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Sneaker Pimps

More odd musical/novelistic connections: one song I belatedly discovered is by a little known band called The Sneaker Pimps. Even though I only heard it properly on a compilation last year it dates back to 1996. Given my recurring themes in The Angel it’s probably not a surprise (but one I only just realised) that it’s called ‘6 Underground’. It’s more than just the title that resonates — it’s also the general feel of the track (a sort of soporific shuffling beat) and the lyrics.

There’s a bit of a refrain alternating ‘underground/overground’, which is quite apt but I particularly like the sense of contempt hidden behind a veneer of patience. I especially like the couplet:

‘Don’t think because I understand that I care/Don’t think because we’re talking that we’re friends.’

And I like the nihilsm of:

‘Talk me down, safe and sound/Too strung up to sleep/Wear me out, scream and shout’

The intonation of the singer, who’s now called Kelli Ali, fits in my mind the sort of attitude that I’ve tried to depict in Kim in the extract that I’ve written to send out for my reading when we come back after our Easter holidays on Monday. She’s massively in debt, been betrayed by someone who she thought was her boyfriend, is hungover and has to entertain this City banker type who she thinks feels quite sorry for himself as he’s just been fired — but she needs his money. She’s only really prepared to be as civil to him to start with as is strictly necessary (‘don’t think because we’re talking that we’re friends’) but he disarms her by his childish enthusiasm and honest compliments to the point where he wins her round and actually manages to get her to drop a lot of her front too.

I’m not too sure what I think about what I’ve sent out to the rest of the class overall. It’s 2,600 words (a little over so Alison might shut me up again) and it’s just two people in a confined space in real time from one POV. It sows a lot of backstory and primes the rest of the narrative though, after the initially more dramatic scenes of the first two chapters. (Most of the class haven’t seen these but Alison has — and she’s given me feedback on them so I’m not going to get her to sit through me reading those again.) The reader will find that James is into cooking, that Kim is in a bad state (asthmatic. in debt), that she works in a pub part-time, that James doesn’t find her very attractive (bloodshot eyes, dirty clothes, spotty) — he’s surprised at one point that she has a female shape.

Yet the two of them both want something from the other. James wants some sort of validation and approbation of his appreciation of art and music. Kim wants to keep her head above water professionally and financially: she’s also in a situation from which she could be persuaded to escape.

I found the video for the song on You Tube so here it is. (Note the nose piercing.)

I came across an autobiography of Kelly Ali, the singer in the Sneaker Pimps (at the time of ‘6 Underground’ anyway). It’s quite fascinating and she has the same kind of voice and philosophy that I imagine Kim to have, with a few important differences. Seems the other pimps were posh kids from the north east — one of them and his father were accomplished fine wine tasters and could identify reds from tasting them (more echoes of my writing there, especially from ‘Burying Bad News’.).

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Kim

In The Angel my main female character is called Kim. She was called that before I decided to make her a German and I’ve not changed the name yet and I’m not inclined to at the moment. It’s quite an androdgynous name in also being used for men but probably the most notable current uses are American actresses like Kim Cattrall and Kim Basinger — such is the influence of American culture that Kim could probably be a genuine name in Germany (though I’ve not come across many although Wikipedia says Kim Basinger has German and Swedish ancestry). It also has an oriental manifestation as both a first name and surname — think of North Korea.

The name is often shortened from Kimberley, which has a South African association with the town or city of that name, which apparently was named after one of the Lord Kimberleys the derivation of whose name will be discussed below. (Incidentally, the Guardian’s obituary of the fourth Earl of Kimberleyshows him to have been a rather colourful character: ‘Johnny Wodehouse, the maverick, six-times-married fourth Earl of Kimberley, who has died aged 78, was as arrogant in his politics as he was in wasting his considerable inherited fortune on gambling, womanising and alcoholism.’ The current Earl is, by contrast, a computer programmer.  I’m not sure what it is but there’s something about that I like. )

Interestingly, my Kim has a history stretching back about eighteen months. She was in a short story which was reworked into a screenplay for the Open University Advanced Creative Writing course and she cost me marks as previously recounted by making ‘Twat’ her opening line. When I was thinking of The Angel she popped up again as a partly developed urban, ‘edgy’ character.  I still wasn’t sure why I’d called her Kim, though I had come across a female one of the South African variety in an office situation – who I’d heard a few stories about but never properly met (oddly enough I just saw her in the work gym today).

