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‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie and the Bulgarian Carrot

For various reasons I’ve been incredibly pushed for time over the last week — principally related to a suspected outbreak of an unpleasant type of virus in the household. While it didn’t affect me directly, it had quite a knock on effect but I won’t go into the gory details. I was also quite addicted to watching every news programme and political discussion going that read the runes of the post-election negotiations — and I got most indignant at times about one potential outcome. Also, while it’s wonderful at this time of year, especially where I live, to see the trees coming into leaf and the days lengthening, it brings all kinds of tedious jobs in the garden like lawn mowing and weeding. I got nearly 200 little bedding plants delivered in plugs during the week which needed potting up, which I couldn’t do until this evening, so I lost quite a few. I also got five chilli plants delivered — one has the great name of ‘Bulgarian Carrot‘.

While I was otherwise occupied time was running short all week and I had a couple of novel course related pieces to produce. Most worrying was my looming tutorial with Alison on Monday for which I needed to send up to 3,000 words ‘by Friday’. I also have a major stage looming in my MSc dissertation and had to postpone my regular Skype chat with my supervisor by two days. I hastily revised the ‘problem overview’ section of the dissertation (2,000 words in all) and sent that off for review by Thursday afternoon (I’m very behind on that). This meant I had about 300 words written by about 3pm on Thursday for my tutorial. With the liberal assumption that ‘by Friday’ would mean by about 5pm on Friday I sat down to write a chapter as quickly as I could.

I wasn’t particularly well disposed to writing towards the end of the week. In Emily’s class we were reading extracts that we had potentially chosen for the evening event in June. I wasn’t sure what to use and hadn’t had time to write the Prologue idea (see previous posting). Alison had helpfully responded to an e-mail that I’d sent out bemoaning my inability to choose and she suggested a section from Chapter Two where Kim pelts Nic with paint from the roof of Village Underground. I quite like that bit too but it was over 900 words. I managed to pare it down to just under 700 in an editing session on Wednesday afternoon and then read it a few times for timing — marginally over 4 minutes.

Because of the virus issues, I had to miss the class I’ve started doing on Wednesday afternoons at City Lit and drive instead to London. I set off late and got stuck in traffic, due to an broken down horsebox, and then it took twice as long as on Monday to get from Finchley to Islington. So I arrived about 25 minutes late for a 90 minute class.

We had quite a few readings to hear and I happened to sit at the end of the row and was last in the reading order. I spent most of the class wondering if time would run out before it was my turn as well as being very impressed with the quality of the material that everyone else was reading. Some people read familiar stuff we’ve already heard and others read out reworked pieces that were significant improvements on the originals. A couple of people read completely new material — and it was all good — frighteningly so.

We ran out of time before Simon and I could read. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood anyway but I knew people had to have their tutorials so I asked Emily if I could mail the piece to her as I really wasn’t sure whether it was the right one. She then took pity on the two of us that hadn’t read and let us run on late. Simon read his novel’s opening of his — which had impressed us all the first time he’d read it.

I read mine but found what seemed to work ok on the page tripped me up as I read it out, although I’d generally managed it ok when I practised it — mainly stumbling over tongue-twisting alliteration. A few people in the class had read this chapter but most hadn’t — including Emily — so the location and situation were new to them as well as one character. I got a few laughs as I read, which was good, but the feedback afterwards seemed to be somewhat underwhelming. People seemed to think other scenes might be better. Emily said it was a good scene — very visual — but perhaps I should use something about when James and Kim go on a bender together — had I written that yet?

I came back home in a pretty foul mood. I think Emily had a good point about the choice of scene — I want something that features both my main characters — but I brooded over whether that meant I’d not yet written anything good enough to read out yet. The readings had also shown me how much progress other people were making on the course and made me think that somehow I was regressing. Almost as soon as I got home I went upstairs to bed and wouldn’t talk to anyone.

So I wasn’t in too much of a hopeful mood to set down writing for the tutorial the day afterwards — but nothing focuses me like a deadline. I wrote most of a first draft on Thursday night — about 2,000 words — then got up at 6am and added another 500 or so — and I added in the 300 I’d previously done. By 10am — when I Skype’d my MSc supervisor, I’d got a first draft of 2,800. I printed it out and made many corrections on hard copy then revised in Word. I then printed it out again, read it out loud, and did a further revision. By 3.45pm I was able to e-mail it off to Alison.

