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Do It Like A Dude

The Angel has an old-fashioned love triangle at its heart and, while I know the eventual outcome I want to write, I’ve been gripped by an internal debate about how much of this tension should be shown in the novel in terms of what the BBC call ‘sexual content’.

This is a difficult question to wrestle with in various ways although I’m convinced that all writers of novels (or of drama) that involve adults in close, emotional relationships must at least consider, but not necessarily write about, the sexual behaviour of the characters — even just to establish that there is no sexual relationship between them.

In real life, as well as in literature, there are many relationships that seem to defy gravity on intellectual, social or various other personal issues but must obviously work at a deeper sexual level — women falling for the bastard or cad or men being mesmerised by a pretty girl are stereotypes that are clearly true. There are many biological and psychological reasons why relationships aren’t driven by rationality — and that people often pursue relationships that logically they know aren’t good for them.

Also, despite (or perhaps because of) much more openness about ordinary people’s sexual behaviour — look at the covers of most women’s magazines and a few men’s — no-one really knows with much certainty what everyone else is up to. There are plenty of surveys but they’re almost by definition self-administered so no-one can verify how truthful are the responses (it’s considered that men tend to exaggerate, women to under-report). This is probably truer the more unusual the behaviour is. Paradoxically, despite sexual behaviour being driven by very deep biological and psychological motivation, most people seem to be anxious to know what’s ‘normal’ — if only to then outwardly appear to be so.

For this reason it’s probably one area where workshopping might yield responses which would be not that representative of readers as a whole. I’ve participated in a few workshops where the writing has involved descriptions of illegal drug usage. People tend to be quite guarded in their reaction — ‘I have a friend who told me that this description is more like ecstasy than speed’ — not wanting to be thought too boring and unconventional as to never have tried the drug but certainly not wanting to admit anything like familiarity with it. And why should they do anything else? Participating in a writing workshop doesn’t oblige anyone to reveal their history of drug usage.

Assuming the feedback gets beyond the tittering ‘Bad Sex Awards’ stage and one gets an honest and adult discussion, it’s still probably true to say that a similar type of reaction applies to sex as it does to drugs: an understandable wariness of revealing personal experience through expressing views on the writing (although people’s experience of sex must be much more widespread and doesn’t (normally!) have associations of illegality). This is wariness is probably more true the more unusual, or even deviant, the behaviour. Consider what might happen if (say) a woman wrote a scene where a man pays a prostitute to perform something exotic for him and one of the men in a workshop starts to correct all the details — she might get useful feedback but no-one would look at him in quite the same way again. (There are all sorts of intriguing permutations about who may be bluffing who in this sort of scenario.) There may be an exception when the action described is so extreme and unusual that it can be thought of abstractly and impersonally — in the City course there was one novel that dealt with incest and this was so bizarre that it was surprisingly easy to comment about.

Reading fiction is also appealing to many people because of its privacy. If you’ve never touched drugs, and don’t ever intend to, you might still have a fascination for imagining what it might be like to snort line-after-line of coke at a glitzy party or have some hallucinogenic trip. Similarly, most readers of the Twilight books don’t want their blood sucked by a vampire but that doesn’t stop them being amazingly popular. So it is with sex in fiction — there’s no doubt people like reading about it but a lot of this enjoyment is probably down to its absolute privacy.

While I’ve been agonising about how much of my characters’ sex lives I show or tell or hint at, I’ve realised that I may being incredibly prudish by the standards of popular culture with which young people are familiar. One of the most popular songs of the last couple of years is about, to put it mildly, curiosity about the same sex — Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’ (‘and I liked it’). My eyes popped out last year when I saw my children quite happily watching Katy Perry’s video for ‘California Gurls’. While I think it’s pretty harmless and, in some places, quite hilarious (the whipped cream aerosols) — she ostensibly appears in it stark naked (albeit lying down) — see embedded video below from YouTube.

Katy Perry says she was brought up a strict Christian and has been critical of her current rival — Lady GaGa, whose exuberance I quite admire. My teenage, secondary school age daughter asked me if I knew what the song ‘Poker Face’ was about? ‘A card game,’ I said innocently. ‘No. It’s about a woman having sex with a man while fantasising about it being another woman.’ ‘Oh!’ Things have definitely moved on a bit since ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.

