Author: Michael Clarke

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Country Life

Not the Roxy Music album with the famous cover (that James no doubt sneaks a look at from time to time in his CD collection) but some ‘research’ I did yesterday.

I’ve done a lot of research into the London settings of ‘The Angel’ and most of what I’ve written is set in the heart of the city so I redressed the balance and went to the Bucks County Show, just north of Aylesbury– which is one of the biggest agricultural shows in the country.

Unfortunately the show this year was held on possibly the most depressing and dark summer days I can remember — cars had headlights on at 5pm — and it followed 24 hours of continuous heavy rain. The showground was a complete quagmire — a mudbath of Glastonbury proportions. (Apparently the Reading festival is already in a similar state.) It didn’t seem to bother most of the visitors — who were wearing wellington boots almost to a person, no doubt the green variety might be their footwear of choice.

The event is so thoroughly immersed in rural and agricultural pursuits and activities that it’s almost incredible that the showground is less than 20 miles from a tube station. (In the 1930s the London Underground extended past Aylesbury and ran within about 5 miles of the show.)

Part of the show is judging the best in breed of sheep, cattle, goats, horses, flowers (a couple of the prizewinners grew their blooms just down the road from me), giant vegetables and so on.  One may also inspect the many tractors, sprayers, fertiliser hoppers, the new high-lifting vehicles that farmers increasingly use to carry around huge straw bales (not sure what they’re called) and even combine harvesters. It’s more Borsetshire than Buckinghamshire.

There were various rings for showing the animals and the main ring had show-jumping and even, apparently, camel racing.

Bucks Show 2010
Tractors, Combines and Saddles in the Mud

I’d expected all the above but wasn’t expecting quite the broad representation of country life that made up the many exhibitors — like the many arts and crafts stalls, car dealerships, estate agents, solicitors, local newspapers, councils, charities, environmental groups and so on. There was also a sizeable military and police presence — mid-Bucks has a surprisingly big RAF presence with Strike Command in a huge bunker under a hill near High Wycombe and RAF Halton, whose Scottish pipe band performed at the show, is a huge base that trains most of the RAF’s new recruits. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, a second world war Hurricane fighter aircraft was on display.

There was even a bookshop, although the titles on display didn’t include the latest Guardian books page recommendations — instead I noticed a whole book devoted to making your own compost among the many gardening titles plus a good selection of books on steam locomotives and the second world war.

Naturally, this being a huge farmers’ marker in itself, there was a great selection of wholesome, locally produced artisanal produce in the food tent. From the farmer P.E.Mead and Sons, I bought a bottle of locally grown (and pressed) rapeseed oil. It’s apparently better for you than olive oil — rape is a strange plant as it looks stunning when flowering in the late spring but the plants are pretty ugly later on with their scruffy little horizontal seed pods. I had a chat with one of the Jenkinson brothers from Chiltern Brewery who recognised me and I bought a couple of bottles of their excellent Lord Lieutenant’s Porter.

All rural life was represented and there was hardly a reference to anything metropolitan or, perhaps worse, suburban, even though the show was in a region that’s officially classified as one of the three most densely populated in Western Europe. Yet there was evidence that one organisation was as effortlessly at home in the muddy fields in Buckinghamshire as it was in the heart of the city when I visited its coffee shop on Monday on Oxford Street in London — John Lewis.

John Lewis and Waitrose had a marquee which was well worth visiting just on account of the food samples they were giving away — strawberries and some very nice cheeses. A few of their suppliers shared the tent, including a fascinating beekeepers’ display of a glass-walled hive.

The presence of John Lewis was interesting because, like the tube and commuting, it brings together the two apparently disparate worlds of city and agricultural show rural yet it’s by no means a universal denominator — its customers are almost completely middle-class with a comfortable income, they need to be if they buy their groceries at Waitrose.

I’ve already used a couple of references to John Lewis in what I’ve written so far and perhaps I’ll consciously carry this on as a bridge between the two ostensibly very different worlds that my characters inhabit. But under the surface there are a number of similarities between inner-city existence and the rural life. There’s the same economic polarisation between rich and poor and, as I found with the Bucks Open Studios fortnight, there are as many, if not more, artists working away in rural areas (not just the obvious places like Cornwall, the Suffolk coast and Pembrokeshire) as there are in Hoxton or Hackney Wick.

Hurricane and John Lewis
Two Indomitables of England -- the Hurricane and John Lewis
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Running Up That Hill

It’s quite a surprise to have  what seems an innate appreciation of an artist (in the general sense of the word) explained by reading some analysis that explains possible reasons behind a latent, unconscious bonding  – or at least have light cast upon it. On holiday I read Graeme Thomson’s recent biography of Kate Bush – ‘Under the Ivy’  (Omnibus Press) – which bills itself as ‘the first ever in-depth study of one of the world’s most enigmatic artists’.

It’s a curious book – mostly biography gleaned from interviews with figures relatively peripheral to Kate Bush’s life and from press interviews with Kate Bush herself. She’s certainly a fascinating and enigmatic subject but what lifts the book above the levels of most music biographies is Thomson’s critical interpretation of her music, somewhat in the vein of Ian MacDonald’s classic about The Beatles, ‘Revolution in the Head’.

There were a few passages of analysis in the book which suddenly grabbed me and made me think ‘that concept is similar to what I’ve been trying to get over in my writing’.

One trait I have is to tend to throw in all sorts of cultural references and allusions, which is what Kate Bush tended to do in her lyrics – almost to the level of self-parody in ‘Them Heavy People’ but there’s far more – think of Molly Bloom’s speech from ‘Ulysses’ in ‘The Sensual World’ (my favourite Kate Bush track of the lot), or the obvious ‘Wuthering Heights’.

Yet Thomson points out that these cultural references are a paradox and something of a deliberate obfuscation because her work is impossible to fully appreciate solely by academic analysis:

‘Bush’s music takes us somewhere else, somewhere deeper…It’s a very inquisitive, giving quixotic thing…there is no need to join every dot, or explain every reference. That is a game for those who can’t trust their own responses without first looking for an intellectual hook on which to hang it. Kate Bush is all about emotion: the things she uses to get to those emotions aren’t necessarily important. You either hear it and feel it – and trust what you’re hearing or feeling – or you don’t.’

I particularly like the last sentence: you’re either the sort of person who trusts your emotional reaction or you aren’t. This ties in with some current debate about writing, especially of the more literary genre – does it work on an emotional level or does it solely exist to perform intellectual gymnastics?

