On Writing

by A. L. Kennedy

  Our man is in his room.

  Ah, now then – no mucking about getting there, don’t need his life story – well, we may, but not at the present juncture. Yes.

  Our man is in his room.

  Sort of scans, that does. We need things to scan – presses them so much further and so much more easily into the Dear Readers’ brains and they notice them so much less. We need them not to notice, just to open up and let us be. Good. Possibly.

  This is a very short sentence – is it a sentence? Are we doing the staccato thing, choppy entrance and then we’ll settle down?

  He stands.

  Apparently we are.

  His bottle of rye is in the desk drawer.

  Yes, I knew we might wander off down some mean streets in a bit – shut up with your nonsense. He isn’t thirsty, he isn’t wearing a fedora, although if you want to imagine he’s Humphrey Bogart for a while, you’re allowed to, because that may help. We like Humphrey Bogart. We have faith in him.

  Our man is in his room. He stands.

  Is he standing because he was sitting? Or has he been standing all this while? What need we imply?

  The leather armchair his Aunt Maude gave him in 1976 squeaks beneath him as he rises in a way that reminds him of his fondness for rubber underwear.

  I am going to give you such a slap in a minute. Expo-bloody-sition. Honestly.

  He stands by the window.

  Okay. Not enough, though.

  He stands by the window and waits.

  Not entirely unmelodious. Run that all by me again.

  Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits.

  That may do for now.

  And it may be that we’re a bit choppy, because he’s a bit tense, which is fine – he’s our man – if he’s tense, we all get tense.

  The light of the sunrise highlights his broad cheekbones.

  Right, I’m filling a sock with room-service apples, taking you into the bathroom and hitting you with it, until you either get a grip or die like the useless weasel you clearly are. Light and highlights? Because we love helpless and meaningless repetition? And highlights anyway? What height is the window – I was getting upper window myself – how is the bloody light striking him? I like that it’s sunrise, but I’d prefer dawn, off the top of my head, and DON’T LET ME EVER CATCH YOU SLIPPING POINT OF VIEW LIKE THAT – WE’RE IN CLOSE THIRD. HE CAN’T SEE HIS OWN SODDING CHEEKBONES, CAN HE? WHAT IS HE, THINKING ABOUT HIS CHEEKS FOR SOME REASON? LOOKING AT HIS REFLECTION IN THE GLASS, WHICH WOULDN’T EVEN WORK BECAUSE IT’S LIGHT OUTSIDE BECAUSE OF YOUR BLOODY SUNRISE – IT’S THE APPLE SOCK FOR YOU, MATEY, AND NO MISTAKE.

  Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits and outside the sun is rising and he watches it. There is a slowness about it that he likes.

  Maybe. We’re less choppy – he seems rather more smooth and substantial here, but I don’t like that second it. Its can get awfully woolly and, as established, repetition makes me tetchy. About it that – bit of a tongue-twister.

  There is a slowness to its progress.

  Maybe.

  There is a slowness in its progress.

  Maybe.

  There is a slowness in the heat of it that he likes.

  And again?

  There is a slowness in the heat of it he likes.

  We’re not shaking the it, but it seems more excusable . . . Can’t miss that beat, though, I don’t think. Once more from the top.

  Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits and outside the sun is rising and he watches it. There is a slowness in the heat of it that he likes.

  And is this a hotel room, or a bedroom, or an office room? Has he been up all night? Does he sleep usually? Is there someone with him? Are they asleep? Why does he like slowness? Does he have a limp? Is it possible to write that without hearing the silent comedy question: a limp what?

  And on we would go, round and round and round until it’s as good as we can manage.

  And then some more.

  Welcome to the rest of my evening. Onwards.

  XXIII

  SPRING AT LAST, Best Beloveds – and how different those green and airy mornings make my apparently endless battering at the novel.

