And onwards.
XVII
I’M JUST BACK from meeting and workshopping (let’s not mention masterclasses, you know how they make me twitch) with the new year’s flock of Creative Writing students at Warwick University. They are, as usual, interesting and thoughtful folk who really don’t deserve what the publishing industry will do to them, should it even allow them publication in these apocalyptic times. But, like the inevitability of death, disease and loss, this is a bleak truth we might as well ignore, having little or no ability to amend it. We carry on regardless and find pleasures where we can.
And there are many pleasures to be found in dealing with new writers. I’d like to dwell on two here. The first is the possibility it gives all concerned to examine the craft of rewriting. I wish there were a better term for rewriting, one that was slightly less unappetising and bald – but, in a way, being euphemistic about it would suggest that it is unpleasant and requires sugar-coating. In fact, it is a glorious process. Once you get used to it.
Of course, rewriting does involve writing again – diving back into this or that piece you’ve laboured at and maybe thought was okay, or at least passable, and you’re tired and can’t you just leave it? – it’s near enough, isn’t it? – and yes, there is that section your eye always skips over because it’s boring, or unremarkable, or flat-out unbearable, but you’re only human, you shouldn’t have to suffer for your mistakes – and you’re fond of this bit – it doesn’t fit the story, or the character, not even remotely, but you’ve had it around in the back of your mind for ages and it needs to go somewhere, why not there? Why not let it lurk like an abusive urchin at the blurry end of that sentence? And surely reworking beats all the spontaneity and joy out of your typing mojo, surely this should feel all natural and flowy, surely it shouldn’t be so difficult?
Oh, but think, Dear Reader, of the dear readers. They’ve done you no wrong. They have, in fact, sought out your work and allowed it into their mind – deep into their warm, intimate and special personal mind, where they could be thinking exactly what they want to about all the wonders of life. Instead, they chose you. Shouldn’t the interaction be – at least in part – about things feeling spontaneous and joyful and all natural and flowy for them? They have already been so very kind and inviting, ought they to suffer for your mistakes?
My thoughts would be that they probably shouldn’t and that they really ought to be rewarded with all your best and finest, and something better than that. Don’t mistake me – I’m not saying that my own attempts at better than best are the best, or everyone’s cup of tea, or anything other than a failure to live up to my hopes. But it seems only fair to do what we can for the reader. Fair and polite. It’s also deeply practical. No one can teach you how to write, or how you write or how you could write better. Other people can assist you in various areas, but the way that you learn how you write, the way you really improve, is by diving in and reworking, taking apart, breaking down, questioning, exploring, forgetting and losing and finding and remembering and generally testing your prose until it shows you what it needs to be, until you can see its nature and then help it to express itself as best you can under your current circumstances. This gives you – slowly – an understanding of how you use words on the page to say what you need to. And by making a mental commitment to believe that you are not as good as you could be, you allow yourself to move forward, to mature as a writer. This can seem disheartening and frustrating – why wouldn’t it? It involves performing surgery on something which is intimately your own: the way you express your self. But why wouldn’t you want to express your voice, your story, your nature more deeply, more beautifully, more effectively? Fretting and worrying at something you made up, an intimate product of your hopes, enthusiasms, passions – it’s bound to feel odd, unnatural, but it’s also deeply rewarding. In time, you will willingly, if not always happily, put invisible hours and days and weeks of effort into offering someone you don’t know, and who will probably never thank you, something which will appear to be ‘effortless’.
And don’t remind me of the conversation I once had with a prominent academic, who intended the phrase ‘But it’s so effortless . . .’ as an adverse comment on a novel. I simply couldn’t rant convincingly enough to ensure that particular book could win a small but useful prize. The narrative’s illusion of ease – and just you try creating an illusion of ease, matey – was too convincing. A parallel idiocy might involve refusing to applaud Derek Jacobi or Judi Dench at the end of a performance, because they looked as if they weren’t acting.