No-one who’s seriously listened to Kate Bush’s music can underestimate its sensuality. The candid attitude towards sex, even in songs released in the 1970s, is quite revelatory and far more insightful than many of her female successors (think of the relatively crude shock-tactics of the likes of Madonna or Lady GaGa). However, even knowing the song for 25 years I hadn’t fully realised (shows how closely I read the lyrics) what she was trying to suggest in one of her most well known singles, ‘Running Up That Hill’. To quote Thomson:

‘Originally called “A Deal With God”, the song spoke passionately of Bush’s impossible wish to become her lover, and he her, in order that they could finally know what the other felt and desired. It was a sobering comment on misfiring communication and the impossibility of men and women ever really understanding one another, and yet – in capturing the basic human need to strive for compatibility – it was not without hope nor optimism.’

I’d say that many novelists also try to set out to achieve this ‘impossible’ ambition (trying to fully understand the experience of the other gender) – to know ‘what the other felt and desired’. It’s certainly something I’m fascinated with – as I have a novel that switches between male and female POVs in a putative relationship.

It’s pretty evident that these songs have lodged themselves quite deep in my psyche and bits of them seem to come out when I’m writing. I had a playlist of ‘quiet stuff’ on my laptop which featured a lot of Kate Bush songs and I have listened to this over the past few years at very low volume as I fell asleep in work trips in various hotel rooms around Europe.

There’s another aspect to Kate Bush’s work that makes it more approachable from a male point of view which I’d never realised until reading this book – and yet it’s so obvious. She likes men. Thomson says of one of Kate Bush’s most touching songs:

‘Aside from its luminous melody and swooping chorus, “The Man With the Child In His Eyes” is one of the first example of the extraordinarily positive ways in which Bush views men. She is surely unique among female songwriters in that her canon contains not a single song that puts down, castigates or generally gives men the brush off. She has been feminist in the bluntest sense – she wants to preserve and embrace the differences between the sexes and understand the male of the species. Many songs display a desire to experience fully what it is to be a man; she invests them with a power, beauty and a kind of mystical attraction which is incredibly generous. “It’s not such an open thing for a woman to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it” she once said. “I can’t understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful.”’

I knew that Kate Bush had a large gay (male) following but it was only after reading the above interview quotation that I the penny finally dropped. On a similar vein I’m wondering about buying ‘Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory’ which is full of analysis (as it says in the publisher’s press release) ‘written by a queer woman in her late 20s, its answers are delivered in a unique way…showing that theory can be sordid, funny and irreverent’. I wouldn’t mind too much if those three adjectives were applied to my novel, at least in part.

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Onwards and Upwards

After our reading at the Art Workers’ Guild, Alison was very forthright in her collective praise of the class and she seems to be expecting some big things from us as a year group, although she might perhaps have been surprised at the progress of at least one of our number over the six weeks or so after the event.

I looked at Facebook page a couple of weeks ago to see a picture of Michael Braga, one of my coursemates from the City Novel Writing course holding a sheaf of papers with a very satisfied expression on his face. In an incredible burst of productivity, he’s finished his novel already – achieving an incredibly impressive 93,000 words – and all this while doing a demanding, full-time job. Amazing.

I always found his readings to be tremendously entertaining, humorous and colourful and the excerpt he read at the Art Workers’ Guild showcased these qualities very well. I look forward to following the progress of the novel and wish him the best of luck with it. He’s set up a blog recently, which is another testament to his productivity – it can be accessed from the sidebar.

Alison sent out a news update to all course alumni a couple of weeks ago mentioning that Simon Holmes from the course had been taken on my Simon Trewin, an agent at United Artists, whom Alison previously described as ‘a big cheese’.  (His photo is now on the agency’s web page.) Simon’s writing is very intelligent; in passages it can be quite beautiful, creating a highly imaginative surreal world with a most intriguing central character. I wouldn’t be surprised to see his novel in the running for a literary prize in the near future.

A few students from the course have taken interesting initiatives. A couple of people have been on an Arvon foundation retreat up in the Black Isle near Inverness – something I’d like to do but for various reasons probably won’t get the opportunity for a few years. I’ll be looking forward to hearing how that went.

Another route is one-on-one mentoring, something that Bren Gosling, has taken up. He’s talked positively in his blog (linked to from the sidebar) about his sessions with Emma Sweeney – who stepped in as a very capable substitute for Emily at the end of the course and helped us with our readings.

Emma marked our last assignments for the course – our reflective commentary and blurb – and made some nice comments on mine. She also gave some very helpful feedback on material for my tutorial in the last term – which was the bulk of chapter five.

I’m mulling over another course of action that I might undertake this autumn in relation to keeping the writing momentum going – if I make a decision to then watch this space and all may be revealed.

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Le Mont St. Michel

The second reason why the blog has been quiet is that I’ve been in France – nearly nine days without any internet access whatsoever, which must be my longest non-on-line period for several years.

We stayed in a gîte on a pig farm, of all places, in the Côtes d’Armor on the north coast of Brittany, fairly near to St. Brieuc. It was a lovely location – the accommodation was quite modern but the farm was a slightly ramshackle collection of buildings and an almost stereotypical evocation of the rustic French rural idyll – vegetables growing in the garden, ducks and geese by a pond, a goat by the farm entrance – and I saw a farmer relieving himself against a courtyard wall on Sunday in full view of our front door.

Not really very near St.Brieuc – about 150 kilometres away and actually in Normandy – is Mont St.Michel. I went there probably over 25 years ago and all I can remember is crowds and an abbey on the top – the sort of sight that I’ve since thought is probably better seen from about five miles away and anything nearer tends to destroy the experience.

From a distance it’s probably the closest actual modern structure to look anything like the mythical structures of romantic Arthurian legend – the Isle of Avalon. Perhaps this stuck in my mind as I’ve written a reference to Avalon rising out of the waters in an early chapter of ‘The Angel’.

On returning after such a long time I had another serendipitous experience. We struggled up the steps to the abbey on the top of the mount just as the ticket office shut at 6pm. If we wanted to see the abbey then we had to come back later as there was a special evening opening starting at 7pm. I couldn’t see why they didn’t keep the abbey open for the duration.

So to kill time we went back down to the base of the mount which, for anyone who doesn’t know the place, is about half a mile of one narrow street lined with hotels, restaurants, crêperies, gift shops and anything else designed to part tourists from all over the world from their money (the place was full of Americans and Japanese as well as the normal British, Belgians, Germans and Dutch that tend to visit other places in Normandy and Brittany.)

Standing among these palaces of tat built into largely medieval stone buildings I was perversely reminded of visiting Disneyland (the mount itself looks very like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty castle from a distance) and theme parks — particularly Legoland’s castle with the dragon rollercoaster.

