On Writing

by A. L. Kennedy

The other topic of writerly chat – I was thinking of you, Dear Readers, and researching as I went – was money. Or its non-arrival. Like other small (very small) businesses, many authors have noticed that those tiny and yet important cheques have started to arrive two or three months late, or not at all. I have even experienced haggling over fees when I turn up for gigs – and, as negotiators go, I’m as resilient as a damp biscuit.

  Please don’t misunderstand me – I know I’m in a very fortunate position – none of this is as bad as not being published, not being able to find work, being fired in a recession, having my house repossessed, or kids to worry about. If I need more money, I can do more work. And sleep less. I mainly worry for the coming generations of writers. If my next advance is smaller than the last (and it will be), I can try to diversify even more, I can tour more, I can try to ginger up work abroad. I have no idea what a new writer would do now – attempting to burrow into a market that’s in free-fall and a literary ‘culture’ that drastically limits the numbers of books that are published or that will ever be visible in major bookshop chains, in reviews, or in the media generally. Publishers are beyond risk-averse and are currently decision-averse. It is possible that published writers will no longer ever leave whatever other employment they use to subsidise themselves. Meanwhile, the increase in poorly conceived and exploitative Creative Writing courses will continue, and increasingly the writers who teach on them will end up training potential writers to teach other potential writers to teach on other courses, and round and round they all will go – never knowing how good they might be, or what they’re missing.

  Which isn’t what we deserve. There’s a place for courses and some of them are excellent – I wouldn’t, for example, be an Associate Professor on Warwick University’s Creative Writing Programme if I didn’t believe in what they do there. But it can’t be that our literature relies on false promises and academia to limp along. Established writers surely can’t feel morally comfortable about helping new writers to commit themselves to the life while ignoring the fact that the chances of success, or even of publication, are minimal. And we can’t pretend that teaching writers to teach writing is meaningful, or anything close to our primary purpose.

  At which point I have to say that I don’t really have any answers to this any more. I only know that, as I tour and tour about, I keep meeting readers. Not just readers, but intelligent and passionate readers who go out of their way to support books. Over the last few years there has been an explosion in literary festivals, readers’ groups and reading series. When the range in your local bookshop collapses, your library dumps its stock and your media barely acknowledge your interests, it seems that you don’t, as a reader, just give up and stop reading, or just buy the fast-seller you’re peddled by the only part of the UK’s publishing machinery that’s still functioning – you fight back, you get organised, you dig about for books that you’ll genuinely love, you reach out to others of your kind. Which – as a reader and a writer – I find wonderful and promising.

  It isn’t the readers’ or the writers’ fault that British publishing (and publishing elsewhere) has fallen on its own sword and allowed bookshop chains and short-term thinking to eat its heart away. It isn’t our fault that the Net Book Agreement disappeared. (Although we should have fought harder to keep it.) But we are the ones who’ll lose out, who don’t get the variety of books, who don’t find the unlooked-for pleasures, who don’t get to share the new dreams. The dreams and pleasures and the appetite for them are currently still out there. With each generation of poor schooling they’ll be diminished – we’ll be less and less able to understand what we don’t have – but, for now, the part of my job which is consistently inspiring involves seeing and feeling the energy of readers, meeting that immense enthusiasm for wonders – in all kinds of people in all kinds of situations: Ilkley, Ely, Toronto . . . it doesn’t seem to matter where. If that energy and intelligence steps up to the next level of organisation, then there could be hope for us. And I need never go on another TV or radio show and find that – however the discussion was described beforehand – what we’re really meant to talk about is how poetry is dead, or the novel is rubbish, or the short story is irrelevant. Fuck that, quite frankly. Really. Fuck that with vigour and from a strange direction. It truly leaves me more than annoyed.

  Meanwhile, 18.11 – and the train is moving. Slowly, but – against all expectations – we’re heading for where we need to be. Just in time for us to get metaphorical. Tiredness, travel, exhausted hyper-sensitivity, rage – they do tend to encourage metaphors. Then again, is this one too obvious, is it a cheap shot? One thing I do know: I’d rather be pondering questions like that than watching us go one better than book-burning. You don’t have to burn them if you just ignore them, act as if they never were and hope they go away.

  Once again – fuck that!

  And especially against the grain.

  Onwards.

  XV

  NOW THEN: THE short story. If we’re sensible and care about prose, we will agree that it’s a fine, exacting and beautiful form. It’s perhaps not huge and showy, like making the Eiffel Tower disappear – it’s more like someone holding your empty hand until it’s satisfactorily and strangely filled with your granny’s cameo and the powder-sweet scent of her long-gone lipstick. The short story is small, but can be devastatingly penetrating – quite like, as I almost always say, a bullet.

  I’m slightly known for producing short fictions and so, every now and then, folk ask me to give them one. Increasingly these requests arrive with conditions and subjects. ‘Could you write a story for next week involving the concept of impermeability?’ – ‘We need something by Tuesday about fish.’ – ‘We’d like it this afternoon – do include Plymouth, a small scene in which someone ginger carves a bit of soap, and a left-handed bloke called Simon who confronts his own mortality as embodied by a swarm of moths.’