As our media reduce costs, effort and mutual respect far below a workable minimum, we have become used to programmes, films, broadcasts and reports that appear effortless in the sense that clearly no one could be bothered trying to make them informative, coherent, entertaining or worthwhile. The insultingly slapdash is, at best, presented as being ironic – at worst, it implies that it’s somehow what we’ve asked for, what we deserve. This lack of care is tedious and depressing, but it’s also dangerous. The idea that Blair wanted regime change, no matter what, that WMD and the smoking gun were a murderous con, is shocking news again – shocking to the media. Anyone else out there remotely surprised? Millions of UK citizens were more than able to find all those ‘45 Minutes from Doom’ headlines laughable – less funny given that they meant we were about to kill people on a grotesque scale. Simply reading the shamefully weasel-worded dossier, even with no other information available – and other information was massively available – made it clear that the case for war was so shaky that its architects were already shaping phrases specifically to prevent themselves being prosecuted for war crimes. As Dr Kelly said, ‘The wordsmithing is actually quite important . . .’
A writer who thinks, who rewrites, isn’t just bucking an ugly trend. He or she is also taking control of a power which can delight the heart, encourage, entrance. That same power can deceive, betray and murder and it is a matter of basic self-defence to keep ourselves as literate as possible, as strong as possible in our words.
If you are interested in strong journalism, you might want to follow this link, www.gregpalast.com, to Greg Palast’s site. There you can also, should you wish, have the pleasure of donating to a charity dedicated to producing genuinely powerful investigative journalism. Remember Bush stealing the vote – twice? Greg Palast and his team – and The Guardian – are why you know that happened.
And the strength of words brings me to my second pleasure in dealing with students: that of simply being near so much writing, so much of the energy of individual human beings reaching out to others and defining and uncovering the strengths of their mind and themselves with words and words and words. When you’ve been locked away with only your own typing, it can be refreshing, if not intoxicating, to feel so much thought, construction, enthusiasm, boiling away on every side.
Meanwhile, spare a kind thought for Sark and the Sarkese – they’ve just suffered a fairly major landslip that has put Grand Greve Bay out of action. Fortunately, no one was hurt. I like it when no one gets hurt.
Onwards.
XVIII
I DO HOPE the festivities were kind to you. I myself spent the duration lying on the sofa and sincerely hoping that someone would shoot me through the forehead. I find there’s nothing quite as effective as Christmas for bringing out all those especially rampant viruses – the ones The Body of the self-employed person saves for rapid deployment as soon as a proper holiday is declared. This is, quite simply, revenge upon The Mind for the rest of the year’s truncated nights, double-booked evenings, hair-tearing afternoons and rewrite-and-email-haunted mornings. It is, however, rare for The Body to really rouse itself, dust off its top hat, stop laughing maniacally and playing the organ in the basement (I know, I know) and put together a proper plan for Complete Domination of Everything. This year, however, The Body outdid itself and The Mind’s planned break – which was to be filled with nourishing readings from the classics, pottering at the
terrifying edges of the new novel and contemplative strolls along the frost-jewelled riverside – actually resolved itself into a tedious amount of throwing up, interspersed by drooling blackouts. Which was restful and cleansing in its own way, I suppose.
And half a mark off to all those of you who briefly thought: Yes, but surely that’s just a traditional Scottish Christmas? The bit after the carafe of Windowlene runs dry and before they start boiling up boot polish with Covonia to release its subtle notes of oak.
You’ll be glad to hear that I was just feeling moderately well and attentive in time for the (albeit strangely/insanely plotted and solipsistic) execution of David Tennant in Doctor Who. The Doctor is dead, long live the next Doctor. Meanwhile, as my Inner Child stares, rocks and whimpers in one of my other mental basements (because it’s fitting that one fictional construct should mourn another while inside a third – welcome to my brain . . .), the rest of me is back on solids and it’s time to look back on 2009’s more pleasant aspects. I’d like to at least open 2010 with a touch of zip and to briefly banish any post-Copenhagen conviction that our entire species is doomed and many activities are therefore rather pointless. The more pleasant aspects of my writing life, of course, involve other people. Without other people it would be, in very many ways, impossible to write.