After buying extortionately priced ice-creams and looking at souvenir rubbish like snowstorms – I actually saw boxes of the stuff being delivered to shops with ‘Made in China’ in big letters on the side – I was ready for a similar rip-off experience at the abbey.

But I needn’t have worried. Just ahead of us walking into the abbey was a jerky Scandinavian on his own who was photographic everything. As soon as he entered the first big room and then ran out again to grab a photo through the narrow door, which framed a woman playing a harpsichord.

I’d read something in the Rough Guide about the evening openings having music and ‘installations’ but I didn’t realise it was such an elegantly organised event that made superb use of the alternately vast and claustrophobic plain spaces of the abbey. Occasionally artworks and sculptures were arranged along the route – making great use of atmospheric, coloured lighting. See the photo for an example of how a vaulted stone ceiling was lit from beneath and reflected into a pool of still water.

These were interspersed with other musicians – a cellist playing a Bach piece, a flautist beautifully playing Gluck’s ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ in a darkened crypt and, in an almost magical touch, as we climbed out of a crypt up a narrow stairway and emerged into the huge space of the abbey’s nave, the emptiness was filled by the music of a harpist.

To walk through the abbey with the art, music and lights was to luxuriate in the appeal to the senses of art, music, light within the feel and smell of a building that, in parts, dates back nearly a thousand years. It confounded my expectations and was a complete contrast to the touristy clatter below. I read in the guide book that only a third of the hordes even make their way up the mount to the abbey’s walls – far fewer will have been so rapt by it as I was.

There seemed to be something quite understatedly European about the use of art and classical music – I know my German colleagues tend not to think of opera and classical music as somehow elitist – until fairly recently ‘Last Night At the Proms’ was broadcast live on German television.  I’d like to try and convey some of this non-self-conscious appreciation in The Angel.

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Reviewing the Literature

There are two reasons why the blog has been a little quieter than usual recently. One is that an element of my ‘other life’ intruded – hopefully the side that will continue to pay the bills in future.  I had to submit an assignment for my Open University MSc in Software Development. I’d set aside a fortnight or so to concentrate on this but I ended also producing going on for 7,000 words of ‘The Angel’, which diluted my efforts somewhat.

I ended up sitting at the laptop in the end from 6am one day until 2am the next morning to try and complete the assignment before the deadline.  The way this OU course works is to build up the final dissertation of about 15,000 words in incremental assignments so you start off with a proposal and then add the literature review and the draft research before submitting the whole thing at the end all polished up and with a conclusion.

What I had to complete was the literature review – which isn’t an enjoyable account of a few choice novels read recently but an attempt to track down academic literature relevant to your subject and assess its contribution to the body of knowledge. My topic is Enterprise Architecture, which is basically how one organises the many IT systems within an organisation to work effectively rather than, as usually happens in practice, allowing IT to re-inforce the warring sectarianism and factionalism within any large organisation.  The term ‘architecture’ has been appropriated by the IT industry to the annoyance of some of the building variety but the analogy transfers quite well. (And I believe that the same sort of skills used in this line of IT work transfer well into novel writing — being able to see the underlying structure of plot, pace, character and so on which lie beneath the surface detail and complexity — I think some of the feedback I gave in the City course owed something to these skills.)

In this area, where IT interacts deals with the corporate strategy of an organisation, it’s quite difficult to find any contemporary academic literature in the first place. This is probably because, despite IT all being based on the work of very clever people in universities, many contemporary practitioners are militantly anti-academic – wanting to prove) how macho, hands-on and problem solving they can be to ‘the business’ (a meaningless and self-loathing term that is used to elevates the status of anyone in a company NOT in IT the IT department as doing the real work).

In ‘The Angel’ James is motivated to leave his City job by this sort of philistinism. Despite his outward gaucheness  and blokey good nature, he’s actually a very bright chap – he has some Masters degree in Finance – his (ex-)job is in the application of clever computer systems which few people (including Will, his boss) can understand. He wants to learn – except now about art and cookery – and he’s pretty appalled by the crass anti-intellectualism of those around him.

So I’ve been finding recent academic papers in my area from places as diverse as Venezuela and Taiwan and I’m a little guilty of not really reading them properly – just finding a quotation which illustrates a point I’ve wanted to make. Doing the novel writing course has made me aware of the main criticism I’m likely to get from my supervisor for what I submitted – the narrative coherence could be improved.

There are a reasonable amount of references and it’s all pretty much on-topic but there’s probably far more work require to relate these to my own argument and research question (and the vagueness of exactly what it is what I’m meant to be analysing in my own research is another bigger flaw).

Even so, this is exactly why the OU structures these dissertations as it does — so when you make a cock-up of the first attempt you have plenty of time to improve it before the eventual submission deadline. Hopefully!

It’s an interesting time management challenge to juggle a serious MSc project and trying to complete the novel started on the City course — a distillation of the question about what I need to do to make a living against what I think I’d like to do.  However, I read a few writing magazines on holiday which gave some information about average published novelists’ earnings suggests that no matter how successful the writing goes, the day-job is likely to be needed for a while yet.

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First Dale Winton, Now Amazon Remind Me of An Enormous Boob

I’ve just had an e-mail from Amazon asking me if I’d be interested in a certain selection of titles by one of their best-selling authors. The titles include: ‘Crystal’, ‘Sapphire’, ‘Paradise’ and, oh this is a bit worrying, ‘Angel’ and, even more so, ‘Angel Uncovered’. The author concerned, as probably 95% of the book-buying population knows (the exception being the sort of people who are enrolled on, or maybe otherwise involved with, university creative writing classes), is Katie Price (aka brand Jordan).

I had actually recently become aware of this unfortunate co-incidence  — but only several weeks after our course reading had touted the title of my novel to the great and good of the London literary agency world as ‘THE Angel’.

I was pulling up weeds in the vegetable patch when I was listening to Dale Winton on Radio Two — who was making a more entertaining stand-in turn than Steve Wright normally manages (why is it that EVERYONE Steve Wright mentions always ‘Loves the Show’ — and that Steve Wright feels it necessary to tell us that?).

Dale Winton was interviewing Katie Price — as one can imagine it wasn’t really a Jeremy Paxman style grilling. After they exhausted the topic of how the media were for some inexplicable reason always invading her privacy (she’s only done three interviews all year so who on earth is promoting the constant coverage of her in the tabloids?) they discussed her writing career. I was mildly interested until I heard the name of the main character of the series — Angel –who’s oddly enough a glamour model.

