Mike Clarke's Adventures in Creative Writing — and Stand-Up
Continuing on the theme of end of year greetings and the real Christmas message (not the ‘buy buy buy’ one that Amazon stopped imparting once it realised it couldn’t deliver its goods) here’s a very apt scene that I took on Sunday 19th December — on the way back from the Nine Lessons and Carols service. I’ve not photoshopped the colours — it came out like this with the moonlight on the snow.
I braved the elements yesterday and went to the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at our local church, which looked rather spectacular in the snow. I took some rather lovely photos just as the light was fading, which I’ve reproduced here.
For ‘The Angel’ it’s always been my intention that something happens in the village around Christmas which symbolises Kim’s surprisingly seamless integration into the community. Â And in the sort of place where ‘The Angel’ will be set then it’s a fair bet that some sort of church carol service or similar might be a good candidate event.
Thinking about this led me on to a variation on my annual musing on the completely bizarre words that we sing to many of the most popular Christmas carols. It’s peculiar that British children sing such arcane and, in some instances, nonsensical lines but at least we all grow up with their familiarity. I wondered what a foreigner who’s otherwise fluent in English would make of the carol service hymn sheet.
Possibly the worst offender of the lot is ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ — the title of which is normally misinterpreted because the hark is an exclamation, grammatically separated from the rest of the sentence. The tune, adapted from Mendelssohn is fantastically stirring but it wasn’t the original melody that Charles Wesley wrote his words for in the 18th century. Surely even then this quatrain from the second verse sounded odd:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
Hail the incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with man to dwell;
Jesus, our Emmanuel.
‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see’ — apart from the butcherly imagery it’s a really clumsy inversion to get the rhyme with deity.
‘Adeste Fideles’ has apparently existed in Latin since the 13th century but the translation we sing as ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ is mid-Victorian. This has a couple of great verses ‘Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation,’ for example, but the second verse is pretty lame:
God of God,
Light of Light,
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb;
Very God,
Begotten, not created
The third line is particularly eccentric — ‘he abhors not the Virgin’s womb’. What on earth is that meant to mean? And the fourth line seems to have thrown in the towel with a three syllable line requiring elongating to five syllables to fit the melody.
Almost certainly the most popular church services these days are the Christmas Eve midnight masses which are conveniently timed to siphon people out of the pub and into the pews. (They’re about the only times when churches are full so maybe the clergy are missing a trick the rest of the year?)
It seems some carols have been specifically written to be sung by ranks of pissed people — ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ is an exhortation to go to bed drunk, of which I entirely approve. Even so the line ‘This holy tide of Christmas all others doth deface’ should puzzle even the inebriated.
A couple of carols seems to have taken this principle further and have been written by people who are pissed. There can’t be any other explanation for the second verse of ‘Ding Dong Merrily On High’.
E’en so here below, below,
Let steeple bells be swungen,
And “Io, io, io!”
By priest and people sungen.
The rhyming of swungen and sungen must be unique in the English language and, perhaps, the quotation of ‘io io io’ is either an intriguing example of self-reflexiveness or simply that Charles Ratcliffe Woodward, the Victorian composer who wrote the words, had simply given up (the tune is several hundred years old). This carol is infamous for the long, extended ‘Gloria’ in the chorus, during which the amount of wavering in the singing voice  is a sure indicator of whom in the congregation on Christmas Eve is the most pissed.
As with most great pop songs, it’s the melodies that make Christmas carols enduringly popular, not the peculiar words. Many hymns also have incredibly rich and resonant tunes that have been embedded deep in the collective consciousness — something for which we have early 20th century composers such as Vaughan Williams and Holst to thank (amongst others) due to their work collecting folk music. In fact, I’d argue that carols and hymns have been one of the main influences on British popular music — the likes of the Beatles will have had the sort of education where these melodies were drilled into them. Another influence was soul music which itself adapted the melodies of these hymns sung in the American south.
One of the universally best-known melodies of all is ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night’ — another very ancient tune. The current words can be forgiven for being somewhat archaic as they were written around the start of the eighteenth century by the then poet laureate, Nahum Tate. It’s interesting that otherwise obsolete words, such as ‘swaddling bands’ or in ‘thus spake the seraph’ are still familiar to most people in the country.  The carol ends with one of my favourite quatrains — evoking an incredible angelic  certainty about the Christmas message:
All glory be to God on high,
And to the earth be peace.