Similarly we were listening to the Top 40 rundown and I asked the title of the Rihanna song at number two. ‘”S&M”, dad.’ I’m not sure if my teenage daughters knew exactly what this meant but the lyrics of the song didn’t leave much doubt: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones/But whips and chains excite me.’

People might argue that this is all about boundaries being pushed but I’m not sure where the limits will stretch to after the precedent set by a new singer from Essex, who’s just won a BRIT award, called Jessie J. Her first single was called ‘Do It Like A Dude’ and, while I’ve only heard the less explicit version, there’s no doubt what it’s about — something that ‘Lip Service’ pushed the boundaries of terrestrial TV (albeit digital BBC3) by showing — although even then Ruta Gedmintas was only shown from the back. (And I don’t think ‘Do It Like A Dude’ refers to same sex relationships either.)

When I was doing the Open University Advanced Creative Writing course I was picked up by the tutor when a female character says the word ‘twat’ (as an insult about a man) — ‘a woman wouldn’t say such a word’. While this could be the view of a certain demographic of readers, if the generation who have been brought up listening to Rihanna, Katy Perry, Lady GaGa and Jessie J take up novel reading then it  will take considerably more to shock them.

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Playlists

This is a post mainly about playlists associated with novels but also has a few references to the BBC3 TV programme Lip Service, which ended its first series last night. Having had a look at a few website analytics I have to start with an apology to the people who’ve ended up on this blog after doing a Google search for Lip Service’s Ruta Gedmintas (or in one case Ruta Gedmintas’s feet!). I think there’s only one blog post about her — in the context that her very effective playing of Frankie in the series eerily summed up the zeitgeist of one of my novel-in-progress’s characters). Nevertheless, for some odd reason this site seems to occasionally turn up in Google searches associated with the actress. This might get worse as I’m going to mention her again in this post.

So if you’ve landed on this page looking for some nice photos of Ruta Gedmintas then the best I can do is provide a consolation link to a photo on the programme’s official Facebook page that captures a beguiling, almost feral look to Frankie — click here to see it (you don’t need to be signed into Facebook to see it). (There will be also be another Frankie related link later on.)

I mentioned David Nicholls’ use of playlists in the last post. In ‘One Day’ Emma makes Dexter a couple of laboriously compiled cassette tapes — from tape-recording on to a cassette tracks from vinyl records and CDs in real time as you had to from the mid-70s until the era of the MP3. Even though CD-ROM drives came along in the mid-90s, it was a bit later than that that the likes of iTunes and Windows Media Player allowed instant playlists to be compiled and burnt to CD — and later digitally — and now we have semi-predictive services like Spotify which make the whole process almost subconsciously easy. My computer made up a playlist last night (presumably from tracks I’d played a lot or hadn’t skipped and it kept me awake an extra hour as I didn’t want to stop the fantastic tracks from coming.

What playlists — and the ‘my music’ concept as a whole — seem to tap into is a deep-seated desire to identify oneself with your favourite music — almost as if that might partially define your personality. Music is often used in TV and film in a similar way and Lip Service has been a good example — the track listing of music from each episode has been demanded by fans and published online.

I’m also very fond of thinking about music in relation to the parts of the novel that I’m writing and I’ve got a habit of describing the music characters are listening to — James likes ‘talented, blonde singer-songwriters like Pixie Lott’ and Dido, Emma likes William Orbit and Kim is a bit eclectic, enjoying a bit of John Tavener or Thomas Tallis as well as Gabriela Cilme (‘Sweet About Me’) and the Walrus of Love, Barry White plus another significant act to be revealed anon.

Referencing music is great but one thing I’ve learned about novel writing — Penny Rudge mentioned this when she talked to our City class — is that quoting lyrics is done at a cost — a pretty high monetary one. Even a line or two needs permission (unlike, perhaps, a quotation from a longer written work) and that might cost into the hundreds of pounds — and the author usually pays the rights holder. So it’s a lot more cost-effective to cite the title and artist and hope the readers can fill in the lyrics for themselves (if that’s really necessary) as there’s no copyright on titles and names. It could be argued that playlists like those created by David Nicholls and Lip Service are actually intellectual property in themselves — I seem to remember a court case in the distant past about this connected with Classic FM first starting up.