  No. No, they don’t: snow, sleet, balmy breezes, my street being inexplicably full of warm and buttered scuba divers – nothing would or could make a difference – with novels, you just have to keep on keeping on. They are a test of endurance. To be more specific, the author does the enduring and quietly harbours tender hopes that the reader will then do some enjoying, or at least get all the way to the end. Although rates of productivity vary, my relatively extensive enquiries suggest that every page in a finished novel will probably represent about a day’s worth of scribbling, mooning, prevaricating, really getting into it, shouting at people who interrupt you, interrupting yourself . . . you get the idea. It may not take a day to write 300-ish words, but for every finished, printed, there-you-go-then page, something like a day will have been added to your book’s total writing time. So most novels represent a year or more of slog. You may choose to bore your Twitter followers with it – ‘novel today’ – or to abandon your Twitter followers for it – ‘bye for now, I’m writing a novel’. Either way, although it may initially sound a bit impressive as a way to spend your afternoon, it soon starts to seem simply sad, obsessive-compulsive, tedious. Eventually, should anyone insist on asking me what I’ve been up to, I just pretend I’ve been mugging pensioners, setting fire to kittens or trying to admire Nick Clegg. (I feel I should be able to; I mean, who else is left?) In this regard, writing a novel is a tiny bit like having a long-term illness: people enquire after it and your relation to it for the first few months and then they don’t – they really don’t – not unless they’re rather peculiar and/or enjoy the discomfort of others.

  And then there’s the less-visible slog of planning. Well done to those of you who understood what I was up to in the last blog – my attempt to give a small demonstration of the kind of poking and prodding necessary to produce words that are tidy and informative for the Dear Readers. To those of you who thought I generally just wander off into paragraphs without thinking about them first, or that I was – Sweet God in Heaven and all his furry-toed angels, NO – showing you something from the novel, then allow me to gently disabuse you on both counts.

  First, I plan. I’m a planner. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it really is quite important – planning makes life easier and makes something as ridiculously large as a novel possible. We could just swim off into one without planning, of course we could – we could just stick our arms into wood-chippers, or paint ourselves with molten lead – there’s no end to the ludicrous and self-harming things we, as human beings, could get up to. But, honestly, really truly, novels provide all the ludicrous self-harm anyone could reasonably need. (In addition to all of the good bits.) Set out on a novel without adequate planning and I will bet you considerable sums, perhaps even of money, that you will then fall into a massive chasm, heaving with all the difficulties associated with not planning. A novel is a new world, peopled and furnished with the never-were and perhaps the never-could-be. Something as beautifully monumental as that, as founded on thin air and bloody magic, will need preparation. I wasn’t kidding about the three years I spend – on and off – fumbling about with settings, finding out about characters, stumbling over lumps of plot and, in every sense of the word, planning. Sorry to bang on about this, but I have, over the last couple of decades, met innumerable people whose novels didn’t make it, because they didn’t plan. At a certain level, the logic is pretty simple: it’s very hard to tell someone a story unless you know what the story is – hence, planning.

  Methodologies vary, naturally, but being slow of thinking, I would rather potter about for a good long while – as I write other things – and get myself comfortable, enjoy at least two conversations during which my editor suggests that I surely must be ready to get started by now . . . do
some more research, have a few panic attacks, do some double-checking and then start.

  And showing you work-in-progress? Oh, now then . . .

  It’s not that I don’t love and care for you as I would for any reader, but I would be very, very much more likely to have myself filmed while dancing naked across Las Vegas with Michael McIntyre and Jeremy Clarkson and – hey, why not? – Jeremy Kyle than I would be to let you peer at even a paragraph of something I haven’t finished. (And, for the more easily confused amongst you, no such film exists – although feel free to look for it, of course.) I have not at any time felt comfortable letting people read my writing when it isn’t as close to being finished as I can manage. This is partly because – although my editor is smart as a comfy bag of parrots – someone can only read a book for the first time once. I want whatever happens to him to be as close to the first proper reader’s experience as possible, and I’m already having to deal with the facts that he and I have been working together for years, that he tends to get what I mean and that he shares (God help us) many of my interests. He’s already much nearer to me than a reader will be, which is potentially fatal when my aim is to be understood by complete strangers – the least I can do is not give him multiple runs through something and a blurry perspective. And other people reading unfinished work? No. Not really. I do run out the opening section of things to editor and agent as a ‘Have I gone out of my mind, this time?’ test. But, given that neither of them will want to throw me off completely at the start of a book by replying, ‘Yes, you’ve really lost it, give up, it’s revolting’, I tend to take any enthusiasm with a pan of salt. Anyone else? Any other sections? No. I don’t even send the final effort to my editor until it no longer makes me nauseous with fright to get it near a postbox. Or, in these advanced days, near my out-box.

