobiography.

And does it matter?

- Well yes, I think it does. To be sure, I picked it up in the fiction section, so I was expecting a novel. But no matter if it is instead your life story, I'm happy to stay with you. I just need to know before I start whether to have my documentary or my drama head on.

Well tell me what you would prefer. As I said before, I have to please you because you are the roof over my head, the jam in my children's sandwiches.

- Fiction, I suppose. Then I know that whatever scrapes or disasters you get into along the way, however sad or upset or threatened you feel, I can wallow in your misery without feeling compromised or embarrassed by enjoying your pain. Whereas if I wasn't sure which of those things had actually happened to you, I would feel a real bastard for getting satisfaction from your misfortune.

That, my friend, strikes me as the ultimate delusion. To be cheered up because some fictional character is worse off than we are. Mind you, I don’t suppose I should knock it - Eastenders exploits that impetus par excellence. And, by all accounts, is one of the most popular TV programmes ever.

But I would ask why you immediately assume my book – whether fict or faction – is going to be full of gloom and doom. That, of course, is a rhetorical question. We all know – and I, as a writing tutor know it more than most and dutifully trot it out to my students when I feel their stories lack a certain oomph – that without conflict there is no drama. And a story without drama is no story. But why should this be? What's wrong with some positive feelgood stuff? Why can we not get our escapism by reading about characters who are pleasant, lucky, who go through life with only good things happening to them and to those they love? Surely, if our own real lives are less than sunny we would do better to get vicarious pleasure from reading about sunshine elsewhere. That, after all, is why most of us head south for our holidays. We don’t decide that for the annual break from the tediousness of our jobs or our families or our homes we will head for a place where we really won't enjoy ourselves… just so our normal crap daily life feels so much better by comparison. Or is that what Butlins and Ibiza are all about?

West Side Stories - Novel extract

THAT'S ENOUGH ABOUT YOU, LET'S TALK ABOUT ME.
I have always been known as The Sensible One. As a child, that was me. Calm, collected, wise beyond my years. While big sister Hatty was scatty, batty and forever getting into the shit. The black sheep.

And when I followed her to grammar school, dragged along always two years behind, like Little Bo Peep's sheep's tail, it was she who pointed me out to her mates – always the bad girls, the lively girls, the ones that made the disturbance at the back of the class. Mum thought they were such a bad influence on Hatty, the ones who had led her astray when she was caught shoplifting. Who led who? Anyway, that's by the by – she pointed me out in the dinner hall, 'that's my sister..' (no name, I was destined to be 'my sister' to Hatty, for the rest of our school years, and when we went for the bus in the morning she insisted we walked on opposite sides of the road) '…she's really sensible.'

Around me all the other first years were frolicking like lambs, running and leaping and bleating. At that time I was what they called 'tall for my age' – now, many decades later I'm exactly the same height I was then, and pretty short for my age. (By the by, why are teenage girls so tall now? A goodly proportion of them are supermodel height, despite that fact that they are all chastised for having the worst diets ever, all junk and no nutrition, so what makes them grow so tall? Once upon a time bad diets stunted growth – no longer, it seems.)

So anyway, I towered over my classmates from all of my 5 foot 6 inches, and wished I could be as unthinkingly relaxed and natural. But that wasn't natural for me, and everything had to be thought about and considered – hard to be spontaneous when life has to be filtered and shaped and pondered upon as it happens. I suppose that's why I became a writer. Even then, I wrote – poems and stories, long and detailed 'topics', even a couple of novels at primary school – which must have extended to all of what, 5000 words? Long enough, say I.

The teachers spent most of that first term grabbing passing first years and telling them 'don't run' – and some never grew out of it, you remember them. The ones that were never still, hopping about like fleas, and twice as irritating. But I never had to be told not to run, not because I was consciously law-abiding, but because there didn't seem any need. If the fleas got to the end of the corridor, or to the next class, a few seconds before I did, did it matter? Well, I suppose it did to them. Couldn't understand why then, and I still can't now.