As The Angel is set largely in a pub, I was speculating last night listening to my auto-generated list that it would be almost inevitable that there would sadly be some riotous party for me to test my writing skills on and, as part of that, I wondered about taking a page or two just to list the music — as other writers tend to throw in odd bits of ephemera like shopping lists or envelopes.

And then in a moment of pure serendipity, I noticed a tweet from Kudos TV’s head Lip Servant on the very subject of playlists. (I’ve exchanged a few tweets with @LipService_BBC3, most recently today when I forwarded a link to the Arts Desk review of the last episode, which has a comment from me added. She’s also read the existing posting on this blog.) This tweet revealed that Ruta Gedmintas had been persuaded to publish her Frankie playlist — songs on her iPod that she used to work herself up into the right mood for the character — so the concept of establishing character via music choices obviously works for her.

It’s on the Notes page of the programme’s Facebook site but can (I think) be accessed without needing to be signed in. Click here to read it: http://on.fb.me/9q7qOV .

There’s even a link there to hear them all on Spotify, which I might have a go at doing out of curiosity as I’ve never heard of most of them. I do, though, have the Florence and the Machine and Bat for Lashes albums so I probably know them. It’s not too surprising to see Björk and the Prodigy there given the character she was playing. However, for me, the serendipitous part was finding the title of a track listed in the playlist that I’d written as the closing line of the novel extract that I workshopped 10 days ago (and wrote about three weeks ago) which a few people who read it said was perfect for the scene I’d written — and I can see why it’s also completely apt for Frankie. I’d probably watched a couple of episodes of Lip Service before I decided on this song but her playlist wasn’t published until this week. Here’s how I referenced it in my writing:

‘Her hand reached into his lap and grabbed the entertainment system’s remote control from where it had dropped…She entered the title of a song that seemed perfect for the pair of them. The screen displayed a list of versions she never dreamt existed but she chose Nouvelle Vague’s cabaret cover over the Dead Kennedy’s original. As she sipped her drink, the suite infused with the sophisticated sound of brushes against drum skins and the ironic twang of the double-bass. Then a cool French chanteuse started to croon “Too Drunk To Fuck”.’

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Kim Makes An Impression

My blog post on Lip Service was read and commented on (via Twitter) by the official Twitter for the programme makers (Kudos). I know that a fair number of people have also clicked through on it via the shortened link that could only be found via Twitter so perhaps a few people involved with the programme have actually read my thoughts — such are the wonders of blogging and Twitter.

And my description of Kim within the post has sparked a bit of friendly interest in the character. Click on http://bit.ly/9Y6Hcy to read more. (As it’s Twitter I don’t know how long the link will work for — but it looks good.)

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Lip Service

A fascinating aspect of reading fiction is that, sometimes despite the best efforts of the author, every reader must have a different mental image of each character — most likely a synthesis of their own experience and from triggers picked up from the text. Most ‘best-practice’ writing advice tends to suggest the author should leave as much detail to the reader’s imagination as possible — only providing concrete descriptions that are vital to quickly establish character or to provide information necessary to the plot.

When a novel is adapted for film or television this often leads to disappointment for readers of the original novel — an actor or actress may be physically dissimilar to how they imagined a character or, perhaps worse, behaves in an entirely different way. I read something recently in the Radio Times complaining about Stephen Tompkinson not being at all like the writer had imagined Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks in ‘Aftermath’.

Stephen Tompkinson as Peter Robinson's DCI Banks
Stephen Tompkinson as Peter Robinson's DCI Banks

(Parts of the second episode of which were filmed on the moors very near where I grew up. Look at those intimidating pylons on the picture on the left. They loomed over me every day. ).

The converse of the reader’s mental image is that a writer must also have a picture of a character in mind when writing fiction. Again this must be a mixture of experience and imagination that rarely transfers directly into a reader’s imagination, although, like screenwriters, if a novelist is writing a series of books that has been featured on film or television then they may start writing for a specific actor. I seem to remember Colin Dexter saying this about John Thaw as Inspector Morse.

Occasionally, however, writers must have the image of a character in mind and see some sort of very close likeness in the visual representation of a person — a photograph or picture or something on film or television. I recently had that sort of revelation in connection with the new BBC3 drama series, ‘Lip Service‘. It was the publicity photos for the series on the front of, I think, the Guardian’s Saturday Review section that made me take notice: the actress Ruta Gedmintas, pictured as her character Frankie in the series is a very close fit for how I see my character Kim — at least Kim at the start of the novel.