  My answer to the above is often, ‘No.’ For a variety of reasons. I object on principle to unhelpful restrictions of time and subject being imposed upon me, because I got into writing at least in part so that no one could tell me what to do or think. I neither like nor thrive upon that kind of interference and it doesn’t necessarily help me to grow or develop my capacities. I also don’t relish restrictions being placed upon a form which should be able to roam free and express itself as it wishes. Sometimes a subject is an inspiration, or chimes with an idea you’ve already got, but often a magazine, or a newspaper, or a bunch of people who say they want to save the short story will end up constricting imaginative and technical scope and making sure much of what they receive will resemble slightly over-emotional op-ed articles. This doesn’t help the uninitiated to think well of the short story. And would anyone phone up a writer and ask them to write a themed novel? The process, however well intended, can seem ever so slightly to imply: ‘It’s only a short story – you can knock one of them out in a couple of hours – here are some bits to start you off.’

  Of course, I am also asked for stories by people who are familiar with my interests. For example, if someone gets in touch – as they recently did – and asks for a story involving sex, then they’re probably not going to go away empty-handed. Then again, the wording of the commission could over-concentrate the author’s mind on what is not absolutely the money shot. This is because writing about sex usually isn’t really about sex – unless you’ve very wisely decided to produce lucrative porn, rather than cheap and obscure literary fiction. Porn doesn’t need (and would in fact be highly disturbing if it included) psychological depth, emotional range, proper characters and a real storyline. Erotica – porn for middle-class people and the timid – tends to follow the same rules.

  Literature within which people have sex is, in many ways, curiously like literature within which people grind coffee, lick wet teabags, play the trombone or visit cottages – they simply involve a humdrum physical activity which has to be accurately described with a sense of personality, psychology
, voice, tone and plot. Let’s say your characters are making a daisy chain: this could be something about which they are passionate and every syllable might be tumescent with heated meaning. Or their subtext could overshadow everything with a sense of impending doom related to the meat-packing facility where one of them will soon be crushed by a poorly stacked load. Their smiles and happily busy fingers could be tinged with tragedy, irritation, somnolence, boredom, mal de mer, you name it – up to a point, it doesn’t matter what they’re doing. If your plot compels you to have a protagonist engaged in something as unpromisingly tedious as buffing a German helmet or cleaning up a sticky string of pearls, you retain the power to give that particular activity whatever emotional and psychological colour, subtexts, leitmotifs and atmosphere you and the rest of the story see fit. If you want and need to, those scenes could be – however unlikely this might seem – as roastingly and justifiably hot as forcing one’s freshly buttered hand repeatedly in through the letter box of the Society of Authors. Or it could be as dull as the back of your knee.

  It’s sometimes difficult to explain this to people – and journalists – who read some of my work and then seem to expect I have engaged in all kinds of strenuous research for which I personally would lack, in every way, the flexibility. Fiction about sex is still fiction – standard operating procedures apply. Equally, it is occasionally disconcerting to deal with emerging writers’ work when half the notes you have to give read roughly along the lines of ‘As far as I’m aware, the average penis doesn’t extend to three feet and is unable to go around corners.’ Or ‘Is this scene followed by reconstructive surgery?’ And a percentage of the remaining comments may mention errors caused by embarrassment or a desire to shock. But we, as writers, are already sitting in the nice privacy of the reader’s head, enjoying the usual range of necessary intimacies, which we have hopefully earned by being beautiful, interesting, hypnotic, poetic and all the rest. Jumping out from behind a damp bush and ejaculating wildly would almost always be inappropriate and shoddy. And there is, naturally, nothing to be embarrassed or awkward about when a piece of writing involves sex – the reader already thinks of sex a ridiculous number of times per hour without our assistance. We are simply dreaming together – anything goes.

  Before the days of scanned-in pages and email texts, I could predict that the number of typesetter-added errors would escalate whenever anything on the page was especially vigorous in its personal areas. This always seemed slightly odd to me because – after the usual repeated, thorough and stretching rewrites – each and every passage has been explored to the point of numbness and has become, on several levels, no more than a test of staying power, a hump to come over, a tricky corner to reach around. This general lack of anything other than a cerebral response to more colourful sections of my texts can mean that I am occasionally surprised by reactions during readings – even though the conventions of a literary event tend to dictate that even the most taboo word, action or subject is admissible, as long as it has been pondered at length and written down before it is mentioned aloud. (Which is actually pretty perverse, if you think about it.) Likewise, responses from readers can be somewhat unexpected. What book-lovers do in the safety and comfort of their own elegantly appointed lobes and parlours is, I feel, their own affair. And I have occasionally been desirous that it should very much remain so.

  Meanwhile, I have a story to finish.

  Onwards.

  XVI

  SORRY FOR THE delay in blogging – as the last of the year is rained into submission, I have been travelling. Again. Manchester, London, Brussels, Berlin, Brussels, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Glasgow and a film festival in Cromarty is beckoning, even as I type. Usually I would have taken advantage of the peace and electricity available in this or that train to hammer out something for you, but sadly I was a little preoccupied with sleep, numbed staring, making up twenty minutes of new comedy and fretting about my oncoming novel.