I was pretty mortified by this at the time. Partly it was because I’d not done my research on names and, had I done so, then I may have avoided using any angelic references in my title. That said, many books have similar titles and Katie Price is the kind of author (if that’s the right word) whose name is in far bigger type on the book cover than the title, which is almost incidental. However, even though the literary agents we invited to the reading would certainly not have expected me to launch into a carbon-copy bonkbuster (I hope) then they may have been unfortunately reminded, even subliminally, of the connection.

I still like my title, though, as it has a lot of meanings and connotations — apart from the religious guidance, protection and revelatory aspects it’s also the name of the nearest tube to City University — it just has an extra association now.

What I’m a bit more unsettled about is Amazon sending me an e-mail suggesting I might want to buy the whole Katie Price canon. I may once have browsed briefly at her book after I heard the Dale Winton interview although I remember more clearly flicking through the new one (‘Paradise’ I think in W.H.Smith) and having to wait as long as page five to get to a sex scene. I can understand them sending me mails about creative writing books or boring IT strategy texts that I buy for my MSc in Software development but I’ve hardly, if ever, looked at the sexy adventures of Angel. I do have a lot of files on my computer’s hard disk with Angel in the title, though, and I may have sent a lot of e-mails with Angel in the subject line. Makes you wonder.

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The Power of Dreams?

I’m currently trying to write the part of the novel that follows on from what I submitted at the end of the City course. I’ve approached it in an odd way as I’ve written mainly dialogue for about six different scenes — all on in the afternoon and evening continuing on from the same day as the first five chapters. I’m already up to about 4,500 words so, once I’ve added in more description and context I guess I’m going to get at least two chapters of 3,500-4,000 words out of the material — but at the moment it’s slow going and without a deadline for workshopping I’m able to flit from one scene to the next adding a bit in here and there.

I would like to get this finished asap though as I’d like to send it out to get a couple of well-respected opinions on it — but I’m also up against a deadline in just over a week to do a literature review for my MSc project.

Perhaps all this is churning round in my subconscious as I had a rather strange dream. I dreamt for some reason I had gone back to our old house in Twickenham and the postman arrived with some ridiculously huge parcels — I think one may have been a bed all wrapped up. Among these pieces of post was an envelope with my marked assignments from the last term at City University (which I’m yet to receive) — chapters 3 to 5 in my case and a commentary and blurb.

As well as the marked assignments the package from City also contained a pepperoni pizza (rectangular shape like the envelope) and two garlic baguettes.

I had great difficulty reading the marked assignments for some reason — perhaps my contact lenses wouldn’t focus?. They were covered in remarks written in large green felt tip pen. Somehow I ended up trying to read the feedback in a car near my old dentists in the terraced houses on the edge of Rochdale town centre. Eventually I made out the words ‘poor’ and I turned over a page of my writing to see that the marker had written ‘KILL’ in huge great letters right across the whole page — the letters were filled in with fluorescent stripes from different coloured highlighter pens and were rounded — rather like psychedelic worms. Obviously that passage of description hadn’t gone down well.

I saw on a cover sheet that I’d been given 60% — and that’s when I started to wake up a realise it a dream as we’re not given any quantitative marking like that on the course.

If anyone is good at dream interpretation I’d be intrigued to know what this might mean — especially the pizza and the odd locations.

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The Narrative Center

As mentioned in the last post, I just spent a very long weekend in Center Parcs (staying until late Monday afternoon. trying to get most value for money).

I’ve been to all the Center Parcs in the country although the one at Elveden in Suffolk the most often (about four times) — and would go more often if it wasn’t so ludicrously expensive. This is quite odd as I normally like holidays to be as independent and away from hordes of other people as possible — I much prefer self-catering cottages in the wilds of Wales or Gozitian villas to big hotel complexes.

The concept of entering a fenced-off compound, surrendering your ability to ‘escape’ because your car is parked (as in my case) literally a mile away and spending three or four days there with over 4,000 other people hell bent on a good time would normally be an anathema to me. And yet…

Like Disneyland or well-run theme parks like Alton Towers, there seems to be something quite re-assuring about these closed, contained, managed worlds. I can pretty cynical about most forms of entertainment and yet I found myself happily paying out extortionate prices — like £10 for 30 minutes on a pedalo (although I saved £96 for a weekend hiring 5 bikes by strapping our own precariously on the car and spent more time looking in the mirror to check they hadn’t fallen off than I did looking forwards down the A11).

As far as I could tell, almost everyone else that I’ve ever encountered there has a similarly good time — again something that seems to happen at Disneyland, even to the most embittered sceptic. I was prompted to wonder why. It goes beyond the obvious factors like things generally working properly and having good staff who are well trained in customer service (they’re in the company of John Lewis and Waitrose in surveys and have recently undergone a whole company training programme ‘Making Memorable Moments’ similar to the ones I used to do at BA when that company actually had good customer service). (It might be possible to spot my MBA training in the interest in customer service and operations management there — I’d love to write a thesis on how these places work.)

But what does this have to do with novel writing? On a psychological level, I think there are some startling similarities. A comment I wrote up on the blog a few months ago that Francesca Main made  (commissioning editor at Simon and Schuster) seems very relevant. She said of reading the opening of a novel that ‘you must feel you are in good hands’ as a reader — and this is exactly what places like Center Parcs do. Well-written fiction has an authorial assurance (distinct from the narrator) that, ultimately, makes the reader feel safe — part of a contract in the reader suspending disbelief and also a guarantee that the time invested in reading will result in a satisfying experience.

Note that the words ‘author’ and ‘authority’ have the same etymological root. And so this is at Center Parcs and Disneyland — there’s an invisible sort of authority that derives from the exclusivity of the community — everyone’s paid a lot to be there so that’s a social leveller and they are literally gated communities where causes of social anxiety can be excluded. In Center Parcs case various design features ameliorate the fact that thousands of other people are also on the site: the accommodation is cleverly laid out so neighbours don’t overlook each other; the forest setting deadens the noise levels (and mobile phone signals!); and the absence of cars eliminates a source of status and also creates an environment which is a bit otherworldly (a bit like that created in fiction).

Center Parcs is also interesting when considered against Maslow’s hierarchy of needs . The safe and exclusive environment is important as it addresses the knows that physiological and safety needs need to be covered before the higher needs are fulfilled. It brings to mind an interesting quotation that I read recently in the Economist Blighty blog about wider society:  ‘the ultimate purpose of politics and the state [is]: the protection of people from each other.’ I’d argue that the attraction of novels to many readers, especially but by no means exclusively in non-realistic genres, is the sense of escape from anxieties about other people’s actions in the disordered ‘real world’.