It’s partly the urban-arty clothing (Frankie’s meant to be a photographer) and her gaunt physical appearance — and she has short-ish blonde hair and a nose piercing, even green eyes. I don’t know whether Frankie is meant to portray a particular lesbian style of dressing. Kim in my novel isn’t gay (I think Frankie is actually meant to be bisexual) but Kim certainly comes from a arty-edgy culture in Shoreditch and Hackney where she will mix with and be influenced by a lot of gay people.  (And similarly in my writing experience I have and have had plenty of contact with gay writers and have workshopped gay fiction.)

Ruta Gedmintas as Frankie on the cover of Guardian Guide 9th Oct (Linked to Guardian Website)
Ruta Gedmintas as Frankie on the cover of Guardian Guide 9th Oct

Frankie is, of course, different to Kim in many ways but, the character, as played by Ruta Gedmintas, captures a startlingly arresting attitude. She has a very interesting, expressive face that varies between a the kind of ‘fuck you’ arrogance of an urban artist and a very genuine smile that shows flashes of concealed vulnerability — two contrasting character facets I’m trying to work on bringing out with Kim. Ruta Gedmintas is probably prettier than I imagine Kim to be but that may be because in my novel, Kim deliberately makes herself look confrontational to start with but she will have the sort of understated beauty that becomes increasingly attractive to James.

I was a bit intrigued by having stumbled over such an uncanny resemblance to a character I’ve had living in my head for around a year. I found from a couple of interviews online that Ruta Gedmintas comes from a Lithuanian family (hence the unusual name) — so perhaps her appearance has an Eastern European aspect, which may have made me think of German Kim — but the actress was brought up in Buckinghamshire which, co-incidentally, is where the bulk of my novel is set — in the Chilterns. (This, perhaps, explains why Frankie curiously speaks with an accent that’s pure Home Counties — or maybe her lack of the Scots brogue might be explained in later episodes with further revelations from her mysterious past?)

In the imaginary sequence of events whereby my published novel gets adapted for film or TV and then (possibly the most unlikely of this chain of possibilities) the original novel writer got asked for opinions on who should play the female lead then I think I’ve now found a perfect recommendation — so long as she can do a Hochdeutsch accent.

‘Lip Service’ has attracted controversy as it’s a series about the lives of lesbians in Glasgow. Apparently it’s the first British-made series specifically about gay women (as opposed to men) and the programme makers have to address a dilemma in that they want, on the one hand, to portray the women’s lives as being as ‘normal’ as possible (i.e. not contingent on their sexuality). But on the other hand if they’ve created a unique platform for the portrayal of intimate scenes between gay women characters then obviously they feel it’s something that they ought not to shy away from using — and, in my opinion, this is achieved very successfully — frankly (or, perhaps I should say, Frankily) but not salaciously.

I’ve watched the first couple of episodes and it strikes me as it’s quite like a gritty Glaswegian ‘Cold Feet’ with added sex (sex is something I always thought ‘Cold Feet’ could have explored more) — a comparison I mean as a compliment as I liked ‘Cold Feet’, especially the first few series — and it had some great actors in it. Like ‘Lip Service’, ‘Cold Feet’ also uses music effectively — and quite a lot of my writing throws in references to music (the latest extract I workshopped mentioned ‘Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before’ by The Smiths and ‘Big Love’ by Fleetwood Mac — the latter in a slyly filthy context).

I’m interested in that ‘Cold Feet’ genre — tangled relationships between people who are starting to deal with the responsibilities of adulthood — and think that my writing is probably pitched at the same kind of audience. The success of David Nicholls’ ‘One Day’ that I read recently and learned quite a lot from (Nicholls wrote some of the scripts for ‘Cold Feet’). The book gets fervent reviews  on Amazon from the many people who say it’s their favourite ever demonstrates that this is also a commercial genre. I have to say too that David Nicholls is a nice chap as he replied very quickly and politely to an e-mail I sent him about the clever playlist feature he did have on the book’s website — which now seems to have disappeared unfortunately in favour of some of the book’s film adaptation promo material.