So I’ve been wondering why I’ve persisted with an androgynous, non-Germanic Christian name for a character who has little in common with stars of Hollywood slightly erotic film and TV (unlike Emma who’d clearly love that sort of thing). I realised that it’s blindingly obvious and goes back to the etymogical origins of the name as in Lord Kimberley. It comes from ancient English and means royal fortress and Kimberley (or Kimblerly) means field of the royal fortress — and they are both derived from the place name Kimble in Buckinghamshire, which itself was named after one of the most ancient English kings, Cymbeline, of the Shakespeare play and the remains of whose castle are still in evidence in a field in Little Kimble. (In a further twist to the power theme I think I’m right in saying that the land on which Cymbeline’s castle stands is actually part of the nearby Chequers estate.) I have to say I find something quite transcendent about the immediate vicinity of the castle — often the weather seems to change as you pass. Here’s an interesting ‘fact’ about the castle from a website on the Ridgeway, which passes close, as do both route of the 7,000 year Icknield Way — the most ancient road in Europe — ‘Legend has it that if you run  seven times round  Cymbeline’s Castle on the Chequers  Estate, the devil will appear’.

Cymbeline's Castle from a Distance
Cymbeline's Castle from a Distance

And The Angel pub is located in a fictional place that’s not too far away at all from Kimble. In fact The Swan at Great Kimble is one of the pubs which will lend attributes to The Angel. So Kim sticks for me because the name is so intrinsic to the location of the novel. I’d never twigged that before but it seems so obvious in retrospect. Of course, Kim is going to explore the area all around here and draw spiritual and psychic energy for her art. I’ll avoid her running round the castle a full seven times though or my careful plotting will go awry.

I’m working on making it plausibly German — perhaps an Anglicised contraction of her real German names or a conscious multi-culturally inspired identity?

Beacon Hill as Tor
Beacon Hill Doing A Good Impression of Glastonbury Tor
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Looking for Inspiration

I wrote quite a bit in a short time up until the last Saturday workshop — around 7,000 words of the beginning of ‘The Angel — two sizeable chapters or perhaps three or four shorter ones. I tend to like shorter chapters myself when I’m reading a book — it leads to a feeling of having achieved more as a reader. However, the style I’ve written in tends to change point of view between James and Kim (in fact for the first chapter more than POV — the whole scene changes as they are apart). That might make for chapters that are too bitty or too obviously in parallel. No need to worry so much about that at the moment, though.

I also wrote about 4,000 words for Swan Supping — mainly a walk and the Beer Diet attached to a previous post — and submitted a 3,500 word assignment for my MSc. (However, there is a serial called ‘The Gravediggers’ Arms’ in Swan Supping, now in its fourth part, by a Charlie Mackle that concerns someone called James taking over a pub — a bit of a protoype for ‘The Angel’.) This probably came off worst in terms of quality. I’ve had it marked and got 60%, which is ok, but based on initial comments from my supervisor I’d hoped to bullshit a bit more effectively but she’d found me out in places and I realise I’ll need to put more time into the next one, which actually counts towards the course marks. Even so, I suppose I’ve taken the first steps to doing it, which is probably the biggest obstacle in these sort of things.

Given that about 3,000 words of The Angel’s extracts were written a week or two before then that’s about 11,000 words done in the space of just over a week. Since then I’ve found it quite difficult to get myself going again. I note from Bren Gosling’s latest blog post (that I note enviously was written from Sicily) that he’s also finding it difficult to start up again after the culmination of last term. In an effort to re-invigorate myself I’ve gone back and looked over the comments that coursemates made on the scripts of the extracts I read for my third reading, back at the end of February. That was two scenes — one of James and Emma looking over a spreadsheet about finances and one the fire scene with James and Kim. The comments were, without exception, really supportive and generous. Some queried a few practical things (volume of fire alarm, is dopamine a hormone? and so on) and made some constructive suggestions. A few comments recurred among several readers — ‘dialogue is always one of your strengths’, ‘the characters’ voices seem real’, ‘believe in the finance speak’, ‘fast-moving’, ‘a page turner’, ‘want to find out what happens next’, ‘deft and sly humour’ and there was also one comment that praised the prose, which I particularly liked as the writing wasn’t particularly showy in those sections. Most comments said this was the best section yet and how it was hitting its stride — which makes it all quite infuriating to find it quite difficult to make myself sit there and grind out more of it unless I have some deadline looming.

I’ve rewritten the ends of the two threads from James and Kim’s POV inside the tub carriage where he turns up on the morning he’s been fired to pay £500 for a painting that she tried to sell for £1,000 the night before at a viewing. This was the end of the chapter I submitted to Alison as my supposed 4,000 novel opening (it’s more likely to be the end of chapter one and start of chapter two). The rewritten part is just practical scene-setting for the 1,000 or so words I’ve managed since then. These, in themselves, tend to set up the rest of the day, which will be the long-anticipated bender (subject to much procrastination in writing terms). He’ll find out she’s in serious debt and she’ll reveal she makes ends meet by working some shifts in a pub (hardly on international art collector circuit money). I’ll also try to describe how Kim looks. It’s important that she’s not too good-looking but she has to have the capability of developing into someone he does find very attractive in the end (Jane Eyre similarities again). She’s also got to look fairly good from a distance in a soft-focus sort of way (I have some plot ideas about this) so he’ll get close up to her and find a few off-putting things like imperfect complexion, unhealthy pallor, bony face exaggerated by piercings and so on — all stuff that can gradually melt away.  