Belonging/social needs are generally covered as people are on holiday with family or friends. However, the popularity of activities, like my doing archery or the tree-climbing that I blogged about below, is certainly associated with achieving self-esteem (overcoming fears, demonstrating ability). Some of the activities even inch towards self-actualisation — having a massage in the spa is very nice and I even got up at 6.30am on a Sunday to be educated by a wildlife ranger — going round looking for deer and birds (we spotted a little owl — which is apparently good going).

Also, as mentioned in a previous post in the context of rollercoasters, much of what we choose to do in our leisure time fits a classic narrative structure, which separates the experience from the inertia and continuity of real life — films, plays, music all tend to have beginnings and ends with middles arranged into some sort of anticipated structure. The same applies to holidays — there’s travel there and back and packing and unpacking, acclimatisation and so forth — although holiday companies seem to have been slow to realise the narrative. A subsidiary of my ex-employer, Thomson Holidays, has stumbled in its current TV advertising on the parallels between drama (films/plays) and a perfect holiday experience ‘authored’ by an expertly directed cast.

One re-assuring facet of holidays, planned activities and instances of fiction is that there is a planned end — in real life we never know when the end is.

A need for narrative structure must be somehow hard-wired into the human brain and is no doubt exploited intuitively by effective fiction writers. As a novel has an all encompassing narrative arc and many smaller arcs within that structure, so does the holiday experience. Even such basic events as a meal in a restaurant follow a set structure — and the more satisfying and memorable a meal the more likely it is to have an expectation setting opening and a satisfying resolution.

The more complex activities that I did at Center Parcs are similarly organised. A well-delivered massage certainly follows a pattern that ends with a rewarding, relaxing denouement. The tree-trekking starts with a briefing then has a series of 9 ‘acts’ of rope obstacles to be negotiated between trees (a place to pause) — tension is gradually built up as the obstacles rise higher above the ground. Then there’s the climax of suddenly descending at speed down the zip wire. You negotiate the course yourself (as you would read a book) but there’s always the re-assurance of the authority of the instructors in the background — like a safe, authorial presence — as with reading a book, it can be thrilling and feels perilous but you know it’s ultimately safe.

The Center Parcs Aerial Adventure could be quite an effective, if unorthodox, model for the plotting of a novel as it seems to tap into the same basic human psychology.

Also, many of these participatory activities are a little like a performance and perhaps it’s not surprising that I mentioned in the last post that I was struck that one of the climbing instructors reminded me of my character Kim — both are acting, to an extent, in some sort of artifice. It reminds me of the surreal line in ‘Penny Lane’ (that Ian MacDonald thought was one of the most truly avant garde lines The Beatles ever wrote) — ‘and though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway’.

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Zipping Up Kim

It’s a paradox that characters in fiction tend, naturally, to be figments of the author’s imagination but also have to be real and credible enough for the reader to maintain the suspension of their disbelief. Of course authors piece together characters from traits they tend to observe in many different people in real life —  but those different facets need to meld together to make a coherent whole.

I had a moment yesterday, while at Center Parcs Elveden, which was remarkably satisfying because I came across someone who not only looked similar to my character Kim but also seemed to have many of the exterior character attributes that I’d pieced together, which is great because Kim is probably the most complex and contradictory character in the novel.

Kim is able, for a while at least, to be something of a chameleon and be an efficient but sympathetic barmaid (or bar manager) whilst also having the disclipline and concentration needed to work on her artistic pursuits.  She’ll have a curious outward mixture of empathy and assertiveness whilst also combining an outwardly approachable, friendly  humour with a sort of inner-steeliness. (And she’ll also show anger and vulnerability to those who get to know her more closely.)

It was this unusual fusion of personality traits that I thought I recognised in the Center Parcs instructors working on what they called the Action Company Challenge Aerial Adventure. It’s like Go Ape ! which, ironically, James enjoys doing — maybe he sees something of the instructor in Kim? (I’ve done three Go Ape’s myself including the one in Aberfoyle in Scotland with the country’s longest zipwire at 426m that dangles you over 150 feet above a valley.)

In the Center Parcs Aerial Challenge participants follow a course ascending through a stand of conifers by negotiating about about nine obstacles placed between the trees (wooden beams, rope swings, rope ‘spiders’ webs’, wobbly bridges and so on).  You eventually end up about 40 feet up on a tree and have a choice of getting down by 120m zip wire or just jumping off with a rope breaking your fall (you hope!).

In fact, the whole course is incredibly safe as, unlike Go Ape! there’s a safety wire permanently fastened and a high staff to customer ratio. Despite knowing it is safe, some people tend to get irrationally terrified even a few feet off the ground, partly as being elevated off the ground and swinging by a rope is such an alien environment.

So the qualities needed by the instructors are both assertive — I was shouted at to perch on a little wooden step to give my safety rope a yank to get it round a corner and also when I somehow tangled my safety line by going through a rope bridge the wrong way. On the other hand,  some panic stricken people need a lot of encouragement to jump off a platform and swing across a gap of several feet hanging to a rope. It’s interesting as these people aren’t performing a straight pleasing-the-customer role, as might the waiting staff in one of their restuarants, as they also need to be able to try and generate a sense of cheerful confidence to get people around (although they sometimes have to lower people down on ropes who can’t face going further).

They also need to be very fit, professional — and probably a bit unusual. The woman working on the course managed to scramble up a 40 foot vertical pole to get ready to kit me out for the zipwire in the time it took me to get walk over a rope bridge. I was having a zip wire attached to me and had the strange experience that the person who was doing it was behaving exactly as I anticipated my main female character would act when at work meeting new people. Then I had to step off the edge and whizz down the wire.

Clearly, there are many dissimilarities — Kim is a German artist, which I doubt this climbing instructor was — she had a touch of Australian in her accent, although it may have been a very prononounced version of Estuary English. However, she also looked fairly like I imagine Kim to do, as much as you can tell under a safety helmet — she had quite a number of ear piercings.

Kim is meant to be quite distinctive looking — having fairly prominent facial features that she can either accentuate or soften — she’s an artist so she knows what effects she can achieve with her hair and make up should she be so inclined. James finds her at the start of the novel looking quite unattractive — and this disarms Emma to some extent — but she soon develops into someone whom Emma would like to see safely paired off (see comments under previous post).

I suppose if a character is synthesised using some imagination and lots of different sources, then there’s a decent enough chance of bumping into someone who can reflect that mixture of attributes at a certain time and circumstance — it verifies that those sort of personality attributes can plausibly combine together in a character — but it’s odd to discover this standing on a tiny platform up a tree 40ft high off the ground.

Now I only need to worry about how well I transfer the character out of my head on to the page and recreated in a reader’s mind.

