On Writing

by A. L. Kennedy

  So, although – for example – it’s always lovely to do things for Radio 4 (they’re very polite and kindly and remain a quite civilised part of the BBC), I do get perversely alarmed by the thought that something, somewhere will end in tears – if only my day, as I subside into a tepid bath while typing and eating a sandwich and wondering if a blood transfusion from a healthy child would mean I’d clear this month unscathed. Meanwhile, I have to remember what city I’m meant to be in, what I’m meant to be doing and where I put the railway tickets I bought expensively at the last minute to replace the ones I bought cheaply earlier.

  Before my plans changed.

  Again.

  Then there’s the book introduction I promised I’d write and the play to be finished and the radio play and the research for the next novel (which is alternately exhilarating and brain-melting – while always being terrifying) and all of the small but persistent requests for prose that seem to rise up with the morning and hang about my shins until I either fall over or deal with them. The danger of this inadvertent lifestyle being that I may end up too tired to be of any use to myself or others and may also fail to have any fun.

  No fun for me, no fun for the reader. This isn’t a rule I made up – it’s a natural law. There has to be joy in the process, or the stuff just dies on the page. Naturally, the possibility of myself being found dead on the page also looms as I curl into yet another Holiday Inn bed, push in the earplugs and hunch under the covers for a nourishing whole three or four hours’ kip.

  Not that there haven’t been bright points as I’ve barrelled along. At the weekend I was again a judge on the panel for the Warwick Shootout – a short (and moderately impossible) film competition for Warwick University students. All kinds of technical limitations and regulations are heaped upon the entrants, and yet hordes of disgustingly imaginative and talented young production teams still come up with lovely little movies every year. And then we get to give them Perspex award-thingies in recognition of their mad skills in variously designated areas. All this and I get to be on a panel with – among others – the fine man and fine writer, Barrie Keefe.

  And the following day involved me running ‘Words’ at Warwick as part of their free students’ arts festival. It was nice to play the studio theatre and to remember doing much the same twenty-five years ago when I was a student at Warwick – and we didn’t have an arts festival, or a film competition, or coordinated limb movements. Although we were dab hands at ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out, out, out!’ Ah, those were the days: only a handful of politicians on which to focus your loathing, nothing as exhausting as despising an entire parliament.

  Back at home, my big author’s box of finished copies arrived a few days ago – so that’s the next book done. Although I’ve seen a number of my own books by now, I always experience the same little shock when I unwrap them and they look so . . . well, like a book – a book that anyone might have written – a proper book, by someone else.

  One minute they’re a buzzing pain behind your eyes, then they’re a screen full of gibberish and rewrites, then they’re mangled papers in coffee- and red-stained heaps and then suddenly they’ve scrubbed up nicely and are off to meet the readers. Or the pulpers. Either way, that first moment you meet what is effectively a neatly bound section of your own mind is certainly an excuse for a short pause, maybe a cup of tea and perhaps a bit of hefting, before you slot it into the shelf with all its brothers and sisters. And in August the new short-story collection will be officially launched, at which point plunging into the media with enthusiasm will be pretty much a parental duty – so off we’ll go again, more travel, more paranoia. Onwards.

  VII

  WORKSHOPS – I’VE ALREADY mentioned them briefly in my blog, but they are currently much on my mind. Increasingly such things are being called masterclasses, which sounds much more impressive and buzzy and vaguely as if they’ll involve an opportunity to be in an airless hotel function suite with a minor deity. I’ve been giving workshops – and now masterclasses – in prose fiction for a period of time I will not mention, for fear of feeling wrinkled and reflecting that I had a bloody cheek to try telling anyone anything for at least the first decade. Then again, giving workshops to people who can’t write yet, while we can’t write yet either, is a traditional way for nascent writers to earn their crusts. And it means we can meet people who aren’t characters bent on resisting our will – real, live people – and learn and consider overviews and be near the process in others and see how lovely it is and how a person can light up when all goes well and a penny drops and so forth . . .