  The comedy has been duly delivered to a couple of surprisingly fragrant audiences, my mail, ironing and packing are up to date and I have these small hours of a Thursday morning to ponder.

  But before I get to the pondering, I will take a moment to point out that I am aware a number of people who used to be what we might call friends of mine now simply read this blog, having entirely abandoned any foolish ideas about phoning me at home for a chat, or actually meeting to do something human. I have been subjected to pathological levels of travel for more than a year now, and whatever relations I had hitherto managed to maintain with non-fictional characters have become almost entirely theoretical. I have even – please forgive me – fallen into the strange pit of gossipy stalkers that is Twitter. At least this allows me to text somebody who might still care – if only because they intend to murder me and then use my skin for cravats. And, as I wandered about in Northern Europe, I was once again struck by how few people on the other side of the Chunnel are welded to their headphones. British high streets are generally packed with what amounts to thousands of competing soundtracks and brave efforts to dodge as much of our prevailing reality as possible. Over There they still do chatting, good coffee and relatively functional public transport. They can also provide civilised, trilingual audiences interested in other cultures and literature in general, at the drop of a jewel-like pastry, and can lavish readers with pleasant venues, varied, well-advertised events and proper media arts coverage. It’s boring to have to point this out – repeatedly – but the UK isn’t as cool and bright and lovely as we are intended to believe. Our public servants don’t just defraud us, they also don’t serve us – in detail and day after corrosive, toxic day. And it shows.

  But enough about them: actors. Actors are an excellent thing. The Manchester part of last week’s itinerary was given over to recording a radio play of mine, and I have to say the proceedings were just a huge joy, parts of which I am still digesting. I knew very little, for example, about the detailed presentation of point of view within sound, and where effects would be live and where they would not and what delicacy and precision goes into the production of radio drama – something I’ve always enjoyed, since the lovely days when I didn’t have a telly.

  I very rarely have time to sit in on filming, rehearsals, or even performances of my own scripts. This is very occasionally a blessed relief when I hear later about insane producers, crippling budgets, vicious weather, costumes only fit to be viewed from one side and the risk of death in – for example – improperly choreographed fights, or botched house fires. (No, really . . .) But more usually I find it slightly heart-breaking to never quite know what the last night was like, or to have been somewhere else when a little rewrite might just have helped . . . Manchester allowed me to sit and do virtually nothing for two full days, beyond eating biscuits and listening to excellent performers do what they do, hearing readings develop, interpretations shift and fret and lock, and generally being made very happy. I ended up quite light-headed. This is partly for entirely predictable reasons. If you have Robert Glenister and Bill Nighy flinging themselves into it all day – along with an equally splendid, professional and charming supporting cast – then you will be interested and entertained in the process. Of course. But bear in mind that I fell in love with words because actors said them to me, because they were out loud and happening at me and in me. I hear words in my head when I write them. I sit – in trains, or even my study – building people who don’t exist, hearing people who don’t exist, until they seem real to me and then perhaps may to somebody else. Imagine what happens when you add actors to that – how very, deeply good it is that the music you couldn’t quite hear not only sings in reality, but is far more beautiful than you could have hoped to make it alone. Imagine how permeable proper actors are to language. Imagine people who genuinely possess levels of recklessness/talent/training/sensitivity/whoknowswhat and being allowed to hear them let words – your words – penetrate and operate and become what they need to be. It’s a strange transaction: on the one hand, the ty
pist (if it’s me) experiences sudden rushes of exhilaration along the lines of I think it, you do it, meat puppets of my brain – oh, life should be like this. And yet there are also swoops of despair along the lines of I could do this all again and make it better now I know what you’re all like, make it fit better – and thank you for being upset then, and sorry for having to have made you upset, but in that scene it is necessary – and this sounds amazing, but that’s you, not me – and that of has to go – that of doesn’t scan at all and should be forgotten and never spoken about again . . . so sorry . . . And so on. At a certain level, actors are the best readers – it’s their job to be. And I hope I can reverse-engineer some response to this whole experience that would improve the reading experience for the rest of my readers. I also need to consider what I can learn from being around people at the top of their game – why are they good? They pay attention, they have a certain type of courage, they are careful of each other, generous, they have interior drives with levels of surprising and usefully applied hunger. What can I apply from this to my own working methods? I don’t know yet, but I hope to.

  And, otherwise, I am simply full of admiration. As I watched Mr Nighy and Mr Glenister on a monitor, working in what appeared to be a concrete holding cell at Heathrow (the space doesn’t need to be pretty, it just needs to sound right) and having to semi-skate on scattered gravel, to produce the necessary effect, while hitting the required mark near the required mike for each cue, while hauling at each other, reading, emoting, taking direction and generally knocking it out of the park with a glorious attention to detail and levels of courtesy and concern for which I will always thank them, I did think very loudly: bloody hell, what kind of a job is that for human people? And grinning like a muppet all the while. God bless them, whatever they’re up to at the moment.