Of course, I now have to break off and agree that writing, particularly novel-writing, does tend to be something one does by oneself. Even those truly, madly, deeply irritating souls who pose with their laptops in fashionable cafés aren’t actually collaborating with the baristas. They’re – perhaps unsurprisingly – alone. They may even not be utter wankers – they could be saving on their heating bills, or using the dull background hum of cheap dating, caffeinated child howls and Heimlich manoeuvres as a kind of aural wallpaper to block out their internal doubts, or they may simply like being able to look up and find immediate proof that the world contains people they didn’t have to make up earlier. The joy and the horror of writing are that it’s something you do by yourself – if your name’s on it, it’s your fault. If your name’s on it with somebody else’s, it’s still your fault. And you’ll rarely find multiple authors attached to a literary novel, or a short story – they don’t make commercial sense for even one writer. Writers may find like-minded folk they can consult with, or even groups of other writers to support them, but the idea that writers hang out together constantly, taking a deep and involved interest in each other’s scribbling as it happens, is less than accurate. Writers can certainly care about each other – I’m very fond of my writer chums, for example, and I do love reading what they’ve come up with. Once it’s bloody well finished. Otherwise, I’ve got my own stuff to write, thanks. Writers who tutor other authors may make suggestions, ask questions, give advice – but eventually the author is alone with the text: every word an opportunity, every word a responsibility, every word another chance. That’s at least half the terrifying fun of it all.
So why, if anyone talks to me about my job during 2010 and uses the words solitary, lonely, isolated or the savage wilderness that is your life would make me want to top myself, do I feel a spot of throat-punching would be in order, if I were not a pacifist? Well . . . for a start, if the writer isn’t writing in expectation of the reader, isn’t, in some way, offering a letter to an absent love, then why bother? Aiming yourself at a clique of pals, or a market, or up your own private right of way doesn’t make for particularly appetising prose. Viciously selfish, compulsive, obsessive and odd though many writers may be, we do everything we do for other people. And then there are the people we make up. Yes, should you watch me writing (for what I can only say would be singularly twisted reasons), I may look as if I’m a bit glum: hunting and pecking away and then staring. And I will have no visible accompaniment. Oh, but inside, Dear Reader – the writer is in minds, under skins, on roads untravelled, and anywhere and everywhere and more. The intensity with which a writer can inhabit a character can make good old reality seem a little bit flat without the use of mental discipline and a will to observe. We have more company than some people will ever know.
Or, we’re far too enthusiastic with our imaginary friends. You pick.
And then there are the other people who make sure that our words reach readers and we don’t have to shout them in queues, or break in and scrawl them on to sleeping strangers, delightful though that might be. The proofreading may be patchy, incomes may be circling the drain, the assurance and vision may be stunted, but at least we still sort of have a UK publishing industry. Huzzah! I’ve had the same editor for nearly twenty years now. Who can say how my work would have turned out if I’d been slammed stupidly into a niche market, forbidden to write short stories, prevented from making my own mistakes? Who can say how cheering I have found the knowledge of my first reader as that one specific, intelligent and really quite warped personality? Not me, anyway.
Those of you who are familiar with this blog will also be aware that this particular writer couldn’t have managed 2009 without, for example, the unsung few who shove refreshment trolleys up and down trains and make a point of actually being pleasant and trying to improve seatless, delayed, boiling, freezing, inexplicable, lost or otherwise disastrous journeys. I would have had much less fun without the festivals in Charleston, Glasgow, Waterford, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Ullapool, Cromarty, Ilkley, Beverley and Toronto, or without additional audiences in Berlin, Wannsee, Ely, Birnam – and apologies to anywhere I’ve forgotten. Thanks to the ladies and gentlemen for the notes, emails, letters and gifts of food. Thanks to all the kind strangers who gave me food, in fact. I have often needed it – and clearly looked as if I needed it. And I would have been abandoned like a parcel in all kinds of places without all manner of cabbies, lift-givers and drivers – thanks to them for a magical blend of casual racism, Climate-Change denial, excellent chat, strange anecdotes, health tips and unhinged brooding. Special mention to the madman (in a nice way) who got me from Preston to Glasgow through gales and floods. I can only regret how much CO2 I must have generated. And thanks to the man who talked about effluent recycling throughout my flight to Toronto – it really was a helpful distraction.
2010 woke up with the start of a new novel for me, so there’ll be slightly less travel ahead and a marked increase in penetrating terror at home. Of which more later. Meanwhile, may the next twelve months prove as pleasant as possible for each of you. Onwards.