And now, I am immortalised in Badger's Blog as The Sensible One. Which is done only out of affection (I think) but nonetheless still irks me slightly. It is also a bit scary as I've never told him about my lifelong reputation but he went straight for it when he wanted a moniker for me.

It is both a blessing and a curse. Because a word which is, apparently, wholly positive – look in the dictionary and find anything less than admirable about 'sensible' – also has wrapped up in it a whole bundle of negative stuff. Look in the thesaurus and the positive stuff is there, no doubt about it. But lurking in the undergrowth, tucked away in innocuously congratulatory lists of words, there are the reptilian boo words: solidity, prudence, vigilance, sobriety, self-possession, cool, calculating, solid, sober, staid, watchful, expedient. It's that mixture of the boring and the manipulative. Always hinted at, never spoken. The sting in the tail comes near the bottom of the list: 'wise as a serpent.' 'Nough said.

Genuine Work in Progress (without deliberate mistakes!)

Okay, for those who asked - I'll be brave. Here's an extract from my NaNo novel. Don't know yet if it'll get into the final version.

TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF
Hello. Let's introduce ourselves. Well, it seems only right, I hope I can engage your attention enough that we spend the duration of this novel together.

Okay, you start. That's only fair too – in fact, I might renege on my part of the bargain already. By the end, you will know more about me than you ever wanted to know - and maybe I will too. But what will I know about you? Bugger all. Is that an equal relationship, in your opinion? And does me not knowing anything about you allow me to write the best novel I can? After all, I am writing it for your entertainment. And whatever other laudable and more shabby reasons I might have, and that other writers might intimidate their readers with – artistic integrity and purity; the telling of Truth; the search for oneself; the making of oodles of money – yes, I admit it, that hope is always there. And why not? Even writers have to eat. Starving in a garret, in my opinion, is a decidedly short term and euthanistic prospect – at the end of the day, 'arry, I must entertain you or you won't stay with me to the end and you won't tell all of your friends and relations to read it too. And that's another year of my life wasted. Back to the garret.

So, let's visualise you. Purely in a cerebral sense, you understand. The physical details are secondary – in fact, if I'm honest, totally irrelevant, although I suppose we all want to be read by beautiful people. People we'd be happy to be seen in public with, and might even consider taking home to meet Mum. You may be – and I hope you are all of these things, because I aim for an all-inclusive readership: this is an equal opportunities organisation - black and/or white; male and/or female; young and/or old; disabled – well, you will all be disabled one way or another, we all are. That man there in the wheelchair, whose legs don't work the same way mine do, his emotional state is far more whole than mine. Look, he talks with everyone who passes, laughs and jokes. Whereas, when I walk towards him, striding out, relatively fit and healthy despite the fact I've reached that Uncertain Age when things don't quite work as well as they might and Change is just around the corner, I find myself wondering if he will speak to me, and if he does, what I will say. He's a stranger, for goodness sake, and I'm no good at small talk. And will I feel embarrassed about how I act with him? Will he think I pity him for his physical failing? Will I stare too long at his wheelchair?… So rather than risk that, I put on my 'oh, it looks like rain' expression, staring off vaguely into the sky, trying to convince myself 'I'm a writer, don't you know, too preoccupied with my own thoughts to engage in friendly conversation' and get past him unscathed. Who's the disabled one there? And why do you think I would rather sit here talking to you through my computer screen? It's easier.