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Addressing Deficiencies

Getting back to ideas for The Angel, I think I may have plugged a bit of a hole in the plot and balanced out the characters a bit by considering introducing a male admirer of Kim when she moves to The Angel. This chap will be actively sought out and encouraged by Emma (in some matchmaking activity reminiscent of her Austen namesake). Emma won’t rest until she’s paired Kim off with someone. Of course, the person she tries to pair Kim off with will be totally unsuitable, although the relationship will develop to an extent which will make James terribly jealous — and when James thinks they’ve slept together then he’ll be extremely agitated. It will be something of a dip in their relationship when he sees Kim having some sort of a relationship with someone who he used to think of as a friend but, in this context, sees as something of an arsehole. He’ll realise how trapped he his himself.

This person will probably have been a friend of James’ but they’ll fall out — and, because James is ostensibly a happily married man — he’ll have to find some other reason to vent his fury. Emma will try and coach the relationship on regardless — she’s the sort of person who thinks any outcome is possible, given the right sort of motivation.

Kim will confide a few things to James about how this chap is an utter philistine but that she’s initially flattered by his attention. Then Kim will start to notice a few suspicious danger signs that maybe the new boyfriend’s attention is beginning to wander — perhaps to someone who’s more receptive of his charms?

I’ll need to flesh this chap out — any suggestions as to his name and other personality features would be gratefully received. Perhaps with this character another piece of the jigsaw is falling into place?

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Arts Bloodbath?

The Guardian reports today that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is preparing to inflict cuts on itself of up to 50% as part of the forthcoming government spending clampdown.

This reduction in its own staff is in keeping with the cuts it is anticipated the department will make in its funding of the arts and sport. With the big expense of the Olympics relatively protected and big tourist draws relatively safe (such as free entry to major art galleries and museums) then the axe is going to fall particularly savagely on less high-profile spending.  Bodies such as the Arts Council in England, which funds 850 organisations, are going to find they have a lot less money to give out in grants. I know of many small enterprises, such as poetry magazines, that struggle along even with the help of a small amount of money from the Arts Council. Similarly, this is the source of the already meagre funding for many students who study arts or creative writing at postgraduate level.

The government has expressed what seems like a somewhat naive hope that private benefactors will step in and plug the funding gaps — as happens in America. I remember when I lived in the US for a year in the mid-80s how mystified I was to see the PBS channel regularly soliciting its viewers for donations — something at the time I found quite shocking but, like TV sponsorship, would not be quite so alien in the UK nowadays.

One of the governments other big targets for expenditure cuts is higher education so it’s not difficult to predict what’s likely to happen to the arts in education over the next few years. I would expect creative writing courses to be put under very tight scrutiny. One point in the courses’ favour is that they’re popular and accessible — people are quite willing to pay to do postgraduate and continuing education courses in writing. They also don’t involve much capital spending on the part of the university — just a room to sit in — unlike courses that require neutron colliders that cost billions, as at Oxford. However, as Emma, who taught us briefly at the end of last term, pointed out — to teach creative writing properly there needs to be a fairly low student to staff ratio — the teaching is interactive. I remember when I was doing my MBA at Kingston being quite astonished at the size of the audience for the undergraduate business course lectures — there were hundreds of them to one lecturer.

Also, a school leaver is going to have to be pretty confident of their future ability as a writer to do creative writing at undergraduate level — passing up the opportunity to get a more ‘marketable’ qualification.

One consequence is that I’d suggest anyone who wants to get a creative writing qualification, like an MA for example, might be better applying sooner rather than later. It’s too late for universities to cancel courses for the next academic year but they will certainly review them carefully for the year afterwards. I can’t see them disappearing but there may be fewer to choose from and perhaps the teaching will be less individual. However, it was Emma’s view that the standard on our City Novel Writing course was MA standard anyway and that the only reason that any of us would find it advisable to take an MA would be if we wanted to teach — and perhaps having a published novel would be more credible in that case anyway.

What might have more lasting consequences is that universities will cut staff in creative writing departments and postgraduate and doctoral students will find it a lot more difficult to gain funding. Many university courses, such as those at City, are taught by lecturers who aren’t full time academic staff (at least at that university anyway) and are working themselves on PhDs and the like while also working on their own novels, poetry or other writing. I guess this route into getting some financial support while developing a writing career is now going to be pretty difficult to follow. These people also give time and support to the large network of ‘underground’ publishing, such as e-zines and small circulation magazines, that nurture the careers of more experimental and literary writers.

With government grants drying up and a major source of financial security (in higher education teaching) likely to wither away then both writers and the outlets they currently use are going to feel the pinch with disproportionate severity unless some private funding can replace that cut by the government. With some exceptions, commercial funding is not likely to support writing that is experimental or provocative. This might have a peculiar knock-on effect as the pursuit of literary prizes might take on even more prominence. Perhaps a new author with literary ambitions might be taken on by a publisher with the sole intention of being submitted for a prize — and if the author doesn’t win or get shortlisted then they could be dumped straight away?

The effect of the ‘new austerity’ is going to be pretty bleak right across the writing spectrum. While the more commercial genres tend to have no need of government subsidy, new authors in these genres may well have benefited from some subsidised support. Also, any author with a literary bent who finds the traditional means of support to be dwindling may decide to switch into a commercial genre, at least temporarily, in an attempt to pay the bills by publishing a work that will sell in large numbers — thus making that market more crowded?

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Angelic Countryside

I went for a longish walk on Friday afternoon between a few villages that may influence ‘The Angel’ and took a few photos. This one was immediately after a heavy, thundery shower had passed over a few minutes before.

Slicing Wheat
Slicing Wheat

The light is very unusual — it was about 8pm so the sun was low and the light was diffused by the atmospheric conditions. The texture of the wheat is interesting — with the footpath and tractor tracks a very dark contrast. Also the expanse of the wheat contrasts with the village (Loosely Row) on the hill in the distance. (The photo is just off the A4010 close to the highest point on the pass through Saunderton — somewhere that can be surprisingly bleak in winter.) Perhaps just the sort of inspiration for an artist?

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Visit from Penny Rudge

I posted briefly, about a month ago on our final visit from  figure from the publishing industry — one of our course’s published alumni, Penny Rudge. She came to see us on 9th June and I’ll try to summarise the many interesting points below that she made in her hour or so with us.

(I’ve been very slow in writing up this and a few things from the course as I’ve been so busy with the reading and also the writing of the commentary and submission of chapters two to four (or three to five in my case — about 11,500 words)).