  Of course, it hasn’t escaped me that I spend a good proportion of my time reading work in progress from new writers of all shapes and sorts – people who are more courageous than me. The first Arvon course I tutored involved me occupying a position of entirely spurious authority, sitting opposite a retired headmaster – a hugely pleasant, sweet and intelligent gentleman of twice my age and experience. His hands were shaking – because I had read his work and was now going to talk to him about it. It’s a hugely intimate intrusion, to clomp about in other people’s half-formed dreams. Sometimes the dreams are unwise or bewildered, sometimes they need little or no assistance – it’s always a privilege to see them, and yet the tutor is always the one who ends up being thanked. And the headmaster? After our hour, he took me outside – being an observant man and a proper educator – and showed me the heaving great rainbow I hadn’t noticed roaring overhead. We both enjoyed it equally. ‘Help’ other people’s work and you’ll almost inevitably get more help back. Onwards.

  XXIV

  DEAR CHRIST, JUST kill me, just please make it stop. Hit me with something solid so that I can lie down, all unthinking, and bleed in a calm and restful manner. Which is to say – I’m a bit tired at the moment and have stopped greeting people with ‘Hello’ and am now going with remarks pertaining to and variations on the whole ‘Please make it stop’ theme. For goodness’ sake, I was in my kitchen at the weekend, genuinely rattling with stress, head ticking away like the Spring Sale window at H. Samuel and smoking. I don’t smoke – it’s a vile-tasting form of self-harm which funnels money into the coffers of some grotesquely unpleasant people and is something in which I have never taken any interest. And yet there I was, sucking on a borrowed cigar as if it were my only remaining form of life support and, indeed, a dear and longed-for friend. Obviously, the smoking didn’t help – it simply made me feel ill in a mildly distracting manner. I think it is symptomatic of my current condition that this was far more than I could have hoped for.

  Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing I am burdened with that I don’t want to do. I am currently in Cambridge and thoroughly enjoying its Literary Festival. I spent part of my morning reading to kind and attentive strangers with Jim Kelman – who is always an excellent gentleman – and then engaging in a discussion about voice and language that enabled us to mention passion and truth and the nature of humanity and being heard and living lives that are fully expressed and entering into the worlds of others imaginatively in a glorious and healthful manner. There is nothing bad about this. I am simply stuck in a moderately horrifying vortex of novel-typing, other typing, waiting, more waiting, utterly unpredictable rail travel and hotels.

  Now, Best Beloveds, I can’t bear to think about almost all of the vortex and so I shall now concentrate on its one almost palatable area: hotels. I fear this blog has not, heretofore, paid proper attention to the place of hotel accommodation in the modern writer’s life. Trust me – if you have any kind of success with your work, you will be spending more time with carpet toenails, mystery bath hairs, incomprehensible heaters, air conditioners, In-Room Entertainment systems and plugholes than you could have dreamed of in even your most masochistic fantasies. (Yes, plugholes – designers all over the world have clearly spent years perfecting all manner of elegant arrangements which will render you pathetically unable to keep water in your bath or sink and which, given only the tiniest opportunity, will damage you in horrible and permanent ways.) So, let us examine some hotel-related considerations.