The bender scene will also pack in quite a lot of character exposition. I’m hoping I can get away with this by moving fast from location to location but I do have concerns that I’ll have perhaps an opening 15,000 words or so that almost entirely concentrates on the two principal characters over a period of about 30 hours in London. I raised this at my tutorial with Alison a week last Saturday and she seemed to think it was ok. I’ll end up following this introduction with an extended time period during which the two characters team up and build up their business, which will be quite a contrast. However, there will be quite a nice symmetry in that I plan the ending to be in London with a similar fast pace, though I may have to insert extra plot elements to bring it up to anything like 15,000 words.

Speaking of Alison’s tutorial, I specifically asked in advance about some concerns that I had and she replied in pencil on a printout of the e-mail in amusingly laconic fashion. ‘Is the scene with James fast-moving enough? ‘ [YES] ‘Are the ones with Kim on her own too slow?’ [OK — WITH EDITING — NB. I’m personally still a little concerned about these being static especially when I continue the action later in Village Underground.] ‘I’ve intercut the two threads in this extract and wonder whether this is a valid approach.’ [YES] ‘I’m also interested in what you make of the location for Kim — it’s a bit unusual but is it clear?’ [YES — GREAT]. And the real paranoid ‘is it any good question: ‘Overall, would this set up a story that readers would be interested in?’ [YES]. So I take all that as not a bad endorsement and really a call for myself to bloody get on with it.

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48 Laws of Power

I caught a glimpse of an old favourite book of mine on my exceptionally cluttered bookshelves and pulled it out to have another look. It’s Robert Greene’s ’48 Laws of Power’, which is, I suppose, a sort of psychology book illustrated with some literary (and other) quotations. I’ve always thought that an awful lot of human motivation is about power and the book likes to allude to military strategies as quoted by Machiavelli or Sun Tzu:  I’ve had a fair amount of what recruitment agents call ‘board level exposure’ and know how much like medieval courts the top tier of management in plcs and AGs are — and the laws can also be applied to business relationships and office politics. Additionally most of the ‘laws’ in the book can be applied to the most intimate or domesticated of human relationships. So in many ways the book could be seen as quite a resource for novelists.

Here is a short selection of my favourite laws — the full list can be found on a website associated with the book (and Wikipedia).

  • Law 1 Never Outshine the Master
  • Law 4 Always Say Less than Necessary
  • Law 12 Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim
  • Law 15 Crush your Enemy Totally
  • Law 16 Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor
  • Law 17 Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability
  • Law 32 Play to People’s Fantasies
  • Law 33 Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew
  • Law 41 Avoid Stepping into a Great Man’s Shoes
  • Law 42 Strike the Shepherd and the Sheep will Scatter
  • Law 46 Never appear Perfect

Probably the most insightful law is the fifteenth. It stems from the famous Machiavelli quotation ‘men must either be crushed or else annihilated; they will avenge themselves for small injuries but cannot do so for great ones’. Law One is also extremely important as it takes into account people’s jealousies. This is why all job advertisements that ask for thrusting, confident, assertive types are fundamentally misconceived — anyone who performs too well in front of their boss and makes him or her look quite ordinary is going to be stitched up sooner or later in a corporate environment. Law 46 is fairly similar — no-one likes anyone who’s perfect but if you’re calculating make sure that your imperfections are carefully selected to be relatively cosmetic.

I wonder if it’s my interest in such theories of scheming and treachery that has led to a lot of feedback on the writing I’ve read so far to emphasise the reader’s dislike of my characters — who it’s been noted are quite often trying to stitch each other up?

Of course the law I ignore most myself is the fourth — ‘always say less than necessary’ as the length of this blog entry and the others confirms.

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Bender

Both Alison and Emily have said they think it’s a great idea for me to start ‘The Angel’ with James and Kim going out on a massive bender together (or at least have the sequence quite near the start). I’m certainly of the belief that there’s no bonding experience like a session getting completely plastered in the company of similarly afflicted others — something to do with the lowering of inhibition and probably why it’s an ingrained part of UK working culture.

In the discussion I had last Wednesday on plot with Guy, Nicole and Sue we discussed, amongst other things, how this might happen and how it might end. I think we all thought it might be good if the two characters ended up in a posh hotel suite but were too tired and emotional to consummate any latent attraction. I’ve thought about this a bit further and have some ideas about how they might wake up the next morning.