I was very pleased to have been able to write so quickly although in retrospect I think the piece is flawed by a few misjudgements about plot and tone more than there are problems with the writing. I ran the risk of planting issues in Alison’s mind before she read it by asking ‘is it too melodramatic?’, ‘are the main characters sympathetic?’, ‘is the balance between humour and dramatic action ok? ‘.  Some of the description is a bit clunky but what can I expect?

Part of the reason why I feel happier with the writing is that it’s moved back into a situation where I’m very at home — a pub. Kim works at a pub that I’ve based very closely on a spit-and-sawdust boozer in Hoxton that I’ve visited a few times, the last being a couple of months ago. I’ve tried to describe the varied clientele and the down-at-heel ambience. Before Kim goes in to work she winds James up by telling him he’ll be unwelcome if he looks like ‘a City arsehole’. He then asks her if it’s the Blind Beggar that she’s taking him to. This, unknown to Kim, is a pub notorious for its connections to the Kray twins (it’s also where the Salvation Army started, which is ironic for a novel about a pub) — click on the link to find out more.

This immediately made me think about how the Krays and their associates are such an ingrained part of popular folklore — but something that’s probably not very well-known to people who’ve only been in the country for the last few years. Even though the events were 45 years ago and these people were in reality unpleasant, violent criminals, the exotic names of some of the players in the Kray story have entered a collective cultural consciousness — Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie is my favourite but also ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser and ‘Nipper of the Yard’ (though he was on the good side).

In a section that no-one but me will probably like, but that cheered me up writing it no end, James reels off these bizarre nicknames to Kim, who is utterly bewildered. It also brings to mind the brilliant ‘Cockney Wanker’ cartoons in Viz which features some hideous East End boozer — which has two framed portraits on the wall — one of Winston Churchill and the other of Hitler.

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My Penultimate Workshop Reading

I read out my Chapter Three at our first evening workshop last night. I’d actually forgotten many of my misgivings about the piece and now I wish I’d ploughed ahead more over Easter and been able to submit the next chapter — which will move fast from place-to-place and start to build a bit of intimacy between James and Kim.

The first two chapters were comparatively much faster paced and had a lot more action as well. However, it seemed to be necessary to use the third chapter to slow the pace to seed a lot of plot elements and themes: Kim was given more reasons to get away (health, debts), it established James liking of cooking and explained why Kim would be a good person to try and get to run a pub. I also tried to dampen the reader’s expectations of a possible romantic involvement between the two in the next chapters.

I was concerned that I might have been accused of homophobic stereotyping as I added at a late stage an idea that James might think Kim was a lesbian, based on the ‘a little knowledge’ principle. I actually did quite a bit of research on body piercing (which James had supposedly read about in Time Out) and one person wrote on the script — ‘like a Prince Albert’. Obviously Kim wouldn’t have one of these (click if you want your eyes to water like James’ did) but she may have slightly less spectacular piercings. (I did once know someone who had a Prince Albert.) There was a discussion about whether James would be quite so ignorant of gay culture as perhaps he came over but no-one objected to sowing this seed of doubt in his mind as a plot device, which was a relief. I’m still not sure whether I’ll continue with it but my objective is to have them both bond together without cranking up the sexual aspect.

I took the attitude that if I sent out a piece of 2,600 words that was basically just two characters in a confined space then I’d be doing well just to sustain people’s interest to the end.

I deliberated about sending out one of the first two chapters, which had both come back from Alison with positive feedback, but I thought that might have the effect of both wasting her time by going over familiar work and it would also perhaps be fishing for compliments on work I knew she generally liked.

Maybe I should have done this as, in the event, I felt I got quite a negative reaction to this new piece from Alison. I think her comments were generally fair in that the piece was probably too long to sustain pace and that Kim’s voice didn’t come over as distinctly German — I was a bit annoyed with myself that at a late stage I’d cut and pasted a bit of Kim speaking German (translating musical chairs) out of the extract it  to use in the next chapter. However, at least one person had picked up on parts of the dialogue where she is struggling to find the correct vocabulary and the speech patterns of young Germans who are fluent in English are not actually that different to many native speakers — they’re quite close to American English.