With our reading only three weeks away, many of the class were interested to know if Penny’s book deal for ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ had been precipitated by her year’s equivalent event (as had been the case with Kirstan Hawkins). A few of us were relieved when Penny said that, while one agent showed interest at the time and a couple asked to see the final book, that this wasn’t out of the ordinary for her cohort and that the novel, while started on the Certificate course, had largely been written when she moved on to do an MA (I think this was at Royal Holloway — and she later went on to do a PhD ).

(The further study yielded an endorsement from Andrew Motion for the novel which can’t have harmed its marketing.)

Penny’s agent (Caroline Wood at Felicity Byron) picked up ‘Foolish Tales in Life and Love’ from the anthology that was produced at the end of the MA course.  So no short cut from the Certificate course reading but Penny said that it was all valuable experience, a nice night — and a well-organised event.

It was also Penny’s view that the City course was more appropriate for the focused development of the novel — the MA being better for experimentation. Practically the whole novel had been workshopped chapter-by-chapter with ex-students from City University because they continued to meet after the course had ended. Penny puts down the fact that the manuscript required fairly little editing once accepted for publication to the feedback received in this way.

As well as the academic courses, Penny had biological deadlines to meet when completing the novel: finishing it just before the birth of her second child. The overall chronology was graduating from the City course in 2007, completing the novel in 2008 and then receiving the final proofs of the novel in the summer of 2009 — for publication in trade paperback in April 2010. A mass market paperback format is due for publication in June 2011.

A combination of managing to get a grant for full-time study and the need to take time off to start a family led Penny to give up her previous job in IT and become a full-time writer — or at least as much as child-care commitments would allow. In this sense the City University course was part of a life-changing experience. Aspiring writers might be well advised to look into Arts Council grants and similar (but don’t expect a champagne lifestyle from one).

Once the novel had been sold, there were a few changes made in response to the publisher’s feedback:

  • A character’s nationality was changed as it was too reminiscent of a recent best-seller
  • The publisher came up with the title of the book — Penny had a different one while she was writing it but was happy to take on the publisher’s suggestion of  ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ as she thought it summed the book up well
  • Historical anachronisms, particularly indoor smoking, had to be removed (how the world changed during the gestation of the book!)
  • Quotations from pop songs and films were removed — not at the insistence of the publisher but because it was pointed out that getting the permissions costs a not insignificant amount of money
  • The ending of the book was made a bit more hopeful than it was originally — apparently readers like that (I shall have to remember this advice myself if and when I get to the end of mine)

Nevertheless, the novel remained remarkably unchanged from the original synopsis.

One point that intrigued some of us was that Taras, the main character in the novel, was male — and a number of our class were narrating from the point of view (at least partially) of someone from the opposite gender.  In Penny’s case that was quite helpful for the first novel as it dispensed with any obvious autobiographical parallels and allowed her imagination to be more free. Her second novel is likely to have more autobiographical components. In the end, it was her view that imagination is at the core of fiction — an author must be able to enter a character’s thoughts (or at least give a convincing illusion of doing so).

I’ve touched in previous posts about how Penny has demonstrated a knack for marketing her work — such as providing material for publicists to try and place in a newspaper (as happened with an article in ‘The Independent’).  Publicists tend to have bigger clients than debut novelists so they are not likely to spend a huge amount of time generating this kind of story but, if the author takes the initiative, publicists can be quite effective in finding the best outlet to take it.

Self-promotion is probably something that doesn’t come easily to most writers but it’s something that authors increasingly need to do. As well as thinking of good stories to prime publicists, events like signings in bookshops are ways of increasing profile and flogging the copies of books that need to be sold to increase the chances of getting subsequent publishing deals. The author has to take the initiative in arranging book signings, doing readings at festivals, walking into bookshops and trying to sell them your book (this seemed to have worked for Penny in Waterstone’s in Piccadilly as the novel had been spotted on the shelves near the door by one of the class) — and so on. Lots of support from literary friends also pays dividends.

All the marketing, while hard work, tends to have a snowball effect. For example, a when a book crosses a threshold of something like twenty reviews then Amazon then it becomes more prominent on Amazon.

Cyberspace promotion is also now expected — Penny is intending to start up a web page or blog when she has time (in between all the readings, signings — with a bit of writing squeezed in as well). In the meantime, there’s a Facebook page that publicises the book and allows readers interaction with the author.

Penny has now sat in enough bookshops to be able to observe buyer behaviour — which includes the surprising revelation that hardly anyone browses the fiction shelves. They probably never get past the infamous 3 for 2 table!

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The England of ‘Long Shadows on Cricket Grounds, Warm Beer and…’


Morris Men at Swan, Great Kimble
Morris Men Brandishing Sticks at Swan, Great Kimble

…I’m sure John Major in his rather risible but memorable speech would have included Morris dancing in his wistful list of unchanging Englishness. That speech is a particular bug bear as beer should NEVER be warm — the belief that real ale is best drunk tepid has allowed bad landlords to get away with serving undrinkable crap. It should be cellar temperature (about 10-12 C) and it’s sometimes so difficult to keep it that way in unrefrigerated cellars that even usually reliable pubs might be wisely avoided in temperatures of the upper 20s and even 30s C of the sort we’re forecast now.

Morris Men at Swan, Great Kimble
Morris Men with Their Traditional Tankards at Swan, Great Kimble
Morris Men at Swan, Great Kimble
Towersey Morris Men Look On At Their Aldbury Rivals at Swan, Great Kimble

I wonder what Kim would make of Morris Dancing. I’ve actually e-mailed one of my German friends  one of the pictures below, which I took yesterday of the Towersey Morris Men (relatively local) in a joint display with the Aldbury troop.

‘The Angel’ will certainly be a pub where the tradition carries on flourishing.I don’t know how often Morris dancers perform in London — there are no doubt some — but I doubt most Londoners ever see them. There are quite a number of sides (I think that’s the correct technical term) in the local area.

Aldbury is in the Chilterns and would actually be quite a good model for the village where ‘The Angel’ is to be located. It’s a decent size, with a picture postcard village green, fairly affluent as it’s not far from a fast train service into London (via Tring station — to which it’s probably closer than Tring itself) and has a couple of pubs, including the CAMRA regional award-winning Valiant Trooper, which is old and historic and quite a model of a community pub. There’s a nice review on the Telegraph website which points up some of the idiosyncratic charm that I’d like to achieve with ‘The Angel’.
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Positive Feedback from Agents and A Publisher

I’ve been so busy preparing for Wednesday’s reading that I haven’t had time to blog about other events that may have more eventual significance.

I went to the Winchester Writers’ Conference last Friday and had three appointments — two with agents and one with a publisher.