I’m now giving some consideration to how the bender might unfold. I’d ideally like this to be the opening chapter that I submit to Alison before Easter. I want to make it fast moving and, towards the end, quite blurry and increasingly surreal (as much as I can get away with within my genre).

I have to admit to recycling this idea from two Open University assignments — one short fiction and the other a longer screenplay —  from 2008-9 where two characters, also called, by chance, James and Kim, went on a bender in similar circumstances. They went from Mayfair to Canary Wharf — where Kim pulled James out of dock.

I’ve settled on having both work around Shoreditch/Bishopsgate so this version will go in the opposite direction. It will be quite picaresque in construction and I want to move up a spectrum of the vast number of options in London and the diversity of drinking/eating places. So I’m minded to start in somewhere really shabby and edgy (in the truest sense) and then move via better pubs up to posy bars and to a top class restaurant and thence to some top hotel — I think something very boutique and designer with massive rooms. I feel a visit to a bookshop and a flick through a Time Out guide to London might be coming up. Actually I’d quite like to base the hotel on the Hotel Rival in Stockholm, which is part owned by Benny Andersson from Abba, and is incredibly Swedish-trendy. I’ve stayed in it twice and drunk in the bar for the beautiful people of Stockholm — with beer at £7 a bottle. The rooms aren’t huge but very stylish and have Playstations and DVD players — with, of course, ABBA CDs to choose from. I’m sure there’s some similar places in London but I may make one up. I may also make up the restaurant as I’m quite keen to reproduce a scene in that from my previous screenplay which was rather satirical about celebrity chefs.

As luck would have it, there was a broken water main on Euston Road last night, causing traffic jams all the way down City Road. I was driving to City so I decided to take an alternative route back to the A40 Westway which is similar to the route that my characters are likely to take. I turned down Goswell Road, then down Clerkenwell High Street and carried on the road (whatever it’s then called) to end up at Holborn. I could have gone round the back roads of Fitzrovia and Marylebone but I stayed on the routes I knew so ended up going down Shaftesbury Avenue, skirting Piccadilly Circus, down through St. James’ and along Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner and then up Park Lane to Edgware Road. I think James and Kim might, for the sake of the readers’ interest in setting, hit the river at some point. I’ll maybe have them go to the Anchor on Bankside and then maybe into the Royal Festival Hall — maybe they could go up the Eye. Now that would afford me a lot of opportunity for the sort of descriptive setting that Emily was recommending to us last night.

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Something Borrowed…Leads to Plugging Some Gaps

The end of my last extract, which unfortunately I didn’t have time to read on Saturday, had a fire scene in The Angel. For some reason I was looking around on the internet for fire and ice imagery and came across some references to a classic novel which has a couple of fires. I decided to ‘borrow’ a bit of the action, although the original language was definitely not in keeping with the tone of what I was writing.

Here’s some selected parts of the source — no need to worry about quotation as it’s very out of copyright:

‘I hurried on my frock and a shawl: I withdrew the bolt and opened the door with a trembling hand…I [was] amazed to see the air quite dim, as if filled with smoke; and while looking to the right hand and left, to find whence these blue wreaths issued, became further aware of a strong smell of burning…in an instant I was within the chamber. Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the curtains were on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep. “Wake, wake!” I cried. I shook him but he only murmured and turned: the smoke had stupefied him…I rushed to his basin and ewer…both were filled with water. I heaved them up, deluged the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room, brought my own water-jug,  baptized the couch afresh…the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last.’

This gave me the idea to have Kim empty ice on James to try and wake him, although my fire wasn’t dramatic enough to have flames inside the room:

‘ She coughed. The air stank. The smoke detector at the end of the hallway bleeped incessantly. She ran to the top of the stairs. Catching an orange glint in corner of her eye she stopped and looked out of the window. She saw flames through the outside glass door of the function room…”James. James. Wake up. Wake up. There’s a fire.” Kim shook him hard…flames were licking at the thatched roof…Turning the bar sink taps on full, she grabbed two bar towels and plunged them into the water. She picked up a plastic bucket and filled it from the ice machine. Carrying the bucket, she rushed upstairs, pressing a wet towel to her face. In her room she found James had put on his jeans but had then fallen asleep again on the bed. The thatch was now ablaze outside the window…Kim threw the ice in his face. “Get up you stupid man. There’s a fire. I’m not leaving you here.” As he awoke, a finger of black smoke entered the bedroom.’

I guess almost every writer who’s ever read Jane Eyre will probably have consciously or unconsciously borrowed something from the novel but it was quite fun to do. No one noted on any of the scripts that they’d spotted it, although had I got to read it out then perhaps it may have been more obvious.

I think there’s a bit of a Jane Eyre archetype in the plot of the book. While James isn’t really a Mr Rochester, Kim is going to be coming from somewhere different (Germany) to London and then will meet James and fall out and reconnect with him later (perhaps?) but I think her St. John Rivers phase will come before James. Hold on! That’s given me an idea for the sort of character she can hang around with in London — a supporting character and a bit of sub-plot that I noted I was lacking with the post-its.