  I very, very rarely do anything which involves a bunch of strangers and a flipchart, unless I’m the one inhaling the delicious marker-pen fumes and being – nominally – in charge. But, only this evening, I was reflecting with a chum on a masterclass I recently attended which has made me reassess how I run my workshops, not to mention questioning the evil which can lie within the human heart.

  First, let us think of the horrible temptations inherent in the workshop scenario. There you are, alone with a largely or completely compliant roomful of people who offer themselves up to your help, perhaps harbouring a curiosity about the writing life and perhaps also a touching belief that there is a Golden Key, which will make all well and effect immediate change in their putative vocation. The workshop leader’s power can be huge, given that writing is so intimate. Although the scale is tiny, the possibilities for wrongness and corruption can be appallingly extensive: ideas can be mocked, weaklings can be bullied, while tired or apprehensive participants can actively encourage the tutor to blather on about his or her self at revolting length and offer all the most toxic sorts of admiration. The nervous and self-critical (many good writers are both) may not express needs which therefore go unfulfilled, or problems which therefore continue to fester unexamined. Participants may have no idea what to expect and could be fobbed off with any old nonsense. With the best will in the world it’s difficult to describe a mental process to someone usefully, without requiring at least a tiny bit that they think like you – when they should ideally think like themselves, only more so. Even without what we might call the intellectual and spiritual pitfalls, there are also the possibilities of technical failures, the restraints of time pressure and the intrusion of acts of God – I once ran a workshop during which a shrew ran up a participant’s leg, for example. Things ended badly for the shrew, much to everyone’s dismay, including the owner of the leg.

  Hopefully, if everything is based on mutual respect and human concern and if the venue isn’t inherently evil and obstructive, then the workshop can quickly become a chance for a bunch of interested parties to explore something together in stimulating ways and then go home all the better for it. But near at hand there is always a vile and possibly inviting minefield of behaviour, which frankly puts the me into mental.

  People who’ve attended my workshops do tend to keep in touch (in the positive, non-stalking sense) and I think responses are largely good, but there have also been sessions when I’ve been tired and a bit snippy, or just snippy. I’ve succumbed to the urgings of folk who wish to avoid a forthcoming task and have chatted on about myself for no reasonable reason. I have made experiments which didn’t work. There have definitely been people I just haven’t helped, or haven’t helped enough. Which makes me unhappy.

  But then I think of That Masterclass – those suppurating two days spent in the company of a man I, on sight, wanted to stab in the face with a screwdriver. (My Tai Chi teacher was, by way of contrast, the shiniest, most convincing testament to his own abilities that he could be, without actually starting to teach me. At which point he became even better.) In That Masterclass I and my fellows huddled in chairs, trying to believe we wanted to make notes, as our Master unzipped and released a tepid stream of narcissistic rage, misogyny, self-aggrandising gibberish and shouting. By lunchtime on the first day we all loathed him. By lunchtime on the second day I was desperately trying to withdraw to my Ha
ppy Place, but was being refused entry on the grounds that anyone lovely I could think of, any beautiful location or delightful event would be irretrievably sullied by contact with an apparently endless succession of rants, humiliating exercises and sad little glimpses into a world of horrible disappointments and fear. Ever done something new while strangers observed? Well, try doing it with a real live sociopath bellowing wet comments against your neck. Yes, much easier.