So I think the way that I’d read out the extract probably did no justice to any subtleties in the dialogue.  And I’m not much good at reading aloud anyway so me rushing it must have been really bad — and I was hampered a bit by wearing contact lenses that are not good for reading close up — at times I was struggling to read my 12 point Times New Roman, even though I’d written it myself!

Paradoxically the pace would probably have come over better if I’d have added in some dramatic pauses and the like. On the other hand, I was quite struck by the number of comments, both written and spoken, that said they’d read through it quickly and easily and thought it had a good pace but then seemed to have second thoughts on hearing it read out.

I’m not sure it’s going to help people write novels, though, if we get encouraged to write prose that sounds better read out loud than on the page — you could understand that with poetry or drama. I’m a bit perplexed by that aspect of the course — it’s not much good for someone writing prose fiction if someone says ‘now I’ve heard you read it out then it seems better’ as the ordinary reader will never hear it read, they just have to go with what’s on the page. Perhaps it’s to prepare us for the reading event at the end of the course?

An average reader isn’t going to read the prose three times over in order to fully appreciate it or have the experience of the dialogue being brought to life by a lively authorial reading. That’s why I find the written comments enormously useful as they generally tend to be more individual observations. I find we don’t really get long enough to hear others’ comments and my tactic is to hear people out and listen as much as possible, although I was dying to say ‘yes, but wait for the next bit’ or ‘that was explained in the chapter before’ a few times.

I respect everyone’s opinions, though I don’t necessarily agree with everything. I think I was quite loose with the use of adverbs in some parts of the extract but I’m not sure that a zero tolerance policy towards them is entirely necessary — sometimes they can be used very effectively in the free indirect style to establish a character’s POV.  I think perhaps I have a prose style which makes the odd bit of ornamentation stand out.

One point I was very pleased about was that the rest of the students were very divided about James. One or two people loathed him with a passion while others thought he was potentially quite nice. Some thought him a blundering clown and others a straight banker. This shows that he’s got contradictions and people seem to be reacting to him like a real person. Also, a lot of that chapter was very close to his point-of-view and some objected to him looking at Kim supposedly as a sexual object and how dare he make judgements over her appearance — but this is all going on in his mind. Unless he’s being very unsubtle in his observations, she isn’t going to know any of this unless he cares to tell her. The controversy is such that I even got an e-mail of support from someone the day afterwards in support of him.

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How Far Does Amazon Go In Researching Its Recommendations?

I got an e-mail this morning from Amazon based on the fact I bought ‘Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’  by Kirstan Hawkins from them. Headed More to explore: are you looking for something in our Fiction category? If so, you might be interested in these items.’

I was intrigued to see that Penny Rudge’s ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ was second on the list. I don’t know how they worked this out unless they’d recorded that I’d searched for the book previously. If they’d combined browsing history with purchasing history they’d also find that I’ve already bought that book from them and it was delivered earlier this week.

So I wondered whether there was something more crafty at work? The books are, on the face of it, not terribly similar in content apart from being modern fiction written by women. I guess it could be that there have been enough people on our year’s (and perhaps previous years’)  Certificate in Novel Writing course to have searched for both books fairly recently and they’ve mined this connection out of their database? If so, that’s quite an interesting network effect and shows how word of mouth and personal connections can influence this sort of viral marketing.

The other books, whose descriptions I’ve not yet dug into to discover if they also have City University connections, are: ‘Ruby’s Spoon’  by Anna Lawrence Pietron; ‘Ms Hempel Chronicles’ by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum; ‘The Wives of Henry Oades’  by Johanna Moran; and ‘The Hidden Heart of Emily Hudson’ by Melissa Jones. I guess they’re all by women but I wonder if any of these authors has a connection with people on the course or with Kirstan Hawkins or Penny Rudge — there’s probably some connection somewhere either through buying the books or some underlying collective browsing pattern.

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Encouraging Alumnus

Later this term we’re having a visit from a ‘real-life’ author but, as an encouraging testament, she is an alumnus of the Certificate in Novel Writing course itself. It is Kirstan Hawkins whose novel, Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop, is being published around now. There’s a short biography on what seems to be her agent’s page and it’s quite re-assuring to see that she’s a veteran of various creative writing courses as well as having quite an extensive writing history related to her academic career.