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Kim’s Hometown

We got given some homework yesterday — to write in one of our characters’ voices about their hometown. Strangely I didn’t leave it until a few hours before the next class to think about starting it. This probably followed on from our discussion about plot where a small group of us considered potential holes in each others’ plots — mine was getting my unlikely protagonists together, Kim and James in ‘The Angel’. I was probably also motivated by my visit to Village Underground (see forthcoming post).

Making Kim a German has let me re-use a lot of my knowledge about Germany — a country I’ve probably visited about once a month between 2001 and 2009, sometimes more frequently. Despite my shameful ability to speak the language I actually know and recognise quite a bit of German. I’ve also met hundreds of Germans and visited more or less every large city in Germany and Austria, with the exception of places like Leipzig and Dresden. So writing about Kim’s hometown was like teasing open the floodgates. I got to the 500 word limit fairly rapidly: Kim’s Hometown .

Incidentally, the Benther Berg is completely real and so is the hotel — I’ve stayed there a couple of times and there’s a photo in existence of me fallen asleep in the bar there worse for wear having consumed Herculean quantities of red wine on the company’s expense account. It can be looked up on German Wikipedia here.

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More Reflections on Feedback

Receiving feedback in the tutorial in short, intense burst means that some comments have only just resurfaced in my mind. One really positive one was that someone said I’d taken a number of characters in a situation and made them really realistic and distinctive — they all came over differently from each other and were like real people — albeit unlikeable ones. This is one of the main challenges of any fiction so it was great to think that someone thought I’d succeeded.

I’m just preparing my next reading and working in a fairly similar way — mainly putting dialogue down at first. This isn’t even in any particular order — just conversations the characters might have with each other. I’ll then go back and write the description around the dialogue. One important piece of feedback that has come through consistently is that I both under and over use exposition. I’ll under use it when I set up a scene, maybe after a change of point of view or temporal change. I won’t always give the reader enough information to flag who, where and when. As a novel develops perhaps this is needed less but I can’t expect the reader to be too intuitive when I’ve made a change as an author. On the other hand, I overuse exposition within scenes and about characters. So a reader can work out that when Frances notices a white band on Gordon’s left ring finger then that’s where a wedding ring used to be — I don’t need to say it myself. Nor do I need to explain why Frances put foundation on her finger – an action that I was told was a first for any woman of the class’s acquaintance. So the message is trust the reader to  ascribe motivation to the character’s actions but give the reader some help in circumstances where it’s me, as the writer, who might be the source of confusion.

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‘You Must Be An Angel…’

…I can see it in your eyes, full of wonder and surprise’ — from Madonna’s ‘Angel’ off the ‘Like A Virgin’ album from 1984.

I heard this song for the first time in years tonight on ‘Only Connect’ — an interesting quiz show hosted by Victoria Coren. (The title is presumably based on E.M. Forster’s famous quotation, which was much referenced by the Leavisite deputy head, Mrs Silverman, when I was in the sixth form who gave a couple of us extra sessions tuition in English Literature in case we wanted to do the Oxbridge entrance exams. I’m sure that our MP at the time, Joel Barnett (of the famous devolution-related Barnett formula) once said that she was related to the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, whose bill abolished the death penalty. She may even have been his wife, although she must have been quite young when he died in that case as that was 23 years before she taught me.)

Anyway, I always thought ‘Angel’ was a wonderful song because, like many others on the album, it was very subversive — at first hearing innocent electro-pop but finding all sorts of darker meanings on closer examination. I love the way she stresses the word ‘must’  in the line ‘You must be an angel’ — you’d expect the stressed word to be angel. The album came out in my first year at university and, having been one of the very small number of people who’d bought Madonna’s first album when it was eponymously titled in 1983, I bought both the single and album of ‘Like A Virgin’ on the day they were released.

I wondered why I thought ‘The Angel’ was a good title for the novel and it’s partly to do with Angel tube station (the lovliest named tube station on the whole underground) being the closest to City University but it’s also because I’ve always pictured, without actually realising it, the Kim character to look quite like Madonna of that era. Odd how it all comes tumbling out of the subconscious.

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Sally Hits Facebook

Inspired by Emily’s suggestion about creating diaries and the like for our characters I’ve come into the modern world and set up a Facebook page for one of mine — except that it’s a bit more complicated as this is something that will probably really happen in the novel. It’s for Sally Hunter — alter-ego wine writer of eco-grunger Sally Edmonds — and she’ll use her Facebook persona to establish her wine-writing credibility.