Goodwill henceforth from heaven to men,
Begin and never cease.
Following various tweets and retweets I came across a great blog posting from the US by writer J.M. Tohline about approaching agents via query letters and submitting manuscripts.
There was a response from an agent called Amy Boggs that not only identified what should go in an agent query letter but neatly summed up the dynamics of virtually any novel (if you substitute ‘novel’ for ‘query’).
The bulk of a query should consist of 1) the main character, 2) what happens to complicate their life, 3) what goals they now have in response to that complication, and 4) the main obstacle between them and their goal. That is the cake of the query; everything else is just frosting and sprinkles.
Of course there’s an awful lot that needs to go into the writing of a novel that is just frosting and sprinkles but the cake is what most readers really want.
Click here to read the full, comprehensive posting.
I was wondering whether I had something of a plausibility gap in the premise of ‘Burying Bad News’ as I have an MP with an attractive young, Eastern European aide (though mine, Ana, comes from Latvia, which is inside the EU and makes her eligible to work here without a visa). But splashed all over the papers today is something a lot juicier from real life than how my plot is set up. As the Sun inimitably describes the story:
So maybe not so good from the perspective of originality but certainly good for plausibility. It gives me more reason to complete this novel once I’ve done a first draft of The Angel — although the two are connected by literary connecting doors as it is. Sally turned up in The Angel in my reading at the workshop yesterday.
On a politically-themed tangent I’ve just seen David Cameron’s signature in the guest book of our local church. He visited the two local churches on Tuesday 30th November — putting his address as Chequers — which is only on the other side of the hill.
I also bumped into the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, on Friday night — he’s our local MP and was in Princes Risborough for the turning-on of the Christmas lights.
One handy aspect of this blog from my own perspective is that I’ve gradually found many other blogs that I’ve linked to and taken RSS and Atom feeds from (see toolbar on the right). Some are those written by friends and others are some really useful sites written by editors, agents and authors.
I was reading a post of NaNoWriMo on How Publishing Really Works which had a link to a page on This Itch of Writing, novelist Emma Darwin’s blog, about revising and editing. The article starts off by discussing the semantics of what the words editing and revising actually mean but goes on to make some excellent points about the teaching of writing  — some which have similarly occurred to me.
Emma Darwin uses some railway and engineering metaphors to argue the logical point that writing a novel is such a huge undertaking that, even with careful planning, it’s usually inevitable that it does (or should) become evident while writing that there are structural issues (plot problems, characters that don’t work) which will need addressing. Rather than give up and start again, she recommends carrying on with a very rough first draft on the basis that, once at the end, it will be easier to address the structure of the novel as a whole.
Interestingly, this was the advice — plough on and finish a rough first draft — that we received from our tutors towards the end of the City Novel Writing course — and that many of us have realised in practice. However, it’s very difficult advice for students on courses to take for a couple of reasons — one internal and one external.
Most people who can write to a reasonable standard, but who haven’t had the experience of producing a work of about 100,000 words plus are probably instinctively unhappy in writing something that they know can be improved without going back to edit it fairly soon afterwards. There are some comments on appended to the post on This Itch of Writing that suggest writers go back and hone recently written prose because it’s a bit of a cop-out — that’s it’s easier than telling oneself it will be sorted out eventually as it’s more important to continue on with a roughly-written draft that will expose plot, setting, character and so on to greater scrutiny.
I think those comments are somewhat self-deprecating — that sort of close line-editing is actually quite hard to do well and very time-consuming in itself. I suspect that one reason why people do it is that they perhaps lack the confidence that they will ever return to re-write it — that the whole enterprise may be abandoned and, therefore, it might be better to produce a well-written chapter partly perhaps to demonstrate that one’s capable of it and maybe to be re-used in the distant future. Perhaps.
However, the external reason that applies to people on Creative Writing courses is all to do with how writing is taught.  Emma Darwin says in her post ‘I think it’s because so much writing-teaching focuses on the small scale. That’s partly because prose is easier stuff to read and write and teach on in class-sized chunks, than structure is…So writers embarking on their first novel are often quite aware of the micro-work it takes, but much less aware of the macro’. For example, on the City University course the  workshopping is structured into about six or seven opportunities to read 2,250 words — perhaps not uncoincidentally each about the length of the short stories that are assessed on the OU Creative Writing courses.