XIX
SO. THE NEW Novel. I’m calling it that in the frail hope that it will hear me and turn into one – at the moment it is, of course, the New Notebook Full of Stuff and a Smattering of Early Paragraphs. A long project is, as you will realise, a massive and potentially ludicrous commitment of time and enthusiasm, which could come apart in your hands at any moment, could promise wonders, cough twice and then turn into ashes and sand at the end of three years’ preparation and one year’s labour. Its customary horrors have been enhanced this time around by my continuing flu. Many commiserations to those of you who are also still staggering along in the grip of the season’s available viruses – you will be well able to imagine how much serious work I’ve actually managed to get done, whilst feeling that I am trapped on a ship in high seas with someone who is trying to insert a migraine into my face using a dulled Black & Decker router. Round and round the fretting runs: I should be further ahead. I should get better more quickly. I should have a nice little bundle of pages to ponder and hit with a stick by now. I should . . .
Well, frankly, I pretty much always should be somewhere and someone other than I am at this point. The initial stages of all my novels have always been sabotaged by (in order) my day job, my part-time job, the other writing I was doing while I was writing them, the work I was meant to have finished long before I got to this point and – naturally – the hideous diseases which flesh is heir to, if you persist in making it work and sit on trains and never give it days off and trips to the zoo with balloons. Or even without balloons. And if you have, in general, been unable
to continue your programme of inspirational and nourishing treats as you would have wished. I am more worried than usual, but then again I am always more worried than usual – so that must be usual, right?
A greater part of writing than you might suppose relies upon the writer ignoring or temporarily setting aside a whole circus troupe of ugly fears and just typing, in spite of them. Once I’ve dodged my own novel-related anxieties I can get used to the familiar cycle of enthusiasms and despairs – I wake up in the middle of the night having finally found out the male protagonist’s proper name: he promptly stops speaking to me and I lie in the dark wondering what he’s up to, if he’s found someone else to let him be expressed; I suddenly feel I have exactly the emotional tone and progression for the opening section, it is exciting, clear and inviting: I reach the page and it all veers off somewhere horrible and leaden while I get overly concerned about a tiny and possibly irrelevant description; I think I know the title of the book, I seem to have known it for quite a while and to be happy with it: but is it a good title, will it work?
Beyond this there is the sense – even if you’re entirely well – that putting one word after another is impossibly tiring. Although that’s quite likely to be a good sign. Falling asleep in my special typing chair after a couple of pages at the start of a book is, in fact, often an excellent sign. This is because writing prose is exhausting. Not in the way that coal-mining is exhausting, or dragging the body of your frozen companion over an icy Alpine pass is exhausting, but it’s demanding, nonetheless. By the end of the novel, things will be easier. Months of concentrating as hard as you are able and then a little bit harder still, of trying to think about sense and musicality and scansion and psychology and tone and metaphor and energy and pace and a number of additional technical doodads will have beaten what’s left of your mind into shape and the novel itself will be helping – the characters will be happy to dictate what they will, and will not, stand for and prior events will be contributing their consequences. But I find that, once a book is finished, when I return to it for the first set of overall rewrites after a couple of weeks’ break, all of my hard-won stamina has melted away and I am, once again, pathetically feeble. Which is why I’m always happy when a new writer comes to see me and says, in a puzzled and downhearted manner, something along the lines of, ‘It’s hard.’ This quite often tends to mean that they have started putting in the amount of effort their work (and the kind lady and gentleman readers) deserves. There are exceptions to this Rule of Tiredness – there are always exceptions in writing. Except when there aren’t, which would be the exception to that. I’m never in any way dismayed when something is so anxious to be written that it rips into the page as soon as I give it the chance and won’t let me be until it’s done – and if I have to load up on Kopi Luwak and Red Bull and hold on tight for a few days to keep up, then so be it. But I’ve never known that to happen with the start of a novel. In my experience, that tends to be much more like being naked and maliciously observed, while dragging a frozen piano over a muddy Alpine pass, spirit voices gathering on all sides in order to mutter things like, ‘You’re shit.’ And ‘This is a bad idea.’ And ‘You really have no arse to speak of at all, do you?’
On Writing Page 7