It’s early days yet — I want to her to become a fan of various wine related things and so on but I’ve had to put in things like education and date of birth. I’ve kept those pretty true to Sally Edmonds’ details. I’ll be interested to see if Sally gets mail (she has her own genuine e-mail address which she needed to set up the account) from people who went to Aylesbury High School or  Birmingham or Birkbeck Universities thinking they remember her. I think if Harry Hill’s Knitted Character can have a Facebook page then so can Sally.

Here’s how she appeared on my page — note her relationship status.

Sally Appears on My Facebook Page
Sally Appears on My Facebook Page

And here are the personal details from her page (or wall or whatever it is)

Sally's Info
Sally's Info

Click on the images to read the info in more detail.

Sally’s only got one friend at the moment so I’m sure she’d love more. You can search for her on Facebook using her mail address sally.hunter@mcnovel.org.uk (note there’s no ‘a’ in that spelling of mcnovel).

In due course Sally’s network will extend to other social-media-using characters who will make friends with her — Ana, Frances and maybe even Robert.

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The Shock of the New

It’s going to be quite an intense day on Saturday for a few of us: Rick, Nick and myself have both a reading and a tutorial. The reading is c. 2,250 words and the tutorial extract can be up to 3,000. I slightly exceeded the word limits on both so I’ve got about 5,600 words in for feedback in one way or another — in two different novels, which might land me in trouble.

I really wanted to make a start on ‘The Angel’ and I began by trying to do something clever and writing a scene which, like Alan Ayckbourn’s ‘Norman Conquests’, brought together characters from different works and had them interact in scenes which were interchangeable. I will probably still use the scene. It’s when Sally(from ‘Burying Bad News’) wants to bone up on wine. It turns out she knows Kim (from ‘The Angel’) from London and Kim persuades James to put on a wine tasting at ‘The Angel’. Sally brings Jez along and meets Emma and Gordon, Emma’s doctor father who tries to take over the wine tasting duties. Both Sally and Emma get smashed and Sally sees glamorous Emma as someone who can help make her image over and persuades her to accompany her to Bicester Village Designer Outlet to buy some discount brand label clothes cranking up the balance on the credit card she’s just wangled. In the course of this Sally would give Kim the third degree about why she’s left London and come to the sticks to work for an ex-banker. Kim would show Sally the space in the pub that she’s planning to turn into her studio. Quite a nice little scene I thought but it was quite dialogue heavy and didn’t really get into the meat of the story so I thought it might be a bit of a missed opportunity to present that for the tutorial.

Interesting that I referred to Alan Ayckbourn as I’ve long admired his plays — the way he works within a limited scope and is marvellously funny but still exposes the deepest recesses of his characters’ psyches. What I’ve described above is not too dissimilar to one of his plots.

So I decided to put the wine tasting writing on hold and write something different — and I had about two or three days to do it and last night’s class to fit in as well (in addition to work). I had a very firm image in my mind about how I wanted the novel to end and, bearing in mind feedback about how a reunion on the Millennium Bridge was a bit of cliche, I decided to construct an ending to the novel that took the cliche and subverted it.

I worked pretty obsessively on the piece as there’s not much opportunity for ‘face-time’ with the tutors and I wanted to deliberately address a lot of my concerns about the novel in the submitted extract. I got up at 5.30am this morning so I could send it in before midday (I failed by 8 minutes).

I also put my fieldwork research in the Tate Modern to good use by setting almost all the action in the gallery. I don’t know how successful a strategy it will turn out but I had the characters look at painting that were then used to reflect concepts and emotions from the plot. I tried to use paintings that readers would have a good chance of knowing, such as Warhol’s ‘Marilyn Diptych’ and Lichtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’. My reference to the latter wasn’t very subtle but it’s not a subtle painting. I really want to use the Cy Twombly paintings I saw last week but can’t find them on the internet. I’m planning another trip to the Tate next week to check. I also ensured that my semi-mystical experience inside Balka’s huge box was put to good use (see blog posting below). I hope Alison says that this works because, if it does, it could be quite a hook for the novel as I would see it being marketed at the kind of people, like me, who are reasonably educated and open to new ideas but who know very little about certain types of culture (in this case modern art). It works very well with things like Morse and his fixations with Wagner and Mozart.

I’m not sure how the piece hangs together. Because of the word limit (yes I came up against the word limit and had to edit it down even though it was put together quickly) it’s probably more rushed than I’d anticipate in a full length novel. For example, I’m concerned that I’ve telescoped the plot a bit too rapidly into the dialogue so there might be some cliches in there. However, some of the most basic emotions must transcend cliche. If a character says ‘I love you’ or ‘I want you’ is that a cliche? I don’t think so but I still feel like there must be cleverer ways of writing that or something like ‘Be there for me.’