I wondered after finishing the course what difference it might have made to have given each writer a couple of slots of about 7,500 words each. I can see that practically it might make some students wait a long time for a workshop and also wouldn’t allow much opportunity to develop the work having received feedback but it would give an experience less like writing a short story — both to the writer but, also more importantly perhaps, to the other students offering feedback.
Someone called Sally Z posted a comment after the Itch of Writing post relating her experiences with a writing group. The members would always ask the ‘big’ questions when asking for criticism on a piece of writing (e.g. do these characters work?). But the sort of feedback that was offered tended to be detailed stuff about punctuation and on the over-use of adverbs. (The ritual slaughter of adverbs is a bête noir of mine that seems to be promoted by people who seem to over-evangelise some of Stephen King’s style advice in ‘On Writing’.)
Close attention to the text is certainly necessary before a novel is submitted to a publisher or agent but Emma Darwin argues that a writer who has polished up a section of a novel to publishable standard may be much more reluctant to subsequently make wholesale changes that may be necessary to improve the structure of the entire novel. However, if you participate in a writing course then it’s almost unavoidable that you will sweat hard to make your prose as good as possible as you won’t want your precious feedback to solely consist of other students pointing out passive sentences, repeated words, too many adverbs and similar textual elements. And it would also seem a bit perverse on any writing course to ask someone to circulate first draft work without worrying about typos and errors as other people will get distracted by them whatever — it’s a bit like walking down the street with your flies open.
However, if one does feel capable of creating reasonably good prose given the opportunity to edit later, what’s most important is to discover how the novel works as a whole — which is fairly tough when readers are exposed to small chapter-length chunks, especially if not in sequence, as I tend to have presented mine. I have a slightly perverse theory that if a 2,250 word extract of a novel works perfectly as a self-contained piece and doesn’t raise any questions of context with the rest of the novel then the writer isn’t really producing a novel — because a novel must necessarily have strands and elements that only make sense when read in its entirety.
Another unintended side-effect of over-examining the prose style is that writers may be tempted to concentrate on a sort of  literary ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ — it’s much easier to praise someone’s brilliant imagery or use of metaphor because examples can be cited from the text than it is to praise something more abstract — such as empathy with an emotion or resonance of setting. Of course there’s nothing wrong with some competition spurring people on to better writing but some genres are more suited to the sort of writing that’s easily praised than others.
For various practical reasons, it might be impossible to teach the more structural aspects of novel-writing in a course or to offer feedback in most writers group — mainly because of the investment in time required. What might be better is for novelists to learn from the examples from the canon of literature — this ties back into the much repeated recommendation that ‘writers have to be readers’ (more Stephen King advice like over adverbs that’s sensible in itself but not when mis-applied in extreme). I know one person from the City course who’s considering doing his next course not in creative writing but in English Literature — and this may be a very astute choice.
The Manchester Metropolitan University MA course has so far taken a similar path — we’ve been studying one novel a week from a brilliantly varied and idiosyncratic list but together by the tutor Dr Jenny Mayhew. When we’ve come to discuss the texts, rather than a loose ‘book-club’ type discussion, we’ve largely concentrated on the ‘big’ questions — like structure, character, narration, use of time and so on. The discussion on these points has the benefit of being able to examine finished, published works.
Personally I’ve done something of a mixture of the rough and (hopefully) more polished. I have quite a bit of rough draft that I’ve produced with the aim of ploughing on and just getting it done but, because of the workshopping and, also because I like to get feedback in other ways, I’ve gone back and spent a long time re-working certain sections for the benefit of other readers — partly with the objective of pleasing the adverb police and also a bit of vanity in fishing for compliments on phrases, metaphors or imagery — which is dangerous as it’s an encouragement to over-write.
As is mentioned in the original blog posts, there are two sorts of professional attitude required by successful novel writers — the discipline to plough ahead and get a first-draft finished and then the maturity to realise how much revision and re-drafting that draft needs before you even think about line-editing.
Does anyone else have any thoughts about how to address the ‘big’ issues in a novel while mired in the middle of writing it?