  First – Food. The acquisition and happy consumption of food in a hotel is always a major issue. Given that you may spend all day getting there and then spend all the next day getting to another hotel – and so on – and may arrive late each evening, outwith the set room-service hours, or there may be no room service, or you may feel that if you have to stay conscious long enough for them to construct a club sandwich and bring it to you there may be a death in your family – yours – then you’ll have to take other steps. I tend to prepare myself for touring as I would for camping. I carry a heating element in case there’s no kettle, I carry powdered drinks and powdered food with me (either the stuff for building up thin people or the stuff for slimming down fat people: same stuff, different packaging . . .) and I carry cutlery, in case I ever see a shop and can buy real food that I can make into an improvised picnic, or indeed just gnaw in the bathroom while I try to decipher how the taps work. On no account lapse into living on caffeine and biscuits – this will reduce you to a state of weirdly manic malnutrition within days. Hotel restaurants are either full of satellite football games, tattooed men and soiled copies of The Sun, or have dress codes and an insistence on staying upright which I usually can’t manage when I’ve been on the road for more than forty-eight hours. There is no comfy and sustaining middle ground. Room service, of course, involves a £300 Tray Charge – which they won’t waive even if you give them back the tray immediately or ask that they bring your steak and chips in a carrier bag. Menus vary. A lot. One hotel I know only serves curry in its rooms; I’ve tried asking for toast, bread and butter, a dish of boiled water – no, just curry. I do love curry, but not in a bedroom. Never ask for a cheese and fruit platter – someone will always have left it outside on a window ledge for a couple of weeks before you get it. Never ask for a cooked breakfast, it will have been on the same window ledge since Christmas. Never ask for soup, it will always be unidentifiable and full of Things. Hotels within which you basically can’t afford to eat at all will provide good and at least warm food, but will justify making you take out a bridging loan to pay for it by adding towers and leaves and twirly, crunchy, confusing adornments and whittled fruit to everything, including your complimentary glass of water. This will bewilder you. The soul-warping mixture of hunger, degradation and/or stupid luxury which results from letting a ghastly range of other people see to your accommodation has led to many scenes I wish I could forget – for example, the tired and withered evening when I simply licked the chocolate lettering off the plate reading ‘Welcome, Miss Kennedy’, which greeted me when I staggered into somewhere posh in Philadelphia. That and some Cheetos from the railway station provided my calories for the day.r />
  Second – Despair. There will, naturally, be buckets of this. If you have a life, it will seem like a distant and mockingly happy dream. If you – like me – don’t have a life, then you will crouch in a corner of your bed, secure in the knowledge that you will now never have time to acquire one. Try to bring things with you which are small, light and also capable of making you happy. Some authors may interpret this to mean booze, drugs and battery-operated aids to relaxation. I might suggest that indulging in these could lead one dangerously astray in an already weakened state. I tend to travel with slippers that remind me of having my feet somewhere I’ve actually been before and maybe even liked. I carry DVDs and a means of playing them – nothing like Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant to cheer you. I even bring images of places and people who make me smile, although these can simply reduce me to spasms of helpless longing, so I have to use them sparingly. And I have an alarm clock which doesn’t just shout ‘Bibbidy-bip!’ at me repeatedly. Mine can allegedly provide the sounds of babbling brooks, or rainstorms, birdsong . . . they all suggest a hideous collision in outer space to me, but that’s kind of what I was after.

  Third – Loneliness. You are mainly going to meet strangers on tour – some of them may be charming, some of them may be revolting; whatever they’re like, they’ll be gone soon. Some authors find that using a proportion of the available strangers as improvised recreational activities is a way to go – or you may decide, as I have, that this option is inexpressibly depressing and potentially embarrassing, dangerous, infectious, and so forth. Many In-Room Entertainment systems will provide the less-personalised option of ‘Films you may wish to enjoy in the privacy of your own room’ – which is a very lovely way of saying, ‘Fancy a wank? We’ve got films.’ This, again, may well turn out to be the equivalent of digging out your own chest with a melon-baller until your heart is even rattlier and more isolated than it was when you started. The knowledge that others before you may have followed this path with enthusiasm may also make you wary of any objects in your surroundings – especially the remote control. (And for God’s sake don’t ponder how many people have died and/or shagged and/or thrown up and/or nursed vile diseases in your present position.) You may feel that phoning someone you care for at this point and being offered consolation and diversion would be dandy – it won’t. It will simply define your lacks all the more clearly, give you taunting dreams and/or make you wonder what they’re actually getting up to without you.