The agents had both read work that I’d supplied in advance and gave me useful feedback. I sent the first fifteen pages of The Angel (about 5,000-6,000 words) to someone from one of the biggest literary agencies in London (A.P. Watt). She was very complimentary about what she read — said she’d ‘really enjoyed it. She praised the evocation in the sense of place as she lives in the Hackney/Shoreditch area herself. She gave some constructive comments about perhaps changing the opening around a bit — which were quite intuitive in a way as what she suggested was the original way I’d opened the novel before changing it to reflect what I read at our showcase on Wednesday. It was a bit too late for me to change the reading. The two points of view worked well for her and also the genre — which she described as on ‘the border between literary and commercial fiction’ which is a good place to be apparently. I asked if this was the type of novel that she would represent and she said that it was. I seem to remember her complementing me by saying I ‘could write’.

I also pitched the novel completely cold to an editor from a huge publisher (I happened to get a spare slot in her schedule on the day). I had to show her my blurb and my reading for the City reading as that was all I had available. But she was also very encouraging — saying it was ‘funny’ and something that people would definitely want to read. In the end she took away all the improvised material I showed her and it’s now at the publishers.

The other agent I saw only asked for the first ten pages and he had a different take on the novel which, I suspect, might have been influenced by not seeing the missing five pages that the other agent had read. While she thought it would appeal very widely as it was, at heart, a love story I think that’s because the extra part had a lot of Kim and her interior. The first agent complemented the quality of the writing but wasn’t sure where it would be positioned in the market — although one of the other delegates later told me that this agent wasn’t a fiction specialist — but perhaps that was because he hadn’t seen enough of the book? Certainly, the majority opinion out of the three was that it was very marketable.

After these sort of events, it’s probably natural to wonder if the agents really meant what they said or were they just being polite but it’s not really in their interest to say something’s good if they don’t like it — it just means wasted time for them in the office. So I think that’s pretty encouraging — everything was read and submitted as it would be for a proper agent submission when a novel’s finally ready and they were quite lengthy samples of the book so weren’t taken out of context.

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Was It Worth It?

Just on the way back from our group’s reading event which was at a lovely venue — the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury.

I enjoyed the night as a social event but it feels rather like work for me as I stepped into the breach as temporary webmaster and spent ages knocking up a website for the reading (the time taken representing my competence at web design rather than the sophistication of the task itself) and also supplying all the drinks. The latter was a particularly stupid thing for me to volunteer to do in retrospect as it’s going to involve two three and a half hour round trips into London (one tomorrow to clear the stuff out of the venue as we only drunk about half of the wine). So I’m completely mentally and physically burned out now.

Overall,  I think the practice of reading aloud in a social venue like that is great but, I wonder if the preparation for the event has taken such a large part of the end of the course it’s in danger of becoming almost like the opposite of a novel writing course — more like flash fiction where people are encouraged to hone the 600 words or so that might catch an agent’s ear. I think I’d rather end up with several thousand words of reasonably good prose than having spent nine months working on a few hundred – but perhaps I have it all wrong?

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A Great Scene for My Novel Happens in 45 Minutes?

I wonder whether today might be an occasion I could use in my novel — pubs should be doing well out of this great weather and the World Cup. 45 minutes to go until England play Germany — that would be a great event to have Kim reflect on English attitudes to the Germans. What would she make of the papers or the massive build up to what’s just a second round game — and exiting it would mean a pretty disastrous World Cup for either side.

I’ve been e-mailing my German friends in the build up — wishing Germany luck but not as much luck as for England. I’m also wearing my new England away strip (the red one) that I’ve worn quite incongruously to a couple of classes at City. I turned up after watching England v Slovenia on Wednesday in the Freemason’s Arms, Covent Garden (where the rules of football were first written down). I was about 6 pints worse for wear and that might have been why my reading rehearsal was rather slow.

I’m also really pushed for time with the end of the month coming up — notably our reading night on Wednesday. I’ve made things worse for myself by volunteering to create a website for the evening — something that took me most of yesterday to do.

Lots of things I need to blog about but haven’t done so far and may not do until the end of the week:

  • A bit of agent reaction to the first few pages of The Angel
  • The antidotes I’ve experienced to the angst that has featured in a few recent posts
  • A write up of Penny Rudge’s visit from a couple of weeks ago (we’ve exchanged a few comments via Facebook in the meantime)
  • The experience of using this blog as the basis for my end of term commentary assignment
  • And much more…

Watch this space…but now it’s time for the football. Come on England — and we’re owed something special from The Big Man and Fat Frank.

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Useful, if not Uplifting, Advice

Following a few links from links I came across this blog entry from ‘Help I Need A Publisher’ by Nicola Morgan which has some sobering thoughts on the state of the publishing industry.

There’s a very interesting bullet-pointed list of advice for new writers — a group the author feels might be less disadvantaged than published writer.

Our visits from authors, an agent and a publisher seem to have wised our class up to these economic realities — I find it quite encouraging in a way that there still are authors who can write whatever they like and still feel ‘the world owes them a living’ — though I guess they won’t be around for that long.

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Strengths and Weaknesses

For our commentary we need to list the strengths and weaknesses in our writing. I won’t list what I plan to write are my strengths but I came up with a rather long list of weaknesses, although some are the inverse of possible strengths. For example, one person’s superfluous dialogue might be another’s illustration of character or inconsistency of character might also be viewed as adding complexity.

  • Over-explaining — insulting the reader’s intelligence by spelling out what can be inferred
  • Occasionally over-writing — though this depends a lot on the reader’s taste and the genre
  • Lapse into cliché/corniness — in the more emotional scenes I can put in soapy dialogue but when it’s real emotion I don’t think it pays to think of clever ways of having your characters avoiding saying ‘I love you’ or ‘I want you’.
  • Balance of interior/exterior — I often avoid the interior (could be linked with the POV issue)
  • POV not clearly enough signalled (or just inconsistent) — my POVs tend to confuse at times because I’ll allow the character whose POV I am writing from to infer observations (the other character must have entered the room because the POV character assumed she heard the door open — perhaps easier to say ‘she must have heard the door open’)
  • Not ‘listening’ to characters — being an authorial bully — thinking ‘wouldn’t it be a great scene for him to parade this other woman before his wife and provoke an argument between them all’ for the sake of creating a dramatic scene when really the characters don’t want to do that.
  • Lack of conciseness (inc. superfluous dialogue) — the universal reluctance to kill your own babies
  • Consistency of characterisation — readers thinking ‘x or y wouldn’t do that’ — but do I do this badly enough to make the reader give up or would be cumulative effect be to increase complexity if done properly?