  There seemed to be no way to block what was happening. Even my most startlingly distracting pornographic fantasies weren’t coming out to play and I really didn’t blame them. My entire still-dampened neck had gone into shock and an ever-tightening backward spasm had cranked in, simply to stop my eyes having to look at someone who was, to be kind, a vile waste of skin as he fumbled at his mad display items and unwieldy concepts. Eventually staring at anything other than the ceiling caused me hideous pain. One participant was yelled to the edge of tears as our level of participation dived into entirely negative areas. There were numbed and surly silences. Our leader paced, kicked, sweated and roared. Having been told we were worthless – albeit by someone with very odd personal difficulties – we felt wounded and bewildered. Bored beyond endurance and stunned by rank nonsense, we were strangely unable to leave, or string sentences together. We bonded in corners, hugged, suppressed waves of fury, depression and giggling. I suddenly understood a lot more about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

  Even today I can honestly write that I might not be deeply saddened if that particular gentleman was found hog-tied and naked in a car park somewhere, after a number of unpleasant encounters with some thoroughly discourteous bikers. And a moose.

  But I did learn a lot from That Masterclass. I did see what happens when anything I could do wrong was done wrong – how penetratingly awful that would become. I recalibrated my understanding of how much a rancid series of thuggish workshop interactions might make me want to wash, and could possibly destroy or seriously damage exactly what I really wanted to do and would deeply enjoy. Whenever I feel myself and a workshop going off the rails, I do now automatically remember: Ooh no, I can hear that zipper coming down . . . Masterclass on its way. Onwards.

  VIII

  THE POST BELOW referred to research undertaken for The Blue Book and to all those ultimately thanked on its acknowledgements page.

  For the first time in, I believe, three months, I am not writing this blog on a train. I am not even on a railway station, am not being dragged up a hill by packhorses, am not – beyond the usual inhaling and exhaling and one of my twitches – in motion at all. I am, in fact, safely ensconced in my For-People-With-Bad-Backs Writing Chair. You may, in fact, already know The Chair from a number of newspaper features in which it has taken centre stage. It is galling to be outshone by a jumped-up piece of office-furniture-turned-black-leather-media-whore. Then again, I have to admit that The Chair is considerably more photogenic than I am. It is glowing with smugness beneath me, even as I type. Either that, or it has hitherto unguessed-at properties and I should see if I can find the manual again.

  Meanwhile, I am currently going through what we might call a period of acclimatisation. I have spent most of this year doing what more and more writers do more and more – battering around the globe to promote the books, perform in a variety of ways and generally earn the money for which I do not, as it happens, write. But, then again, money can be exchanged for many goods and services I enjoy and so I find it handy. My novel sedentary condition means I can get used to having more than five shirts, having access to all my books and having to dust and make my own bed, rather than expecting Room Service to break in and do that while I’m trying to sneak a lie-in. I have, of course, become immediately and boringly ill – sinuses, neck, ears – simply because my body has resentment issues to work out, but I can make myself chicken soup as a consolation and mainly my circumstances are unusually convenient, if achy. Until the start of August, I will continue to stay at my very own personal address, having baths whenever I want to and being near the park in case I suddenly need to sit in amongst the daisies. Daisy-sitting could be a hobby of mine, who knows – I no longer remember my hobbies, but I do like to keep on the lookout in case one turns up.

  Not that I am unbusy. I am now in the run-up to the Edinburgh Festival and so I have rehearsals for the show almost every day. This year I am blessed with a director (rehearsals would be slightly solipsistic without one) and a stage manager/lighting chap, so they’re handling many problems I wouldn’t understand, but I am still having to deal with the design and arrangement of items such as posters and programmes and flyers. Once again, Room Service has not come to my rescue. In my downtime, when I’m not tweaking at the script, I have a radio play to poke with a stick and much research to digest.

  Part of the last fortnight’s rush and chaos has been down to research. Naturally, as an author of fiction, I am quite literally paid to make things up, but I still need research. Contexts have to be legitimised, characters have interests and occupations which need to be filled with credible detail, variations of geography or time period will throw up all kinds of questions and I will have to dig about for all kinds of answers. For any given novel, I’ll spend around three years – on and off – pondering and picking at worries and researching, before I ever write a word.