No, the physical stuff doesn't matter a jot, but I'm sure you, as my representative reader, will have empathy and intelligence, the ability to be easily amused and equally easily roused to passion and outrage. And if I can sometimes irritate the hell out of you, and make you scream in your head 'you stupid bitch!' or 'look behind you!' or 'stop that right now, it will all end in tears, can't you see that?' that's good too. Bet you can't put the book down at those points. So I'll give you some well-designed hiatus points where you can put it down – and I promise my chapters won't be too long. Because there's something so unsatisfying about having to stop reading in the middle of a really long chapter. But the dog must be fed, the children taken for a walk (or vice versa), you will fight against your closing eyes as you read in bed, so it's part of my job to allow you to put it down and turn to other things, or to sleep. In fact, I don't want you to read it at one sitting. That way the experience is just too intense and overpowering, leaving you with a vague sense of indigestion, like eating a whole box of chocolates in one go. So much more satisfying to savour each mouthful, to digest it properly, before you go on to the next chapter, the next mouthful.

You, my perfect reader, will turn back to this book each time you pick it up with interest and anticipation, hoping that it pleases you as much as the time before and the time before that. I promise I will do my best to keep you hooked – because if I disappoint you once, the next time you might not pick it up, and you might move on to the next book in the pile by your bedside – because you are a voracious reader, sometimes with several books on the go at one time. Or you might head for the bookshelves, searching for that old favourite, the one you re-read when you need something comfortable and warming to wallow in, like a hot bath before bedtime. If I can eventually become one of those old favourites, then I will be as happy as you.

So, what shall I call you? Dear Reader? A bit too Victorian, too respectful, too distanced. Charlie? A nice name, a democratic name – could be male, female, old, young etc. etc. But it might alienate those of you who aren't actually Charlies, by name or temperament. Friend. Yes, that's it. I shall call you Friend. And I hope we will be friends by the end.

Work In Progress

They lived in a small muse cottage. Elfrida really missed the absence of a Father Figure, despite the fact of when he was still alive he had not a Patella bone in his body. Sometimes he would often say, 'Oh Daughter of mine, though you be the fruit of my Lions, you are no child of mine.'

Then he would go off to the Hostelry that was at the bottom of the road that they lived in and that had myriad types of beer and he would be totally Besotted by the end of the night, to which he would come home and Bamboozle his wife with his boozy breath.

Her Mother had Arachnophobia and was permanently glued to the Television therefore she could not leave the house.

One day, suddenly Elfrida had a Premonition. She was sure there was a terrible calactymistic disaster about to occur. She rushed to the Muse Cottage. 'Mother! Is there anything wrong? I'm really worried,' she said in a worried voice.

She threw her eyes around the room. They fell on the floor, where they saw a blood red stain on the carpet. 'My God, look at that red stain on the carpet. It must be blood!'

Ghostwriters in the Sky

NaNoWriMo 2005 post-match analysis:

Total number of participants: 59,705
Winners (i.e. those who wrote at least 50,000 words during November): 9,765
Combined worldwide word count: 714,227,354!!!!!!!!!!

That's one heck of a lot of words. Most of which will never see the light of day.
I wonder how many of those 9,000 odd novels will eventually make it into print: 10%? 1%? 0.1%? Even fewer?

Sadly, I expect it's the latter. Whatever the number, I'm sure it's far fewer than those which are worthy of being published. I wonder how much genuine gold remains unextracted from them thar slush piles in publishers' offices? It does appear, looking at so many of the books in our bookshops, that it's too often the fool's gold that rises to the top.

So should we feel sorry for all the poor publishers worldwide who are now, presumably, going to be inundated with the results of NaNoWriMo? I think not. They sure don't feel sorry for us frustrated novelists!!!!

Anyway, that's the rant. Now back to work. The novel's gone on one side for a few days until I can bear to re-read what I wrote during the month. In the meantime, plenty to keep me busy. I started The New Book today (so expect interesting(!) snippets in upcoming blogs all about how, when, where and why to Get Married in Scotland).

I'm also negotiating a ghost-writing project. The author thinks it will one day be a Hollywood blockbuster. Which it may be - I'll sure do my best to push it in that direction. It's an interesting thought that, if it makes it either as a novel or a film , I'll never be at liberty to tell you 'I helped write that.' Not sure how that would make me feel. Would the ego rebel?

PS. Thanks to ct for the excellent post title!