I wanted to write something that had both dialogue and some extended description but I think I would want to hone the diction and rework some of the imagery in a re-draft. However, I wanted to use the extract to bring in and work on some of the themes I would see running through the novel, such as obsession, depression, communication, misunderstanding, ambition, modern art, etc. There’s also themes pubs and urban-rural tension but these aren’t so evident in the extract.

Now I’ve sent it in I’ll probably do something completely different tonight like watching television — I thought the new Rab C. Nesbitt wasn’t bad last week (I watch it with subtitles as I like to read how the dialogue is written) and ‘Bellamy’s People’ was ok last week.

And I’ve got six absorbing chapters from the other class members to read in detail before Saturday.
I’ve read through two or three quickly already but I’ll read them all through, let them stew away in my subconscious for a while, and then annotate them with any detailed comments I might have.

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A Useful Resource for Novelists?

“Most of the time I just lie there and make lists in my head. I grunt once in a while so he knows I’m awake, and then I tell him how great it was when it’s over.”

I was watching an old edition of The Book Show with Mariella Frostrup and they asked novelist Tony Parsons what was on his bedside table.  Among other books he said he found ‘Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivation from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)’ by  Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss to have been a fascinating and invaluable resource, particularly for a male novelist (and it’s not just about women it has plenty in there too about men).

I found this interesting review from The Guardian — which cites the above quotation from the book, which I thought might not be out of place in a novel.  

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Two Sections of ‘Burying Bad News’ to Read

 Here are the fruits of my labours of approximately the past six weeks — about 12,300 words in two sections. That’s about 12-15% of a whole novel by a rough estimation so I’m reasonably pleased with the amount I’ve done. The longer piece (working title ‘Bird and Baby’) is the more revised and redrafted of the two. It’s taken an awful lot of hours to produce that. The other one could probably benefit from a couple more redrafts.

Taken together, they give a reasonably good overview of the characters in the novel — the five principal characters are all featured between the two pieces. The two are fairly contemporaneous in terms of plot sequence too. I would probably divide the longer piece and use the shorter one to intercut it.  

In both I’ve tried to combine some character exposition with plot development. In ‘Bird and Baby’ I’ve also tried to reveal my character Robert Cross’s political views (I’ve actually made him a secret lefty) so I go into his opinions on things as weighty as the Iraq war. Hopefully the political exposition isn’t too tedious as I’ve brought in other characters and plot elements.

I found that this section expanded enormously as I was writing it — almost in the fabled way that writers talk about when they say characters take over. I threw in a few chance meetings to break up the scene and found that the interaction with the characters created whole new scenes I’d not anticipated. The same happened with a pair of shoes.

There’s a bit of self-reflexiveness in that there’s a fair amount that discusses writing and the English language — and there’s also a bit of a rant about getting published.

A read of the latest synopsis should hopefully give some context to these two sections.  This first (‘Bird and Baby’) comes when Sally has got to know Robert Cross (the minister) reasonably well in her subterfuge as a supposed wine-writer. She’s arranged to meet him in Oxford when he’s doing constituency business so she can hopefully try to press him on his political views. She starts the novel as a committed enemy — the references to the demonstration outside the Oxford Union and the aggressive woman are to Sally as a political agitator — she was the tormentor but is trying to keep that hidden.

Sally is also responsible for having started a rumour that Cross is having a sexual affair with Ana. This has reached the press, via her political contacts. The story is just starting to break in the second section — Wendover Station.

Spot the carefully hidden references to Nancy Sinatra and Little Richard.

Click here to read ‘Bird and Baby’ (9,024 words): Bird and Baby — v44 — featuring Sally, Robert and Ana

Click here to read ‘Wendover Station’ (3,323 words): Wendover Station v12 — featuring Frances and Declan

The letter referred to in ‘Bird and Baby’ really exists and is exactly in the place described. I referred to my own photo when I was writing about it.

Inkling Letter from Eagle and Child
Inkling Letter from Eagle and Child

Should anyone have any comments then it’s possible to add them to the end of this blog post. I can also mail Word files if anyone’s really keen to suggest any changes.

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‘The Angel’ Changes

I reworked the synopsis of ‘The Angel’ based on the feedback I’d received.

Probably the biggest change was that I gave James and Emma a different backstory that changed the start of the novel — I married them — unhappily of course as there wouldn’t be much of a novel otherwise. Actually, in terms of a catalyst for action, he doesn’t actually fully realise that he is unhappy until the relationship develops with Kim. Emma will have some good qualities but I think theirs will be one of those functional sort of relationships that people drift into, ready to be shocked out of them at some point.

Because James will be newly married then his relationship with Kim will need to start more gradually — and this will hopefully give her decision to run the pub with him some more plausibility. She’ll need to be running from something in London, however, as much as being attracted to the countryside. James and Kim can still go on their massive bender round London — that’s a slightly environmentally friendly approach as I’ve already written something very similar for an OU course (albeit as a screenplay). It should be good for location and setting, though.