  Apologies if that sounds like the kind of writer’s confession – I always write my second draft in the sweetest little cabin above Lucerne . . . – which tends to make me bilious. Fiction takes research and I take my time over it, cos I’m slow to digest things, okay? That’s all I mean.

  The research I prefer, the type with which I am comfortable, involves me sitting in my study surrounded by a ziggurat of books at which I munch away until they give in. Sadly, if something doesn’t appear to be in any book, anywhere – and many things I seem to need for the next novel are ridiculously arcane – then I have to seek out free-standing human beings and pester them, exactly when I am unable to articulate a description of what I don’t have and can’t understand. Would you let a random scribbler into your premises and then put up with them basically describing a void, the dimensions and angles surrounding a nothing, while waving their arms a bit too much? I know I wouldn’t. And I’m only ruining these people’s afternoons because they’re experts – so this isn’t just a theft of time, it’s a theft of expert, well-informed time . . . for which I can’t pay, because paying is rude and stops a favour being a favour, but you have to bring them something . . . but what do you bring someone who earns – say – ridiculously more than you do . . . ? Do you obsess for weeks trying to figure out what they might like . . . ? You’ll then feel slightly grubby if that works . . . or do you take a flyer and get it wrong . . . ? You’ll then feel thuggish . . . And if you see them again, should you give them books? You write books . . . but what if they don’t like your books, or books at all . . . ? And if you sign the books, that’ll mean people feel bad when they dump them in the Oxfam shop – plus, that’s a bit up yourself, isn’t it, foisting your own signed books on people? But not signing them might seem rude . . . And what if they run over the time they said they’d give you . . . ? Do you interrupt, do you let them go on, do you cry? If they really nail something magnificently, are you allowed to kiss them on the forehead? What if you’re bellowing because they’re deaf, but they haven’t said so, but they are . . . is that rude, or just audible? I have spent a number of fretful hours lately, sitting on patient strangers’ sofas and feeling bad, bad, bad about myself.

  I can only say that the strangers have, so far, always provided at least sweeties, if not cakes and tea (I clearly look underfed) and have been ridiculously pleasant. I have been hugged, I have been kissed, I have been allowed to play with dogs and I have been given slivers and lumps and handfuls of insight that I sincerely hope I’ll be able to boil down into a form I can absorb and use and not spoil too appallingly. And there are few things finer than listening to folk who are at the top of their game enthusing about the things
they know and care about. (I vaguely remember that kind of thing being broadcast on telly and the radio in happier times, but I may be mistaken . . . It’s good sometimes to have your mind race alongside someone else’s, clinging on for dear life, before eventually something goes twang in your limbic area and you fall over happy, while they lope off, hardly out of breath. So thanks to everyone who’s helped so far – you know who you are. And you have made me feel good, good, good about my species. Onwards.

  I’m still in my flat – extraordinary how boring that can become. Plus, it’s amazing how many things have gone wrong since I last really lived here. (I have been mainly away for most of the last three years) . . . So while I sing and hoot through my (no doubt excruciating for the neighbours) voice exercises in preparation for the Fringe, various tradespersons have fiddled with my boiler, my bathroom-sink taps, my gas fires and all and sundry. And it is indeed pleasant not having to brush my teeth in the bath any more.

  Meanwhile, the new book, What Becomes, is being reviewed, even though it’s technically not out yet. It’s always good and helpful to be reviewed, rather than ignored, but it is slightly frustrating to think of potential readers coming to the end of a piece and thinking, ‘Oh well, I might buy that then . . . wonder if it’s in a shop? I haven’t seen it in a shop . . . Ooh, look, a shiny thing. And a biscuit.’ And they are lost for ever.

  In theory, the book emerges, blinking and coughing, on the 6th August, but publication dates do seem to be entirely theoretical these days and I have already given readings where copies were available and am beginning to think publication dates are all designed as some kind of eBay scam – authors sign and date copies before the stated date and then they’re worth a florin more than they would have been if we’d left them undefaced. Who can say.