Most of the middle of the synopsis has stayed the same but Kim’s story follows a simpler narrative arc — she arrives, settles in eventually, deals with some crises which eventually lead her to move away again — and at the end the big question is ‘does she come back again?’ She does undergo some change, however — a development of calm and spirituality.

I’ve cut some of the ending of the previous synopsis — the bit about the abortion and so on. It was a bit too rushed to properly do justice to in the synopsis and I need to think whether it’s appropriate in the light of the other changes. The way the synopsis now reads, she could be motivated to leave by the fire.

One thing that’s not in the synopsis that I’ve been considering is making Kim even more of an outsider by having her as a non-white character. I think it would make a negligible difference to the plot – but it might give the outsider theme some more resonance. It would also be a challenge to write — and a potential minefield.  However, I’ll carry on considering this as it’s not something I’d want to take over the novel.

I kept the locations at the end in (Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge) mainly to give some sort of sense of location.  In practice I may well go for something more original — or perhaps subvert expectations by having them set-up to meet on the Millennium Bridge but things don’t go to plan and they are reconciled somewhere else — the skateboard park under Waterloo Bridge perhaps?

I created a spreadsheet based on Emily’s list of questions/attributes for characters. I still need to properly fill it in but it made me realise another flaw in my synopsis — I don’t seem to have enough characters. I can see this might have been a reason behind some of the feedback. There’s really only two who play a role all the way through — James and Kim. If you don’t like them then you’re not going to like the book. I have Emma and her predatory father as additional characters in the synopsis but I think I need a couple more significant characters.

So I’ve simplified my original ideas but I think I need some new ones for the actual novel. The synopsis itself is much improved, however. Here’s the version I handed into Emily.The Angel Revised Synopsis v4 — Distributed Dec 09

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Feedback on Synopses

I had my one-to-one tutorial with Emily and she was happy to go through both synopses — although this made it quite frenetic as we only had ten minutes to cover both.

I was most surprised that she liked both synopses equally — both “had legs” she said. This was was interesting as I had thought one was a lot stronger than the other — or at least one was more developed to the extent of a lot of the synopsis actually having been written.

The most vivid synopsis was the one that was the newest, although it had plenty of flaws, such as the lack of development of a potentially interesting character — Emma the status conscious girlfriend who gets the elbow somehow. This was also picked up by my friend Kathy (who’s doing an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University) who also kindly read through the synopsis.

I was a bit worried that the pub setting of what is currently called ‘Pub Story’ would be thought of as humdrum but Emily thought it potentially rich and entertaining.  The newer synopsis also had an immediate ‘inciting incident’ (the point at which the reader is invited into the story) that set the tone for the rest of the novel. The ‘Burying Bad News’ synopsis was much more confused as it was difficult to work out at which point the reader was going to be pulled in. This probably reflects the indecision that comes with having written substantial parts of this novel already — I’m really not sure whether it should open chronologically or in ‘media res’. 

Both synopses failed in some of the most important aspects — they didn’t communicate effectively what I’d planned for the novel. One example was setting. I’d planned to use as settings a combination of London and the area around where I live (literally Midsomer Murder country — it’s filmed all round here and people are surprised it’s not the West Country or Cotswolds but Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in reality).  The setting is obviously pretty vivid to me but I didn’t get this across at all in the synopsis — and clearly the setting is appealing in general or else Midsomer Murders, Morse, Rosemary and Thyme and all the rest of these dramas (loads of them) wouldn’t be filmed round here.

So I think I’ve learned a lot about synopses and hope to work on the two to correct the flaws. I see it needs to do a lot but the most important is to hook the reader with the inciting incident and set the tone. Also, elements such as setting and a vivid sense of character are just as important as plot. I have different jobs to do with either synopsis.

For ‘Pub Story’ I need to think more about the actual plot  and characterisation and I’ve given this a lot of thought and come up with some interesting ideas for Emma and to link her in to some of the other characters. I’ve thought some more about Kim and also about the need for a better title — preferably something that can work as a pub name and a metaphor for the story in general. I’ve decided that ‘The Angel’ might be good — and it’s a nice reference to the tube station just up the road from City University too.

‘Burying Bad News’ is slightly more problematic as I have to rejig what I already have rather than have the freedom to think of new ideas. However, the questions that Emily raised are more problems with the synopsis than the ongoing work itself — I need to make it more obvious that the story is told from the perspective of the two women and that the role of the MP is more of a foil than anything else. I also need to tick a few more boxes as regards the genre — it’s a thriller rather than a detective story (as the detectives are fairly peripheral).

So quite a bit of revision to do to the synopses but I’m fairly encouraged that the ideas themselves are appealing. One point that Emily made was that they both had plenty of character in opposition and potential for conflict — which is the basis of any dramatic action.